PERCEPTUAL ART OF JAMES TURREL

Perceptual Art of James Turrel

Perceptual Art of James Turrel

What is Perceptual Art?

Psychologist, philosopher, and critic Rudolph Arnheim explored the cognitive basis of art. With a background in Gestalt psychology, which emphasizes the perception of patterns, images, and forms as organized wholes, Arnheim sought to apply the principles of Gestalt psychology to the study of art. He examined, for example, the structures of an artwork—such as form, line, or color—and the emotional reaction that results. He wrote about multiple media such as painting, photography, film, architecture, and television. His theory about perception and art can be found in two of his well-known books, Art and Visual Perceptionand Visual Thinking, which explore the relationship between vision and cognition and the question of whether or not perception and thought differ (Wilson 2000, p. 48). Arnheim concluded that there was no difference: Perception, or the taking in of sensory information, was synonymous with thought. Thus, Arnheim critiqued the often-employed dichotomy between perception and reason as false. Employing the senses (seeing, hearing, and touching, but also, according to Arnheim, knowledge) was the way in which people imposed order on the world. Henry Schaeffer-Simmern's The Unfolding of Artistic Activityis another text that based accounts of cognition on Gestalt psychology, linking changes in children's artistic development to changes in perceptual development or learning.

Developmental Views of Cognition

The research and theories of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Howard Gardner, and David Perkins promote a view of cognition as the construction of meaning making, in which individuals build conceptual understanding from experiences over time. Such theories emphasize a developmental view of cognition that is constructed by an individual in relation to prior experiences and his or her environment. These views also emphasize a pluralistic view of intelligence, involving many different cognitive processes. Both Gardner and Perkins have argued that intelligence is multidimensional. Perkins, for example, has argued for three dimensions of intelligence: neural, experiential, and reflective. Gardner, Perkins, and several of their colleagues at Harvard Project Zero, a research organization that has examined arts education and human development since its inception in the 1960s, have examined the unique contributions that the arts make in relation to thinking and human development. Recently, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein identified 13 features of thinking in their study of eminent thinkers across disciplines: observing; imagining, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, analogizing, bodily thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and synthesizing. Many of these operations have been identified in other research and theories as well, but they hold implications for those in the artistic fields (Tulving 2000, p. 102).

This view of cognition as multidimensional and situated within an interaction of mind and environment is also found in the work of curriculum theorists Elliot Eisner and Madeleine Grumet, who have argued, along with Perkins and Gardner, that the arts offer unique cognitive contributions. Eisner has argued that the arts help us develop a disposition toward ambiguity, attend to an environment's expressive features, stimulate the imagination, and present forms of and opportunities for representation ...