WORDS OF ART: THE P

Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College

WORDS OF ART: THE P_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton

If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@okanagan.bc.ca.

PAEAN: A joyous song (or hymn, or analogous thing) for praising, giving thanks or tribute, or celebrating triumph.

PAGEANT: Any of various sorts of temporary exhibitions with processions, perfomances, music and dance, colourful costumes, and the like. Pageants and pageantry are fairly frequently represented in visual art of earlier centuries, and some artsists were also well-known for creating them (e.g., Gianlorenzo Bernini). For a narrower connotation, see carnivalesque.

PAINTERLY: Heinrich Wölfflin's term for any formal element or compositional principle which draws attention to the characteristic sensuous traits of paint, like fluidity, looseness, impasto, scumbling, texture, and so on. By analogy, even a drawing or a photograph can be painterly. Painterly works are often conventionally understood to be more impassioned than linear ones, which are associated with reason and deliberation. See linear, periodicity. Cf deictic.

PALILOGY: Websters Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1913 gives this: "The repetition of a word, or part of a sentence, for the sake of greater emphasis; as, 'The living, the living, he shall praise thee.'"

PALIMPSEST: A manuscript illumination or similar inscribed surface which has been erased and repainted or otherwise used more than once, so that occasionally layers of what is beneath will show through and blend or interfere with the most recent image on the surface. "Palimpsest" refers to an objective phenomenon, like certain medieval works of art, and it also sometimes used metaphorically to indicate metaphoricity, polysemy, or even simple figurative language (sense 1). See also palimpsestablishment,

PALIMPSESTABLISHMENT: Because it can have multiple meanings, the word "palimpsest" is sometimes used to signify indeterminacy. But a real palimpsest is limited to those images that actually appear there. That is, a palimpsest might have commingled images of, say, a good shepherd, a pastoral scene, and a classical myth, but that does not give us license to say that it is also represents an experience I had at my grandmother's house because it reminds me of that. What is actually in the image establishes certain boundaries of interpretation. Within these restrictions one can still produce a bewildering variety of interpretation, depending upon the quantity and kinds of contextual information adduced.

PALINODE: A retraction of something previously said, often in poetic form.

PAINTING: Any of a variety of works of art made by applying paint on a surface. There is a wide variety of types of paint media, surfaces, application tools and techniques, and aesthetic preoccupations. Paint media, for example, include acrylic, bodycolour, casein, enamel, encaustic, fresco, gouache, ink, lacquer, oil, pastel, tempera, watercolour, and any number of natural alternatives from blood to elephant dung. Surfaces include animal hides, architectural features, canvas, cardboard, cotton, felt, paper, silk, wood panels, various types of natural surfaces like rock faces and cave walls, and various types of three-dimensional surfaces, as in combine painting, sculpto-peinture, and other forms of installation and multimedia work. Application tools and techniques include airbrush, brush, drybrush, palette knife, pen, etc. The sky's the limit for aesthetic preoccupations, since even a brief list here would consitute a summary of much of the entire history of art. Dedicated readers would be well advised to visit a site like Chris Witcombe's Gateway to Art History.

PANEGYRIC: Formal praise in an elaborate or grave manner, as in a eulogy. One wonders if the word could be applied to a painting like David's Death of Socrates.

PANEL: See painting.

PANOPTIC: Something which provides a comprehensive or panoramic view is said to be panoptic. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon was a model for an ideal prison in which a minimum number of guards could observe a maximum number of prisoners by virtue of having a panoptic view of the goings-on. Michel Foucault appropriated the idea as a metaphor for the scientific point of view, which can supposedly survey everything objectively. Here is more on Foucault's take on the Panopticon.

PANORAMIC: Pertaining to a panorama -- i.e., an unobstructed view in every direction. Figuratively, then, "panoramic" indicates comprehensiveness or thoroughness in a presentation of a subject. By entension it can mean any of several types of visual presentations that endeavour to represent an unobstructed view, as in a panoramic photograph (now commercially available in an impoverished variation) or an enormous painting in which a seemingly endless vista is literally unrolled before an audience, as in certain pre-twentieth-century entertainments. The closest relative to the latter, which is now outdated, is perhaps the IMAX film projection system.

PANTOMIME: Under construction.

PARABLE: Under construction.

PARADIGM: 1. An example, pattern or standard. In grammar, a paradigm is the set of inflected forms of a word -- e.g., "artist, artist's, artists, artists'" -- or the standard pattern followed in the conjugation of a verb -- first person singular, second person singular, third person singular, first person plural, second person plural, third person plural. 2. By extension, the term also refers to the basic structure of given mind-sets or models of knowledge, as in paradigm shift. 3. Saussurean semiotics has developed the notion that every sign is part of a system of relationships with other signs structured through similarity and difference. These systems are called paradigms. A word thus has a paradigmatic relationship with its own inflections, new words established through prefixes and suffixes, synonyms and antonyms, etc. The "paradigmatic axis" is a field of possible substitutions of one word for another, developed by Roman Jakobson into what he called a selection relation. In film studies, a paradigmatic axis refers more simply to a single shot or view of something (see mise-en-scčne) rather than to a succession of images, so that a metaphor, for example, in a paradigmatic axis is one which emerges in an individual shot, rather than in a sequence of shots (which would be its syntagmatic axis).

