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.