Ekphrasis – Artspeak

In the field of Art Criticism, a term called Ekphrasis is defined as a verbal description of art.

Dwell on this thought for a moment longer – why is Ekphrasis such an important concept that it gets this fancy word-name?

Because Ekphrasis is actually the process by which we translate a work of art like a painting into a verbal statement – it is the mental process through which the artist’s brushstrokes become words on the blank slate of the audience’s mind.

Ekphrasis has existed as long as art and language have coexisted. So this begs another question – across cultures with different values, religions, philosophies, social structures – has the Ekphrasis been fundamentally different? In other words, if an art critic from the Renaissance.

Were to discover a Modernist Frank Stella Sculpture from hundreds of years later, they’d write differently about Stella’s sculpture than Stella’s contemporaries not just due to differing cultural taste, but because their brain has not been wired to even comprehend what Stella is doing.

The word for this cognitive wiring is neural plasticity –

Cognitive scientists have discovered that action neurons in our brains are shaped (or plastered – and I do not the drinking kind, mind you) by our experiences. This is why consistent practice develops muscle memory, the ultimate evolution of an instinctive drive which replaces our need to consciously focus on the actions at hand.

For example, the first time you drive a car, you’re freaking out about signaling and making that left turn. Today, on the ump-teenth left turn of your driving career, you’re probably texting, blasting Big Sean, and not giving a fuck – all thanks to neural plasticity.

In fact, Art Historians, Linguists, and Cognitive Scientists have combined elements of their disciplines in order to develop a theory for the genesis of art in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira of Spain. The idea, explained by Art Historian John Onians, is that the inhabiting cavemen actually carved the likenesses as an attempt to communicate, but the first attempts at visual representation were crude and exaggerated.

Other cavemen not only read the visual representations, but also interpreted the exaggerations, continuing to reproduce this mistake and create a second system of visual representation – an artistic one that evolved alongside pictorial, symbolic communication as a more visual, metaphorical means of communicating thoughts.

When Art critics engage in ekphrasis, they’re describing how a painting works – using literary terms such as irony, metaphor, metonymy, as well as cognitive concepts, such as spacial relationships, logical inclusion, and so on. Ekphrasis is therefore a powerful mental tool that allows an individual to become more self-aware of how their own life experiences and interaction with a larger culture have shaped their mind to form a unique visual logic.

With this post I hope to emphasize the value of Art History, a subject which allows us to expand our visual logic and interact with cultures beyond our own – both today and throughout history – by learning their cultural contingencies in order to understand how and why they produced the art they did.

This post was inspired by a class I took 2 years ago with Martin Powers – HA 393 – Art Language, and the Language of Art – one of the best educational experiences of my life – Take it!!!