June 15, 2007

• ART WARS continued:

  A Study in
  Art Education

  Rudolf Arnheim, a student of Gestalt psychology (which, an obituary
  notes, emphasizes “the perception of forms as organized wholes”) was the
  first Professor of the Psychology of Art at Harvard.  He died at 102 on
  Saturday, June 9, 2007.

  The conclusion of yesterday’s New York Times obituary of Arnheim:

  “… in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, Celia McGee called
  Professor Arnheim ‘the best kind of romantic,’ adding, ‘His wisdom, his patient
  explanations and lyrical enthusiasm are those of a
  teacher.’”

  A related quotation:

  “And you are teaching them a thing or two about yourself. They are
  learning that you are the living embodiment of two timeless
  characterizations of a teacher: ‘I say what I mean, and I mean what I say‘ and ‘We are going to keep doing this until we get it right.’”

  – Tools for Teaching

  Here, yet again, is an illustration that has often appeared in Log24– notably, on the date of Arnheim’s death:

  

  Related quotations:

  
  “We have had a gutful of
  fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that
  holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of
  perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art
  that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in
  10 seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something
  deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite
  of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at
  their own game.”

  – Robert Hughes, speech of June 2, 2004

  “Whether the 3×3 square grid is fast art or slow art, truly or falsely iconic, perhaps depends upon the eye of the beholder.”

  – Log24, June 5, 2004

  If the beholder is Rudolf Arnheim, whom we may now suppose to be
  viewing the above figure in the afterlife, the 3×3 square is apparently slow
  art.  Consider the following review of his 1982 book The Power of the Center:

  “Arnheim deals with the significance of two kinds of visual
  organization, the concentric arrangement (as exemplified in a
  bull’s-eye target) and the grid (as exemplified in a Cartesian
  coordinate system)….

  It is proposed that the two structures of grid and target are the
  symbolic vehicles par excellence for two metaphysical/psychological
  stances.  The concentric configuration is the visual/structural
  equivalent of an egocentric view of the world.  The self is the
  center, and all distances exist in relation to the focal
  spectator.  The concentric arrangement is a hermetic, impregnable
  pattern suited to conveying the idea of unity and other-worldly
  completeness.  By contrast, the grid structure has no clear
  center, and suggests an infinite, featureless extension…. Taking
  these two ideal types of structural scaffold and their symbolic
  potential (cosmic, egocentric vs. terrestrial, uncentered) as given,
  Arnheim reveals how their underlying presence organizes works of art.”

  – Review of Rudolf Arnheim’s The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1982). Review by David A. Pariser, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1983), pp. 210-213

  Arnheim himself says in this book (pp. viii-ix) that
  “With all its virtues, the framework of verticals and horizontals has
  one grave defect.  It has no center, and therefore it has no way
  of defining any particular location.  Taken by itself, it is an
  endless expanse in which no one place can be distinguished from the
  next.  This renders it incomplete for any mathematical,
  scientific, and artistic purpose.  For his geometrical analysis,
  Descartes had to impose a center, the point where a pair of coordinates
  [sic] crossed.  In doing so he borrowed from the other spatial system, the centric and cosmic one.”

  Students of art theory should, having read the above passages, discuss in what way the 3×3 square embodies both “ideal types of structural scaffold and their symbolic potential.”

  We may imagine such a discussion in an afterlife art class– in,
  perhaps, Purgatory rather than Heaven– that now includes Arnheim as
  well as Ernst Gombrich and Kirk Varnedoe.

  Such a class would be one prerequisite for a more advanced course– Finite geometry of the square and cube.

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