## Highlights Memory provides the foundation for our understanding of the world and for our sense of personal identity; we are who we are as individuals in large part because of what we learn and what we remember. — location: 160 ^ref-53841 --- Reductionism, taken from the Latin word reducere, “to lead back,” does not necessarily imply analysis on a more limited scale. Scientific reductionism often seeks to explain a complex phenomenon by examining one of its components on a more elementary, mechanistic level. — location: 178 ^ref-45482 --- Artists often use reductionism to serve a different purpose. By reducing figuration, artists enable us to perceive an essential component of a work in isolation, be it form, line, color, or light. — location: 185 ^ref-24110 --- Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting.” In their attempt to abandon European influences, the American artists created Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international acclaim. In moving from figurative art to abstract art, the New York School of painters—notably, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko—and their colleague Morris Louis were taking a reductionist approach. That is, rather than depicting an object or image in all of its richness, they often deconstructed it, focusing on one or, at most, a few components and finding richness by exploring those components in a new way. — location: 225 ^ref-53340 --- For the artist, the creative process is also interpretative, and for the beholder the interpretative process is also creative. Because the extent of the viewer’s contribution depends on the degree of ambiguity in the image, a work of abstract art, with its lack of reference to identifiable forms, arguably puts greater demands on the beholder’s imagination than a figurative work does. Perhaps it is these demands that make abstract works seem difficult to some viewers, yet rewarding to those who find in them an expansive, transcendent experience. — location: 329 ^ref-25634 --- In a sense, to see what is represented by the paint on a canvas, we have to know beforehand what sort of image we might expect to see in a painting. Our familiarity with the natural environment, as well as with centuries of landscape paintings, helps us to discern almost immediately a wheat field in the brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh or a lawn in the Pointillist dots of Georges Seurat. In this way the artist’s modeling of physical and psychic reality parallels the intrinsically creative operations of our brain in everyday life. — location: 393 ^ref-2013 --- The visual system. Information flows from the retina to the lateral geniculate nucleus through the optic nerve. The lateral geniculate nucleus sends information to the primary visual cortex, which gives rise to two major pathways: the where pathway concerned with where an object or a person is located and the what pathway which is concerned with what an object is or who a person is. — location: 438 ^ref-17669 --- Our capacity for learning is so remarkably developed that human societies change almost exclusively by cultural evolution. In fact, there is no strong evidence of any biological change in the size or structures of the human brain since Homo sapiens appeared in the fossil record some 50,000 years ago. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times, are the product of cultural evolution, and therefore of memory. — location: 674 ^ref-39307 --- As we have seen, Kris and Gombrich showed that learning and memory are essential to visual perception and thus to our response to art. That response entails not simply seeing a work, but also associating it—through top-down processing—with memories of other works of art we have seen and with other life experiences that the work brings to mind. — location: 700 ^ref-16235 --- While we are just beginning to understand how our brain mediates our perception and enjoyment of art, we do know that our response to abstract art differs significantly from our response to figurative art. And we know why abstract art can be so successful. By reducing images to form, line, color, or light, abstract art relies more heavily on top-down processing—and therefore on our emotions, our imagination, and our creativity. — location: 894 ^ref-36911 --- At the time Turner was painting the remarkable Snowstorm, photography was beginning to revolutionize our ability to capture a view of the world and convert it to a two-dimensional surface. During the Renaissance, Western painting evolved to a progressively more realistic depiction of the world. — painting lost what Ernst Gombrich called its “unique ethological niche” in the world of depiction. This prompted a search for alternative niches, one of which was greater abstraction. — location: 949 ^ref-6520 --- The theory challenged absolute notions of space and time, and it eventually had a strong