Many of the earliest surviving paintings of animals are pockmarked, theoretically by spears. Anthropologists suggest that the spear throwers’ intent was target practice. I do not believe it. A stump or a mark of any kind on a wall would suffice as a target. I believe that the spear throwers were participating in the magic of perception. For evidence I offer the outline of a hand that often appears by a depiction of animals, I remind you of the fear primitive people have that cameras will entrap their souls, and I point to your experience and my experience.
Imagine the effect on the first connoisseurs of the painted representation. In a way a picture was unlike anything they had ever seen before, yet in a way it was not. Seeing a person create an image on a cave wall was unprecedented, and must have amazed the more contemplative members of the clan. |
Very likely the artist also was amazed that such an accomplishment was possible, knowing that what had been no more than juices and bodily fluids now appeared as an antelope, and so promptly celebrated the transubstantiation with an imprint of his agent, the hand. (Many artists even today marvel that their own efforts take on a life of their own. I know I do.)
And yet this was not an entirely unfamiliar experience. Just as do you and I, early man surely recognized faces and animals in clouds and tree trunks and distant rock formations. Human history is rife with such representations, where a person might say, knowing she is looking at a cloud, that a formation in the sky looks like a dragon or a cow. And there are numerous cases of deliberate and total identification of object and image: Voodoo dolls, icons, idols, and constellations are treated as actual persons. The Muslim rejection of all imagery stems from the refusal to allow such creation, leaving that work to Allah alone.
It is pleasurable to gaze upon a distant view or an attractive person; but the pleasure of viewing a painting of a view or a person is different and, for some of us, actually more powerful. It is pleasurable to us to knowingly perceive paint and object at the same time. Watch a spectator approach a very realistic painting, closer and closer, squinting now. Is it a painting, or is it a photograph? Ah, now, when she detects the hand of the artist betrayed by the slightest wavering, it’s a painting! And she is pleased, more than she would be pleased by a photo.
Any magician will tell you, the magic is in your head. The magician suggests the illusion, but the magic is inside you.
A century and a half ago photography robbed painting of its position. The only flat representations had been paintings. Except for the occasional misapprehension of an image as the real thing, paintings were always identifiable as paintings, the more realistic the better. The photograph was too perfect, too easy, too immediate for painting to compete and it went through a crisis. Much of its role—and its business—was taken over by photography. Every major art movement of the late nineteenth and the entire twentieth century can be interpreted as a reaction against photography. Painters were seeking to create something that a camera could not, and abandoning tasks that the camera could perform. Many even disavowed painting’s original mandate: to create identifiable images.
An artist friend recently claimed that we do magic when we render a three dimensional scene into two dimensions. I disagree. The eye itself mindlessly performs this task by projecting an image from the light received through the lens onto the retina, a surface which mathematicians call S2, meaning the surface of a sphere that behaves like two dimensions when you work with just a small portion of it. In the case of rendering three dimensions, there is magic; but this magic occurs in the visual cortex, where two slightly different images are integrated into the very convincing perception of depth.
It is pleasurable to gaze upon a distant view or an attractive person; but the pleasure of viewing a painting of a view or a person is different and, for some of us, actually more powerful. It is pleasurable to us to knowingly perceive paint and object at the same time. Watch a spectator approach a very realistic painting, closer and closer, squinting now. Is it a painting, or is it a photograph? Ah, now, when she detects the hand of the artist betrayed by the slightest wavering, it’s a painting! And she is pleased, more than she would be pleased by a photo.
Any magician will tell you, the magic is in your head. The magician suggests the illusion, but the magic is inside you.
A century and a half ago photography robbed painting of its position. The only flat representations had been paintings. Except for the occasional misapprehension of an image as the real thing, paintings were always identifiable as paintings, the more realistic the better. The photograph was too perfect, too easy, too immediate for painting to compete and it went through a crisis. Much of its role—and its business—was taken over by photography. Every major art movement of the late nineteenth and the entire twentieth century can be interpreted as a reaction against photography. Painters were seeking to create something that a camera could not, and abandoning tasks that the camera could perform. Many even disavowed painting’s original mandate: to create identifiable images.
An artist friend recently claimed that we do magic when we render a three dimensional scene into two dimensions. I disagree. The eye itself mindlessly performs this task by projecting an image from the light received through the lens onto the retina, a surface which mathematicians call S2, meaning the surface of a sphere that behaves like two dimensions when you work with just a small portion of it. In the case of rendering three dimensions, there is magic; but this magic occurs in the visual cortex, where two slightly different images are integrated into the very convincing perception of depth.
But the magic of which I speak occurs when the merest squiggle on a paper is perceived simultaneously as a squiggle and as a face, looking in a specific direction with a specific expression. It is not magic if the image on the paper is indistinguishable from an image on the retina, as in photography and photo-realism. It is not magic if the squiggle appears only as a squiggle, as in non-representational art and most doodles.
Representational art lives in the perceptual space between daubs of color and recognizable image. The width of that space varies—it is wide for Picasso and narrow for Wyeth—but just the same art loses its magic outside that no-man’s land.
Representational art lives in the perceptual space between daubs of color and recognizable image. The width of that space varies—it is wide for Picasso and narrow for Wyeth—but just the same art loses its magic outside that no-man’s land.