Art as Visual Music & The Importance of Form

Art

During history, pictorial art has had different functions and served different purposes: decoration, education, mnemotechnical tool (support of memory), etc. Its earliest use, however, most probably was for symbols, and there is not much doubt that the oldest symbols served the oldest lore, magic.

I am bold enough to claim that symbology is still the most important part of art. Not necessarily quantitatively, but as the part reaching the deepest into our minds. If we develop it to its extreme, we land in a form of mathematics, or at least something analogous to mathematics.

Its complementary visual opposite is abstract art (also taken to its extreme), an art without a meaning. Instead it shares the basis with music: it is entirely sensual. Harmony, contrast, counterpoint, colour – a dynamic balance that speaks to the senses without intellectual processing.

Absorbing abstract art is hard, much harder than enjoying music. Still they are much the same, only for different senses. The reason for this is found within ourselves. Our brain is geared to find recognisable objects in every visual impression. It tries to find a face, a human body, a hand, a claw, or any object it can define. It tends to find a picture more agreeable when it shows something. If it cannot find anything, it loses interest and judges it as nonsense. There is no such compulsion when it comes to hearing. I have never heard of anyone trying to find recognisable everyday sounds in music in order to find it enjoyable.

To be able to enjoy an abstract painting as a form of visual music, to experience its harmony and balance; its movement, proportion, depth, shape and colour sensually, it is necessary to train away the compulsion to intellectualise it or to distinguish something recognisable in it. That is easy for some people, hard for others, and for a few it is impossible. But only very, very few individuals have this ability instinctively.

Why would sight and hearing differ in this respect? Obviously sight is closer to the intellect, and then it reflects the intellect's undue dominance in another way as well. Of the brain areas used for processing of sensory information, 80-90% are used for sight.

It is worth mentioning that most so-called abstract art is not more than semi-abstract. That is, it depicts something, although to various degrees deliberately abstracted. This art requires intellectual processing, it is not entirely sensual and is therefore irrelevant for this discussion. I here refer only to totally abstract art.

Even in a totally abstract picture, the individual spectator might find recognisable objects, people or beings. That is an interesting phenomenon illustrating the almost boundless imagination the brain possesses when it comes to finding meaning, even where no meaning exists.

Form

One of the most interesting aspects of creative art, or other creative activity, is how to generate variation within a limited framework. The most refined forms of art are those which have very limiting canon; that is, those with predefined rules strictly binding them. That requires more of the creator than if everything is free and allowed. Examples are, for instance, the musical art of composing fugues, a very strictly bound form; the pictorial art of traditional heraldry, bound by canonical rules; playing chess, or by all means all mathematical games; and metric poetry. All of them have their greatness in variation within a tight framework of pre-set rules. To some extent even sports can be included. What would remain of football or tennis if they weren't bound by rules? Art, perhaps all human activity, loses its quality if totally unregulated, if it has no closed framework within which to operate. This framework can be very detailed or vague and general, it can be defined by others or by yourself - but a framework you need, otherwise everything becomes nonsense.

“All songs must end before we can know them. Without borders on a thing it cannot be comprehended as a whole.”

(O.S.Card, Songmaster)

The most important thing about art is the frame, because without frame it's just, "What's that shit on the wall?"

(Frank Zappa)

Such nonsense is not nature's nonsense, but the nonsense of our mind. The compulsion of finding or creating order by regulation is a property of the brain. We need a frame around a picture to enclose it and set boundaries, but boundaries exist only in our mind, they bear witness of our limitation, not the limitation of reality.

(The article is based on material previously published in Meriondho Leo, and in my e-book “From Vision to Visual Music”, 2017.)

This article is part 2 of 2. Part 1 is Symbols & Their Opposite: Mathematics & Music

Related article:

Brain & Horror Vacui (Fear of the void)

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