\nOn the Signification of Walls in Verbal and Visual Art
\nMichael Moore
\nLeonardo, Vol. 12, No. 4. (Autumn, 1979), pp. 311-313.
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\nLeonardo, Vol. 12, pp. 311-313
\nPergamon Press 1979. Printed in Great Britain
\nON THE SIGNIFICATION OF WALLS IN
\nVERBAL AND VISUAL ART
\nMichael Moore*
\nWalls-think of the great walls of history: The Chinese
\nWall, the Wailing Wall, the Berlin Wall, the Walls of
\nJericho and the wall on which the handwriting appeared
\nto Belshazzar. Think of Zechariah’s wall of fire and of the
\nwaters of the Red Sea which ‘were a wall to them on their
\nright hand and on their left’. Remember the walls of
\nliterature: Sartre’s wall of execution, Shakespeare’s ‘sweet
\nand lovely wall’, and the wall raised in front of your (and
\nthe unfortunate Fortunato’s) eyes in Poe’s poem ‘Cask of
\nAmontillado’. And think of the expressions: up against
\nthe wall, to go over the wall, wall-to-wall; think of
\nwallflowers, of walls of silence and of separation, of
\nstonewalling and of Stonewall Jackson, of invisible walls
\nand of the hole-in-the-wall. An exhaustive list of famous
\nwalls, religious and other, would, of course, be impossible
\nto compile. Walls have inspired cinema makers, science
\nfiction writers, poets, playwrights, painters and muralists.
\nIn one of the literary sources in Ref. 2 (F. Dostoyevsky)
\nthe protagonist’s adversaries try to convince him about
\nthe immutability of the laws of nature: ‘A wall, you see, is
\na wall . . . and so on, and so on.’ But is it? It is my thesis
\nthat, in addition to their versatile physical functions, walls
\npossess an immense measure of signification and that
\nthese two realms-the concrete and the symbolicinteract
\nwith each other.
\nTake first the multiple significance of walls for the
\nvisual arts, in whose history walls have a place of
\ndistinction not merely because pictures are hung on them.
\nSince prehistorical times, unadorned walls have attracted
\nadornment, giving rise to such different modes and media
\nof artistic expression as cave drawings, frescoes, murals
\nand street art, as well as reliefs, tapestry, wall hangings
\nand posters [3]. The motivation behind these expressions
\nhas a wide range, from the homeopathic magic presumably
\npractised by the Cro-Magnon artists of the
\nAltamira caves in Spain, through the religious murals of
\nthe Neolithic culture in Catal Huyiik in Anatolia, to the
\nsecular, decorative tapestries of the Gothic era and to the
\npolitical murals and posters of the present age.
\nNext consider architecture, where walls may be said to
\ndefine the art itself, for architecture is the art of bounding,
\nthe provision of multiple volumes that are separated from
\none another and from their surroundings by walls [4].
\nAnd yet the function of walls in architecture has drastically
\nchanged throughout the ages: the Romanesque
\ntradition of heavy, structurally indispensable walls has
\ngradually given way to the decorative facades of the
\nGothic period with their buttress-supported vaults.
\n*Psychologist. Dept. of Education in Technology and Science,
\nTechnion. Haifa 32000. Israel. (Received 22 April 1978)
\nNor are walls a structural necessity in skyscrapers, where
\nthe weight of such a building is carried by a steel
\nframework [5].
\nIn the light of the basic function they serve, the need for
\nwalls is hardly surprising. This basic function is one of
\nseparation and the notions of physical and of psychological
\nseparation are fundamental aspects of human existence.
\nSeparation lies behind the two most significant
\nevents of life: birth, which is the separation of the
\nnewborn from its mother’s body, and death, which has
\nbeen interpreted as the separation of soul from body.
\nBetween these two there are other important separation
\nevents, such as the infant’s distinction between itself and
\nthe world [6] and the subsequent tribal and national
\ndichotomization of the world’s inhabitants into ‘us’ vs
\n‘them’ [7].
\nSecond in importance only to the separation function is
\nanother theme associated with walls, referred to by
\ndictionaries as the ‘prevention of free entry or egress’.
