Art and Structure
I read a really fascinating thing in The Story of Art last night. The author suggests that it is wrong to think about artistic movement as an advance or decline as one would describe scientific movement (linear and direct). Art does not move in this manner. He suggests that every innovation, stylistic change, or technical "advance" is accompanied by a loss of one of the aspects of its predecessor "school," so the artists then find themselves struggling to reconcile what is lost with what is gained, and artistic movement is characterized by this kind of activity.
The example is the early Renaissance in Florence where the artists "rediscovered," (began to utilize with greater skill and frequency), the classical mastery of foreshortening and shading to make the figures more robust, and discovered the technique of perspective. What was lost in this more natural and realistic approach was the harmony and balance that Medieval art was able to demonstrate by not having to deal with spacial considerations. The middle Renaissance period demonstrates a somewhat forced and inadequate attempt to re-introduce harmony and balance into naturalistic art using foreshortening, perspective, etc...
The high Renaissance (which is the next chapter to read) is when artists, Leonardo I think, learned how to re-incorporate balance and harmony. This is pretty fascinating because its sounds like something Derrida would have written. Everything is structured, art is a structured language, all structures are characterized by an arbitrary center that limits the play of its structure. In Renaissance art the technique of perspective was made the center and the result is that it appeared to limit the ability to balance the paintings (a technique that was abundantly available prior to perspective). What must have happened was some kind of deconstruction of the center to loosen the structure and allow for play, bricolage, and the ability of Leonardo and his contemporaries to make a structure balanced and centered on perspective (probably not exactly perspective, but something like it...plus it did not hurt that Leonardo may well have been the most ingenious Westerner to ever live!).
Science is firmly centered, and its center is accepted on faith, so its progress appears self-testing and valid. Science too would move like art if people began to demand that some of the things science limits be reintroduced. Undoubtedly, we would lose some of the pragmatic benefit of the scientific method and be forced to spiral adjust. Linear progress, at least as the dynamic of thought, is an illusion.
The example is the early Renaissance in Florence where the artists "rediscovered," (began to utilize with greater skill and frequency), the classical mastery of foreshortening and shading to make the figures more robust, and discovered the technique of perspective. What was lost in this more natural and realistic approach was the harmony and balance that Medieval art was able to demonstrate by not having to deal with spacial considerations. The middle Renaissance period demonstrates a somewhat forced and inadequate attempt to re-introduce harmony and balance into naturalistic art using foreshortening, perspective, etc...
The high Renaissance (which is the next chapter to read) is when artists, Leonardo I think, learned how to re-incorporate balance and harmony. This is pretty fascinating because its sounds like something Derrida would have written. Everything is structured, art is a structured language, all structures are characterized by an arbitrary center that limits the play of its structure. In Renaissance art the technique of perspective was made the center and the result is that it appeared to limit the ability to balance the paintings (a technique that was abundantly available prior to perspective). What must have happened was some kind of deconstruction of the center to loosen the structure and allow for play, bricolage, and the ability of Leonardo and his contemporaries to make a structure balanced and centered on perspective (probably not exactly perspective, but something like it...plus it did not hurt that Leonardo may well have been the most ingenious Westerner to ever live!).
Science is firmly centered, and its center is accepted on faith, so its progress appears self-testing and valid. Science too would move like art if people began to demand that some of the things science limits be reintroduced. Undoubtedly, we would lose some of the pragmatic benefit of the scientific method and be forced to spiral adjust. Linear progress, at least as the dynamic of thought, is an illusion.
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