Ambiguity

In reading about the manipulations, operations, and ambiguities intentionally created by artists, I’ve been thinking about ways in which we as artists can challenge the viewer’s perception of a painting. I think in making the observer work to understand an image he or she is more engaged and therefore the painting feels more active. This was well represented in Livingstone’s discussion of Impressionism’s manner of using “low spatial precision” to “lend vitality to a painting because the visual system completes the picture differently with each glance.” Impressionism was an endeavor to make something that offered what the static camera image could not, and therefore it needed a way to capture movement or concurrent moments in time. And in attempting this, one can argue that it represents something actually closer to the human experience than a camera’s image.

This line of thought connected nicely to the focus of Mamassian’s article: ambiguity in visual art. The ambiguities that he outlines are part of the choices that the painter makes in composing an image and aspects that the Impressionists manipulated to give a feeling of transience to their paintings—the process of translating a perceived reality to the canvas. Mamassian poses the following questions, questions which I ask myself each time I begin to make something (although at times asking these questions may occur unconsciously): How do the objects relate? What patterns or groups are created? How are edges formed? How are shadows interpreted? Where is the light source and how does it affect the color of objects? How is the color of the surface differentiated from the intensity of the light source? How is movement depicted? To conclude his article Mamassian clarifies that “not all ambiguities are resolved” by the artist. This seemed obvious to me. Ambiguity and challenging the viewer is what makes art intriguing. It’s an interpretation of our perception.

Something I want to investigate more relates to La Gournerie’s Paradox, the phenomenon where observers rarely notice the deformations of a scene caused by not seeing a painting head-on. After reading about this I wondered about what happens if the artist has intentionally created deformations. How does the viewer’s brain interpret, react to, or perceive that? For example, the distortion of the human body in the majority of Francis Bacon’s paintings. Ernst van Alphen in his book Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self cites the painting Figure writing reflected in a mirror at the beginning of his discussion of perception and says, “His mirrors do not reflect or reproduce adequately, nor do his lamps project or highlight adequately. The bodies of his figures are not reflected or elucidated by these visual devices; instead they are dissolved by them” (60).

This is an excellent example of what Mamassian described as “inconsistencies.” He elaborates that these impossibilities or inconsistencies don’t take away from the painting and that the observer can still interpret the unconventional image. Perhaps being forced to “read” the break in convention of representation also pushes the viewer to grasp onto deeper implications in the painting. Van Alphen suggests in this piece such themes as vision in the motif of the mirror. It is not mimetic as a mirror conventionally is in reality and gives the viewer pause to consider the act of looking more carefully. He makes the claim that this theme is present throughout Bacon’s body of work. The following quote seems to ask some of the same questions I’m considering, but in regards to this specific painting: “The focalization in the painting is totally ambiguous with regard to both its object and its subject. It is impossible to detect where the defect in looking originates or whose defect it is. Is it the external focalizer (the inscribed viewer), the internal focalizer (the figure), or the mirror that defeats the representation of the visual experience? Is the sense of sight deceived or does the sense of sight deceive us? Do we see what we see, or does vision (the mirror) make us see?” (van Alphen, 73) Yet again, ambiguity making our perception of visual art more engrossing.