“All our knowledge is the offspring of our Perception.”
--Leonardo da Vinci, “Thoughts on Art and Life”
SEEING
BILL RAMAGE
4869 Main Street
P.O. Box 2200
Manchester Center, VT 05255
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SEEING
Copyright © 2011 by Bill Ramage
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ISBN Number: 978-1-60571-105-8
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Cover: Detail from Empirical Study III
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE – THE EMPIRICALS
1) Empirical Study I
2) Empirical Study II
3) Empirical Study III
4) Empirical Study IV
PART TWO – THE CENTRIPETAL
1) The Studio Drawings
2) The Installations
a) Alternative Perceptions
b) The VCU Piece
c) The Bard Piece
d) The Brattleboro Museum Piece: The Mental Temple
3) Considering Time: Using Musical Form
a) The OSU Piece: Sonata Form
b) The University of Akron Piece: Bruckner’s Ninth
c) The WCMA Piece: Mozart’s Sonata in A Major
4) Another Consideration: Sight, Thought, and Disposition
a) The Fleming Museum Piece: Bruckner’s Eighth
5) Considering Belief Systems
a) The Hood Museum Piece: Petrarch’s Threshold
b) The No. B.I.A.S. Piece: The Light Hole
c) The Portals and Thresholds
PART THREE – THE NEURALCHEMIST
1) The Circle in the Square: A Two-Tiered Metaphor
2) The Drawings
3) The Dynamisms # 2 through #8
4) The Dynamis: The Spiritlike Vital Force
a) Dynamis Triptychs I and II
b) The Apollonian Triptych
5) The Self-Portraits: The Neuralchemist from the Inside
6) The Venus of Willendorf: A Series of Iconic Drawings
7) A Postscript
a) Question #1: What Is Real?
b) Question #2: Male Transcendence?
PART FOUR – WHAT WE SEE
PART FIVE – CONCLUSION
1) A Recapitulation
2) Epilogue: “A Prospective Brain”
PROLOGUE
In the truest sense of the word, artist might not be apt. I would go so
far as to say, I mostly use art because it is my first language and the medium
most suitable to my designated task. If the truth were to be known, I consider
myself to be as much a theorist and a soothsayer as a visual artist.
I have always been intrigued and curious about seeing, but this
intensified thirty years ago while I was working on the Empirical Studies. It
was as though an almost tangible presence within me made the request that I
focus my curiosity about seeing on trying to find another way to envision the
Lebenswelt (life world).
For the last thirty years my efforts have been an evolving response
to this request. Its three phases, the Empiricals (the large head drawings),
the Centripetals (the spatial drawings in situ), and the Neuralchemist (the
metaphorical drawings in search of a mental mechanism that sees), is a single
effort that needs to be considered as a whole. The whole of this thing is all
about its purpose, which is to challenge the very limited way we visually
interpret and image the life around us. And with this thing, the message is
the medium. Any one piece is not the art that it might appear to be; in fact, it
is really nothing without the context of its purpose. For any part of this effort
to be considered without regard to the request to reenvision the Lebenswelt
would be like the old story of the Wall Street Journal covering the crucifixion
and reporting on the profitability of the concession stand near Golgotha. It
misses the significance of the event.
PART ONE – THE EMPIRICALS
“My perception is itself a thinking,
and my thinking is perceiving.”
--Goethe
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THE EMPIRICALS
This alchemical event where light is turned into thought and the
mind extends beyond the body to radiate consciousness out into the world
is incredible to think about. But that is what seeing is. Although seeing
happens readily and can function without much conscious thought, when
you seriously consider the sensation of sight, it becomes an experience that is
truly miraculous.
Going back to my student years in the 1960s, I primarily worked from
life, making observations and then analyzing and synthesizing that process,
both two-dimensionally (drawing) and three-dimensionally (sculpture). The
objects produced were manifestations of the observations. It was not just
about the product, but it was always about the process—the seeing and what
could be gleaned from that activity.
Around 1977, I realized that most of what I had learned about
translating sight two-dimensionally and what I could visually extrapolate
three-dimensionally were two separate and often competing and/or
contradictory experiences. I could draw a very convincing two-dimensional
space, but this would break down when I tried to connect the spatial lines as I
saw them three-dimensionally.
One good example of this would be to have two vertical parallel lines
that are about fifteen feet high and three feet apart. There are two ways to
consider these lines. The first would be to look at each line in time and space.
If you were to stand back about fifteen feet from those lines and turn to face
the left line straight on, you would see a straight up-and-down line. And then,
if you were to take the time to turn to your right and consider the right line,
you would find the same thing. So spatially you would see two straight up and
down, parallel, vertical lines. But then, still standing fifteen feet from those
lines, if you were visually to measure the widths between these lines from that
position, the visual width at the top of the vertical lines would appear narrower
than the visual width at eye level. So spatially, you have two vertical lines that
are parallel, and two-dimensionally you have varying widths between these
two vertical lines. That is to say, you have parallel lines with varying widths. If
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SEEING
you were drawing this empirically, you would have to choose one or the other
of these two perceptions. This is a two- and three-dimensional contradiction.
