One of the greatest mysteries to me is the artist's task of taking in a 3-D world using a 2-D retinal image, converting that information to 3-D using the brain, a
nd then transferring it back onto a 2-D surface, but with the attempts of making it look 3-D. The mental gymnastics required for such a task are truly mind boggling, and something I never before realized had to occur.
It seems that the same clues our brain gets from the 2-D image produced by the retina are the same clues that artists use to portray a 3-D world with a 2-D surface. These tools are perspective, shading, occlusion, haze, stereopsis, and relative motion. For example, in terms of perspective, the further away an object is from the viewer, the smaller the image that is cast on the retina. Thus our brain processes this information to say that as objects consistently get smaller, they consistently get further away. This is exactly what artists do with perspective. They use converging lines to map out the mathematical "shrinking" of objects the further away they become from the eye. So, when we look at a painting using perspective, we see the laws our brain has already registered as truth and convert it to the information given to us on this 2-D surface. Once again, as objects consistently get smaller, they consistently get further away.
What is interesting is when artists play with rules like perspective to create a new world, instead of an exact representation of the "real" one.
Arnheim discusses this in his chapter on space. He mentions Giorgio de Chirico, the artist that I happen to be studying in conference. Surrealists like de Chirico base their art off of re-creating what is portrayed as "real," that is, painting realistically a world that could not physically be realistic. De Chirico used perspective, but used it in "incorrect" ways. At first glance, his paintings seem to make sense, but one is left with a feeling that something is off. This is because de Chirico uses more than one vanishing point, but none of them in the "correct" way.
Traditional perspective uses one horizon line that all of the vanishing points go to. It is in this way that perspective is created; it seems as though everything is receding in the same direction, just as it appears when we look at the world in real life. De Chirico created vanishing points along different horizon lines, breaking the rules of ordinary perspective. Some of the horizon lines are within the ground of the painting, some are in the sky of the painting. This gives us an image of impossible space.
Renaissance perspective is meant to recreate the world accurately, setting the viewer at peace that what he is seeing is correct and familiar. De Chirico's perspective is meant to recreate the world inaccurately, making the viewer uneasy. His paintings have a sense of space, a real, defined sense of space, but it is also a sense of uneasy space, uncertain space, in fact, impossible space. I think de Chirico is a wonderful example of what Kirchner is saying when he says a painter "creates new appearances of things." I think it is the role of the artist not only to "copy" what we see, but challenge what we see, to present us with a new and interesting way to look at the world.
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I am quite familiar with this work by de Chirico as well and agree with Danielle that this not only beautifully exemplifies the spacial themes found in the readings but also pushes through the boundaries of conventional space in a way that perplexes the eye and challenges our normal perception of depth and relations of objects. She wrote, “At first glance his paintings seem to make sense, but one is left with a feeling that something is off.” The colonnade seems to extend into the far reaches on the pictoral space, giving it the illusion that it is endless and the multiple perspectives reinforce this concept of spacial ambiguity. Are we, the viewer, peering out of an upstairs window onto the street below? Is the approaching dark figure far away from us or is he very close---making him even more threatening? De Chirico also uses the open caravan to add yet another layer of mystery. It’s dark interior leaves the viewer curious to what lies inside, something we crave to know but will never because it is lost in shadows and vague space.
While I was reading I thought about a place that I often visited as a child—the hall of mirrors. These are found in fun houses at carnivals and demonstrate this concept of warped, confusing space. When you walk in you are faced with the challenge of finding your way out of a maze-like room filled with hundreds of mirrors. The task is much harder than it sounds because of the reflections off of the mirrors and claustrophobic space. We are so used to space as it exists in nature that when faced with this artificial one, our reaction is to panic.
Throughout this weeks reading on space all I could think about was choreographing dances. I am currently working on a composition that includes set pieces. All of the set pieces are taller than the dancers but cut at different heights to create depth in the space. But the set pieces are sunflowers. So it is not often that a person would appear small next to a flower. And then there is the question, what are these people doing in a field of giant sunflowers? Who knows? I am thinking about placing bodies in space as well as the space itself. I am trying to create a representation of the world. But, like the surrealists my world is just a little off.
I agree with Danielle that it is the job of the artist to represent reality but to also challenge our perceptions of it.
One of the things that struck me most when doing this week's readings was the idea that artists who excel at reproducing depth in their work might, in reality, actually have poor depth perception. Not being an artist myself I've never tackled the problems of perspective or shading, so much of these chapters was foreign from that point of view.
