As my Tutor gave me some valuable comments on Part one of the First Assignment I change some formulations and added new thoughts. For easier navigation, I highlighted areas which I’ve changed.
No title
John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing 1857 created the expression “the innocence of the eye” which triggered any amount of comments, analysis, essays and artworks. But can it actually be that the eye is innocent? By Ruskin “The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, - as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.” (Ruskin, 1907, 3)[i] But with the development of the avant-garde and contemporary art scene, this concept reconsidered. On the one hand, there are supporters of the idea of a child’s geniality and aspiration to reach the same clearness of child’s eye but on the other hand, today we can debate how someone who is in middle age can be physically and psychologically free of life experience? Mark Tansey in his work The Innocent Eye Test (1981) refers to this problem. But what is he trying to do, to make a point of it or at the same time posing a problem? Step by step I will try to answer this question in a consequent way.
It is commonly believed that human and artist perception can’t be “innocent”. Ernst Gombrich (1960) asserts that “...It is the business of the living organism to organize, for where there is life there is not only hope, as the proverb says but also fears, guesses, expectations which sort and model the incoming messages, testing and transforming and testing again. The innocent eye is a myth.” (Gombrich, 1960, 251)[ii] For example the title of this essays “No title”. It could be perceived as a fact that there no title for this big quantity of words. But just because you could know about “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” of Magritte and “One and three chairs” of Joseph Kosuth so your prior knowledge let you think a bit further and trigger the ideas. Is this text really doesn't have a title or “no title” is a title with the idea that appearance does not always match with connotation? Is there a different sense of calling it this way? If you ask a child with his “innocent eyes” what could be the name of this work he for sure will reply that there is “no title”.
There also opinion exists that innocence is “a motivator” for the artist to create something outstanding and unlike anything else. According to supporters of this idea for instance advanced by Charles Baudelaire The Painter of Modern Life (1863) “... genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will” (Baudelaire, 1864, 8)[iii] or reiterated Jonathan Fineberg in The Innocent Eye (1997) as cited by Taberham (2014) “Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists and members of the Russian avant-garde often played up the parallel and frequently exhibited their work alongside the art of children”. (Turner (2010) TATE online) “For Ruskin, one of the greatest barriers to true visual sensitivity is that people see what they think they know to be there, rather than what they actually see. In constructivist language, Ruskin would say that our ability to attend to the world from the bottom-up is inhibited by the non-conscious reflex of applying top-down processing (although his theory predates constructivism by about a century). According to constructivist doctrine … perception is an active, goal-oriented sense-making process.” (Taberham, 2014, 2,1)[iv]
As Christopher Turner mentioned in an article for TATE in 2010 that “An interest in children’s art would seem a logical outgrowth of this empiricism, but it was only in the craze for primitive art in the first decades of the twentieth century that artists began to look at children’s art seriously.” (Turner, 2010, online) [v]
So with other words around the end of the nineteenth beginning of twentieth-century constructivist theory argued that our perception is based on our knowledge. At the beginning of twentieth-century innocence of children’s perception was used actively and in 1960 Gombrich declare that Ruskin’s “innocent eye” theory “is implausible”. Thereby subject of “the innocence of the eye” was deeply analysed before the year of the Mark Tansey’s painting and he knew about this as he used this metaphor.
“The works of Mark Tansey (whose parents were art historians) challenge the mythology of art history and criticism (especially American formalism), bringing back pictorial rendering and discourse into the foreground. In contrast with the "photo-realist" and "hyper-mannerist" painters of the period, emphasis does not fall solely on technique, as Tansey is interested in “how different realities interact with each other". (WikiArt, online) [vi]
In the work “The Innocent Eye Test” 1981 rendered academics in an environment of a drawing atelier with artwork on which depicted three cows and one of them is alive. The artwork is accomplished in a typical artist’s manner – monochrome and figurative. Feelings and subject are exaggerated and almost comic as in the down left corner one of the academics with a mop in case something happens with a cow. In the background of the painting, we can notice one more painting with a stack of hay. At this moment surrealistic impression is rising up. Probably academics will test the cow on this reality as well if it wants to eat it. But this painting can be by Claude Monet which could mean that situation take place in a museum.