You cannot have it both ways.
Vézeley Abby (Basilique Ste-Madeleine), photographs by
Maggie Stokes
The photograph on the left is a manipulated image in which the vertical columns
were made to appear straight up and down to match, as Ms. Stokes puts it, the way
you really see. And straight up-and-down columns is the way you would experience
this cathedral. In an actual space, you would not see tilted columns. The other is the
original photograph. The angled perspective of the vertical columns is the product of a
two-dimensional medium.
After a couple of years and quite a few failed attempts to address
this conundrum, I decided to simply do what I have always done . . . to work
empirically, to look at three-dimensional objects and make careful twodimensional observations. New to my approach was to aggressively suspend
everything I knew about seeing and make the three-dimensional observations
without any preconceived ideas or structures or any other learned seeing
skills, and then to respond to these observations with an unbiased integrity
that would be totally mindful of the process at every step of the way.
After a good deal of consideration, I concluded that heads would be
the best subject for the activity of monitoring the empirical process, because
of their subtle complexity. The thought was that the format was simple and
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BILL RAMAGE
universal: an ovoid volume with
two ears, two eyes, a nose, and a
mouth. Yet the subject has enough
physical and visual variables that
almost seven billion people can
appear recognizably different from
each other. Besides, it is a subject
we believe we know well, because
we see faces everywhere every day.
Therefore, I thought drawing heads
was the perfect medium to address
the issue of preconceived beliefs
about what we see.
Proto-empirical, Susan, 22 x 28 in.,
pencil on paper, 1977
The process was slow to develop. I made
a series of about twenty small drawings (twentytwo inches by twenty-eight inches) of friends
with which I tried to wean myself from the
almost reflexive precepts I knew about seeing.
Nevertheless, these drawings were not that
successful. All those years of learning how to
structure perception was both consciously and
unconsciously ingrained deep in my mind.
One thing that did happen was with all that
concentration, I was seeing more information
than could fit on a twenty-two-inch by twentyeight-inch piece of paper. The solution was to get
a larger piece of paper (a thirty-six-inch roll) and
with this I drew my friend Mark. This three-foot
by six-foot drawing took more than a hundred
hours to complete.
Proto-empirical, Mark,
3 x 6 ft., pencil on paper,
1977
That drawing taught me three things.
First, I was still dealing with the bias of all I knew
about seeing. Although the observations were
becoming more competent and astute, I could
tell the underlying structure of the head was a
SEEING
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learned structure. The second was that I was still seeing more than I could fit
on that three-foot by six-foot piece of paper. Also, more than a hundred hours
was too much to ask of anyone. I needed to be my own subject.
In order to work from my own head, I
needed to reconcile using a mirror. Was the
reflected image on the flat surface of a mirror
a three-dimensional object? I concluded that
to look at an object that reflected light and was
not a graphic image was three-dimensional.
My first attempt was a three-foot by
six-foot drawing. Intuitively, I still felt as
though most of my decisions were responses
acquired by training, as opposed to what
could be seen. It seemed that the size of the
drawing was part of the problem. The scale
was wrong. A three-foot by six-foot piece of
paper did not adequately accommodate all
that could be seen, and the entire process
was conceptually constricted by the format.
So, I bought a roll of paper that was sixtytwo inches wide and started a series of four
drawings. As it turned out, the scale facilitated
even more information and it allowed me to
focus even more intensely. This required me
to make even more accurate observations, free
of assumptions and constructs.
Each of the four drawings took about
a year (over one thousand hours) of very
intense and careful seeing. While working
on these drawings, I knew I was searching for
something: for some explanation of the two- and three-dimensional disparity
of understanding. But there was no specific idea as to what to expect. This
process resembled a type of scientific research. I would experiment with a
thought as to what was operative when making observations, and then monitor
where it would lead the empirical activity. I called the drawings Empirical
Studies.
Proto-empirical, Bill, 3 x 6 ft.,
pencil on paper, 1977
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BILL RAMAGE
EMPIRICAL STUDY I
Empirical Study I, 5 x 8 ft., pencil on paper, 1978
The first Empirical Study tried to void out all the things known about
the structure involved in seeing a head. To address this, I approached the
structure of the head unconventionally. Just about anyone who was ever
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taught to draw a head learns to start the same way: an oval with an elliptical
line that indicates the center of the head’s symmetry and a perpendicular
elliptical line, about halfway down, to indicate the placement of the eyes.
However, for this drawing, I started with the left nostril. I worked for days
drawing it as accurately as I could and by doing so, I knew the depiction of this
nostril would determine the size and placement of the head and all its features
on the paper. When drawing an object, there are a lot of learned principles
about proportions and placement, shapes and volumes, and these principles
are very specific and seemingly helpful. But they prescribe the seeing process
to the point where you cannot see without them; your perceptual thinking
is imbued with this information and pretty much directs all the decisions
you make about what is being seen. It took all my concentration to try to see
without them. It was like trying to read music without a staff. But the result
was worth the effort. I was pleased and surprised by the way the image came
together. With this unconventional approach, each feature had its own axis in
relation to each other. I found this to be an interesting way to understand the
visual structure of a head.
