On Visual Art
10/01/2008
An essay written for an Arts History MA. Copyright Ever Orchid 2008. All rights reserved.
"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart." Helen Keller
Introduction-
Visual art is the classification of mostly art that are visually in nature, such as bi-dimensional works as painting, drawing, photography and others.
Visual is everything that is concerned through vision.
Vision is classified as a sense. Apart from the five traditional senses usually taught in school (vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste) there are other senses agreed by neuroscientists, such as thermoception (temperature), nociception (pain) and equilibrioception (balance) in between others.
The term visual art is used many times to understand that we are dealing mainly with images and not with the other media. However, in many artworks where the main source is not visual, is still classified and thrown in the same bucket as visual art. As artworks in general will normally have a visual source or device, something that can actually be seen, regardless if it is the stereo where the sound installation is coming through - these artworks are at risk of also being labelled as visual art. A giant cube full of pillows where the public is invited to touch, interact and a more tactile feeling is the priority to be experienced also has the chance of being called visual art, instead of sensorial or touching art. This happens mainly because there are objects related to the work that can be seen visually – whether or not the principal sense explored within the work is related to another sense, which is not vision.
Understandably, any visitor or admirer of arts ends up being called a viewer. But the viewer is not only viewing or merely looking: his whole being is listening, feeling, breathing, reacting and experiencing. This is not only a visual experience but it encompasses the whole body, which interacts and exchanges information within the brain. You do not experience with your eyes, but through your whole body interacting information within your brain. Vision only offers visual information, and nothing else; not the experience. Thus, the viewer is actually, an experimenter.
Still, art history itself is very reliant on the visual art media, and maybe that is why it ends up using a term that 'labels' with the same name almost everything done artistically that is visible. As a discipline mostly based in theory and documentation, art history involves a lot of paperwork or other materials normally bound to visual resources. Everything that is studied, analyzed, described and categorized, is photographed and written about. Even if the subject is not only used to study visual media, its practice will engulf mostly what can be grasped and documented visually – through images, texts and sometimes film. Despite the fact that the sound medium and other resources are available to the other senses, these are rarely used for documentation and study of the history of art.
Although we have many other senses to perceive and understand artistic expressions, we seem to overuse vision and classify as visual art almost everything that we can see. And it can be incorrect to use the visual term to most art that was created, as we all know that we do not use only vision to understand this information, in many cases. We could have developed a whole culture on tactile art, or equilibrium art instead. Yet this did not happen.
Senses as a way of communication
The senses are ways that we have to communicate with the outside world. All different types of information that reaches us through several external stimuli are perceived by one or more of our senses and the information is sent to the brain, so the physical body can react accordingly.
Apart from the senses mentioned above, Howard Gardner developed the theory of extra intelligences1 such as bodily-kinesthetic (learning through doing things, rather than reading or hearing); interpersonal (interacting with others); linguistic (to do with words, spoken or written); logic-mathematical (logic and reason); naturalistic (relating to natural processes and one's own environment); spatial (senses of direction and coordination); musical (rhythm and harmony) amongst others. A child's upbringing heavily influences which senses will develop and relied upon more. This person can have the main sense re-explored at an older age, mainly to improve learning skills, using information on a format that would appeal more to the sense that is more developed, or even train the other undeveloped senses depending of the individual's needs.
The more someone is exposed to such a perception, the quicker the response will be. It is an education of the senses. Examples: a trained musician will know within a few seconds of listening to a song if he will like the sound, if it is good or bad (following his parameters) and determine a style or recognize any familiarity with the sound. Someone with such training had been storing a lot of aural information through his whole life and will respond with this medium faster than someone who has not had such an aural experience. A visually impaired person will have the lack of eyesight stimulating the other senses to develop more, thus compensating and experiencing through other ways what fully sighted people would perceive mainly through vision. On the other side, someone whose job is in a visual resources department will have such practice in gathering visual information and image memory developed, that instantly automatically the body can end up relying on vision more than anything else, even while doing different activities.
