The true artist is doing more that presenting a work they hope will be attractive to the viewer; they are trying to express something about the human experience. I mentioned Leo Steinberg’s collection of essays, Other Criteria, in a previous blog. As he noted in his essay, “The Eye is Part of the Mind”: “Even non-objective art continues to pursue art’s social role of fixing thought in esthetic form.”
“The Eye is Part of the Mind,” illuminates the nature of the mimetic tradition of art. I think the average person believes that the history of art is unmistakably dedicated to the representation of reality as understood by the artist and their culture. This has traditionally meant in Western and Eastern Art that the artist sought to represent nature. Many critics would claim today that this Aristotelian tradition died in the Twentieth Century with the birth abstract art and postmodernism. Is this true, however? Professor Steinberg notes that:
Appearances reach us through the eye, and the eye—whether we speak with the psychologist or the embryologist—is part of the brain and therefore inextricably involved in mysterious cerebral operations. Thus nature presents every generation (and every person who will use his eyes for more than nodding recognitions) with a unique and unrepeated facet of appearance….The encroaching archaism of old photographs is only the latest instance of an endless succession in which every new mode of natural representation eventually resigns its claim to co-identity with natural appearance. And if appearances are thus unstable in the human eye, their representation in art in not a matter of mechanical reproduction but of progressive revelation. [emphasis added]
Thus, one argument is that as the art historian Bernard Berenson noted: “man seems to have begun as an artist and only in the last hundred years has he succeed in emancipating himself from art completely, exchanging the possible Phidias for a Ford.” The counter argument is that we have not ceased to mimic the natural, we’ve simply thought about the nature of reality itself and come to different conclusions. You must decide for yourself which argument appeals to you.
In sum, at the turn of the Twentieth Century I suspect that we in the West changed our view of what it means to be real as the result of two things: (1) the advancement of the industrial/technical revolution; (2) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which demonstrated that there was no objective reality (which was then misappropriated by the culture for a variety of reasons and turned into a social/political theory).
No. 34: “The Eye is Part of the Mind” or Seeing is not Perceiving
The true artist is doing more that presenting a work they hope will be attractive to the viewer; they are trying to express something about the human experience. I mentioned Leo Steinberg’s collection of essays, Other Criteria, in a previous blog. As he noted in his essay, “The Eye is Part of the Mind”: “Even non-objective art continues to pursue art’s social role of fixing thought in esthetic form.”
“The Eye is Part of the Mind,” illuminates the nature of the mimetic tradition of art. I think the average person believes that the history of art is unmistakably dedicated to the representation of reality as understood by the artist and their culture. This has traditionally meant in Western and Eastern Art that the artist sought to represent nature. Many critics would claim today that this Aristotelian tradition died in the Twentieth Century with the birth abstract art and postmodernism. Is this true, however? Professor Steinberg notes that:
Appearances reach us through the eye, and the eye—whether we speak with the psychologist or the embryologist—is part of the brain and therefore inextricably involved in mysterious cerebral operations. Thus nature presents every generation (and every person who will use his eyes for more than nodding recognitions) with a unique and unrepeated facet of appearance….The encroaching archaism of old photographs is only the latest instance of an endless succession in which every new mode of natural representation eventually resigns its claim to co-identity with natural appearance. And if appearances are thus unstable in the human eye, their representation in art in not a matter of mechanical reproduction but of progressive revelation. [emphasis added]
Thus, one argument is that as the art historian Bernard Berenson noted: “man seems to have begun as an artist and only in the last hundred years has he succeed in emancipating himself from art completely, exchanging the possible Phidias for a Ford.” The counter argument is that we have not ceased to mimic the natural, we’ve simply thought about the nature of reality itself and come to different conclusions. You must decide for yourself which argument appeals to you.
In sum, at the turn of the Twentieth Century I suspect that we in the West changed our view of what it means to be real as the result of two things: (1) the advancement of the industrial/technical revolution; (2) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which demonstrated that there was no objective reality (which was then misappropriated by the culture for a variety of reasons and turned into a social/political theory).