\nWhile birth separation has profound individual or ontogenetic
\nsignificance [8], the impenetrability of walls, hence
\ntheir defensive function, is endowed with group or
\nphylogenetic meaning. Whether naturally formed or an
\nartifact, whether in a cave, a castle or a city, walls offer
\nsecurity and protection to those dwelling behind them.
\nThis need for protection was demonstrated on the most
\ngrandiose scale by the emperor Shih Huang Ti who,
\nfollowing his predecessors’ custom, built a 2400 km long
\nwall on the western frontier to defend China. Long before
\nhim, in 7000 B.C., the neolithic people inhabiting Jericho
\nsurrounded it with a massive wall against invaders [9].
\nHow different and multivalued can be the interpretations
\nattached to walls is illustrated by the biblical
\nmetaphor. Swedenborg, having warned his readers
\nagainst a ‘material’ interpretation of the Scriptures,
\nshows that whenever a wall is mentioned, it refers to ‘The
\nWord’, i.e. to the Scriptures (‘By “a wall” is signified that
\nwhich protects’) [lo]. Thus ‘living within the walls’ is
\nequivalent to living by the Scriptures. The same notion
\nwas used by New England Puritans of the 17th and 18th
\ncenturies, who in their sermons identified a wall with faith
\nand with the ministry, surrounding and protecting God’s
\ngarden from the beasts of the wilderness [ll]. It is ironic
\nthat the term ‘wall’ was used in the U.S.A. by Thomas
\nJefferson and by Supreme Court Justice Black [12] to
\nseparate two estates of society; they talked of ‘. . . a wall
\nbetween Church and State which must be kept high and
\nimpregnable’. But these notions are not surprising: the
\nwall prevents both free entry and egress.
\nThe omnipresence of walls and of their metaphorical
\nuse is facilitated by an additional characteristic to be
\nfound in both the separation and the defense functions
\n312 Michael Moore
\nmentioned above. This characteristic is ambivalence or the
\nsimultaneous presence of positive and negative evaluations.
\nBecoming an individual, different both from the
\nmother’s nurturing organism and from the surrounding
\nenvironment is an achievement, but it may be also a loss:
\nIndividuation may be accompanied by anxiety and frustration.
\nIn a similar vein, the security offered by a wall is
\nreadily changed into imprisonment and vice versa. This
\nhas its topological equivalent in the indeterminacy of
\ninside vs outside [I?]. Due to this multiplicity of meanings
\nand affects associated with them, walls, when presented as
\nsigns, are an important source of human interpretation. A
\nwall depicted visually and described verbally brings with
\nitself a multitude of meanings, some of them intended by
\nthe artist, others found only in the mind of the beholder or
\nof the reader.
\nToward some walls there is true ambivalance, as in
\nFrost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’ (Something there is that
\ndoesn’t love a wall.. .’ [14]), or, on a different level, as in
\nthe case of Jerusalem’s Western Wall (Fig. l), the
\nimplication of both destruction and monumental
\nstrength. Many of Sartre’s walls illustrate the same
\nprinciple-while imprisoning, they offer security [15].
\nSartre himself has been identified with this dualism, with
\nsimultaneous claustrophobia and claustrophilia [16], and
\nthe same thesis could be connected with Kafka’s stories,
\nmany of whose characters are ‘imprisoned’ in cells with
\nopen doors.
\nOther walls have opposite meanings for different
\npeople, for those who are defended by it vs those who
\nattack it, or for those who built it as opposed to those
\nagainst whom it was built. City walls and prison walls, in
\ngeneral, fall into this category-the Berlin Wall and the
\nWall of the Warsaw ghetto, in particular Literary
\nand visual art have presented these various walls, most of
\nthem foreboding and cruel. Consider, for example, the
\ncity wall, serving as the background of Daumier’s ‘Le
\nFig. 2. H. Daumier. ‘Le Fardeau’, oil, 147 x 96m, about 1860.
