argus @ acmeme

Cameric

Mono sent these links on theories of how the old masters painted their amazing works:
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: Further adventures in opticality with David Hockney

Hockney Completely Refuted, by Fred Ross

I vividly remember the image of Ingres' seated lady, forearm absurdly mistaken, beatific smile, from art school. Hockney's theory (or the article describing it) is incredibly pleasing to me.

The "refutation" offered by the second link is useless, because it does not address the numerous vector-point and math analysis techniques that the scientific gaze buttresses Hockney's theory with. What about those damning lines on the table rugs? The double-jointed elbow? Where are these coming from if it isn't optics? I really doubt Ingres didn't notice his model had hideously long arms if he was so good at all the other details ARC is saying he was.

Emotive response to theories only make for vague refuation. Tone matters, and ARC obviously dislikes Hockney (I don't like many of his works myself, though I might look at them more closely now). Their cause - photorealistic skill in producing works of painting - is entirely what Hockney's theory refutes, because his theory says we need to get back to emotive, not photorealistic, portrayals.

Whether or not we need photorealistic art when we have cameras of all kinds depends on what photorealism brings to us. The "new glasses" feel of hyperrealism expressed in a non-photographic medium is a type of onanism, since we in fact see those things daily with our eyes, which have been trained to see things in that way somewhat by movies and photos. It all depends on how agile the "reader" of the painting is. A patron untrained in following brushstrokes and studying meaning in a painting might prefer seeing their kitty or family member frozen for all time, because they see the subject matter, not the painting. On the other hand, replication of this sort doesn't *evoke* anything. It stands in for the actual subject. It is a cloning process.

My theory of art is that art *evokes* emotion - it doesn't create it. This answers every question about "Is it art?" that has plagued modern times. Evoking means that by creating an item, an emotion is conjored that is not equivalent to lived experience. There is a transformation, a function, placed between lived lives of humans and the emotions caused by art.

For instance: my mother yelling at me is not art. My emotional response (anger, sorrow, sarcasm) is due to the situation. Direct effects on my emotions cause lived experience.

Instead, when I stand in front of a painting, I am not living the experiences of those in the painting. Instead, there is a shifted effect, that of gazing at a painting about a subject. As I look at a painting of the Last Supper, I see the human figures, the anguish, the complexity of our species, and I contemplate that within the format of paint, color, light, and revealed expression. The artistic response I get from the painting come not that of having been teleported into the last supper of a diety, but from my thoughts and musings, looking into this scene through a filter of art.

The line I draw is best express by an art show in the DC area I read about. A work on Homelessness, it allowed patrons to sleep on a park bench under a newspaper, sit on a recreated street corner, etc.. This merely let them live an experience which caused emotion - it did not evoke emotion. So, too, Thomas Kinkdaid mainly tries to offer an imaginary space of beauty to his patrons, but does not evoke.

In another theory's terms, art is a communication of emotion. Where there is a sender, message, and receiver, the art constructs a emotive message which is processed, and the noise of the centuries sometimes alters our receipt.

The submlime and the weird are both held comfortably in this definition of art. From DaVinci's Lady with Stoat to Henry Darger's traced fairy kingdom, our experience comes not in being in the plot of the image, but through the transformed emotion the images evoke.

Posted by argus at December 18, 2003 10:05 PM