PARADIGM SHIFT: Established, largely unconscious habits of mind, like faith in scientific progress in the modern era or the divine right of kings in the mediaeval era, can be considered paradigms. When one era shifts into another, the old habits are disrupted by new ones which eventually settle into a familiar routine. The phrase derives from Thomas Kuhn, who wrote about changes in the history and philosophy of science (see realism), but it is now a commonplace used to describe any sort of major shift of mind-set or perspective. For example, the change from pre-modern to modern art was effectively a change from the so-called "window paradigm" -- the idea of a painting as a hole in the wall through which one saw beyond the room, as in Renaissance and Baroque illusionism -- to a new paradigm of abstraction. Similarly, the change from modernism to postmodernism is now commonly called a paradigm shift.

PARADIGMATIC AXIS: See paradigm, sense 3.

PARADOX: Under construction.

PARAESTHETICS: Under construction.

PARAGONE: Under construction.

PARALEPSIS: Under construction.

PARALINGUISTIC: A paralinguistic shift is a matter of the way form affects meaning: If one changes the delivery of a word or image (that is, the signifier), one can produce a corresponding change in the meaning of the word or image (that is, the signified). Like tropes, these shifts can be conventional, evoking an immediate, intuitive response: For example, everyone spontaneously recognizes the difference between the look, sound, and meaning of "fire" and "FIIIRRRRE!!!" Like tropes, these shifts can also be invented for expressive, aesthetic purposes, as in expressionism. (Similarly, design decisions affect content in architecture: The primary content of a building might be "church," whereas the secondary content might be "a truely awe-inspiring church for the glory of God" versus "a simple church of humble piety," or some such thing.)

PARALLEL PERSPECTIVE: Under construction.

PARAPHRASE: Under construction.

PARATAXIS: See hypotaxis.

PARENT CULTURE: A euphemism for the dominant portion of a culture. See subculture.

PARENTHESES: A postmodern tactic to reveal the hidden agenda of putatively neutral words. Common examples include "(cult)ure" (indicating that culture is in some respects an expression of the symbolic fetishism of cult-worship), "imag(in)ing" (to conflate something akin to aimless day-dreaming with the deliberate construction of ideology), and so on. Some examples seem decidedly sophomoric, and some publications -- like the newsletter of the College Art Association -- occasionally poke fun at the practice by recording particularly laboured examples from recent conferences, etc. The singular is "parenthesis."

PARODY: An imitation of the form or content of a prior artwork, either for comic effect or to ridicule it or its author. Originally, parody could be quickly recognized because of a marked tendency towards caricature. The famous cartoons poking fun at Courbet, Manet and others in magazines like Charivari are obvious examples. (Less obvious is whether or not Courbet's Bathers and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe are themselves parodies, as was alleged in the television series "Art of the Western World.") In contemporary discourse, parody is a more serious affair, usually aimed at critiquing (see critique) or undermining the tacit assumptions of, say, patriarchy or late capitalism. Straightforward examples are Hans Haacke's poster works about American Cyanamid; General Idea's reworking of Robert Indiana's Love series as part of an AIDS project; and pieces by any number of appropriation artists. For example, David Buchan redid Jacques-Louis David's famous Ŕ Marat (1793) as an ad for Halo shampoo. It is often very difficult to determine just exactly what signals parody, leading Linda Hutcheon to offer this working definition: "repetition with critical distance [cf aesthetic distance] which allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity.... [This] allows an artist to speak to a discourse from within it, but without being totally recuperated by it [see co-opt]" (A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction). Unfortunately, there is still no unequivocal flag that pops up to indicate "this is parody," leading to all sorts of instances in which, for example, Native art like Bill Powless' Indian Summer -- showing a fat Native in a Speedo suit and umbrella beany, eating a popsicle -- is criticized for simply indulging in stereotype, instead of critiquing it (see indulgence or indictment).

PAROLE: See langue and parole.

PARANOMASIA: Under construction.

PAROUSIA: Under construction.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION: Under construction.

PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE: Immersion of the individual self in the mystical participation in the collective identity of a culture, usually one that is non-European in origin and practices. The idea crops up in anthropology, ethology, sociology, etc., and it plays a role in Jung's collective unconscious and visionary mode of artistic creation.

PARTICULARISM: In "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures" (in The American Scholar [summer 1990]), Dianne Ravitch divides multiculturalism into two camps, the pluralists and the particularists. The former seek a richer common culture by including marginal groups in the existing historical narrative, with appropriate modifications (as in add women and stir). The particularists's goal is separate self-fulfilment through the raising of self-esteem, ethnic pride, and the like. Among other things, Ravitch sees particularism as a wrong-headed assertion that blacks or women can only achieve if taught by blacks or women. Accordingly, she concludes that it is both deterministic (see determinism) and filiopietistic.