If the painting indeed is Monet’s and we know that this genre called impressionism but as an opposite of the cow's eye it seems to be naturalistic... At that point, I think, the game of metaphors is starting, as probably the cow would think that it is the yummy stack of hay which humanly means a naturalistic stack of hay as a food for animals. Is Tansey wants us comparing cow’s naturalistic eye and our knowledge about Impressionism?
The painting on the middle of the image is most likely a work of Paulus Potter “The Bull” 1647. “What makes The Bull so special is the fact that Potter painted something as ordinary as a bull on such a grand scale – which had never been done before.” (Mauritshuis online)[vii] Big size of the painting (height: 235.5 cm., width: 339 cm.) emphasizes the value of the Bull. Basically, the cow is gazing at the idol of the race similar as we look at Angelina Jolie our days. Is it again a metaphor? If to see the best individuals of our species we need to go to the Museum? Does it mean that Museum or academics decide which picture to use with what depiction as an example of “idol”? And why in general these two paintings (Monet and Potter) represented in this way? If in front of the cow would be a hay would it be more primitive thinking about food, but when the cow in front of the Bull probably Tansey asking us who can be an Idol on the painting?
Academics “testing” a painting or it is the cow which testing them and the Bull on a painting, as a symbol of the beauty of a cow’s genus? The curtain in the hand of one of the academics says that they first positioned the cow in front of the work, and then lowered the curtain. Thus, there was a presentation effect for the cow its mean that the artist positions the cow as the main viewer, who with an “innocent eye” evaluates the work of art. Is it a parallel with uneducated museum visitors?!
Also most likely educated people want to “innocently” compare if the image of the cow as good as real. But if to apply the theory of Gombrich then there is no innocence in an old academic’s eyes. Therefore I could conclude that Mark Tansey just used the problematic of the Ruskin’s phrase and made a point of it but he didn’t pose a problem because it was posed long time before. At the same time, he amplifies obvious “innocence of the eye” of the cow in a contrast to the experts and ridicules this situation. But if we assume that Tasney ridicules the viewer, then maybe he calls him with an "uneducated eye" then this may be a new problem for discourse.
Bibliography and references
[i] John Ruskin (1907) p. 3 The Elements of Drawing and The Elements of Perspective. Rprinted 1912 London: Published by JM Dent&Sons Ltd. And in New York by EP Dutton&Co
[ii] Gombrich, Ernst [1960] 2002: 251. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon Press.
[iii] Charles Baudelaire (1864) p. 8 The Painter of Modern Life , Phaidon press
[iv] Paul Taberham (2014) "Bottom-up processing, entoptic vision and the innocent eye in Stan Brakhage's work" The Journal for Movies and Mind.[Online] Volume 8, Issue1 (Summer 2014) p1-22 Available from: http://www.academia.edu/12257345/Bottom-up_processing_Entoptic_Vision_and_the_Innocent_Eye_in_the_Work_of_Stan_Brakhage [Accessed 28/06/18]
[v] Christopher Turner (2010) Through the eyes of a child [Online] Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/through-eyes-child [Accessed 29/06/18]
[vi] .WikiArt Mark Tansey “The Innocent Eye Test” 1981 [Online] Available from: https://www.wikiart.org/en/mark-tansey [Accessed 28/06/18]
[vii] Mauritshuis. Paulus Potter “The Bull” 1647 [Online] Available from: https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/explore/the-collection/potter/the-bull-136/# [Accessed 01/07/18]
Assignment one Part B
Invention or discovery of a perspective?
I suggest before start a discussion it is essential to understand the terms.
In Cambridge dictionary an “Invention” is interpret as
something that has never been made before, or the process of creating something that has never been made before.[i]
The definition for a “Discovery” is
the process of finding information, a place, or an object, especially for the first time, or the thing that is found:.[ii]
Thus an invention is a process about something that has never existed and a discovery is a process about existing things or objects but unknown to human being.
Graphical perspective (from Latin: perspicere "to see through") in the graphic arts is an approximate representation, generally on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is seen by the eye. (Wikipedia)[iii] Perspective in the arts the way that objects appear smaller when they are further away and the way parallel lines appear to meet each other at a point in the distance. (Cambridge Dictionaries) [iv] Also there is an aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective, reverse perspective, Panoramic, Elliptic, Spherical, Tonal perspective and Russian Academician B. V. Rauschenbach[v] researched Perceptual perspective when a person perceives depth in connection with the binocularity of vision, the mobility of the point of view and the constancy of the form of the subject in the subconscious. (Б. В. Раушенбах 1986, 17, 102) Out of these interpretations, perspective is something which changes the objects in the distance but also it is ways of representing the image.
