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Triptych Theory of Art
Adam Gazdalski - Triptych Theory of Art
2006'
The problem presented in this paper is not, “what is art?” but rather, try to give more supportive ground consisting of opposing viewpoints by asking, “Why is it we argue over it’s use?” By taking an empirical-outsider’s perspective to the problem we can see three general values of art arise. The first being that of the Mimetic Theory, which says that art is merely an imitation of something real, and that the artists mimics what he or she attempts to create in his or her work. Others say that art is the evocation or stimulation of emotions and feeling in the viewer, which is sometimes called the Romantic View by art historians and artists themselves. Finally there is the view that says design is the principle aspect in art and take a Designer’s Standpoint. Why is it that all three of these are taught in art classrooms if all three of them are argued for separately as the prominent judging value of a work of art? Why is it that most visual art uses all three, and yet some still propose that if the work of art participates in one over the other than it is a ‘better’ work of art? This to me being of an empirical persuasion, leads me to believe that art is possibly a combination of all three. Dependent on the purpose of the artist at hand.
To better understand how art takes place in all three views, we should analyze them separately and hear the arguments from each standpoint. The Mimetic Theory of art is perhaps the oldest theory and classically the most upheld by artists(until recently). The very first instance of this type of art being used is in ancient cave man painting on walls. Depicting buffalo and other game animals, and eventually even humans during a hunt. These men were not depicting some deep emotional sentiment for the animals, nor were they interested much in the design and placement of the buffalo around the cave. They were simply attempting to illustrate that they knew what it was to hunt an animal, possibly using the artwork for the purpose of exclaiming that they were successful hunters to other people in their tribe.
Any element of design in these works must have come from observation. It may be argued that the ‘hunting men’ in such a picture were placed purposefully next to the buffalo in order to make it look like ‘a better picture’, possibly advocating design. This can be refuted if you look at the social and cultural aspects of such a tribe. There was no pottery as of yet and no other elements of design. The men and the buffalo were obviously drawn from the observations of the man who painted them.
Another possible argument in offense to the Mimetic Theory is the strong possibility that such an action as a ‘hunt’ was a very emotional for a cave man. This is what kept his family and himself alive. It can be seen that when this man only took a moment to decide what to draw on his cave. The one thing that kept him alive, food. In addition to food the next thing the man would depict was himself and his tribe hunting the food. Is it possible that the man drew not what he saw necessarily, but was attempting to depict the emotions that came along with the hunt? The poised figures holding the spears seem to portray tension and sometimes death, two very strong emotions for someone living in that time. The large pictures of the buffalo possibly representing a struggle to live, and the risks that need to be taken to do so.
These arguments are well and good for a man living in this age that went back in time to hunt buffalo, but the truth is that the men in the cave were simply depicting what they had seen. So in defense of Mimetic Theory, the very first artwork ever made was simply that. Mimicking the outside world. Elements of high level thinking, such as depicting emotions and a strong sense of design only came about thousands of years later(Probably design coming first on pottery). The problem with taking a mimetic standpoint today is that art today is more sophisticated, and requires a more sophisticated standpoint to fully understand and appreciate it.
What are these other standpoints? The next one is ‘Design’. There is so much evidence for design in art that one can look at any culture in history and see it. Take the very first clay pots for example. They were inscribed with ‘designs’ all over them. There may be a couple reasons for why design seems to be so evident in such a wide base of cultures. One is simply because it requires more honing of a specific sense, and less knowledge of other things besides that sense of what ‘feels’ right.
Yet design in itself can be seen as a sense. Inherit in humans and evident in all kinds of art. Music for example has scales, in which all humans can notice them with the exception of people who have some kind of hearing or intellectual disability(e.g. Randy Newman). These scales are a kind of ordering of pitches and the placement of sounds mathematically. Not only in music is this true, it can be seen in visual art as well.
