A Short Narrative

Let me first note that while Arnheim's ideas certainly do resemble in certain details ideas that have come before (Plato's Ideals, Jung's Collective Unconscious) it isn't the same as those things, and his purpose in writing is not the same as those people's. Arnheim is interested in a pretty simple question, which is how do we see? and his book is more or less a survey of the science that had been done up to that point. Is it all correct? I rather doubt it.

Does it fit well with my perception of reality? Yeah, and it's possible, even reasonable, that Plato and Jung both had some vague notions of these same things (they were, after all, humans who could see, and had therefore access to a human visual cortex to ponder and examine) and constructed their towers on some of the same material. But really, Arnheim and I are mostly interested in how people see stuff.

Here are some simple graphics which, I propose, relate a short narrative:

Now, to be sure, this is just me, fumbling through my probably shoddy understanding of Arnheim's ideas, feeling my way through some graphics. To me, the "story" reads clearly. To you.. I don't know. I dare say you see some sort of narrative, especially since I told you there's supposed to be one. Certain elements are likely to "read" for you, but probably not all of them.

For reference (spoiler alert) what I intend is: figure at rest, an eye observes you observing, the figure rises, violent outburst, the figure is prone once more. Is there one figure or two, or three? Is the figure at the end victorious or dead? Unknown.

These arise out of some photographs I have taken recently, and it strikes me that the photos muddy the allegorical waters a great deal by being photographs. It is not an abstract prone figure, but a hand, or a razor. The eye is not an eye, but a flower, or a bottle cap, or a ball.

Even assuming that the abstracted graphics "read" can one successfully do the same things with photographs? Does a prone razor, followed by an ball, have the slightest chance of reading as the prone figure... observes you or will the ground truth of the pictures as what they are forever prevent that? I dunno.

Certainly if I repeat many prone figures, the hand, the razor, the dog, the branch, you will probably get the prone figure reference. Arnheim might teach that your percept of each of these photos would contain the prone figure abstraction, and I assert that by repeating different pictures of different things your percept will distill naturally into the underlying abstraction.

Similarly, if I gave you the ball, the bottlecap, and maybe even an eye, each centered in the frame, you would at least note the common graphical appearence, and might be willing to accept the idea of an eye or a peephole with a little prompting.

I don't entirely know where I am going here. I don't want to tell "Gilgamesh" with pictures of razors and tennis balls, because that would be stupid. But some sort of flow of emotion, or feeling, would be nice.

Arnheim on Expression

I finally managed to bash my way through the last page of Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception. It's not difficult to read or understand, but it is pretty dense, so it took me a lot of time. Many many small bites.

Anyways, as I mentioned earlier he talks a lot about the idea of the percept, that which is perceived, rather than merely seen. This is some sort of gestalt but essentially visual experience of what is seen. It transcends the mere geometry projected onto the retinas, and includes our understanding of the objects as possessing three dimensions (sometimes), ideas about motion, and tension, and so on. The point here is that the rabbit hole goes very deep.

The entire conceit is that, roughly, the material assembled by our visual apparatus, that low-level, distinctly sub-verbal, non-cognitive, chunk of our brain, that material goes much further than we imagine it does. We see two distorted hexagons, one smaller than the other. We perceive two dice, one farther away than the other, one seems in some ineffable way to be striving toward the other.

Arnheim wraps up with a short chapter on Expression, which is essentially the conclusion of his argument and, I think, the statement of his overall thesis. I will attempt to state it myself, with some of what appear to be the implications. To really determine where Arnheim leaves off and I begin, I suspect you'd best read the book, but I will try to alert you to the rough shape of the boundaries as we go. Everything about culture is me, extrapolating from what I understand of Arnheim.

Consider two different cultures. In one (mine) we grieve in postures of low-energy, of ennui. Our bodies are limp and listless, our head hung, our arms dropped. In another, perhaps, they grieve with arms and face lifted to the sky, appealing thereto, in a posture we might consider one of prayerful exaltation.

Consider now a tree, or a painting of one, or a photo. A tree with limbs upthrust and spread, reminiscent of that second posture.

In my culture we might read the tree as symbolizing exaltation, in the other as grief.

The standard explanation here, and evidently the one given by Ruskin, is that we know the postures of people. The tree reminds us of those people, consciously or nearly so, and so we make a cognitive analogy: the tree appears as a man grieving, and so we recognize the tree as symbolizing that.

