For artwork to hold significance or persuasion, according to the ancient Greeks, it must have grounding in reality.
How about a rock and its watery reflection falling into outer space,
a toppled lighthouse
and reeds in a lost lake?
What more puzzling, reality turned upside down or abstract art?
Birgit,
Strangeness week, indeed! I find the first the most disorienting; it seems that switching horizontal and vertical is less cognitively acceptable than switching up and down. Its surreal quality reminds me of Jerry Uelsmann.
The last is interesting because flipping it has put the clouds back at the top, where they seem more natural than reflected at the bottom. So we get conflicting clues here. But the distortion of the reflection is fairly slight, so it feels less peculiar than it might.
Steve,
Ignoramus that I am, Jerry Uelsmann only entered my consciousness a couple of days ago after I had processed images for this post and, perhaps, also my next one. It remains to be seen how much of an inspiration he will be for me.
Having spent decades on scientific illustrations, I find my present form of photography and Adobe Photoshopping liberating.
Upside down is only puzzling when normal cues are less obvious than they are in the lighthouse picture. Turned sideways is tantalizing.
Birgit:
Sensitive eye.
The shallowness of the water adds a lot to these images. It allows for a gradation across that is more visually engaging than had it been all surface reflection. Instead of a rock studying itself, we see it occupying a sort of place.
Furthermore, the complexity of the photo causes one to stop and take a visual inventory. This teasing out of depth, surface, reflection and objects and the mysterious aroma and flavor that arises in the senses, has a lot to do with provoking an aesthetic response. Steve isn’t the only one with a horse here. I ride an assertion that the aesthetic response is our sensing of a sort of parallelism; maybe another set of dimensions, that pervades our existence. When we move to get a better camera angle or arrange things just so, we are interacting with this overall thing. The book on Rudolph Steiner awaits me at the store and I might get a better idea of his thinking on these matters.
Jay,
What a interesting thought: the aesthetic response is our sensing of a sort of parallelism; maybe another set of dimensions, that pervades our existence.
Reading up about Uelsmann, I came across the idea of ‘synchronicity’, which I suppose could be viewed as another dimension?
It will be interesting to see where we, here on A&P, will be going.
Birgit:
David has his eye on Florence. I suggest Disneyland.
Off to the web to brush up on ‘synchronicity’. It’s earliest manifestation, for me, goes back to late cubism – I’m thinking Delaunay, if I spelled the name right.
Birgit,
Your original question was “what is more puzzling, reality turned upside down or abstract art?
AS a puzzle, it seems to me that “reality turned upside down” is clearly the answer. But the question of reading the art and responding to it is different, I think, and in this case I bow to Jay, whose reading is quite delicious and enhances my understanding of your photographs.
But I’m not sure about Jay’s philosophic point — for one thing, I’m not sure what it means — or perhaps, I’m not sure I believe it. I find the idea mildly interesting, but less so than my response to your photographs. Don’t ask me why that’s important, either….
June:
Bowing?
I didn’t have a philosophical point in mind, actually. And belief has little to do with it. More that I was reporting a perspective that I seem to find in a lot of places.
Yes, the book on Rudolph Steiner finally came in and it’s somewhat turgid. However, it appears that the man had a vivid sense of a spiritual dimension that, for him, manifested itself in abstract thought, and, if I’m understanding the author, aesthetics.
On one level, Steiner’s, lifelong preoccupation is compelling, But otherwise, I myself am not much impacted by it. It’s a matter of entertaining a proposition without necessarily believing in it, but feeling a breeze nevertheless.
Thank you, Jay, for introducing me to Robert Delaunay. Researching his work, I was eventually led Sonia Delaunay and the Ragged Cloth Cafe.