Semiotics of visual language /

The fact that this book has practically nothing to contribute to the ongoing debates on semiotic issues that presently enliven historical and critical discourse on visual art illustrates the range of projects that fall within "visual semiotics," and a missing middle ground between its most ideological/philosophic and scientific/perceptual poles. Firmly situated at the latter, Saint-Martin takes the viable position that the distinctive complexities of visual signs are missed when they are illegitimately assimilated to the status of linguistic structures, but she moves too far in the opposite direction by assimilating the formal description of visual signs to an exhaustive and universalizing description of perceptual phenomena, developing a complicated method of "semiological analysis" that is never demonstrated in application. Isolating the "coloreme" as the fundamental unit of visual structure and the topological distribution and integration of coloremes on the "basic plane" surface as the primary level of visual syntax, the book has the deadening flavor of the kind of art appreciation textbook that marches through "the visual elements" of color, texture, line, and shape, with accompanying artistic examples and diagrams (there are no art reproductions here; some diagrams, but none in color--a serious omission when color is so centrally considered). This is not a book about art, though the semiotic intuitions of artists are used and cited, nor about visual language in its semantic and pragmatic dimensions or any actual visual language(s); fundamental problems of scope and purpose create a curious admixture of insight and blindness. -W. B. Holmes, University of Rhode Island