PARTNERSHIP: Under construction.

PASQUINADE: Under construction.

PASSE-PARTOUT: A matte. Used metaphorically in Derrida's Truth in Painting. See frame.

PASTICHE: Under construction.

PATHETIC FALLACY: Under construction.

PATHOGRAPHY: Freud used this term to characterize his investigation of the unconscious motivations of Leonardo da Vinci's art. E. H. Spitz (in Art and Psyche) has suggested that the term implies that psychoanalytic criticism is necessarily preoccupied with works of art as symptoms of suffering, if not overt mental illness.

PATHOS: Under construction.

PATHOSFORMEL: Aby Warburg thought that specific historical periods were characterized by coherent clusters of perceptions and feelings, as in, for example, Renaissance classicism. The expression of these perceptions and feelings demanded a certain consistency of formal approach. Warburg thought he could identify principles of configuration which he called pathosformel -- which might be translated loosely as "forms or formulas of emotional style" -- running through many different arts and giving expression to a wide variety of cultural preoccupations, ranging from folklore to religion. See also iconology, topos.

PATRIARCHY: Literally, the rule of the father. A social organization in which men are the heads of their families and descent and inheritance are reckoned in the male line. Feminism, in characterizing patriarchy more generally as officially sanctioned male dominance, sees it as the root of all evil. For example, Lisa Tuttle's Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986) defines it as "the universal political structure which privileges men at the expense of women." Proponents of the new masculinity argue that feminism is right in seeing patriarchy as oppressive but that it is wrong in defining it as the universal privileging of men. A simple example is that men, historically, were drafted into the army and women were not. A more balanced view is probably that industrialized society suffers from epidemic bi-sexism.

PATRONAGE: Under construction.

PATTERN: Under construction.

P.C.: See political correctness.

PEDANTRY: Under construction.

PEDIMENT: The uppermost portion of a principal architectural facade, usually triangular, but sometimes semicircular, broken, and/or curved, or the imitation of same as a decorative motif over windows, doors, and some furniture components.

PEIRCEAN: Pertaining to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. See icon, index, interpretant, reference, sign, symbol.

PEN: Under construction.

PERCEPTION: Under construction.

PERCEPTUAL: See mind-set.

PERCEPTUAL PREJUDICE: Under construction.

PERCEPTUALISM: A notion appearing in the writings of Norman Bryson describing the uncritical reception of realism as optical (i.e., perceptual) truth, instead of as a meaning-bearing construction which is therefore subject to the inflections of social values. That is, when confronted with a realist image unreflective viewers think of what is depicted only that "it is," rather than "it means." (Bryson does not seem to take into account that what appears to be perceptualism might be a visual instance of a self-effacing or unreliable narrator.) For a related thought, see hypotaxis.

PEREPATEIA: Under construction.

PERFORMANCE: See interpretation.

PERFORMANCE TESTING: See translation.

PERFORMATIVE: Under construction.

PERIODIC STRUCTURES: Under construction.

PERIODICAL: Under construction.

PERIODICITY: The state of being organized and categorized according to periods, as in Renaissance versus Baroque, Byzantine versus Modern, and so on. Since any such scheme streamlines, homogenizes, and ignores or downplays difference, much interesting material is lost. This is one of the fundamental complaints against the canon.

PERIODS: Under construction.

PERIPETY: Under construction.

PERIPHRASIS: Under construction.

PERRUQUE: A French idiomatic expression meaning work one does for oneself in the guise of work done for an employer, as when one photocopies personal material on the office account, or the like. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau construes the idea as a socio-cultural trope of sorts, in which the socially weak (e.g., those who must work for others) make use of the socially strong (e.g., the bosses) by carving out an independent domain within the circumstances imposed upon them from above. See tactics.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: See retinal lag.

PERSONA: Under construction.

PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS: Under construction.

PERSONALITY TYPES: Under construction. For the moment, try http://www.wipd.com/~masha/main/types.htm or http://knuaqui.stllab.ibm.com/aqui/help/jung.html or http://home.netinc.ca/~wallaceb/JungLinks.htm.

PERSONIFICATION: The conventional representation of an abstract quality by a concrete thing, usually a person with identifiable attributes. Familiar examples are Justice (a blindfolded woman holding scales) and Liberty (a woman wearing a diadem and holding a torch aloft). In visual art, such representations have been codified for centuries. At one time, an artist who needed to know how to represent something abstract like "knowledge" or "charity" could turn to visual dictionaries, so to speak, like Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, which would give straightforward guidelines to follow.

PERSPECTIVE: Under construction.

PERSPECTIVISM: Under construction.

PETRACHAN CONCEIT: Under construction.

