Pigment and Meaning
Abstract painting is a misnomer, a contradiction in terms as 'pictorial philosophy' would be. The concept of justice is an abstraction. The concept of a square is an abstraction. A picture of Solomon meting out justice is concrete. But the picture of a blue square on a yellow ground is equally concrete.
'Non-representational art' and 'expressionist art' are serviceable labels for certain styles of painting; but if they are supposed to describe a philosophy or a programme, they are equally misleading and can create only confusion. A pattern of pigment on canvas always means, or expresses, or represents something which is not the canvas plus pigment. However, it does not represent objects or events, but the artist's mental experiences or imaginings of the nature, causes, shape, and colour of objects and events. It does not represent a model, but the artist's vision of the model; not a young lady called Lisa, but the way Leonardo saw his Lisa. It invites the spectator to share an experience which the artist had; it provides him with an illusion -- not the illusion of seeing a thing, but the illusion of seeing through the artist's eyes. Without that illusion there will be no response, and the spectator will behold the canvas through the eyes of a dead fish.
Art was always 'expressionist' in the legitimate sense of the word: it expressed a subjective, biassed vision -- even if the artist deluded himself into believing that he was 'copying nature'. And pigment on canvas always 'represents' something outside its frame -- for instance the impact of a green arrow on the blue square when placed next to it on the yellow ground. That impact does not take place on the canvas, but in the artist's mind, and in the beholder's mind. The pigment of the blue square remained static and unchanged. But in the beholder's eye its colour, shape, and weight have undergone a dynamic change. To produce this illusionary change was the artist's intention; it is as if he were saying: Look what my green arrow can do to my blue square. The canvas expresses or represents an idea in the artist's head, and if all goes well it will cause a similar experience to occur in the beholder's head: he will read something in the picture which strictly speaking is not there. Apologies for the pedantic demomtration, but one has to revert to elementary issues to escape the muddle created by the writings of some expressionists and anti-representationalists.
Much of this confusion (as in other impassioned controversies in the past) is due to the fact that visual experiences cannot be traduced into verbal statements without suffering major impoverishment and distortion. All verbal analysis tends to make implicit, part-conscious experiences explicit and fully conscious -- and to destroy them in the process. There seems to exist a kind of biological rivalry between the eye and the vocal cords, epitomized by the painter puffing at his pipe in contemptuous silence while the garrulous art-critic is holding forth. We always see a work of nature or art 'in terms of' a selective matrix governed by this or that criterion of significance; but these 'terms' are not verbal terms, and if we attempt to verbalize them the result is unavoidably a gross 'clumsification' -- a medley of clichés and psychological jargon. The matrix may carry emotive echoes of some archetypal experience, but our vocabulary is extremely poor where emotions are concerned. If we say that it responds to the sight of the ocean with associations of 'eternity', 'infinity', and so forth, this sounds as if we were referring to verbal associations. Such words may present themselves to the mind, but words are the least important part of the experience, and detract from rather than add to its value. We cannot help using words in referring to processes which in the listener's mind are not crystallized into words. The alternative is to say a rose is a rose is a rose, and leave it at that.
Another difficulty is that at moments of intense aesthetic experience we see not only with our eyes but with the whole body. The eyes scan, the cortex thinks, there are muscular stresses, innervations of the organs of touch, sensations of weight and temperature, visceral reactions, feelings of rhythm and motion -- all sucked into one integrated vortex. A literary narrative or a piece of music unfolds in stages, but in a still-life time is fore-shortened as it were, and by taking it in with a single sweep of the eye (or so it seems) this multitude of experiences blends into one near-simultaneous process, so that it is extremely difficult to sort out the various elements which went into its making. The trouble with explaining visual beauty, and also its fascination, is that so much is happening at the same time.
The Two Environments
What is happening is, put into our jargon, a series of bisociative processes involving the participatory emotions.
At the base of the series we again find illusion -- the magic transformation of the carved tree into a god. The painted mask, the carved idol, are perceived at the same time as what they are and what they represent. The witch-doctor works his evil spell by sticking a needle into the rag-doll representing the victim; the cave-artist of Altamira made sure of a plentiful supply of meat by populating the rock with painted bison and wild horses.
