Later on in the night, the artist tells you she has one more painting waiting at her home. “What is it of?” you ask. That is the assumption: the painting is a duplication of reality, or of something in reality. It’s a “pictorial representation,” as Arnheim puts it. Even if it is a subversion or interpretation of reality, as are Picasso’s drawings (Figures 91a and b), it is still of reality, connected & bound to it, not a painting of its own entity.
Why is so much of Arnheim’s discussion of Form about the representation of an object from real life? Probably & greatly it is a result of the artistic trend throughout history to make art that way. In the Egyptian humans, and the Greek horses, art has been a method of relating to reality, saying something about something real. Even in abstractions, like below in Picasso’s The Guitar Player, titles direct us to the bridge between art and reality. (And if, in these abstract paintings, the title doesn’t give us reality, our cognitive processes do. Arnheim says on page 139, “It makes all the difference whether in an ‘abstract’ painting we see an arrangement of mere shapes...or see instead the organized action of expressive visual forces.” I think the viewer, more often than not, sees an arrangement of shapes; Arnheim assumes a viewer’s choice between the two equally, but I believe there is a tendency to project or infer reality from even the abstracts.)
Why has the representation of reality been the artistic trend? (and where it has not been, why was it the unconscious goal of art viewers?)
Surely there have been painters who have created paintings--self-sufficient entities, detached from reality, images that have nothing to say or do with reality.
It probably isn’t possible. What painter takes brush to canvas without an incentive? a real incentive? A realistic object or objective is what causes the painting. Regarding Figure 102 of Arnheim, we would say that The Silk Beaters is, being a painting, detached from reality--but Hui Tsung was real, and was inspired by real silk-beating women, or the idea of real them, or the objective of making a real statement on real sisterhood. A revolution or viewer’s emotion can be the desired effect of the piece of art. Even in the sudden & unquestioned “surge” an artist might blessedly experience, and then immediately paint without a conscious objective in mind, a painter is real and thus the painting has something to do with reality, by very nature of its irreversible relationship to the painter. It was birthed by something real. Why then, do we talk about a painting as if it is a detached entity?
A tree is real, we would say. A tree is a part of reality. A tree grows; it is not a tree of something, or about anything. It simply is a tree, and none of its existence is devoted to “pictorial representation.”
But is the same tree real if its seeds were planted by a man?
We often perceive (correctly) that what’s in a painting is not limited to the two dimensional plane, but is a three dimensional scene. Our understanding of reality, and objects from reality, leads us to assume and believe the same dimensionality in a painting. Our experience with objects fills in the blanks of Figure 90, from Ballet Mecanique. We assume that outside the frame, this lipsticked woman continues; and that her face is dynamic and three-dimensional, holdable, kissable, and even that it contains a skull and blood. In Salvador Dali’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, in a painting of the non-realistic, even here we process the information in a way that assumes depth and gives shape to objects we’ve never seen in reality. We assume the teetering golden throne is not a cardboard cutout, but a deep and rounded vehicle holding a full woman.
In even more abstract works, we may not see three dimensions. We may not discern anything from reality. But we try, and we would rather have it than not. In Pollock’s Number 14: Gray, we can see different layers of sperm-like swirls, planes on top of planes. We may even assume the dimensionality of the swirls, that they are round and substantial. I think “expressive visual force” is an artistic goal equally valuable than representing reality, but I believe the truth is that viewers look for reality first, and deeply. I know, at least, that I do, very instinctively and not to uphold any conscious “belief.”
Arnheim gives only small value to the role of Knowledge. He says on page 116, “Knowledge may tell us that [Figure 88] is a horse, but contrary perceptual evidence--and should always overrule in the arts--such knowledge, and tells us that this is a penguin shaped creature, a monstrous horse-man.”
At first I found this preposterous: I saw a horse, albeit from a potentially confusing perspective, but a horse from which I could discern the shape of a thing I knew from reality. I knew that at another perspective, I would see the same horse. But after looking at this Greek horse multiple times, I am more likely to see a “monstrous horse-man”-- a two-legged thing with a lumpy, human-sized torso. Maybe this viewing sequence occured because this monster is what I am now looking for, persuaded or directed that way by Arnheim. Maybe I saw a horse originally because I was in such disagreement with Arnheim’s idea that knowledge should be and is overruled, that I looked immediately for the realistic horse.
Regardless of what I see now, I think Arnheim plays down Knowledge too readily. Foreshortenings occur because what is on the painting is not (at least, sometimes is not) the birth of a new thing. It may be a foreshortened perspective of a thing from reality we knew beforehand, with which we compare and fill out the dimensionality of the painted image. Arnheim says on page 117, regarding the foreshortened Mexican man and Greek horse, “It is only our knowledge of what the model object looks like that makes us regard these orthogonal views as deviations from a differently shaped object. The eye does not see it.” But the eye can and often does see it; sometimes it happens after the brain “figures out” that this is a view of a real horse, albeit a bad view, and sometimes the eye sees the horse immediately. And yes, sometimes the horse is not seen, but rather an equine penguin. Looking back now, as I draw my eye up the horse’s legs, telling myself it’s a horse, I see it. This effort is different from the horse I originally & instinctively saw. Maybe Arnheim was right--in both cases, maybe my eye didn’t see a horse at all, at least not without the help of my brain.
But viewing a piece of art is not just done with the eye--the brain obviously is working in conjuction. “The eye does not see it” seems a statement ignorant of the entire cognitive process involved with art perception. Arnheim says that “contrary perceptual evidence overrules,” and thus we should see the horse-monster, taking the visuality of the image as the authority. The image’s percepts are the canon of the image’s story, by which we follow information. This is what’s on the Greek vase; this is what is. It may be easier for you to wrap your head around a horse from reality, but this isn’t reality, this is art; this is a vase.
The word in Arnheim’s statement, “should,” is the important word. Arnheim believes that justly--rightly, even morally--the viewer of the art must abide by the perceptual evidence, and disregard the temptation of Knowledge. Knowledge, he and I both believe, makes it easier to “see” an image, to understand what it is of and what is occurring. But that application of knowledge assigns information to the art that isn’t true, because it’s not what is in the art! It’s only the projection of reality onto the art, by the viewer. And while I agree with Arnheim on that that, what should happen is not necessarily what happens. Knowledge makes an image easier to understand. As long as artists continue to leave holes in paintings, the viewers will continue to fill them with reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment