philosophy paper...

Perception in Art
I.
"It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly." -Monet
In his book Action in Perception on a section about art Noe say’s “To discover appearances is not to turn one’s gaze inward, as it were, to sensation and subjectivity. Rather it is to turn one’s gaze outward...(Noe p179)” When first reading the above words I felt Noe was extremely cold and mechanical in his view of perception in art. I interpreted his words to mean that he wished to do away with introspection in image making all together. Feeling that introspection is a vital aspect of art, I questioned whether Noe had ever even held a paintbrush or felt compelled to paint something, and whether he understood the process of making art at all. However, a more careful reading of his text led me to feel that he did not wish to, ‘do away with introspection in image making all together,’ as I had so violently feared, but rather that he was suggesting a different kind of introspection, something I had already known very well, but had no words for. It is something I have come to call ‘eyes open’ introspection. That is what this paper is about, the ability, through interaction with our environment, to gaze upon the world, “in a very special way (Noe p179).”
When a painter approaches a canvas (or whatever other surface they are creating an image on) no matter how abstract, vague, or imaginary the image they are about to create may be, there is a special relationship that forms between the artist, their environment, and their tools. It is within the evolution of this relationship that the artist is able to bring out the images they have inside themselves. This is ‘eyes open’ introspection. It is a kind of pulling out, of abstracting the essence of what you feel and mixing up with pigments, brushes, and light.
‘Eyes open’ introspection is not simply self-reflection of ones own isolated mental and emotional processes. It is the realization that ones own mental and emotional processes cannot be observed in isolation because they do not exist in isolation. Painting is an acknowledgment of this. People often say that they, ‘need an emotional outlet,’ by pushing emotions with a paintbrush, an artist is working through a mental and emotional process within relationship to their environment and its affordances. Introspection is utterly and completely dependent on our interaction with a dynamic world. Introspection is not limited to a relationship with the world as it is, it also allows for a kind of creativity that gives us the ability transform our environment, and that allows it to transform us.

II
“All bodies are in perpetual motion, like a river”
-Liebniz

In section 3.7 Noe discusses the “touch-like character of seeing”. He agrees with Berkeley that touch is the only spatial sense, but unlike Berkeley he does not limit touch-like characteristics to the perception of space, but rather says that all vision is touch-like. Both Berkeley and Noe tried to explain perception through the sense of touch. But I would like to espouse that perception is not simply touch-like but that it is dependent on a dynamic relationship with the world. Above all it is dependent on our capacity to be moved.
Berkeley says that the content of space is grasped through movement or interaction with the environment. Although we cannot literally ‘touch the vanishing point’ any more than we can ‘touch the end of a rainbow,’ we can perceive that one point is farther than the other through moving in relation to that point. Gibson, “analyzes touch in a new way by describing touch not in terms of of an experimenter’s push on the skin, but in terms of an observer who actively explores the surfaces of objects...(Goldstein pg.193)” This kind of active exploration and movement is very important to life artist. For example an artist will often hold up a pencil, a straightedge, or the edges of their palms in order to measure the proportions of an object in the distance. From this activity of moving one’s body in relation to a point, tilting the head, squinting the eye, moving to and fro, an artist is able to make sense of spatial relationships.
Berkeley uses the example of measuring your distance from an object in relation to how many steps it would take you to get to it. Similarly, in life drawing we check the proportions of the body in relationship to the size of the head. The average body for life drawing is about eight heads, and the average body for fashion illustration is nine heads. These measurements serve as an indicator of what we will accept as an average or beautiful body.
It is interesting that before even sighting the ‘true’ proportions of our figure models we already have some conceptual idea of how she or he should look. So our interaction with the space, the model (our object of perception,) our tools, and ourselves are as much dependent on our ability to see correctly what is out there as it is to our ability to see what we have been taught to see (the concept of perfect proportions.)
Berkeley makes an interesting analysis of vision. He says that vision alone cannot tell us anything about space. There are many optical illusions in which the convex and concave aspect of an image cannot be distinguished, for example. Berkeley suggest that it is only through tangible significance that we can learn to interpret the spatial information presented in vision. He thinks we are only able to understand the shape, size, and depth of objects in a picture through the understanding we have acquired through tangible experience. Thus, as we will discuss in more detail later in this section, viewing a picture draws on the same skills as viewing the depicted scene.
I agree with Berkeley that touch is a kind of movement. This idea of movement is what I consider to be the most essential aspect of the enactive theory of perception. The puffy white clouds hanging low in the back of the valley at dawn do not literally settle into my skin, creating the sensation of goose-bumps. Rather, I feel this sensation arises from my dynamic relationship with my environment. It is my ability to move within relationship to my environment, to actually become a part of it, ‘becoming one with the space,’ that allows me to ‘dance with the clouds,’ as it were. My ability to perceive the clouds is a result of this dance created between myself and the object of perception, everyone no matter how clumsy, as perceivers take part in this dance. It is our capacity to move and to be moved that allows for perception.
It is this same capacity to be moved that allows for creativity in art. Although a painting is static, the most profound paintings create a stirring of emotions and physical reactions within the perceiver. My mom use to say that my paintings made her feel sick when she looked at them because they were just too close to what she was actually feeling. As Noe says, “Pictures are a very simple (in some senses of simple) virtual space. What the picture and the depicted scene have in common is that they prompt us to draw on a common class of sensorimotor skills.” The way that picture is different from the depicted scene, and from reality in general, is that they contain element of transcendence. The same sensorimotor skills we use to navigate our immediate space can be used to take us to another realm, one of imagination, chimeras, and dare I say, dreams. This element of transcendence is the result of the kind of ‘eyes open’ introspection we spoke of earlier.
I would argue that the visual world is not, “given all at once, as in a picture (Noe pg.99)” This statement is based on the assumption that pictures are given all at once, when in-fact they are not. Just as touch requires serial contact, I feel understanding a painting also requires temporal progression. Similar to the way paint is literally layered onto the surface the artist chooses, the perceivers experience of a painting, of a ‘virtual space,’ becomes more complex as they interact with it, creating layers of transcendence. This is why art critics can spend a lifetime analyzing a single painting, or those who simply appreciate art can have a new sensation each time they gaze upon a familiar painting. Interaction with the visual world is not static, paintings are windows into the dynamic world. As Noe says, perception is diaphanous.
Stimuli are produced and perceived within us as a result of our relation to our environment. Tactile perception does not mean we have to physically touch the object to experience it. Rather, it suggest that there is a dynamic relationship between the perceiver and the world. It does not suggest that other senses are subservient, but rather suggest that all senses are tactile-like. This means that all perception require us to dance, it does not allow us to be wallflowers, to stand motionless at the edge of experience. movement is the criterion for existence.