impact on public thinking. For one thing, it encouraged artists to question the classical view of figurative art. Since reality may no longer be as clear-cut as it seems, why does painting need to be a literal depiction of the world? Do we need to depict nature realistically in order to express ourselves? — location: 952 ^ref-35861 --- This group emphasized painting outdoors and capturing the changing qualities of light during the course of a day, using pure color, blurring contours, and flattening the image—three early steps toward the emergence of abstraction. The term Impressionism, derived from Monet’s painting Impression, Soleil Levant (Sunrise) (fig. 5.6), was used to describe the movement. The term conveys the effect of a natural scene on the painter and the effect of the painting on the beholder. — location: 987 ^ref-31151 --- As artists started to move toward abstraction, they began to see analogies between their art and music. Although music has no content and uses abstract elements of sound and division of time, it moves us powerfully. Why, then, does pictorial art have to have content? — location: 1021 ^ref-32879 --- It is therefore particularly interesting that the earliest truly abstract painting was achieved by the pioneer of abstract music, Arnold Schoenberg. — location: 1026 ^ref-39436 --- Kandinsky then proceeded to break free of the painterly convention of representing nature and abandoned the last vestiges of figuration. In Murnau with Church 1 (fig. 5.8) he uses bright colors, but the outlines of the church have become obscure. In 1911 he created Sketch for Composition V (fig. 5.9), a work that makes no reference to nature—until then, the central focus of art—or to any recognizable object. It is commonly considered the first abstract painting, a historic work in the canon of Western art. — location: 1034 ^ref-50396 --- The Impressionists realized that they need not represent exactly what they saw; instead, they conveyed what they felt, their state of mind. This realization was carried a step further by the Cubists, beginning with Fernand Léger’s Nudes in the Forest (1909) and Georges Braque’s Still Life with Metronome (1909) (Braun and Rabinow 2014). Léger and Braque, like Cézanne, eliminated perspective from their paintings and often depicted the same image from different vantage points. As the conceptual pioneer of abstraction, — location: 1051 ^ref-9405 --- painters can make elements of art more objective by emphasizing line, color, and light, thus helping to systematize abstraction. — location: 1059 ^ref-20916 --- Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder. — location: 1060 ^ref-50114 --- Perhaps the most radical reductionist of the early abstract artists was the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, the first artist to create an image from pure lines and color. — location: 1096 ^ref-31395 --- Mondrian explored the influential ideas of Paul Cézanne, who greatly influenced the analytic Cubists with his idea that all natural forms can be reduced to three figural primitives: the cube, the cone, and the sphere — location: 1107 ^ref-8885 --- In 1959, brain scientists discovered an important biological basis for Mondrian’s reductionist language. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, working first at Johns Hopkins University and then at Harvard, discovered that each nerve cell in the primary visual cortex of the brain responds to simple lines and edges with a specific orientation, whether vertical, horizontal, or oblique (fig. 6.6). These lines are the building blocks of form and contour. Eventually, higher regions of the brain assemble these edges and angles into geometric shapes, which in turn become representations of images in the brain. — location: 1131 ^ref-28020 --- I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things. (Mondrian 1914) — location: 1181 ^ref-33636 --- in Excavation de Kooning has multiplied and repeated shapes so that they form a consistent, all-over pattern of texture, abolishing the distinction between figure and ground that we see in Pink Angels. De Kooning gave the synthesis of Cubism and Surrealism a strong American character. — location: 1243 ^ref-9945 --- Woman I is considered to this day to be one of the most anxiety-producing and disturbing images of a woman in the history of art. In this painting de Kooning, who was reared by an abusive mother, creates an image that captures the divergent dimensions of the eternal woman: fertility, motherhood, aggressive sexual power, and savagery. — location: 1266 ^ref-14104 --- How can two mutually exclusive behaviors—mating and fighting—be mediated by the same population of neurons? Anderson found that the difference hinges on the intensity of the stimulus applied. Weak sensory stimulation, such as foreplay, activates mating, whereas stronger stimulation, such as danger, activates aggression. — location: 1300 ^ref-27968 --- de Kooning varied the “visual” speed of his brush, thus masterfully leading the eye first at one speed and then another. — location: 1345 ^ref-9049 --- Pollock went on between 1947 and 1950 to develop a new method of painting, one that revolutionized abstract art. He took the canvas off the wall and put it on the floor. In doing this, he was following the lead of Native American Indian sand painters in the Southwest, whose traditional works he had become familiar with during his boyhood in Wyoming (Shlain 1993). — location: 1380 ^ref-13768 --- Finally, Pollock stopped applying names to his paintings and now just gave them numbers, so that the beholders would be free to form their own opinion of the work of art without being biased by the title of the work. This radical approach, which focused on the act of painting, was appropriately called action painting — location: 1385 ^ref-41494 --- Pollock argued that the act of painting has a life of its own, and he tried to let it come through. “On the floor,” he stated, “I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and be literally ‘in’ the painting” — location: 1396 ^ref-22654 --- First, he abandoned traditional composition: his works do not have any points of emphasis or identifiable parts. They lack a central motif and encourage our peripheral vision. As a result, our eyes are constantly on the move: our gaze cannot settle or focus on the canvas. This is why we perceive action paintings as vital and dynamic. — location: 1405 ^ref-29246 --- Pollock seems to have grasped intuitively that the visual brain is a pattern-recognition device. It specializes in extracting meaningful patterns from the input it receives, even when that input is extremely noisy. This psychological phenomenon is referred to as pareidolia, in which a vague, random stimulus is perceived as significant — location: 1428 ^ref-17455 --- This is a question that Kahneman and Tversky explored extensively in their collaborative work (Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Tversky and Kahneman 1992), which led to a Nobel Prize in economics for Kahneman in 2002 (Tversky died in 1996). They showed that when confronted with a choice that has low probability—approaching randomness—our top-down cognitive processes impose order on the choice so as to decrease the uncertainty. This is what the beholder of an action painting often does—looks for a pattern in random splatters of paint. — location: 1436 ^ref-21359 --- many forms of abstract art isolate color, line, form, and light, thus making us implicitly more aware of the functioning of the individual components of the visual pathway. — location: 1465 ^ref-51853 --- Sensation is the immediate biological consequence of stimulating a sensory organ, such as the photoreceptors in our eyes. Sensory events can affect our behavior directly, but they lack context. Perception, as we have seen, incorporates the information our brain receives from the external world with knowledge based on learning from earlier experiences and hypothesis testing. — location: 1479 ^ref-16460 --- two regions of the brain involved in top-down processing were activated: the prefrontal cortex and the superior parietal cortex. The prefrontal cortex responds only to figurative images that the brain can fit into a known category, such as a face or house or cat—images that convey content. The superior parietal cortex, which manipulates and rearranges information in working memory, is activated by any visual image. — location: 1532 ^ref-7580 --- Abstract art, like Impressionist art before it, relies on the assumption that simple, often crudely depicted features are sufficient to trigger a perceptual experience that is then richly completed by the observer — location: 1550 ^ref-44302 --- Moreover, after we have seen figure 8.4, our next encounter with figure 8.3 will be markedly different because of the information we bring to bear on it from memory. In fact, our perception of the original image may have been permanently altered. — location: 1569 ^ref-45819 --- Cubist art often retains figurative elements, yet it asks us to explore them from different, unrelated perspectives that our brain did not evolve to process meaningfully. The abstract paintings, in contrast, seem to rely less on bottom-up processing, which primarily serves to resolve potential ambiguities; instead, they rely heavily on our imagination, our top-down associations from personal experiences and encounters with other works of art. — location: 1630 ^ref-61663 --- Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, to whom we now turn, took a different approach to abstraction. While Piet Mondrian reduced his paintings to lines and colors, Willem de Kooning introduced movement and tactile sensibility, and Jackson Pollock conveyed the raw creative process, Rothko and Louis reduced their paintings to color alone. — location: 1641 ^ref-36494 --- Rothko pioneered color-field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. He spread large areas of a more-or-less flat, single color across the canvas, creating visually gorgeous, lighter-than-air planes of unbroken color on its surface. — location: 1645 ^ref-19229 --- Rothko saw such reductionism as necessary: “The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment” (Ross 1991). Only by pushing the limits of color, abstraction, and reduction, he argued, can the artist create an image that liberates us from conventional associations with color and form and allows our brain to form new ideas, associations, and relationships—and new emotional responses to them. — location: 1679 ^ref-4636 --- The fact that Rothko did not want his pictures fixed by an unchanging light—by one optimal effect—is critical for Rothko’s self-interpretation. . . . This relinquishing of one effect, of one exact illumination in this ecumenical chapel might be seen as symbolic: as a renunciation of one truth, as the impossibility of favoring one light over another light. — location: 1713 ^ref-65531 --- In focusing on color, Rothko was searching for a new style of abstraction that would link modern art to ancient mythic and transcendent art forms that reach out to the infinite. — location: 1723 ^ref-20621 --- As Rothko was to say about these later works, “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience.” — location: 1731 ^ref-39802 --- Greenberg saw that the distinctive feature of painting is its flatness; therefore, he thought that painting should purge itself of all illusions of depth and turn that concern over to sculpture. — location: 1764 ^ref-49573 --- Louis thinned acrylic paint and poured it directly onto a large unstretched, unprimed canvas, which allowed the paint to follow its own course and soak directly into the material. As a result, the illusion of depth is eliminated and the color becomes an integral part of the surface (Upright 1985). This technique, in which paint moves freely without the interference of a brush or sticks, was a radical departure from action painting. — location: 1759 ^ref-51265 --- The paintings in this series are distinguished by a large open space in the top central area of the canvas. This area of the painting, which had conventionally been the most important, even to Cubist artists, was now totally blank. Our attention is immediately drawn to the top of a painting because, as Wassily Kandinsky points out, it is the region that elevates the viewer’s soul and mind. — location: 1792 ^ref-21653 --- Once color was no longer determined by form, a color that might have seemed “wrong” in a particular figurative context would actually be right, because it was used to convey the artist’s inner vision, not to represent a particular object. Moreover, the separation of color from form is consistent with what we know about the anatomy and physiology of the primate visual system: that is, form, color, movement, and depth are analyzed separately in the cerebral cortex. — location: 1848 ^ref-1160 --- “People are wedded to the idea that colors are properties of objects, when they are in fact made up by the brain” (Hughes 2015). As the dress clearly illustrates, our perception of color is greatly influenced by top-down processes. — location: 1987 ^ref-16837 --- By making it evident that a fluorescent light bulb could stand on its own as a work of art, Flavin was following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, a French artist whose early twentieth-century readymade works, such as his famous urinal and bicycle wheel, challenged the historical course of artistic creativity by illustrating that ordinary, utilitarian objects are works of art when placed in an artistic environment. — location: 2018 ^ref-3139 --- Flavin’s pieces defy the conventional notion of art as object. Light emanates from the fixtures, pervading the atmosphere and reflecting off walls, floors, and viewer alike, blurring the distinction between ourselves and the art and letting us become part of it. — location: 2036 ^ref-47791 --- Turrell’s work is not about light or a record of light; “it is light—the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form” (Tomkins 2003). His medium as an artist is pure light, and as a result, his work offers profound revelations about the perception and materiality of light. — location: 2046 ^ref-12710 --- Ganzfeld is a German term for the entire visual field; it describes the experiences of a snowbound arctic explorer or a pilot navigating in dense fog. When everything in the visual field is the same color and brightness, our visual system shuts down. White is equivalent to black is equivalent to nothing. When this occurs for a long period of time, we are likely to experience hallucinations. Prisoners held in isolation cells also experience this phenomenon. — location: 2054 ^ref-32870 --- “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought” — location: 2061 ^ref-24718 --- By the 1950s, however, a surprising trend had begun to develop. A number of artists, led by Alex Katz, Alice Neel, and Fairfield Porter, began to work specifically with figuration and portraiture, but with a new vision based on the lessons they had absorbed from abstraction—its gestural vitality, its vehemence, and its reductionism — location: 2088 ^ref-27247 --- The first tradition—a reductionist return to figuration—was pioneered by Katz, among others, who was familiar with the New York School and began to use monochromatic backgrounds for his simple, deconstructed portraits. Katz anticipated the second tradition—Pop Art—and he specifically influenced Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Warhol, in turn, influenced Close, who pioneered the third tradition—deconstruction followed by synthesis — location: 2093 ^ref-18479 --- It presented a challenge to traditional fine art by including imagery from popular culture. Whereas Pop Art, particularly that of Warhol, was strongly influenced by Katz and by Abstract Expressionism, it was neither abstract nor very reductionist. Rather, the flatness and pairing of images introduced by Katz stimulated Warhol to move in an entirely new direction. — location: 2143 ^ref-54933 --- Warhol often did multiple paintings and replicable prints with the idea—much like Katz—of erasing emotion through serialization. “The more you look at the same thing,” he said, “the more the meaning goes away, and the better you feel” — location: 2175 ^ref-58902 --- Reductionism in brain science is often followed by attempts at synthesis, at reconstruction, to see whether the parts, when put together, explain the whole. Such synthesis is rare in art, but one artist—Chuck Close—stands out for this very reason. — location: 2180 ^ref-28744 --- To reconcile the problem of face blindness with his desire to paint portraits, Close developed a new, reductionist-synthetic form of portraiture that combines photography and painting; this style later became known as photorealism. Close first takes a large-format Polaroid photograph of his model. He then places a transparent sheet over the photograph and—in a step of radical reductionism—divides that transparent sheet into many small cubes, each of which he decorates in a distinctive way. Then—in a step of synthesis—he transfers the decorated cubes onto the canvas. Thus, Close achieves a paradoxical result in having a reductive process lead to a complex and richly detailed end result. — location: 2192 ^ref-40113 --- Each face is built on that carefully constructed grid of colorful squares, so when you stand close to the portrait of Maggie or Shirley, for example, you see only the radical reduction of the portrait into a grid, but as you step progressively farther back, you see the synthesis of those grids into a face (figs. 12.11, 12.12). The portraits also illustrate Close’s philosophy that one’s identity is a highly constructed composite. — location: 2204 ^ref-55647 --- In describing the world they see, abstract artists not only dismantle many of the building blocks of bottom-up visual processing by eliminating perspective and holistic depiction, they also nullify some of the premises on which bottom-up processing is based. — location: 2258 ^ref-55233 --- Abstract art dares our visual system to interpret an image that is fundamentally different from the kind of images our brain has evolved to reconstruct. — location: 2263 ^ref-55298 --- Imaging studies of brain function have now shown that abstract art does not activate category-specific regions; rather, it activates the regions that respond to all forms of art (Kawabata and Zeki 2004). Thus, we view abstract art by exclusion; we seem to realize unconsciously that what we are looking at does not belong to any specific category (Aviv 2014). In a sense, <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">one of the perceptual achievements of abstract art is to expose us to less familiar or even totally unfamiliar situations</mark>. — location: 2273 ^ref-9746 --- Abstract art, like Cubism, put an end to what the art critic Carl Einstein called “the laziness or fatigue of vision. Seeing had again become an active process” — location: 2317 ^ref-46207 --- Wilson argues that knowledge is gained and science progresses through a process of conflict and resolution. For every parent discipline, there is a more fundamental field, an antidiscipline that challenges its methods and claims (Wilson 1977; Kandel 1979). Typically, the parent discipline is larger in scope and deeper in content, and it ends up incorporating and benefiting from the antidiscipline. These are evolving relationships, as we can see with art and brain science. Art and art history are the parent disciplines, and brain science is their antidiscipline. — location: 2374 ^ref-6816 ---