The Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, with assistance from the Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (Sydney University), the Power Institute and the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis, brought Richard Wollheim to Sydney for a three day conference on his work in the areas of Art, Emotion and Psychoanalysis.

The conference was attended by 40-50 people each day and was deemed a great success all round. Readers of this newsletter will mainly be interested in the first day of the conference.

Professor Wollheim presented his latest reflections on views of his that are well known, taking into account a number of criticisms that have been made over recent years.

On the nature of pictorial representation and how it differs from linguistic representation, Wollheim remains unmoved by the myriad attempts of a semioticians and their ilk to discover any sort of syntax or grammar for supposed elements (analogues of words) in the matter of painting as an art. He cleaves to his useful phrase "the marked surface" and firmly rebuts suggestions that artistically skilful and creative marking of surfaces, no matter how susceptible it is to criticism, improvement, etc, is much, if at all, like the ability to speak a language.

Wollheim's best known problematic idea, that what he calls "seeing-in" and its accompanying "twofoldness" is a primitive, unanalysable human ability, a "mode of perception" deserves a place as the fundament of painting as an art, both in relation to the maker and the spectator of art. This is not puzzling when we keep in mind that, according to Wollheim, the artist is essentially his own first spectator.

The ability to mark a surface so as to induce a viewer to recognize your intentions is basic to what it is to paint artistically. The fulfilled intention of the artist, as it can be discerned through contemplation of a painting is determinative of the meaning of the work and so to its being understood. It follows that a critic's task is to help the rest of us discern these intentions and whether they are or are not fulfilled in the work. It is perfectly appropriate in this endeavour to treat information external to the painting as the source of hypotheses about the artistís intention. But confirmation of any such hypothesis is to be achieved by contemplation of the work itself.
There were two other speakers on the day, Professor Terry Smith, Power Professor of Fine Art at Sydney, and Adrian Heathcote, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Sydney University.

Smith expressed gratitude and deep appreciation of the contribution that Wollheim's work has made to reflection that goes on in what Smith called the "artworld". In particular, he appreciated Wollheim's introduction of the term "minimal art" into the lexicon of that world's discourse. Smith appeared to think that Wollheim meant to be commending such art perhaps more than Wollheim intended.

Heathcote welcomes enthusiastically Wollheim's recognition of the centrality of artistic intention. He laid into the perpetrators of the intentional fallacy fallacy with vigour. Heathcote thinks that what we find in works themselves is only evidence of artistic intention and does not seem to take as seriously as Wollheim does the problems of the relation between, and the problems of, intention and fulfilled intention.
Heathcote and Wollheim also had an interesting difference of opinion about the symmetries or lack thereof between painting and writing as arts. Wollheim thinks that writing is always productive of a text as well as a work, the text being the sentences of some language that have their meaning before being written down in aid of the further meaning that the artistic writer intends. Heathcote's acceptance of symmetry seems to place him in the camp of those who are formalist or semiotic about painting as an art.

Wollheim, after his three days in Sydney, gave two lectures at the National Gallery in Canberra and a lecture at the University of Melbourne. He returns to Berkeley, where he is now Chair of Philosophy via Munich and Manchester, where he will participate in conferences on art and on emotion.

Richard Wollheim's paper on Art will be published in the next issue of Literature and Aesthetics, the journal of the SSLA, due out in November 2001.