The Brooklyn Rail

In his introduction to The Gothic Image (1899, English trans. 1913), Émile Mâle implicitly acknowledges that a nineteenth-century viewer may find the visual language of medieval art obscure. Mâle responds by explaining that, unlike art in the Renaissance tradition, medieval art does not attempt to reproduce literal appearances. Rather, it is “a sacred writing of which every artist must learn the characters.”

So too must the viewer. As a lexicon, Mâle turns to a thirteenth-century encyclopedia by Vincent de Beauvais, an example of the literary genre known as the Speculum Mundi: the “mirror of the world.” Vincent’s Speculum is divided into four sections: the Mirror of Nature, the Mirror of Instruction, the Mirror of Morals, and the Mirror of History. These are not mere summaries of fact, like the thirty-seven books of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Rather, Vincent interrogates each realm of knowledge as a compendium of religious and spiritual allegories. The Mirror of Nature recounts and interprets the seven days of Creation, each charged with sacred meaning. The Mirror of Instruction tells the story of the Fall, demonstrating the need for Redemption. The Mirror of Morals offers “a learned classification of the virtues and vices.” The Mirror of History summarizes the Old and New Testaments, revealing a coherent spiritual narrative hidden within the chronicles of pagan history.

The task of interpretation that Mâle set himself in The Gothic Image has become fundamental to art criticism today. Contemporary artists use re-invented styles to construct social and political allegories. Criticism explicates these allegories. Formal analysis, central to modernist criticism, seems almost irrelevant. As Christopher Wood writes in the conclusion to his 2019 History of Art History:

Art today is less about form than about the conditions of possibility of effective speech and action … There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple … The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often … a dynamic, multipolar interaction that creates temporary publics … Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination … Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy.¹

In practice, this “dynamic, multipolar interaction” is often mystifying to the broader public. Contemporary art can seem like a private language exchanged among initiates. To make it more widely intelligible, it might be useful to compile a new Speculum Mundi—a glossary of visual memes.²

The task is more challenging than it appears. The linkages between image and meaning in contemporary art are strikingly unstable. For some artists, the house is a place of refuge, for others, a place of confinement. For some, the portrait is an embodiment of social and ethnic stereotype, for others, a declaration of individuality. A suitcase can be a symbol of exile or a container of memories. Signifying either metaphorically or metonymically, abstract art is equally mutable. In the twentieth century, the woven grid often functioned as an expression of women’s overlooked creativity; more recently, it has become a symbol of Indigenous, decolonial authenticity.

In the absence of fixed memes, the recurrent image, mediating between content and form, provides a useful unit of analysis. The critic may begin by describing what message the artist wants their chosen image to convey. But why did the artist choose this particular medium—sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, montage, video, installation, text, performance, or situation? This particular style? How effectively is the image rendered? Does it in fact convey the artist’s intended message, or do the formal qualities of the artwork transform the message in unintended ways?

Hence the question I want to ask my fellow critics: what image or images do you find particularly insistent in art today? What images do artists use to respond to the non-stop crises of our public life? To respond to the pains and pleasures of private life? To the longing for transcendence? If contemporary art is a Speculum Mundi, what do we see in the mirror?

1. Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 380-383
2. Although now identified with the culture of the Internet, the term “meme,” describing an idea associated with a phrase or image, was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, long before the rise of social media. Dawkins seems to have adapted it from the linguistic term “sememe,” which dates from the early twentieth century.