Information is Beautiful

"The eyes and minds of beholders..."

I just bought this lovely book by author-designer-thinker, David McCandless, a contributor to Wired magazine and The Guardian newspaper, amongst other things. He uses visual communication and infographics to clarify many complex issues, uncover what have been generally perceived as accepted truths to be, well, clearly not truths at all, and to make some very sharp cultural and political observations via crisp colour-coded diagrams that are more than the sum of their parts...

Much of the graphs and graphics are lovely to behold, regardless of their sometimes very serious and worrying content. Their poetic 'balance' is often reminiscent of minimal art such as the grids of Piet Mondrian, or Suprematism, whilst others look like bauhaus designs or its antithesis, Pop Art... and like Pop Art often reappropriate the symbols of our everyday environment. And these visuals, unlike some minimalist art, convey very clear and easily assimilated meaning.

Anyway, rather than reading my words describing his visuals, why not just take a look at his rather excellent and generous website: Information Is Beautiful. Yes it is.

A Tale Of Two Dogs

"You paw things..."

[ The last entry made me think about this little parable concerning, age, experience, effort, achievement... This is just 'paws for thought', I do not expect this to become a 'dog-blog'... Not that I'd mind. ]

There is a house.
In the house there lives a family and their two dogs.
Their house is a home.
One dog is young and energetic.
The other one is old, experienced and seasoned.
The young dog loves to bark and play and chase things, like squirrels and its own tail.
The older dog prefers to lay near to the hearth at the feet of his master or mistress.
The children love the young dog because he is noisy and funny and always seems to be doing something…. and visitors all notice the young dog as it plays tuggy-rope, or chases its tail or starts after squirrels and barks at birds.
One dog spends its energy going round-and-round in circles or chasing after something that it cannot catch… popular and entertaining, perhaps, but actually achieving very little.
The other is reliable and, in turn, relies on experience and knows how things work around the home – he has the experience and strength to do what is really important to everyone in the house.
The master and mistress know which dog can be trusted to see off a rat or an intruder and to look out for their children when they are not there to do so.
(…and, they also know that one dog will learn from the other…)

Praise Dog!

"homo canis sapiens"

We have had plenty of snow this winter. It came much earlier than usual in what I heard has been the coldest December for 30 years. Here in Snowdonia, it is more likely to be snowing in February-March rather than December-January, but there has been snow on the ground for more than three weeks and in our mountains it lays an even 10 cm on level ground with drifts of up to a metre. Roads and schools have been closed. So, we have been putting food out for the birds and our garden has been visited by a good variety of the feathered folk… the expected Yuletide robins, blackbirds, thrush, tits, finches, jackdaws and the pheasant that became a regular last winter.

When we had a dog, visits to the garden punctuated the day, now, it is the empty bird feeders that coax us out into the cold (or the occasional urge to have snowball battles… or build a snow creature). So, missing Watson-the-dog whilst filling the feeders, I was thinking about the Horizon TV programme last week, which was investigating how closely and naturally we interact with domestic dogs. It was an interesting documentary that was, mainly, scientists confirming what was already deep, instinctual knowledge to dog lovers. They can read us. They are attuned to our moods. They are ‘in-sync’, empathic almost to the point of telepathic.

The gist of the programme was that dogs are the only species apart from ourselves that are fully tuned in to human emotions. The higher apes are not capable of understanding our emotional cues, not even chimps, who are almost genetically related to us. Certainly cats are not. There have been series of experiments to support this, conducted by universities and research centres that looked like great places to work…

The observations from some of these experiments led my mind to Eugene Delacroix and a fuller understanding of something that I have been teaching my art history class for about a decade concerning the ‘left of centre resting gaze’...

Delacroix was neither an ape nor a feline, but was a revolutionary French Romantic painter and a primary influence upon the French Impressionists of the late C19th. He is credited as introducing the use of ‘structural colour’ as a method to govern the way the eye of the viewer moves over the picture plain. He used the distribution of colour within some of his major works as a way to direct how we actually look at his paintings and read the narrative they contain. The two examples I use to illustrate this are his famous 'Liberty Leading The People', and 'The Death of Sardanapalus' (1827).

I already knew that the place that the average human viewer wants to rest their gaze within a composition is slightly left of centre. Delacroix also knew this. I knew this fact without knowing why it was so. (I had my own theory that the act of art appreciation would be an activity dominated by the right-hemisphere of the brain, therefore giving a slight bias to look left.) If you divide these works in half horizontally and then in half vertically, you find the centre of the composition…. and slightly to its left, we find... nothing of interest. There is no reward, nothing to hold our interest, so the eyes look for something more satisfying. In Liberty we are attracted either to the yellow of the dress, or the red section of the flag. This keys us into those colours and then our eyes pick out the flashes of reds and yellows scattered around the composition. This is what gives the painting its sense of movement. Our eyes do not rest easy but are dragged from one key colour detail to the next. This movement of our eyes lends movement to the figures that are actually painted in a very posed manner, static as statues – which, in turn, gives the scene its sense of grandeur and historic import.

He used the same technique with Sardanapalus: slightly left of centre, our eyes find nothing to ‘hold on to’, so it is the red swathe that thrusts diagonally up through the composition, or the ivory white of the sultan’s robes that attract our attention, and then our eyes find the scattered rhythm of these two colours throughout the rest of the canvas. This gives the arrangement of quite static figure studies the atmosphere of a decadent orgy.

Right, back to the dog documentary (or dogumentary). It is a fact that the right side of our face more clearly and honestly expresses our emotions. This is supported by reams of evidence, and is common knowledge to profilers, psychologists, CIA operatives, councillors, etc… and dogs. All of us, except for... well very rare exceptions, are subconsciously aware of this. The right side of the face displays our actual emotions, whilst the expression on the left side displays the modified expression, when we ‘put on a brave face’, or try to give the socially appropriate response. When we look at another human face, we first look at it centrally, to recognise the features of the individual, then a fraction of a second later, we scan the right side of their face to read their emotions. To do this, our gaze finds centre, then shifts slightly left-of-centre – the same pattern as when we engage with a work of art. The key point about dogs is this: they also look at the human face with exactly the same pattern. They do not do this with other dogs, animals, or inanimate objects, they only respond in this subtle way to the human face… recognition of features, then reading of emotion through specifically selecting the right side of the face. There is no other animal that does this. Dogs are uniquely tuned into our true emotions.

The documentary also pointed out that we, as two species, communicate on a number of levels. Dogs recognise and respond to many complex verbal cues and commands and we can understand their limited vocabulary of barks, whines and growls. We both use facial expressions to communicate moods. We both rely on posture and body-language to convey a lot of information in addition to, and sometimes in contradiction of, vocal communication. Dogs can very quickly understand gestures such as pointing and other methods of indicating objects and direction. Again, chimps were shown to have major problems with understanding simple gestures and only a very few individual, female chimps have ever been trained to communicate with signing.

So why is it that dogs are unique in this way? Well, obviously, humans and dogs have been working closely together for a long time, possibly tens of thousands of years. During those millennia, we have been selecting and deselecting dog traits through breeding over countless generations. We have created the domestic dog out of the original wolf packs that began to hunt alongside prehistoric humans and shelter in the same caves during the last Ice age. The survival of our species may well be directly linked to this ongoing partnership with the canine clans. I believe this to be so.

The scientists on the Horizon documentary theorised that we began working closely together because we both used similar hunting methods, were both social carnivores, and through necessity both developed some sort of language - in order to coordinate the hunt and to maintain a social structure of some kind. Wolves that cooperated more readily and effectively with humans would have benefited from more successful hunts, scraps and bones, warm dry caves… Of course, this is a two way deal and humans who worked with wolves would stand a better chance of survival, more effective hunts, advanced warning of danger, defence against other predatory animals, additional warmth in the cave… And so the long, slow, but sure process of domestication began and the wolf eventually became the dog.

Back to the birds and another train of (perhaps whimsical) thought… When I go out to replace the seeds, nuts and fat-balls, the birds no longer take flight and disappear, they simply retreat to the hedge, or the higher branches of trees, watching until the food is re-stocked. They return as soon as I reach the back door. Birds also have a social structure, literally a ‘pecking order’, they have basic language, they have songs that mean safety, and alarm calls that warn of danger. By feeding the birds in our gardens, we are helping to select birds that do not fear us, and feel comfortable within an artificial environment. Are we beginning on that long, slow, but sure process of domestication? There are already ‘bird fanciers’ who have created loads of new varieties. Charles Darwin was fascinated by the pigeon breeders who create fancy varieties by selecting traits and emphasising them to create new dominant features in only a few generations. Not to mention chickens, eh?