To those with naïve tastes, illusion in itself is sufficient to evoke aesthetic experience, and 'life-likeness' is regarded as the supreme criterion of art. As mentioned before, even Leonardo wrote 'that painting is most praiseworthy which is most like the thing represented'. However, the 'most like' has an infinite number of interpretations -- and that for two solid reasons: the limitations of the medium and the prejudices of vision . The range of luminosity in the painter's pigment is only a fraction of that of natural colours; the area on the canvas only a fraction of the visual field; its coarse grain can accommodate only a fraction of fine detail; it lacks the dimension of depth in space, and motion in time. (Even a photograph is far from being a true likeness; apart from its obvious limitations of colour and light-sensitivity, it increases the ratio of focal to peripheral vision about a hundredfold -- which may be one of the reasons why nature is so much prettified on picture postcards.) Hence the painter is forced to cheat, to invent tricks, to exaggerate, simplify, and distort in order to correct the distorting effects of the medium. The way he cheats, the tricks he uses, are partly determined by the requirements of the medium itself -- he must think 'in terms of' stone, wood, pigment, or gouache -- but mainly by the idiosyncrasies of his vision: the codes which govern the matrices of his perception. Whether Manet's impression of 'The Races of Longchamp' looks more 'life-like' than Frith's academically meticulous 'Derby Day' depends entirely on the beholder's spectacles. An artist can copy in plaster, up to a point, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze head; he cannot 'copy' on canvas a running horse. He can only create an appearance which, seen in a certain light, at a certain distance, in a certain mood, will suddenly acquire a life of its own. It is not a copy, but a metaphor. The horse was not a model, but a motif for his creation -- in the sense in which the landscape painter looks for a romantic or pastoral motif.
In the terminology of behaviourist psychology we would have to say that looking at the model constitutes the 'stimulus', and putting a dab of paint on the canvas the 'response' -- and that is all there is to it. But the two activities take place on two different planes. The stimulus comes from one environment -- the outer world: the response acts on a different environment: a square surface. The two environments obey two different sets of laws. An isolated brush-stroke does not represent an isolated detail. There are no point-to-point correspondences between the two planes of the motif and the medium; they are bisociated as wholes in the artist's mind.
Visual Inferences
Once the artist has acquired sufficient technical skill to do with his material more or less what he likes, the question what he likes, i.e. what aspects of reality he considers relevant, becomes all-important. In other words, of the two variables I mentioned -- the limitations of the medium, and the prejudiced eye beholding the motif, the first can be regarded, within a given school, as relatively stable, and we can concentrate our attention on the second. There can be no unprejudiced eye for the simple reason that vision is full of ambiguities, and all perception, as we saw, is an inferential construction which proceeds
on various levels, and most of it unconsciously (cf. pp. 38-44). The visual constancies (p. 43) which enable us to perceive objects as stable in shape, size, colour, etc., in spite of their unstable, ever-changing appearances are a first step in the interpretation of our confusing, ambiguous retinal images. They are automatic skills, partly innate, mostly learned in early childhood. The process is reversed in some of the so-called optical illusions where the unconscious code governing preception draws the wrong inferences in an unusual situation. But even these primitive mechanisms, which normally function below the level of awareness, can suddenly become a problem in interpretation for the painter. I have mentioned (p. 43) that owing to the mechanism of brightness-constancy a black glove looks as black in sunlight as in the shade -- until you look at it through a reduction screen in the experimental laboratory or through the impressionist painter's crooked index-finger. The various constancies are unconscious inferences we draw to make sense of our sensations, to lend stability to the unstable flux of appearances. They transform what the eye sees so as to suit the requirements of reason, of what we know about the external world. Between the retina and the higher centres of the cortex the innocence of vision is irretrievably lost -- it has succumbed to the suggestion of a whole series of hidden persuaders.
Perceptual projection, which I have already mentioned (p. 295), is one of them: the unconscious mechanism which makes us project events, located in the brain, into a distance of yards or miles (as opposed to the dazzling flashes which are 'correctly' located on the retina). Foreshortening and perspective are consciously added twists to unconscious projection -- like sensations in a phantom-limb: the flat canvas is the amputation stump. (The analogy is actually quite precise: pain, too, is located in the brain, but projected to the locus of the injury; the phenomenon of the phantom-limb is a secondary projection.)
Projective empathy is another hidden persuader which I have briefly mentioned before (p. 296). Vernon Lee [3] regarded aesthetic experience as primarily derived from 'the attribution of our own moods of dynamic experience, motor ideas, to shapes. We attribute to lines not only balance, direction, velocity, but also thrust, strain, feeling, intention, and character.' Jaensch has been able to demonstrate in a fascinating series of experiments that the eidetic image (p. 346) of a straight horizontal line will expand considerably in length ifa pull is exerted on the horizontally outstretched arms of the subject. [4] And vice versa, the sensation of the scanning motions performed by the eye, and of other subliminal muscle-impulses and stresses -- not to mention Berenson's 'tactile values', the 'feel' of texture -- all interfere with perception.
