Deixis
The art historian Norman Bryson (1983) persists with a linguistic model and advances a detail of parsing and tense, 'deixis’. He rejects resemblance and illusion as incompatible with the ambiguities and interpretation available to pictures and is also critical of the inflexible nature of structuralist analysis. Deixis is taken as the rhetoric of the narrator, indicating the presence of the speaker in a discourse, a bodily or physical aspect as well as an explicit temporal dimension. In depiction this translates as a difference between ’The Gaze’ where deixis is absent and ‘The Glance’ where it is present. Where present, details to materials indicate how long and in what way the depiction was made, where absent, a telling suppression or prolonging of the act. The distinction attempts to account for the ‘plastic’ or medium-specific qualities absent from earlier semiotic analyses and somewhat approximates the 'indexic’ aspect to signs introduced by Peirce.
Deixis offers a more elaborate account of the picture surface and broad differences to expression and application but cannot qualify resemblance.
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