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AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. I first became aware of it as an undergraduate art student watching the silent German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Weine, , which is known for its non-naturalistic sets and highly contrasting monochromatic lighting. About three quarters of the way through watching the film something remarkable happened: Although I could clearly see the screen was full of shapes there was no problem with my vision as far as I was aware they did not form a meaningful scene, and I was left struggling to identify the forms before me.
1. Introduction
This 5-s sequence had a big impact on me, with repercussions that continue to this day. Unlike normal visual perception where the world is full of objects we readily recognize, in this short lapse of time my usual conceptual grip on the world failed. I remember the experience as marked by a mild form of anxiety and bewilderment combined with an active struggle to make sense of what I was seeing.
I've since realized that such experiences are not uncommon. Indeed, I've spoken to many others who report similar momentary lapses of recognition. I have certainly been aware of it in my own perception many times since. One of the most vivid televisual memories of my childhood was a segment in an early evening quiz show called Ask the Family , broadcast in the UK in the s, which pitted two families against each other in a test of general knowledge and observation. The section of the show in question involved an everyday object being presented in close up or from an unusual angle.
As the camera pulled out to reveal the object in full the families raced to identify it as quickly as possible. Part of the reason, I suspect, this piece of television trivia is remembered so readily by those who saw it is because it was one of the rare occasions in popular culture where an image was deliberately presented in such as way as to be unrecognizable. When faced with such images we seem to be compelled to determine their meaning, so paying a different kind of attention to them than we would with easily recognizable views of the same thing.
These days we might even enroll the help of the online community to resolve visual conundrums of this kind. Found in a package of Cadbury's Festive Friends chocolate biscuits in the office this afternoon. What on earth is it supposed to be? Do tell if you know! Visual indeterminacy can be defined, then, as the perceptual experience occurring in response to an image that suggests the presence of objects but denies easy or immediate recognition. Anecdotal evidence suggests that being confronted with such images arouses a need to determine what is depicted, so that additional attention is given in order to resolve the conundrum.
The allure of indeterminate images has not escaped the attention of artists, who have frequently exploited their capacity to perplex audiences. The painting depicts a scientific demonstration of the effect of oxygen deprivation on a bird, and is generally rendered with immaculate clarity. Yet there is a strange object floating in a backlit jar prominently positioned in the foreground of the scene. Ever since the painting was first exhibited people have wondered what this object is.
It has been variously labeled a bird's carcass, a skull, and a pickled organ, but there is still no universally agreed interpretation Schupbach, , pp. It has generally been assumed that the artist deliberately fashioned the object in this way in order to add an extra dimension of interest for audiences. One artist who did more than most to exploit the artistic possibilities of visual indeterminacy was J.
Turner, the English painter associated with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century and famous for his atmospheric landscapes and seascapes. It is surprising that the images Turner exhibited publicly and which were complained about most vociferously, such as the landscapes of the early s, appear to us to now as quite clear and distinct. Of one such painting another artist commented: A nineteenth century caricature satirizing J.
Turner's painting methods, which were regarded by many of his contemporaries as producing indistinct or unrecognizable scenes. Had critics seen some of the works Turner did not show in public, such as the highly indeterminate Interior of a Great House: Historians are still unclear about the subject or the motive for the painting, and indeed even when inspected closely it is impossible to make out all but a fraction of the objects depicted.
It is interesting to speculate what was going on in Turner's mind that led him to create such works, and in the minds of the public who struggled to read even his more recognizable pieces. We do know, however, that his paintings had an impact on the year-old Claude Monet when he visited London in to avoid conscription into the Franco-Prussian War, where he saw Turner's work for the first time House, , p. Monet soon echoed Turner's atmospheric images in a painting made in , Impression, Sunrise , the title of which, when exhibited in , gave the Impressionist movement its name.
This rather sketchy rendering of Le Havre harbour in fog particularly incensed one contemporary critic, who ridiculed its imprecision and scornfully asked: In fact, as far as Monet was concerned the function of his painting was not to obscure but to faithfully depict the appearance of the world, in other words what he saw rather than what he knew to be out there in front of him. A painting like one of the many views he made of Rouen Cathedral in the s is not so much a depiction of the cathedral's walls themselves than the light reflected by those walls House, , p. It is up to us as viewers, according to the theories of vision popular among artists in Monet's day, to read into those patterns of light the form of the cathedral from which they were derived using our own conceptual resources.