Humankind is very bound to vision as a main or primary way of socially connecting. We judge people by their looks, even when that is not a rational priority. An individual's public image is normally how we refer to his lifestyle and personality. We direct ourselves in our environment mainly through vision. We rely in what we can see. If we talk to someone and that person is not looking at us, we might feel ignored or even offended, presuming that they are not paying attention at us. Visual contact is something that most people thrive for in general relationships. When we expect a visual response from someone and that person does not look at us, it often gives us a feeling that the person is not there; or not there for us.
The hierarchy of the senses
Light and vision are quicker than sound. We first respond to sight, then to sound (with sight still on board), then to the other senses (with sight and sound still active). It all depends on physical speed of facts observed in nature, and this will have great importance in considering which senses will react first. On a normal experience, on a physical reaction order, by the time we finish the contemplation of any piece, the sight will be the one more explored; sound the second and the rest in third.
As we rarely are allowed to touch artworks, they rarely have sound or smell, and vision being the fastest sense to respond, it has become the most reliable known to our society - especially for understanding art. Not only for the viewers, but also for the artists, who, in most cases, will normally expect a quick visual response from the viewer.
Vision is also the easiest one to switch off and disconnect. If we do not want to see something, we simply close our eyes. We cannot do the same with our ears, or skin. We can close our mouths, but we might take some effort until it is possible to get rid of an unwanted taste. Not only our bodies can receive easier visual information, but also disconnect from the outside at any desired moment.
As the reception of light and visual information strongly influences in our brains, when we lay down our bodies for a rest, we usually close our eyes in the intention to sleep. We do not shut down our other senses to rest our body, like we do with our eyes. Such is the power of vision and light reception in our brains, that visual and picture thinking is a common process found amongst the population. Sometimes, to appreciate something that is not primarily bound to the visual world, the individual can close his eyes, stopping the visual and light input in distracting the brain; then, he can pay more attention to what the other senses are receiving. The routine of receiving images and relying on their use is enforced each time more, and this also gives to the individual a vast visual vocabulary that communicates with its own mind, influencing dreams and inspiring unusual imagery creations such as abstract art.
Still everyone experiences sensations through most of their body parts which are active and has sensations connected to the brain. Even if contemporary society is addicted to visual resources on gathering information and experiences – it does not mean that the individual's experience is limited to this source; the other senses are also active during the perception. That might not have been caught into attention at the moment; maybe the viewer wasn't fully aware of it; the other senses might even have reacted as a second thought or later effect after the experience. But they are definitely present in that moment and it will depend on the individual's personal awareness to store this information from other senses either consciously or subliminally in his memory.
Visual art & visual culture
The term visual art is useful to point a resource where visual source is the most reliable for art history recordings.
Even if it is a musical piece for example, the score, normally written on paper, which is a visible object, would have been the only registry stored; and that is a visual record of something that is experienced aurally as its main sense.
When music started to be recorded on a media where the original sound could be listened to over and over again, such as vinyl records, it meant that people could now carry the actual physical object where more accurate copies and exemplars of the original information would be recorded within them. Stored in an actual sound device, and not being recorded only through visual media anymore, the accuracy of the sound information could finally be registered properly and listened to it afterwards - bringing an experience closer to the original version or performance.
In the early days of the cinema, there was no sound recorded from the images. All the information about the story would have to be given and obtained through visual sources only, and instrumental music would be inserted as a background sound, with the slight intention of emphasizing the emotions brought up by the story.
Sound in film was eventually developed and finally fully merged with the image. Nowadays in some cinemas it is possible to experience not only the original audiovisual altogether but also other sensorial happenings - such as mechanisms adjusted on the viewer's seat to give the sensation of trembling when an impact is shown on screen, or shaking if the visual equivalent is depicted on film. Special screens and 3D spectacles offer a three-dimensional viewing, bringing a deeper reality through vision. It tries to convince the brain and therefore, the other senses, that what is depicted on the image is real; and is not only to be perceived through the eyes, but to be experienced by the whole physical body, as a real presence.
