Art, Science, and Society

I really agree with Elizabeth’s earlier post, this longer posting is also partially a response to Theo’s post on “Emotion and Color.”

There seems to be a tension within the readings between the social and scientific I find important to open for discussion.

Theo, in your response to “Color and Emotion” you had suggested that Gestalt psychology “saves visual perceptions from cultural and social associations.” If I understood you correctly, I am guessing you mean that Gestalt psychology when applied to art creates a sort of access point--getting at it on a more physical and visual level, focusing on the shapes, forms, and the colors and isolating the manner in which we visually process information as piecemeal. Under the Gestalt analysis, we focus on how the artist directs visual attention through contrast, familiarity in forms, and color so to guide the eye in receiving either more or less important information, i.e. The man in Shiskin’s The Forest. Livingstone and Solso provides extended and informative explanations on these very principles of perceptual organization (the What and Where systems).

However, the scientific discoveries that explain how colors and shape occur in the external world and hit our eye and mind doesn’t suddenly free entities from their embeddedness in society and how we relate to them. I think I will run the risk of repeating myself, but colors, shapes, and forms are heavily steeped in cultural and social conventions. We understand them on these levels before any scientific intervention. Science if reconsidered within the argument actually serves to reinforce the primacy of social and cultural conditions, which have shaped and are currently still reshaping our visual perception.

Gestalt psychology and of course science itself, I believe arise from cultural and social needs and wants. I am not sure if the purported message in Arheim, Livingstone, Solso, and the rest of the readings is to use Gestalt as a means of taking art outside of social or cultural associations, for he certainly cites a fair amount of social and art historians in making his case. Perhaps, someone who has had more previous experience with Arnheim can point me in the right direction. But from what I had gathered, as Arnheim cites Renaissance art and the triangular compositions of these paintings at the time he seems to reassert their social and cultural significance. To me the prevalence of the equilateral triangular form in Renaissance was utilized as much for its possible social and cultural connotations (the holy trinity, equality, the balance of church, state, and public) as well as for prompting visual acuity--And my interpretation again speaks to the mutability of visual perception relying on " the acculturation" of experience, information, and most definitely social and cultural connotations.

Solso writes about the evolution of the conscious brain and it is not a coincidence that artmaking coincided with the consolidation of a modern thinking brain, a brain imbued with AWAREness attributes of consciousness. This brain evolved though a change of environment and most importantly a change in social infrastructure. From means of survival to intellect. He goes further with this idea, into words, citing the fact that it was not until the advent of language, “a system of communication” --a system created for society that artistic creation became a concern for man. (Solso, 53) Art is analogous to language it is a visual form of communication.

If we look at ancient art, we do not look at it with the same standards. Primitive art sought to be legible, to merely illustrate what was seen in the external environment for humans at that period had just begun experimenting with image-making. There is a difference aptly pointed out by Mamassian that art and our experience of it greatly differ across periods, cultures and human development. He talks about Egyptian art and how the body is rendered in manners that are unnatural to emphasize “each body part in its most informative pose.” (Mamassian, 2144) The purpose at the time was to create a visual language to coincide with one’s culture and verbal language. It was the beginning of symbol and sign building or rather convention-building--that is the basis of all art. Mamassian prefaces with Gombrich, “No Art is ever free of convention.” Indeed, as these signs become a part of our environment, they enter into our mental bric-a-brac. In modern times, verbal, phonetic, and visual language reaches a nexus and art becomes more complicated, ridden with concepts. A jumbling of symbols and a mixing of different creative mediums. The fluidity between forms and forms of art is what accounts for the obscurity of modern and contemporary art. For me, I think this is where the split between “everyday perception” and “visual art perception” is most potent.

Gestalt psychology when applied to artmaking is actually activating the social and cultural connotations that are inherent within colors and forms to elicit emotional response. I will use an example of the role of the actor in Meyerhold’s school of theater. (Theo, as a theater student, please correct me if I am wrong about any of this). Meyerhold school of theatre used common connotations of certain physical gestures to strike a mass audience at an emotional core. Specifically this form of theatre is built by stock characters, essentially common symbols that form a sequence of physical positions and situations to arise points of excitation which are informed with some particular emotion. This is Gestalt. It is scientific. It is artistic. It is also sociopolitilcal. Meyerhold actors use commonplace forms--social and cultural constructs on the physiological level, actors playing the aristocrat, the worker, take on physical attributes commonly associated with these societal figures. The actor must utilize correctly his body’s means of expression to create pathos and ethos. It is clear, psychology isn’t saving anything from cultural or social connotation because it itself, being a form of analysis on our human behavior and perception, is necessarily inextricable to the society and culture from which we reside in.

I guess the main topic that I would like to open up for criticism and discussion in this long winded and certainly somewhat obnoxiously digressive post is the line between art, science, and society and particularly how science has become a generator of visual forms that are then weighed with social and cultural connotations? Let’s say Rorschach his inkblots and the ripple effects of these inkblots reappearing constantly in various visual and intellectual forms--(The Watchmen both film and graphic novel). Also how did the notion of “scientific fact” perpetuated by culture affected artmaking such as the case of Meyerhold whose entire theatrical program seemed to be based on the scientific innovations of biomechanics?