Dynamics in the Paralytic Child

In his chapter on Dynamics, Arnheim mentions the Muybridge photographs of the galloping horse, noting that none of the photographer’s stills captures the full intensity of the horse’s speed and exertion as the impossible image of a horse fully spreading his forehand and backhand. One of my favorite and heartbreaking Francis Bacon paintings is a interpretation of another series of Muybridge stills, images of a paralytic child in motion. As Arnheim would anticipate, almost none of Muybridge’s stills adequately capture the distorting that the child’s body must undergo in order to move forward within itself. It is no surprise, then, that Bacon chooses to paint the final image in the series (bottom right still): it is the image in which the body is the most fully distorted, the rear highest in the air, torso most compressed, front right shoulder dropping to accommodate the tilted head and neck. The final Muybridge still not only captures the extent of the child’s contorting, but it also is the most balanced: the bend of the right knee and the resultant weight paced on the left leg is compensated by the weight which the child shifts onto the right arm as he tilts his head towards the camera. Because of the balance within this still, it is the image which most adequately captures a dynamic sense of “movement:” as Arnheim might also have predicted, this image is perhaps the one in which the child looks the least uncomfortably static and frozen. In his adaptation of this final image, Bacon emphasizes this sense of balance with the addition of a door frame which is balanced in a manner similar to the child (with the weight of the foreground, or the closer arm, placed visually on the right-hand side and the weight of the background, or the far leg, resting on the left), with its weight resting in the foreground in the righthand side of the painting and presumably meeting the wall in the background slightly to the left. In his image, Bacon captures the movement and dynamism of this child in a way that the Muybridge stills can only reproduce when shown as a continuous film (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80gjYWEbZlA). 

It is also worth noting that while each of the Muybridge stills contains at lease the horizontal line separating the floor if not horizontal and vertical lines within the body of the boy, only oblique lines (including the one separating floor from wall) comprise Bacon’s image, a device which adds to the dynamic effect of the painting. The Muybridge stills look rather like Hans Thoma’s illustration mentioned in Arnheim, for the child looks stiff because the abnormal curves and oblique angles of his body do not conform to the total, quite grid-like schema of the whole image. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Muybridge photographs look quite scientific and less like “art” than the Bacon painting which situates its dynamic boy within a setting composed of complex and irregular angles. Bacon’s child can stand on his own and no further images are needed to lend the work a dynamic quality, but much of the dynamism within the Muybridge comes from the grouping of the various photographs: the slight changes in the child’s position from one image to the next lends the work the movement Bacon accomplishes in one image. For a painter who so often relies on the theme of being “trapped” or “confined,” it makes sense that Bacon relies so fully on abnormal distortions that convey such dynamism to prevent his images from seeming frozen or lifeless.

The Fake Horse: Handicapped in Time or Space?

I have been thinking over the past few days, for my conference work, about the stark opposition between space and time in a painting, in an artistic image. It has seemed that space is the painter’s mode, her material, the clay of which she has an infinite abundance, and that the limits of her spatial creation only exist in her limits of a human being. She does not, of course, have a paint color of every wavelength, and perhaps her fingers do not have the precision to create a perfect circle. But if she had every material and the power to master it all, she would be unlimited in her three-dimensional spatial creation—as of now, she is unlimited spatially, within the realm of her ability.

Time, however, I have come to see as not the mode, but rather the constraint upon visual imagery. Each frame is limited temporally, to one moment, by necessity of the oneness of the painting. We have there only one viewpoint, which is not progressed or affected by time (except of course by erosion or vandalism, features “outside the art”), and the frozenness prevents the existence of two moments, and at least two moments are necessary for the progression of time. Even a film can only convey one set of visual features in each momentary frame. The challenge of art, then, would be to explode and dazzle infinitely within the boundaries of a single moment in time.

But Arnheim’s Dynamics chapter is shifting my view. He says on 424, “[T]he immobile image is not momentary, but outside the dimension of time,” and that to succeed at conveying a sense of movement, one must convey not one moment of a “temporal sequence,” but must wrap up the entire sequence into one “timeless pose.” Thus an image has actually complete control over time, in that it can distort to its liking the linearity of actual time; it can sculpt the laws of time so that many moments are present in the image’s one moment, or perhaps, “non-moment.” Time is what the image is not constrained by—it can do anything, at any time. There is no time, as it applies to the real world, at all. It can alter “real-time,” or perhaps disregard it completely, by conveying movement by the horses’ limbs in a complete leap, fusing multiple frames of real-life movement into one image. When looking onto a scene, only the center of our stare has that  particularly vivid acuity, and the surrounding and peripheral fall out of focus gradually. Many hyper-realist disrupt the reality of real-time seeing by giving the entire painting a stunning acuity. It merges several moments of real perception into the image’s one container of time. Contrastingly, some paintings (see Flowers in a Pitcher, by Matisse) intentionally mimic the eyes’ temporal restriction (they cannot function the same way in two moments) by giving thick, crisp globs of brushstroke to the important areas, and painting the unimportant, the intentionally peripheral, with less detail and exertion. Perhaps it is not true that the immobile image is “outside the dimension of time” as Arnheim says, but rather, free to alter the rules of time as we know it in reality. A painting has its own dimension of time.

