"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, as the name suggests, is a term applied to classify art objects where a visual nature is dominant. As we highly rely on sight - a discreet, quick and efficient sense - throughout the development of the human being within our society many artefacts and techniques were developed through vision in order to be seen or explored visually. As an example, writing started as a cuneiform technique - where you could "read" not only with your physical eyes, but also through touch – but when became bi-dimensional only, flat on paper – was restricted only for 'seeing', altogether with paintings, drawings, books, etc.
Whether 'seeing is believing', or 'appearances are deceptive', perception and knowledge, seeing and understanding, or visual art and art history, do not often agree with each other. Society had developed a preference for vision over literacy. Through the media-saturated environment that we in live today, images are taken too quickly, and the concept of visuality developed, as a vision that has become socialized. We do not only 'see' (or better say, perceive) with our eyes, but also with our touch, hearing, and other parts of our senses that brings us information to interact with our notions of self-identity and communication with the external. As vision is our quickest sense, perhaps we simply end up 'monopolizing' all the credit of perception towards sight – even if the external is also been perceived through the other senses. Today, most people, as soon as they read the topic question for this essay, at first think it would be a very difficult answer, or even maybe impossible – to obtain. The general public of today is so used to rely on sight that they rarely think on other possibilities of obtaining the same sort of information.
Art history writing structures historical representations of art, and art criticism evaluates the contemporary art displayed in galleries. Aesthetics identifies the entire field of art, past and present. Museums provide historical visual narratives - and when describing the entire body of art, we can turn to aesthetics. Art museums and galleries present art that displays historical development described in the narratives of art history and art criticism. Aesthetics examines the same group of objects, identifying the essence of the studied art subject. To the philosopher, all art can be contemporary art, for he seeks a definition of art encompassing everything in galleries and museums, within a timeless gaze. Therefore, we use our vision to segregate, analyze and combine concepts, thus building our history of art through aesthetics values. If the works have a visual nature, we must look at them; if they have a sound nature, we must hear them, and differentiate and compare with the other historical and artistic data that we already have.
I. How useful it is
Within visual art we developed many sub-values, such as iconography, aesthetics and visual culture - and they are all used to evaluate the subjects in art history related to optic values, such as the nude, which brought temptation through the eyes - or the portrait gaze, miracle visions and spiritual symbolisms. We have a prevalent culture where, from its pagan origins still, where it worshipped the sun and the wonders of light, which can all be captured by vision; and the magic of transparency. Visual art comprises all different images and depictions of realities that can be seen. Today, we have technological devices that can explore and distribute images and visual items easily and accurately – all via a very quick access, not only to and through our eyes, but also spreading fast in our society - and "visual art" ended up comprising most of the art produced until today. Through religious iconology appears the tradition of worshiping images, and we can refer to similar contemporary examples of today such as individuals who have images of their modern idols or 'icons' - in their bedroom walls, or 'fans' adoring performers on a stage – like 'pilgrims' in search of the holy in churches.
When printing techniques were developed to increase the demand of items that could be seen and visually read, it was a great tool for the spread of a visual culture in development. Later on, other technologies were brought on board, especially from the 20th century with televisions and computers. Based on the emission and reception of light, the visual culture had become a colossal influence in our contemporary society, surpassing almost all the other medias, or ways of perceiving information with other senses. Narrowing most of what is artistic production to a visual interaction only, one became extremely accustomed to what the eyes can perceive easily - without developing enough ideas about its content.
The camera, as a visual registering mechanism, can "trick" the viewer showing only what is wanted for him to see - and not everything else that is happening around. After the over-exploration of visual devices encouraged by history of art itself – e.g. the high status value of oil paintings that brought a general appreciation, admiration and observation of those. With the development of photography and digitalized images, publicity and advertisement, another sort of not-so-visual, but more interactive and less 'passive' art started to develop - such as happenings, conceptual music, performances, and installations. A multi-sensorial and interactive approach started to grow within artworks.
In the early days of the cinema - such as George Melies' films - there was no sound originally recorded with the images. All the information about the story would have to be given and obtained through the filmed image only, and some instrumental music (executed out of the film previously, or sometimes, it would have live musical performances while the film was playing) would be inserted later on as a background sound, and one of the intentions of this music would be to help in emphasize the emotions brought up throughout the story.