III.
Art is exploring fundamentally new modes of perception, through the senses, and new forms of imagination.
-Bohm
It seems to me that artist can to some extent explore different forms of sense perception and the meaning of perception.
-Bohm

The transition from the traditional snap-shot view of perception to the enactive view of perception is parallel to our advancement in the understanding of the mind through neuroscience.
This transition is also reflected in art history, from representational art which focuses on appearances to schematic art which focuses on the act of visual perception. It is exciting to think that from the spheres of philosophy, science, and art there is a co-progression that suggest that this world is more dynamic than we think.
The enactive theorist argued that representational pictures are just partial environments that contain static elements. They further said that representational pictures do not reflect how the brain works. While I would agree with the enactive theorist that the aim of representational art, at least intentionally, was not to translate the phenomenal perceptual experience, I would disagree that they do not reflect how the brain works, or at least reflect our understanding of how the brain works. In-fact, there seems to be a remarkable co-evolution of our understanding of art and our understanding of the mind.
The paradox of representational art is that it aims to capture objects as they are by depicting how they look. Representational art suggested that the brain creates a representational picture of the scene in the same way a representational painting does. From our previous comparatively limited understanding of the mind, this idea was not far off. It was previously thought that the visual world was impressed on our retina like a stamp. It was than translated by the seeing visual cortex. This led artist to believe that hey could passively observe an object or scene, thus rendering a more realistic picture. While some artist may believe they paint with an ‘innocent eye,’ and while they may dream to become ever more innocent, our continual development in the understanding of the mind would suggest that this is not possible (Zeki.)
The first part of the brain that was discovered to be related to vision was the visuo-cortex. It was also thought for every point in the retina there were related points in the visuo-cortex, supporting the idea that images were ‘impressed’ on the mind. The naive idea that this was the sole location of visual activity in the brain led scientist to believe that there snap shot view of perception was correct, that images seen on the retina were simply translated by this region of the brain. This made it very easy for people to think that they see with the visuo-cortex and the rest of the brain functions in understanding what is seen. That seeing is passive and understanding is active. However, in the past seventy years there has been remarkable research into the way vision works and neuroscientist are constantly discovery how different areas of the brain function. For example they have discovered separate regions of the brain responsible for the detection of color, face and object recognition, motion, and so forth. It is not simply the visuo-cortex that is responsible for seeing (Zeki.) Just as perception requires a dynamic relationship with our environment, our own brains mimic this dynamic relationship. Seeing is an activity that occurs as much between the different regions of our brain and the entire visual system, as it does between our body and the world.
Representational art tried to look at the world through an ‘innocent eye.’ It tried to separate seeing and knowing. It thought that seeing was an objective process and that knowing was a reflective experience. But as alluded above, this was a contradiction. While Berkeley had many novel ideas about tactile perception he was wrong in saying that we construct the world, that vision is only a sensation of color in our retina.
We now have a more broad understanding of the entire visual system. Vision is not a mere sensation of color on the retina. Rather our eyes are connected to many different areas of the brain, each with there own task. No where is this more evident in visual art than in Experiential, or schematic art, which aims to capture the potential for movement. Like phenomenology it looks at perception as an experience. For example, Picasso aimed to invite the viewer to imagine what we would see if we saw a woman seeing herself in a mirror. This scenario invites the viewer into the virtual space, it motions them into the act of “visually perceiving an act of visual perception (Chakrabarti.)”
I feel that the work of philosophers, scientist, and artist is intrinsically connected and that we can benefit from the appreciation of each others effort to understand the world. The progression towards an enactive approach suggest that action is necessary for existence. It further suggest a co-dependence with each other and with the earth. To me this is really important, because it give grounds to advocate understanding and compassion.
Experience is a thoughtful activity. If we were more sensitive to what Gibson referred to as ‘affordances,’ we could not only improve upon our sensorimotor skills (which helped Gibson teach pilots to improve on their flight skills) but we could be more sensitive to affordances in people and in the environment. In the same way affordances tell us that something is ‘sit-on-able’ or ‘climb-able’ we could recognize the emotional affordances in each other. If we did away with the passive view that we are just going through this world all unaffected, disconnected, and void, and we embraced the understanding that we are dynamic beings, that we have the capacity to move and to be moved, I feel that people would be compelled towards thoughtful action.