Letter to V. S. Ramachandran


8/28/08

Dear V.S. Ramachandran,

In "The Science of Art" you express the hope that your paper will "stimulate a dialog between artists, visual physiologists and evolutionary biologists".  I am taking you at your word. I am a painter with a great interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

I found your suggestion, that through early vision/limbic connections the earliest stages of visual processing may be reinforced by pleasure, to be a most important, a really significant, insight. If so, the organism may get positive response from perception even before objects are assembled and well before any meaning of the visual array becomes evident. If there are more recent developments in this area your suggestions for reading would be much appreciated.

It has long been my belief that the viewer derives a basic satisfaction from the perceptual experience of a painting rather than from it's meaning.  As you point out early processing takes place outside of consciousness.  Therefore the viewer would not be aware of the origins of some of the pleasure he/she is experiencing.  Such a situation would, of course, be anathema to the conscious self.  It would be quick to find a plausible meaning in the painting to account for its positive response.  This strikes me as much like Gazzaniga's left hemisphere "interpreter" function in split-brain patients.

I would like to suggest that the quality of pleasure, satisfaction, engagement, interest derived from a work of art, and this applies to music and dance as well, may be heightened because works of art provide a stable fixed repeatable experience or sequence which allows the brain over time to assimilate perceptual complexities beyond what is possible in normal ever changing perceptual experience.

Though we may experience many other kinds of pleasure from art ranging from the pleasure taken in the artists mastery of technique to pleasure in the depiction of pleasing subjects, it is my view that what has proven to be adaptive and thus has preserved art making and art enjoying behavior across time and cultures is art's role in refining, exercising and developing the assimilation of complex perceptual events.

From this painter's point of view a great difficulty arises when one tries to develop "laws" based on the form of works of art rather than the functions of the perceptual system.  The history of art is full of discredited rules or laws for making art that are based on how the work should look.  A particularly lovely still life by van Gogh is said to be the result of an exercise in which he methodically broke every one of the fifteen rules for still life painting promulgated by the French Academy of the time.

The same perceptual function, i.e. grouping, contrast extraction etc. can manifest itself in many often contradictory ways. I think one gets into trouble basing rules on a particular way those perceptual principles are to be applied to achieve successful art.  Though I agree artists use all these principles, consciously or not, they tend to use them in every way possible.  They may be consistently followed. They may be consistently violated or they may be followed consistently for the most part with a violation thrown in from time to time just to increase perceptual complexity or ambiguity.  Better to focus on the pleasure derived from processing all the manifestations of the perceptual principles than to champion the forms they may engender in a particular work or group of works.  Such forms will be violated by the next artist who comes along looking for fresh visual experience to process.

It seems most probable that the satisfaction we get from a work of art comes from the pleasure we get in processing it rather than from the work of art itself. In your words the perceptual "struggle in itself is reinforcing." The myriad styles, schools, periods all afford this pleasure.

Thanks very much for your paper. I hope my remarks may be useful to you.

Sincerely,   
Tony Thompson


PS.     If I can be permitted one general observation about non-artists writing about art.  Most tend to underestimate the importance to artists of the literalness of a work of art; the fact that a painting not only means or represents something but also is something.  Two stories to illustrate:

       <i>A disgruntled gallery visitor said to Matisse, "The women you paint are always so ugly."  Matisse replied, "I don't paint women I paint pictures."
       After the war a G.I. met Picasso and showing him a tiny snapshot he carried in his wallet of his fiance, asked Picasso what he thought of her.  Picasso said, "Kind of small isn't she?"</i>

Perhaps both these stories are apocryphal, but they reflect the way many artists feel about painting and sculpture. Two sources sympathetic to this point of view are:

       Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, (1992) N.Y. Zone Books (Introduction)
       Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1961) N.Y. Dell (the title essay and "On Style".)