Making: “Seeing Anew”
摘要
Aesthetic theories are always from the point of the view of the viewer. This chapter does it differently. The aesthetic perspective of the artistartist relies on the first personfirst person accountfirst person account of her world. The well-known teacher Josef AlbersJosef Albers wrote that artists are to “see anewsee anew” and “to open eyes”—e.g., artists are to see the world not in terms of semantic descriptions. “The chair” is really very many, many chairs. It is the most fundamental aspect of learning how to paint and draw. No skill can be imparted until this mental work has been done. And this is emphasizing the experience of the low-levellow-level featureslow-level features of visual experiencevisual experience: The illumination, shadows, negative spacesnegative spaces, the unexpected moments of color, etc. The world comes to us as “seemingsseemings”; they are, in EvansEvans’ words, “resistible”. This means that we have the capacity to resist the original gistgist visual experience and re-enter the process and look again. The p-unitatesp-unitates are a kind of knowledge by acquaintance, given to us in determinate moments, and processed through saliency mapssaliency maps—a roping off of some low-level ontological p-unitates. ArtistsArtists recombine them in such a way—with affordancesaffordances—as to make a useful object for human communication.