Intimate Stranger

REALITY IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

Over the last few days I had the opportunity to become acquainted, a little, with David Hockney’s theories on the uses of optics by master painters from the very early Renaissance on. I must admit that I was skeptical. It just seemed to me inconceivable that such methods — using mirrors at first and later all sorts of lenses to project images on canvas that would then be traced or copied in an effort to create the illusion of ‘reality,’ employed systematically over centuries, and all of this collectively referred to as ‘secret knowledge’ by Hockney — would not have been written about. After all, historians of the time, like Vassari, wrote exhaustively about the lives of the painters and their techniques, and every major practitioner had a whole studio of apprentices working with him. Or, for that matter, that no art historian or contemporary painter worth his wits has since tumbled to the same discoveries and conclusions. To my knowledge there’s not a whisper in the dusty tomes, although it is true that the paintings themselves sometimes refer obliquely to the ubiquity of these potential devices in the vicinity of the makers: eyeglasses resting on the pages of an open book, someone reading with a magnifying glass, the convex mirror as in Van Eyck’s wedding portrait of the Arnolfinis — a dark, bulging, all-seeing eye. The (partial) answers to my caveat would seem to be that, a) there are (or were) indeed written traces of these ‘occult’ goings-on, a reference to Caravaggio with his head stuck under a black cloth here, the hosed legs sticking out comically, some other puzzling process observed there. .; and b) that the old masters were far more secretive about their discoveries, and therefore protective of their businesses, than is generally realized. Jan van Eyck, for instance, is said never to have revealed the composition of his marvelous glazes. Artists of the time belonged to guilds and brotherhoods. All thought of themselves as alchemists — were they not bringing into the world images more real than what the naked eye could ever perceive and was this not producing the sublime from base materials? — and in order to push back the limits of realism, or its depiction (or substitution?), they used whatever measuring trick, broth, talisman, golden rule or theory they could lay their hands on. They knew they were indulging in magic. All creation, be it in words or visually, is a transgression, lifting the skirts of existential darkness, and manipulating the mysterious power this ability bestows is not only human but possibly obligatory if you want to communicate with the unknown. The initiated one has a pact with the mysterious. It was only normal, in order to protect and preserve their power, that certain discoveries or ways of doing should be kept confidential. If the patron king or cardinal didn’t think they were magicians of a kind they probably never would have received the commissions they did. Still, can it really be believed that since six centuries no-one has cracked this momentous code, that all scholars and lovers of fine imagery were struck by some historical blindness?

On Friday last, over lunch at the New York Institute for the Humanities, Hockney’s accomplice in this crusade to invent the wheel, a physicist working in the field of optical science, named Charles Falco, failed to convince the audience completely. Doubts were the deeper shadows framing the highlights of his intellectual bavardage. The Irish term is ‘blarney.’ He first explained why and for how long he has been a motorcycle enthusiast and then tried to pull the wool over our eyes with all sorts of jargon relating to ‘laws of nature,’ ‘depth of fields of vision,’ hypotheses and theories (and how a scientific ‘theory’ is a radically different bird from the artistic one), ‘vanishing lines of perspective,’ fractured edges and fractions of degrees and angles. In other words, he could measure the magic. And, if needed, develop the tools to do this with. It seemed to me odd though, that one should start with the ‘scientific’ proofs and proceed via the methodology to arrive, after much close scrutiny and more than just a slight sleight of eye, at the ‘problem.’ Never mind that none of the old fellows would have approached painting so systematically, even if they thought they did. All artists have a bee in the bonnet. Douanier Rousseau thought he was the greatest living painter in the ‘Egyptian style’ and Picasso in the ‘Greek style.’ He told Picasso so. The creative process has the empirics of ‘natural’ growth (one thing calling up the other and then establishing relationships) and more than a smattering of voodoo (ascribing transformative and ‘covert’ power to these relationships), but many decisions made during the course of the process are arbitrary, destructive and irrational. When I pointed out that all of these paintings born from projected images, at least in part, would then have had to be painted upside down, and this should be visible to the perceptive eye since brushstrokes go from the top down in their movements and are from left to right or inverse, depending on whether you’re left- or right-handed, he lamely refuted the flight of my argument and held that this could not be visually verified. I concluded that he has no understanding of what the hand and the eye do in the game of drawing or applying color to a surface, and he certainly is mistaken in thinking that artists proceed like scientists.