Again, the painter can consciously exploit these unconscious processes, and give them an added twist. In Seurat's 'divisionist' theory, horizontal and 'gently' ascending lines, as well as 'cool' colours convey a mood of calm and content, 'swift' and 'animated' lines and 'warm' colours make for gaiety, and so on. (The adjectives in quotes have become so current that we tend to overlook their synesthetic origin). Juan Gris, though certainly far removed from Seurat's neo-impressionism, talked in the same vein of 'expansive' and 'contractile' forms, of the physiological effects of various types of symmetry. [5] The theorizings of the 'abstracts' are not at all new. Linear rhythm, chromatic harmonies, and their combined effects have always played, consciously or unconsciously, an important part. In non-figurative painting the motifs are, instead of a landscape and a human body, say blue squares and green arrows. But ultimately these too are derived from nature -- the blue and the green, the square and the arrow. Let me invoke the authority of the greatest and most eclectic painter of our time:
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger then anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, exalted his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. . . . When I paint a picture I am not concerned with the fact that two people may be represented in it. Those two people once existed for me but they exist no longer. My vision of them gave me an initial emotion, then little by little their presence became blurred; they became for me a fiction, and then they disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems, so that they became for me no longer two people but forms and colours -- forms and colours which nevertheless resume an experience of two people, and preserve the vibration of their life. [6]
I must add a word on a more primitive kind of attitude to colour. Some reactions to the 'temperature-values' of colours seems to be common to most people within the same culture circle; Rimbaud even tried to co-ordinate each vowel with a different colour. But the emotive associations of specific colours vary from person to person, and can be very strong. Wollberg [7] had a schizoid patient who reacted to red with intense anxiety, to blue with a feeling of elation; yet under deep hypnosis, Wollberg reversed these reactions. Valentines quotes the case of a patient born blind who, after a successful operation, felt intense pleasure at his first sight of red, and was physically sick at the first sight of yellow. Man not only 'thinks with his hands', he quite often sees with his bowels.
The visual constancies and illusions, perceptual projection, empathy and synesthesia form an ascending series of inferential processes. One step higher in the series we come to the phenomenon of the 'face hidden in the tree', the 'image in the cloud', the Rohrschach-blot: the projection of meaning into the ambiguous motif. Once more we have here an unconscious process which has been consciously exploited from antiquity to the expressionists. Pliny recounted the anecdote of an artist who tried in vain to paint the foam at a dog's mouth until, in exasperation, he threw a spongeful of paint at his canvas -- and there was the foam. The story reappears in Leonardo's Treatise on Paintings -- where he makes 'our Botticelli' say that if you just throw a sponge at a wall it will 'leave a blot where one sees a fine landscape'. There is an oft-quoted passage in that classic treatise which bears being quoted once more:
You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine. [9]
This passage inspired the eighteenth-century English landscape painter Alexander Cozens to publish a book [10] recommending the use of random ink-blots 'from which ideas are presented to the mind', to serve as landscape motifs. It seems that Rohrschach's method of psychological testing by inviting subjects to interpret ambiguous blot-shapes was derived from Cozens -- and thus from Leonardo, and thus from Pliny. Similar methods were used by Chinese artists from the eleventh century onwards. The bisociations of form and meaning are inexhaustible.
In these cases the motif (the cloud, the patterned wallpaper, or the ink-blot) and also the meaning read into it, are both of a visual nature. But the matrix which provides the meaning can also be governed by non-visual conceptual codes -- for instance, a verbal suggestion such as Hamlet uses on Polonius to make the cloud change from weasel to whale; or by the various notions entertained by Egyptian, Greek, and Byzantine artists on the function and purpose of the human body. In some forms of insanity, and in the experimental psychoses induced by drugs, the patient sees serpents, genitals, archaic creatures budding out of every curve of an ornamental design. The cubist's vocabulary consists of cylinders and cubes; the pointillist's of daubs; classical composition obeyed the grammar of harmony and balance; the Egyptian painter saw in stereotyped clichés; so does the Japanese Zen artist.
Codes of Perception
This leads us to the most powerful single factor among the many factors which enter into t
he processing of the visual input: the power of convention as a hidden persuader (p. 42 f.). Perception is a part-innate, part-acquired skill of transforming the raw-material of vision into the 'finished product'; and every period has its conventional formulae and methods of interpretation for doing this. The ordinary mortal thinks most of the time in clichés -- and sees most of the time in clichés. His visual schemata are prefabricated for him; he looks at the word through contact-lenses without being aware of it.
The extreme example is ancient Egypt -- but merely because it lasted so long; contemporary Zen painting and calligraphy, as already said, obeys almost as rigid rules of the game. The Egyptian painter unvaryingly represented the human figure with head in profile, eye frontally, legs in profile, chest frontally, and so on, showing each part in its most characteristic aspect. Whether the ordinary Egyptian perceived his fellow creatures this way we cannot tell, and -- remembering that we perceive a tilted coin still as a circle, and not foreshortened into an ellipse -- he probably could not tell either. But we do know that the moment he translated motif into medium, his vision became stereotyped. It is highly improbable that conformity was enforced on artists against their will for a full three thousand years. There exist exceptions to the rule, relief figures dating as far back as 2400 B.C., [11] which show foreshortening and dynamic motion; if there had been a taboo on such innovations, they would hardly have been preserved. But the exceptions became less, not more frequent as time went by; for reasons beyond our understanding, Egyptian art, as Egyptian society, remained static, and habit prevailed over originality.
The Act of Creation Page 44