Psychology and Dynamic Expression

There was a lot going on in this week’s readings, but it was all extremely interesting so there was a lot to think on. Particularly I thought Solso had a lot of interesting and crucial things to say about face processing in Chapter 5, which we haven’t really talked so much about. That aspect of art really represents the intersection of neuroscience studies, anthropology, and art, so it was particularly cool for me. Besides all the neat stuff about facial recognition and processing that goes on in the brain, Solso brings it back around to a discussion of how faces play such an important role in artwork and how that translates to the brain.

His pretty ingenious study of the portrait painter Ocean in the MRI gave some great perspective on how the artist’s brain differs from a non-artist’s brain. While it was confirmed that the “facial fusiform area” of the brain was active while looking at faces to draw, Solso was initially surprised to find that the non-artist’s brain activity was stronger in those areas than Ocean’s. He concluded that a portrait artists would not have to look at faces for an extended period of time; he would pick out the key features almost immediately whereas the non-artist would spend more time gathering information about the face. Relatedly, Solso also found that Ocean displayed greater activation in other regions of his brain, particularly the right prefrontal areas. This perhaps signifies that artists activate a deeper meaning behind the face they are drawing than a non-artist. This shows that artists seem to use more of the brain than would be involved in just a mechanical reproduction. and may give some insight into why they are so good at what they do. I was also interested in how different artists would perform on this task, and what their brains would tell us. Would a landscape painter be different from Ocean, or a photojournalist, or an actor?

I also really enjoyed Solso’s discussion of how our sensory systems do not give as accurate a representation of the world as we assume they do. Blocking our way to a “true” perspective of the world are sensory illusions that distort the perceptual system, cognitive illusions that are the result of intellectual paralysis caused by linguistic coding of visual information, and artistic illusions created by a visual scene. Solso describes the relationship between physical energy and psychological sensation as far from direct, and in fact “curvilinear,” signaling that our visual system does not give an invariable view of reality. Additionally we are faced with the problem of translating our experience, which is sensory, into words. This is true when looking at the natural world or at artistic depictions of it. Because of these distortions (what Solso refers to as “the power of the mind to see these as they ought to be, rather than as they are”), artists have the tough job of depicting a world that looks natural to the deceiving eye. Artistic illusions have to be created in order to match the psychological interpretation and the sensory one, and portray the natural world in a way that makes it “psychologically correct.”

As Arnheim discusses in his chapters, this is not always an easy thing to do. Even in the most “accurate” snapshots of the world, i.e. motion photographs, images can look still and lifeless because they do not posses dynamic qualities. Arnheim explains that this dead effect occurs when artists assume that dynamic qualities in art are re-enactments of actual movement, which is a false presumption to make. In fact, he says, “when immobile shapes come closest to giving the impression of actual displacement in space, they do not look dynamic, but, on the contrary, painfully paralyzed” (414). Arnheim uses one of Kandinsky’s theories of art in explicating the answer: a sense of ‘movement’ is only demonstrated by creating ‘tension’ within the artwork which is directed for the viewer. This can be achieved by showing moments “outside the dimension of time,” for example by portraying multiple phases of an event in the same image. Obliquity enhances dynamic qualities, as do non-primary colors, which strive toward or away from the primaries.

Arnheim asserts that by providing dynamics in art, we immediately attach expressive meaning to a piece. One of the most interesting parts of this chapter for me was when Arnheim makes the distinction between expression as an anthropomorphizing of the natural/art world and expression as attributing psychological meaning. He explains, “The willow is not sad because it looks like a sad person. Rather, because the shape, direction, and flexibility of the branches convey possible hanging, a comparison of the structurally similar state of mind and body that we call sadness imposes itself secondarily” (p. 452). When we attribute expression to something non-human, we are not humanizing that in as much as everything that we see is imposed with some kind of meaning. Human actions do not carry more importance than non-human things, our visual brain works uniformly to find expressive meaning in the world.