Transcript
What we were thinking is looking at some of the pictures in the
Book
And just discussing them.
Oh, I signed this book for you. Yeah,
Yeah. I don't know
When that was. I don't know this will be very successful, but let me-
I neither do I, but we'll give it a go and see where we get to. If it's not working out, we'll do
Something else. Yeah. One of the differences in the ways in which the left and right hemisphere take in a scene is that the left hemisphere tends to focus on something that stands forth from the background. Whereas the right hemisphere is interested in the background as much as whatever it is that is salient. And that sounds perhaps like a rather small difference, but actually it's at the root of many important philosophical distinctions that we think that the world is composed of entities that stand forth. We raiify them, we call them the things, and we see them as somehow therefore isolated from the background out of which they emerge and in which they belong. And so there's a tendency for the left to objectify things. And one way in which this gets expressed is by the intrusion into the field of the eye itself, so that the eye is no longer the unspoken ground of what is seen, but it becomes something that is itself seen in the picture. (01:39): And you see this in the paintings of schizophrenic subjects. And I want to do a book on the paintings of psychotic subjects because they are so fascinating. There's so much richness in them, as well as them often being stunningly interesting and beautiful works. But one of the things you see is this intrusive eye, and it starts happening quite early. And you see it here in this picture. This is from a flower book by Barbara Honeywood. There's a whole album of these pictures. And some of them are simply of flowers, but some of them, when you start to look at them, there are eyes that have trud, disembodied eyes that are somehow present in the field of the picture. And you see that again here, this painting by David Chick. He did a series or certainly a couple of paintings with a very similar design to this particular one. (02:35): Both had this eye present in them. I chose those as particularly obvious examples, but really there are hundreds and hundreds of such paintings in the collections of paintings by people with psychosis. I think the interest there is that it is an increase in self-consciousness where the eye is no longer the eye with which you unself-consciously see the world, but the eye is sort of intrusive in your world and is looking at you. So people describe themselves as being constantly under observation. One of the things that schizophrenic people often say is that there's a camera watching me. Now this is in some ways just the paranoia of the left hemisphere left for itself, but it is also, I think, a rather important expression of this idea that the self is monitoring the self all the time and it's becoming intrusive. And actually there's much in life that can only be lived at the level of the intuitive, embodied and unconscious. (03:37): As soon as you become conscious of it, you're alienated from it and you'll stop being able to act. And some people with schizophrenia say that, for example, they can't walk because they have to think about putting a step in front, one leg, in front of another. So it stops them in their tracks.
When I see this eye, I'm thinking, have you seen the Truman Show?
Yes, I
Have. Yes. And that really seems to be extreme self-conscious. At first, he's living life as normal, and then suddenly he starts to feel like everyone's looking at him, and it turns out that he is in fact
Correct. Of course, there are many science fiction films now that play with this. Is it fantasy? Is it reality? Is it virtual? There are layers of virtuality constantly being unfolded. And this is the hall of mirrors I'm talking about, in which once you start inspecting, you're inspecting of your inspecting. There's an endless series of these things in which you're no longer actually attending to the world, but you're intending internally to your attending. See what I'm saying?
