On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them

An 1998 art historical study of the way in which images and words differ as 'signs'.

James Elkins (Author)

9780521624992, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 February 2011

348 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, James Elkins argues against the assumption that images can be adequately described in words. In his view, words must always fail because pictures possess a residue of 'meaningless' marks that cannot be apprehended as signs. On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them is a 1998 text which provides detailed, incisive critiques of fundamental notions about pictures: their allegedly semiotic structures; the 'rational' nature of realism; and the ubiquity of the figure-ground relation. Elkins then opens the concept of images to non-Western and prehistoric ideas, exploring Chinese concepts of magic, Mesopotamian practices of counting and sculpture, religious ideas about hypostasis, philosophical discussions concerning invisibility and blindness, and questions on the limits of the destruction of meaning.

1. Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendors
2. The anti-splendor
3. Figure and Ground in Philosophy, Neurophysiology, Phenomenology, Psychology, Painting, and Psychoanalysis
4. The signs of writing
5. The common origins of pictures, writing, and notation
6. Different horizons for the concept of image
7. Nine steps down the ladder of disorder
8. The unrepresentable, the unpicturable, the inconceivable, the unseeable.

Subject Areas: Theory of art [ABA]