Perceptual constraints and perceptual schemata: The possibility of perceptual style

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 61, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 259-273

  McMahon, Jennifer A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 45749135669     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00111     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Even the examples of analytical cubism by Georges Braque and Picasso, which at first look identical, can, with some familiarity with their work, be told apart on the basis of differences in methods of composition
2. A parallel treatment of style in music can be found in Leonard B. Meyer, 'Toward a Theory of Style" in Berel Lang, The Concept of Style (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979)
3. Paul Thom, Making Sense: A Theory of Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
4. I refer to Arthur Danto's philosophy of art history, according to which art history has ended. See his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981)
5. Raymond A. Macdonald, "The Styles of Art History: Entities or Processes? The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 7 (1993): 48-63
6. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. For a helpful discussion of this aspect of Danto's philosophy of art, see Noël Carroll, "Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art," in Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 79-106
7. Harold Osborne, ed., The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 218-219
8. Schema is used, not in the philosophical sense of an established inference, but in the related psychological sense of an internal model or representation of a unit of knowledge that corresponds, roughly, to a domain of interaction with the world. These units might include objects in the usual sense, but also other things "from some attention-riveting detail of an object all the way up to some sophisticated domain of social or linguistic interaction for purposeful beings." Richard L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 696. These units encompass related knowledge to a given context or purpose such that our knowledge storage and retrieval can be as economical as possible, in terms of real time and use of neurons. This means that we store units of related knowledge that when triggered by related items in the environment set off prescriptions for responses. This is what is meant by the claim that expectations and prior learning will influence what you notice and how you respond
9. Every artistic community probably has their equivalent to the young Roar Studio painters of Melbourne from whom a collective roar of color and animation burst forth for a limited time in the early 1980s before they were picked up and tamed by more mainstream art world practices
10. W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley wrote a very influential article titled "The Intentional Fallacy," in which they argued that the intention of the artist was irrelevant to an interpretation of an artwork (published in Morris Weitz, ed., Problems in Aesthetics [New York: Macmillan, 1959]). After much published debate, Beardsley conceded that intentions that were explicit and visible in the artwork were relevant to the artwork's interpretation. See Mary Mothersill for a summary of the debate (Beauty Restored [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], pp. 14-21). This debate, while timely in the face of formalist theories of art, is superseded in the light of ready-mades like Duchamp's Fountain, which Danto responded to with his theory of indiscernibles wherein the artist's intentions, and the art world's readiness to accept a particular object as an artwork, is what defines an object as an artwork
11. See Arthur Danto, "The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld" in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and R. J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), pp. 22-35
12. For Carroll's argument that Danto is inconsistent in holding that artists' intentions are relevant to interpretation while not to attribution of style, see Noël Carroll, "Danto, Style, and Intention," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 251-257
13. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. Mark Roskill (London: Flamingo, 1963)
14. John Willats, Art and Representation (Princeton University Press, 1997)
15. David Marr, Vision (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1982)
16. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983)
17. Marr, Vision. See also the various perceptual strategies explored in The Artful Eye, ed. Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard, and David Rose (Oxford University Press, 1995)
18. Another way to make this distinction is between structural (primary) and denotational (secondary) descriptions; only the latter involves semantic content. See J. A. McMahon, "An Explanation for Normal and Anomalous Drawing Ability and Some Implications for Research on Perception and Imagery," Visual Arts Research 28 (2002): 38-52
19. Patricia S. Churchland, V. S. Ramachandran, and T. J. Sejnowski, "A Critique of Pure Vision," in Large-scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, ed. C. Koch and J. Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). p. 29
20. Churchland et al., Large-scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, p. 39
21. That such a separation of the visual experience from semantic content is possible, see M. A. Peterson, J. F. Kihlstrom, P. Rose, and M. L. Glisky, "Mental Images Can Be Ambiguous: Reconstruais and Reference-Frame Reversals," Memory and Cognition 20 (1993): 102-123
22. This paper began as a response to Mark Rollins's suggestion that the perception of certain artworks might, in effect, isolate, select, and combine perceptual strategies in various ways. See Mark Rollins, "The Invisible Content of Visual Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 19-27, esp. p. 25
23. Richard P. Taylor, Adam P. Micolich, and David Jonas, "Using Science to Investigate Jackson Pollock's Drip Paintings," Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000): 137-150
24. Viewer-centered means that our focus is centered on just the particular view we have at any one moment. It is like framing the particular view that you have and noticing the relations between objects just as much as the shape of the objects themselves. Object-centered means that you bring to bear all the assumptions you have about the solidity of objects, and the fact that there are relatively few connected surfaces, and you register the shapes you perceive as connected, variously sized volumes, ipso facto objects. See Marr, Vision, for a more detailed explanation. Or for a very introductory text, see part 2 of Ilona Roth and Vicki Bruce, Perception and Representation (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1995)
25. Robert L. Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: Bradford, MIT Press, 1994), chaps. 5 and 9
26. Solso writes: "Artists throughout the ages have chosen to emphasize one or another aspect of the rules of visual perception in the way they portray their impression of the world and its people" (p. 230). His examples: Peter Max: illumination, colors, and a hint of visual perspective; Roy Lichtenstein: linear perspective, occluded objects, diminishing size; M. C. Escher: shadows, linear perspective, exploits the saccadic nature of our eye movement during visual perception, and top-down expectations; Picasso: (analytical cubism) exploits linear perspective, shapes from shading, occluding contours, orientational and volumetric primitives; Cezanne: motion parallax; binocular disparity; color as tone; Van Gogh: distorted laws of linear perspective; Monet: atmospheric perspective, color as tone (to show depth), occluded objects, diminishing detail in texture to show depth; diminishing size, elevation, and linear perspective; Leonardo's Last Supper: linear perspective, gestalt groupings (four groups of heads); Massacio's The Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella: linear perspective, elevation, occluding figures; Jan van Eyck's The Betrothal of Arnolfini: linear perspective, occluding objects, diminishing size, shape from shading, atmospheric perspective
27. I use "realistic" as though it is an unproblematic style category. It is not. For an example of the issues involved, see Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977)
28. and Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968)
29. See Glyn Humphreys and Dietmar Heinke, "Spatial Representation and Selection in the Brain: Neuropsychological and Computational Constraints," Visual Cognition 5 (1998): 1-2 and 9-47
30. This would be an example of ontogenetic, not phylogenetic, evolution
31. I would like to thank Michael Davis (Ph.D. scholar, Australian National University) for his research assistance, which was funded by an Australian Research Council small grant, awarded to me by the University of Canberra, 2001. I would also like to express my gratitude to an anonymous referee for The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism for very helpful suggestions and constructive criticisms, which I have attempted to address. I am especially grateful to Philip Alperson for his support of this paper