Patterns... Why is it that just about every ‘clay pot’ excavated has had patterns on it? Is it because we as humans see repetition as a kind of soothing outlook on our life? A kind of control issue resolved by detaching ourselves from our chaotic life and instead relating to a pattern to get a sense of stability for even a moment? Possibly, and looking at history it seems even more evident. For an example we can look at a more modern example, for it explains this design-stability relationship a bit better than looking at the earliest examples.
A not so famous but still very successful in her own right, local painter by the name of Kathie Watters shows this psychological relation to design perfectly. Her painting of a house in Cammerata Italy contains many significant physiological elements of design. The most prominent one being repetition or patterning. When asked in an interview I took, why she had repeated so many bricks on the houses she responded, “It was because it took my mind off of other things going on in my life, and when I look back at this painting it soothes me.” This example is just one of an endless array of other artists. Everything from Jimi Hendrix and his ‘guitar as therapy’, to rave clubs in Europe. As a matter of fact, the modern ‘rave’ is a perfect example of repetition in design and it’s therapeutic effects. A constant beat that drives us. One might even say we enjoy repetition so much because our very heart repeats itself.
Now here is where one may say, ‘Not all design involves repetition!’, and they would be correct in saying so, but only to an extent. More complex designs, especially those proclaimed as ‘asymetrical’ designs sometimes don’t seem to repeat anything at all. The most prominent example is Mondrian and his colored boxes. Simple and asymmetrical, his designs seem to beg the question, “What does repetition have to do with here?” The answer is everything.
By definition, repetition is the ‘act of doing or performing again’. So to repeat ‘x’ all one has to do is say ‘x, x’. Seems simple enough, but what if ‘x’ is not something that can be repeated by copying it’s empirical attributes? What if ‘x’ was an amount of brightness in a painting, or amount of empty space vs amount of filled space? When shown in a simple example we can see how making ‘x’ an element of design rather than a physical section of the painting, we can better understand how Mondrian in fact uses repetition in a seemingly ‘non symetrical’ painting.
EXAMPLE-A ‘Repetition of what?’:
*in origional paper... there are three black boxes... each containing a white dot. The first box has a white dot in the top left corner. The next in the bottom left, and the last in the top right.
In this simple example we can see how repetition of ‘black vs white space’ can in fact be used as a form of repetition. The final step to apply this to Mondrian is to simplify our analysis to an even further extent. The simplest form of repetition is symmetry. If half of the block was black and half the block was white, the symmetry could be easily seen and would consist of the repetition of ‘the quantity of some color, or lack there of’. In the previous example of the three blocks we can see that ‘some color’ is not the only thing that can be repeated. Now the question arises, “Who’s to say that an asymmetrical picture such as a Mondrian, is not symmetrical in terms of the symmetry of an element of design?”
EXAMPLE-B ‘Symmetry of one kind, Asymmetry of another’:
*in origional paper... there is a single black box, with a white circle taking up one quarter of the box in the bottom right corner.
In this example we see an ‘empirically asymmetrical’ block, and a specifically ‘of design-element, symmetrical’ block. To eliminate confusion on how this is so I will explain how this was made. Beginning with a black rectangle, take a white circle that can fit into the rectangle and resize the circle until it ‘feels’ it is the right size. This is not some mystical process, or something that is so gravely different from person to person that it doesn’t exist as a sense. One simply uses the ‘Golden Mean’ and can determine that the white circle is pretty much exactly 25% of the entire rectangle. This is simply how design works. It is the stimulation of our ‘sense of design’. The innate feeling we all have(some more than others for whatever reasons) when something ‘fits’ in our senses. When we take a cheeseburger and put ‘just enough’ ketchup on it. When we hear a song and say, “That solo goes on for way to long man!” We all have this sense, which goes to prove that design, and furthermore symmetry(a form of repetition) is itself a highly significant element in almost all of modern art. So far does this claim go that today, ‘Design’ is a form of art in itself.