\nFardeau’ (Fig. 2): The laundress’ plight is greatly accentuated
\nby the blind, silent, insensitive wall along which she
\nmust hurry. Or take Sophocles’ drama, where Antigone is
\ncondemned to die in a walled-up tomb by Creon of
\nThebes, or Sartre’s title story, in which the condemned
\nman imagines himself pushing against the impenetrable
\nwall that ‘will stay like in a nightmare’, as it indeed does in
\nexecution scenes painted by Goya, Courbet, Manet (Fig.
\n3) and Garcia.
\nTo conclude my description of the more noteworthy
\nwalls presented in visual and in verbal art, it appears that
\nsince humans descended from the trees, they have left
\nsigns and symbols on the walls of caves and cliffs and,
\nthus, walls have become a permanent fixture of human
\nFig. 3. E. Manet. ‘The Execution of Maximillian’, oil, 250 x Fig. 1. View of the Western Wall of the Temple, Jerusalem, Israel. 305 cm, 1867.
\nOn the Signfieation of Walls in Verbal and Visual Art
\nexistence. The meaning of the sign of a wall, as that of any
\nsign or of any symbol, is fluid and, to a large extent,
\npersonal. Tillich claimed: ‘There are within us dimensions
\nof which we cannot become aware except through
\nsymbols’ [18].
\nREFERENCES AND NOTES
\n1. \t Among them such literary pearls as H. G. Wells’ ‘Door in
\nthe Wall’, Ayme’s ‘The Walker-through- Walls’, Sartre’s
\n‘The Wall’. Kafka’s ‘Great Wall of China’.
\n2. \t F. Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground (New York: New
\nAmerican Library. 1961) p. 98. A similar passage occurs in
\nMax Frisch, The Chinese Wall (New York: Hill & Wang,
\n1961) p. 103: ‘. . . a wall is a wall, and therefore I say.. .:
\nLet’s build one! . . . A wall that will protect us from the
\nfuture.’
\n3. \t See the following sources: H. de la Croix and R. G. Tansey,
\nGardner’s Art through the Ages. 6th ed. (New York:
\nHarcourt, 1975): The Great Age of Fresco (New York:
\nMetropolitan Museum of Art, 1968); J. Jobe, ed. The Art of
\nTapestry (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965); I. Robinson,
\nA Wall to Paint On (New York: Dutton, 1946), in which she
\nreports on her work, together with Diego Rivera, on the
\nmurals of the National Palace in Mexico City: R. Sommer,
\nStreet Art (New York: Links, 1975); M. Constantine and J.
\nL. Larsen. Wall Hangings. (New York: Museum of Modern
\nArt, 1969); J. & S. Muller-Brockmann. Geschichte des
\nPlakates (Zurich: ABC Verlag, 1971): A. Massiczek, Zeit
\nan der Wand (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1967) presenting a
\n120-year history of Austria through posters and wall
\nnotices. See in this respect also another type of ‘wall
\ndecoration’, namely grafiti: R. Reisner. Grafiti: Two
\nThousand Years of Wall Writing (Chicago: Henry Regnery
\nCo., 1971) and H. Kohl, Golden Boy as Anthony Cool: A
\nPhoto Essay on Naming and Grafiti (New York: Dial Press.
\n1972).
\n4. \t P. Weiss, Nine Basic Arts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
\nUniv. Press, 1961).
\n5. \t T. Hamlin. Architecture through the Ages, rev. ed. (New
\nYork: Putnam’s Sons, 1953). for the historical development
\nof walls in architecture see B. Fletcher. A History of
\nArchitecture (London: Athlone Press, 1961).
\n6. \t M. D. S. Ainsworth. Object Relations. Dependency and
\nAttachment: A Theoretical Review of the Infant-Mother
\nRelationship. Child Development 40,969 (1969). A lack of
\nability by adults to achieve this separation is considered
\nsymptomatic of various psychiatric disorders. For some
\nexamples of the inner-outer confusion see F. T. Melges and
\nM. D. Freeman, Temporal Disorganization and InnerOuter
\nConfusion in Acute Mental Illness. Amer. J. PSI.-
\nchiatry 134, 874 (1977). See also V. Nabokov, Pnin (New
\nYork: Avon, 1959) pp. 19-20; ‘Man exists only insofar as he
\nis separated from his surroundings.’
\nS. Chase, Power of Words (New York: Harcourt, 1954): C.
\nB. De Soto, N. M. Henley and M. London, Balance and the <\/p>\n
Grouping Schema. J. Personality and Social Psychology 8,1 <\/p>\n
(1968). <\/p>\n
S. Freud, Inhibitions. Symptoms and Anxiety. In Vol. XX <\/p>\n
of The Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1959): 0. <\/p>\n
Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Harper and Row. <\/p>\n
1973). <\/p>\n
According to legend, the first walled city was built by Cain, <\/p>\n
who then forced his people to settle there; see R. Graves and <\/p>\n
R. Patai, Hebrew Myths (London: Cassell. 1964) p. 94. The <\/p>\n
desirability of living without walls, i.e. without the need for <\/p>\n
protection, also appears in Ezekiel 38:ll. <\/p>\n
E. Swedenborg, The Apocalypse Revealed (London: The <\/p>\n
Swedenborg Society. 1970) n. 898. <\/p>\n
A. W. Plumstead. ed., The Wall and the Garden-Selected <\/p>\n
Massachusetts Election Sermons 1670-1 775 (Minneapolis: <\/p>\n
University of Minnesota Press. 1968). A parody of the <\/p>\n
enclosed-garden concept forms the basis for the barely <\/p>\n
disguised erotic imagery of the medieval allegory by <\/p>\n
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the <\/p>\n
Rose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. 1971). In this <\/p>\n
allegory, written about 1275, the lover’s object is a rose <\/p>\n
enclosed and protected by walls and hedges that he must <\/p>\n
penetrate. <\/p>\n
D. H. Oaks, ed. The Wall between Church and State <\/p>\n
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1963). <\/p>\n
Escher must be credited with a striking graphic repre- <\/p>\n
sentation of such relativities: see The Graphic Works of M. <\/p>\n
C. Escher (New York: Duell, 1961) and H. S. M. Coxeter. <\/p>\n
The Non-Euclidean Symmetry of Escher’s Picture ‘Circle <\/p>\n
Limit III’, Leonardo 12, 19 (1979) and J. C. Rush, On the <\/p>\n
Appeal of M. C. Escher’s Pictures, Leonardo 12,48 (1979). <\/p>\n
For a purely psychological and phenomenological expo- <\/p>\n
sition of the same idea see one of Laing’s Knots’: ‘. . . to <\/p>\n
have the outside inside and to be inside the outside. . . .’, in <\/p>\n
R. D. Laing, Knots (New York: Vintage Books. 1970) p. 83. <\/p>\n
See also Rabelais’ comment in Gargantua and Pantagruel <\/p>\n
(New York: Modern Library. 1936. p. 144): ‘. .. where there <\/p>\n
are mures, walls, before, and mures, walls, behind, we have <\/p>\n
murmures, murmurs of envy and plotting.’ <\/p>\n
For example, Eve in ‘The Room’: ‘. . . she took a step <\/p>\n
toward Pierre’s room but stopped almost immediately and <\/p>\n
leaned against the wall in anguish; each time she left the <\/p>\n
room, she was panic-stricken at the thought of going back. <\/p>\n
Yet she knew she could live nowhere else: she loved the <\/p>\n
room.’ In J. P. Sartre “‘The Wall” and other Stories’ (New <\/p>\n
York: New Directions, 1948). <\/p>\n
M. D. Boros, L1n Seyuestr&L’Homme Sartrien (Paris: A.
\nG. Nizet, 1968); G. Idt, Le Mur de Jean Paul Sartre (Paris:
\nLarousse, 1972).
\nE. L. Dulles. The Wall: A Traged~. in Three Acts (Columbia,
\nS. C.: Univ. of South Carolina, Inst. of International
\nStudies, 1972) and J. Hersey, The Wall (London: Hamish
\nHamilton, 1950).
\nP. Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957)
\np. 43. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the Signification of Walls in Verbal and Visual Art Michael Moore Leonardo, Vol. 12, No. 4. (Autumn, 1979), pp. 311-313. Stable URL: http:\/\/links.jstor.org\/sici?sici=0024-094X%28197923%2912%3A4%3C311%3AOTSOWI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J Leonardo is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}