A Typology of Visual Illustration

This commentary considers how three interrelated kinds of illustration that I call ‘problem-based,’ 'technique-based,' and 'history-based' illustrations build on, as they include or otherwise reflect, the text-based, concept-based, and theory-based illustrations that Wartenberg has identified. Examples that fit the novel kinds of illustration noted can show how they build on the Modernist paradigm by using conditions of the recognition and production of art to create works that reflect their relation to those conditions, while other artworks examined question or counter established practice and illustrate ways of extending art that provoke reflection on its nature and relation to critical acceptance and reflection. These notions, as well as their relation to such things as mind, agency, and ontology, to which they pertain and, in some way, involve, are intrinsically interesting, philosophical in kind, and raise questions of a sort that future philosophy of art and illustration might find valuable to consider. The relation of such artworks to thought means that philosophy or critical examination will be illustrated by the works to which either kind of reflection is written to pertain. Art might provide problem-based illustrations that, while not illustrating existing philosophical concepts or theories, identify a problem that philosophy is required to answer, as Danto maintained to be the case with Warhol's Brillo Boxes, or that philosophy articulated through the work is then understood to ground. Finally, it must be recognized that works of art that are problem-based illustrations can reveal problems that, while relevant to philosophy, art has raised and only art can solve.