Consciousness and Art

University Hall, Rm 134

Across human cultures, there is a boundless variety of aesthetic preferences and modes of artistic representation, but as with many other aspects of human behavior, certain universalities emerge upon broad analysis of global art history. It seems almost trivial to point out, for example, that line is present in every society that ever made drawings or paintings. Recent art history has demonstrated that line is not mandatory when making a picture: Impressionism, pointillism, color field painting, and abstract expressionism are full of examples of art that do not utilize line at all. But these carefully chosen exceptions serve to point out the ubiquity of line, which is potentially explained in large part by an evolutionary psychology perspective. As an artist, I explore this concept. Vision, like all perceptual processes, cuts utilitarian corners when reporting information to the brain and as a result omits, modifies, supplements, and takes wild guesses with sensory input. The resulting perceptual experience of reality is in large part a construction, and while useful and not noticeably contrived, it is no more representative of an objective reality than the art that it makes possible. In this perspective, line is revealed to be an invention of the human mind, and a result of a necessarily sensitive process of edge accentuation in the visual process. My presentation for the symposium would analyze the elements and principles of art through a cognitive psychological perspective using research done in that field, art history, and my own body of work.