Учебно-методическое пособие для студентов специальности «Дизайн»
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Text 10 Cubism, probably, is the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture-that of a man-made construction, a col- ored canvas. If illusion is due to the interaction of clues and the absence of contradictory evidence, the only way to fight its transforming influence is to make the clues contradict each other and to prevent a coherent image of reality from destroying the pattern in the plane. Unlike the Fantin-Latour, a still life by Braque will marshal all the forces of perspective, texture, and shading, not to work in harmony, but to clash in virtual deadlock. Perhaps the most telling of these contradictions is Braque’s treatment of light. There are black patches on the apples where Fantin-Latour painted highlights. In thus inverting the re- lationships, the painter drives home the message that this is an exercise in painting, not in illusion. Cubism has sometimes been explained as an extreme attempt in compen- sation for the shortcomings of one-eyed vision. The picture embodies clues of which we could become aware only through movement or touch. We are made to see the outline of the table even under and behind the objects, and it can be claimed that this corresponds to our actual experience in life, where we always remain aware of the continued existence of objects half hidden by overlap. But whatever the theories of the cubists may have been and whatever whiffs of conversations may have reached them from the discussions of the critics, they were, after all, artists and not psychologists. The main impulse behind cubism must have been an artistic one. It is hardly just to look at cub- ism mainly as a device to increase our awareness of space. If that was its aim, it should be pronounced a failure. Where it succeeds is in countering the trans- forming effects of an illusionist reading. It does so by the introduction of con- trary clues which will resist all attempts to apply the test of consistency. Try as we may to see the guitar or the jug suggested to us as a three-dimensional ob- ject and thereby to transform it, we will always come across a contradiction somewhere which compels us to start afresh. 131 Some of the effects exploited by the cubists were known to art for a long time, though they remained in comparative obscurity as decorative devices. The mosaicists of the ancient world were fond of the trompe l’œil, but they also knew how to tease the eye with ambiguities. We have seen that they knew ambiguous patterns of the type discussed by the Gestalt psychologists. But the mosaicists of Antioch and Rome may have been as eager to counteract a purely spatial reading as were the cubists two thousand years later. The pattern of mosaic will suggest a spatial reading in every detail but tends to resist the effort to complete it consistently so that we are driven round and round. Ex- perimental psychology is familiar with this effect from the configuration called “Thiéry’s figure”. It is practically impossible to keep this figure fixed because it presents contradictory clues. The result is that the frequent reversals force our attention to the plane. Thiéry’s figure, presents the quintessence of cubism. But this device of artful contrariety is supplemented by other methods designed to prevent a con- sistent reading. Again we may go back to classical mosaics to find the first prototypes of these visual teasers. The whirling pattern from a floor in Rome will set us searching for a point of rest from which to start interpreting. We cannot find it, and so we have no means of telling which of the overlapping arcs is supposed to lie on top and which below. An analysis of cubist painting would reveal a great number of such devices to baffle our perception by the scrambling of clues. To see them in isolation, we had better return to the methods of commercial artists who have profited from these experiments. The most familiar is the divergence between outline and silhouette that results in the feeling that two images have been superimposed on each other. But the word “superimposed” somehow begs the question. It is precisely the point of these devices that it is often impossible to tell which of the shapes is meant to lie at the top and which below. A more complex device results in the impres- sion of transparent forms piled one upon the other but with the same ambigu- ity as to their sequence. The cubists discovered that we can read and interpret familiar shapes even across a complete change of color and outline. In earlier art the figure had to stand out unambiguously against the ground. In many contemporary posters, even letters or symbols are no longer formed of positive shapes. Relationships are reversed and still remain readable. These simple methods give the artist one extra dimension for the arrangement of forms without at the same time committing him or us to any one special reading. This type of ambiguity is cleverly exploited in a poster by McKnight Kauffer. We can read it in any number of ways for we cannot tell which of the “early birds” is actually leading, and though we may not be aware of it, his checker- board shapes contribute to the impression of rapid flight, just as the Roman 132 artist’s whirl resulted in a feeling of movement. The device recalls Eraser’s spiral, but the effect is the opposite. There our baffled perception finds refuge in an illusionary cohesion of forms. In cubism even coherent forms are made to play hide-and-seek in the elusive tangle of unresolved ambiguities. Gombrich E. H. Ambiguities of the Third Dimension // Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York, 1965. P. 281–285. жүктеу/скачать 0,79 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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