Questioning Perception
At the beginning of the twentieth century artists revisited the ancient philosophical problems of perception. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger summarised the ideas that drove cubism in “Du Cubisme”, a book published in 1912:
“There is nothing real outside ourselves; there is nothing real except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental direction. Far be it from us to throw any doubts upon the existence of the objects which strike our senses; but, rationally speaking, we can only have certitude with regard to the images which they produce in the mind.
It therefore amazes us when well-meaning critics try to explain the remarkable difference between the forms attributed to nature and those of modern painting by a desire to represent things not as they appear, but as they are. As they are! How are they, what are they?” - Du Cubisme
Do we see the world as it is, in itself, or do we experience some sort of copy of the world in our brains?
The simplest demonstration that we do not see the world directly is provided by looking in a mirror. If we look at our eyes in a mirror we cannot see them move. This phenomenon is known as saccadic masking or saccadic suppression. The input of detailed data is suppressed during the movement of the eyes. Why is this proof that we do not see the world directly? Notice that when your eyes are moving you can still see steady eyes in the mirror – where are these steady eyes? They are in your mind.
There is an interesting logical error associated with the analysis of mental images. If the image that you see is in your mind then it appears to be seen from the “mind's eye”. But if information flows from the world to the eye and from the eye to the mind's eye then what sees what the mind's eye sees? Another mind's eye? Is there a little being or “homunculus” inside the brain, looking out at the eye and a little being within that being looking out at the little being's eye and so on ad infinitum? This argument has been used to suggest that mental images cannot exist but of course, it simply shows that the assumption that there is a flow from the mental image into a mind's eye is an absurd assumption. The mental image is the mind, we see no flow into a centre point or “mind's eye” and, indeed, if such a flow existed we would have the absurdity of minds within minds within minds...
Our minds are mental images. The geometry of these images and how they work is largely unknown. Aristotle was the first to realise that the mind that is actively thinking is the objects that it thinks and he was right.
So, our experience is a construct that we call our “mind”.
The content of our minds is constructed by our brains on the basis of samples of data from our senses and provides a highly packaged idea of the world. Sometimes the packaging provides content for our minds that is quite different from the objective world around us:
Cubism
Cubism developed from the work of Cezanne in the late nineteenth century. Cezanne had a Platonic idea of art in which he believed that geometric forms were central to perception. Georges Braque admired the work of Cezanne and took his abstraction of the landscape at L'Estaque to its logical conclusion. The term Cubism was coined by the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles after he saw the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L'Estaque.
Cubism is almost the opposite of Symbolic Realism, instead of the imaginary being painted as if it were real the real is painted as if it were imaginary. In this process there is a huge loss of peripheral information content, the message becomes the picture. However, the early nineteen hundreds are the time of Freud and the rise of materialist nihilism so the message could be a comment on the scene, an investigation of perception, an impression of the artist's mood, an experiment in colour and geometry or simply a play of paint on canvas etc.
Part of the popularity of cubism was due to the way it complemented modern American architecture. Large, airy rooms with white walls are enhanced by bold geometric designs.
The aspiring millionaire in the US needed something modern for their acres of walls. It also became fashionable for the wealthy American to have a private art gallery:
"His was the typical private art gallery to be found in the opulent millionaire mansions of the postbellum [late nineteenth century] period”. Jochen Wierich, “Grand Themes”.
Interior design and the history of art as a story unfolding on the walls of your own gallery affected the art market. Art dealers stocked the types of pictures that would complement the new interior décor and collectors began collecting the “Story of Art” rather than simply buying pictures that they liked.
Perhaps the most influential of these collectors was Gertrude Stein, the American heiress and wealthy authoress, who set up her own art gallery in her two storey Paris town house. Stein had been a student of the brilliant American philosopher and psychologist William James and was open to work that expressed deeper philosophical ideas. She ran a successful “Salon” that was attended by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Rousseau and especially patronised Picasso and Juan Gris. Most importantly, Stein owned and put on show Cezanne's “Bathers”, allowing them to be appreciated by Picasso and Braques.
The most influential art dealer associated with cubism was without doubt Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler who persuaded Picasso, Braques, Gris and Léger to sign exclusive sales contracts in return for a guaranteed annual income. He also published Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire's poems. He wrote the book “Der Weg zum Kubismus” which placed cubism in the story of art.
Art
historians divide cubism into proto-cubism, analytical cubism and
synthetic cubism. Proto-cubism includes the early work of Braque
and Picasso between 1907 and 1908. Analytical cubism is
usually applied to cubism
between 1908 and 1912 and Synthetic Cubism is applied to the
developments between 1912 and 1914 where collage and and a wider
palette were used.
Key examples of Analytical Cubism are “Girl with Mandolin” (1910) by Picasso and “Mandora” by Braque (1909).
Cubism also caught on amongst other artists. Major cubist artists during the analytical period included Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay. Formed a close group of like minded artists.
It was not only perception that fascinated the Cubists. In 1905 Einstein had published his first work on Special Relativity and by 1908 this was being interpreted in terms of the existence of time as a “fourth dimension”. Relativity became all the rage amongst intellectuals.
"If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidian mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's Theorems” (Du Cubisme).