PHALLOCENTRIC: Any of several self-indulgent tendencies which describe male characteristics as central and female ones as marginal. Anything which foregrounds a putatively essential masculine or patriarchal (see patriarchy) principle can be considered phallocentric. See also phallogocentric. Cf gynocentric.

PHALLOGENERIC: The sexist use of gender-specific nouns and pronouns to refer to generic humanity. For example, Montréal's Expo '67 had as its theme "Man and His World," even though it was supposed to mean men and women collectively.

PHALLOGOCENTRIC: We traditionally tend to think that words have a necessary relation to the things they describe or designate. Such relations imply a certain presence hovering just behind the word itself. Deconstruction argues that there can be no such presence (see metaphysics of presence) and that words function only on the basis of their differences from other words in given contexts. This replaces presence with absence. Jacques Lacan (see Lacanian) argued that the phallus was the privileged signifier -- i.e., the principal presence hovering just behind meaning as a general phenomenon. For Lacan, this was partly a metaphor and partly a psychological account of the way the mind is constituted (see constitutive) by language. Accordingly, any discussion of language which maintains presence as an essential condition is, particularly to some feminist writers, metaphorically an assertion of the primacy of the phallus. In other words, traditional conceptions of language are both word-centered ( logocentric) and phallocentric, hence "phallogocentric." Paul Berman's Debating P.C. puts it more bluntly: "the regrettable tradition of imposed masculine logic."

PHALLUS: Under construction.

PHANOPEIA: Under construction.

PHENOMENOLOGY: Under construction.

PHILOSOPHY: Under construction.

PHI PHENOMENON: Under construction.

PHONE: Under construction.

PHONEME: In linguistics, the smallest sound, meaningless in itself, capable of indicating a difference in meaning between two morphemes. The word "dog" differs from "cog" by virtue of a change of the phoneme "d" to "c." One of the problems of early visual semiotics was to determine what constituted a visual counterpart to a phoneme (e.g., Louis Marin, "élements pour une sémiologie," in Les Sciences humaines et l'histoire de l'art). See also coloreme, phonology.

PHONOCENTRIC: Giving priority to the principles underlying verbal language when attempting to theorize about the very different nature of visual language. See semiotics.

PHONOLOGY: The study of language in terms of the relationships between phonemes. Phonology can be directed at segmental features (the segments of phonemes, like consonants, vowels, syllables) or suprasegmental features (see paralinguistic). See coloreme.

PHOTOCOLLAGE: A collage made chiefly of photographic materials. The Berlin Dada group (from c. 1919) were especially renowned for this technique, with notable examples in the works of Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, George Grosz, and many others.

PHOTOGRAM: Under construction.

PHOTOGRAPHY: The underlying principle of photography -- that light could pass through a pinhole and be projected upon the other side of a darkened box -- predates the mechanical means of modern photography by thousands of years. The first practical instrument to resemble a modern camera was the camera obscura (literally, an "obscure" or "darkened chamber") , a contraption which allowed an image to be transferred by means of a lens fitted over the hole to a sheet of paper suspended on the other side of the chamber, where the image could be then be traced (see tracing) with some precision. These were available in the seventeenth century, and some scholars believe Jan Vermeer may have been familiar with their use. The first photomechanical means of transferring the image was developed by J.-N. Niépce in 1826, when he discovered that an asphalt coating on pewter, treated with solvent, would be bleached by the sun in proportion to the light reflected through a lens from nearby objects. Because it was a mechanical means of "sun-writing," as it were, he called the process "heliography" (sun=helios). It was never a practical method because the exposure time ran to many hours. In 1839, the painter L.-J.-M. Daguerre announced an improved process called the daguerrotype, which substituted a silver-coated copper plate sensitized with potassium iodide fumes. The exposure time dropped to a half an hour or so, at which point the plate had to be developed by exposure to mercury fumes and then stopped or "fixed" with a hyposulfite of soda. (The process so effectively foreshadowed subsequent developments that we still use some of this terminology in spite of many significant advancements.) Within ten years or so the process was speeded up again with the application of bromine fumes to the plate. With the exposure time now down to a minute or so, photography began its history as the fashionable medium of portraiture. Popular and prized possessions, daguerrotypes were unlike today's photographs in that they were fragile, single, non-reproduceable images of high quality and lustre, typically protected by little decorative boxes lined with velvet. Both the heliograph and the daguerrotype were positive processes: that is, both required that the light-sensitive plate be directly changed by light exposure, so that bright light created a bright spot on the plate. The next step in the evolution of modern photography was the discovery of a negative process, in which a bright light created a dark spot on an interim surface from which multiple prints could be made. That invention is attributed to W. F. Talbot, whose calotype (sometimes called "Talbotype") of 1841 replaced the copper plate with a paper sheet sensitized with silver iodide. Prints made from these negatives would of course reverse the process and become positive images again. However, they were generally poorer in quality, so the method died entirely with F. S. Archer's 1851 publication of the wet-plate or collodion process, which reduced exposure times to mere seconds and produced a glass negative from which multiple prints of better quality could be produced. Collodion's disadvantage was that exposure, development and fixing had to be done in a sort of portable darkroom while the plate was still wet. Both processes produced albumen prints, so-called for the paper, which was coated with egg white and ammonium chloride and which produced a rich and lustrous surface. The gelatin-silver print gradually replaced this technique in the late 1870s and 1880s with a so-called dry-plate process involving papers coated with silver halide suspended in a gelatin emulsion. Roll film came along about the same time, enabling George Eastman to create an entirely new consumer phenomenon by marketing the Kodak camera in 1888. (Roll film, incidentally, also made the discovery of practical motion pictures possible.) Until the inventions of Edwin Land's Polaroid instant camera and the digital camera, subsequent developments were mostly a matter of camera size, shutter speeds, and the like. There is a large repository of useful supplementary information, including technical definitions, at Robert Leggat's History of Photography site.

