Reading Art and Visual Perception has made me reconsider the definition of an optical illusion. In the light chapter, I discovered just how many of the everyday visual experiences we take to be "optical truth" are actually "optical illusions," in that our perception of the world around us conceals the reality of what we are seeing. Light does not seem to emanate solely from the sun, but from all the objects that sunlight touches. Shadows do not seem to be the absence of light, but to have a substance all to themselves. The sensation of brightness we experience in an object can change dramatically based on its relation to other objects, just as colors can seem to change according to their context according to the laws of simultaneous contrast. As Leon Battista Alberti stated, "[A]ll things are known by comparison."
In the realm of art, the limited and distorted way our senses perceive the world influences our depiction of it. The result is the production of art that "looks" realistic to us, but does not treat light and shadow in realistic ways. This idea - that in order to make a picture "realistic," an artist must make it less like reality - was baffling to me. So was the revelation in Livingstone's chapter 8 that "[t]he range of luminances (contrast) in a given scene is almost always enormously larger than the range of values an artist can achieve using pigments" (111). It seemed difficult to believe that art could be so limited, given the wide range of expressions that artists have been able to achieve over the centuries. A startlingly realistic-looking painting such as Ingres' Princess Albert de Broglie does not seem to be lacking anything in terms of brightness and contrast. And what about color photographs? Like most people, I have always assumed photography to be an extremely accurate method of recording a scene. A color photograph that has not been manipulated should portray its subjects exactly as they appeared. Yet the limitations of photography have always been clear; I simply hadn't thought about them that much. Even the best photographs of a beautiful day, for example, seem to fall short in recreating the blueness of the sky or the golden quality of the sunshine that I remember. There are great differences between reality and the photograph's representation of it. We ignore these, however, and simply assume that there is no more accurate way of capturing images. Arnheim seems dedicated to illuminating the advantages that other methods of depiction have over our traditional Western, perspectival, "realistic" modes of representation.
When it comes to the interpretation of human perception, Arnheim also works to dissolve our Western presumption that we know better than any other culture. Societies that believe their shadows to be a mystical representation of themselves and will go to great lengths to avoid "losing" their shadows in the light of midday are not "wrong," says Arnheim. He writes, "Human thinking, perceptual as well as intellectual, seeks the causes of happenings as close to the place of their effects as possible." The Western interpretation of a shadow as the absence of light is farther from our perceptual truth than that of these African societies. The impression that a shadow takes up space may be an optical illusion, but "optical illusion is optical truth." Intellectual knowledge often conflicts with this truth, but it doesn't make it any less "correct" - just as a so-called "primitive" or cubist depiction of an object that ignores Western laws of depth and perspective are not any less true to reality than the "realistic" means of portrayal invented during the Renaissance.
The idea of "optical illusion" vs. "optical truth" relates to my conference work. I've been studying very early art, including Egyptian art that seems - to the modern Westerner - flat and unrealistic. Yet the Egyptians formulated their very specific style of representation in order to achieve the sorts of images that would be most accessible to the human eye - that is, the most realistic. They would not have drawn a square pool as viewed from one specific point of view and using the laws of perspective. Such a method would result in a square pool that was not square. Egyptian artists drew square ponds as squares, human heads as seen from the side, and trees as seen straight on. Every choice about how to depict an object was based on the need to make them instantly recognizable - and it worked. Even to the Western eye that is accustomed to seeing depicted scenes in perspective, with one point of view, Egyptian art is easy to understand. The figures in the art may look flat and strange, but it is clear what they are.
The history of Western art has been the process of distorting reality in order to make images more realistic. This is an irony that is well represented in the paintings of Cezanne and Titian that Arnheim mentions, in which portions of buildings or a face are darkened in order to contrast better with a light background. These methods make these images look better to us, but are in fact "forced" and "against nature," according to Goethe (who also stated that the products of such methods are "higher than nature"). It is not strange, though, that art distorts reality in order to make it realistic, when we consider the fact that our own vision distorts reality in order to highlight what is important for us to see in evolutionary terms.