Synchronized sound in film was eventually developed and finally fully merged with the image in 1927. Today 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. Through special screens and 3D spectacles, like the IMAX cinema in London, it is possible to offer a three-dimensional viewing, bringing a deeper reality through vision. This tries to convince the brain and therefore, the other senses, that what is depicted on the image is real; and is not only for the eyes, but to be experienced by the whole physical body, as a real presence.
Vision implies in the simple and pure process of seeing. To explain it in a few words, a chemical operation that is processed through the eyes – as physiological organs only – transmits the received content from those, to the brain - where the data will be interpreted and comprehended. This is one of the many tools we have to receive and perceive information. One-third of the brain is devoted to the process of visual signals. The brain integrates colour, motion, depth, shape and form into a single perception. Seventy per cent of all the information received by the brain is from a visual input - and this is more than all the senses combined.
The 'visual' is not a solitary operation, but something that happens with a group of functions altogether, and the eyes being merely the first receptors. Within our minds, we normally perceive the world as one, and not as five - the total number of senses that we usually consider – touch, smell, hearing and taste. This can suggest that our brain is constantly adding information from any of the other senses to what we are also seeing, or memories and any other data that we already have as an experience. There are also processes that can happen of information from diverse senses experienced altogether, such as colours and shapes, strongly associated with sounds, smells, feelings, etc.
Images can also appear within the mind while the eyes are closed. We have our memories to constantly bring visual items to our consciousness, which can happen naturally, such as dreams, imagination, and visualization - or be enhanced while we are feverish or under effects of mind-altering substances. We do need only external stimuli to have our imagery fully functioning in our minds. There are also extra visual effects that are exclusive to our sight but not exactly matching with our shared visual reality, such as the 'found' images phenomena – the ones encountered by the viewer in an image, but are not necessarily there – and also the after image effect. This was further explored in the Optical art and design of the 1960s, with black-on-white patterns and optical illusions of various kinds. Plato also 'divided' the mind in four, on this order; intelligence, reason, belief, and illusion.
Throughout centuries of painting and sculpture, with art used as a medium of documentation, portraiture or status symbol, the gaze was formed and trained. Images were made specifically to get the viewer's attention. Poses would be highly trained and explored, always with the aim to retain the visual attention of whoever that would look at it. This composition and gaze became the norm, and the artist learned how to "frame" the visually desired object and to narrow its point of view in diverting ours entirely. Voyeurs are often found in most societies, as many are tempted by the mystery and pleasures stimulated in the mind's imagination. Thus, the code was settled; and followed by printing and advertising, the word was spread; so visual culture items are everywhere now. It covers streets and building's facades. It is in the food, clothes and anything else that will to be consumed. It is all there, delivered straight for the eyes. All was to be watched, seen, understood, and looked at.
There was the predominance, in the sixteenth century, of the senses of smell, taste and touch and the relative rarity of visual references, or the triumphant presence of the body and its functions. But emerged a divorce between the intellect, seen as superior, and the body, seen as inferior; between the most abstract senses, sight and hearing with the corresponding arts, painting, 'a mental thing'. These oppositions, translated with total clarity in the cardinal dualism of soul and body (or understanding and sensibility), are rooted in the social division between the economic world and the world of symbolic production.
Vision became a more 'intelligent' sense from the others, as the Renaissance man and a more complex visual art were slowly being inserted in culture. Hearing would be second. But other senses, like touching, smelling, tasting – these possibly started to be considered as something more 'animal', rudimentary, rustic and primitive; therefore, not as 'respectable' as the others. Using only sight and hearing, people would stay in place, not showing movements, and behave with enough secrecy - therefore it worked on a way to be more accepted socially. The other senses, once involved, could include the invasion of the personal space of the other. To 'look' only with your eyes, and not with your 'hands' (touch) became more respectable. The image is there, delivered, static – but also and fast as light.