PHOTOMONTAGE: A mixing of imagery through means peculiar to photography to achieve collage-like effects, not always precisely distinguished from photocollage.

PHOTOSTATIC: Under construction.

PLAISIR: French for pleasure. See jouissance, pleasure of the text.

PLAN AMERICAIN: Go here.

PLAN FRANCAIS: Go here.

PLAN SEQUENCE: Go here.

PLANE OF CONTENT, PLANE OF EXPRESSION: In Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Louis Hjelmslev distinguished between the actual content of an utterance and the manner in which that content is expressed. ("Content" here is conceived of as only the primary and secondary types described under the heading content.) While early visual semiotics (e.g., Umberto Eco, "Sémiologie des messages visuels," Communications 15 [1970]: 11-51; and René Lindekens, élements pour une sémiotique de la photographie [1971]) saw simple enough parallels between verbal content and visual iconography, it noted that the visual plane of expression differs markedly from the verbal one. This necessitated a revised description of the plane of expression, one which differed from verbal syntactics. Although this led Eco to conclude that the icon could not serve as the true basis for a visual semiotics (A Theory of Semiotics), he offered no compelling solution. In Semiotics of Visual Language, Fernande Saint-Martin offered a solution with her conception of "spatiality," which she defined as "the apprehension of a simultaneous coexistence of multiple elements in an autonomous form of organization, which is considerably different from that of the temporal order of these elements." Spatiality, she argued, was peculiar to the visual in a way that did not occur in the verbal and was therefore more appropriate in describing a truly visual syntax. Spatiality in turn led her to her conception of the coloreme.

PLANE OF EXPRESSION: See plane of content, plane of expression.

PLANIMETRIC: Go here.

PLASTIC: "Plastic" does not mean polymer, in an artwriting context. It simply means that which can be molded or modeled. Typically it refers to sculptural works, especially in the German tradition, but in some contexts it means any type of visual art, before the era of photographic and electronic imagery, especially if it has 3D properties. Nothing more obscure than that.

PLAUSIBILITY: In Philosophy Looks at the Arts, Joseph Margolis replaces the closure and determinacy of right and wrong interpretations with the more flexible notion of plausibility. The criteria include such things as whether a conclusion is reasonable or unreasonable, appropriate or inappropriate, and the like. The process of rendering interpretation more flexible consists in part of exposure to a wide variety of modes. See also falsification, misprision, validity, verification.

PLEASURE: See jouissance.

PLURALISM: 1. A near synonym of multiculturalism, which entails a lack of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, creed, class and the like. For an antonym, see particularism. 2. In artwriting, the term is also used simply to describe the late 1960s to the 1980s, when no one style predominated and a variety of options was seen as a sign of cultural health and diversity. See, for example, Corinne Robins' The Pluralist Era, which offers relatively little multiculturalism per se.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Go here for a definition and some discussion.

POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS: Along with many other postmodern (see postmodernism) writers, Fredric Jameson feels that an audience never encounters a text innocently, as a unique, unmediated thing (see mediation). Texts appear instead as the always-already-read, something composed by a writer in response to previous texts, something discovered by a reader only through layers of previous interpretations or through inherited habits and traditions of reading. Any interpretation thus constructed is inherently ideological (see ideology), but since readers are usually unaware of the operations of ideology in their habits of mind, the term "political unconscious" is apt. The subtitle of Jameson's most famous book is telling: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

POLITICALLY CORRECT: See political correctness.

POLITICS OF IDENTITY: An umbrella term for political and/or critical agitation by specific social groups, including black nationalism (see afrocenticity), women's rights (see feminism), gay and lesbian liberation, diverse ethnic revivals, and so on.

POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION: An umbrella term for a variety of types of critique of the act of interpretation as a thinly-veiled ideological activity (see ideology).

POLITICS OF THE TEXTBOOK: An umbrella term for a variety of types of critique of the textbook writing and publishing as thinly-veiled ideological activities (see ideology).

