Art and Visual Perception 2010: THIS VERSUS THAT

I enjoyed reading Van Campen and Behrens’ articles this week. They definitely summed up the gestalten way of thinking and clarified any of the once ambiguous details that I was struggling with in the beginning of the course. I want to bring up the connection/resemblance between the gestalt principles and the Japanese inspired aestethics that Dow and others propagated as discussed in Behrens’ article. Behrens’ states, that the gestalt emphasis on the dynamic interplay of parts and wholes had been anticipated as early as the third century B.C. in China by a passage in the Tao Te Ching that states that although a wheel is made of 30 spokes, it is the space between the spokes that determines the overall form of the wheel. The yin-yang symbol can be looked at using the gestalten principles and and in Japanese art, it is an example of the notan meaning having the compositional equivalence of light and dark. The gestaltists' ideas of structural economy the propensity to perceive incomplete forms as complete are reverberated in the Japanese emphasis on elimination of the insignificant. The viewer has to be able to ‘mentally complete the incomplete to see the beauty’ in its entirety. Gestaltists are likely to say that all of a color are legitimate, because we always experience percep-tual wholes, not isolated parts. We never see figures (or swatches) alone, only dy-namic "figure-ground" relationships.
I included a few of the lattice compositional grids referenced in the article in order to compare them to those composed by Piet Mondrian and others even though it is said that there is no evidence that the gestalt psychologists were directly or knowingly influenced by eitherJapanese art or aes-theticism.