Give me a Clark bar any day. You mean that Pepe doesn’t comment on the guitar theme? The guitar is oft mentioned, but how often in a tactile frame of reference?

I’m not sure what other scanning studies were done. I’d ask Stine Vogt for her thesis, but I’ve already too much to read. Her basic premise involved interference between a “decoding” mode of perception, which we usually engage in without thinking, and a “veridical” mode in which we try to reduce the amount of unconscious interpretation, as an artist trying to see “real” colors in a scene might do.

I’m still chewing of the Karmel, but in general he is not reading so closely as TJ Clark. As for memes, I can’t believe nobody has mentioned the obvious association of guitar with the female body. Particularly for Picasso, who was very concerned with the figure (and women). “Ma jolie” is/was a common pet name for “my girlfriend,” but its use in the refrain of a popular song certainly fit with a portrait of his lover playing guitar.

Some quick takes:

I assume that the study using the optical scanning method addressed a limited question – artist/non-artist. The same methodology could be used to follow that same artist as heshe observed a variety of images. Does the scanning sequence change and, if so, why?

Can the aboriginal person maintain the absolute orientation in a windowless room? When pictures are arranged in a North/South orientation, is the direction true or just an approximation of magnetic or polar North/South?

You sampled the bag of Karmels more than did I. I can’t remember to what extent he got into the Cubist subjects: guitars, glasses, stickers and the like – things to be picked up and handled. And then stuff that we might be inclined to call “memes” these days, that get under the skin and take up residence there. “Ma Jolie”, if I got the title right, was, I believe, the name of a popular song. I can imagine Braque saying: “You know, Picasso, a thousand things happen to me while I’m painting a picture. How can I get that down?

Something else came to mind about our increasingly visual perception. My physical therapist told me to balance on one foot with my eyes closed to train my proprioceptors. Supposedly, proprioception diminishes as one get older. Makes sense. Most of us don’t do much running over irregular territories. Instead, we sit on our office chairs, car seats, sofas. Not much challenge for our joint receptors.

I don’t think there’s a disagreement, as long as “differences between the Aboriginal and the Western way of perceiving” are understood as being learned from the culture, not inherent. That’s how I read it, anyway.

The relation of visual perception and touch is considered quite important in the Pepe Karmel book on cubism (see this recent post for a quote). The dominant, empiricist model of learning to perceive visual objects involved associating them with the concrete objects that can be felt and manipulated. After the Impressionists’ efforts to learn from the optics of visual perception, the Cubists were interested in re-introducing touch, making objects (and space itself) palpable. Braque wished to re-establish “a tactile or palpable feeling. It’s very nice to make people see something, but if you can make them touch it, that’s better still!”

I find Chomsky very hard to read, and I usually disagree with him.

I would like to think that the differences discussed by Deborah Barlow are cultural. The mentioning that aborigines have a

“predilection for a sensitivity of touch, a hapticity or physical quality different from the visual sensation of eyesight…The painters seemed to me to understand space as an emotional idea, the capacity to feel this idea often excluding any need to visualise what was represented.”

makes me think of our children’s desire to touch. I too like to touch but am inhibited by the watchful eyes of the museum guards.

Thus, I don’t buy

Bardon’s observations speak to profound differences between the Aboriginal and the Western way of perceiving. David Michael Levin (author of Sites of Vision) makes this distinction: “I think it is appropriate to challenge the hegemony of vision in the ocularcentrism of our culture. And I think we need to examine very critically the character of vision that predominates today in our world.”

I propose that touching is beaten out of us and therefore, by necessity, we have to rely on seeing.

The linguistic references look interesting. I might even understand some of what is written unlike a talk by Chomsky that I attended in the midseventies.