February 20, 2020
So here is a dilemma: do I listen to the advice of my Beloved who insists that art shouldn’t come with an instruction manual? Or do I listen to the urging of friends to provide extensive explanations for my, admittedly, often complex photomontages? Do I tease with titles? Rely on short introductory artist statements? Write up lengthy descriptions of individual works?
It is not just a theoretical question. I have two exhibitions coming up, with two very different series, and quite a body of work. (Details attached below.) With no introduction whatsoever you can have the most personal encounter with an image possible, defined by your own visual pleasure or your own thoughts evoked by the piece. Will you miss something? Perhaps. Will you understand what I was trying to accomplish? Maybe. Will your reaction be influenced by some extraneous manipulations? Definitely not.
On the other hand, does it help to understand the context of the larger body of work to decipher this or that meaning? You bet. Do textual references enable you to understand the framework and relations to art-historical elements? I’d say. Can I smuggle concepts and ideas into your head that guide your perception? Count on it.
It is all about manipulating attention.
I’ll save the truly fascinating, larger topic of attention research for some other day and focus on the basics today relevant to the questions above.
In the simplest of terms, attention is a mechanism that relies on multiple control mechanism. The exogenous control of attention comes from stimuli in the environment that trigger your attention automatically – the streaking movement perceived from the corner of your eye that has you look to where it came from. The piercing noise that alerts you whether your like it or not. A sudden burst of color that grabs you. A design of a page that draws your eye to a certain position. Something is literally grabbing your attention, hard, if not impossible, to resist.
Parallel to that we can control much of our attention endogenously, choosing where to look and what to process on the basis of what holds meaning for us, what we are trying to find, or what we expect to see or when to see it. (This, by the way, is what makes experts so good at perceiving in their field of expertise: they know where to attend at what point in time, which is crucial for events unfolding in time – think referees at a sports competition or mothers catching the kid at the moment where it falls off the play-structure.
Back to art: If I put a concept into your head, by alluding to something, or simply asking a question, or showing you hints that trigger stereotypes, you will attend to the work in front of you trying to integrate what you see with what you ponder. Here is the classic demonstration (Yarbus, 1967) by a Russian psychologist who used one of the very first eye trackers to check where people attended when moving their eyes to various locations on a given stimulus.
He asked subjects to look at a reproduction of a Russion oil painting An Unexpected Visitor painted by Ilya Repin in 1884, with different questions in mind, provided by the experimenter. The conditions included [1] examine the painting freely. [2] estimate the material circumstances of the family. [3] assess the ages of the characters [4] determine the activities of the family prior to the visitor’s arrival. [5] remember the characters’ clothes. And [6] surmise how long the visitor had been away from the family.
As you can see the patterns of eye movements (the black lines going back and forth) to explore the painting was dramatically different from condition to condition, with your “set” or assumptions about the potential discovery guiding your attention.
Here is an overlay of 2 question conditions and the recorded eye movements onto the actual color reproduction, making the differences even clearer (work by Sasha Archibald) (free examination at center, question about material circumstances of the family to the right.)
And here is of course the trick: only those things you attend to will get fully processed in your visual system, and potentially put into your memory stores. Unattended input might linger on some low levels of the processing hierarchy but will soon end up in the dustbin with all the other junk our brains discard. Details that might have significance will be simply overlooked if we were not conceptually driven to check them out. That might be of crucial importance if you are called as an eyewitness. But it also might affect how you embrace or understand a work of art, particularly if it is detailed and representational.
Then again, you might share the opinion of one half of our current household: I either like it or not!
Exhibit 1: Tied to the Moon
Stevens-Crawford Heritage House Museum
603 6th St, Oregon City
March – June 2020
Open: Friday – Saturday, 11:00am – 4:00pm
Admission: $5
Artist Reception on March 21st – 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
http://clackamashistory.org
This 2019 photomontage series describes some of the common experiences of women across centuries. Just like our physiologies are tied to the phases of the moon so are we tied through shared life events and states connected to our lives. A lot has changed for women; not enough has changed for women. Giving birth, raising children, aging, being loved or abandoned, being controlled or forging our own path has always been basic to the female experience. Finding solace among sisters or competing for scraps as rivals was often part of our existence. Curiosity, skepticism, learning and rebelling had to be fought for. Longing, dreaming and hope were part of the way.
Exhibit 2: Postcards from Nineveh
Oregon Coast Council for the Arts
Newport Visual Arts Center – 777 NW Beach Drive, Newport, OR 97365
March 7 – April 25, 2020
Artist Reception March 14, 1:00 – 5:00 pm, talk at 4:00 pm
On display is a new (2020) series of works that combine photographed snippets of 17th-century Dutch paintings of whaling expeditions along with contemporary environments. It calls for attention to environmental stewardship at a time where nature is under threat. The title is a play on Jonah (the one swallowed by a whale) who was a reluctant prophet, ignored by the people of Nineveh. We, on the other hand, should listen to clarion calls about the need to protect our oceans and fish populations.”
Here is a piece of music by Arvo Pärt where silence commands everything around it. (For more examples of composers using silence, go here.)
Richard
As a critic I always say the more information the better. Not necessarily extending to explaining each and every piece at length, but certainly an artist statement for each body of work. Some people think you spoil the mystery if you tell your secrets, or that you will browbeat the viewer by telling them what to think. In my experience, the viewer still will think whatever they want, regardless of how much you fill them in. And a viewer can always just not read the statement if they don’t want to. It’s hard to write good artist statements.. I like yours, but then, you are a writer in addition. For non-writers it can be very hard. I periodically teach a workshop called “How to Write an Effective Artist Statement,” and the response has been very gratifying.
Drew
I really enjoyed this post Friderike.. Thanks for sharing!