Knowing that the distortion of art mirrors the distortion of perception, we should be more open to the range of artistic expression present in cultures across the world. Their art may not be realistic, but neither is ours. The difference is in the fact that non-Western art is not so limited by the need for so-called realism that it must ignore optical and cultural truths. An African mask, for example, may not seem to represent how a face "looks." Rather, it represents what a face IS to the people who created it.
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Madeline and Carissa both wrote about many of the things I have been thinking about in terms of illusion and realism. Livingstone writes about the use of brightness value that is not derived by rules, or that even contradicts the rules. Michelangelo’s desaturation of color is almost unrealistic. Rembrandt uses background changes in local luminance to convey changes in overall luminance that are not actually there. I think these examples illustrate Arnheim’s argument that classical painting conventions are culturally constructed according to the painter or audience’s concepts about the purposes of art.
Arnheim also reminds us that light and darkness, in particular, have many representative roles across cultures. They are conveying not just how the world looks but our symbolic ideas about light and dark. In this sense, we are again reminded that artistic conventions are illusions. Again, conflict is important, as in Arnheim’s chapter on balance. His concept of the conflict between oneness and duality has strong Freudian undertones. Arnheim writes that this conflict represents a “modern interpretation of the human community and the human mind.” This echoes some of Oskar Schlemmer’s writing that I looked at last week for the Bauhaus artist paper. I wonder if other people found the resolution of conflict to be a central issue for the Bauhaus artists they studied.
It seems like many paintings really stood out to people this week. Like Kit, I was fascinated by Derain’s portrait of Matisse (Livingstone,137). I was struck by the how much the artist can see something that the civilian eye cannot. It is almost as if Derain could turn off his color system in order to convey seamless, depth representation. In the color version I have a general sense of the luminance gradient, yet I would never have imagined that without color, the shadows would be so naturalistic. You can really see how color does not carry depth cues, yet those cues can be hidden in the luminance, only fully apparent to the artist.
I think many artists, myself included, avoid working from photographs when their intent is to “realistically” represent a scene. They work directly from the scene. I’ve never been able to articulate exactly why I find this photographic source technique less effective but I can often tell when a piece is done this way. As a viewer, I feel twice-removed from the actually subjects (and maybe this is the desired effect). Of course the obvious reason for this result is that the photograph, as a source, is a two dimensional, often much smaller, representation of the actual scene. But what I didn't realize until after these readings, was that the range of luminance in photographs is extremely narrow compared to the range we perceive in the actual scene. The viewer naturally feels twice-removed because the source photograph has already butchered most of the vibrancy and vividness of the scene.
As a theatre student, I was also fascinated by what Arnheim had to say about the influence of light in perception. In conventional theatre light is incredibly effective in directing a viewer's attention,in altering the appearance of a set or a performer, in conveying mood or environment.
I was very interested in Madeline's discussion of how artists do not portray reality exactly how it is in order to make their paintings more realistic. While this seems like a contradiction, it is in fact not at all. In fact, the reality that we are depicting is perhaps not "the whole picture" in itself, that is to say, we are not seeing everything that is there.
In reading Livingstone, I was shocked to find that "individual cells in our visual system can signal only about a ten-fold variation in luminance" (122). So then, as Livingstone asks, "how can our limited visual system perceive the wide-range of luminances present in most scenes? The answer is that center/surround organization makes the cells in our visual system much more sensitive to abrupt changes than to gradual changes" (122). We don't need cells that can code thousands of levels of luminance because the center/surround cells help us see a wide range of contrasts. So that begs the question to me, are we really seeing things "as they are?"