Arnheim argues, persuasively, that both the tree and the human posture evoke the same expressive/emotional response at a visual level, as percept. Regardless of culture, we see either one, and we react, we feel, in roughly the same way. This feeling is evoked at a pre-verbal, pre-cognitive level. It is baked in to our visual system.

Arnheim's argument is — I think — that it is only when it comes to assigning a name to this percept that we seek analogy with the expressed emotion. Assigning exaltation or grief comes after the expression, not before it. At least to some degree.

Well who cares? The result is the same either way, right? We name it exaltation and they name it grief either way.

In the first place it's academically interesting, and if you know me at all, you know I love that shit. But in the second place it speaks to the universality of visual art.

If the tree begins by evoking essentially the same emotional reaction across all of humanity, well, that's powerful, right? It means that we can, to a degree, reach out to all or at least to many, with some hope of getting through.

Now, we do need still to take care. If we intend to tell "Gilgamesh" with photographs of trees, we might still be sunk. We may need not only the raw, universal, responses to our photos, we may need also the culturally-specific naming of those reactions.

For us, we may need our drooping willow tree to specifically mean grief, the grief of Gilgamesh upon the death of Enkidu. If it doesn't read specifically as mourning, the meaning may collapse, and even Arnheim cannot save us here.

If on the other hand all we require of our drooping willing tree is that pre-verbal, rather more vague, expressive quality, that sense maybe of ennui, of dis-energy, perhaps we can make something more universal. "Gilgamesh" isn't going to work, but something else might. In the land of arms-up grief, they will still read something of the same listlessness in the drooping tree, because the percept in universal in ways the cultural naming of it is not.

The implication of Arnheim's thesis is that a lot more stuff might be down to nurture than to nature, more than we might guess. What the stuff is, though, is pre-verbal, non-cognitive. Something about energy, tension, motion. Maybe yearning, reaching, falling, failing. But nothing so specific as "grief" or "prayer" or "love." Visual art does, after all, seem to enjoy a strangely universal appeal.

Further, if Arheim is right, these things are embedded in strong graphics. Not the muddled grey mess of the MFA student, but the sturdy line, the distinct shape, the clear diagonal obviously leaning heavily on the strong vertical. It's runes and cave drawings, not vague washes of middle tones.

I don't know if Arnheim is right, but his argument is pretty burly. There seems to be some pretty definite work about a world of perception far richer that we might guess offhand, that lies below the verbal, below the conscious, and (perhaps) inextricably entangled with our humanity, even our biology, rather than in the nuance and minutiae of our cultures.

Steve

Remember my friend Steve? Well, I ain't seen Steve in 3-4 months. I figured he was in jail, or dead.

Turns out he's neither. He's sober. No drugs or alcohol for three months so far, he's working in the kitchen at the Lighthouse Mission downtown, feeding the homeless guys. He's in a program. A year long thing.

He's even tracking pretty well. Previous bouts of sobriety have left him not-entirely-present. But the lights are on in there this time. Looks good, looks healthy.

Made my day.

A Thought Experiment

This will ramble a little, and then I will get to the thought experiment.

I was reading an "art-thotz" piece on The White Pube, well, ok, I was skimming it and then after a little bit skipping great chunks of drivel in a desperate race to reach the end before my soul died. So, I didn't really get all of it. Anyways.

The gist seemed to be that some organization, let's call it the People's Front of Judea, has funding, and some other organization. the Judean People's Front, doesn't. Both seem to be social-justice-focused Art Organizations, I guess. I assume that both produce, essentially, macaroni glued to construction paper with an incoherent essay on the back that says roughly "Colonialism was v. bad why won't anyone talk about that."

The fact that the PFJ was well funded and the JPF not seemed to bother the author. I assume that the PFJ is doing social justice all wrong, and the JPF is doing it right or something. I don't know, and the extent to which I do not care cannot be measured with current technology.

This is, essentially, an oft-repeated refrain: There should be more funding for the arts, but it should go only to good art which is, in a bizarre coincidence, made mainly by me, my friends, and a few other people who agree with us about some things we happen to think are very important.

