Previous - 140. Cezanne & Zola
Cézanne continued
The Blank Canvasp116 When Cézanne began his studies in the blank canvas, science had no way of explaining why the paintings appeared less vacant than they actually were. The very existence of Cézanne's nonfinito style, the fact that the brain could find meaning in nothing, seemed to disprove any theory of mind that reduced our vision to pixels of light.
The Gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century were the first scientists to confront the illusions of form that Cézanne so eloquently manipulated. Gestalt literally means "form," and that's what interested Gestalt psychologists. Founded by Carl Stumpf, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer... the German Gestalt movement began as a rejection of the reductionist psychology of its time, which was still enthralled with the theories of Wilhelm Wundt and his fellow psychologists. Wund had argued that visual perception is ultimately reducible to its elemental sensations. The mind, like a mirror, reflected light.
But the mind is not a mirror. The Gestaltists set out to prove that the process of seeing alters the world we observe. Like Immanuel Kant, their philosophical precursor, they argued that much of what was thought of as being out there -- in our sensations of the outside world -- actually came from in here, from inside the mind. ("The imagination," Kant wrote, "is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.")... According to the Gestaltists... everyday illusions [like vase/silhouette] were proof that everything we saw was an illusion. Form is dictated from the top down... the Gestaltists began with reality as we actually experienced it. [Like Kant, they are, I believe, saying that we aren't in a position to say anything about the thing-in-itself.]
p117 Modern neuroscientific studies of the visual cortex have confirmed the intuitions of Cézanne and the Gestaltists: visual experience transcends visual sensations... If the mind didn't impose itself on the eye, then our vision would be full of voids... we each have a literal blind spot in the center of the visual field. But we are blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world.
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p119 The shocking fact is that sight is like art. ["surrounded by artifice"] What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas, which is the brain. When we open our eyes we enter an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex...
...[The visual experience] is art, and not science, that is the means by which we express what we see on the inside. The painting, in this respect, is closer to reality. It is what gets us nearest to experience. When we stare at Cézanne's apples, we are inside his head. By trying to represent his own mental representations, Cézanne showed art how to transcend the myth of realism. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Cézanne made the fruit so real that it ceased to be edible altogether, that's how thinglike and real they became, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness." The apples have become what they have always been: a painting created by the mind, a vision so abstract it seems real.
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