II. How limited it is
Perhaps we might be 'misunderstanding' the visual art term in full, over-estimating it towards general art history. Through aesthetics we inevitably categorize the visuality of a piece; however, we are so over-saturated with visual culture information on a daily basis, that we end up interpreting almost everything we see, in many occasions - through quick and poor visual concepts - without much art 'essence' or history involved. But did not art history create, or at least, encourage visual culture to exist? Didn't the gaze stand in awe for all the great master's paintings throughout the centuries, making it possible to develop countless complex visual codes, practices, techniques and special ways of having it recognized?
The audience is restricted of properly interacting with art pieces, as part of the traditional criteria from a museum conservation programme. But when it regards sculptures or other tri-dimensional works, raises the question if every audience was actually supposed to touch, but possibly those are also not meant to have this sort of interaction, and be looked at only. Because an object is tri-dimensional, or has a more 'caressing' and 'tactile' nature, it does not necessarily mean that it was made for specifically touching. The third dimension here might exist as an extra 'appeal' to the eye and to our own reality, instead of a flat image on a canvas, for instance. Many paintings have extremely interesting textures on their surface that would be quite amusing to our touch as well. Although, those are not because they were made to be touched - but only to enhance their visual effect - and to also 'explore' in volume and texture, with our eyes only.
If mentioning an early musical piece for example, the score, normally written on paper, which is a visible object - is the only media registered; but is only a visual record of something that is experienced aurally as its main sense.
Architecture is another visual art form, as it has an aesthetical appeal. But we do not experience it only with our eyes – we get inside the construction, we open and close doors and windows, we inhabit, cohabit and interact with the work itself.
Conceptual art many times would clash with visual arts on the claim that they were merely visual, and again, it had only the superficiality of the image, and no further ideological developments. Literacy is not exclusively a visual media as we have also Braille available, but due to visual culture and printing industry, literacy became also largely delivered as a main visual item.
Today with digital media and quick access to film, the audiovisual term has become common and almost compulsory to use. Many 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. That reminds us that the audio and the visual, are only expressions to point on how the media is being perceived; the history of art will be something developed much beyond that, regardless if the differences on the senses will have an influence or not.
With the computer era increasing its influence on 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 until now. Like interactive holograms, where images are explored spatially and in three dimensions, they could be used as a medium by any other discipline taught academically, for a more interactive approach. Most of the school subjects today are still taught, shown and memorized relying on our eyes as receiving mechanisms of information. But 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. This would 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 – and might open more perspectives to art history evaluation.
A visit to a museum is an option to experiment a more holistic perception of the history of art – as the presence within other senses are accessed in a more holistic approach to experiment artworks, 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 when 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.
Television and Internet are also based mainly on the image. Regardless of how advanced the sonic system of the device is, or sound production was involved, the sound is a complement. 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.
Very often visual art end up excluding the cultural interests of the people who cannot see. The "cognitive alternative to visual art" may include: touch, verbal description, sound and drama, tactile diagrams, art making, and art in a broader context. [ABS 20] Blind people, as we all know, have many challenges to adapt in our society, and partly can be due to the strength granted to visual culture for almost everything else. The television set, for instance, can become 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 visually perceive.
The visually impaired individual will understand visual culture in different ways and levels than 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, can be well mastered by them, many times developing it into a career. There are several institutions and non-governmental organizations that promote visually impaired artists; although 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 non-visual senses, yet most of us with perfect sight will perceive them mainly as an image.
In the book Art Beyond Sight: A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual Impairment, there are statements from several visual impaired professionals that are active in the visual arts, such as Rebecca Harris, a fine art graduate who experienced great difficulty to be accepted in an educational art institution or even to continue her studies within the same one that accepted her previously – because she is blind. Also Yvonne Eriksson, who is also blind and teaches in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at Goteborg University, Sweden; between many others. Possibly one of the interesting cases is the one of Helen Keller, deaf and blind, who obtained a BA in Arts, with a distinction. She is an example of art studies being concluded by someone who could not see or hear.
Tactile images shouldn't be such an alien idea; we do look at reproduced images all the time, be they in paper, through a computer or TV screen – and regarding black-and-white illustrations, the information loss is similar. The idea of such tactile picture might be instilled with some form of prejudice. Partly because we take sight as a more important sense, and 'nobler' than touch - and partly because some of us still have a kind of prejudice against the visual impairment itself.
