The Inocent Eye
The Inocent Eye
The Inocent Eye
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to The Journal of Aesthetic Education
ERIK FORREST
Erik Forrest is Professor of Art at Ohio University. His articles have appeared in
Studies in Art Education, Leonardo, and Dialogue.
There are similarities here to the controversy raised by Thomas Kuhn and
his followers about the forms of scientific change and about the relation-
ships between science and reality.
Kuhn argues that the normal work of the scientist is encompassed by a
framework which "defines a coherent research tradition." This research
tradition is controlled by sets of presuppositions-both conceptual and
methodological-that find their expression "in the 'standard' examples
through which students learn the prevailing theories of the field."8 These
examples set the norms for what constitutes "good" science; set out for
students not only what they are expected to do as scientists but also what
kinds of questions are scientific questions and can therefore be raised
legitimately in a scientific context; and what kinds of answers would be
acceptable. There are paradigmatic examples of these which are easily
and, in this century particularly, the nature of reality itself. In the place
of a view of science as the exploration of an ultimately objective reality
waiting to be discovered by the researcher, Kuhn puts diverse views of the
present scientific enterprise as a way, but only one way, in which the
world of science may be organized.
During the Renaissance there had been close relationships between
artistic and scientific change. Sometimes the artists too were scientists,
and both disciplines shared in the excitement of new forms of enquiry.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the structure and philo-
sophical foundations of the disciplines had grown apart, both artists and
scientists began to be affected by radically different views of their rela-
tionship to the external world. The artist rejected the concept of the
"innocent eye" (closely paralleling the notion of the scientist's view of
himself as the discoverer or uncoverer of already existent entities, phe-
nomena, and natural laws) in favor of systems of aesthetic structure,
affected no doubt by the world external to the artist but primarily prod-
ucts of individual sensibility and creativity.
What leads the artist or scientist to feel the need to modify a symbol
scheme or to come up with a new scheme? Why might a painter or scien-
tific researcher feel discontent with the way he or she currently works and
wish to change to another? What leads to the attempts to break away
from present styles and methods and replace them with something com-
pletely different?
No simple answer is likely to be satisfactory. Afflicted with some feel-
ings of general dissatisfaction with earlier or current symbol schemes or
symbol systems, new possibilities are erected, new alternatives proposed.
The present system is no longer adequate; the explanations it provides are
no longer convincing; the predictions that stem from it fail; the represen-
tations created by it seem no longer to capture the essential element; the
solutions found by the system's procedures are too complex or do not
appear to cover the required ground; the system is too unsystematic, too
rough or, alternatively, is too systematic, too neat, removes too many of
the rough edges; observed or understood similaries between phenomena
are not covered by the system or are not well enough covered; a desire is
felt to integrate significant, dominant symbol systems that already exist in
the culture (perhaps now seen as aspects of a further, more comprehensive
symbol system); a present perspective begins to seem disordered, chaotic;
a need is felt for greater economy. Added to these specific reasons is
the more general one that our culture primes us to expect and to strive for
more rightness, more security, more truth, more happiness.
Given these perceived restrictions and inadequacies in the world, what
kinds of things will enable us to see the world differently, that is, enable us
to devise new aesthetic and scientific schemes which are less prone to the
still life or landscape viewed from a fixed viewpoint; discarded was the
necessity to find transitional tones of subtlety and complexity between
major areas of tonal change; added were multiple viewpoints and multiple
perspectives; imposed were processes of fragmenting and reassembling.
4. Not only do artists give different weight to different elements and
order the elements of their art differently, they also use distinctive and
personal methods of deformation and distortion. When Modigliani or El
Greco stretch and elongate figures and their surroundings, when Picasso in
his "Greek" period evolves a kind of heavy-limbed, heavy-breasted figure
type, when Golub suggests significance with massive weight and limited
detail, when Henry Moore distorts the figure to reveal its elemental con-
nection with the rock and cliff structures of Yorkshire, processes of dis-
tortion in the service of new schemata are taking place.
These are but some of the ways in which artists create new worlds, "a
new world which is the work of art. Each work originates just as does the
cosmos-through catastrophes which, out of the chaotic din of instruments
ultimately create a symphony, the music of the spheres. The creation of
works of art is the creation of the world."'14 So, somewhat grandiloquent-
ly, writes Kandinsky on innovation.
The adoption of a new "frame of reference" has been noted. It is worth
emphasizing how often that new frame is borrowed from another world,
another discipline. Very often, the creation of a new vision comes, as
Kandinsky puts it, from "a thundering collision of different worlds." As
Seurat used the viewpoints of Goethe and Chevreul, so have other artists
looked to optics, to psychology, to politics, to biology, to sociology, either
for new material or, more often, for a new viewpoint from which old
material and old methods might be reassessed. Malevitch writes that "no-
thing in the objective world is as serene and unshakeable as it appears to
our conscious minds. We should accept nothing as pre-determined-as con-
stituted for eternity. Every firmly established familiar thing can be shifted
about and brought under a new and, primarily, unfamiliar order."' s It is
this phenomenon, more than any other, which leads us to view each epoch
as characterized by a zeitgeist, or at least as having some important shared
characteristics in different media and across different disciplines.
Sometimes the new emerges from almost total rejection. Alan Davie,
teaching in England in the fifties and very much basing his teaching on his
own practices as an "Abstract Expressionist" painter, would have his stu-
dents make a mark on a piece of paper, decide on the next appropriate
mark-and then do the exact opposite. "I always encourage the use of
irrational or crazy ideas and the result of intuitive action will always be
distinct and positive."'16 That doing of the contrary for the sake of its
surprise value, or just as a means of breaking down the conventional re-
sponse, is one obvious way of seeking the innocent eye, the new approach.
in which, for example, a row of Coke bottles is set. In one the space is
occupied by an old radio: the radio is turned on, and music or speech can
be heard, that is, quoted within the work of visual arts.
Given these ways in which new possibilities might arise, we also need
criteria for evaluating the new, in our own work and in that of others.
The forming or newly formed scheme might be worth pursuing, or worth
valuing, on the basis
But these are just examples. Depending on the kind of symbol system
we use, criteria will have to be found to fit them.
The degree to which any criterion is satisfied is another matter. No
numerical measure is likely to be possible. We will be flung back on levels
of economy, simplicity, coherence, as such concepts can be found to apply
to the criterion in question. For each symbol system applications will be
different: what we would take as economy of expression in a Mozart sym-
phony will not be the same as what we take to be economy of expression
in a piece by Boulez; in the one case, a delicacy of melodic line and clear
simple harmonies; in the other, the isolation of single notes surrounded
by their envelope of silence and subtle harmonics. So, too, with all and
any other applications of criteria.
But it would be foolish to imagine that the concept of the "innocent
eye" is no longer of any value. While it does not appear to offer the kind
of new insight to help satisfy the aforementioned criteria, the search for a
"new vision" goes on, and the wide-eyed, unprejudiced, innocent stare
will still, as it always has, help to combat prejudice and misconception.
NOTES
2. See especially M. Van Senden, Space and Sight (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Pres
3. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 298.
4. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1968), p. 7.
5. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 298.
6. Howard Gardner, Artful Scribbles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 259.
7. Howard Gardner, The Arts and Human Development (New York: Wiley, 1973),
p. 10.
8. lain Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms (New York: Harper, 1974), p. 103.
9. Ibid., p. 104.
10. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 147-48.
11. Ibid., p. 6.
12. Barry Barnes, T. S. Kubn and Social Science (New York: Macmillan, 1982),
p. 22.
13. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 33.
14. Wassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences," in Modern Artists on Art, ed. R. L.
Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 35.
15. Kasimir Malevitch, "Suprematism," in Modern Artists on Art, p. 98.
16. Alan Davie, The Developing Process (Newcastle: University of Newcastle Press,
1959), p. 22.