Organized perception is what art is all about.
—Roy Lichtenstein
Our visual perception systems provide all human beings with a profound commonality and continuity. Just as we are hard-wired to learn language, our perceptual system is hard-wired to “see” in a particular way. Perceptual theory holds that perceptual laws govern what we see. Individual experiences attach unique meanings to those patterns of visual organization, and many are culturally determined. But the perceptual patterns themselves are not necessarily unique to the individual. These are human visual processes. We do NOT see the world as it is, but as humans see it.
An individual’s actions, beliefs, and language are unique, shaped DNA and environment, “nature and nurture,” experiences, and purpose. Individuals have unique experiences; they may also be culturally predisposed towards certain actions and responses, through understanding different sounds, characters, and vocabulary as language, articulating meanings from a particular set of symbols. Individuals also have the capacity to “see” the point of view of the “other.” We can empathize with difference. We can understand that some critical discourses may be descriptive, some judgmental, some are indirect and metaphorical, others factual, ironic, analytic, fantastic, humorous, absurd, psychological or lies.
We can understand multi-levels of belief and meanings, entertain simultaneously contradictory truths, suspend belief while engrossed in make-belief, fiction, and play, and follow the trail of logical argument, solve puzzles, mysteries, and construct and project conspiracy theories.
According to Max Wertheimer and other pioneering Gestalt psychologists, the perceptual process of seeing any of the relationships in which the viewer comprehends the whole are meaningful experiences, experiences that transcend mere recognition of a concept, idea, or object in the physical world or what they might symbolize. The contextual ground that informs the figure, the process by which we complete the incomplete or recognize the part within the whole, the experience of making connections and understanding, putting together, the seeing that is more than just looking, are all meaningful.
Wertheimer said that an “inner stipulation” guides whole processes and that our recognition of this inner stipulation is meaningful. He wrote, “The processes of whole-phenomena are not blind, arbitrary, and devoid of meaning—as this term is understood in everyday life. To comprehend an inner coherence is meaningful; it is meaningful to sense an inner necessity…In all such cases meaningfulness obtains when the happening is determined not by blindly external factors but by concrete ‘inner stipulation.’ Hence, we may say in general that a whole is meaningful when concrete mutual dependency obtains among its parts.”
Visual art is an example of “inner stipulation.” Paintings, drawings, and designs are wholes in which the parts exhibit a concrete mutual dependency among and upon one another. This is integration. The artist’s integrating of the work’s visual structure creates a link to the viewer’s perceptual processes. Viewers construct their own meanings, make assumptions, forms opinions, associations, and value judgments based upon their own experience, purpose, and interests. A picture is worth a thousand words, but those words will be different for different individuals.
NOTES:
Ellis, Willis D., A Sourcebook of Gestalt Psychology, (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paulk Ltd, 1955), 16.
Michael Torlen