The Cubists misinterpreted time as a positive real dimension – like the frames in a film – and attempted to portray change and varied views of an object as simultaneous on the canvas. This was total nonsense from a physical point of view but gave rise to an interesting abstraction of successive images on the canvas.
It was not only perception that fascinated the Cubists. In 1905 Einstein had published his first work on Special Relativity and by 1908 this was being interpreted in terms of the existence of time as a “fourth dimension”. Relativity became all the rage amongst intellectuals.
"If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidian mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's Theorems” (Du Cubisme).
The Cubists misinterpreted time as a positive real dimension – like the frames in a film – and attempted to portray change and varied views of an object as simultaneous on the canvas. This was total nonsense from a physical point of view but gave rise to an interesting abstraction of successive images on the canvas.
Dadaism
Leftist Art: The Rise and Rise of Philosophical Materialism
Between the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century physicists had described the universe as a stack of instants. Reality was like the frames in a magic lantern. This description was seized upon by philosophers who realised that if the past was gone and the future yet to be then only the instant was significant. If there were but an instant then all of reality would be like the state between the clicks of a clockwork mechanism: static and meaningless. If this were the nature of the universe then human beings, as part of the universe, would be part of the mechanism.
De la Mettrie in 1748 summarised the consequences of this clockwork universe in his “L'homme Machine” and Karl Marx, in 1844 wrote “The Holy Family” to explain how de la Mettrie's approach led to Marxist Materialism.
The philosophy of the instant, of time as a succession of stages of no duration, provides no meaning for life or events. It can lead to nihilism and led Marx to introduce a wholly spurious idea of meaningfulness as being embedded in the life of a society. Marx, who dealt in the politics of power, glossed over the fact that in a clockwork universe the life of a society is as meaningless as an individual's life.
Science has advanced considerably since the nineteenth century, time probably exists so that we are four dimensional objects, not instants, and quantum physics has undermined apparent certainties such as archaic materialism. We can now be certain that we know very little. Of course, a moment of reflection shows that nothing exists for no time at all so the instantaneous universe was always hugely problematical.
The archaic materialism of the early 20th century gave rise to two groups of artists, one in Zurich and one in New York, that are nowadays labelled "dadaist".
The Zurich Group
“Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth.” Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto, July 14th 1916. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dada_Manifesto_(1916,_Hugo_Ball)
The Zurich group was composed of socialists and anarchists who had gravitated towards Switzerland to avoid the First World War. Switzerland was the focus of the International Socialist movement for non-involvement in the war, the Italian Socialists, under Benito Mussolini, and the Swiss socialists having agitated for a major Socialist Conferences at Lugano and Zimmerwald where Trotsky and Lenin sat on the committee that condemned the war as the last gasp of Capitalism.
The Dada group was initially focussed on the “Cabaret Voltaire” which was a radical, fringe theatre that was founded in 1916 by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hemmings. Politically they were Internationalists and Anarchists. Hugo Ball was an admirer of Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian Collectivist Anarchist. They were materialists who had much in common with the postmodernists of our own time and, as postmodernists often become Post-Marxists, the Dadaists often became communists.
http://www.ieeff.org/dadatransZurberlin.htm
The Zurich Dada group were a mixture of poets, performers authors and artists. The leading artists in the group were Jean Arp and his wife, Sophie Täuber (sometimes spelt Taeuber), Marcel Janco and Hans Richter.
Sophie Taeuber was born in Davos, Switzerland but studied textile design in Germany. Her textiles embodied many of the design features of middle-eastern carpets and durries.
Marcel Janco was a Romanian artist, architect and art theorist. He was heavily influenced by cubism.
New York Dada
Artists fleeing the First World War created a vibrant avant garde art scene in New York. The scene included Marcel Duchamp. Francis Picabia and the American artists Man Ray and Beatrice Wood.
Marcel Duchamp is particularly famous for his “Fountain”:
Duchamp
submitted Fountain anonymously to the 1917 exhibition of the Society
of Independent Artists in New York. It had been the custom that all
pieces submitted to this exhibition were displayed but the “work”
was rejected because it was not considered to be “art”.
Although Fountain was an ordinary
urinal and Duchamp released 17 copies, one of the copies sold for
£816,000 in 2002.
The Fountain was one of Duchamp's first
“Readymades”, everyday objects that are presented as “art”.
The editor
of the Dada art journal, The Blind Man, wrote of Fountain:
“Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain
with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an
article of life, placed it so that its useful significance
disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new
thought for that object.”
Of course, Duchamp's real intention was
to take the P**S but this idea of Readymades as works of art caught
on. As we beachcomb in Sidmouth and spot a particularly interesting
pebble or a piece of flotsam, perhaps a piece of glass, frosted by
the sea, it is hard not to agree with the editor of Blind Man.
Francis Picabia was the main connection
between New York and Zurich. Although the Dada style had developed
in parallel on both sides of the Atlantic Picabia had connections
with French intellectuals such as Albert Gleizes and the
cosmopolitan poet Guillaume Apollinaire
as well as being friends with Marcel Duchamp. In
1916, whilst in Barcelona he founded the Dada publication “391”
which he illustrated with drawings that often had a mechanical theme:
Dada led to surrealism.