This is what Gombrich , p. Gombrich , p. As a young man in the Russian artist later to be credited with introducing abstraction to European art, Wassily Kandinsky, saw one of Monet's series of paintings depicting sunlit haystacks in a Moscow gallery.
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Unable to recognize what the painting was of, he later recounted:. And suddenly for the first time I saw a picture. That it was a haystack or rather, a grain stack , the catalog informed me. I did not recognize it … And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor. And, albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.
It was in fact one of his own rather impressionistic paintings turned on its side, the subject of which he had failed to recognize. Kandinsky realized the potential of objectless images to evoke a remarkable perceptual response. He subsequently spent many years refining a visual language through which this insight could be expressed.
Among contemporary artists, Gerhard Richter is somewhat unusual in that he works in a number of quite distinct styles.
Theories of Art: From Impressionism to Kandinsky - Moshe Barasch - Google Книги
He is particularly recognized for both his photo-like images, precisely rendered, and his generally larger abstract works, which he frequently produces by an almost chance-like act of scraping, leaving the final effect to the unpredictable interaction between paint and tools. What the artist is trying to produce is a sense of uncertainty, lack of fixedness, which draws the viewer in to try and resolve what they are seeing. Richter himself is very explicit about this, saying: It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning or view.
And in this exchange with the art critic Robert Storr he offers an insight into his own theory of indeterminate perception:. I try to avoid something in the painting resembling a table or other things. It is terrible if it does because then all you can see is that object. So you allow for aspects or suggestions of images in the abstract work but not actual pictures? I just wanted to reemphasize my claim that we are not able to see in any other way. We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us.
I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: When we do not find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored. That's how abstract painting works….
I am just saying that you use paintings as a way of making it difficult for people to read the image. What is evident from this brief survey of visual indeterminacy in art is that artists who make hard to decipher images are doing so not just to be wilfully obscure or to confound their audiences. They are also acting rather like vision scientists by exploring how certain kinds of images engage the visual system and how we make sense of the world.
Moreover, by heightening our visual awareness, so certain artists believe, indeterminate images in their various forms can produce interesting, even revelatory, esthetic experiences. Like the artists cited here, my initial interest in the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy was artistic.
I became absorbed by the challenge of creating images, both still and moving, that could induce the same state of visual uncertainty in others that I had undergone myself when watching the Cabinet of Dr Caligari sequence. I tried many methods of achieving this using film, video, collage, fractal image generation, and digital image manipulation. In each case I was trying to produce a picture of sufficient complexity to strongly suggest the presence of some object or scene yet at the same deny easy or immediate identification.
As I now realize is well known to vision scientists, the human visual system is extraordinarily effective at rapidly identifying objects in perception Thorpe et al. Even given the scantest of clues — such as two dots and a curve — we can interpret things, like faces, almost instantaneously. An early attempt to create an indeterminate image using paper collage. The image on the left is a noisy texture that does not suggest any objects and so is effectively treated as abstract.
The simple arrangement of two dots and a curve on the right show how readily we are able to recognize objects, even from the scantiest of clues. The problem of creating indeterminate images is how to avoid both these kinds of interpretation. The challenge in making artworks that are truly indeterminate, then, was to achieve a fine balance between recognizability and abstraction in order to excite the inquisitiveness of the viewer's visual system while frustrating its capacity for recognition at the same time.
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After many years of experimentation I gradually developed a method of drawing, and then painting, which seemed to produce this effect quite reliably. I discovered that by using a classical pictorial architecture, of the kind frequently found in European paintings made between the s and early s, I could create an image that incited strong expectations of recognizable objects and scenes. This classical period was the epoch in figurative art that many people associate with recognizable depiction of forms, in contrast to later Modernism where artists turned increasingly to distortion and abstraction.
By using this overall pictorial structure but omitting, or otherwise manipulating those features of the image that would be readily recognized I was able to achieve a consistently indeterminate image. Collection of the University of Exeter. In the early stages of making this work, the process of deciding what made a certain image successfully indeterminate in the terms described above was largely a matter of my personal judgment. I had to rely on my own reading of the image I was producing, and gage whether or not the forms in it were sufficiently evocative of objects or scenes, or whether they were too abstract or textural to incite the curiosity of the viewer.
