【Art Research】Ma Ruiqing: Seeing Yourself in Appreciation Serialization (7) "The object presents itself to me, and I also open myself to the object. ”
Psychology uses the term "projection" to describe the beginning of the screening process, Gombrich mentions, "By 'mental orientation' we may mean the state of readiness to begin projection, the readiness to extend the tentacles of illusory colors and illusory images that are always flickering around our senses." "The projection that follows the state of readiness must be instantaneous. This passage vividly illustrates the nature of this stage – intuition, i.e., without thinking, filtering out unnecessary parts, and directly obtaining the information you want.
At this stage, the sensory and perceptual processes of the viewer's mind are involved. As a "summoning structure", the work of art is open to the viewer. In Dufheiner's Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, he mentions that "the object presents itself to me, and I also open myself to the object." "How to choose all the visual elements of a work of art, including the dots, lines, and planes of the shapes, lights, colors, and shadows, which are presented to the viewer together?" Dufheiner goes on to say: "To identify colors, you must have a unique attention and a will to analyze. This point has been made quite clear by Gestalt theory: the object is presented to us as a signifying whole of its sensual aspects, and therefore every aspect of sensibility is organized around this whole, and no one aspect occupies a special place: the rose we see is at the same time red, fragrant, mild, and soft. Each of these qualities reminds one of its counterparts of the other. There is no one quality that constitutes a particular theme, and the others are just an expression of it. Just like the lotus flower below, the visual information through psychological orientation is faced with the choice of the viewer's schema.
Arnheim also addresses this issue in his famous book Art and Visual Perception:
The overall outline of a tree or a clump of bushes tends to provide the eye with an easily understandable spherical or conical shape, or it can crudely provide the texture of the leaves and the green hue. However, there are many things in this landscape that the eye can't grasp right away. In other words, this chaotic panorama can only be truly perceived if it is seen as a structural schema with a clear direction, a certain size, and various geometric shapes and colors.
Lin Fengmian "Autumn Beauty"
The brain processes that form this clear structural schema are agnostic. We can assume that in response to the perceptual properties implied by the raw materials that are stimuli, a rough structural schema corresponding to these properties may have been generated in the visual cortex region of the brain. But for now, this can only be regarded as a conjecture based on experience and observation.
On the question of how perception is chosen, he further speaks of the fact that the shape is not only determined by what stimulates the eye at the time, and that the immediate experience never appears in a vacuum, but is the latest experience developed from the countless experiences that a person has acquired throughout his life. Therefore, the latest schemas of experience are always associated with traces of memories of various shapes that have been perceived in the past.
Dufheiner puts it more explicitly, as he begins with the first chapter, "Presentation", in the third part of the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Perception, "Perception: "Perception is not a passive recording of appearances that are not meaningful in themselves, but the recognition of appearances in or outside of appearances, that is, the discovery of a meaning that appearances deliver only to those who are good at recognizing them, and from this knowledge derives the result of the intention that guides our behavior." ”
It can be seen that the viewer's eyes are projected on the art work, and the information of feeling and perception is the combination of the visual elements provided by the work and the orientation of the main schematic structure, and it is also the raw material for the matching and processing of the schematic structure in the next step. On the other hand, this orientation is precisely the nature of the viewer's perception. Teng Shouyao's discussion in "Description of Aesthetic Psychology" reveals the close relationship between this perceptual orientation process and schema: "....... All of this proves that human perception is not a passive reproduction activity, as in the case of a camera, but an active reflection, in which past experiences accumulate into "schemas" that determine which ones to choose. ”
Here, the appreciative of the main schema is actively selected for the elements of the work, and the content of the schema is composed of channels, categories, and grids, and it is the screening of these "items" that makes the information an object that can be processed through this process. The obtained visual elements have been screened by the factors accumulated in the schema, and the selection result is determined by the knowledge composition in the main schema structure.
Van Gogh "Sunflowers"
Due to the directional function of the schema structure, the difference in the quality and quantity of the input information affects the formation of the artistic image, and the art work has begun to become a work with a personal imprint in the mind of each viewer, which is the preparatory stage for the formation of differences. Due to the difference in the results of each viewer's choice, it can be said that differences are destined at the beginning of the process of art appreciation. (To be continued)