This, of course, does not mean that each work of art by necessity manipulates time successfully—though the image might be intended to convey motion, as Arnheim explains, a snapshot of a football player may have “the human figure awkwardly arrested in mid-air as though struck by sudden paralysis,” (414). It means only that time is the malleable material, available to be manipulated to convey whatever certain visual expression, whatever facet desired in the painting world, unattainable in the real world. Perhaps “successful” manipulation is irrelevant, because it refers to the artist’s intention; the image on the canvas inherently either obeys temporal reality or doesn’t, has tension or has none. Arnheim mentions “Muybridge’s serial photographs…[in which] the full impact of the blow appears only in those pictures in which the hammer is lifted high. In-between phases are not seen as transitional stages of the smashing blow, but as a more or less quiet lifting of the hammer,” (424). If an artist intended the immense weight of inertia that charges the high-hammer images, but produced a work more resembling of the in-between, we wouldn’t necessarily see the image as unsuccessful in its mastery of time, but rather simply a resemblance of the in-between stage of real life’s swinging.

It is interesting that to convey one realistic dynamic, one of the mobile, four-dimensional, non-painting world, we have to destroy another. Indeed, it seems Arnheim, in his approval of the non-realistic outstretching of galloping horses, which forgoes realistic position for realistic speed, holds one kind of dynamic above another; expression is more important than content. What must be conveyed is the sense of tension, weight, movement; it matters not whether these artistic legs are truthful to the limbs on real horses. A step further, it does not even matter what the shapes of the legs are on the painting, but how we perceive them, what they strike the viewer with. We see not the ontogram, as Arnheim says, but the phenogram. It is a function of gestalt psychology, that no beautiful part gives us a stable and complete sense of beauty. It is taking a cue from the subjective principle of perception, that the value of the image of shapes and interplay are not in their truthful being, the noumenon world, but how we see them. Their value relates to us selfishly. It’s not just that the successful horse’s limbs aren’t realistic—it’s that their success relies not on inherent qualities in the painting, but on us as perceptive visual creatures,. There is no visual gestalt without us. The images without us are not images, worlds of their own, separate from and perhaps representative of the real world. They are just objects—when I try to describe what a painting is without humans, I’m at a loss for words that don’t contain a principle of human organization or perception (shape, color, material, piece, instance). I’m reminded of the principle of currency; what we are holding is strips of green paper, and if the human race perished then there would be no monetary property in the bills, no value, nothing except the paper itself.

In fact, it is space that is the painting’s handicap—not in size, for enormous canvases exist, but in that no space can by occupied by two things at once. A square centimeter that is occupied by red, and cannot, also be occupied by blue. It is the law of substance, of matter, that confines our real world as well. If the vase is completely full of flowers, it isn’t full of water. An image can contain many temporal phases in one horse, but it cannot contain two horses in one horse. In photograph overlays, perhaps, a fusion of two spaces into one is obtained, but what results is more accurately its own space, and each image is unseeable in its original form, bound to the other. It is perceived as two spaces, physically containing a determined array of pixels, but understood and impossible to understand any other way than occurring within one space. Rubin’s vase, or duo of profiles, contains two organizational patterns in one image—but as far as which space is occupied by black and which by white, the makeup of the image, the ontogram, the image is limited to being one image. It is photographic overlays and optical illusions that challenge the spatial handicap of painting, and succeeding throughout the course of one viewing—but no viewer, at one moment, can perceive two images, can “see both.”

Children and Art

“Tell me about your picture.” This is the way the teachers at the Early Childhood Center and (progressive) teachers of young children express interest in and appreciation of a child’s artistic composition and the effort they have put into creating it. To ask for a description of the picture includes an implicit appreciation of the complex labor the child undertook to create this picture. More importantly, it respects the child’s developmental stage by letting their picture be what it is to them and thus refusing to impose the confining and potentially destructive limits of adult expectation or “realistic representation.” In short, it honors the ongoing developmental processes Arnheim describes in his chapter on “Growth” and thus falls directly in line with the educational pedagogy he describes as well.