Increasingly I sought the opinions of others by showing the paintings in galleries or the studio and asking viewers to describe the processes occurring in their own minds as they studied the works. After doing this many times I found people tended to report they were having similar kinds of experiences. Their initial response was to think they were seeing a classical painting depicting a familiar theme, such as landscape, figure, or still life. But wherever they looked to find objects that would corroborate this initial response they failed to do so.
They would fixate on an area in which they thought they saw a human limb or a piece of cloth, but would then realize that this was a false start, and would look for some other salient feature to pin their interpretation on. Many reported they were looking at certain forms within the images and sifting through the possible interpretations in their mind, testing various options in order to successfully name what it was they were looking at. This process of testing the indeterminacy effect of paintings on viewers was very useful as a way of confirming or refuting my own judgments about the way the images would be read.
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Those paintings I felt were more effective also tended to be the same ones other people would report as having the strongest effect on them. But although useful in guiding my judgment, these viewer surveys were not carried out in any scientifically valid way. They were simply verbal reports elicited under a variety of conditions and recorded rather haphazardly.
Having had a longstanding interest in the science of perception and visual consciousness I wondered if scientific methods could be usefully applied to study the effect I was investigating in a more systematic way. I also became increasingly interested in what science might have to say about the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy, and what effects the process of looking at indeterminate images might be having on the vision systems and brains of those looking at them.
As I started to look for scientific literature relating to visual indeterminacy it became clear this was a relatively lightly investigated area of perception compared, for example, to the related phenomenon of ambiguous or reversible images. Ambiguous images, such as the Necker cube, the Duck—Rabbit illusion, or the Boring vase, are distinguished by having alternating interpretations the image is perceived either as a duck or a rabbit each of which is quite determinate Kleinschmidt et al.
This is an image of a cow, although most people are unable to see it at first glance, or even after prolonged study. Once seen, however it is very difficult to see the image as it appeared prior to the point of recognition. From American Journal of Psychology. Copyright by the Board of the University of Illinois.
Used with permission of the author and the University of Illinois Press. When I first saw this photograph I remember having a good deal of difficulty in finding the cow, although once I did it was very hard to see it as anything else. The experience I had prior to the point of recognition was similar, as I recall, to that occurring during the Cabinet of Dr Caligari sequence many years before.
Both were marked by a sense of struggle in which various alternative interpretations were tried out until the flash of recognition occurred. My interest in such images was less in the moment of recognition than the preceding process of object search, and what kinds of perceptual processes might be taking place during this time. At the same time, thinking, they prefer untraditionally, low authoritarian the individuals who are open to experience also have regime and liberal behaviours. Furthermore, these higher scores of surrealism than impressionism and individuals are more compatible with the concepts of traditional art.
In our study, it was also found that individuals who are extroverted and open to experience mostly prefer surrealist paintings and they 4. Discussion are not very interested in impressionist and traditional paintings. Also, according to Per and Beyoglu [10] and five factors personality was not so strong either. When the literature is generally taken into The students who attend fine arts department in Turkey consideration, it is seen that although the correlations are more extroverted individuals given that they are between the personality and art preferences are not selected with reference to interests and talents.
In the preference of shapes. In this sense, these individuals are liberalist. It is believed that extroverted personality traits impressionist preferences. Personality Types of them relate with the others. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 12, Personality and Individual Differences.
As a result, the relationship between personality types [4] Wilson, G. Conservatism and art preferences of individuals is obvious. The one and art preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 25, Influences of education, background and subconscious and abstract works that emphasize ideas as personality on interest and involvement in the arts. British Journal shown in the literature. But unlike this, It is a consequence of Psychoiogy, 97, SS Sci, 37 5 , The high levels of responsibility and Bilimler Dergisi, Cilt: Developing interest in art scale and arts.
So it shows that our country is an indication that determining the relation between personality type of teacher candidates and their interest in art. Educational Research and similar results with studies in other countries about the Reviwers. Personality types of students who study at the departments of numeric, verbal and fine arts in education faculties.
Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 12, 6. This [13] Arda, Z. Personality and aesthetic preference in Spain and England: Two Mixed patterns which include a combination of studies relating sensation seeking and openness to experience to quantitative and qualitative data can be suggested for the liking for paintings and music. European Journal of Personality, 14 6 ,