Transcript Powerpoint - University of Brighton

Towards a multi-sensory
appreciation of drawing
(or how drawing might contribute
toward decentring the ocular….)
• The importance of sight is evident
throughout Plato’s writings. In the Timaeus,
for example, he distinguishes between the
creation of the sense of sight, which he
grouped with the creation of human
intelligence and the soul, and that of the
other senses, which he placed within man’s
material being. (Jay 1993:26)
• The human eye, he contended, is able to
conceive light because it shares a like quality
with the source of light, the sun. Here a
similar analogy holds between the intellect,
which he calls the “eye of the mind”, and the
highest form, the Good. (Jay 1993:26)
Descartian Perspectivalism
• All the management of our lives depends on
the senses, and since that of sight is the most
comprehensive and the noblest of these,
there is no doubt that the inventions which
serve to augment its power are among the
most useful that there can be. (Descartes,
Discourse on Method, Optics Geometry and
Metereology 65 quoted by Jay 1995:71)
Descartian Perspectivalism
• perceptual (psychological and physiological
experience)
• social practice (cultural preferences and
constructs, including perspectival systems, also
systems of social control
• discursive construct (metaphors linking sight with
logical reason, impartiality and detachment)
Stephen Pattison (2007)
The Albertian Window epitomises modernity
where the subject has become fully separated
from the object of its gaze: detachment.
Phenomenology
• Phenomenology has developed a theory of
interconnectivity of body and mind in relation to
perception and its immediate environment.
Within that Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and
Heidegger have become key philosophers
providing the grounding for the contemporary
trend to emancipate senses other than vision.
Perception of one’s environment is multi-sensual,
sight needing to be integrated with other senses
including sense of direction. This leads to
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘intentionality’.
Jay’s summary of Merleau-Ponty’s
critique of ocularcentrism
• vision on one level has become reduced to
observation and turns the subject into an object; each
sense being distinct/ separate (position of
empiricism)
• vision has been granted absolute subjectivity: the
subject being all powerful, perception has turned into
a form of judgment, with the assumption that
transcendent knowledge of the world exists prior to
sense experience (position of intellectuals)
•  both positions lead to a construction of a world
view as spectacle to be observed (reductionist
approach critiqued by phenomenology) (Jay 1993)
Haptic Vision: Pattison 2007
• It is arbitrary to divide off the visual dimension of
human perception from other parts of sensory and
perceptive experience. It is not just the visual world
that is important, but also the world known through
hearing, touch, and the other senses. Sensual
perception is not the province of separate, clearly
demarcated individual senses; it is the sum of those
senses interacting with the whole of the external
world. Perception is a whole-body phenomenon.
(Pattison, Stephen, 2007, Seeing Things – Deepening
Relations with Visual Artefacts, London: SCM Press: 3)
Mark Paterson: Senses of Touch
• Paterson refers to recent neuro-scientific findings in
relation to sensation, perception and physical
apprehension:
• The traditional assumption of five senses is too reductive
and ‘exteroceptive’ (outward orientated), overlooking
internalization and inner sensory awareness, like for
example a sense of body awareness in space referred to
as proprioception:
• vestibular sensations: a term used in connection with
“balance, head position, and acceleration and
deceleration”
• cutaneous sense: skin is “receptive to pain, pressure,
heat”
• Kinaesthesia: inner awareness of bodily movement, in
relation to sensations of muscles and joints. (Paterson,
2007: Ix).
Paterson: haptic vision
• “These interoceptive sensations combine
in a felt coherence of bodily perception
of the spatial environment, a synergic
interaction of the somatic sense
sometimes referred to as ’haptic’, often
contrasted with the ‘optic’ or visual
system”
(Paterson 2007:4)
Memory
• Psychologists now believe that perception is a
very active process involving the brain with its
previous experience and knowledge in creating
perceptual hypotheses about the world. It is not
the eye that sees (…), it is the eye-brain working
together in an integrated system that creates
visual perceptions […] perceptions are
integrated interpretative constructs which draw
upon signals from all the senses, as well as upon
perceptual and conceptual knowledge built up
from past experience. (Pattison 2007:48)
Juhani Pallasmaa
• The primacy of the tactile sense has become
increasingly evident. The role of peripheral and
unfocused vision in our lived experience of the
world as well as in our experience of interiority
in the spaces we inhabit has also evoked my
interest. The very essence of the lived
experience is moulded by hapticity and
peripheral unfocused vision. Focused vision
confronts us with the world whereas peripheral
vision envelops us in the flesh of the world.