            This is a wonderful outlook because it respects experience. Arnheim’s assertion that an artist has the ability to articulate experience as opposed to the limited ability to express only “himself” “rang true” to me. In the realm of art, this is felt in how off-putting and limited patently self-indulgent artistic expression feels. In the realm of childhood, this serves as the best possible explanation for both the compelling quality of children’s “primitive” art and their own, often very clear satisfaction with their work. The notion of children’s art as being “incomplete” or “incorrect” falls apart in the face of their apparent satisfaction or seeming disregard for the lack of realistic accuracy in their work. Of course they may grow frustrated but this can be explained by their progressing development and thus their growing sense of differentiation—not merely the inherently “low quality” of their work. Children love to pant and draw. The undertake such work with focus and purpose and more often then not are pleased with the results. Think of how often they decide to present their work as a wonderful gift to a beloved family member or friend. Such work is an “impressive achievement,” the result of “laborious experimentation” to meet what their developmental level of perception allows them to see (Arnheim 168).

            Arnheim alludes to linguistic development in this chapter to emphasize how a sense of general structure enables the child finds his or her way to the specificity of differentiation. The similarities between visual/perceptual development and linguistic development are striking. Children learn and grow through experience; they first perceive the “effect” or general structure of experience and then strive to find the particularities and complexities of structural elements. While I believe this course of development is accurate, useful, and observable, I’m impressed by the fact that it’s not necessarily intuitive. To “see” in this way requires rigorous study and reflection. I’m left wondering is this is the dark side of human’s psychological tendency to seek the simplest form. It’s much simpler to think of children’s artwork as incomplete or incorrect. It’s simpler to think of primitive work as primitive. But neither view is accurate or productive when confronted with the lived, sensory experience of perception and creation.   

Sacks & Sue

Reading Sacks’ article, I became acutely aware of my own eyes and the distance between them. An artist is taught that they should leave one eyes-length between the two. While I have long been privy to the notion that the eyes of prey are typically set farther apart than predators, It never occurred to me that this would effect their 3D perception. After regaining stereoscopic vision, Sue became more aggressive (predatory?) on the road—should we then equate the monoscopy caused by strabismus with defensiveness? I am curious, now, about vision in arachnids and other insects with more than two eyes. The media tends to portray an insect’s visual field as a blurry honeycomb of tiny images. It strikes me that there is more than likely a significant overlap in what each oculus sees. Would we humans be filled with the same wonder that Sue experienced were we to suddenly sprout extra eyes?

We are conditioned to assume that eyes are automatically situated on the horizontal plane. That a small difference in the vertical alignment of Sue’s eyes prevented her from experiencing the world as I do completely blew my mind. Under other circumstances I might go off on society’s “normalization” of stereoscopic vision—who’s to say that our way is the right way?— but the fact that alternatives become physically and mentally taxing over time proves my zeal misplaced.

Sacks’ childhood experiments with hyperstereoscopes and pseudoscopes prompted a frantic web search for examples of their effects and an irrepressible urge to build my own from paper towel rolls. It seems that hyper-stereo 3D, where the two perspectives (or eyes) converge at a sizable angle, has become a go-to format for video game designers looking to push boundaries. I’m less likely to emulate his other experience with stereoscopic deprivation, but the fact that one’s entire perceptual framework can shift based on the size of a room confirms that the brain is more responsible for our visual experience than our eyes.

Even after hearing Sue’s account I have a hard time grasping how one could function only using one eye at a time, especially with nearby objects. When I hold my phone right in front of my face I get completely different images from my right and left eyes. The effect of opening one after the other is almost jarring. Would Sue subconsciously favor one eye over the other in all close-up situations to avoid this effect? What if, in a deliberate attempt to trip up her visual stimuli, Sue rapidly alternated the eye she was using to focus? Like most of Sacks’ work, this story leaves me wishing I was able to meet and interact directly with his subject.

Side Note: I know that I, and many of my friends have a hard time working through “Magic Eye” illusions. I was surprised that such a frustrating game is used as proof of stereoscopic sight. Perhaps I’m just jealous.

Sue and Virgil integrating new sight

While reading the Sacks' piece, I became aware of the contrast between Sue's feelings about gaining stereoscopic vision and Virgil's experience with regaining sight.  Sacks addressed this difference in a general way towards the end of the "Stereo Sue" piece,  when he said: "While I liked the poetry of Sue's analogy, I disagreed with the thought, for I suspect that someone who has grown up in a completely colorless world would find it confusing, or even impossible, to integrate a new "sense" such as color with an already complete visual world."

