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The arts have always been something of an attractive nuisance for semiotics. Not only are the meanings of many art works "open" as Eco had suggested then modified (Eco 1962 and 1990) but works such as music and non-objective painting are held by some not to mean at all. Even when scholars agree that art works all do in some sense "mean," the way in which they mean is notoriously hard to define, though it is clearly different from the way in which a sentence in a natural language or a conventional visual symbol means. Yet semiotics cannot ignore that vast body of works, fine or practical, high or low which has had so profound an influence on culture through the millennia. Much excellent semiotic study has been published on the arts, the lion's share of it on that art, literature, which best accommodates a program of analysis based on the linguistic model. But music, painting, cinema, theatre, comic strips, even circuses have been examined. The visual arts have had their share of attention over the years and among those so attending has been the Canadian scholar Fernande Saint-Martin, Director of the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal from 1972-77 and now professor at the Université du Québec in that city. Professor Saint-Martin, who published her first book on the visual arts in 1968, has now given us a theoretical program for the field in her Semiotics of Visual Language (1990, 1987 in French).
Semiotics of Visual Language addresses many of the issues which haunt any semiotics of the arts, though reasonably enough this relatively short (231 pages of text) treatise is restricted to consideration of visual signs and, of those, only such as may be represented by the fine arts of painting and sculpture. Any semiotics of the visual arts which could gain reasonably wide acceptance on the basic theoretical issues and on an analytical terminology would be of great help, not only for work in the visual arts themselves but for all arts which have a large non-iconic component. Saint-Martin's book vigorously and deeply engages many of the theoretical and analytical issues of the field. It is not, I fear, that book which will serve as the agreed platform for future work. The book...