Why art works. The hidden language.
“Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate it as our own.” Solzhenitsyn
It is incredible that we can encapsulate our profoundest feeling within an object and transport them across time and space. Since we first painted river mud on our bodies clouds of incoherence have obscured how art works. Today I’m going to suggest a simple clarifying idea.
In 1966 in an interview with Pierre Carbanne, Marcel Duchamps stated, ‘Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.’ He was expressing his frustration with the lack of a more cerebral art. I think he was wroung about early 20th century art but this paper is not about intellectual signage, I want to focus on his marvelous phrase, ’The retinal shudder’
What is it really? When we observe an object what is the thing that can move us to tears or fill us with joy? That thing that ultimately is the only guide for an artist. Forests have been felled creating books on aesthetics, here I want to concentrate on the fundamental biological functioning of vision as it pertains to art.
When we dream we create a complete world in our minds which even when it defies natural law we accept as true. This also happens when we are awake. We live in an electromagnetic puzzle onto which our mind furnishes a necessary illusion.
The world as we see it is entirely a mental construction. It does not exist outside of us except as electromagnetic waves. For example, I may see a red tomato but the light waves that bounce from its surface into my eye are not actually ‘red’. When they hit my retina the electrical impulse that arrives at my brain is decoded and given the feeling of ‘redness’. This feeling we call qualia , the quality of the feeling being created by the mind. As an aside this feeling is what will always separate us from an AI machine. We construct a map from these imaginings. The nature of this map is forged by natural selection. If we were birds or butterflies our brains would develop a visual map in the yellow ultra violet range. Touch, sound and light all arrive in the brain at different speeds but we integrate them into the map that renders a seamless illusion of space time.
Everything we perceive is a jumble of electromagnetic data, it has no form or color or sound, we create those sensations inside our brains, so we don’t walk into walls or tigers. Here is an interesting thought experiment. Before the creation of vision the universe was invisible, it didn’t look like anything, it was a swirl of indecipherable data.
The construction of our maps didn’t start when we became human beings they started with the very beginning of life. Vision came to be rather late in the game. Life floated around in the ocean for perhaps 4 billion years before the first vision occurred around 80 million years ago. Animals before this had a very accurate map, if they could speak their idea of reality, it would be complete it just wouldn’t include vision, just like bats today.
Vision became an incredibly useful attribute becoming present in most higher animals. Slowly vision became more complex as visual perception became an evolutionary advantage in almost all environments. The visual stimulus was converted into Qualia, the sensation of experience, feelings. These feelings became more complex as the animal brain increased in complexity. Red not only has the feeling of redness but created a sensation of excitement, perhaps because it triggers associations with blood or ripe fruit. Perhaps plants developed fruit to ripen red because animals were already excited by redness. Though the map we create is individual and interior it overlaps with all of atomic reality. We must share a language of reality with everything with which we interact in order to optimize our survival. The inability to share leads to extinction or madness.
There are traces of the Hominid, Homo heidelbergensis, creating symbols using dye, clay and rock a million years ago, 600, 000 years before Homo Sapiens. We don’t know what could not be spoken or touched that created the need for visual art, but it was urgent, these were animals on the edge of survival with little time to waste. Perhaps it was consciousness of mortality and the desire to communicate our subtle unease at this discovery. These symbols are essentially exterior maps of the interior map, designed to allow us to communicate feelings of exquisite complexity. They are so powerful because they use a language older than humans, a language gathered in the entire story of life on earth.
Form and shape communicate quite obviously. Vertical is stable but diagonal is unstable because it mimics the danger of falling. A circle is comforting because it mimics the curves of a body. A spikey shape causes discomfort because we know to avoid such shapes when moving through a landscape.
Color has its own emotional correspondence. I’ll quote Kandinsky here,
‘In accordance with this explanation, to see is not only a question of harmonious taste but also one of effect on the other senses. In the case of the eye, some colours can look sharp or piercing, while others appear smooth like velvet, so that one feels inclined to stroke them (dark ultra- marine, chrome oxide green and rose madder); even the distinction between the warmth and coldness of a shade is based on such feelings. Some colours appear soft (rose madder) and others seem to be cold and hard (cobalt green, blue-green oxide), so that even when such colour is freshly squeezed from a tube, it has a dry appearance. The expression "scented colours" is also frequently used. Finally, the sound of colour is so precise that it would be difficult to locate anyone who would attempt to express the impression of bright yellow in the bass notes of the piano, or rose-madder as a soprano voice).
The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings. The artist is the hand through which the medium of different keys causes the human soul to vibrate…
Calling it the soul obscures a simpler truth, it is the mind that the artist is causing to vibrate using a language as old as life to talk to fellow travelers in human form. To let us know that our feeling are shared, our love and fear need not be borne alone and we can celebrate our lives together.