Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College
WORDS OF ART: THE W_LIST

WORDS OF ART: THE W_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton
If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@klo1.ouc.bc.ca.

WAINSCOTTING: Decorative panelling on interior walls, usually confined to the lower half.

WALL: In architecture, any of a variety of upright structures whose length is many times greater than its thickness and the purpose of which is either support or enclosure. The former, typical in most eras except the High Gothic and the Modern, carries the weight of whatever rests upon it, like the upper stories of a building or a vault. Such a structure is said to be a "bearing" wall, because it bears a load. Examples of the latter include free-standing barriers (like the Great Wall of China) and enclosures which bear loads by other mechanisms (as in the High Gothic and Modern periods of architectural history, when the load tended to be taken up by columns, or slender vertical elements functioning like them, in stone, iron or steel, rather than by the wall itself). In such a case, the wall is little more than a skin of glass serving principally to separate one space from another and so is called a "screen" or "curtain wall." Examples of curtain walls range, then, from Cologne Cathedral to the shop block of the Bauhaus.

WAMPUM: Beads, usually of shell, strung together and used as a decorative means of exchange in some aboriginal North American cultures.

WANT-TO-BE: See lack, manque-à-être.

WARBURG: See iconology, Pathosformel, topos.

WARM COLOUR: Reds and yellows and their intermediaries (i.e., oranges) are conventionally referred to as warm colours, ostensibly by virtue of their resemblance to the natural hue of fire and other hot things. Warm colours are said to advance -- i.e., to draw towards the foreground of an image -- and so are said to be generally opposed to the temperature and movement of cool colour. The effect can be both visual and emotional -- see, for example, Leighton's Flaming June -- but it is strongly dependent upon any number of other formal features.

WASH: A layer of thinned colour applied by brush, often rapidly, to roughly block in and/or model forms in paintings, watercolours, and some drawings. Famous applications range from colourful watercolour notes, as in the Moroccan sketchbooks of Delacroix, to the colourless but equally adept modelling in Tiepolo drawings.

WATERCOLOUR: Pigment in a water soluble medium, handled as a wash. Most watercolours are quite translucent and exploit effects peculiar to the medium, like reserve highlights and the appearance of spontaneous and rapid execution (see, for example, Turner's deft sketches of the British Parliament in flames). See also body colour.

WEBS OF SIGNIFICANCE: See interpretive web, stratigraphic fallacy, thick description.

WELTANSCHAUUNG: The mind-set , outlook, or "world-view" of a particular group, whether aesthetic, ethnic, political, social, etc. Weltanschauungen are usually limited in scope to readily identifiable historical, geographical, ethnic and other entities. See Geistesgeschichte .

WESTERN: 1. Pertaining to the culture, history and values of the Occidental world, especially Europe and North America. The western mind-set, for example, has been characterized as patriarchal, racist and rationalistic. (Such a viewpoint, of course, oversimplifies egregiously.) 2. In literature, film and theatre, works dealing with the western United States of the nineteenth-century, along with its trademark themes of "cowboys and Indians," pioneering and expansionism, etc. One of the more notable Western artists is Frederick Remington.

WET-PLATE PROCESS: See photography.

"WHEN IS ART?": Under construction.

WHOLISTIC: Under construction.

WHORF HYPOTHESIS: In Language, Thought and Reality, part-time linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf formulated the notion that language was a function of the mind existing prior to our experience of reality, in a sense, thus shaping the external world in a fundamental way. Accordingly, speakers of a given language are parties to a binding agreement about reality, whereas speakers of a different language exist in a different reality, as it were. While the theory, also called linguistic relativity, was quite popular in the 1950s, it was discredited in 1969. One of the examples used to point out Whorf's misconception was a discussion of the famous idea that Inuit peoples have a large number of terms for snow: since English has only one, the Inuit supposedly thus experienced the world as much richer and more variegated. This, of course, is wrong, for English distinguishes sleet, hail, slush, etc., not to mention the complex meteorological vocabulary that accompanies such terms. Interestingly, another of the debunking examples was a discussion of colour terminology in various languages, which apparently followed nearly identical structural patterns. By 1991, however, the idea was being reinvestigated (Scientific American [February 1992]), perhaps under the influence of generalized postmodern notions of cultural difference. However, many new theories seem to take it for granted that language is formative of experience. See, e.g., Lacanian.

WILL-TO-POWER: Under construction.

WISDOM LITERATURE: Under construction.

WOMAN AS THE NOT-YET: Luce Irigaray challenges gender essentialism by arguing that woman is not biologically determined but is caught up in ceaselessly changing cultural productions of gendered meanings. It is possible to negate these productions as they arise, but it is not possible to fix the feminine, so woman is "woman as the not-yet."

WOODCUT: Under construction.

WORK: See text.

WORLD-VIEW: Under construction.

WRITING: See écriture .

WRITING DEGREE ZERO: Under construction.

WRONG INTERPRETATIONS: See plausibility, testability, and validity.
© Copyright 1996 Robert J. Belton
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