Sorry for the delay with these notes...
These are from the Tate Modern course Sensing Art led by Nigel Warburton (by ticket only).
Aims of the course:
- To think about the senses in relation to art
- To engage with works in the Tate Modern collection, and, hopefully, to discover new, rich, and interesting ways of experiencing them
The topic of the first session was Synaesthesia There are at least two important meanings of 'synaesthesia'. The first sense, often investigated by psychologists and neurologists, is an involuntary mixing of the senses. This involves the appearance of sensory information from a sense modality that isn't being directly stimulated. Put simply it is when someone sees the letter 'A' as red (the commonest form of synaesthesia), or has strong visual stimuli when listening to music, or auditory phenomena when looking at visual art.
The artist David Hockney, the composer Olivier Messiaen, and the writer Vladimir Nabokov, are examples of synaesthetes in this sense. Wassily Kandinsky is widely assumed to have had synaesthesia on the basis of his explicit aim to evoke auditory phenomena through his painting. You might want to read this interesting article about Kandinsky and some other synaesthete artists, see 'The Man Who Heard His Paintbox' and a composer's view of Kandinsky's 'visual chords' 'Sound and Vision'.
The UK Synaesthesia Association investigates this type of synaesthesia.
The second sense of 'synaesthesia', the one we focused on in the course, might be called 'artificial synaesthesia'. Those who don't have involuntary confusions of the senses in the style of full-blown synaesthetes may be able to stimulate synaesthesia-like experiences in relation to art. This is sometimes used as a creative technique by artists and writers. The idea is that by deliberately concentrating on an 'inappropriate' sense modality when experiencing a painting or sculpture, new aspects of the work might be revealed, and it can be experienced under a different aspect.
In the Tate Modern galleries we spent most of the evening in Level 3 East Material Gestures. An example of the kind of activity we used to generate artificial synaesthesia. Looking at Philip Guston's 'The Return' from the point of view of the sense of taste led several people to see ice cream scoops in the picture. If you see the yellowish shape in the bottom right hand part of the picture as a scoop, it changes the way you organise your visual understanding of the painting, seeing it as having depth and solidity. In contrast, when someone compared the image to an English breakfast, the white surrounding this yellow shape, suggested the white of an egg, bringing that white part of the painting to our attention in a different way, and emphasizing the rasher-like striated red marks to the left of the 'egg'. With Clyfford Still's untitled painting (sadly not illustrated, but described here), someone imagined tasting the picture, and licking its surface, which immediately drew to our attention the complexity of marks on what had appeared an almost uniform blue canvas, and gave a different significance to the marks at the top of the painting which appeared as layers uncovered beneath the blue. In both these cases the transfer of senses was based on seeing abstract paintings as if representational of edible substances - quite different I suspect from the actual synaesthete's experience.
With Cy Twombly's late series, asked to think of these through the modality of hearing, the rhythmic, large scale, angry red marks invoked rock music, and for some, Stockhausen or Debussy's L'Après-Midi d'Un Faun. This fits very well with the paintings' titles which suggest Bacchanalian festivals (and the loss of sense of self that Friedrich Nietzsche indentified in his account of the Dionysian force in art in his first book The Birth of Tragedy - for an introduction to this, listen to my interview with Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on art).
The idea that we might experience paintings through more than one sense modality is not new.
The art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson writing about Giotto in his book Italian Painters of the Renaissance, set out his view about tactile values. For him effective figure painting needed 'the illusion of being able to touch the figure'. He wrote:
'I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the various projections of this figure, before I shall take it for granted as real, and let it affect me lastingly.'
The critic Roger Fry in his 'Essay on Aesthetics' of 1909 suggested that the emotional effects of painting are felt, that rhythm in visual art 'appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity'. Similarly mass, and space depicted in visual art appeal to kinetic and tactile qualities.
You might also be interested in notes on the topic of 'Molyneux's Problem' from a previous course at Tate Modern available here.
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