A Relational History of Art: 1 The Reflexive Image — Art as the Evolution of Construal

Art has always been more than representation. Long before a painted bison resembled an animal, early Homo sapiens — already equipped with a stratified semiotic capacity — engaged in the gesture of pigmenting stone as an act of alignment: a way of bringing being into coherence through form. The traces left on cave walls, carved spirals at Newgrange, and sand drawings of Indigenous traditions were not depictions of a world already given. They were participations in its becoming.

To understand this, we can look at art through the same relational lens that Halliday applied to language. For Homo sapiens, what made communication transformative was not communication itself — many species communicate — but the stratification of the content plane into semantics and lexicogrammar. This architecture of meaning allowed a wording to realise both a congruent and a metaphorical meaning at once: a junctional relation in which one meaning stands for another. The effect was revolutionary. Metaphor expanded the semantic potential of language by allowing meanings to stand for meanings — a reflexive fold within the system.

The emergence of art was a parallel innovation along the expressive side of the semiotic continuum. It arose when image, gesture, and mark, already grounded in stratified Homo sapiens semiotic capacity, became symbolic construals — forms through which relations could be seen and felt as relations. These early works were not mere extensions of action or ritual participation; they were reflexive acts, letting form itself stand for the act of construal. In this sense, the earliest art was already metaphorical: not in depicting one thing as another, but in making visible the relational folds through which human experience could be organised and apprehended.

This systemic leap — the same that made language possible — brought a new domain of reflexivity. With language came the capacity to mean about meaning; with art came the capacity to see seeing itself. Both opened a new realm of experience: not just life lived, but life imaged, said, re-membered, and imagined.

From this point on, art became the evolving mirror of construal — a record of how the human collective has understood, and re-understood, its own participation in being. Each phase of art history is not merely a stylistic shift, but a transformation in the ontology of meaning itself: what could be construed, and how construal could be experienced.

This series traces that trajectory — from the participatory image of prehistoric art, through the representational order of classical realism, to the reflexive and distributed images of the digital age. In each case, we will ask two interdependent questions:

What made this phase possible? — the semiotic, social, and ontological conditions that enabled it.

What did this phase make possible? — the new kinds of meaning, subjectivity, and relation it unfolded.

In following this evolution, we do not chart the history of objects or styles, but the unfolding of symbolic consciousness itself — the reflexive image through which meaning becomes aware of its own becoming.