Well, we’ve come a long way from clay pots and cave paintings. So far that we are sophisticated enough to show repetition in sensibly non repetitive things(ergo design). All of these elements are well and good except for one thing, their purpose. To what end does an artist create art? Only recently has art been done ‘for arts sake’, and this view can be seen to have just as much purpose as doing art for any other reason. The purpose of ‘a more complex design’ or ‘a simple more elegant design’ or even ‘an attempt to be as chaotic and contain as little design as possible’ are just a few examples of possible purposes of an artist. All of these are purposes, but in their purpose lies the key to weather or not what is created actually is art. This purpose will be discussed after showing the final element of art. The next element can be seen well enough in an example:
No matter how many times some prankster might bring in a mound of clay to a figurative sculpting class, demanding a descent grade for his ‘abstraction of a woman’, he still fails in not creating some form of art. He failed only in the purpose of the assigned lesson in the class, but succeeded in his own comical interests, creating a work of art that stimulates our humor. (No matter what the ‘purpose’ of a work of art may be, there will always deductively be one!) This stimulation of senses(in this case ‘humor’) is the third and final aspect of all of art. I call it Evocation.
To evoke something is to draw it out, or call it forth. This can also be seen as a form of communication. Such as I can either write the word ‘Tree’ or draw you a picture. The written word ‘Tree’ evokes the remembrance of a tree(putting aside poetry for purposes of this example). May be not a specific tree, but some form of a tree non the less. The difference between simple communication and art is the fact that the drawn tree evokes something more than just a ‘some form of a tree’ in your head. It stimulates both emotion and the form of a tree. One can go so far as to say we compare our previous ‘form of a tree’ to the one presented, and therefor can judge it’s mimetic qualities. One cannot deny that any sense, any sense at all, evokes some response within us. Otherwise we would not be sensing anything at all!
Contributing elements to this ‘sensual titillation’ all stem from two things. One being the element that is the object of our sense at the moment, and two being our relation of that object to something we have previously experienced(indirectly or directly). Or more simply put, one being the object and the other a filter we impose upon it. This ‘filter’ is our own unique psychological makeup. An example of this would be a man viewing an all too often depiction of Jesus on the cross. His ‘filter’ will decide wether or not he has any memories to relate to this picture. If he is Christian and has the indirect memory of this event, he will have a very different reaction to someone who does not know who this ‘man on a cross’ is. It will evoke different emotions from person to person, from filter to filter.
This filter doesn’t have to be specific to emotions either. An art student studying design will have a better sense of design, and would enjoy a Mondrian much more than someone not educated in design. An student artist studying ‘fine art’, who has been doing representational sculpting of models for four semesters, will appreciate a fine Greek statue of a perfect human body far more than the design student.(Obviously assuming that the design student is diligent in his studies, as well as the fine art student in his). For music, a man who has been listening/studying classical music for a long period of time may not appreciate the finer poetic workings of a descent Rap artist. A Rap artist who denies himself classical music will obviously enjoy A Tribe Called Quest, much more than Beethoven. An artist may argue here that the arts are a matter of complexity, but there are countless progressive rock ballads that would out do classical compositions in complexity. I am not advocating any kind of relativism, rather showing that when each ‘art in-taker’ is stimulated by some work of art, they apply their own individual filters on them. These filters decide how much of what is evoked when sensing the artwork.
To end this paper with some kind of conclusion as to what of the three elements of art is ‘best’ or which one outweighs another would be ignorant of the fact that this is written from an outsider-observers point of view. All three of these elements exist within what we call art. In the end it is the viewers psychological filter that decides what the viewer gets out of the art, and the artists purpose that judges wether or not the art was successful in its own right. Wether discussing ‘Art’ or other vague subjects such as ‘Personhood’ there will always be countless views on what it is to be ‘x’ or not be ‘x’. The truth of the matter is that this triptych-definition of art is not the end of the line, nor will it’s line ever be complete. Hypothetically it is possible that someday humanity will develop a sense that surpasses that of ‘design’ or ‘mimicification’ or ‘evocation’. If someday that happens, there will simply be another contributing element to the grand scheme of art, and in my opinion anyone who denies themselves knowledge of any aspect of art is simply limiting themselves as either an artist or a viewer of art.
*I wrote this paper before I realized art is just... well... fancy communication... So i say to myself back in 2006'... try not to be so complicated, you end up missing the obvious answer... dumbass............