Pigeons have been trained as missile guidance systems and also used in reconnaissance. So, in a few millennia, will we be co-dependent with birds? Each of us wearing specially accommodating head gear for our mini-flock to perch upon. With a few whistles and clicks (like a sheepdog handler) sending our birds off to let us know what’s over that hedge or round the next corner. Taking simple messages from one person to another in a noisy room or field. Locating the car keys. Finding a particular person in a crowd… Whistling our dogs over the hills and far away, singing the sky news.

It could happen… a little bird told me.

[For more about Delacroix and to see bigger images of 'Liberty' and 'Sardanapalus' go to Mark Harden's invaluable online Artchive... and I also discuss these works in Evolution of Western Art... ]

Is This Good Art?

"Time to reflect upon the meaning of life..."

Whilst trying to come up with a general definition of art with a group of students, we found ourselves discussing this image of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Turning The World Inside Outside’ (1995). As far as I recall, this piece was exhibited for part of the year in a clinically white gallery space, and then for part of the year in the open air amongst the Rollright Stones (near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire).

We thought that this does what good art should do. It is attractive and engaging. It does not initially challenge, offend or seem to be ‘really serious’… and it is a beautiful object.

It is something like a big silver apple, or a bauble off a Yuletide Tree. Like other reflective pieces by Kapoor (such as the great ‘Cloud Gate’ in Chicago's Millennium Park) it also has that funhouse mirror thing that entertains children and invites you in. As you approach it, you realise that you have been incorporated into it - your reflected image is now part of the ‘work’.

You cannot actually see the object itself. You can only see where its surface disrupts and distorts its environment. It does not stand apart from its surroundings, it alters them and reflects them back to the viewer, who is also altered and reflected back. By doing this, it presents us with a new viewpoint that incorporates the piece of art, its environment, and ourselves.

Perhaps this shows us what good art can do. Its presence changes the way we see our environment, ourselves and others within that environment, but to some extent, it is up to the individual to respond to that view and reflect on what it could mean. So good art should either reveal something to us that we were not previously aware of, about ourselves, others, or the wider world - or change our view of these elements and the way they interact. Hopefully by doing this, (good) art enriches our experience of being.

Or maybe it is sometimes enough for art to reflect reality and show us how subjective that concept may be…

Anish Kapoor Homepage - worth a look!

I discuss this work in the book Evolution of Western Art

What Is Art?

“I don’t know much about Art, but I know what I like… ”

This old cliché may be one of the best definitions we can agree on! There has always been difficulty in defining exactly what Art is. The perceptions of aesthetics vary so much from culture to culture (even from person to person). The definition of art is closely linked to the aesthetics of the culture that produced it. Oh no! Now there are two more words that we need to define: ‘Aesthetics’ and ‘Culture’… perhaps art is its own definition and the art a culture produces, defines that culture.

The word, ‘art’ comes from the Roman Latin word, ‘ars’ – meaning ‘art’ – which they defined as ‘a thing of beauty that was of human (as opposed to natural) origin’. (I think it's pronounced 'arz' but it gets more laughs if you say 'arse'.) Hence other similar words such as ‘artificial’, ‘artifice’... but just because something is artificial, it does not mean it is art… which means that there has to be a judgement of whether the thing is beautiful or not. So, what is ‘beauty’? And...

We’re right back to cultural differences and aesthetic perceptions…

In antiquity, there was not just ‘art’, there were ‘the arts’, which were perceived to be of two orders:

The first order were the liberal arts, or artes liberales, which were: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music and Philosophy – which was the highest of all and from which all other arts were derived. Aesthetics was a philosophy of beauty.

The second, lesser, order of arts were the technical arts: Architecture, Agriculture, Painting, Sculpture… and other manual Crafts, which seems closest to how most people think of 'the arts' today. (Perhaps we should show more cultural appreciation for the farmers' ploughed furrows as eARTh art.)

So what is art? I don't think there will be a definitive answer, though we can explore and discuss what makes good, or at least sucessful, art. That is a thread that I expect will run through this blog.