On Saturday, Hockney himself put up a much more attractive fight. The occasion, “Art and Optics: A Conference Around a Theory,” hosted by the Law School, seemed to draw New Yorkers in droves. Hundreds of people were waiting in line all around the block. A sardonic friend of mine suggested there were several reasons for this extravagant interest: Egalitarian New Worlders would like to witness those old European genius ‘masters’ brought down a notch or two by having it explained how they were just tricksters; paradoxically, this would make their works more accessible since Americans just love the idea that creativity is finally but a ‘do-it-yourself’ paint-by-numbers activity that can be mastered if only you knew the techniques; even the sophisticated city dwellers cannot resist being awed by snake oil salesmen — this naivete, too, is part of the American dream bolstered by a pioneer spirit; and any diversion that arouses passionate polemics would be a welcome relief from the post September 11 depression syndrome. In fact, my (American) friend smiled, you could say this is another expression of “America strikes back!”

Hockney, his shoulders bent so that it looks as if he’s developing a late hump (he did say that all of this had started with a hunch), and apparently totally deaf, introduced a BBC film made on the subject. The film, frenetically applauded, was a marvel of humor and insight. Some sadness too. In it he was shown walking through the masterpieces of smoke and mirrors left us by Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres and others. Apparently he has more than a thousand ‘cases,’ reproductions of artworks qualifying for examination, pinned to his studio wall. His curiosity was first aroused by the strong light on the faces of patrons sitting for their portraits in studios, light only found outside under the sun or close to a fierce window. Then the film showed him attempting to reproduce the methods and means ostensibly used by the ancients. This involved dressing up desirable young men in Medieval apparel and draping bunches of grapes over their curly heads. One of them had distinctly rosy, tumescent lips. You could envision the juices. A lot of this was, perhaps inadvertently, very funny. It could be done, sure, but the procedure was cumbersome and the results inferior. Some gems were brought to our attention, like a Dutch drinking scene with all the revelers left-handed, including the monkey at the bottom of the frame. But all in all, he seemed to negatively disprove his theories: his own work, done by simple eyeballing, trusting the well-worn working relationship between eye and hand, was far better and much more ‘life-like’ than all this complicated maneuvers necessitating apparatuses. I could not help but think what a great artist he is, and how typical with this unlikely, cranky obsession!

In the ensuing commentary on the film, he did elucidate a few points. For example, according to a London curator (Hockney says) one can indeed see on a Caravaggio painting how he made initial markings from an upside down projected image, then turned the canvas right way up to continue painting. On the other hand, after watching Hockney laboriously trying to reproduce the procedure he thought Van Eyck used to paint the very intricate chandelier dangling from the ceiling in the Arnolfini portrait, I was left wondering why Van Eyck did not then do the same in order to make the wedding couple more ‘realistic.’ They are waif-like and willowy, very distinctly not life-like! And how (a questioner wanted to know) did Michelangelo succeed in giving such an intense appearance of realness to the hands of his Piëta sculpture? In other words, was the perception and depiction of what is ‘real’ really dependent on lenses?

Panel discussions were to follow, pitting intellectual luminaries of the likes of Svetlana Alpers and Keith Christiansen and Jonathan Crary and James Elkins and Susan Sontag and Martin Kemp against one another. Fur and spittle were certainly going to fly. But I’d had my fill. Besides, I had far better nourishment in mind — a meal and some wine in a restaurant on Thompson Street with friends, including a fine painter from down under now working at Yale.

Over wine we thought about how man has since the beginning tried to imitate or reconstruct the ‘real’ (why? to appropriate the power of the image and the creative act, or to deny it its potency?), about how this activity was kept secret in dark caves, exactly the way movies are still projected in dark rooms — and does this not mean that man must go inside himself in order to see the light, and too, that he knows obscurely he has to ‘reproduce’ but also ‘invent’ an image which, exactly, should not be an exact replica of the model? Then the conversation turned to the similarities between painting and writing, at least in approach. There is painting in writing and a lot of writing in painting. Both present us with human constructs about the nature of reality. More precisely, they make us aware of the nature of seeing — that is, the mystery, the wobbles and approximations and limitations and interpretations — and alert us to the fumbling mounting of consciousness by words. (With hose-clad legs sticking out comically below the black cloth.)

