Balance and Shape

I found this week’s Arnheim reading fascinating, particularly his discussion of shape. I was drawn to the idea that our experiences influence how we perceive objects and shapes. The example of how if “we are shown a melon that we know to be a mere hollow leftover, a half shell whose missing part is not visible, it may look quite different from a complete melon that on the surface presents us with the identical sight” (47) really struck me, because it illustrates just how impossible it is to look at something subjectively. This issue is something that bothered me in the Livingstone reading we had for last week. Her claim that she was able to view the Mona Lisa without succumbing to her prior knowledge of it as a work of art seemed kind of preposterous to me. While I am sure that it is possible to suspend such preconceptions, the act of suspending them involves keeping them in mind; they will always affect what you see. For example, if I were to look at half a melon that I knew to be hollow and tell myself to look at it objectively, I would have to actively overcome my knowledge that it was fundamentally different from the way I was attempting to perceive it, and, in doing so, I would still be thinking about the fact that it was not a whole melon. The fact that we are unable to separate what we see from prior experience not only implies that there is no such thing as truly objective vision, it suggests that everything is subjective. I’m not sure whether I find that comforting or unsettling.

I was also struck by Arnheim’s discussion of our tendency to gravitate towards simplicity, as well as the idea that for something to be both simple and a “true” work of art, it must secretly be complex. I have often wondered what makes a simple drawing, such as something by Matisse, so much more spectacular than a drawing of the same thing done by a child. In all likelihood, they use the same number of lines and the same very general shapes, but there is something about Matisse’s mastery of form that adds a hidden complexity. I think the same is true of the Greek temples and Egyptian statue that Arnheim gives as examples. There is an underlying mastery that compensates for the simplicity of the actual object. In fact, I think this principal extends to disciplines beyond visual perception. In reading Charlie Chaplin’s description of how a film is like a tree and one must shake the tree to see what is worth keeping, I was reminded of the phrase I’ve heard in almost every writing class I’ve taken: kill your darlings. The idea behind this is that it is often the most gorgeously crafted, complex sentences that make a piece weak. Yet, in order to craft a solid, powerful, simple sentence, one must know what is superfluous and how to compensate for the words that they take out. As Arnheim says, “[t]he principle of parsimony is valid aesthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose” (59), but in order to accomplish that successfully, the artist must truly know what is needed.

I was also struck by Arnheim’s description of how the way we see the world differs from the way we measure objects with a yardstick. A yardstick can measure individual aspects of distance and combine them to create a complete picture, but that we impose our own ideas about structure onto objects, even incomplete ones, shows a much higher level of processing. I’d never thought about the fact that “[a]n incompletely drawn circle looks like a complete circle with a gap. In a picture done in central perspective the vanishing point may be established by the convergent lines even though no actual point of meeting may be seen” (12), but it’s true. We infer so many things about the world around us that we cannot see these things for what they truly are: a curve that fails to meet at both ends and an imaginary spot on a canvass.

Last, I enjoyed Wade’s discussion of the overlap between the work of gestalt psychologists and techniques that artists have been using for years. Yet, I think he failed to take something important into account: motive. It is certainly true that many of the works of art he discusses are far more subtle than the examples created by gestalt psychologists, but the artists were using such effects to influence a work that they were creating to be visually interesting, while the psychologists created them to illustrate a point. It is okay if such examples are heavy handed—indeed, it almost seems like a better idea to make them that way, if only to ensure that everyone who sees them will understand the point being made.