2006'
The problem presented in this paper is not, “what is art?” but rather, try to give more supportive ground consisting of opposing viewpoints by asking, “Why is it we argue over it’s use?” By taking an empirical-outsider’s perspective to the problem we can see three general values of art arise. The first being that of the Mimetic Theory, which says that art is merely an imitation of something real, and that the artists mimics what he or she attempts to create in his or her work. Others say that art is the evocation or stimulation of emotions and feeling in the viewer, which is sometimes called the Romantic View by art historians and artists themselves. Finally there is the view that says design is the principle aspect in art and take a Designer’s Standpoint. Why is it that all three of these are taught in art classrooms if all three of them are argued for separately as the prominent judging value of a work of art? Why is it that most visual art uses all three, and yet some still propose that if the work of art participates in one over the other than it is a ‘better’ work of art? This to me being of an empirical persuasion, leads me to believe that art is possibly a combination of all three. Dependent on the purpose of the artist at hand.
To better understand how art takes place in all three views, we should analyze them separately and hear the arguments from each standpoint. The Mimetic Theory of art is perhaps the oldest theory and classically the most upheld by artists(until recently). The very first instance of this type of art being used is in ancient cave man painting on walls. Depicting buffalo and other game animals, and eventually even humans during a hunt. These men were not depicting some deep emotional sentiment for the animals, nor were they interested much in the design and placement of the buffalo around the cave. They were simply attempting to illustrate that they knew what it was to hunt an animal, possibly using the artwork for the purpose of exclaiming that they were successful hunters to other people in their tribe.
Any element of design in these works must have come from observation. It may be argued that the ‘hunting men’ in such a picture were placed purposefully next to the buffalo in order to make it look like ‘a better picture’, possibly advocating design. This can be refuted if you look at the social and cultural aspects of such a tribe. There was no pottery as of yet and no other elements of design. The men and the buffalo were obviously drawn from the observations of the man who painted them.
Another possible argument in offense to the Mimetic Theory is the strong possibility that such an action as a ‘hunt’ was a very emotional for a cave man. This is what kept his family and himself alive. It can be seen that when this man only took a moment to decide what to draw on his cave. The one thing that kept him alive, food. In addition to food the next thing the man would depict was himself and his tribe hunting the food. Is it possible that the man drew not what he saw necessarily, but was attempting to depict the emotions that came along with the hunt? The poised figures holding the spears seem to portray tension and sometimes death, two very strong emotions for someone living in that time. The large pictures of the buffalo possibly representing a struggle to live, and the risks that need to be taken to do so.
These arguments are well and good for a man living in this age that went back in time to hunt buffalo, but the truth is that the men in the cave were simply depicting what they had seen. So in defense of Mimetic Theory, the very first artwork ever made was simply that. Mimicking the outside world. Elements of high level thinking, such as depicting emotions and a strong sense of design only came about thousands of years later(Probably design coming first on pottery). The problem with taking a mimetic standpoint today is that art today is more sophisticated, and requires a more sophisticated standpoint to fully understand and appreciate it.
What are these other standpoints? The next one is ‘Design’. There is so much evidence for design in art that one can look at any culture in history and see it. Take the very first clay pots for example. They were inscribed with ‘designs’ all over them. There may be a couple reasons for why design seems to be so evident in such a wide base of cultures. One is simply because it requires more honing of a specific sense, and less knowledge of other things besides that sense of what ‘feels’ right.
Yet design in itself can be seen as a sense. Inherit in humans and evident in all kinds of art. Music for example has scales, in which all humans can notice them with the exception of people who have some kind of hearing or intellectual disability(e.g. Randy Newman). These scales are a kind of ordering of pitches and the placement of sounds mathematically. Not only in music is this true, it can be seen in visual art as well.
Patterns... Why is it that just about every ‘clay pot’ excavated has had patterns on it? Is it because we as humans see repetition as a kind of soothing outlook on our life? A kind of control issue resolved by detaching ourselves from our chaotic life and instead relating to a pattern to get a sense of stability for even a moment? Possibly, and looking at history it seems even more evident. For an example we can look at a more modern example, for it explains this design-stability relationship a bit better than looking at the earliest examples.
A not so famous but still very successful in her own right, local painter by the name of Kathie Watters shows this psychological relation to design perfectly. Her painting of a house in Cammerata Italy contains many significant physiological elements of design. The most prominent one being repetition or patterning. When asked in an interview I took, why she had repeated so many bricks on the houses she responded, “It was because it took my mind off of other things going on in my life, and when I look back at this painting it soothes me.” This example is just one of an endless array of other artists. Everything from Jimi Hendrix and his ‘guitar as therapy’, to rave clubs in Europe. As a matter of fact, the modern ‘rave’ is a perfect example of repetition in design and it’s therapeutic effects. A constant beat that drives us. One might even say we enjoy repetition so much because our very heart repeats itself.
Now here is where one may say, ‘Not all design involves repetition!’, and they would be correct in saying so, but only to an extent. More complex designs, especially those proclaimed as ‘asymetrical’ designs sometimes don’t seem to repeat anything at all. The most prominent example is Mondrian and his colored boxes. Simple and asymmetrical, his designs seem to beg the question, “What does repetition have to do with here?” The answer is everything.
By definition, repetition is the ‘act of doing or performing again’. So to repeat ‘x’ all one has to do is say ‘x, x’. Seems simple enough, but what if ‘x’ is not something that can be repeated by copying it’s empirical attributes? What if ‘x’ was an amount of brightness in a painting, or amount of empty space vs amount of filled space? When shown in a simple example we can see how making ‘x’ an element of design rather than a physical section of the painting, we can better understand how Mondrian in fact uses repetition in a seemingly ‘non symetrical’ painting.
EXAMPLE-A ‘Repetition of what?’:
*in origional paper... there are three black boxes... each containing a white dot. The first box has a white dot in the top left corner. The next in the bottom left, and the last in the top right.
In this simple example we can see how repetition of ‘black vs white space’ can in fact be used as a form of repetition. The final step to apply this to Mondrian is to simplify our analysis to an even further extent. The simplest form of repetition is symmetry. If half of the block was black and half the block was white, the symmetry could be easily seen and would consist of the repetition of ‘the quantity of some color, or lack there of’. In the previous example of the three blocks we can see that ‘some color’ is not the only thing that can be repeated. Now the question arises, “Who’s to say that an asymmetrical picture such as a Mondrian, is not symmetrical in terms of the symmetry of an element of design?”
EXAMPLE-B ‘Symmetry of one kind, Asymmetry of another’:
*in origional paper... there is a single black box, with a white circle taking up one quarter of the box in the bottom right corner.
In this example we see an ‘empirically asymmetrical’ block, and a specifically ‘of design-element, symmetrical’ block. To eliminate confusion on how this is so I will explain how this was made. Beginning with a black rectangle, take a white circle that can fit into the rectangle and resize the circle until it ‘feels’ it is the right size. This is not some mystical process, or something that is so gravely different from person to person that it doesn’t exist as a sense. One simply uses the ‘Golden Mean’ and can determine that the white circle is pretty much exactly 25% of the entire rectangle. This is simply how design works. It is the stimulation of our ‘sense of design’. The innate feeling we all have(some more than others for whatever reasons) when something ‘fits’ in our senses. When we take a cheeseburger and put ‘just enough’ ketchup on it. When we hear a song and say, “That solo goes on for way to long man!” We all have this sense, which goes to prove that design, and furthermore symmetry(a form of repetition) is itself a highly significant element in almost all of modern art. So far does this claim go that today, ‘Design’ is a form of art in itself.
