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To the rescue of art: Twenty-six essays
The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 20, pp. 433-434, Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
1993 Copyright
0191-4556193 $6.00 + .CKl 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd.
BOOK REVIEW
To the Rescue
ofArt:
Twenty-Six Essays
Rudolf Amheim, (Berkeley
and LOS Angeles,
CA: University
of California
Press, 1992, 243 pages, $38.00 Permanent
of California
Paper, $16.00 Paper)
before in Art and Visual Perception (I 974)” and rrhe Pu,wer of the Center (19&B)*. However, in this collection of essays, Amheim’s ideas are more accessible to the critic or clinician who is not so scientifically inclined. Rather than applying principles of optical illusion and perception to the arts, Amheim speaks in these essays from within the arts, using case studies that enrich his theories and enliven the art and artists’ stories. Rather than relying upon scientific theories to define his principles, Amheim now refers to Gestalt as “sublimated, exalted form,” or the “pure embodiment and essence of form.” With grandfatherly wisdom and simplicity, Arnheim weaves his Gestalt ideas into a range of subjects-art history, criticism, architecture, religion, psychopathology as well as any other “symbolic forces which activate life.” Througbout his discussions, Arnheim reminds those who are quick to uncover covert symbolic meaning in art that insight into an image begins with the direct spont~eous observation of form and content. His methods are applied across stylistic cultural and temporal boundaries with discussions from Picasso’s “Guernica,” Chinese sculptures of the Bodhisattva, Mendelssohn’s “Tower of Potsdam,” to Pollack’s psychoan~ytic drawings. With regard to an ancient Minoan Ax, Amheim illustrates his method:
Rudolf Amheim mounts his rescue of art by beginning with scathing social commentary on the state of the arts in Western culture. As a symptom of cultural decline, contemporary art, writes Amheim, is at a “low tide,” in which unbridled extravagance, vulgarity of taste and triviality of thought hold sway. He rails against the lack of discipline and moral irresponsibility of artists whose art often reflects a mindless consumerism that is driven by the fads and conventions of popular culture. Such objects no longer derive meaning from their context, laments Amheim, only existing as luxuries of enviable living, offering comfort and prestige. In keeping with Romantic aesthetic tradition, Amheim makes his preference known for the artifacts of early cultures, whose objects were indispensable aspects of their beliefs, inspired by ideas about nature, life, death and the spiritual powers that control human existence. Lost is the spontaneous imagination exemplified by the art of children and naives, including those with psychiatric conditions who sometimes evoke deep-seated passions in their art. It is from this modernist vantage point that Amheim sets out to rescue aesthetics and art criticism by striking at the essential roots of artistic endeavor: that is, to revive and explore the art process through sensory perception and expression-principles upon which Gestalt psychology and Phenomenological art inte~retation are based. Amheim has systematically explored both subjects *University
PhD
What is preserved here is an image, reduced in size and wrought in the finest metal to express the high dignity of the portrayed object.
Press 433
434
BOOK REVIEW
Larger double axes made of bronze were also found at Knossos, but they, too, served as ritual showpieces, displayed in sacral or ceremonial halls. This encourages us to look again, this time to see the object as an emblem, presenting itself frontally like a face. Its two sides no longer tear their practical functions asunder, undoing each other, but like wings their opposite strivings hold the symmetry of the shape in a live balance. The handle has become a central backbone, and we now appreciate the elegance of the swinging curves outward in the horizontal, inward in the vertical-a form beautiful enough to serve as the brandmark for a whole civilization. Interacting with the space around it, advancing and receding, our shape need not stay alone. It readily admits company. In fact, as a painted decoration or carved on the walls and sacred pillars of the palace, the double ax appears quite sociably in whole rows or together with other symbols, intertwining with its neighbors like chains of dancers holding hands. (pp. 6667) This poetic yet no-nonsense reading celebrates the object’s multiplicity of meanings without resorting to personal projection. Instead, Arnheim relies upon sheer sensory experience to free-up associations and references. To see such poetry in manifest form and content (a value also reflected in the ideas of Edith Kramer and Viktor Lowenfeld) can be viewed as a form of empathy. Whether it be in art criticism or art therapy, Amheim challenges the viewer to truly enter into the artist’s experience and engage the very intentions and perceptions that brought the work into being. This process need not be limited to the usual modes of perceiving and experiencing, according to Amheim. With penetrating insight, he discusses the art of the blind with regard to haptic modes of perception. He considers haptic expression not merely a compensatory or regressed form of perceiving but as an alternative mode that has an integrity, validity and purity all its own. This sensitivity is carried over to a discussion of the art of those with psychosis. Here again Amheim aligns himself with the early modemists and anti-psychiatry analysts such as R. D. Lang, who viewed schizophrenia less as a medical disorder