“Leon Battista Alberti was the first to present a perspective construction in writing. He did so in 1435 in his De pictura, in which he also introduced a model for perspective representation.”(Andersen, 2007, 1) [vi]
So, on the one hand, if the perspective was invented then how we can apply the definition of this term: “invention of a perspective or a representation of it is a creation of the information about an image as it is seen by the eye which never existed before”. The fact that one object is bigger when it is closer to us was there but the way of presenting this fact not.
On the other hand, we can imagine that perspective was discovered: “discovery of a perspective or a representation of it is a finding of information about an image as it is seen by eye which existed before but was unknown to human being”. Kirsti Andersen explained that Sufficient material, above all paintings, has survived to allow us to conclude that perspective was born in quattrocento Italy. Doubtless the creation was a result of earlier generations’ struggle to organize objects in space, but we have no documents that reveal the individual steps in this development. (Andersen, 2007, 2) A lot of evidence of the attempt to use and organise knowledge about perspective or representation of it but without satisfied outcomes.
As a logical result that our eyes have always been seen a perspective and it was there but till the 1435 year knowledge about representation was not systemized. In other words, a perspective itself as a physical fact was discovered but the representation of it was invented as a new development. As compared with a fire it was in the world far before humans have been created matches.
There are many things which were invented for instance telephone, light bulb, internet, vehicle, mirror, glass, Mendeleyev's table, oil colours and many more. In the contrast to this a fire, solar system, chemicals elements, geographical locations, biological species, gravity, electromagnetic waves and others things were discovered. Also, the key definition of the invention is the fact of creating something new, materialistic. This is the result of human activity expressed materially trough on attitude, system, theory or object.
In Conditions of Patentability in the Handbook of The World Intellectual Property Organization[vii] (2018) mentioned that “an invention must meet several criteria if it is to be eligible for patent protection. These include, most significantly, that the invention must consist of patentable subject matter, the invention must be industrially applicable (useful), it must be new (novel), it must exhibit a sufficient “inventive step” (be non-obvious)…” but also written that “Examples of fields of technology which may be excluded from the scope of patentable subject matter includes the following: - discoveries of materials or substances already existing in nature; - scientific theories or mathematical methods;…”. In light of the above for an invention, for example, would be patent applicable and for a discovery not. It is also can mean that in terms of discovery everyone can have access to the object or information which we discover as it is a heritage of mankind but in case of the invention it will be defined by creator if this object of information will be available for mass usage.
As a conclusion, for objective judgment of implications of thinking that perspective was invented or discovered is important to identify if we speak about perspective as obvious phenomena or about a representation of it. At this point, I would assume that once a perspective as phenomena was discovered by someone which now we cannot identify and a perspective as a way of representation on a flat surface first time was invented by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435.
For visual culture, it would mean two different research/development methods. In case of discovery it will be the natural exploration and in the case of the invention, it could request further creation/invention. With the example of the fire – discovery contains only exact action of “opening” = fire is here, Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. (Wikipedia) In case of the invention of fire is a way of usage and methods of getting it. This process is multiple actions. With the perspective it is similar – one action is a “finding” of the perspective and multiple varieties of the representational ways.
In the end, I would like to put one rhetorical question that the perspective is not only a way of seen things in nature or the way of representing the depth on paper but it is also a plan, expectation, outlook, view... – something which is in the future. The same “distance to the tree” but in terms of time is a distance to the goal. Did someone invent or discovered the fact of the future or does it have actually a matter to be discovered or invented?
Bibliography and references
[i] Cambridge Dictionaries [Online] Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/invention [Accessed 01/07/18]
[ii] Cambridge Dictionaries [Online] Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/discovery [Accessed 01/07/18]
[iii] Wikipedia [Online] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical) [Accessed 01/07/18]).
[iv] Cambridge Dictionaries [Online] Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/perspective [Accessed 02/07/18]
[v] Раушенберг Б.В. 1986, Системы перспективы в изобразительном искусстве. Общая теория перспективы. Москва «Наука»
[vi] Kirsti Andersen (2007) The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge New York Springer
[vii] WIPO [Online] Available from: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/intproperty/489/wipo_pub_489.pdf [Accessed 02/07/18]
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