Sunday, October 5, 2008

Science/Art, Sensory, Kinesthetics, Culture

Arnheim writes that the mind “organizes shapes in accordance with the tendencies that govern its functioning. We have much evidence that the principal tendency at work here is that toward simplest structure (145).” Arnheim’s writing makes more sense to me as our class work fleshes out the connection between Gestalt principles and the underlying biological and physiological properties of vision. Wertheimer’s demonstration of the Phi phenomenon was really an “A-ha!” moment for me. That just shows how a visual experience can profoundly illustrate an abstract principle, perhaps in a way that language cannot.
Elizabeth has been stressing the point that science and art illustrate different ways to systematically examine human processes. Von Campen elaborates by writing about the common history of abstract art and experimental science. The science of art theory places what I interpreted as an essentialist conception of the artist’s pure perception of aesthetics. Yet, it seems to me that artists and scientists merely do deliberately what all humans do instinctively. Both scientists and artists use practical applications to systematically organize the world. Oliver Sacks case study of Mr. I certainly shows that an artist may have a different or enhanced perception of the world. Yet that experience is based on memory, experience, associations, and expectations, not innate perception. I find this a far more convincing theory than simply that artists possess “pure visibility.”
The concept of tension in art, posed by Arnheim last week, came up again in this week’s readings. Von Campen quotes Kandinsky stating, “composition is nothing other than the logically precise organization of those living forces encapsulated within elements in the guise of tensions.” Arnheim really contextualized tension and energy fields as having aesthetic, dramatic and psychological meaning. He seems to encompass both Kandinsky and Lipp’s theories.
I was a bit confused about how Lipps and Kandinsky’s theories differ on perception. Our current understanding of neural processing involves multiple, interactive pathways. How does this understanding of visual processing complicate the idea of the two-step process consisting of sensory registration and mental construction of forms? Does the two-step perception theory concept coincide at all with the “what” and “where” processing systems? It seems to me that sensory and mental processing do seem to coincide, on a very simplified level, with the distinct primitive and cortical pathways of visual information.
Arnheim makes a distinction between kinesthetic and visual awareness, again building on the idea of the body’s centrality in visual perception. Some of the work I read last semester in The Feeling Brain class emphasized the importance of listening to signals from with the body for cognitive and emotional tasks. Arnheim’s discussionof kinesthetics, in the context of visal processing, is interesting considering the large amount of work being done on the prevalence of sensory disorders among children. The work done in this area evidences the range of humans experience through their bodies and the effect of sensory processing for learning, cognition, etc. In essence, we are all over and understimulated to a certain extent. We have a range of varying proprioceptive and vestibular difficulties. Sensory awareness I just being more widely recognized as a huge part of self, learning and perception.
Behrens raises an interesting point about the Gestalt neglect of cultural or linguistic meaning. He writes that visual perception was isolated and trivialized. However, I thought that Arnheim’s discussion gives a lot of credence to how graphic arts traditions influence perception. Certainly his interest is in the universals of visual perception, but this theory encompasses cultural and individual differences. The illusionistic doctrine shows that the conventions of perspective are one cultural model, among many, that represents the three-dimensional world in two-dimensions. I wonder if others read Arnheim in a similar way or if I am imposing my post-structural theories onto his work. He also proposes that artists and cultural conventions of art represent the world in vastly different ways because they have different goals. I see this more and more as I examine children’s art from the Gestalt perspective. In self-portraiture each child adopts different conventions depending on what concepts, emotions or characteristics they want to emphasize. As Arnheim writes, different art “expresses a way of living, of being a person” and must also fulfill “the purpose of the drawing.” Those purposes are certainly culturally and linguistically determined.

2 comments:

Zac Singer said...

I experienced similar doubts about the situation of this discourse in any structural or cultural context. Arnheim's treatise of this aspect, however, was the first element of this perspective that I had been waiting for. His attention to the historical differences in the portrayal of 3 dimensions was really needed, and seemed largely free of value judgments. On the contrary, Arnheim was able to speak in order to communicate to the reader that, different cultures, epochs, regions etc. have different and equally valid approaches. I think this also was important to think about this in a broader context, beyond the intentions of the individual artist as you point out. Not only do different methods arise from different intentions, but from different standards, understandings of the purpose of art, history etc. I don't think its just your post-structuralist ideas (though I'm coming from a similar place...so I don't know). Thanks for bringing this up again, it has been one of my strongest critiques of the material thus far and I hope we can think about and discuss it more fully as the course goes on.

Sonia said...
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