POLYCHROME: More often than not, "polychrome" is used of sculpture which is finished in coloured glazes or equivalents -- like gold leaf, for example -- especially when highly polished and placed in an architectural setting, which can itself be highly decorated with multicoloured marbles, white stucco figurines with gilded details, and painted elements to create an illusionistic dimension. Italian Baroque and Rococo chapel décor was often elaborately polychromed, and the style spread quickly through Eastern Europe. For an example, see this organ loft of a church in Krzeszow.

POLYPTYCH: See polyptych.

POLYSEMY: From the Greek for "many signs," the hypothetically infinite range of meanings which results when determinacy is replaced by indeterminacy. The term has become so commonplace that it is impossible to attribute to a particular writer. For other applications, see illustrement, linguistic inflation.

PORTMANTEAU: A word created from the blending of the structures and meanings of two or more other words. A famous example is "smog" (smoke and fog). Palimpsestablishment, in the list above, is just such a portmanteau word.

PORTRAIT HISTORIE: See genres.

PORTRAITURE: See genres.

POSITIVE: See photography.

POSSIBILITY (OF MEANING): See inexhaustibility by contrast, meaning.

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC: Latin for "after this, therefore on account of it." It is a common error in argument similar to the genetic fallacy. That one thing habitually follows another thing does not ensure that the latter caused the former. A specific application of the principle is Hume's constant conjunction.

POSTCOLONIAL: Characterizing a society moving away from cultural, economic, psychological, social and other dependence on the subordination of another social group. Cf imperialism.

POSTINDUSTRIAL: Characterizing a society moving from economic dependence on heavy manufacturing (and its concomitant problems, like waste and pollution) to one more interested in information exchange, recycling, cultural democracy, and a number of related things.

POSTMODERNISM: It is something of a gross oversimplification, considering that modernism and postmodernism are difficult concepts circulating in disputed territory, but it is safe to say at least that modernism tended to have faith in the perfectibility of mankind through technology and rationalistic planning. It is now felt that these were instruments of white European males interested only in maintaining their own hegemony, so the result was a certain homogeneity which disallowed cultural differences. Art which seemed to illustrate, foster or otherwise exemplify values like faith in perfectibility and rationalism was modernist art. In contrast, today's emphasis on the cultures of women, peoples of colour, and gays and lesbians might be seen as postmodernist by default. Examples of modernism include such things as Le Corbusier's house designs and Piet Mondrian's geometric abstraction, both of which were supposed not only to be aesthetic but, more importantly, to affect viewers in salutary ways. That the world could always supposedly be improved upon also led to two other characteristics of modernism in the arts: that art could progress, suggesting that the worst thing one could do would be to repeat something which had been done before, and that the way to progress in art was to focus on its only essential characteristic -- i.e., that painting would only be about painting, sculpture would only be about sculpture, etc., as in formalism. In contrast, postmodernism seems gleefully to assert that there is nothing new under the sun and that works which speak only about their essential characteristics really say nothing at all about the human condition. Colloquially, what is often simply described as "modern art" included types of work which actively critiqued modernist values, so while it might have been chronologically modern it was not modernist. In fact, what might be called anti-modernist art bears many of the characteristics of what we now call postmodernism. For example, neither Dada nor Surrealism had any faith in reason, preferred uncertainty, adapted imagery from other cultures and eras, and exploited irony, mockery and humour. (Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and those letters applied summarily, is a prime example.) All of these traits appear in postmodernism. For example, in postmodern architecture we find allusions to illogical mixtures of historical building styles, many of the references turning the source on its ear in the same way as historical mannerism. See, for example, the use of the unexpected in James Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart or Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans. Because of its critical stance towards the certainty and homogeneity of modernist tradition, postmodernism is far too complex to characterize with one simple set of stylistic criteria. In any case, it is more a matter of any attitude which invokes an unconventional fusion or overt diversity of historical and/or cultural styles (e.g., David Salle), with particular emphasis on critique, irony or mockery (e.g., Guerilla Girls). Charles Jencks, for example, describes it as "characteristically double-coded and ironic..., [emphasizing] conflict and discontinuity of traditions, because this heterogeneity most clearly captures our pluralism." Linda Hutcheon asserts that postmodernism and parody are nearly synonymous. Warren Montag argues that "We act within a specific conjecture only to see that conjecture transformed beneath our feet, perhaps by our intervention itself, but always in ways that ultimately escape our intention or control, thereby requiring new interventions ad infinitum" (see Postmodernism and Its Critics, ed. E. A. Kaplan, for these and many other explanations). One of the better known proponents of postmodernism is Jean-François Lyotard, whose Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge offers lengthy meditations on the subject. In the introduction, for example, he defines it simply as "incredulity towards metanarratives," where "metanarrative" means the set of values and expectations underlying faith in reason and science. Elsewhere he argues that a postmodern work is not made according to preestablished rules and cannot therefore be judged by applying familiar categories of analysis; in fact, the very purpose of the work is to search for and create new sets of rules and categories. See also culture jamming, death of the author, Derridean, prolepsis, skepticism.

