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The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain

by Robert L. Solso
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003
294 pp., illus. 114 b/w, 24 col. Trade, $45.00
ISBN: 0-262-19484-8.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

pepperell@ntlworld.com

There has been a recent spate of titles in which eminent scientists of one sort or another have applied theories from their own field to the analysis of art (several have been reviewed in Leonardo). The art in question is almost invariably painting, from the period prior to the second half of the last century, and mainly drawn from the corpus of the major European museums. So we tend to get neurological accounts of Van Gogh or cognitive accounts of Manet, and the like. To be fair to Robert Solso, The Psychology of Art does consider several examples of artefacts from Africa and Asia alongside those from Europe and America, but otherwise it follows in much the same vein as others. It offers a "cognitive neuroscience account of aesthetics" based on a conventional evolutionary theory of mind (along the lines of ‘our perceptual systems evolved to find ripe berries and avoid tigers’) whilst efficiently summarising the current state of knowledge on perception, dealing with things like visual processing, cognition, and illusion. All this is illustrated with frequent (although not always necessary) references to well-known paintings.

Solso’s major theoretical contribution in the book is what he calls AWAREness, or "the five facets of consciousness". These include attention, wakefulness, architecture (the neural structures underpinning consciousness), recall, emotions plus several others that combine to form a working definition of consciousness as "a state of attentional wakefulness in which one is immediately aware of his subjective sensations" (p. 27). His aim is to arrive at an objective scientific account of what is an essentially subjective experience by attempting to "reduce the variance in defining the subjective experience we call consciousness". ‘Variance’ is a technical term from psychology referring to that which is controlled or minimized in experiments and is used here in order to create "an objective science of art" (p. 27). The notion of variance thus presented seems crucial to the methodology of Solso’s project, and yet we are given little by way of further explanation; there are brief mentions (such as on p. 128) but no reference in the index, where the inquisitive reader would naturally look.

Much of the book is spent outlining a range of topics that gives empirical insights into the way we see and think, including neuroanatomy, the visual system, perceptual illusions, and evolutionary biology. But while there is plenty of anatomical and empirical data to help us understand the primary processes of sight and perception, "the neurological trail goes cold", as Solso puts it, when we get to the bit that seems to matter—conscious experience itself. In order then to explain phenomena like aesthetic experience we are reduced to making "intelligent inferences" based largely on the principles of evolutionary necessity (survival and reproduction) out of which the basic attributes of consciousness and aesthetic sensitivity somehow emerge. So, for example, our brute, primal reactions to objects of attraction like the smell of roses were initially tied to survival needs but later acquire "secondary valences" such that "things become ‘beautiful’, not just ‘pleasing’. Food became ‘delicious’ more than simply consumable" (p. 255). Whether this forms the basis of an "objective science of art", or is just informed speculation, I found it hard to judge.

As I was reviewing The Psychology of Art, I met an undergraduate art student who, by chance, was also reading the book. She had found it useful for its clear and well-illustrated presentation of topics and data from the contemporary psychology of perception. It is less useful, I feel, as a contribution to our theoretical understanding of art or its relationship to mind. Of the 100 or so bibliographic references in the book, only around 10 were specifically on art, and several of these were general histories. What this fact reveals is a lack of depth and complexity in the author’s appreciation of this aspect of his topic. There are moments where the book misleads (Léger is described as an "overtly abstract" artist on p. 250), where the level of argument is reduced to truism ("Without light there would be no art, but without an eye to register the light there would still be no art" on p. 82), or where the conclusions are simply banal ("Faces have dominated art, especially Western art" on p. 132).

Naivety and banality are scarcely forgivable in a book purporting an academic study of art but perhaps understandable when the author is working well outside his field. What is less understandable, however, is the perpetuation of gross errors that have a bearing on the field in which the author has some specialist knowledge, namely the psychology of visual perception. For it has long been recognised that flat representations are quite unlike the real objects they represent, which is why we never mistake a photograph for what it depicts. Yet Solso asserts the most naïve view of representation when he says:

"All art is representational . . . at least partly. In the case of ‘realist’ art, as in illustrations by Norman Rockwell, a depicted object is made nearly identical with what the eye senses. Here a pumpkin looks like a pumpkin, a man like a man, a woman like a woman." (p. 248)

"What! Small, square and flat?" as Picasso is reputed to have jibed when a stranger asked him why he didn’t paint women as they really were and produced a photograph of his wife for reference. Solso evidently has a soft spot for Rockwell, whose brand of ‘realism’ he nevertheless recognises as "somehow slightly ‘idealised’", which to judge by the two examples he presents is an understatement. The first is a mawkish and highly contrived assemblage of "faces of people from around the world", entitled Do unto Others (1961), and the second a G.I. homecoming scene featuring a serviceman peeling potatoes with his doting "Mom", entitled Thanksgiving (1945). (Solso chides art critics for not treating such works as ‘serious art’). The level of discussion here descends from the naïve to the credulous, as the author abandons any semblance of scientific analysis or critical awareness: "This is Rockwell at his best. He shows people as they like to be seen and as we like to see them" (p. 249).

Given his irony-free enthusiasm for superficial Americana, it is no surprise that Solso is uncomfortable in the presence of contemporary art and criticism. His distaste for Lucien Freud’s portrait of the Queen is telling; "How could such a picture be produced by such a talented artist?" (p. 158). So, despite its pretensions to universality, The Psychology of Art contains little to no analysis of recent art, with the exception perhaps of Humphrey Ocean, the rather conventional portraitist whose head Solso scanned in a recent highly publicised experiment to determine which parts of the artist’s brain lit up when he drew. What we are left with is a book that is useful in part for its accessible presentation of certain scientific ideas (although it is not the best of its kind) but that fails to carry any convincing thesis about the nature of art or our appreciation of it.

 

 




Updated 1st March 2005


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