Thursday 24th

Art is a constant companion through the millennia, independent of cultural embedding, zeitgeist and civilizational development. Art is much more than the artwork itself as Art is context-, meaning- and situation-dependent, the artwork emerges by a specific mode of Experiencing Art which is fundamentally different from everyday perception modes. The keynote on “Experiencing Art” clarifies how ill-defined many approaches to understanding the experiencing of Art can be and will describe ways to improve the situation to inspire new ways of approaching these essential questions of the Psychology of Art.

The capacity both to understand such drawings as representations, as well to produce such images, is ubiquitous in human cultures, and examples of it belong to the oldest art we have (ca. 40.000 years bce). Strange to say, the production of such images is uniquely human: there is no other species that does it. Ou near cousins, the great apes, do not draw images, even though they may be nudged by humans to do so. This by the way, also seems to be the case with pointing, very common already in young children, but apparently not fully practised by apes. One wonders whether there might be a connection between these two very different ways to draw attention to an object. Be that as it may, I would like to turn to general history of man-made images and art, and propose a simple taxonomy, based not on various forms of projection, but on the making of as-if objects; first and foremost separate things in contour, to which later indications of ‘where’ and ‘what’ are added, by means of a ground or floor, or an indication of a background, as a backdrop for the objects. When one looks at the development of perspective during the Renaissance, it seems that it originated as a special case of integrating object, ground and background, rather than the direct introduction of ideas of projection. In both painting and pointing we witness the singling out of objects for inspection. In pointing, the object lifted out of its full environment as it were; in the history of painting, we may almost witness the opposite: the adding of more and more articulated environment to single objects.