I recognize as foundational in my artistic training Conrad Fiedler’s theory that visual perception is an innate conceptual process, equal to abstract thinking, which withers (like the ability to speak) when neglected and transforms when rigorously developed. “Each time that sensation is awakened and abstract concepts appear, perception vanishes.” (p. 37) “Before the capacities of forming concepts . . . have been developed in him . . . he acquires and creates for himself the many-sided world, and the early substance of his mind is the consciousness of a visible, tangible world . . . The child acquires a consciousness of the world and . . . possesses the world.  When other mental forces have grown in man . . . and provide him with another consciousness, he very easily fails to appreciate that earlier consciousness by which he had been first awakened on entering life . . .  [he] sacrifices the one for the sake of building up the other.” (p. 49-50)

I was taught the artwork was the vehicle for expanding capacity and not the intended result. “The mental life of artist consists in constantly producing this artistic consciousness.  This it is which is essentially artistic activity the true artistic creation, of which the production of works of art is only an external result.” (p. 51)

I was instructed to practice visual investigation and distinction of nuances as I moved through my everyday existence.  The manipulation of tools and media was subordinate to the capacity to perceive.  Conceptual thinking about known properties of identifiable subjects was to be set aside in service of untainted observation.  “ . . . art does not deal with some materials which somehow have already become the mental possession of man; that which has already undergone some mental process is lost to art, because art itself is a process by which the mental possession s of a man are immediately enriched.  What excites artistic activity is that which is as yet untouched by the human mind.” (p. 48-49)

While I could see a direct link from Fiedler’s theory to representational art, the possibility of it’s influence on abstract art did not occur to me until Anthony pointed it out to us.  I wondered if that development had occurred to Fiedler.  Abstraction would be “pure sensory experience” disentangled from the historic European context of visual perception.  German Expressionism developed from Fiedler’s writing about “inner necessity,” (Review by: Alfred Neumeyer The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jun., 1958), pp. 530-532, Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428055)

  “ . . . When, driven by an inner necessity and applying the powers of his mind, he grapples with the twisted mass of the visible which presses in upon him and gives it creative form . . . In the creation of a work of art, man engages in a struggle with nature not for his physical but for his mental existence” (p. 48) “When the artist develops his visual conception to the point where “this way and no other” becomes a necessity for him.” (p. 57)

This ability to create other contexts and possibilities from a shift in fertile ground is one of the most exciting and wondrous capacities of the small part of the human mind that is overlooked by the survival mechanism.