Yeah. You're looking inwards what you already attended rather than outward to what's beyond. That would be my
Interpretation. It's saying of Gillandios of the adoration of the shepherds. It's interesting if you contrast it with a picture with this picture, which shows a late medieval representation of a scene as Gill and I represents a scene. But there are various things you notice about it. First of all, that it has no depth to it. That's because at this point in the Renaissance, perspective had not been discovered. That's what we're told, but actually perspective wasn't discovered in Florence in 1415. It was present in the Greek world. It was present in the Roman world. We know that they painted with perspective, but in each case, as the civilization decayed, they lost perspective. And as this society of our own has gone through its various phases, it started without perspective, but then gained perspective, and it has now lost perspective again. So that is interesting. That's one observation. (05:56): But another is that this is a painting not of what is seen, perceived, but what is known. In other words, it is not as things look in any sense at all. It has a meaning that must be decoded. For example, this man on this horse is smaller than the bishop's head. The whole man is smaller than the bishop's head, and that's because this man is not important. The bishop is important, so he's painted huge. Now that is not anything to do with the world, as we know Kenneth experienced, but is the world this, the world we know about. And so there is a huge distinction there. Also, the picture has no unifying sense. It is little pieces of detail, which do not cohere, partly because of the lack of perspective. But in an extraordinarily short period of time, I think only about 1150 years, which is nothing in terms of, of course, the evolution of a society, you have something like this. (07:04): And I chose this for several reasons, this painting by Gilandire. First of all, let's just take a simple point about visual depth. There are several planes of depth in this picture. There's the plane right at the front where the shepherds are kneeling and the virgin is in prayer. There is then the animals and some other shepherds behind. There is then a procession coming towards the viewer from deep in a landscape, winding its way. Behind that, there is a plane of a hill. Behind that, there is a city on a bay. Behind that, there is a mountain. So there is enormous depth in this thing, in space. The effect of that is to draw you into it. So you don't see it out there as something that is flat, doesn't have perspective, doesn't have shape, doesn't have meaning for you. It draws you into this scene, which is a habitable scene. (08:03): And the second thing you notice about it is that it has depth in time. So in the picture of the bishop and so on, this is just a slice in time. But here we see already that the birth of Christ is situated historically 2,000 years ago. Here is a Roman sarcophagus. So Giandio is saying, this is something that has meaning in time. It's a long way back in our culture, but it leads to us here in the way that the figures process towards the viewer. And then of course there are the columns here, which are again from an earlier period, but you're beginning to get the sense of it connecting to the modern world. So although there is an ancient archophagus here, the shepherds who are praying are contemporary shepherds. They're dressed in 15th century Florentine Gar. So they are representatives in this picture of a scene that has its meaning through the depth of time. (09:04): So there's a lot of things about this that distinguished it. There's a depth in space. There's a depth in time. But there's also the way in which the thing coheres as a ... Your eye is meant to feel the balance of the parts of this. And of course, it is extremely beautifully executed. There is interest in the faces which are not just stylized faces. These faces are faces of real identifiable human beings. They look like different individuals. But if you go back to the picture of the bishop and the peasants, these are not recognizable individual faces. These are stylized. And what happens in, for example, Roman and Greek sculpture is that things begin very mask-like. So the faces are inexpressive, they're staring forward and they can be very beautiful, but they don't have that sense of an individual person with which you might have a relationship. (10:05): But as sculpture progresses in both Greece and Rome, it becomes more beautifully individual and there is movement, movement in the face, movement in the form, and these are individuals that are recognizable as unique. They can be exemplars of something, but they don't lose their uniqueness in order to be exemplars. So all of this marries with my view of the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere of being the one of the stylized and the impassive and the remote and the abstracted knowledge. And the right hemisphere being that are the immediate perceptual experience of reality. And as Rome decayed, as you come to the end of the Roman Empire, the fourth century, they go back to depictions of people in hierarchical ranks, rather like the little man and the bishop. And again, you lose the sense of living people because the faces are rather crude and they're all just staring blankly forwards. (11:14): And there was interesting work done by, originally by a German or Austrian surgeon who looked at a vast number of representations of the human face over time. And what he found was that when people first represented human beings, they didn't have heads. They were usually almost invariably sculptures of women and they had only breasts and buttocks and sometimes a vagina. And then as things went on, there was a head, but it was not a head with a face. And then there became a head with a face, and then there came depictions of the face that looked more recognizably like a human face, but they were all blankly staring ahead. And as you come towards the ancient civilizations, there was a slight tendency to angle the face, but it tended to angle the face looking towards the viewer's right. What that does is expose the interesting part of the face to the left hemisphere's field of vision, which is the right part of the depiction. (12:30): And it exposes the right side of the face that is depicted, which is the left hemisphere's half of the face. As we move into more humanistic