The Judgement of the Eye: The Metamorphoses of GeometryOne
of the Sources of Visual Perception and Consciousness
by Jürgen Weber. Springer , Wein New York, 2002
200 pages, 83 pages illustrated, some color
Paper, US $ 29.95 / Eur 29.00
ISBN: 3-211-83768-X
Review by Amy Ione,
PO Box 12748,
Berkeley, CA 94712-3748
USA
ione@diatrope.com
Of the many books that have recently explored relationships among art,
perception, and geometry, Jürgen Weber's book, Judgement of the
Eye: The Metamorphoses of GeometryOne of the Sources of Visual
Perception and Consciousness, stands out. In this recently published
work, Weber effectively brings his background in science together with
his life as a sculptor, a painter, and art educator. Overall the book
acquaints the reader with the extensive research program that evolved
as he studied a number of questions of interest to him. As he explains
at the beginning, the book is "essentially about what forms say
to us, what information they convey about their very existence, how
we understand their language. How does their expression come about?"
To its credit, the book offers a good survey of visual perception and
an adequate sense of how one might balance art, neurophysiology, and
perceptual psychology. Weber has obviously studied a number of areas
related to vision and art. Most impressive was the way he used several
neurological case studies in the beginning of the book to set the stage
for his inquiry into expression and perception. Gestalt psychology and
the work of a number of gestalt psychologists are also well stated.
Weber surveys work of gestalt (form) psychologists such as Köhler,
Koffka, and Arnheim to convey the history and distinctions of this movement.
As he explains, these psychologists were the first to state that geometric
forms played a decisive role in visual perception and recognition. His
efforts to relate Gestalt psychology to the Lie Transformation theory
were a bit hard to follow. Nonetheless, Weber does convey that this
second movement followed a completely different path. Essentially, those
who worked with the Lie Theory of continual transformation groups (e.g.,
Hoffman, Dodwell) attempted to relate the simple geometrical forms produced
by the visual cortex with environmental phenomena.
Perhaps Weber's greatest contribution to the work of the Gestalt psychologist
and Lie theorists is the experiments he conducted with his students.
Some mentioned in this book include asking them to respond to basic
shapes and drawings, reproduce from memory as well as identification,
and tasks that included 2D, 3D, and rotated shapes and surfaces. Weber,
moreover, does not restrict his work to static shapes. He also asks
about movement and how Euclidean forms might undergo a geometric metamorphosis.
This allows him to compare historical art and traditions, such as Egyptian
and Greek art.
Several aspects of the book, however, undermine its effectiveness. Although
much of the discussion encourages the reader to look closely and thus
aids perceptual understanding, the format of the book works against
it. The carefully chosen images effectively illustrated ideas about
shape, memory, how we see, and how art is made. Yet it is difficult
to interrelate the text and images due to the book's structure of relegating
the images to a separate section at the back. The 83 pages of 501 primarily
black and white images could have easily been integrated into the body
of the text. In my opinion, the decision to print these images separately
made them difficult to use, particularly since pages with images contained
six to eight pictures of various shapes and sizes. Indeed the need to
keep turning pages to locate the appropriate images was distracting
and about halfway into the book I found I had lost patience when I needed
to search through a page full of images to find the number mentioned
in the text. I would have also like a longer index and a more extensive
bibliography. Hoffman, for example, is mentioned frequently throughout
the book, but I failed to find a single text by him listed in the bibliography.
In summary, Weber impressively brings his work as an artist and art
educator together with a number of disciplines outside his field. Asking
how we see, why we do not see what appears on the retina, and how we
see additional information such as the mood contained within a facial
expression (among other things), Weber effectively asks good, important,
questions about perception. He ably succeeds in aiding the reader to
look closely at what is seen. The book, as a result, is successful in
extending scientific theories into the world of practice and expression.
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