The Law of Simplicity

In his chapter on Growth, Arnheim introduces the Law of Differentiation, which helps me understand why I have not hitherto managed to post any image examples on this blog. Ah-ha. I am at this point not quite capable of being moved by visual phenomena, not without rigorous analysis and aid of other intelligent brains. Nor am I much lettered in art history. Well what's the solution? Is the solution for me to go to a museum and look at works of great genius? As Arhneim states in his introduction "mere introduction to masterworks will not suffice." No, essentially, I am at the level of the primitive, in which forms are highly undifferentiated, and representation is manufactured with the crudest possible schemata. I will have to start at the bottom, and work my way up from the bottom.

What's marvelous is that the chapter on Growth (which I know was not the reading for this week) equates the developments of art history with the development of our visual capacities from birth, so that both paths parallel each other. And meaning that those of us in our maturity who wish to perhaps start from scratch need do no more turn to the history of art, and begin at the beginning.

Arnheim makes it possible to view artistic creation as a narrative. In other word, we can pose a problem or question such as "how is the artist going to represent such and such a phenomena on a two dimensional canvas using colored paints?" and then follow the protagonist (the painter) or the collective protagonist (painters and artists throughout history) as they find ever more complex and effective solutions to the problem. Obstacles present themselves (the introduction of central perspective makes it more difficult to represent a simple phenomena like three people sitting around a square table fig 87, the introduction accurate illumation makes it harder to clarify borders between objects, as in figure 232), and the artist must overcome them.

Aesthetics then becomes not a matter of taste, but of effective solutions to problems.

Similarly, our visual perception can be thought of as a narrative in which our perceptive mechanisms solve the problems presented to them by eyesight. HOW our mechanisms solve the problems is subject to debate. There are behaviorist theories. There are blah blah blah theories. And then there are the Gestalt Theories, which are moving in that they are the most effective. According to Gestalt theory, we solve the problems of resolving visual information according to the law of simplicity. So that a given shading, or a given light patch will be interpreted as illumination IF that organization produces the percept of greatest simplicity.

All this is a development of Arhneim's stated desire at the beginning of the book to depict the visual perception of art as a dynamic, and not a receptive, act.