Allowing Seeing

… blessed are your eyes, for they see … (Matthew 13:16)

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Imagine this: you are looking at something you feel is beautiful; then, unexpectedly, someone, who is fully of what you are picturing, comes over and begins to talk to you – telling you that what you are doing is immoral.

This scenario accurately describes a real and common cultural phenomenon. And it is most definitely not a new one.

Across the centuries a long string of ideologies (of many categories) which promulgate mandatory aesthetic austerity. Some varieties of austerity might be admiringly meditative, like the California Light and Space movement, while others are oppressively antiseptic in their mandatory purism. “Ornament is a crime,” was the proclamation of one of the prophets of modernism in 1908. “Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength,” was the credo. Since then there have been many other ideologies, some purist in pictorial value, some in ideological value.

Yet art that fails to follow whatever the prevailing dogma might be, including works that are unabashedly ornamental, has nevertheless continued to flourish. Outside those elite taste-making centers which have dominating most of the 20th century in their Pied Piper progress toward aesthetic purity, people will still create that which they were not ordered to produce. Tribal societies could not easily be coerced into abandoning their hard-earned long-cherished inventive idioms, their “folk art.” Visual delight and continuity of meaningful tradition was not to these people a sin.

IMAGE vs. WORD

It is important to know the difference between seeing and hearing. This sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it? Let me explain.

It is possible to have thoughts that are not appropriate, or even permissible to speak out loud in many public venues. We know this from the illustrative examples of “utopian” systems of totalitarian regimes. In freer times and places also the pressure of conformity, compliance and ideological orthodoxy still call us to excise and repress unorthodox thoughts, regardless of their reasonableness and veracity. Thus we know that – no matter how honest and innocent we might be – we can be placed into a position where we are not allowed to speak certain thoughts and we can be coaxed into giving up on holding banned thoughts, as a matter of social acceptance. We might then consider whether such social conditioning – training, inculcation of dogma, promulgation of absurdly excessive politeness, overt or covert indoctrination, etc., masked as “education” – might apply to seeing.

There is such a category as “visual perception,” which can be measured. Yet concepts, which are abstractions rather than something experiential, such as visual experience, that is to say something not physically (optically) perceived, can indeed blind us to what is before our eyes.

A PRETTY PICTURE

Let me offer an example, a picture: an Indian miniature painting, from Jaipur, dated circa 1800. The descriptive title (invented by an art dealer long after the picture’s creation) is

“A princess smoking a hookah.”

This picture is a unique hand-made object. Whether you like this miniature or you don’t you will certainly agree that this image is neither a concept, nor even a collection of concepts. For many people, however, schooling (along with constant reinforcing messaging from all directions) has trained them that concepts take precedence to direct experience, to the innocent prejudice-free taking in of phenomena, and the fresh contemplation of the newly experienced.

The ad hoc title is words. For those of us trained to trust words more than our own eyes, we will activate that part of our brain where words and abstract concepts make their home.

Thus, for people with this habituation they might “see” this:

Or to be more precise, they will engage their brains with cogitations prompted by words and concepts which block the functioning of visual perception. In reality those with this training are prophylactically insuring that they will not engage in ideologically impure feelings or thoughts. Pure feelings and thoughts are socially proper.

This illustration is admittedly crude – a simplistic reductio ad absurdum – yet it does describe real behavior. And it describes how one person will “see” ideas while another will see pictorially.

What do I mean by seeing “pictorially?” Nothing complicated really. The detail is full of sinuous curved lines; it is a sparkling undulating swirl. It has a variety of patterns that “rhyme” with another, like the intricate rhythms of a tabla player for the eye. (Tabla is the Indian classical music drum). And then there are the colors, none of them aligned with the primary and secondary colors of the Western “color wheel” system.

Another fragmentary view shows the dominant green field and the color play between the green and the aqua, lavender and dull lemon yellow. And is shows the interactive contrast of lines curved and lines rectilinear.

What does this all mean? Strictly speaking, nothing, and that is not at all a bad thing. What does C sharp major mean when played staccato?

HIGH MODERNISM

There was a time when such pure visuality I am promoting was itself a kind of narrow dogma. This was the era of High Modernism, characterized by “formalism.” Frank Stella famously said of his formalist paintings, “What you see is what you see.” That was in 1966.

In this photo of a 1967-1970 “Protractor Series” painting, influenced by classical Persian art, incorporates, as the artist said, “interlacing, or interweaving …. things doubling back on themselves like snakes swallowing their tails.” The colors are rich, much like the palette of Indian art and design. It does not, as does our early-1800s miniature painting, depict any natural object or scene.

Around the time this type of High Modernist, purist and reductive art was at its apogee a highly influential new way of approaching representational art of the past was offered.

A corrective to the formalist “what you see is what you see” approach was needed and it was provided in 1972 by Ways of Seeing on TV (and book form by John Berger).

It helped people discover and appreciate ideologies in visual images which are lost on viewers lacking information on specific historical context and specific facts. But now the “socially conscious” literalist mindset, infused with ideological prejudices, is dominant to the point of oppressive dogmatism.

Now its time for the pendulum to swing the other way. Its time for a quiet private optical revolt. We must steal back our eye freedom and disobey thought-bosses who tell us what to think and what we are permitted to see.

ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

Below is a photo of a rather unusual scene. I'll give you the context. The picture shows village women in Hindustan with elephants who they provided with "sweaters" (or, "jumpers") to protect them from unusually frigid weather. Just look at what they came up with!

This is an interesting enough scenario, but the facts do not explain what we see. That is something we can do in silence and without knowing the anecdotal circumstances.

We can be sure that the village knitters see things somewhat like Stella, without bothering with all the turgid verbal apparatus that the Western "art world" would regard as a necessary medicine to take to temper the uncontrollableness of just plain seeing. Rather than range their colorful patterns along antiseptic white planes arrayed within a glass-clad steel grid they ornament themselves and then extend their visual delight throughout their natural surroundings.

Look freely. See. Enjoy!

(It is allowed.)