I was also curious about Sue's nearly seamless integration of stereoscopy into her other visual percepts, and agreed with Sack's (especially after reading about Virgil) that while this shift may have been easy for Sue, it is not an experience that can be mapped on to the vision changes of others.  I wonder if it is possible that Sue had an easier experience because she simply had to fuse two separate visual fields in order to correct her vision, while sight for Virgil was an entirely unknown experience.  I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that Virgil had to learn object delineation, while Sue already had the ability to see object boundaries, even if it was on a primarily two-dimensional scale.  It was necessary for Virgil to acquire skills in object recognition if he wanted to be able to correctly interpret visual stimuli, whereas Sue had perfect recognition capacities before the experience of stereopsis.  To reiterate Sacks: Sue had a precursor; Virgil did not, and this precursor, it seems, made all the difference.

Beyond this, I also wondered whether other facets of Sue and Virgil's personalities affected the ease of their visual integration.  Sacks describes Virgil as developing a kind of "psychic blindness" (as well as visual blindness) in reaction to his surgery.  Sacks describes this psychic blindness as a bad side effect of a  surgery gone wrong, but I wonder how intentional this psychic blindness might have been, to what extent it could have been Virgil's attempt to return to the former mental state that accompanied his former visual one.  Sue, in contrast, seemed extremely adaptable to her pre- and post-stereoscopic visual states.  She was not especially bothered by her lack of normal vision (as Sacks describes it), and was not even entirely aware of what was missing, whereas Virgil was aware of what was missing and tailored his life around it. Changing Sue's vision did not change her life in any profound way, whereas changing Virgil's vision removed him from his essential zone of familiarity.

This led me to consider the effects of "experimenting" with one's vision.  Does one need a visual baseline in order to be positively affected by eyesight changes?  What is the ideal platform of vision capacity/incapacity for experimentation?

The Observer

I think it is difficult to write on such matters as vision because what I am gradually learning in class is that I do not think we see at all, only imagine to see what is provided to us by the dimension humans are give, that being the 3D. When we look at a screen (camera or moving picture) it’s a 2D image that we give depth to and create the illusion of 3D image. Tovee goes on to explain how the muscle controls the eye, which then determines the value of angles, and these angles capture images, more so, objects, converge them, and create something that the human observer becomes familiar with. It is more complex then that, as we all learned in the beginning of class when focusing on the biological aspect of the visual system. We are given sight, a tool to understand, manipulate, function, and most of all, survive with in this subatomic world we are all composed of. Tovee states, “So if the viewer is familiar with the size of an object, the size if its retinal image can be used to judge how far away the object is… can be judged by reference to the size of the familiar object.” (Tovee 161) The viewer scales objects to compare to a relative size he or she has seen before, which makes me wonder how the viewer can see at all when he or she is constantly comparing object’s sizes to other sizes that have no define/ given size. Each person is his or her own observer, therefore, each objects size must be different to each person, which is why there couldn’t be one exact size for each object. On top of it, there are other factors that contribute to what a viewer sees, such as linear convergence, texture gradients, shading, and of course the amount of light given to that object.

I think the clip that Sarah provided for us is a perfect example of how some of us (maybe a majority of us) see in a more common agreed upon way, while others in a unique perspective unlike anything most viewers can relate to. This can only reveal to me that each person is his or her own observer of each phenomenon within space and time. Through this, a larger reality is constructed by individual realities combined together. These realities contribute into a more productive reality that many of us are familiar with, because either we contribute to this reality or it affects the individual observer’s reality. Temple Grandin sees in pictures, very detailed pictures that the average eye cannot depict. Why is that? How can it be that a certain glitch in genetic makeup can cause one person to have an entirely new vision?  How many artists then, have or had some sort of mishap within their functioning system that gave each artist the vision to see beyond the conceptualized form? Van Gogh with schizophrenia, and De Kooning Alzheimer’s, Chuck Close with faceblindness, and I am assuming there are more artist with something particularly unique to them, but I am referring to these artists since they were in our readings. 

