What kind of phenomenon is art

Heidegger believes works of art serve as equipment to set truth to work, insofar as shoes serve as equipment for interacting with other objective things. This image of shoes unconcealed from the natural materials of earth similarly unconceals, or moves into a clearing, the "being of the shoes.

This aforementioned pitfall will be sidestepped here. Having arrived at this conclusion, one can see why Heidegger avoided qualifying greatness from visual attributes; such a criteria can never be drawn from the ever-growing contexts of involvement for use in the present as greatness requires deeper placement within history. Our concern shall now be to broaden his scope, not necessarily to challenge the notion of "great," but to delimit and readdress his arguments with contemporary work in order to unconceal being a work of art as it stands today by confronting the objects and phenomena of light itself.

Though popular culture often associates Thomas Edison as the inventor of the light bulb, its origins predate his first, late-nineteenth century patents for the object by several decades. Bulbs in their early incarnations were incandescent, and their many initial iterations were primarily concerned with extending their working life, shortened because of their thin filaments that quickly burned out by beaming hot, hot light. Bulbs are created with composites of silicate glass and inert gasses vacuum-trapped, then inserted into ceramic ballasts powered by copper wiring to be turned on and used.

They have been made as a result of unconcealing the natural materials of earth. Consequently, fluorescent bulbs are handy things. When fluorescent light bulbs suddenly fail, especially in a room illuminated with only a single tube, a new world slowly opens up. No longer useful, the bulb itself is now merely a thing. This new world is dark.

It is quieter. The constant faint hum of electricity buzzing through a tube dissipates. This world is confusing since we cannot see without light. This world is perilous as we slam our foot into the unseen tire iron haphazardly jutting into the path we now take, hoping to escape a very dark garage.

The hazardous, confusing truth of the world, one that had been covered up underneath light, now makes itself known. In , when the production of fluorescent bulbs outpaced its alternatives, a result of their wartime usefulness, they soon began to buzz in households everywhere. But in , the being of fluorescent light changed suddenly when artist Dan Flavin started placing a single fluorescent tube at a 45 degree angle on a wall, calling it a work of art, exemplified by Diagonal of May 25, The premise was not new, per se; artists had already introduced the readymade—any commercially available object, often unmodified, and appropriated into a non-commercial function—as art five decades earlier.

No, in the sense that, if one compares the same model of bulbs, the chemical composition of its object, when excited by similar amounts of energy, will fluoresce equally. One typically takes a nap in darkness to in order to stop. But what about sunlight? Is sunlight earth? Is it de facto equipment? Is it art? The work of James Turrell asks these questions. Turrell, a member of a group of artists commonly referred to as creating the Light and Space movement, constructs his Skyspaces by removing portions of walls and ceilings from architectural structures in order to let natural light into a space.

These apertures act as both frame and ground. The interiors are often also illuminated with artificial light, but the prime instigator in these works is the daylight of a sun-filled sky.

The passing of time changes the position of the light and the context of the work. So, what is the work of art? While Diagonal is a singular object of light, Skyspaces encompass much more. Not surprisingly, the Elaine craze was helped along by the media of the time. Over the years, the press had featured stories about Rosenthal, the local painter studying in Europe, well on his way to becoming a famous artist.

By the time the doors of the San Francisco art gallery opened, there were already hundreds of people in line. After three days, almost 9, people had seen the painting. Pandemonium ensued. The headlines made it sound more like a kidnapping than a theft. People stood in front of the empty frame—the canvas had been cut out—and wept.

People lined up to see the recovered painting on a table in City Hall. And then they lined up to see it back in the gallery, where it was accompanied by a large photo of detective Lees.

In the end, over 10, people had seen the painting, which went on to win a gold medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in Elaine was eventually purchased by a Chicagoan named Mrs. Maurice Rosenfeld, who gave it to the Art Institute in But once I learned the story behind it, I sought it out and spent some time in front of it.

As is often the case, the painting is much more captivating in person. It has an otherworldly quality: the details of the flowers, the gold brocade, her flowing hair, all rendered with such precision and loving care. I can easily picture people pausing in front of the painting, overcome by the story of heartbreak, and easily imagine the pride of the Rosenthals as their son is welcomed home, a conquering hero.

Sure, the throngs of people who had lined up to admire it are gone, but Elaine is still here, offering her story to the world. I relied on several online sources for this article: a wonderful story in the San Francisco Chronicle by Gary Kamiya; an informative entry on the artist in the Society of California Pioneers ; an interpretive archive from the University of Virginia Library ; and a history of San Francisco on Britannica. Elaine, I will then describe some of the neuroscience that relates to the phenomenon, and the collaborative studies I have undertaken with neuroscientists and psychophysicists to investigate responses to such images.

Finally, I will consider some of the implications of this work for art—science interdisciplinarity in general. Visual indeterminacy is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a viewer is presented with a seemingly meaningful visual stimulus that denies easy or immediate identification Pepperell, I first became aware of it as an undergraduate art student watching the silent German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Weine, , which is known for its non-naturalistic sets and highly contrasting monochromatic lighting.

About three quarters of the way through watching the film something remarkable happened: the image suddenly became unrecognizable. Although I could clearly see the screen was full of shapes there was no problem with my vision as far as I was aware they did not form a meaningful scene, and I was left struggling to identify the forms before me.

Figure 1. Two stills from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari showing left the moment of non-recognition and right the moment of recognition some 5 s later. This 5-s sequence had a big impact on me, with repercussions that continue to this day. Unlike normal visual perception where the world is full of objects we readily recognize, in this short lapse of time my usual conceptual grip on the world failed. I remember the experience as marked by a mild form of anxiety and bewilderment combined with an active struggle to make sense of what I was seeing.

I have certainly been aware of it in my own perception many times since. One of the most vivid televisual memories of my childhood was a segment in an early evening quiz show called Ask the Family , broadcast in the UK in the s, which pitted two families against each other in a test of general knowledge and observation. The section of the show in question involved an everyday object being presented in close up or from an unusual angle. As the camera pulled out to reveal the object in full the families raced to identify it as quickly as possible.

Part of the reason, I suspect, this piece of television trivia is remembered so readily by those who saw it is because it was one of the rare occasions in popular culture where an image was deliberately presented in such as way as to be unrecognizable.

When faced with such images we seem to be compelled to determine their meaning, so paying a different kind of attention to them than we would with easily recognizable views of the same thing. These days we might even enroll the help of the online community to resolve visual conundrums of this kind. The image in Figure 2 was an image posted on a university bulletin board by a confused IT manager who wanted help in identifying what his Christmas-themed biscuit represented.

Figure 2. What on earth is it supposed to be? Do tell if you know! Visual indeterminacy can be defined, then, as the perceptual experience occurring in response to an image that suggests the presence of objects but denies easy or immediate recognition. Anecdotal evidence suggests that being confronted with such images arouses a need to determine what is depicted, so that additional attention is given in order to resolve the conundrum.

The allure of indeterminate images has not escaped the attention of artists, who have frequently exploited their capacity to perplex audiences. The painting depicts a scientific demonstration of the effect of oxygen deprivation on a bird, and is generally rendered with immaculate clarity.

Yet there is a strange object floating in a backlit jar prominently positioned in the foreground of the scene. Ever since the painting was first exhibited people have wondered what this object is. It has generally been assumed that the artist deliberately fashioned the object in this way in order to add an extra dimension of interest for audiences.

One artist who did more than most to exploit the artistic possibilities of visual indeterminacy was J. Turner, the English painter associated with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century and famous for his atmospheric landscapes and seascapes.

In spite of his now titanic reputation, in his lifetime Turner was often vilified for producing what were seen as unreadable and indistinct works, which many critics thought flouted good taste and artistic probity see Figure 3. It is surprising that the images Turner exhibited publicly and which were complained about most vociferously, such as the landscapes of the early s, appear to us to now as quite clear and distinct.

Figure 3. A nineteenth century caricature satirizing J. Had critics seen some of the works Turner did not show in public, such as the highly indeterminate Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle of around , now in the Tate collection in London, they would very likely have been bewildered. Historians are still unclear about the subject or the motive for the painting, and indeed even when inspected closely it is impossible to make out all but a fraction of the objects depicted.

In fact, as far as Monet was concerned the function of his painting was not to obscure but to faithfully depict the appearance of the world, in other words what he saw rather than what he knew to be out there in front of him. This is what Gombrich , p.

Gombrich , p. Unable to recognize what the painting was of, he later recounted:. And suddenly for the first time I saw a picture. That it was a haystack or rather, a grain stack , the catalog informed me. I did not recognize it … And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor. And, albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.

Parsons and Gale, , p. It was in fact one of his own rather impressionistic paintings turned on its side, the subject of which he had failed to recognize. Kandinsky realized the potential of objectless images to evoke a remarkable perceptual response. He subsequently spent many years refining a visual language through which this insight could be expressed.

Among contemporary artists, Gerhard Richter is somewhat unusual in that he works in a number of quite distinct styles. He is particularly recognized for both his photo-like images, precisely rendered, and his generally larger abstract works, which he frequently produces by an almost chance-like act of scraping, leaving the final effect to the unpredictable interaction between paint and tools.

What the artist is trying to produce is a sense of uncertainty, lack of fixedness, which draws the viewer in to try and resolve what they are seeing. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning or view. And in this exchange with the art critic Robert Storr he offers an insight into his own theory of indeterminate perception:. GR: I try to avoid something in the painting resembling a table or other things.

It is terrible if it does because then all you can see is that object. RS: So you allow for aspects or suggestions of images in the abstract work but not actual pictures?

GR: Not actual pictures. I just wanted to reemphasize my claim that we are not able to see in any other way. We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. And usually we do find those similarities and name them: table, blanket, and so on. When we do not find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us excited and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored.

RS: I am just saying that you use paintings as a way of making it difficult for people to read the image. What is evident from this brief survey of visual indeterminacy in art is that artists who make hard to decipher images are doing so not just to be wilfully obscure or to confound their audiences. They are also acting rather like vision scientists by exploring how certain kinds of images engage the visual system and how we make sense of the world.

Moreover, by heightening our visual awareness, so certain artists believe, indeterminate images in their various forms can produce interesting, even revelatory, esthetic experiences. Like the artists cited here, my initial interest in the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy was artistic.

I became absorbed by the challenge of creating images, both still and moving, that could induce the same state of visual uncertainty in others that I had undergone myself when watching the Cabinet of Dr Caligari sequence. I tried many methods of achieving this using film, video, collage, fractal image generation, and digital image manipulation. In each case I was trying to produce a picture of sufficient complexity to strongly suggest the presence of some object or scene yet at the same deny easy or immediate identification.

Figure 4 shows an early paper collage examples of these experiments. As I now realize is well known to vision scientists, the human visual system is extraordinarily effective at rapidly identifying objects in perception Thorpe et al. Even given the scantest of clues — such as two dots and a curve — we can interpret things, like faces, almost instantaneously.

Figure 4. An early attempt to create an indeterminate image using paper collage. Figure 5. The image on the left is a noisy texture that does not suggest any objects and so is effectively treated as abstract. The simple arrangement of two dots and a curve on the right show how readily we are able to recognize objects, even from the scantiest of clues.

The problem of creating indeterminate images is how to avoid both these kinds of interpretation. After many years of experimentation I gradually developed a method of drawing, and then painting, which seemed to produce this effect quite reliably. I discovered that by using a classical pictorial architecture, of the kind frequently found in European paintings made between the s and early s, I could create an image that incited strong expectations of recognizable objects and scenes.

This classical period was the epoch in figurative art that many people associate with recognizable depiction of forms, in contrast to later Modernism where artists turned increasingly to distortion and abstraction. By using this overall pictorial structure but omitting, or otherwise manipulating those features of the image that would be readily recognized I was able to achieve a consistently indeterminate image.

