Postmodernism Readings

I hate to critique a piece of writing without finding something I enjoyed about it, but frankly I didn't enjoy much about either the Postmodernism Introduction or Jean Baudrillard's piece on Disneyland. From what I gathered in these two readings, Postmodernism is merely satirical art hellbent on pointing out the flaws of modern culture and interests. I don't understand the author's brief implication that the merging of cultures in our society today was positive only to go on and denounce it as the fragmentation of culture. This makes it sound like less of a blending of cultures and more like cultures are being broken and diluted. The Disneyland reading was no more redeeming with its belief that Disneyland's fake world only exists to make our fake world seem more real. Sure, Los Angeles in particular can be a little vapid because it's an entertainment hub, but that doesn't make the people and their lives and experiences any less real. I just don't really understand what Postmodernism is attempting to accomplish based on these two readings

Colors Podcast

I found it really fascinating how the musicians determined the musical tone of a color. I never really imagined red as a deep note, it always seemed brighter and therefore higher than blue or purple. So for the highest musical notes to be blue and purple seemed pretty strange to me.

The idea that we don't all see the same colors is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Throw in the variation in color processing across species and that's almost overwhelming. I never realized that dogs could see blue and green tones and I can't even fathom what 16 color rods would allow a mantis shrimp to see. Even more bewildering to me is the fact that researchers have been able to add color cones to monkeys through a virus. Should the FDA ever approve of human testing, that procedure would be ground-breaking for those suffering with color-blindness.

Additionally, I had no idea that women were capable of being tetrachromats. It's difficult to imagine the actual reality of that, especially when the test performed on the woman with tetrachromacy was also successfully completed by a man who happened to have an eye for color.

While the story behind the Cambodian pigment Gamboge is tragic and leads to questions about the morality behind possessing a color that has such bloody origins, I loved learning about how pigments are naturally occurring. Although pigments are naturally occurring, some are extraordinarily rare. This brings us to the issue of Homer's depiction of the sea being wine colored. Despite the belief that he was color blind, his bizarre depictions of colors had to do with the fact that blue is the rarest naturally occurring pigment and therefore many cultures, the Greeks included, simply didn't have a name for it. Because they didn't have a name for it, blue wasn't perceived as often as other identifiable colors even when it was present.

Whitescape

The first picture shown was taken in the art room with bright, cool toned lights. I selected a white cotton round and a white ping pong ball for my comparison. When placed next to each other in this setting, the white cotton round appeared much lighter and had an essence of blue in its tone. The white ping pong ball hardly looked white at all in comparison, and it seemed to possess grayish, lavender tones.

The second picture was taken in a hallway with much dimmer, warmer toned lighting. In this lighting, the contrast between the two objects is even more intense. The white cotton round looks dingy and appears to now have yellow undertones, but I feel that it's still identifiable as white. On the other hand, it would be very difficult to identify the ping pong ball as white next to the cotton round when placed in this lighting. It's hard to see in this picture, but in person the ping pong ball took on a sort of greenish tan hue.

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Jean Pillement
Landscape with Ruin

Jean Pillement's 1791 oil painting Landscape with Ruin was, for me, the most interesting of the three paintings I selected. I tend to favor classical European art because there's always an intricate, ethereal quality about paintings from that era regardless of the subject; however, this painting captures that essence even more so through the mystical scenery. The artist beautifully executed many visual techniques in the composition of his painting, the first of which is radiating lines. Some of these radiating lines are more subtle in comparison to the other two paintings I selected, but I have a greater appreciation for that approach because I believe the eye moves more fluidly over the painting and the viewer is granted a little more freedom in how they choose to follow the painting. The radiating lines in this painting present themselves in the rocky structures that move your eye up toward the right, the bowing tree that swoops down to the left through the trunk and roots, and the more subtle sun beams and resulting highlight of the ground on which the subjects, a group of travelers, rest. The painting also does a spectacular job of applying the rule of thirds. Traditionally I thought of the rule of thirds as a painting being sectioned off into either horizontal or vertical sections of three, but in this case they appear more like large pieces of pie, each capable of telling its own story. The upper left section of the "pie" is sectioned off by the swooping trees just above the travelers in the foreground and where the sky begins to turn dark. Within this section, the mist surrounding an ambiguous man-made structure creates a sense of mystery. The upper right third is sectioned off by the beginning of the darkening sky and the shadowy downward slope of the rocky structure above the travelers.The dilapidated castle is eerily beautiful and I spent a great deal of time imagining what it looked like in its prime. The final third, which also happens to be the Golden Triangle we can find in many classical paintings, is everything under the top of the sweeping trees down to the river rocks in the bottom left hand corner, and from the top of the trees down the sloping rocky structure and mound of land at the bottom right hand corner. While the travelers were the focal point of the painting, I didn't focus so much on where they were in the painting but rather where they were headed and from where they had already traveled. I felt like a movie was playing out in my head when I looked at this painting and that was pretty incredible to me.

Henry Matisse
Festival of Flowers

In the Festival of Flowers, Henri Matisse produces an exceptional landscape with what I felt were rather unexceptional techniques. That sounds insulting, but there's nothing particularly complex in the composition of his colors, lines, or shapes and yet I was totally captivated by what became a living, breathing picture for me the more time I spent looking at it. Admittedly this painting fell to second place for me because I do prefer the intricacies of more realistic paintings, but like the Landscape with Ruin, I loved that there were more stories being told than just the obvious subjects of the foreground. This leads me to the composition: the radiating lines in the painting converge to draw the eye to the standing woman in the foreground and by doing so, the eye is also drawn to the woman seated directly under her. These subjects are important, but I also spent a great deal of time pondering why the man in the balcony above them was seemingly facing away from the women and the commotion in the street below. I also contemplated the reasoning behind certain people being clustered together in the manner they were. The ambiguous composition of shapes allows the viewer to form their own interpretation for these stories as well as the overall layout of the scenery. For example, I didn't initially read the accompanying background information on the painting so I viewed the dark figures on either side of the road as people gathering to look at different vendors selling art, flowers, and food, the cars were just two lanes of traffic, and the people in the road were simply crossing the street to go see a different part of the festival. But after spending more time with the painting, it definitely makes more sense to interpret the scenery as crowds watching a parade.

Gino Severini
Dancer at Pigalle's

I hate saying this painting came in last place because it really is captivating, but I personally wasn't able to extract a multi-faceted story from this piece like I was for the other two paintings. As far as composition is concerned, though, this painting is a close second behind Landscape with Ruin. In addition to elements of the painting literally coming out of the canvas, there's undeniable rhythm and movement in the composition of this piece that really brings it to life. When I first walked by the painting I didn't really appreciate the manner in which shapes were broken up and arranged to create a twirling dancer; I thought it was just some bizarre abstract landscape. Upon looking at it a second time, though, the leading lines (circular pink arrangements), the radiating lines (the spot lights shining down from the top of the painting), and the rhythm in the folds of the dress guided my eyes to see an uninterrupted image of a ballerina in motion. While I love that the execution of this piece required me to trust the flow of the artist's techniques, I didn't feel compelled to dig deeper in the story because the only true subject is the dancer. For me, there weren't any questions I asked myself that I needed to reflect on the answer.

Ways of Seeing

John Berger's video Ways of Seeing offered a lot of fresh insight for me regarding how paintings are viewed. He opened with a brief explanation of European painting style which was born about 1400 and died about 1900. All paintings of this tradition used the convention of perspective, which Berger says is unique to European art. Because perspective centers everything for the beholder, the process of viewing paintings is far less spontaneous than we believe. Our eyes are guided to what the painter wants us to see. I had never considered this as a limitation, but rather a comprehension of what the artist wished to accomplish; once it was phrased in this manner, though, I was willing to entertain that this can be a handicap of sorts. But Berger goes on to say that there is one invention that can free us from what he calls "human immobility:" the camera.

The camera offers a fresh perspective on art and it's even capable of changing paintings created long before its invention. I found the concept of this really captivating. The painting itself can only be seen in one place at one time, but the image of the painting can be made available "in any size, anywhere, for any purpose." By doing this, you alter multiple aspects of the painting; for instance, the camera allows you to see the painting in the context of your own life, surrounded by all the things that are familiar to you. When viewing a painting in this manner, it's going to drastically change the way you perceive its meaning. Originally, a painting was intended to be viewed in the context of its surroundings; everything around it is intended to be an integral part of confirming and consolidating its meaning. With the camera and printed images, however, this is no longer the case. Furthermore, once paintings have been removed from their original setting, they can be manipulated by not just their new surroundings, but also by motion and sound. The video gives examples of how you can be subtly guided towards forming certain feelings about a painting based on the instrumental accompaniment. The other form of manipulation, motion, was actually pretty disheartening when it was explained in Berger's logic. The idea of motion discussed in the video really boiled down to zooming in on one aspect of a painting, thus removing it from the overall context of the painting. As Berger examines, in a painting zoomed in to show only a single character's face, an allegorical figure becomes just a pretty girl anywhere. He also shows a painting which he describes as a "strange, poetical world of metamorphosis," but it's capable of reducing one of the subjects, a dog, to a mere pet when it is removed from its setting. As a whole, the video really expanded my understanding of how a painting can be perceived.

A review of Visibility

In the fourth chapter of Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the New Millennium, he looks to examine the duality of visibility: imaginative processes that "[start] with the word and [arrive] at the visual image" versus processes that "[start] with the visual image and [arrive] at the verbal expression." Frankly, my reading comprehension failed me a little on this reading. I found myself struggling to understand exactly what was being conveyed in Calvino's writing, and it took several attempts of reading and taking notes to feel that I had grasped what was being analyzed.

From my understanding, Calvino seeks to break down each process of imagination then tries to determine which process forms first, much like the chicken and the egg conundrum. He opens with excerpts from Dante's Divine Comedy describing images that begin as outward visual projections and noises cast on the ear that gradually turn inward to strictly mental representations. These mental images, which Dante believed were "divine inspiration," are just that: images. There are no words associated with them, but Dante assigns verbal expression to convey to the reader what he has imagined. This is an example of the second imaginative process mentioned earlier involving a visual image arriving at verbal expression, and this is the process that Calvino favored, at least when pertaining to "novelty, originality, and invention."

Calvino didn't dismiss the validity of word arriving at visual image, however. He goes on to discuss Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises in which Loyola uses words to paint a "vast visionary panorama." Calvino distinguishes Loyola's approach from the visual approach of Catholicism at the time as rather groundbreaking. The Church relied on sacred art to invoke "emotional stimuli" in order to further the believer's understanding of the teachings. This can be limiting to the believer, though, because they are being presented with a preconceived image that shapes how they should feel and think about the matter at hand. By verbally expressing a concept, Loyola leaves it to the reader to mentally paint the scenery and individuals involved, which affords them more liberty in their spiritual enlightenment.

If I were to pick a side, I personally believe more often than not that the visual image precedes verbal expression. I respect both lines of thinking, but I think Douglas Hofstadter explained the matter very well; he mentioned that a writer will start with a mental image and oftentimes will make multiple attempts to piece together the words that will best convey this image. Even once the words are formed, the origin of the idea is vague and hidden, much like the majority of an iceberg that hides beneath the water. You can't associate words with this ambiguity, but you can assign imagery to it on some level.