Florence saw the ‘invention’ of perspective in representation, with apparently converging lines and diminishing sizes as observed and operated from a single-point position. Bruges and Ghent developed the Flemish approach, where successive ‘squares’ of a painting would receive the same intensity of attention to closeness and to detail, creating the effect of a collage, ‘flattening’ the surface. The same differences between closeness and distance can be observed in writing; it is defined by one’s interpretation of or need for verisimilitude. Is seeing and rendering life a process of parsing and discarding, separating the important from the ‘supporting’ and the drivel — or is it a dissolution, a way of entering the rhythms of creation?

‘Voice’ has to do with point of view. If you wish to maintain a certain distance and an objective, authorial authority, you’d want the omniscient voice, or at least the singular awareness, which relates to the fixed point of perception from where everything is put in perspective. In foregrounding that which you consider to be important, you’d inevitably ‘distort’ or ‘blur’ the rest, the surroundings. What is out of focus in painting would correspond, in writing, to that which needs to be kept in mind but is not momentarily present in the line of telling. In writing we refer to this as providing ‘setting’ and sketching ‘secondary characters.’ To maintain the illusion of life-likeness — nothing exists in isolation — you have to make the setting believable and, to a certain extent, alive, without it becoming intrusive. In a painting the looker will graze his eye over the surface, taking in both the essential and the ‘background’ and putting each in its place instinctively; in writing this relates to rendering the description of the ‘background’ vivacious enough for it to be kept in mind (or memory) for long enough to still be operative. The living memory of the text must be kept immediate. As writer you have to develop and establish the bird’s-eye view while still recognizing and accommodating the fact that the reader will read sequentially. How do you keep that which is out of sight as alive as aftertaste or as an echo? Writers have, of course, developed various techniques for doing so — mainly by creating resonance through patterns, flashbacks and metaphors. The time / totality of conception in painting and writing may be the same, but the reader will be handicapped by the obligatory linearity in apprehending the text. Can it be different? Can it not be argued that, so as to hook the reader, a story should have thrust and not just be thrashing about?

The ‘collage’ approach will depend on how close you want to be to the words. By breaking down the fixed or singular point of view, you actually get inside the painting or text. You may merge, may even become matter.

The two different approaches have interesting implications. One could argue that ‘perspective’ denotes a choice for coherence of vision and for a hierarchy of images, where some figures and motifs will be more important than others. It would suggest that you subscribe to the notion of conveying a ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ since you are bringing forward a central narrative. You are the master of your domain, in charge of your fate, a reasoning man facing the chaos of creation. This sense of purpose and order, an expression of our need to understand, can only be achieved through illusions. ‘Reality’ in a work of art is there because of the contrast with what is not real.

One approaches and appropriates ‘reality’ through imagination. The human needs to invent himself and his circumstances, and identifies through projection. Understanding is a leap of the imagination. Writing, for instance, is moving forward through imagination. Writing is imagination projection. The reader/onlooker will be involved because he/she moves with the ongoing or unfolding observations setting off linkages and creating patterns. Movement, which includes turning back to where one has already been, is an attribute of consciousness. So is the establishment of a periphery because it creates the illusion of being centered.

‘Collage,’ on the other hand, will imply a more diffused vision, you could almost say a more democratic attitude; one accepts the ostensibly more natural and pragmatic assessment of two-dimensionality (this is a picture on a flat surface, not ‘reality’; this is a story, not ‘life’) as contrasted to the illusion of three dimensions suggested by perspective (this is an evocation or mimicry of ‘out there,’ which in your mind will become a reconstruction of ‘real life’). In ‘collage’ you are allowing, implicitly at least, for the autonomy of the means. Attention is sucked into the very surface of the text and to the material used. In painting, the ‘background’ as colors, contours and textures — not necessarily being anything more than paint — will be the environment contrasting or chiming with the ‘figures’ which stand out in the looking. In writing this environment will be language itself. You will work more with the text-ure and the immediacy of words as living organisms.

One may perhaps wish to go further by suggesting that these two ways of making, of engaging consciousness, have ethical repercussions. Certainly ‘perspective’ implies more authority, a stronger sense of generally accepted moral conventions, and a clearer conviction of what ‘identity’ is all about. ‘Collage’ could be interpreted as anarchistic, where one is not looking for Truth but for connections, and Reality would then be a point of view, a passage continually reinvented, recast, questioned, mediated and discarded.