Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007
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Ione, Amy, Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths. Amsterdam & New York, Rodopi, 2005. 271 pages, ISBN 90-420-1675-2, Euros 55.
Reviewed by
University of Plymouth, UK
The history of technological advances in the visual arts is a long and complex tale. The ways in which these advances have affected modes of representation and artistic styles and themes is an even more complex affair. Amy Ione has made an ambitious attempt to trace these convoluted histories and to untangle some of the knots of assumption, cliché and ignorance surrounding who did what, when and where. In the main she has succeeded in this attempt and provides us with a lucid, informative and richly detailed account of these histories.
Throughout the narrative Ione traces some of the ways in which currents of scientific thought, knowledge and methods have informed and energised artistic ideas and practices from classical times to the present day. She mentions the relatively recent coining of the term ‘scientist’ by William Whewell, a Cambridge professor, who in 1840 first used the term in the sense in which we use it today. This marked a significant change in the status and scope of the practitioner of science. Scientists were no longer ‘natural philosophers’ but exponents of a distinctive branch of learning that was rapidly developing its own methodologies, theories and bodies of knowledge which would occasionally prove to be challenging to philosophers and artists alike.
In a thoughtful discussion of the development of technologies of conservation and restoration, Ione points out that these technologies can also be used very effectively to analyse the history of innovation, experiment and ‘trial and error’ in the making of art. They become very useful tools for the art historian as well as the conservator. X-ray technologies, for instance, provide art historians with a means of identifying the steps taken by a painter in the construction of a particular image. Underdrawings and the sequential layering of pigments can be exposed in the laboratory in ways which were previously unavailable. Painterly techniques which had been the subject of guesswork by historians could now be seen with the aid of a new technology.
Underpinning Ione’s fascinating account of such technological innovations is her argument against those, like Robert Williams, who, Ione claims, argue that art history should be largely the province of theoretical and philosophical study. According to Ione this emphasis on theory and philosophy has ‘had a negative impact on our understanding of the embodied cognition of visual artists’. It could be argued that there has been a tendency within art history to downplay the importance of technical developments and to impose philosophical and theoretical ideas and explanations upon artistic phenomena, rather than to take an artist’s eye view. This leads to an imbalance in our understanding, a privileging of theory over practice, and exegesis over praxis. Ione makes the point very succinctly: ‘Plato not only questioned the mimetic qualities of art, he and his peers elevated ideas over work done with one’s hands’. This book can be seen as an attempt to redress such an imbalance.
It is interesting to see how this re-assertion of the importance of what artists actually did and do, echoes a time in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when, Ione argues, ‘natural philosophers’ were turning to experimental analysis and recognised that the ‘artist’s intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials’ enabled them to manipulate such materials with ever-greater sophistication over time. This suggested a methodological model that could be used within the natural sciences. The way in which sensual, somatic and practical activities are inextricably linked to cognitive development forms another of Ione’s leitmotifs.
Throughout her book Ione charts the convergences and divergences in the investigations of artists and scientists, the tension between empirical specificity and locality exemplified in the work of artists, and theoretical abstraction and universalism that tends to be the goal of science. This is done in a balanced and open-minded way, offering a wealth of information and a diversity of perspectives that don’t ‘resolve theoretical issues’ but do provide a picture of the complex interactions and mutuality of art, science, technology and consciousness studies.
In a lively discussion of the ideas of Semir Zeki about art and consciousness, Ione is supportive of his view that ‘artists are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them, but studying unknowingly the brain and its organisation nonetheless’. However she is critical of Zeki for not, in her view, engaging scientifically with this ‘insightful proposal’.
In another stimulating strand of argument, Ione discusses the influence of book printing on art and on theories about art. She is particularly eloquent about the ways in which the developments in textual printing enhanced the role of rhetoric – the text gaining importance at the expense of the visual image. This was almost a reversal of the situation in medieval times when the visual dimension of a book was often more important that its accompanying text, indeed the text was often primarily a visual construction as can be seen in the illuminated manuscripts of the period. As the production of these manuscripts declined and the printing of texts increased, framed paintings become more popular and more highly valued. The publication of Alberti’s, On Painting, and its rapid and widespread influence, can be seen as emblematic of a process in which verbal discourses (theory and rhetoric) come to colonise and legitimise the visual arts. The methods and styles of rhetoric and textual analysis are transposed to the analysis of paintings, drawings and sculpture.