Alongside the critique of the hegemony of
vision, we need to reconsider the very essence
of sight itself. (Pallasma 2005:10)
Pallasmaa
• The eyes want to collaborate with the other
senses. All the senses, including vision, can
be regarded as extensions of the sense of
touch – as specialisations of the skin. They
define the interface between the skin and the
environment – between the opaque
interiority of the body and the exteriority of
the world. (Pallasmaa 2005:42)
Body memory & Smell
• A particular smell makes us
unknowingly re-enter a space
completely forgotten by the retinal
memory; the nostrils awaken a
forgotten image, and were enticed to
enter a vivid daydream. The nose makes
the eyes remember. (Pallasmaa 2005:54)
Synaesthetic experience
• Point of convergence is memory:
• one is ‘touched’ by something, the smell of an
object or a situation reminds one of
something or someone
• an image evokes a lateral connection
• compare Walter Benjamin’s (1999) essay on
Proust establishing voluntary and involuntary
memory
• compare E Casey (1987) on body memory
Mapping memory, mapping sense perception –
towards a multisensory appreciation of
drawing
• drawing no longer solely defined through the
traditional idea of outcome
• drawing above all is a complex act of translating a
range of multi-sensory data into a visual system,
thereby linking perception with bodily movement
• Indeed the eye with the hand, but also the nose
with the hand, one’s sense of balance and
coordination: placing a mark on paper, the pen a
prosthetic extension Paterson alludes to
This workshop attempts to:
• propose that drawing can be a mapping activity
for a fused object-subject relationship, drawing
awareness to inner body sensations, touch both
passive and prosthetic
• dismantle the dominance of visual data informing
drawing as a process
• re-instate the role of touch and smell, and other
less easily defined senses like that of inner bodily
awareness when gathering data for mark-making
• establish a range of sense and spatial experiences
contributing towards the complex process of
translating such into visual thinking (or mark
making as translation process)
This workshop attempts to:
• propose that by suppressing the visual sense, and by
privileging a range of sense data (smell, taste, orientation
of body in space) drawing can access and map experience
and translate these into marks less mediated by convention
and academic notions of skill (albeit sacrificing visual
communicabilityand claims towards universal
recognisability)
• throw open the debate on the importance of memory in
assisting any creative visual or other process, including
drawing, and how this affects the ability to increase a
repertory of marks and visual signs of value to artist and
environment/ audience/ public
• Consider notions of voluntary and involuntary memory in
creating subjective drawing responses
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter, 1999 [1936] , Illuminations, London: Pimlico
Casey , Edward S, 2000 [1987] Remembering Bloomington: Indiana
University Press
Davies, Jo & Duff, Leo, 2005, Drawing the Process, Intellect Books
Downs, Marshall, Sawdon, Selby, Tormey, 2007, Drawing Now, I B Tauris &
Co Ltd
Edwards, Betty (2001) Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Harper
Collins.
Jay, Martin, 1995, Downcast Eyes, Berkeley, L A: University of Californa
Press
Merleau-Ponty, 1998 [1962] Phenomenology of Perception London:
Routledge
Pallasmaa, Juhani , 2005, The Eyes of the Skin, Chichester: Wiley Academy
Pallasmaa, J, 2009 The Thinking Hand, Chichester: Wiley Academy
Paterson M, 2007, The Senses of Touch, Oxford: Berg
Pattison, Stephen, 2007, Seeing Things – Deepening Relations with Visual
Artefacts, London: SCM Press