Most of all, I am astonished to learn that the viewer is stuck in a 3-dimension world and does not have the capacity to go beyond this dimension, simply because he or she is incapable of doing so. I wonder if artists aim to simplification because of this. Arnheim continuously refers back to theory of simplification in every chapter and I think is extremely crucial in all art forms and non-art perceptive ways of viewing life. More so, because it appears that we relate better with objects at their purest essence of form (geometric shapes) and from there can relate these objects to other objects easier. For example, to understand 3d form we begin with 2d shape of it, and gradually lead up to 3d form because in the 3d world, there is more freedom to explore these objects. However, due to being binocular creatures, when these images converge, information will be lost. Once again bringing into question the legitimacy of what one can or cannot see. Yet, I think the human compensates with this default by using one’s imagination, and through this push beyond realms that fear us, are non relatable, and most of all question life. Art questions life depending on how far the artist’s wishes to see it like this. Art is not only provided to the visual creator. I think Temple Grandin is an artist in her own right, as Oliver Sacks is. I now wonder if artists are about pushing the realms of our dimensions by the simple aim to understand the world around them. If so, then the only limits rest within our dimension.

Helpful for understanding dimension but the cartoon is a tad bit silly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOuXtONDAN0&feature=related

Space and Naive Perception

This week I was most drawn to Arheim's discussion of the figure-ground and the varying ways artists achieve the depiction of 3 dimensions on a 2-dimensional surface. I felt it was extremely impressive that Arnheim was able to formulate such a simple and concise list of different techniques artists use to create depth that was nevertheless effectively comprehensive. The chapter on Space was even arranged in a kind of hierarchy, with the most essential elements needed for minimal depth mentioned first (line, contour, and convexity/concavity to create figure-ground), followed by techniques necessary for intermediate and ambiguous depth (overlapping, transparency, deformation, and obliqueness to create isometric depth and "simplicity-over-truthfulness" depth), and followed by techniques necessary to create a vivid and seemingly-realistic perception of depth (gradients, centrality, and horizons).

Space was also heavily built from a concept Arnheim has discussed previously in Shape and Form, that being that our visual faculties unavoidably establish a figure-ground for literally any perception we experience: "there is no such thing as a truly flat two-dimensional picture" (227). We can investigate the various physical conditions which cause us to see some particular visual stimuli as being the figure and some other particular stimuli as being the ground, but we are neither able to experience the stimuli in a global way that supervenes on the figure-ground distinction nor experience some local aspect of the stimuli without instantly perceiving that aspect as either being a figure or a background (relative to its surrounding). We're always perceiving a stable state, even when we're given the impression of instability by ambiguous or dynamic percepts, such as with the Necker cube, Rubin's figure-vase, or Kitaoka's rotating snakes. Our brain and mind 'insist' on stability on multiple levels of abstraction, so it is easy to espouse the misconception that the world around us literally consists of these stable percepts, that our perceptions are a veridical representation of what is actually outside of us. There is nothing particularly special about this image, but we can only see it stably as being duck or a rabbit, rather than just a series of lines on a blank background that suggest an animal. We can imagine it as a series of lines on a blank background that suggest an animal (or actually perceive it that way, if we can avoid the Gestalt-ing effect through a lack of familiarity with small organisms, e.g. being an young baby), but even then we're still imposing on the percept the idea that the black lines are some kind of "figure" and the not-lines as some kind of "background", and even then we're still imposing that the black is made up of "lines" and the white is made up of "not-lines", etc etc.

The very discussion of the techniques used in this chapter to achieve the appearance of depth both reflect and subvert the lack of veracity in how we perceive the world around us. The folk/common sense perspective believes that we see the world more or less as it is (e.g. naive realism), and yet it is also so clearly the case that when we look at 2-dimensional visual art we might deem as "realistic", we can be profoundly unaware of how little it corresponds with physical reality. That "realistic"-looking art, more often than not, merely has to take the bare minimum of elements which are true of reality, and then (as Sarah noted in her post, and as Arnheim makes clear in the Space chapter) "deform"/"arrange"/"organize" them in ways that exploit the perspectives, biases, and preconceptions we already have about how the world looks. We consequently end up viewing even the most simplified of arrangements as looking a certain way, even if we have no fundamental reason to believe that they are that way. This is one of the major reason why I enjoy the "multiple-perspectives" way of depicting objects in art (as frequently seen in Cubist works, and in contrast to the single-point perspective), because the objects would not ever be considered realistic from the folk perspective, but are nevertheless instantly identifiable. This creates tension for someone coming from the folk perspective, because why should they be if they aren't realistic? The multiple-perspectives artist has taken human preconceptions to the extreme -- they have not only removed most of the elements which are related to reality, but also only use the bare minimum of the kind of exploitations mentioned earlier, producing objects that don't correspond well with reality but correspond just well enough with our naive perception of reality.