POTBOILER: Formulaic works of art produced cheaply and quickly produced to satisfy a market demand -- usually for genre paintings -- and to make a modest income (i.e., to keep soup boiling in the pot). By extension, the term has come to mean any work considered to lack distinctive quality or originality. Almost every continent has a maker of potboilers, although many of them are also well-known for more important works: in Canada, Cornelius Krieghoff; in Europe, Carl Spitzweg; in the United Kingdom, David Wilke, and so on.

POWER: One of the more crucial conceptions of much postmodern is that things we used to take for granted as given -- things like nature and truth -- do not have objectively verifiable existence because they are nothing more than paradigms created, unwittingly or not, by broad, impersonal forces in society. For Foucauldians, these forces are determined by epistemes, habits of knowing peculiar to given social groups who have managed to suppress rival groups in practice and who continue to maintain power by instituting (see critique of institutions) symbolic mechanisms which masquerade as disinterested knowledge, but which are really systems intended to keep subjugated those peoples who are uninitiated or excluded. A British lecturer on photography from the University of Derby, John Roberts, defines power more succinctly as the viewer's right of reply, which thus invites comparison with Susanne Kappeler's critique of pornography. All sorts of things have been challenged as instances of this kind of power: academic standards like the traditional canon, certificates/diplomas/degrees, the "King's English," logic, and standards of pronunciation; and the general cultural attitudes described under the headings ageism, classism, homophobia, lookism, racism, sexism and so on. See also hegemony.

PRAGMATICS, SEMANTICS, SYNTACTICS: Charles W. Morris developed a three-part structure to clarify the nature of language. "Pragmatics" he defined as the study of the circumstances in which a communication takes place, ranging from purely material conditions like the presence or absence of noise to more intangible conditions like personal motivations or the relations between speaker and audience. Pragmatics is thus very close to context. "Semantics" he defined as the study of meaning in signs prior to their use in a particular statement. While this might suggest that a parallel can be drawn between semantics and iconography, Morris's term is more abstract and closer in meaning to interpretant and paradigm (sense 3), both of which can be embraced within the term content. "Syntactics" Morris defined as the study of rules of syntax or grammar (see also code [sense 2]), which to some extent is embraced within the term form.

PREJUDICE: In common speech, bias or unfair treatment. In Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic theory -- most notably in Truth and Method - - one cannot achieve an objective understanding of the meaning of a work produced under culturally, geographically, historically and/or socially alien circumstances. One can, however, achieve a balanced understanding (and a sort of dialogue between past and present that goes beyond superficial perspectivism) by making oneself fully aware (via a hermeneutic circle) of the conditions and assumptions underlying one's own point of view, as well as those of the author. These conditions he called prejudices or prejudgements.

PRESENCE: The fact or condition of being present -- i.e., of being at hand or before one, of actually existing. In postmodern contexts, presence is caught up in the discussion of determinacy in the sense that there must be something lurking behind a sign in order to guarantee that it will signify. In that sense, a determinist would believe in some sort of presence (if only metaphorically). In contrast, deconstruction would argue that there is no such metaphysical guarantee. See, for example, metaphysics of presence.

PRESENTATIONAL SYMBOL: Professor Dale Cannon gives this: "A religious symbol that serves not only to represent some aspect of what is taken to be ultimate reality but which in the appropriate circumstances serves for participants to render it present and enable direct participation in it. In that respect they are sometimes called sacramental symbols. All presentational symbols are in the first place representational symbols, but the reverse is not true." Professor Cannon's site is the (R204: Glossary for his Western Religions course at Western Oregon University.

PRESENTIMENT: Foreboding. Giorgio de Chirico said that an ominous feeling of something about to happen was a characteristic of good metaphysical art. It has been argued that he was directly influenced in this by Freud's uncanny. The idea appears frequently in aesthetic theory, albeit in slightly different forms. Another example is in Jung's notion of the visionary mode of artistic creation.

PRESENTMENT: Not a common word, but Edward Bullough (see aesthetic distance) used it to denote the manner of presenting something, as distinct from "presentation," which he understood to mean that which is presented. The word is not to be confused with presentiment either.

PRESTATION VALUE: The conventional prestige value of a sign in an otherwise valueless Baudrillardian world of simulacra. See Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in Arts (September 1986).

PRIMARY COLOURS: The basic hues of the spectrum from which all of the other hues can be mixed. The primary colours actually differ from context to context, but in the classic formal language of much artwriting, there are only the three: red, blue and yellow. Classic colour theory asserts that admixtures of any two of these in the proper proportions will result in the creation of "secondary" colours which will be the "complementary" of the third primary colour. For example, mixing the primary red and blue gives the secondary violet, which is the complementary of yellow; mixing red and yellow gives orange, the complementary of blue; and mixing yellow and blue gives green, the complementary of red. One of the curious optical phenomena attending this observation is that a hue will always seem its most vibrant when accompanied by its complementary. This is very easy to test with combinations of squares of the sort often reproduced in pyschology survey texts: several small squares of an identical red will appear quite different when sent into larger squares of different hues, and the apparently most vibrant red will be the one surrounded by the hue closest to its complementary green. Painterly artists from Titian to Matisse have long known and exploited this effect, although it was not theorized coherently until the nineteenth century publication of the works of Eugčne Chevreul and other colour theorists. There are, of course, further admixtures of hue one could call tertiary and quaternary colours, and so on down the line, but there are diminishing returns in terms of usefulness.