Today with digital media and quick access to film, the audiovisual term has become common and almost compulsory to use. Most visual works i.e. films have their complement in sound, and many musical works has also their complementary in image (such as music videos). Both media are extensively explored together. It is a product largely distributed, easily accessible and the final work normally has these two media mounted together. If the audience experiences just one of these two, what can happen is that, unconsciously or consciously, the brain might miss the input of the other media that normally stimulates another sense altogether. In this case the mind itself could start imagining what the missing media would be like during the presentation of such work. This happens very often today, as many people are exposed to audiovisual streams (sound and vision active simultaneously). We are getting used to have sound combined with image, being influenced by television, computers and film, and if one is absent, the mind will bring to the imagination information necessary to satisfy that particular sense. That could be almost like reading a book, when the reader's imagination adds the images missing in the text, bringing its own information to complement what is being read. Even when some senses are not directly stimulated, the brain could bring a similar task in imagining the sensation equivalent to the input that is missing.
As the computer era increases its influence on our daily life, it could be possible in a near future to experiment art history documented in a more multidimensional fashion, and not relying so much in vision as we did until now. For example, through interactive holograms, where images are explored spatially and in three dimensions, they could be used by any other discipline taught academically, like most of the school subjects are still taught, shown and memorized relying on our eyes as receiving mechanisms of information. In a near future other techniques – possibly more tactile and aural, rather than visual - might also be used to teach mathematics, physics and other subjects. It will obviously depend on the educational resources available on teaching programmes, but technology could be used to help in broaden the didactic level for a more holistic experience of the pupil, not relying in vision only as the first and main sense.
A visit to a museum is always another option to experiment a more realistic perception of the history of art – using our presence to experiment artworks within our other senses, rather than having contact through this discipline through only looking at some printed reproduction. Exhibitions touring all over the world are very successful in most parts of the western culture – due to the fact that not only the visitor can step in front of an original painting, step back, observe details, walk around if possible, imagine and experience feelings and other sensations that maybe through the photographic reproduction on a book alone would not have been possible to feel or experience.
The influence of television still grows in our culture and this is a device based mainly on the image. The sound is a complement, regardless of how advanced the sonic system of that device is. If you rely on subtitles and other dubbed options available, it is possible to say that most of the information brought from a television is mainly visual. Even more within the Internet – only a few people use sound devices to get full use from the web or the computer, as most of the time they are not so necessary. The majority of the population use this resource mainly through the images displayed on the screen.
Blind people, as we all know, have many challenges to adapt in our society, which is one based on visual culture for almost everything else; not only for the arts. The television set becomes some sort of radio for them, where mainly the sound is received by the listener and the verbal or sonic descriptions of scenes and landscapes brought through sound hopefully will give enough information to be possible to build a picture inside their minds of the image that they cannot physically receive.
The visually impaired individual, obviously, cannot understand visual culture in the same way fully sighted people do. Instead, all the other senses which are active will work to compensate the lack of visual input. A profession commonly developed by visually impaired people is the one of a musician. As sound can work like a full-time tool of interaction within the external world, it is well mastered by them, and many times, can be developed into a career.
There is also the fact that when visually impaired people who create an artwork that is visible, were not relying mainly on vision for it. However we use our own vision as a primary sense in perceiving it. Even when we hear the work of deaf musicians, obviously we are listening to something quite different than its composer when the work was conceived, and possibly far from what it was intended at first. The same happens with blind painters or photographers. There are several institutions and non-governmental organizations that promote visually impaired artists; although most of their works are very pleasant for our sight, we must remember that the blind artist did not exactly conceive the work with the image in his mind in the same perception as we receive it afterwards. These works were done with a much more awakened feeling of the other non-visual senses, yet most of us with perfect sight will perceive them mainly as an image.
If our society would have to focus on sounds instead of images, we would rely mainly on sonic communication. If we had developed a preference in smell for instance, we would communicate mainly through scent and odors, like many animals communicate through pheromones. We would be focusing on pheromones stories and sculptures, like a perfume instead of a written text, for example.
But an image is already there, is directly made for delivery, fast as light; and you can keep taking your eyes back to your favourite details. The sound, you have to hear it, and rely on your memory to build a bridge, from the beginning until the end, of the wholeness of the sound wave - and then, comprehend it. Sound relies and depends on time, as it is not possible to go backwards and forwards within the sound itself – unless it is stored into any sort of equipment, so it is possible to be played again.
