Is it more interesting to look at a river than a highway? (A highway with cars passing on it, I mean.) Is a colorful paint spill on a sidewalk as beautiful as a sunset?
People enjoy contemplating rivers. I bike along the Hudson almost every day. The constant motion always stays more or less the same. Is that what it is — a visual metaphor (as are many other things)? And is the headlong never-ending flow of water over rocks, around piers or by the shore, constantly changing and varying but structurally the same — is that some sort of metaphor for a bigger picture? Is that why we like it and find it so mesmerizing to look at? Is the water us? Is it life, flowing eternal but never the same?
Why shouldn’t a highway be perceived more or less the same way? The never-ending flow of cars, often fairly evenly spaced, has a similar constant variation, more or less like a river, and it remains more or less one thing, like a river. Small eddies and ripples of traffic occur, sometimes a fleet of trucks appears, like a large boat or flood of debris, but most of the time the flow of traffic is constant in its variation. So aren’t they more or less the same?
Is it a cultural prejudice? Over the millennium have we grown accustomed to gazing at rivers and viewing the works of man as impressive, but not as moving and beautiful as a river? Do we see the works of man as suspect, impure? Highways, in particular, are seen as practical devices to get us from one place to another in vehicles of one sort or another. And while some interchanges and triple-layered overpasses might be majestic and even aesthetically lovely, gazing at traffic going by an ordinary stretch is seen as the pastime of a psychopath.
Likewise, I sense there were moments in the history of fine art when painters asked themselves — why should the chosen object that I am painting be considered more interesting than the background? Objectively speaking it is all a rich colorful mosaic that is falling on our retinas, and shouldn’t I therefore give equal weight to all of it? (Here science may have had a part — leading aesthetic reasoning into a curious place.) Aren’t the curtains as interesting as the person whose portrait I am painting? Isn’t the sky as interesting as the street? Isn’t a chair as interesting as a face?
So painters like van Gogh and Cezanne pulled the background up to the foreground until they were all more or less equal. Somehow they managed to still give primacy to the sunflowers, the bowl or the fruit, but never mind.
Follow this line of reasoning and eventually you end up asking yourself questions like the one I asked myself at the beginning of this. Isn’t a Brillo box or a newspaper clipping or a can of beer therefore as beautiful and interesting as a mountain vista or a person’s face? Plus, these commonplace subjects would have the added interest of being drawn from our immediate surroundings — the new world we inhabit but traditionally prefer to ignore in the fine arts. They therefore actually are about our life, our surroundings, our man-made environment. It’s all equal. The highway becomes the river.
Truth be told, I intuitively feel that staring slack jawed at a river is indeed more enthralling and uplifting than watching cars pass — though my reasoning tells me it shouldn’t be. Here is where my reasoning has, for now anyway, reached it’s limits. I have to admit the obvious to myself — that rivers are entrancing to look at. Highways, somewhat less so. While our retinas may indeed scientifically receive a “flat” “objective” mosaic of light and color and shape, our brains filter this raw data and make of it foreground and background (it’s not just parallax that does this) and, more importantly, our brains make separate objects —some of which are more important to us than others. We “think” visually this way. It is not a matter of “naming” each object — it’s not about words or language — although metaphorically maybe that is what it is — but of perceptually managing the material, sorting it out, making a kind of visual symbolic language out of it.
Thinking in pictures, as with music, bypasses the logical filters in the brain and the emotional buttons are within easier reach.
Psycho-genetically, for example, we have evolved to be able to spot minute changes and aspects in a human (and even an animal) face. The look of a face has immediate and important implications for us — it is anything but an objective field of light and color. (Though it is always that too.) It can be life-threatening or life-changing. The features tell us if that person is a threat, if they are sexually propositioning us, cowering before us or merely sleeping. We take other clues from the surroundings, the posture and the dress — clues regarding class, sex, position, status and social group.
We find dealing with all this moving, repulsive, attractive, seductive, and beautiful.So we see a narrative, not just images. The images have meaning, potential, possible history, implication.
Technically, sight occurs in the processing of the visual stimulus, not just in the eye. The eye “sees” nothing. Only after the data has been filtered, processed, turned right side up and scrutinized, have we finally “seen” anything. Even pure color isn’t “seen” unless it is identified and compared with previous similar colors. Sight and vision take place using a confluence of organs — it is almost neither here nor there, but a result of a system, a network, not a machine.
So, in my opinion, the “objective” point of view —that all is visually equal — which inspired much of 20th century Western art — Impressionism, Cubism, Modernism, abstract expressionism — was perhaps a huge inhuman detour, going off course as a result of the vast influence of science and logic. We literally “lost the plot,” as the British like to say. We ignored our human impulses and instincts and left all narrative behind — a presumed relic of a less enlightened age.
There was and is a certain perverse pleasure in perceiving pure pixels — in ways that might be closer to objectivity. Like funhouse mirrors, hallucinogenic drugs and the skewing of perception caused by illness, the “objective” viewpoint is a nice place to visit, but maybe it’s not the place that regularly and emotionally moves us, that drives our car and gets us where we need to go.