PRIMARY DRIVE: See drive.

PRIMORDIAL IMAGE: The term was coined by Jakob Burckhardt, but it is now most closely associated with C. G. Jung's notion of the archetype. See visionary mode of artistic creation.

PROBLEMATIC: Some writers use this conventionally as an adjective meaning "ambiguous, capable of creating a problem, doubtful, questionable." Writers of Marxist inclination tend to use it more specifically as a noun meaning the ideological framework within which a particular issue is discussed (see ideology). For example, the Marxist critique of the art of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s is driven by the problematic of class struggle. For "problematic," see Louis Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (1968). For Courbet, see T. J. Clark, The Image of the People (1973).

PROCESS: In some current writing there is a greater emphasis on the mechanisms of creating meaning (the "process") than on meaning (the "product") itself, especially when the writer is particularly concerned with ideology. See, for example, signifying practice.

PRODUCT: See process.

PRODUCT SEMANTICS: Phrase coined by Reinhart Butter to indicate loosely the semiotics of advertising, for the producers of such products. It was used as the title of a conference at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki in 1989.

PROFONDEUR DE CHAMP: Go here.

PRO HOMINE: A tactic in informal logic where conclusion X should be accepted because it is held to be true by person Y, who is ostensibly knowledgeable, trustworthy, and free of bias. Rarely identified as such, the tactic appears with alarming frequency in some writing about art -- alarming because the alleged authority is frequently not above suspicion. An instance which casts connoisseurship in a poor light is a story in which the famed connoisseur Bernard Berenson gave a painting a highly desirable attribution -- or, to be more charitable, he did not deny it the attribution -- because he was pressured to do so by the works' owners. To challenge such an attribution principally on the grounds that Berenson was allegedly untrustworthy, rather than some material evidence about the work itself, is an ad hominem argument, the opposite of pro homine.

PROLEPSIS: An anticipation, as in foreseeing possible objections to an argument in order to answer them in advance. In a different form, this concept is fairly common in current thought, but it is rarely addressed as such. For example, we see in Lyotard's Postmodern Condition the statement that artists work "without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done" (author's stress). See also always-already-read, woman as the not-yet.

PROTAGONIST: In narrative analysis, the principal character, hero(ine) or leading role. In Angelica Kauffmann's Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, the protagonist is Cornelia. In David's Le Sacre, it is Napoleon.

PSEUDO-STORY: See narrative analysis.

PSEUDOTRANSHISTORICAL: It is a commonplace in popular culture for people to assume that certain great works of the past do not really belong to the past but to a perpetual present. Accordingly, for example, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling or Leonardo's Mona Lisa appear to be timeless (see timelessness), giving the viewer the opportunity to read into them any meaning they choose. While one component of this enterprise -- the undermining of exclusive authorial responsibility for the production of meaning -- is generally applauded in postmodernism, it also creates the illusion that the artist intended the work to exist outside of his or her particular historical moment, which is, according to postmodern thought in general, quite impossible. Mieke Bal (Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word/Image Opposition) has added "pseudo" to show that the impression of timelessness is false. See also greatness, masterpiece, transcendental.

PSYCHIC EMBED: Mary Daly's term (in Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy) for basic structures of or practices within the female psyche which usually function without the subject's being aware of them. One such is what Demaris S. Wehr called internalized oppression.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM: Under construction. Practitioners have included writers from both artwriting and professional psychoanalytical fields. Examples of the former include Jack Spector, Adrian Stokes, Mary Mathews Gedo, and Donald Kuspit. Examples of the latter include Milton Viederman.

PSYCHOLOGICAL MODE OF ARTISTIC CREATION: See visionary mode of artistic creation.

PSYCHOPHYSICAL PARALLELISM: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's response to the mind-body problem was similar to occasionalism in that both denied the direct interaction of mind and body. Leibniz, however, did not conclude that the only will was divine intervention, preferring to believe that the mind and the body were ordained to be separate but parallel to one another.

PURITANISM: Beginning in sixteenth century England as a programme of religious reform, but now associated with any particularly zealous austerity, discipline, frugality, industry, and the like. One can discern a Puritan sensibility in most art which favours austerity, and it is particularly common in Dutch art, from Baroque-era paintings of plain church interiors to Mondrian's mature works. Most recently, the term has been applied to both sides of the debate on political correctness to explain fairly high degrees of intolerance.

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