Sound art?
Through all the art history that we know, since the first organized civilizations formed, or even from pre-historical art - until the advent of photography, bi and tri dimensional visible art was always used and developed to depict reality, our environment and what was outside us. To copy what we could see with our eyes. To be able to freeze a moment in time. To represent a situation and manner.
However, with other creative arts that deal with other senses, such as music, the route was not the same. Songs from the Renaissance or Byzantine period can be quite abstract and structurally complex, and might not bring or copy any sound from our outside world at all. As the visible art was the one to be relied for historical documentation, the art developed through sound gained freedom in having a more loose form instead. Some elements in our sonic reality would be used as inspiration themes, such as copying the bird's singing in some orchestra pieces or even when Beethoven uses the onomatopoeia of destiny's knock on the door, in several notes and harmonies on his 5th Symphony (Tamtamtamtam). Still, music was developed as something parallel to the art that was visual, and would not directly relate to the sounds that we hear on real life. Having a more abstract form, a way of controlling and organizing was necessary, with the intention to provide structure. Using some sort of mathematical system, following particular parameters of order and equilibrium, it developed its own language. Painting, sculpture and architecture would also share the ambition of reaching an unworldly beauty, a sacred and perfect universe - where everything is harmonic and some theorists will even affirm that music harmony is similar to color harmony.
Although we can follow the beautiful sounds that classical or academic music can bring to us, they come from another idiom and are not based on our external reality. This is an example that we can justify why visual media ended up being used so vastly to communicate any sort of expression – it ended up depicting reality more accurately than other resources, even when the media was not from a visual source. On another side, if we listen to a piece of "music" that has only random sounds recorded from our environment, and does not have musical notes and structures within it - can be quite unpleasant for our ears and brain, and we might qualify them only as noise. To be officially called music, regardless of the genre, the sound might have to follow a melody, or some sort of musical structure normally used by academic systems, and not the odd cacophony that we hear outside our bodies on our daily lives.
Cross-disciplines and synesthesia
Sometimes considered a condition and other times an ability, synesthesia is the possibility of mixing experiences of different senses within an individual's brain. People who have it are called synesthetes, and are commonly found amongst artists - as those have the facility of depicting reality to re-communicate it through unpredictable media, many times crossing over different senses, transmitting and expressing information from one sense to the other.
Cross-sensory fusions are vastly used in literature, such as fiction writing, to expand the possibilities of descriptions of characters and their inner depths, mixing sensations so that the reader can connect better with the text itself. It makes then easier to whatever is been read, to be identified as a real experience and become a more convincible story, as this use of language will appeal to maybe stimulate other senses throughout the reader's physical body.
As it happens with many artists or creators in other media that also uses varied sensorial combinations, the writer may not be a synesthete at all; sometimes they are only interested in causing experiences of mixed perception to the public and exploring different ways of expression for that result.
Even throughout history, many scholars and professionals in whatever areas they were working in, would often cross one discipline to another one that could be unusual or will have a different analogy, hence comparing results, analyzing subjects, and many times, experiencing and concluding through mixed senses or abilities. Examples: musical notes as numbers; planets as music; colors as music; (color organs were an instrument extensively explored under this idea); the Futurist's Manifesto, where on demanding a compulsory mixing of the senses, an out-of-the-ordinary experience become their aim; or even people who has more than one active career at the same time – they would bring different sources of information into their work or to deal with the same subject, whatever that would be. An example of that could be Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who was a writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic. Nevertheless, all his fields of interest would influence into each other and he would always use one approach to complement the other, crossing sensorial perception and understanding, like in his essay on Laocoon2.
Another highly explored visual medium is writing; however many authors struggle in finding their true voice through the paper. How can that be? A written voice? It is not being really spoken and does not manifest itself as a sound. But it can be as personal and powerful as a physically manifested sonic voice, it can mark the style and intensity of someone who is merely using an alphabet as a visual code to supply information to all the others senses, and even replace illustrations through written descriptions. The imagination of the own reader will supply the images, sounds, sensations and everything else that will be missing on the actual text, and that will be mainly directed by the writer's written voice.
