Expression As Representation

According to Richard Wollheim, three ways of seeing are involved in beholding a painting—i.e. seeing-in, expressive perception, and the capacity to experience perceptual delight (PA 45)—and the painter relies on the beholder to use them in appreciating his paintings. Only the first two ways are relevant to my argument. Seeing-in is the kind of perception adequate to representations of external objects. It is characterized by a specific phenomenology, that is, twofoldness: we see something in a marked surface.1 Expressive perception is adequate to a painting’s expression of mental or internal phenomena;2 it involves correspondence “[…] between some part of the external world—a scene—and an emotion of ours which the scene is capable of invoking in virtue of how it looks”, and projection, “[…] a process in which emotions or feelings flow from us to what we perceive” (PA 82). Do these distinctions capture sufficiently the differences and similarities between representation and expression? In what follows I develop a theory of expression’s connectedness with representation, and divert from Wollheim’s subtle considerations. My most crucial departure from Wollheim’s point of view lies in my characterization of the way in which representations address our senses, and my insistence that expression follow suit in this type of addressing us (instead of demanding a distinctly projective mode of perception). Wollheim thinks we can see events in a painting that have preceded what is visible in it, but that we have to project its melancholy expression.3 It seems to me, however, that in both cases an act of imagination is needed. My argument will start from stock approaches to expression, and via an account of (naturalist) types of representation such as depiction, go on to an account of expression in terms of that account of representation.
‘Expression as Representation.’ in: Van Gerwen (ed.) Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting. Art as Representation and Expression, 135-50. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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