How Theory-Laden is Our Seeing?
Notes from Session Two of Sensing Art a Tate Modern course led by Nigel Warburton (by ticket only).
For the second session we focused on seeing and the degree to which our knowledge affects what we see. Here is the philosophical background.
Some philosophers of art in a tradition stemming from Immanuel Kant have argued that we should strive to remove all pre-conceptions and expectations when coming to a work of art. With visual art, our seeing should be pure and unpolluted by what Ernst Gombrich calls our 'mental set' and others our 'cognitive stock', that is the beliefs that influence how (and perhaps what) we see. For Arthur Schopenhauer, this amounted to losing one's sense of individuality and becoming a 'clear mirror' to the work. A similar idea resurfaced in the Twentieth Century with Clive Bell's theory of art as significant form. He stressed that when viewing a painting as art we need bring nothing with us from life, no art historical knowledge, and needn't even concern ourselves with what is represented in the picture, but should experience its patterns of line, shape and colour as stimuli to an aesthetic emotion (for more on Clive Bell's theory of art, see these notes from a previous Tate Modern course, or Chapter 1 of my book The Art Question
Nelson Goodman (in his book Languages of Art) mocked the assumption that we can achieve such a purity of vision and the idea that the resulting frissons are particularly valuable as indicators of aesthetic worth by labelling it a 'Tingle-Immersion' theory (even including a mock footnote referring to Immanuel Immersion and Joseph Tingle ca 1800).
So there are two issues here. First can we practically achieve a purity of response, a kind of retinal seeing unaffected by beliefs? Secondly, even if we could, should it be given a higher value than are everyday seeing which is so obviously coloured by mental set?
In the philosophy of science the idea of neutral observation is frequently called into question. N.R. Hanson famously declared 'There's more to seeing than meets the eyeball' and 'seeing is a theory-laden activity.' For a summary of some of the key debates, see 'Theory and Observation in Science' in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (a very useful and generally reliable free online resource). We may be almost blind to unexpected phenomena - such as a four of hearts in black or a 6 of spades in red. Our conceptual expectations affect what we see and remember.
Yet there are some pheonomena which are completely resistant to being affected by expectations. The Müller-Lyer ilusion, for example is one of these. We know the lines are the same length, but that doesn't allow us to see them as the same length. The Checker Board Illusion is an even more powerful example: it y seems impossible that squares A and B are the same shade, yet they are. Knowing that they are doesn't allow us to perceive them as the same. This is a different case from the Duck-Rabbit which seems to some degree under our conscious control: we can see the figure as a duck or a rabbit (but not both), and make the according Gestalt shift consciously (we can even choose to see it as a sea-gull or a hare). For my views on the Duck-Rabbit and a purported Stone Age precedent, see 'World's Oldest Optical Illusion Found?'
In the Tate Modern collection we visited two rooms in the 'Poetry and Dream' section (Level 3 West): the one dedicated to Mona Hatoum's work (read or listen to a fascinating long interview with Mona Hatoum); and the one containing the recently loaned Picasso painting 'Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust' (famous for having fetched the highest price of any painting at auction, c£66 million).
In the case of Mona Hatoum, we considered how knowledge that she is a Palestinian woman who has lived in a number of countries affects how we perceive her work. Captions and discussions of her work frequently emphasize her nationality and the fact that she spent her childhood in Beirut. Once you know this fact, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to see her work without this colouring the interpretation. Yet in the interview linked above she is very concerned (at least in relation to her early work) that people should have a sensual, bodily experience of her work as well as an intellectual one:
'the work that I wanted to make I wanted it to appeal to your senses first maybe or to somehow affect you in a bodily way and then the sort of connotations and concepts that are behind that work can come out of that original physical experience. This is what I was aiming at in the work. I wanted it to be experienced through the body. In other words I want work to be both experienced sensually and intellectually rather than just one dimensionally if you like.' (from an interview with John Tusa)
With the Picasso painting, knowledge both that it is an extremely valuable object, but also that it depicts a woman with whom Picasso was sexually obsessed (and who was seventeen when he met her) are hard to set aside...
In discussion several people raised questions about the curator's role in shaping what we see (notes and links from a previous course discussion of this topic are relevant), and more generally about the relevance of an artist's intentions in determining what we see (more notes and links relevant to this topic). In the interview with Mona Hatoum above, it is interesting in this context that she expressly discusses multiple interpretations of the work that transfigures domestic utensils:
'...it becomes a sort of threat as opposed to comfort and then makes you think about all the possible unpleasant things to do with home whether it's like the housewife or the woman feeling entrapped by domesticity, or whether it's to do with a condemned environment where the inhabitants have to flee, or an environment that is to do with incarceration as in being under house arrest, or the notion of the home denied. I mean there could be so many different readings, but basically what I like to do with these works is to like introduce a kind of disruptive element, physical or psychological element, that makes you question the whole environment.' (from the interview with John Tusa)
Listen or read the entire interview for the interesting comments she makes about multiple meanings and the richness of artworks: 'the language of art is slippery' 'the meanings are never fixed', and the analogy she makes between a work of art and a mirror. (You might also look at a discussion from a previous course of questions about projective interpretation and alleged objective meanings of works of art).
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