As a little kid, nothing was as beautiful during the silent
or black and white movie days, to suddenly watch slide
commercials fill the theatre screen with wonderful color.
Saturday matinee 10 sent pleasure that satisfied every
part of my being.
On Dec 23, 2008, at 5:03 PM, Michael Brady wrote:
On Dec 23, 2008, at 7:33 PM, William Conger wrote:
Why would you want to regard them separately anyway? All the old
views regarding categories of mind are not so helpful anymore.
That's why I like the new neuroscience. It points to new
orientations (with evidence) for our thinking about thinking.
I brought it up, but the dictionaries did also make the same
emphasis on "intellectual" faculties.
I was thinking of works of visual art that seem on first glance not
to observe the standards of conventional pictorial beauty.
Hockney's swimming pools, for example. They engaged me
intellectually, first, more so than by immediate visual
recognition. I saw them as patterns and arrangements, initially, as
"cool" and aloof, as fundamentally detached from their referents by
the linear abstractions. I liken that to intellectualizing the
image, to Hockney's repositioning the mode of perceiving the scene
from the almost immediately pictorial to the analytical abstraction
into flat color areas and schematic proxies for the reflections in
the water, etc. Compare Mondrian's early paintings, where the
portrayal of natural forms seems more natural, to the later
rectilinear grids of pure color and black lines. The change that
occurs shifts the way one grasps the image, again, from a more
immediate reading of tree to a more abstracted, more schematic, and
thus more "intellectual" reading. Also, compare Broadway Boogie
Woogie or other late Mondrian's to Motherwell's Elegies. For me,
there is no "reading" of the structure of the "Elegy." It's all
immediate.
I don't believe that one's viewing of a WoA engages separate or
discrete kinds of perception. All of what I know and remember comes
into play during every experience, including looking at paintings.
It's just that in the process of seeing, I realize that I attend to
a picture more with one kind of understanding, let's say,
intellectual and analytical, than another, say, color and emotions.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