Well, we’ve come a long way from clay pots and cave paintings. So far that we are sophisticated enough to show repetition in sensibly non repetitive things(ergo design). All of these elements are well and good except for one thing, their purpose. To what end does an artist create art? Only recently has art been done ‘for arts sake’, and this view can be seen to have just as much purpose as doing art for any other reason. The purpose of ‘a more complex design’ or ‘a simple more elegant design’ or even ‘an attempt to be as chaotic and contain as little design as possible’ are just a few examples of possible purposes of an artist. All of these are purposes, but in their purpose lies the key to weather or not what is created actually is art. This purpose will be discussed after showing the final element of art. The next element can be seen well enough in an example:
No matter how many times some prankster might bring in a mound of clay to a figurative sculpting class, demanding a descent grade for his ‘abstraction of a woman’, he still fails in not creating some form of art. He failed only in the purpose of the assigned lesson in the class, but succeeded in his own comical interests, creating a work of art that stimulates our humor. (No matter what the ‘purpose’ of a work of art may be, there will always deductively be one!) This stimulation of senses(in this case ‘humor’) is the third and final aspect of all of art. I call it Evocation.
To evoke something is to draw it out, or call it forth. This can also be seen as a form of communication. Such as I can either write the word ‘Tree’ or draw you a picture. The written word ‘Tree’ evokes the remembrance of a tree(putting aside poetry for purposes of this example). May be not a specific tree, but some form of a tree non the less. The difference between simple communication and art is the fact that the drawn tree evokes something more than just a ‘some form of a tree’ in your head. It stimulates both emotion and the form of a tree. One can go so far as to say we compare our previous ‘form of a tree’ to the one presented, and therefor can judge it’s mimetic qualities. One cannot deny that any sense, any sense at all, evokes some response within us. Otherwise we would not be sensing anything at all!
Contributing elements to this ‘sensual titillation’ all stem from two things. One being the element that is the object of our sense at the moment, and two being our relation of that object to something we have previously experienced(indirectly or directly). Or more simply put, one being the object and the other a filter we impose upon it. This ‘filter’ is our own unique psychological makeup. An example of this would be a man viewing an all too often depiction of Jesus on the cross. His ‘filter’ will decide wether or not he has any memories to relate to this picture. If he is Christian and has the indirect memory of this event, he will have a very different reaction to someone who does not know who this ‘man on a cross’ is. It will evoke different emotions from person to person, from filter to filter.
This filter doesn’t have to be specific to emotions either. An art student studying design will have a better sense of design, and would enjoy a Mondrian much more than someone not educated in design. An student artist studying ‘fine art’, who has been doing representational sculpting of models for four semesters, will appreciate a fine Greek statue of a perfect human body far more than the design student.(Obviously assuming that the design student is diligent in his studies, as well as the fine art student in his). For music, a man who has been listening/studying classical music for a long period of time may not appreciate the finer poetic workings of a descent Rap artist. A Rap artist who denies himself classical music will obviously enjoy A Tribe Called Quest, much more than Beethoven. An artist may argue here that the arts are a matter of complexity, but there are countless progressive rock ballads that would out do classical compositions in complexity. I am not advocating any kind of relativism, rather showing that when each ‘art in-taker’ is stimulated by some work of art, they apply their own individual filters on them. These filters decide how much of what is evoked when sensing the artwork.
To end this paper with some kind of conclusion as to what of the three elements of art is ‘best’ or which one outweighs another would be ignorant of the fact that this is written from an outsider-observers point of view. All three of these elements exist within what we call art. In the end it is the viewers psychological filter that decides what the viewer gets out of the art, and the artists purpose that judges wether or not the art was successful in its own right. Wether discussing ‘Art’ or other vague subjects such as ‘Personhood’ there will always be countless views on what it is to be ‘x’ or not be ‘x’. The truth of the matter is that this triptych-definition of art is not the end of the line, nor will it’s line ever be complete. Hypothetically it is possible that someday humanity will develop a sense that surpasses that of ‘design’ or ‘mimicification’ or ‘evocation’. If someday that happens, there will simply be another contributing element to the grand scheme of art, and in my opinion anyone who denies themselves knowledge of any aspect of art is simply limiting themselves as either an artist or a viewer of art.
*I wrote this paper before I realized art is just... well... fancy communication... So i say to myself back in 2006'... try not to be so complicated, you end up missing the obvious answer... dumbass............
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