What is it about?
Explores the possibility that 20th century abstract expressionist paintings were based on the need to discriminate objects in natural fractal foliage. Artists were drawn to such abstract arrays because they triggered the deep seated semi-automatic visual search procedures of the visual brain. This hypothesis is supported by the close resemblance of such paintings to the fine branched fractal natural foliage arrays in which humans, over evolutionary time, needed to detect crucial forms in order to survive such as animals.
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Why is it important?
Provides an alternative explanation for the interest in abstract art to that of art critics and artists themselves base on recent research in neuroscience and how the visual brain functions.
Perspectives
Thanks to my previous research on the "abstract" geometric art that predates Upper Palaeolithic representational art, I wondered why early humans were interested in such abstract forms. This led me to investigate some more recent abstract paintings, such as that of Jackson Pollock and Mondrian, when I realized that the common factor could be found in the way the visual brain attempts see forms in noisy situations where the process begins with the extraction of simple geometic features that occurs in the preconscious stage of the perceptual hierarchy.
Derek Hodgson
University of York
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Graphic Primitives and the Embedded Figure in 20th-Century Art: Insights from Neuroscience, Ethology and Perception, Leonardo, February 2005, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/leon.2005.38.1.55.
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