Image-Object-Thing: Idea-Idea-Idea

In his essay “Painting as Apparatus: Twelve Theses,” Helmut Draxler suggests that painting exists in tension between image and art. In a way, then, could the following 1:1 correspondence then be set up?

Image-Object-Thing : Image-Painting-Art.

According to Draxler, there is a key difference between an image and a painting—a painting exists as something more than just the image upon the surface, and something less than art. It exists as something rooted in its materiality as an object. Draxler posits that a painting exists between the pull of image and of art, implying that image and art are two separate qualities; a painting therefore exists as an object, oscillating between an image and a piece of art, but only always as an object. The same holds true for other media—why else would a Polaroid photo hold such power in its material identity?

And yet I think there is something missing in this analysis, perhaps a transformative agent that allows for movement and slippage amongst these three categories—namely, the idea.

In his Philosophy Bites lecture on 17^th century philosopher George Berkeley, Tom Stoneham explains that, for Berkeley, an idea is an object of sensorial experience. Because of this, he uses the terms idea, object, and thing all interchangeably. Every object is a thing as well as an idea, and the qualities that comprise those objects/things/ideas and parse them into discrete objects—chairs, lamps, apples—are derived from the senses (qualities include color, shape, texture, taste, etc.). Paintings, photographs, and sculptures also derive their discrete identities from these experienced qualities.

Perhaps an obvious example to discuss would be Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, an installation consisting of a chair, a picture of a chair, and the word chair alongside its dictionary definition. This piece unifies the Idea-Object-Thing relationship; as well as the Image-Object-Idea relationship; the Image-Object-Thing; the Image-Painting-Art; the Idea-Idea-Idea. 

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965, image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art

I’ve heard this piece referred to in art history classes as conceptual art. (Conceptual, defined as of, relating to, or based on mental concepts). During the first class of the semester, we discussed the conceptual turn, and the production of art through language and ideas rather than through physical objects. I would argue that the two are not so different after all.