sculpture, and I would say a flourishing of the culture, you get not 100%, of course, but you get a significant, something like 65 to 35 shift towards depictions of faces looking to the viewer's left. And in doing so, what that does is take the part of the face that is of interest into the left visual field of the viewer, which is for which their right hemisphere is responsible, and exposes the more expressive left half, the right hemisphere half of the face that is depicted. And it is just the fact that the left hemisphere's side of the face, the right side of the face, is less expressive than, and also smaller than the side of the face that is governed by the right hemisphere. (13:34): If you take photographs and you split them and you make symmetrical pictures, you will see that the right half of the face is larger and is usually more expressive. So that is interesting. Something was happening, and then as each civilization declined, it went back to staring eyes, just staring straight ahead, and that happened again at the Renaissance. And there's a lovely place in the National Gallery in London where there's a line of portraits by whole mine and various contemporaries, and it just happens that in this long sequence, each of these faces is looking to the left. Now it doesn't mean that you can't find examples. Of course, you can find plenty of examples in which the face is looking the other way, but it is a tendency and a statistically highly significant tendency. And then it disappears around the 18th century in which people were again, and they become much less individual. (14:33): There's these wonderfully individual faces from about 1450 through to about 1720. And then you start getting puffy looking aristocrats with absolutely nothing to distinguish one from another. Again, in the National Gallery, you can walk through these pictures of 18th century aristocrats. It's almost impossible to tell anything about any of them, except their status again, nothing about them as individuals. And as Oscar Wilde said, their faces at once seen are never remembered, and that's where we got to. And of course, now in the 20th century, you find faces that are very interesting, but they look often like and have features which reflect in ways I go into in the book, the way in which faces seem to somebody who has right hemisphere damage. Now, I'm not saying that these artists had right hemisphere damage, but many of the things in which many of the characteristics of these depictions show elements that are typical of people who have right hemisphere damage. (15:39): They don't have a sense of depth, they've lost the sense of perspective, the faces are asymmetrically distorted, the parts don't cohere, and so on and so forth. And you may say, "Well, yes, that's just the way in which art has progressed." And that's true. And I'm not saying that none of the art is good. These are not value judgments. And I happen to like medieval art and I happen to like quite a few things in modern art as well, because you can't do a good artist down. It doesn't matter how unpropitious the culture is, a great artist will paint great paintings. So Picasso was able to paint great paintings, but all I'm saying is he did it despite the culture, not because of the
Culture. No, I think that's a pretty decent summary of the art changing through time. The faces shifting from one side to the next, death perspective. It's mostly there. It's a shame not to mention Turner because he's a bit of a legend, but apart from that-
Would you like me to mention it?
Well, I don't know, just because he is such a legend for color and you make the point yourself that just because he's not depicting at times people or places, it's not to say that it's abstract. Exactly. It's more that he's telling story through color.
Precisely. And of course, this is exactly what Cloud is doing in this wonderful painting which gets in here because it's probably my favorite painting in Northern World, but Clove I think is ... I mean, when I first saw an exhibition of Clode in the National Gallery again in London, I was about 18. I was completely speechless for days. I just thought, "I've never seen these things. They're absolutely staggering." And again, you've got these depths of ... I won't go through the whole thing, but you can see in this picture there are something like half a dozen planes of depth and space you were invited into and depth in time because this already ancient monument is in the ancient world and it's got something like a thousand years of wear on it already. So you are taken into a world of texture, form and color. The actual actors here are not important. (17:49): What is important is the play of light, the sense of depth, the feeling of the space, the magical effect of these particular colors. And you may say, "Is that an abstract painting?" But I don't consider it to be an abstract anymore than I consider this picture by Bierstadt to be an abstract. (18:11): Once you stop being tethered somehow in reality and give full reign to the left hemisphere, you're losing some sort of element that would actually be a constraint, but would actually be very helpful. I mean, often in art, constraints are as important as freedom. It has to be a balance. And I quote this thing in the book which is from Gertain which means in containment or constraint, the master first shows itself. And so although in the last hundred years, we've done away with all the rules and forms and conventions of everything, we've slightly fallen flat on our faces doing it and we need to re-inhabit. We can't turn the clock back or go back in style. I'm not asking for a pastiche of something that's gone, but there are artists now, right, a painting and I think an emphasis on painting is quite a good thing because too much of art now is remote from the senses, is conceptual, but they are actually rediscovering these important elements in art again. (19:18): And poets again are ... I mean, free verse had its time and it produced one or two good things, but actually the constraints of meter and even of Rhine produced some of the greatest poetry. You need something to contain what you're doing. It's not just a one way, not like pushing at an open door, you need that. You need everything to come into being needs some opposition, some constraint. That doesn't make it less creative. It makes it more creative.
There we go. That's great.
Enough on that.
Yeah. No, that's good. That did go on my thought. That worked.