On the other hand the techniques of artists grow in effectiveness and complexity. The development of oil paint can be seen as an important technical innovation, enabling more control and subtlety over tone and colour, particularly in the representation of reflections, the play of light on various surfaces and the nuances of shadow and texture. An artist like Jan Van Eyck is usually credited with making the main contribution to this technical development, though Ione points out that he was only one of a number of artists involved in this process during the early fifteenth century. What marks him out is the use to which he puts this innovation, namely a sophisticated and fluent narrative realism unprecedented in his day. At the end of her discussion of Van Eyck, Ione adds a brief, but very interesting, description of some of the philosophical ideas of Kepler, Baumgarten and Kant, although it is not clear how these ideas particularly relate to, or inform, our understanding of Van Eyck’s fifteenth century locus.
Continuing with the theme of the interaction of artistic and scientific ideas and methods, Ione makes the point that photographic processes were the invention of both artists (Niepce and Daguerre in France) and scientists (Fox Talbot in England). Scientists and artists manifested high levels of visual acuity combined with a propensity for practical enquiry and innovative thinking: ‘a superficial perception differs from the kind of active viewing a practitioner uses when producing innovative work’. The early development of photography was a complex field of research, involving many different processes and techniques used for many different purposes. It is the dynamic interweaving of these researches, and the interaction between artistic and scientific innovators, that creates the extraordinary momentum that carries photography so rapidly into so many arenas of daily life.
Turning back to developments in painting Ione describes how, in 1841, the invention of tin tubes in America gave rise to, or enabled, changes in the way paints were stored, carried and used by, amongst others, the Impressionists – working outdoors in the landscape. The introduction of a new technical possibility into the working practices of painters can be seen as an important lubricant in the process of change that occurred in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a change that rippled outwards from innovations in modes of representation to major changes in other cultural spheres. Paraphrasing Jonathan Crary, Ione writes: ‘The break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth century’ involved ‘a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive and desiring capacities of the human subject’.
While the impact of photography on nineteenth century art and culture is well-documented, the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen in 1895 and the impact of X-ray images on art scholarship, is much less well-known. Ione explores this and other aspects of research into the electro-magnetic spectrum, arguing that with Röntgen’s discovery ‘it became possible to use technology to gather information about domains that had formerly been completely impenetrable’. The history of art is also a history of changes in how we perceive the world and how we understand perception. Changing technologies have contributed to these understandings and perceptions, disclosing phenomena that were previously hidden and inaccessible.
Taking Frank Stella’s book, Working Space, 1986, as a reference point, Ione analyses the ways in which twentieth century artists have depicted, investigated and constructed space in paintings. To some extent critical of Stella’s position, Ione appears to support David Hockney’s view that Stella, ‘doesn’t address how a two-dimensional image can appear to have depth and thus force us to see space when an artist uses paint to create depth and the illusion of space’. The paradoxes involved in this play of illusion and the cognitive implications of such phenomena are yet another of Ione’s subjects. In relation to Hockney’s own work Ione shows how his formal and stylistic evolution is energised by technical innovations – for instance, his use of acrylic paints in the early 1970s, a relatively little-used medium at that time, and his extensive use of photographic technology in the 1980s. Ione sees here a ‘direct line from the spatial explorations of Leonardo da Vinci.’
It is this kind of historical insight and connectivity which makes Innovation and Visualization such a stimulating text to read. With its combination of scholarship and lucidity, fascinating information and provocative argument, this lively and intelligent book will be welcomed by the academic community and by many general readers, who will enjoy Ione’s eloquent cross-fertilisation of ideas and her healthy disregard for disciplinary boundaries.