Further, as an art history student, particularly of the classical era, perspective is not something that I come across too often and when I do it's usually rudimentary. It just makes me wonder what clicked in the Renaissance that allowed artists to fully develop these techniques. Was something actually missing before or was it merely a change of the artist's perspective?
While doing this reading on space, I was struck about the parallels with my conference work. I'm studying dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History; my early research thus far has been from a book called Windows on Nature that accurately describes what the dioramas themselves are. In these boxes, the artists (because the taxidermiests, foreground specialists and background landscapers were all artists) recreated an illusion of 3 dimensional space that was vast and expansive in a tightly confined 3 dimensional space. I found the conversation in Solso and Livingston about perspective particularly interesting, and I plan to look closely at the dioramas the next time I make a visit based on the readings we've been doing.
Bramante's Trompe-l'oiel was impressive and reminded of the same kind of illusion that is performed in the dioramas. While the visitors are unable to get inside the dioramas the way that church-goers can go up to the altar, I predict that a person inside the diorama would see the small space for what it is in the same way that the church loses its depth the closer to the front one goes.
The other thing of interest to me in the Solso piece was his discussion about schemata. I was particularly taken by the notion that the “street schemata” is “activated” when one views a street scene. I wonder how that schemata comes about and what keeps it together. Last year, in my language development class, we studied narratives and the way that children develop an understanding of their life's events through organization into mental event representations. Instead of remembering specifics of an event like eating dinner, they will rather remember the generalities of what goes on in the event, “dinner” or even “meal time” (Nelson, 1996). These mental representations are like scripts toward achieving a goal. I am interested in the role of narratives in the development of schemata.
Relating this idea of schemata back to the museum dioramas, I have found that the dioramas that have a clear narrative are easier to use as teaching diagrams, because they have a specific story to tell the children, laid out for the educator to direct the children's attention to.
Comparing the de Chirico image to the three dimensional illusions mentioned in both Arnheim and Solso's text is interesting. A painting in a frame, which uses central perspective acts as a perceptual window. In three dimensional space, however similar illusions can also be created.
The Ames room illustrates the mind's preference for simplicity. It was also interesting to think that our minds would prefer to perceive a cubic room with improportionate people rather than an irregularly shaped space containing regularly sized people. This makes me think about the hierarchy of our perception in relation to our socialization. Why prioritize simplicity in our space over accurate perception of people? From an evolutionary perspective what does that mean?
Solso's Trompe-l'oeil example on the other hand, shows how what is "real" is overlooked by our perceptual system. This is the opposite of the painter creating an interpretive depiction of an actual or imagined environment. Instead, the architect fools the viewer by creating a 3 dimensional space which is "not right" for the functional purpose of creating more space (I think I want him to paint my bedroom). In this context perspective is not bound by the frame but acts as a continuation of the actual environment. Our perception of reality is still being challenged but in a very different and functional way. I believe Arnheim refers to the feeling of uneasiness or sickness that results when we physically enter the space. The discord between our perception and our environment is enough to yield a real physically sickening response.
I also found it interesting looking at the 16th century architectural woodcut how central perspective may be the most "accurate" representation but that even for means beyond personal expression or interpretation, it is not always the most clear representation of space. In this illustration we are able to see more parts of the building in its entirety, than the flat rectangle that we would see in perspective.
I was also amazed and amused that the job of a representational artist -is actually a complex series of 2D - 3D translations. And I think part of the thrill of looking at representational paintings is this pull between between 2D and 3D worlds. On the one hand we are completely aware that we are looking at a 2D plane but on the other we are in awe at this magical illusion of three-dimensionality, the "original sin of Western Art" as Solso called it. And if we were to call a representational piece "bad" or "unrealistic" it would usually be because it is not convincing enough, it is not pulling us into a 3D world.
The play between two and three dimensionality is something that interests me a lot in my own work and the work of other artists.
I'm doing some conference work on an artist named Felice Varini (http://www.varini.org/, check it out)who paints two-dimensional-looking, simple images on the surfaces of public places. The images, however only appear from a certain perspective.
His art conjures all sorts of thoughts and feelings for me. But, at first glance, it makes me chuckle because so much art that we see, as we read in all three readings, is about converting 2D canvases into some sort of 3D image. But Varini plays with converting our 3D world into 2D images. I'll post a picture of one of his installations on the main board.
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