Other examples of cross-disciplinarities within the senses can be: visual music, sound symbolism or phonosemantics (where vocal sounds have meaning), ideophones (words to convey impressions of sensations), transcription (the conversion of spoken words into written language) and onomatopoeias (words suggesting the actual sound).
A point of view
There are many images created with the intention of deceiving the eye. This is another substantial proof that the eye is nothing more than a mechanism, which perceives light and merely send the information to the brain – it does not hold the bare truth. Is what we will understand within our own minds, from that information, that really matters, and will bring the respective reaction through or to the other senses. As many of us rely on sight on a daily basis, there is the old popular saying "what the eyes can't see the heart can't feel". Although it can have a certain influence in our visual cultures of today, this is quite a redundant affirmation. If an experience, which took place a long time ago is forgotten at a certain stage, it is because the other senses also stopped having that experience - and not because the eyes couldn't see that anymore. The other senses are always present in any experience if there is enough time for them to react. It is premeditated and inadequate to conclude that our lives and experiences are mainly visual, thus, by eliminating the image, the experience is not there anymore.
Also strongly depicted through visual media is information that does not have a visual nature or origin. Emotions, thoughts, ideas, news of the world – at first when they originate they do not have a purely visual form, but they are quickly transferred to visual media through symbols and codes, to be streamed and transported as information. We end up absorbing all through our eyes, and sometimes our other senses do not even have a chance of experimenting any of this information at all. It stays only as a visual data, although it did not always have a visual source. Vision is a primary receiver of information, almost like a camera or mechanical eye device, but it does not retain it or understands it. Is the brain that does it, and will do the same with any other information brought in through the other senses too.
Humanity relies on vision more than everything else; the illusion that "all that can be seen, is considered to be safe", is literally, an illusion; sounds cannot be seen, yet they are there, and we rely on them; radio waves and emotions the same. We believe that only what is seen is safe. Yet we are only looking but not touching; we see things that sometimes are not even there. One example is a mirage, which is an optical phenomenon of a displaced image.
In our culture, we use many language expressions based on our senses and several of these expressions rely on visual input. A good example could be "a point of view" - which normally means an opinion, a totally abstract concept, and therefore, cannot be visual. However, it is a misplaced metaphor, as the other example mentioned before of the writer that needs to find his true voice. These terms can be classified as cross-disciplines or maybe they were effects brought in by synesthesia and adopted as general language afterwards.
Conclusion
Visual art can be a useful term, but is vastly misused and often misdirected.
It can be inappropriate to classify most of the art produced in the world mainly as visual.
The fact that our society is strongly influenced by vision as a practical matter throughout the times makes our art based mostly in what can be appreciated with our eyes. So, visual art it will be, even when other senses are stimulated first.
Plastic arts may not be an expression used often in English culture or language, although it could be more adequate than the term visual art. Sculptures, installations and other media that are academically classified as plastic, also end up being called visual.
If our civilization would have to focus on sounds instead of images, we would rely mainly on sonic communication as a primary media. If we had developed a preference for smell, we would communicate mainly through scent and odors, like many animals communicate through pheromones. We would be focusing on pheromones stories and sculptures instead, for example, like a perfume. But light is faster than the others, and our eyes are quick to respond to it – so maybe if we were to give preference to another sense, we would have to change the physical conditions of how is expressed and received externally, too.
Although not all of us are officially classified as synesthetes ourselves, we can still use other senses to depict images, and vice-versa. If there is the chance, the suggestion to awake our other senses to the same thing is welcome - and maybe a much richer experience could be waiting for. Such as feeling the sunshine of Turner, hearing the scream of Munch, smelling the sunflowers of Van Gogh, dance with the ballerinas of Degas. A bi-dimensional image can be more than multidimensional, if there is time for the other senses to wake up, or to the brain to bring the sensations that will complement the experience.
Close your eyes, so you can pay attention to what is around you.
1 Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
1983, New York, Basic Books.
2 Gottold, Lessing. Laocoon : An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 1984, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Copyright Ever Orchid 2008. All rights reserved.
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