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Slow art

I like to return to Kandinsky's observation in Point and Line to Plane that simple visual elements take short time to perceive, while complex elements take longer time. The point is instantaneous, as is the staccato note, appropriately written with a dot under or over the note head. A line takes some time to follow with the eye, longer the more wiggly it is.

In fact, we are capable of taking in complex stimuli and making sense of them even in a brief glimpse, at least at a crude level. As you enter a museum, a few seconds of looking around might suffice to categorise works as painting or sculpture, assess their complexity, style, and probable epoch, and to decide whether it might be worth taking a closer look at the works. Similarly, a few tenths of a second of sound is often sufficient to identify a musical genre, sometimes even to recognise which song it is. The blasé visitor at a gallery show opening might inspect the room rapidly to find that there is nothing insteresting there, so better rush off to the next opening across the street. Certain art, minimalist works in particular, might not reaveal more about themselves the longer you stare at them, but some works of art benefit from sustained scrutiny.

I recall visiting a figurative sculpture exhibition last year. While I was discussing perspective with one of the artists, an excentrically clad young man dashed in, hardly cast an eye at the room but promptly went up in front of a relief and stood there inspecting it for several minutes, then leapt out as abruptly as he had entered. Indeed, there was something fascinating about those reliefs and the few other sculptures that didn't look as if they might have been made in the nineteenth century. Realistic figurative sculpture usually doesn't captivate me, because it leaves little room for the artist's vision or expression in the form of discrepancies between the depicted original and the sculpture. Consider Giacometti for an example of fascinating discrepancies, yet his slender figures came about in an attempt to capture something about the way he saw people at a distance.

Now, apparently there is a slow art movement which organises slow art events where visitors look at a few paintings for ten minutes at a time and then discuss their experience. A relatively recent paper by Rebecca Chamberlain and Robert Pepperell discusses this slow movement and how it might apply to the paintings of Pierre Bonnard in particular.

Bonnard emerged in the wake of impressionism, with a recognisable style featuring characteristic perspective distortions and a saturated colour palette where neighbouring surfaces often have similar luminosity but contrasting hues. The skewed perspective is noticeable in details such as unproportionately long legs in standing figures. According to Chamberlain and Pepperell, Bonnard used to paint from memory, only aided by small sketches, which may explain the unusual perspective. They argue that drawing from memory makes it easier to display wide-angle views. Distortions arise from trying to apply linear perspective to extreme wide angle views, straight lines will curve and look anything but natural. Bonnard's panoramic scenes use other compromises, such as depicting various parts of the picture as if looking from slightly different angles. From the reproductions I have seen, with few exceptions Bonnard's compositions do not seem to me to be extremely wide-angle, but perspectival "inconsistencies" abound if you look closely.

The impressionists loosened the boundaries between figure and ground by using patches of colour instead of outlines. In Bonnard, human figures sometimes vanish into the background by the use of low contrast and similar colours. To notice the figure at all, you would have to look at the painting for some time, and even then the figure may dissolve unless you focus on it.

While I appreciate the philosophy behind the slow art movement, its apparent valuation of certain art that takes more time to enjoy is itself anything but neutral. In a lot of contemporary art aesthetic contemplation is besides the point, the viewer is not rewarded for looking closely at a work for an extended period of time; instead, it may pay off to read about the work and getting acquainted with other works by the same artist.

The presumption that spending time doing something implies valuation or appreciation is epitomised in the saying "time is money." Of course it isn't, only the practice of payed labour makes this confusion possible. Nevertheless, we wouldn't spend much time with art lest it offer rich experiences and perhaps subtly shifting perceptions over time. Conversely, though, works that we grasp in a matter of seconds aren't necessarily bad art.

Recommended reading:

Chamberlain, R. and Pepperell, R. (2021). Slow Looking at Slow Art: the Work of Pierre Bonnard. Leonardo.

In this paper they also quote J. J. Gibson, whom I perhaps wrongly intimated in my previous post as having had little impact on current visaul arts research. Gibson makes the case that there is no limit to how sensitive our senses can be: "Looking and listening continue to grow with experience." Artists who practice drawing from life know this very well.

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