Some examples of these paintings are shown in Figures 6 , 7 , and 8. Figure 6. Private collection. Figure 7. Collection of the University of Exeter. Figure 8. In the early stages of making this work, the process of deciding what made a certain image successfully indeterminate in the terms described above was largely a matter of my personal judgment.

I had to rely on my own reading of the image I was producing, and gage whether or not the forms in it were sufficiently evocative of objects or scenes, or whether they were too abstract or textural to incite the curiosity of the viewer. Increasingly I sought the opinions of others by showing the paintings in galleries or the studio and asking viewers to describe the processes occurring in their own minds as they studied the works. After doing this many times I found people tended to report they were having similar kinds of experiences.

Their initial response was to think they were seeing a classical painting depicting a familiar theme, such as landscape, figure, or still life.

But wherever they looked to find objects that would corroborate this initial response they failed to do so. They would fixate on an area in which they thought they saw a human limb or a piece of cloth, but would then realize that this was a false start, and would look for some other salient feature to pin their interpretation on.

Many reported they were looking at certain forms within the images and sifting through the possible interpretations in their mind, testing various options in order to successfully name what it was they were looking at.

This process of testing the indeterminacy effect of paintings on viewers was very useful as a way of confirming or refuting my own judgments about the way the images would be read. Those paintings I felt were more effective also tended to be the same ones other people would report as having the strongest effect on them. But although useful in guiding my judgment, these viewer surveys were not carried out in any scientifically valid way.

They were simply verbal reports elicited under a variety of conditions and recorded rather haphazardly. Having had a longstanding interest in the science of perception and visual consciousness I wondered if scientific methods could be usefully applied to study the effect I was investigating in a more systematic way. I also became increasingly interested in what science might have to say about the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy, and what effects the process of looking at indeterminate images might be having on the vision systems and brains of those looking at them.

As I started to look for scientific literature relating to visual indeterminacy it became clear this was a relatively lightly investigated area of perception compared, for example, to the related phenomenon of ambiguous or reversible images. Ambiguous images, such as the Necker cube, the Duck—Rabbit illusion, or the Boring vase, are distinguished by having alternating interpretations the image is perceived either as a duck or a rabbit each of which is quite determinate Kleinschmidt et al. An example is the image of a cow first presented by Dallenbach , a version of which is reproduced in Figure 9.

Figure 9. This is an image of a cow, although most people are unable to see it at first glance, or even after prolonged study.

Once seen, however it is very difficult to see the image as it appeared prior to the point of recognition. From American Journal of Psychology. Copyright by the Board of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the author and the University of Illinois Press.

When I first saw this photograph I remember having a good deal of difficulty in finding the cow, although once I did it was very hard to see it as anything else. The experience I had prior to the point of recognition was similar, as I recall, to that occurring during the Cabinet of Dr Caligari sequence many years before.

Both were marked by a sense of struggle in which various alternative interpretations were tried out until the flash of recognition occurred. My interest in such images was less in the moment of recognition than the preceding process of object search, and what kinds of perceptual processes might be taking place during this time. The perceptual state of visual indeterminacy occurring prior to the moment of recognition bears similarities to the rare neurological disorder of associative visual agnosia.

A notable case study of this condition, presented by Humphreys and Riddoch , concerned a patient, John, who had suffered a stroke resulting in a bilateral lesion in the region supplied by the posterior cerebral artery.

He showed no difficulty in recognizing objects by other means, such as touch, or describing them in detail from memory and was able to make quite accurate copies of drawings, albeit slowly. Figure 10 is a drawing made by John on the right copied from the picture of the owl on the left.

Figure The drawing on the right is the copy made by John, the patient with visual agnosia, of the drawing on the left. A subsequent set of processes then match that input data to associations about function and meaning. In her extensive study of visual agnosia Farah makes the same broad distinction between perceptual input and the conceptual associations involved in visual object recognition. For most of us this can occur occasionally, but for the unfortunate sufferers of visual agnosia it is a permanent condition.