Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Interpreting “Eye and Mind” by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Human creations are derived from a natural information process.” (122)

Sometimes we have to experiment with our artwork and ‘throw our net out to sea’ in order to get somewhere, and we won’t always know where that will take us. We have to trust our vision and our soul.

We must resort back to all our bodies of artwork in order to decipher our current vision and movement in our art practice.  We need a visionary map in order to achieve. That requires thinking and foresight.

This vision is already inside us.  We see with beauty in nature and art. Ex, light, quality, texture, depth, space. Because this is in our very being, “the world is made of the very stuff of the body” (125).

“What interests me in all (photographs) paintings is likeness-that is: something that makes me uncover the external world a little” (126).

We learn by seeing. (127) Photography celebrates visibility. “The mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects” (127). We photograph because we have seen, and we are shaping light, because something has ‘emblazoned’ upon our soul. We interrogate our subject with our ‘gaze.’ Example: a Mountain. (128)

“The artists role is to project what is making itself seen within himself’ (129). We need to convey what we are thinking from our ‘gaze,’ aka the subject matter, to the viewer. That is our vision. That is our goal. Many things look at me instead of me looking at them, catching my eye, as a photographer.

“I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it….I expect to be inwardly submerged. Perhaps I paint to break out” (129). We are engulfed and surrounded by the universe, we make art to express ourselves and process how we interact with the universe. (That being everyone and everything in it in which we interact with).

‘Vision is an ongoing birth.” We are constantly learning, evolving, experiencing, and seeing.

“The mirror emerges because I am a visible see-er, the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity” (129). This should be every photographers national anthem.

I can invest my psychic energy into other bodies I see, ie: through my photography. Hence my body (of work) ‘can include elements drawn from the body of another.”

Refer to page 7 of “Steal Like an Artist.”

“Mirrors are instruments of a universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors…” (130).

As artists we ‘so often chose to draw ourselves,’ or photograph ourselves, a vision of ourselves.

It is best to think of light as illusion and perception made by contact that reflects and acts upon the eyes projecting a likeness of ones own essence and existence, weaving the connection between imaginary and real.

Vision is a thinking that decodes signs given to our brains within the body, from light casting upon our eyes the visible world and then transferring to our brains.

‘Photography causes us to see empty space where there is none,’ objectifying space in ways which we see fit as the artist representing an extension of ourselves within our work.

First we need to have a vision of space, to conceive an idea for a concept to convey onto that space. Orientation, polarity, envelopment, remain ominously present within space, and yet space remains absolutely within itself, a vantage point of it’s own (134).

“There is no vision without thought: but it is not enough to think in order to see. Vision is a conditioned thought, incited to think by the body” (135-136).

The soul thinks according to the body, which is the soul’s native space, where vision naturally occurs because the soul is capable, thinking according to our body, and this is encoded into our inner workings and comes without our trying or reflecting.. It is incited to think by the body (136). And the body is made up of the universe and vise versa, so therefore we are in space and space is in us.

The world is around me, not in front of me.  My vision of the world is a space starting from me as the degree zero of spatiality. I live in space and I am immersed in it. My vision shows more than myself, it shows how space and light speaks to me (138). When our vision becomes ‘gesture,’ we think or act in photographing and create.

‘In a sense everything that may have been said and will be said has always been and henceforth shall be,’ it is our job to to use our art work to interpret our space from a different perspective and show the space of the world in a different light. (139). We need to transform our art and become what follows in that process, and to begin we just need to start doing.

To make great work, we also need a broad understanding of history and practices before us.

Depth: We are constantly seeking depth all through life in all aspects of life. We use color to understand depth and give dimension to things. We are surrounded in space which radiates around us in planes that cannot be assigned to the ‘physical-optical’ relation with the world. The world does not stand before me as a representation, rather I give birth to the representation of the space of my inner self and make visible to the world.

Depth, color, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy are part of our being.

Art is the ‘voice of light,’ and once it is present it awakens the powers dormant in our selves and expressed through vision (142). Depth, space, and color are the result, the radiation of the visible.

The secret to photographing ‘is to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line, which is so to speak, its generating axis, is directed through its whole extent,’ what I refer to as composition, perspective, and depth. (142).

The lines render visible, they are the blueprint of our work, and when a network of lines becomes entangled that becomes a representation of ourselves.

“It is the artist who is truthful, while the photograph lies: for in reality, time never stops. The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith” (145).

“We must understand the eye as the window of the soul, which show us the infinite variety of creation” (146). It is up to our vision to shape light and space how we see fit. Everything that is visual functions as a dimension in our space.

“The world will always be yet to be painted (photographed), even if it lasts a million years, it will end without being completed” (148). “If no work is ever absolutely completed, still, each creatin changes, alters, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates by anticipation all the others” (149).


Questions?

What would vision be without (movement) doing?
How do we envision beyond what we can see?

Are humans stationary? Are we just recreating what is already created?

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