And that takes us to the next question, Is there one way that "things are," or is everything just relative perception? Obviously humans see the world differently than other creatures, so can it be said that one species sees things "correctly," "as they are," or "accurately"? We all have different systems that interpret things differently. But to go even deeper with this idea, different humans can perceive very differently. I am not just discussing the example of color, but that which we are currently talking about, light. When I was having those terrible migraines, I also had terrible photophobia. The world around me had not changed, but my perception of it did greatly. Light seemed so much brighter, so much that I could not go into a lighted room or into the sunlight without sunglasses and a hat on. The world had not changed, but my brain and my eyes had, and that caused me to live in a different reality.
To bring it back to art, I have looked at a lot of art by migrainers and it is interesting to see how they depict the world, world which would seem unrealistic to others, but is very realistic to them.
As a non-artist much of what was discussed in these chapters fascinated and confused me. Intellectually, I understand that Da Vinci "achieved tonal unity by investing every colored object with a common range of value" (Livingstone, 115) but I could not translate that into a physical reality.
In Michelangelo's painting of the Holy Family the colors are similar to those found in Ingres paintings - vibrant, high contrast, and metallic almost to the point of being unrealistic in their realism. For some reason, the close attention to contrast and shading in an attempt to make something look real in an unreal medium reminded me of CGI in modern films. The figures with their bright colors and goal of realism made me think of Pixar animation. Admittedly an unusual reaction to Michelangelo and Ingres however I think its revealing about how techniques of luminance and shading to create depth and realism have been re-invented for the modern digital age.
Arnheim’s discussion on shadow struck a cord with me because it pertained to both my conference project on Odilon Redon as well as my interest in photography. Redon is recognized for his “noirs” or black and white lithographs from his early career. The way in which he manipulates light and shadow is astounding. He was a master of the color black and wrote “Black should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid color palette or of the prism.” (http://moma.org/exhibitions/2005/redon/redon.html) He used this belief to create works with bold, dramatic shadowing. Because the blacks in his lithographs are so pure, the contrasting light spaces illuminate the paper with an almost tangible glow.
Another aspect of shadow and light that I am fascinated by is “Monster lighting” in studio photography. This is when a light is placed underneath the subject as opposed to in front of or above which is much more typical—creating a reversed shadow. In doing so the subject appears menacing and eerie. I’ve experimented with this a couple of times and find it curious how a photograph can take on an entirely new tone simply by shifting the direction of the light.
I was interested in Arnheim's discussion of light and its affect on perception of movement in space. Light is used, as in theatre, to draw attention to specific areas of the stage or specific movements. There are many choices that can be made with the light. For example the absence of light. Light works together with other aspects of such as costuming, space and use of bodies in space, to cultivate the world within which the dance takes place.
I am also intrigued by "realistically" representing. I have done a few composition exercises where the prompt was to take something two-dimensional and translate it onto three-dimensional bodies in space. It is interesting to see just how abstract the representation can get and then to put the original next to the furthest abstraction. Can the audience see that one was inspired by the other? Dance itself is an abstraction. It is just another way to represent reality. I wonder if this can be connected to what Gordon said about feeling twice removed and the idea of truth?
Throughout Arnheims piece on light, I kept relating it to photo-shopping techniques. I had a teacher that shares Gordons view about working from photographic images, but I have found these modern technologies very inspiring. I can manipulate images into the way I would want to see them, but it also allows me expand my usage of colors and forms in ways I would had never thought about. Madelines mention of the artists depiction of reality can be seen in advancements such as photoshop. Instantaneously we can see how an image and light source can be manipulated. I learned how visual distortions and shadowing are crucial when portraying an image through painting or drawing. A very simple shift of luminance can change an entire experience of a form. Figure 225 in Arnheim gives a great example of that. Sphere a seems to almost have motion but when the luminance shifts to the center as it does in b it looses some dimensionality.
Arnheims mention of pointillism, or what he refers to as modern reinterpretation of illumination reminded me of Kandinskys early works particularly, his 1907 piece, "Couple Riding a Horse." Although the main source of light seems to be coming from the city in the background, each brush stroke manages to stand alone and actively interact with luminance.
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