than as a phenomenological experience in which the balance between inner and outer experience is fluid and idiosyncratic. The art resulting from such experience often takes on abstract, geometric or archetypal elements as the psychotic person strains to organize incoming stimuli and create clear, meaningful gestalts. Amheim also found this to be true in the case of Nadia, the autistic savant. Here the autism is again seen as a matter of phenomenological balance, in which the usual reliance upon concept formation is suspended, enabling Nadia’s sublime perceptual capacities to record pure visual experience. Though she is disabled according to the norms of conventional culture, Amheim points to Nadia’s sophisticated mixing of haunting and fluid linework whose strokes force viewers to accord their own form and meaning to the work. A similar process occurs in dance and movement. Amheim draws upon Laban’s ideas on movement as an ultimate Gestalt experience in which “light sweeps unhampered along generous perspectives; the eyes face a simply shaped goal as visions, thoughts and actions move to attain it.” In his lovely essay on the “Artist as Healer,” Amheim gently probes into the motivation that prompts the artist to become a therapist. He then offers commentary on artistic intentionality, aesthetic viability of patient art and other pertinent issues relating to our field, though in a way that is wholly fresh. His application of gestalt and phenomenological principles to art therapy strives toward balance and synthesis in treatment, beyond the limitations set by arbitrary classifications and prejudices. Finding universality in the human condition is again treated in Amheim’s discussion of religion and art. Amheim states that, as forces of perception and emotion, art and religion involve heightened sensory experience that is amplified by a poetic vision that comes alive and reverberates in our consciousness. When religion and art are at their best, one is impelled to live up to the intensity and purity of these profound experiences. One senses that, in his long and distinguished career as exemplified by these essays, Rudolf Amheim continues to do just that.
David R. Henley, MA, A.T.R. School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL
1993 Copyright
0191-4556193 $6.00 + .CKl 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd.
BOOK REVIEW
To the Rescue
ofArt:
Twenty-Six Essays
Rudolf Amheim, (Berkeley
and LOS Angeles,
CA: University
of California
Press, 1992, 243 pages, $38.00 Permanent
of California
Paper, $16.00 Paper)
before in Art and Visual Perception (I 974)” and rrhe Pu,wer of the Center (19&B)*. However, in this collection of essays, Amheim’s ideas are more accessible to the critic or clinician who is not so scientifically inclined. Rather than applying principles of optical illusion and perception to the arts, Amheim speaks in these essays from within the arts, using case studies that enrich his theories and enliven the art and artists’ stories. Rather than relying upon scientific theories to define his principles, Amheim now refers to Gestalt as “sublimated, exalted form,” or the “pure embodiment and essence of form.” With grandfatherly wisdom and simplicity, Arnheim weaves his Gestalt ideas into a range of subjects-art history, criticism, architecture, religion, psychopathology as well as any other “symbolic forces which activate life.” Througbout his discussions, Arnheim reminds those who are quick to uncover covert symbolic meaning in art that insight into an image begins with the direct spont~eous observation of form and content. His methods are applied across stylistic cultural and temporal boundaries with discussions from Picasso’s “Guernica,” Chinese sculptures of the Bodhisattva, Mendelssohn’s “Tower of Potsdam,” to Pollack’s psychoan~ytic drawings. With regard to an ancient Minoan Ax, Amheim illustrates his method:
Rudolf Amheim mounts his rescue of art by beginning with scathing social commentary on the state of the arts in Western culture. As a symptom of cultural decline, contemporary art, writes Amheim, is at a “low tide,” in which unbridled extravagance, vulgarity of taste and triviality of thought hold sway. He rails against the lack of discipline and moral irresponsibility of artists whose art often reflects a mindless consumerism that is driven by the fads and conventions of popular culture. Such objects no longer derive meaning from their context, laments Amheim, only existing as luxuries of enviable living, offering comfort and prestige. In keeping with Romantic aesthetic tradition, Amheim makes his preference known for the artifacts of early cultures, whose objects were indispensable aspects of their beliefs, inspired by ideas about nature, life, death and the spiritual powers that control human existence. Lost is the spontaneous imagination exemplified by the art of children and naives, including those with psychiatric conditions who sometimes evoke deep-seated passions in their art. It is from this modernist vantage point that Amheim sets out to rescue aesthetics and art criticism by striking at the essential roots of artistic endeavor: that is, to revive and explore the art process through sensory perception and expression-principles upon which Gestalt psychology and Phenomenological art inte~retation are based. Amheim has systematically explored both subjects *University
PhD
What is preserved here is an image, reduced in size and wrought in the finest metal to express the high dignity of the portrayed object.
Press 433
434
BOOK REVIEW
Larger double axes made of bronze were also found at Knossos, but they, too, served as ritual showpieces, displayed in sacral or ceremonial halls. This encourages us to look again, this time to see the object as an emblem, presenting itself frontally like a face. Its two sides no longer tear their practical functions asunder, undoing each other, but like wings their opposite strivings hold the symmetry of the shape in a live balance. The handle has become a central backbone, and we now appreciate the elegance of the swinging curves outward in the horizontal, inward in the vertical-a form beautiful enough to serve as the brandmark for a whole civilization. Interacting with the space around it, advancing and receding, our shape need not stay alone. It readily admits company. In fact, as a painted decoration or carved on the walls and sacred pillars of the palace, the double ax appears quite sociably in whole rows or together with other symbols, intertwining with its neighbors like chains of dancers holding hands. (pp. 6667) This poetic yet no-nonsense reading celebrates the object’s multiplicity of meanings without resorting to personal projection. Instead, Arnheim relies upon sheer sensory experience to free-up associations and references. To see such poetry in manifest form and content (a value also reflected in the ideas of Edith Kramer and Viktor Lowenfeld) can be viewed as a form of empathy. Whether it be in art criticism or art therapy, Amheim challenges the viewer to truly enter into the artist’s experience and engage the very intentions and perceptions that brought the work into being. This process need not be limited to the usual modes of perceiving and experiencing, according to Amheim. With penetrating insight, he discusses the art of the blind with regard to haptic modes of perception. He considers haptic expression not merely a compensatory or regressed form of perceiving but as an alternative mode that has an integrity, validity and purity all its own. This sensitivity is carried over to a discussion of the art of those with psychosis. Here again Amheim aligns himself with the early modemists and anti-psychiatry analysts such as R. D. Lang, who viewed schizophrenia less as a medical disorder
than as a phenomenological experience in which the balance between inner and outer experience is fluid and idiosyncratic. The art resulting from such experience often takes on abstract, geometric or archetypal elements as the psychotic person strains to organize incoming stimuli and create clear, meaningful gestalts. Amheim also found this to be true in the case of Nadia, the autistic savant. Here the autism is again seen as a matter of phenomenological balance, in which the usual reliance upon concept formation is suspended, enabling Nadia’s sublime perceptual capacities to record pure visual experience. Though she is disabled according to the norms of conventional culture, Amheim points to Nadia’s sophisticated mixing of haunting and fluid linework whose strokes force viewers to accord their own form and meaning to the work. A similar process occurs in dance and movement. Amheim draws upon Laban’s ideas on movement as an ultimate Gestalt experience in which “light sweeps unhampered along generous perspectives; the eyes face a simply shaped goal as visions, thoughts and actions move to attain it.” In his lovely essay on the “Artist as Healer,” Amheim gently probes into the motivation that prompts the artist to become a therapist. He then offers commentary on artistic intentionality, aesthetic viability of patient art and other pertinent issues relating to our field, though in a way that is wholly fresh. His application of gestalt and phenomenological principles to art therapy strives toward balance and synthesis in treatment, beyond the limitations set by arbitrary classifications and prejudices. Finding universality in the human condition is again treated in Amheim’s discussion of religion and art. Amheim states that, as forces of perception and emotion, art and religion involve heightened sensory experience that is amplified by a poetic vision that comes alive and reverberates in our consciousness. When religion and art are at their best, one is impelled to live up to the intensity and purity of these profound experiences. One senses that, in his long and distinguished career as exemplified by these essays, Rudolf Amheim continues to do just that.
David R. Henley, MA, A.T.R. School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL