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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 acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

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The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Mon Jul 2 19:55:17 2007 Leonardo, Vol. 12, pp. 311-313 Pergamon Press 1979. Printed in Great Britain ON THE SIGNIFICATION OF WALLS IN VERBAL AND VISUAL ART Michael Moore* Walls-think of the great walls of history: The Chinese Wall, the Wailing Wall, the Berlin Wall, the Walls of Jericho and the wall on which the handwriting appeared to Belshazzar. Think of Zechariah's wall of fire and of the waters of the Red Sea which 'were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left'. Remember the walls of literature: Sartre's wall of execution, Shakespeare's 'sweet and lovely wall', and the wall raised in front of your (and the unfortunate Fortunato's) eyes in Poe's poem 'Cask of Amontillado'. And think of the expressions: up against the wall, to go over the wall, wall-to-wall; think of wallflowers, of walls of silence and of separation, of stonewalling and of Stonewall Jackson, of invisible walls and of the hole-in-the-wall. An exhaustive list of famous walls, religious and other, would, of course, be impossible to compile. Walls have inspired cinema makers, science fiction writers, poets, playwrights, painters and muralists.

In one of the literary sources in Ref. 2 (F. Dostoyevsky) the protagonist's adversaries try to convince him about the immutability of the laws of nature: 'A wall, you see, is a wall . . . and so on, and so on.' But is it? It is my thesis that, in addition to their versatile physical functions, walls possess an immense measure of signification and that these two realms-the concrete and the symbolic- interact with each other. Take first the multiple significance of walls for the visual arts, in whose history walls have a place of distinction not merely because pictures are hung on them.

Since prehistorical times, unadorned walls have attracted adornment, giving rise to such different modes and media of artistic expression as cave drawings, frescoes, murals and street art, as well as reliefs, tapestry, wall hangings and posters [3]. The motivation behind these expressions has a wide range, from the homeopathic magic pre- sumably practised by the Cro-Magnon artists of the Altamira caves in Spain, through the religious murals of the Neolithic culture in Catal Huyiik in Anatolia, to the secular, decorative tapestries of the Gothic era and to the political murals and posters of the present age.

Next consider architecture, where walls may be said to define the art itself, for architecture is the art of bounding, the provision of multiple volumes that are separated from one another and from their surroundings by walls [4].

And yet the function of walls in architecture has drasti- cally changed throughout the ages: the Romanesque tradition of heavy, structurally indispensable walls has gradually given way to the decorative facades of the Gothic period with their buttress-supported vaults.

*Psychologist. Dept. of Education in Technology and Science, Technion. Haifa 32000. Israel. (Received 22 April 1978) Nor are walls a structural necessity in skyscrapers, where the weight of such a building is carried by a steel framework [5].

In the light of the basic function they serve, the need for walls is hardly surprising. This basic function is one of separation and the notions of physical and of psychologi- cal separation are fundamental aspects of human exis- tence. Separation lies behind the two most significant events of life: birth, which is the separation of the newborn from its mother's body, and death, which has been interpreted as the separation of soul from body.

Between these two there are other important separation events, such as the infant's distinction between itself and the world [6] and the subsequent tribal and national dichotomization of the world's inhabitants into 'us' vs 'them' [7]. Second in importance only to the separation function is another theme associated with walls, referred to by dictionaries as the 'prevention of free entry or egress'.

While birth separation has profound individual or onto- genetic significance [8], the impenetrability of walls, hence their defensive function, is endowed with group or phylogenetic meaning. Whether naturally formed or an artifact, whether in a cave, a castle or a city, walls offer security and protection to those dwelling behind them.

This need for protection was demonstrated on the most grandiose scale by the emperor Shih Huang Ti who, following his predecessors' custom, built a 2400 km long wall on the western frontier to defend China. Long before him, in 7000 B.C., the neolithic people inhabiting Jericho surrounded it with a massive wall against invaders [9]. How different and multivalued can be the interpre- tations attached to walls is illustrated by the biblical metaphor. Swedenborg, having warned his readers against a 'material' interpretation of the Scriptures, shows that whenever a wall is mentioned, it refers to 'The Word', i.e. to the Scriptures ('By "a wall" is signified that which protects') [lo]. Thus 'living within the walls' is equivalent to living by the Scriptures. The same notion was used by New England Puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries, who in their sermons identified a wall with faith and with the ministry, surrounding and protecting God's garden from the beasts of the wilderness [ll]. It is ironic that the term 'wall' was used in the U.S.A. by Thomas Jefferson and by Supreme Court Justice Black [12] to separate two estates of society; they talked of '. . . a wall between Church and State which must be kept high and impregnable'. But these notions are not surprising: the wall prevents both free entry and egress. The omnipresence of walls and of their metaphorical use is facilitated by an additional characteristic to be found in both the separation and the defense functions 312 Michael Moore mentioned above. This characteristic is ambivalence or the simultaneous presence of positive and negative evalu- ations. Becoming an individual, different both from the mother's nurturing organism and from the surrounding environment is an achievement, but it may be also a loss:

Individuation may be accompanied by anxiety and frus- tration. In a similar vein, the security offered by a wall is readily changed into imprisonment and vice versa. This has its topological equivalent in the indeterminacy of inside vs outside [I?]. Due to this multiplicity of meanings and affects associated with them, walls, when presented as signs, are an important source of human interpretation. A wall depicted visually and described verbally brings with itself a multitude of meanings, some of them intended by the artist, others found only in the mind of the beholder or of the reader.

Toward some walls there is true ambivalance, as in Frost's poem 'Mending Wall' (Something there is that doesn't love a wall.. .' [14]), or, on a different level, as in the case of Jerusalem's Western Wall (Fig. l), the implication of both destruction and monumental strength. Many of Sartre's walls illustrate the same principle-while imprisoning, they offer security [15].

Sartre himself has been identified with this dualism, with simultaneous claustrophobia and claustrophilia [16], and the same thesis could be connected with Kafka's stories, many of whose characters are 'imprisoned' in cells with open doors.

Other walls have opposite meanings for different people, for those who are defended by it vs those who attack it, or for those who built it as opposed to those against whom it was built. City walls and prison walls, in general, fall into this category-the Berlin Wall and the Wall of the Warsaw ghetto, in particular Literary and visual art have presented these various walls, most of them foreboding and cruel. Consider, for example, the city wall, serving as the background of Daumier's 'Le Fig. 2. H. Daumier. 'Le Fardeau', oil, 147 x 96m, about 1860. Fardeau' (Fig. 2): The laundress' plight is greatly accen- tuated by the blind, silent, insensitive wall along which she must hurry. Or take Sophocles' drama, where Antigone is condemned to die in a walled-up tomb by Creon of Thebes, or Sartre's title story, in which the condemned man imagines himself pushing against the impenetrable wall that 'will stay like in a nightmare', as it indeed does in execution scenes painted by Goya, Courbet, Manet (Fig. 3) and Garcia.

To conclude my description of the more noteworthy walls presented in visual and in verbal art, it appears that since humans descended from the trees, they have left signs and symbols on the walls of caves and cliffs and, thus, walls have become a permanent fixture of human Fig. 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. On the Signfieation of Walls in Verbal and Visual Art existence. The meaning of the sign of a wall, as that of any sign or of any symbol, is fluid and, to a large extent, personal. Tillich claimed: 'There are within us dimensions of which we cannot become aware except through symbols' [18]. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. Among them such literary pearls as H. G. Wells' 'Door in the Wall', Ayme's 'The Walker-through- Walls', Sartre's 'The Wall'. Kafka's 'Great Wall of China'. 2. F. Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground (New York: New American Library. 1961) p. 98. A similar passage occurs in Max Frisch, The Chinese Wall (New York: Hill & Wang, 1961) p. 103: '. . . a wall is a wall, and therefore I say.. .: Let's build one! . . . A wall that will protect us from the future.' 3. See the following sources: H. de la Croix and R. G. Tansey, Gardner's Art through the Ages. 6th ed. (New York:

Harcourt, 1975): The Great Age of Fresco (New York:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968); J. Jobe, ed. The Art of Tapestry (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965); I. Robinson, A Wall to Paint On (New York: Dutton, 1946), in which she reports on her work, together with Diego Rivera, on the murals of the National Palace in Mexico City: R. Sommer, Street Art (New York: Links, 1975); M. Constantine and J. L. Larsen. Wall Hangings. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969); J. & S. Muller-Brockmann. Geschichte des Plakates (Zurich: ABC Verlag, 1971): A. Massiczek, Zeit an der Wand (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1967) presenting a 120-year history of Austria through posters and wall notices. See in this respect also another type of 'wall decoration', namely grafiti: R. Reisner. Grafiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1971) and H. Kohl, Golden Boy as Anthony Cool: A Photo Essay on Naming and Grafiti (New York: Dial Press.

1972). 4. P. Weiss, Nine Basic Arts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1961). 5. T. Hamlin. Architecture through the Ages, rev. ed. (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1953). for the historical development of walls in architecture see B. Fletcher.

A History of Architecture (London: Athlone Press, 1961). 6. M. D. S. Ainsworth. Object Relations. Dependency and Attachment: A Theoretical Review of the Infant-Mother Relationship. Child Development 40,969 (1969). A lack of ability by adults to achieve this separation is considered symptomatic of various psychiatric disorders. For some examples of the inner-outer confusion see F. T. Melges and M. D. Freeman, Temporal Disorganization and Inner- Outer Confusion in Acute Mental Illness. Amer. J. PSI.- chiatry 134, 874 (1977). See also V. Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Avon, 1959) pp. 19-20; 'Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings.' S. Chase, Power of Words (New York: Harcourt, 1954): C. B. De Soto, N. M. Henley and M. London, Balance and the Grouping Schema. J. Personality and Social Psychology 8,1 (1968).

S. Freud, Inhibitions. Symptoms and Anxiety. In Vol. XX of The Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1959): 0.

Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Harper and Row.

1973).

According to legend, the first walled city was built by Cain, who then forced his people to settle there; see R. Graves and R. Patai, Hebrew Myths (London: Cassell. 1964) p. 94. The desirability of living without walls, i.e. without the need for protection, also appears in Ezekiel 38:ll.

E. Swedenborg, The Apocalypse Revealed (London: The Swedenborg Society. 1970) n. 898.

A. W. Plumstead. ed., The Wall and the Garden-Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons 1670-1 775 (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press. 1968). A parody of the enclosed-garden concept forms the basis for the barely disguised erotic imagery of the medieval allegory by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. 1971). In this allegory, written about 1275, the lover's object is a rose enclosed and protected by walls and hedges that he must penetrate.

D. H. Oaks, ed. The Wall between Church and State (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1963).

Escher must be credited with a striking graphic repre- sentation of such relativities: see The Graphic Works of M.

C. Escher (New York: Duell, 1961) and H. S. M. Coxeter.

The Non-Euclidean Symmetry of Escher's Picture 'Circle Limit III', Leonardo 12, 19 (1979) and J. C. Rush, On the Appeal of M. C. Escher's Pictures, Leonardo 12,48 (1979).

For a purely psychological and phenomenological expo- sition of the same idea see one of Laing's Knots': '. . . to have the outside inside and to be inside the outside. . . .', in R. D. Laing, Knots (New York: Vintage Books. 1970) p. 83.

See also Rabelais' comment in Gargantua and Pantagruel (New York: Modern Library. 1936. p. 144): '. .. where there are mures, walls, before, and mures, walls, behind, we have murmures, murmurs of envy and plotting.' For example, Eve in 'The Room': '. . . she took a step toward Pierre's room but stopped almost immediately and leaned against the wall in anguish; each time she left the room, she was panic-stricken at the thought of going back.

Yet she knew she could live nowhere else: she loved the room.' In J. P. Sartre "'The Wall" and other Stories' (New York: New Directions, 1948).

M. D. Boros, L1n Seyuestr&L'Homme Sartrien (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1968); G. Idt, Le Mur de Jean Paul Sartre (Paris:

Larousse, 1972). E. L. Dulles. The Wall: A Traged~. in Three Acts (Columbia, S. C.: Univ. of South Carolina, Inst. of International Studies, 1972) and J. Hersey, The Wall (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950). P. Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957) p. 43.