Binding Vision

Sorry that this is a wee late! I was a little thrown by the schedule due to Spring break and didn't realize it's already my turn until I went to post a comment! Anyway. Here goes.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte features the notion that it is the retina, rather than the painting, that creates the light and effects of ocolor and depth. One of Seurat’s main interests in his color theories is to address and understand the forming of the image. He invented a color theory surrounding a law of contrast where color achieves maximum intensity once brought closest to its complementary, creating an optical unification in the viewer’s eyes at a given distance. With the use of modern scientific thought Seurat believed that the theory assured his predecessors’ (The Impressionists) close attention to light and color, rendering colors more vibrant than standard brushes.

A clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off depicts pointillism's binding physical and visual effect quite well, also demonstrates the scale and dimensions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNMXbeaKeak

The repeated dots is an excellent example of the illusion of depth through the repetition of a pattern as well as the persistence of vision that accounts for a fusion of a new vibrant color between dots of pure color. The flickering dots bind the viewer's vision, activating a stereoscopic view through pure color contrast. In the painting each adjacent dot is another image, causing the two eyes to oscillate between the two. The scientifically achieved painterly effects uses the engagement on a physiological level to short circuit the painting's implicit social criticism.

The scientific and methodical manner in which the dots are applied and their presence once implemented in an artwork seem to erase originality, an end impressionism earnestly sought to reach in the movement’s spontaneous renderings of moments in nature. This undeniable aspect of homogeneity and depersonalization found in paintings produced by different artists who relied on the common method was so imposing that at the first opening between Seurat, Pissaro, and Signac, visitors were unable to distinguish one artist’s work from the other. In implementing a new color theory and a new method of rendering images as a continuation of impressionists’ studies in light and color, Seurat championed the modernist ideal to isolate form from the fiction of the painting. The isolation between form and fiction is quite literal. These dots were in fact stacked on top of a finished painting. The human figures appear to be caricatural, rendering the subjects critically in the stiff, cutout like imaging overemphasizes class difference that percolate under a screen of equalized dots. The rower in the foreground is strikingly different to the uptight top hatted gentleman. The corsetry to suggest women's fashions is also exagarrated.. The sardonic portrayal of the bourgeoisie, mirrored the socio-political milieu brewing in the last quarter century of France. In this endeavor he challenged the laws of legibility upheld at the time. Salon paintings entailed clear relationships and social, economic, and moral hierarchies. These lines are decisively blurred in La Grande Jatte by the facture, causing the painting to veer towards anarchy.

This overlay of modernist, scientific technique, which sits atop a traditional promenade schema, is an aesthetic blurring between old and new forms and styles that disrupts the painting's fiction of a utopic union of classes along the Seine. The painting is shrouded by a cloud of equality that is not actually present in the society. This ethereal mist is unnerving and through a contrapuntal application of egalitarian dots, anti-utopian aspects of democratization, urbanity, and industry emerges from the fragmentation. The reality is there is no mobility. The stiff silhouettes alludes not to heroism, but the restrictive social stratification industry perpetuated under capital.