A familiar thing, the art of looking
“What is familiar and well-known as such is not really known for the very reason that it is familiar and well-known. In the case of cognition, the most common form of self-deception and deception of others is when one presupposes something as well known and then makes one’s peace with it.”
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, 2018, Pref. § 35.
“I see, I see more and more, I reconstruct by seeing”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics, p. 232)
My wife and I own a ‘Danielle Lopes-Cardoso’. It is a small work on silk organdie, set within a white acid-free passepartout and framed by an unassuming beech-wood frame. It hangs above our sofa on the narrow bit of wall dividing our two street-facing windows. It has hung there for nearly four years at the moment of writing this essay.
To get there it has undertaken a long and occasionally whimsical journey, being moved from house to house and from place to place within each house, each time ending up where we both thought best.
What the criteria for ‘best’ were, would differ in each house and on each occasion, but they would always revolve around the notion of justice. We had to do justice to the work and our home.
Now it appears to have settled comfortably, but who knows what the future holds. There are still tensions to resolve. During the day it hangs between the two large Dutch windows I mentioned, giving a view out on the canal in front of our house as well as the houses opposite and as a result it gets a little lost in all the life going on out there: grebes nesting, urban gulls prowling, rowers rowing, litter whirling, boats with deep-frying sunbathers drifting, students laughing, shouting, drinking and singing loudly, tourists ambling, cycling, talking.
All this life passes behind the work, it’s hidden side, people and things disappearing from the one window to reappear in the other for a fleeting moment only to pass on; all of them visibly concerned with their own business and unaware that they have just passed behind a small work of art, much valued by its owners.
In the evenings it hangs between two cream-coloured curtains with Indian embroidery bathed in golden light and comes into its own in a quiet, playful, and happily modest sort of way. Or so I imagine. Although I do not really know what I mean with that. Perhaps it would be answered by asking what the picture is of?
But before we get to that deceptive question which, once dealt with will inevitably get in the way of discussing other equally important things, I would like to continue my description of the materials making up the work. It is, essentially, a piece of embroidery of black silk thread seemingly roughly sown onto the white silk which has, in a painterly way, been brushed with taupe acrylic, and, as a result, taken on a shape…
So, what is it of? I suppose we can’t put it off any longer. But be warned, there lies the difficulty.
I like to think of it as a tree. I was told by the artist that it was of a tree, although at the same time it seemed of little real importance. That was not what the work is about. It is about being a material object made and gifted by a dear friend and formed with that enviable casual mastery in the selection of materials, textures and colours and the gentle expression of gesture and productive movement with which great artists imbue their works and of which their products bear forensic witness.
That is what the work is about. And surely this is of as much value as what the picture is of. It is the texture, colour and atmosphere that speak together with the shape.
But if you want to focus on the shape rather than the matter, the wild threads of black silk thread in their chaotic toing and froing make up the rough shape of what indeed could be seen as a tree. And it was a tree for many years.
And then a friend of mine mistook it for a woman’s pubis. What that says about my friend or about the picture I leave to the reader to decide, but at that moment the work was ‘lost’. It lost its balance, tipping from being ‘a material work’ emphatically into ‘a picture of something’.
We won’t easily find the way back. My friend’s remark had an indelible effect. Once labelled, labels stick in the mind and there become necessary attributes after the fact of what is so labelled.[1]
The image of it cannot be rubbed out of my mind. So, for me personally the picture is both ‘of a tree’ (happily and quietly) and —as a feint— of a pubis: a tree-pubis (insistently).
In this way it has acquired the power of becoming a strong hybrid symbol, perhaps of ‘growth’, of ‘birth’, of ‘life’ of ‘generation’ and of all that trees and pubes have in common, such as being the origin of worlds or even being the earth itself in their guise as a mother.[2]
This on top of the connotations trees bring on by themselves, such as ‘majesty’ and ‘generosity’ and, naturally, what pubes bring on by exerting a deeply sentient sexuality, drawing desire, and standing for the eternal feminine in everything[3].
I try to resist all that. Symbols require so much of the viewer projecting themselves upon the work; they require the viewer to take a stand with regard the thing symbolized and so the viewer is almost forced to become a believer and before you know it, the work becomes a political thing, a message about priorities.
That is too heavy for our wall. We ought not to overload a work with constrictive thought. I prefer the feigned Apollonian innocence to be found in enforced symbolic silence, despite knowing this to be a deception.[4]
Nevertheless, I love the work as an expression of material and skilled gesture and have found my peace with what it represents. I suppress the amplification and proliferation of its meaning and leave all that simmering under the lid.
And so, over the years, the picture has quietened down. It has settled into being a work expressing its matter through form. I look on it attentively and fondly every day. It is a work I believe I have become intimately familiar with.
At the same time my familiarity with it is, of course, a mere deception of self. What do I know of it? Nothing! The axes along which my getting to know the picture branch out are all self-serving, self-confirming.
In getting to know the picture I get to know only myself and get to elaborate myself. In getting to know myself through the picture I expand myself. I learn to know it materially in that I can learn what materials it is made up of. I elaborate that knowledge to fill up a space of implications that makes silk organdie, acid-free paper and beech wood frames matter to me. I make the correct naming of the colour matter. I get to know its form and its deceptive meanings. I see the busy trajectory that the needle has followed through the near transparent organdie setting out a chaotic but single path of black thread. I come to know how it was made, how the tree grew, as an idea, how embroidery is done. I even know something of its purpose.
The purpose of a work of art —according to Hegel— is to explore the world, in any way it can, and serve the progress of thought.[5] I explore my relationship with such a work to construct a life, a fuller life, in thought. The purpose of having art on my walls is to make me pay attention to my world, to make me stop and think and generate more world, to allow myself to grow fond of, and familiar with the things we have privileged with a place in our home and that have condescended to accept that place, knowing always that to be familiar with something is just to have made your peace with it… for the moment. The journey goes on indefinitely, disquietingly.
Owning a picture is not a knowing, it is an adventure of getting to know. Oneself. In the world. Acquainting yourself with a picture is to explore the space of implications within yourself, the space of possibilities along a chaotic trajectory of change called time that makes up that life that is our ultimate work of art. In this way the work of art on my wall has become a dear friend, unfolding itself in friendship.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
[1] This refers to an old favourite: Saul Kipke’s Naming and necessity, Princeton,1980
[2] Gustave Courbet once painted a woman’s vulva as they reclined against a tree and called it origin du monde, 1866.
[3] Das wig weibliche, Goethe’s Faust, Part II, 1832 last verse:
| Chorus Mystics. Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnisse; Das Unzulängliche Hier wird’s Ereignisse; Das Unbeschreibliche Hier ist es getan; Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan. Finis. | Mystical Chorus. Everything transient Is but a symbol; The insufficient Here finds fulfilment; The indescribable Here becomes deed; The eternal-feminine Draws us forward. End. |
[4] Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872 where the Apollonian stands for the order that is mendacious opposing the true and dark chaos of the Dionysian that is too awful to confront.
[5] Hegel’s aesthetics ***