武智 周三 

The Attitude of Resisting the Sign: Perception, Medium, and the Genealogy of Art History

 

Introduction

 

Human beings can only apprehend the world through signs. It is impossible to bring perception into consciousness without the frameworks of language, imagery, or categorization. At the same time, however, we have continually longed for an outside of the sign. The impulse to stand before what is not yet named, before form has taken shape—this is what I call an “attitude of resisting the sign.” This essay considers how this fundamental desire has repeatedly emerged in the history of art, and how it has been carried forward in painting, photography, and contemporary practice.

 

1. The Sign and Its Impossibility

 

In Saussurean linguistics, meaning arises only through difference. Thus, it is theoretically impossible to grasp “pure perception” prior to the sign. Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, likewise showed that perception always occurs as a bodily “being-with-the-world,” already embedded within a field of meaning. What we may call “pure sensation” is itself always already situated within the texture of interpretation.

 

2. The History of “Resistance to the Sign”

 

The Renaissance and Imitation

Alberti’s dictum that “painting is a window” gathered the world into perspectival order while being driven by the desire “to see nature as it is.” It was a moment when the regime of signs intersected with a non-signifying impulse.

 

Impressionism and the Temporality of Light

Monet and others dissolved the sign-character of form, striving instead to record the tremors of light and atmosphere. Here an attempt was made to approach perception prior to the sign, emphasizing the fleetingness of sensation.

 

Cubism, Abstraction, and Flatness

Cézanne’s “little sensations” did not seek to reproduce objects, but to construct the very field of perceptual relations upon the canvas. Picasso and Braque shattered unified forms; Kandinsky and Mondrian eliminated objects altogether, establishing abstract painting. Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” argued that the essence of painting lay in “flatness” and “materiality of pigment,” institutionalizing the impulse toward the pre-sign in the logic of medium-specific reduction.

 

Mono-ha and the Foregrounding of Medium

In Japan during the 1960s–70s, Mono-ha presented precisely this independence of medium. Lee Ufan emphasized the relation between “things” and “place,” arranging stone or iron to call forth a presence beyond interpretation. Nobuo Sekine, in Phase—Mother Earth (1968), excavated soil and inverted it as a mound, turning the earth itself into medium. Here, the latent “manifestation of medium” within painting was separated from support and representation, and presented directly as material.

 

Photography and Indexicality

Photography leaves behind an indexical trace of its object, but is simultaneously strongly coded by cultural and social conventions. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argued that photography dismantled “aura” and inaugurated a new form of art open to reproducibility. Photography does not require the manifestation of material medium to exist; it may equally subsist as screen or data. Thus the longing for the pre-sign appears as an indexical trace, yet is immediately entangled in a field of signification.

 

3. The Practice of Choosing Objects with Weak Sign-Character

 

A distinctive feature of my photographic practice is the deliberate selection of objects with as little sign-character as possible. Strong signs—monuments, signage, advertisements, text, emblematic landscapes—draw perception immediately into familiar cultural codes. Viewers become preoccupied with “reading” the subject, estranged from the experience of perception itself.

Instead, I seek anonymous and non-symbolic fragments—shadows along a wall, parking-lot lines, cracks in a surface, light slipping through weeds, residues at the city’s margins. These have weakened sign-character, demanding no immediate attribution of meaning. Thus the viewer is compelled to remain with “perception itself.”

This practice resonates with several art-historical lineages:

 

• Like Mono-ha’s choice of stone, iron, or paper—materials with attenuated semantic charge—my photographs use “weakened signification” to present the presence of the world.

• Like Greenbergian modernist painting, which stripped away signification through reduction to flatness and pigment, my work employs diminished sign-objects to foreground perception itself.

• As Merleau-Ponty suggested, it is at ambiguous and peripheral objects that the pre-conceptual layer of bodily perception is revealed. By avoiding strong signification, one opens the possibility for sensations “not yet named.”

• In Benjamin’s terms, I turn not to “aura-laden sign-objects,” but to anonymous, reproducible traces that, through weakened signification, generate a trembling of perception.

 

Thus, the choice of objects with weak sign-character is not mere aesthetic preference, but a practice that structurally secures the attitude of resisting the sign at the level of artistic production.

 

4. A Contemporary Position

 

I wish to stand before what lies “prior to the sign,” while understanding this to be impossible. Hence, I choose paradoxically to “present impossibility through the sign itself.” Painting, as Greenberg argued, resisted the sign by manifesting its medium; Mono-ha rejected the sign by presenting materials in their raw presence. In contrast, my practice does not require the manifestation of medium; instead, by selecting objects with weakened sign-character, it foregrounds perception itself, pointing paradoxically toward the pre-sign.

 

Conclusion

 

The attitude of resisting the sign is a fundamental impulse running through art history. The imitation of the Renaissance, the light of Impressionism, the flatness of abstraction, the materials of Mono-ha, the traces of photography—all were attempts to resist the necessity of signs and to summon what lies before them. I situate myself within this genealogy: while seeking the “pre-sign,” I acknowledge that it can only be touched through the “post-sign.” My work adopts this paradox, selecting objects of weakened sign-character to distance the viewer from interpretation and to keep them within perception itself.

This stance, turning the constraints of signification back upon themselves, makes of impossibility itself an artistic proposition. It testifies to the fundamental possibility of art in the contemporary world.

 

Works Cited (MLA Style)

• Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969.

• Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Art and Literature, no. 4, 1965, pp. 193–201.

• Lee, Ufan. From Point to Line to Plane: Selected Writings by Lee Ufan, 1970–1990. Edited by Joan Kee, Hatje Cantz, 2014.

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith, Routledge, 1962.

• Sekine, Nobuo. Phase—Mother Earth. 1968, Suma Rikyu Park, Kobe, Japan.