Here comes the thought experiment: Maybe there shouldn't be any funding at all for arts organizations. This neatly solves the problem of allocating funding to good art, but not to bad art. Indeed, I thought to myself, perhaps there should be a limit on the financial size of privately funded arts organizations, because when you get enough private funding in a pile it turns into a grotesque grift anyways.

How awful! What a barbarian! I hear you thinking.

Here's my clever scheme, though. Rather than funding the PFJ and the JPF and the Tate and the MOMA, why not fund people? Everyone gets a check. Not a huge check. Just some money. Do whatever you want with it. If you want to make some art, go for it. If ten of you want to pool your checks and bootstrap a little gallery, go for it. Start an art school. But keep it pretty small, there's a cap.

I'm not sure how amused I am by the idea of the MOMA and the Tate closing, but I rather like the idea of a rotating cast of little schools and little galleries popping up and failing constantly in every town, almost no matter how small.

Sure, there are technical issues (is a graphic design house an Arts organization?) but it's just a thought experiment. Throw out government funding of Arts Institutions entirely, and give that money equitably and across the board to everyone. See what happens.

Yes, it's Universal Basic Income, wearing a prettier hat.

The Punctum

Obvious, the punctum is the dog.

Romeo is the largest pit bull I have ever seen in my life, but he is a very sweet boy.

Is it real?

The world of photography is awash in projects and collections in which cumbersome processes are front and center. This guy takes wet plate photographs of pig's noses, this guy found a huge stash of glass plate negatives inside a piggy bank he bought at auction in Iowa, and on and on. Everything from collections of improbable found material, through cumbersome darkroom processes, to simply I shoot film.

The common thread here, from where I sit, is that all of these things are essentially trivial to fake. Given the sheer number of them, it stands to reason that at least some of them are fake.

Is the Vivian Maier archive fake? Probably not. That one is old enough and got enough traction that, probably, enough people have actually seen some negatives and someone would have said something. That said. John Maloof continues to hold the actual collection remarkably close to the chest. I do not think that one can apply to study the whole archive, even today.

But this is surely the most public of all of them. This is the one that would require the largest conspiracy to cover up, and even there it's probably a dozen people you'd have to have subverted. As any pirate knows, though, that is 11 too many.

Most of these things are really just one person, who is pushing out medium resolution JPEGs onto the web.

What astonishes me is that we have yet, as far as I know, to have seen a Big Scandal in which so-and-so's whatever-it-was is revealed to have been fake all along.

I assume that it's simply because people are not looking very hard, and most people don't even know what to look for.

I Don't Know

There's tons of people out there who can grab a camera and take a ramble and come back with a bunch of pictures, and in a way, I am jealous of them. Not all of them produce pictures that are any good, and some of them tend toward imbuing these visual beachcombings with rather more weight than I find convincing. But sometimes they're perfectly nice pictures, pleasing to look at.

I could probably do this, technically. At least pretty well. I like to think I have some minimal competence in filling a frame.

The point is, though, that I don't want to. It's not that I am jealous of other people's ability to do it, I am jealous of their ability to take pleasure in doing it. It's just not fun for me, and it clearly is for them (even the windbags, even the people who take junky snaps of nothing.)

Related, and even more important in my tiny insular philosophical corner of the world, is that I find myself unable to force a story to emerge from snapped pictures.

I am certain, as sure as I am that the sun will rise, that if one simply goes and takes photos on some theme, that some sort of project can in theory emerge. One can, eventually, construct a sort of poem, a sonata, or a story, by simply starting out shooting and letting the project emerge.

I can't do it.

I absolutely cannot do it. I have tried, and it does not happen. I have to have some sort of project idea to start with, or nothing happens. What emerges may not much resemble the initial project idea, so in theory I could have started anywhere, right? If the end of the journey is far away from the beginning, why does it matter where you start? And yet, somehow, it does.

I have over the years preached variations on this process, this method that does not work for me, so if I suckered you into it and it didn't work for you either, I apologize. On the other hand, maybe it worked beautifully for you! In that case, I do not apologize.

As always, I dare say there is a spectrum from no idea whatever to a very clear idea indeed and all I can really be sure of is that I need to begin somewhere near the clear idea end of the spectrum. Where, exactly, is a bit murky. All I know is that if I am too far off in the weeds, I end up with a pile of photos and no will whatsoever to look at them after a little while.

So, I Don't Know! Maybe you should always start with a pretty clear project idea!