Many artworks where the main nature is not visual are still classified and thrown in the same bucket as visual art. As they will normally have a visual source, item or device - something that can actually be seen, regardless if it is the stereo where the sound installation is coming through, or pillows where the public is invited to touch and interact, are at risk of also being labelled as visual art, instead of sensorial or touching art.
Several artists widely known in western art history experienced sight problems – Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro would be a few ones to mention between many. The visual impairment would influence on work results, as the artist would see the image differently from the audience.
Understandably, any visitor or admirer of arts ends up being called a viewer. But the viewer is not solely viewing or merely looking: his whole being is listening, feeling, breathing, reacting and experiencing. This is not only visual information but it encompasses the whole body, which interacts and exchanges information within the brain. Vision only offers the image, and nothing else. Not the full experience, or its history. Thus, the viewer is actually, an experimenter.
As a discipline mostly based in theory and documentation, art history involves much 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.
Usually, it is the art historian – and not the audience – who will decide what is art, through historical data, aesthetic evaluation and other references. The usefulness of the visual art term specifically might become questionable, as it automatically narrows understanding to only one sense. We might risk on perceiving it on a superficial level only, as visual art can be – because most works of art are much more than an image, especially when a history of art is applied.
To be able to make art history, is necessary to analyze the development of art, from any time that is created or studied further; evaluate contemporary art, or values. Later on, looking at the same group of objects from an atemporal view, to explain why these artefacts deserve discussion by historians and critics; telling us why they are art, in which sense - if 'old' art is seen with contemporary eyes, they can also become contemporary art instantly. Looking at the sequence of facts, one can wonder if visual art is really crucial to study art history, or not.
If our society had focused on sounds instead of images, we might have relied mainly on sonic communication as a primary media. Or, if we had developed a preference in smell, our language would be highly developed for perceiving scent and odours, like some animals communicate through pheromones. We could be focusing on odours stories and 'sculptures', like a 'perfume' instead of a written text, for example.
Although not all of us are officially classified as synesthetes ourselves, we can still use other senses altogether with vision to depict images, and vice-versa. A bi-dimensional image can be more than multidimensional, if there is time for the other senses to wake up for it - or to the brain to bring the sensations that will complement the experience.
Conclusion
Regardless of time or media, the interaction between audience and object, will direct how the subject will be studied – or read. Visual art can be a useful term, but is vastly misused and often misdirected. This term is useful in the sense of guiding us to the fact that we are dealing with mainly visual media item, however - with the visual culture of today, this can be quite narrowing, as it might direct us through only what can be received visually. With the fastness that visual culture grows, and with vision and light's speed allowing it to do so, we may end up missing the full understanding of or object of study, or even, of observation, as there might not be a chance to the other senses to respond to that intellectual stimuli.
It can be incorrect to use the term 'visual' to most art that was created. The fact that society is strongly influenced by vision as a practical matter throughout the times makes our art based mostly in what can be appreciated with the 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.
Works of visual art can be appreciated without historical awareness. They are physical objects after all, that exists in the present and may convey values and meaning that might change in time. The history of an artwork can be created without the need of a visual reference, as sometimes they can be replaced with enough literary information. The history of art is needed to understand why and how that object was created and resulted as such. In many cases, the subject is not an artwork until the art historian says so – and for that, the visual input plays only a small role in it.
Interpreting art is beyond vision. The artwork does not stay only as an image, or sound, or smell. That is just a first and primary superficial perception, from the external, and once it has been comprehended – the human meaning and value is what might matter more. What happens in the viewer's, visitor's or listener's brain is the key – that will start the interpretation process and questioning about the significance and history of the work. After all, you need the history to understand the image. This history also helps us to understand through the eyes and times of others, and for that, in many cases, the image is not the key, but the idea.
Bibliography
Books
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(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
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Films
Berger, John & Dibb, Mike. Ways of seeing. (UK: BBC Television Series, 1972)
Lumet, Sidney; Chayefsky, Paddy. Network. (USA: Warner Home Video, 1976)
Moorhouse, Jocelyn. The Proof. (USA / Canada: New Line Home Video, 1991)
Tykwer, Tom; Suskind, Patrick. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. (Germany/UK: Pathé Films, 2006)
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