Meanwhile, on another front and unrelated to the structure, there were
dozens of other variables that had to be taken into consideration. For instance,
the temperature of the studio affected the color and texture of the skin; the
constantly changing ambient light affected the tones on the head. With this
drawing came the awareness that there were many more considerations to
be made than I had ever imagined. That realization alone made the drawing
process intensely engaging.
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BILL RAMAGE
EMPIRICAL STUDY II
Empirical Study II, 5 x 8 ft., pencil on paper, 1979
SEEING
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After becoming aware of the myriad of variables that were presented by
the first drawing, I came to the second Empirical Study more knowledgeable
about how to go about it. I thought the only way to address this was to be
absolutely and unflinchingly honest, as well as careful about every single
observation and its synthesis. To scrutinize and analyze anything and
everything that came to mind while working on this drawing, I kept copious
notes and made many didactic drawings about what I was seeing.
To maintain focus and concentration, I had to slow down my
metabolism. I had to invent mechanisms and rituals to avoid slipping into the
familiar comfort zone provided by the known structure that had always been
at the core of my perception. On February 2, 1979, I wrote: “The problem
is to make the processing and the mind responsive rather than directive,
susceptible rather than structured, open to the possibility of perception rather
than blurred by intention.”
It was during this drawing that I became aware of the function of the
fovea (a rodless area of the retina affording acute vision) and its role in the
act of perception. On February 6, 1979, I wrote: “The peripheral is always
beyond or around what is focused. Consequently, it is much more dependent
on language and constructs. Can the un-languaged foveal activity function
apart from the peripheral’s constructs?” And on April 26, 1980, I made these
notes: “The mechanics of the eye demand a constantly changing and moving
focal point. This mechanism, the fovea, requires purpose to engage it, find its
range, and cause its movement. The purpose is not the seeing. So it would
appear that some kind of thinking, and all that implies, intrudes on perception
both before and after the act of seeing.”
Another thing that became obvious with the awareness of the fovea
was that my left eye is profoundly dominant. I would say it manages about
eighty-five percent of the seeing. And about eighty-five percent of what was
seen and synthesized in this drawing passed through this eye. Only the area
around the right eye was processed through that eye. The structure of this
drawing was the product of two different perceptual axes, each distinct from
the other. Consequently, to draw the head I had to compensate for these two
perceptual origins. As hard as I tried to be unflinchingly honest about the
seeing, I had to “lie” to present a coherent image.
BILL RAMAGE
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This didactic tried to delineate the areas seen by
the left and right eyes. The radials from the left
eye covers about eighty-five percent of what is
seen by that eye and the right eye sees the much
smaller area depicted by the smaller radials
extending from that eye. There is a narrow
triangle extending from the left eye to the lower
right-hand corner of the drawing. The area of the
head in this triangle had to be distorted in order
to compensate for the two different perceptual
axes. It is fabrication.
Didactic II, 8 ½ x 11 in.,
photocopy, 1979
It was becoming apparent that it was an extremely difficult, if not
impossible task to be objective about how I synthesized the perception.
Conceptually, physiologically, and temperamentally (in terms of my ability to
concentrate and maintain the stamina required to stay focused), I could not
separate myself from the decisions needed for the perception that was taking
place. On February 24, 1979, I came to the following realization: “The more
specific I try to base the decision I have to make, the more intense I look at the
subject, the more intense the perception, the more each unit becomes finite
and isolated. This proliferation of tiny disconnected units of information
forces an even more subjective, nonspecific decision/perception that causes
an intrinsic abstraction based on extrinsic information.”
This drawing failed to be absolutely and unflinchingly honest. That
intention was compromised by the demands of the drawing.
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SEEING
EMPIRICAL STUDY III
Empirical Study III, 5 x 9 ft., pencil on paper, 1980
BILL RAMAGE
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As I began the third Empirical Study, I thought if only I could have more control
over some of the variables, then maybe there could be more perceptual objectivity.
So I made a special effort to control the light I would be working with by blocking
out all the daylight from the studio. To avoid the problem of the dual axes of the
right and left eyes, I would use only my left eye, literally turning the right eye off. But
most of all, I was determined to step up the diligence with which I would monitor the
process. “The anxiety level is a very significant part of this drawing,” I wrote on July 3,
1980. “The quality and integrity of each observation, decision, and execution has to
be monitored with an intensity that is unnerving. But it is this crazy watching of the
activity: this very internal, singularly personal observing of the thinking that makes
this process worth the effort.”
This time it was significantly different because I was using only the left eye.
For the third time I approached the structure of the head by starting with the left
nostril. The size and anticipated placement of the head and its features needed a
completely different approach. It ceased to be a perceptual understanding of the
head that needed restructuring. It was the seeing itself.
And then there was the light. Even in the controlled light environment, the
variables were out of control. In order to understand what was going on, I borrowed
a photometer to measure the light intensity on the head. Taking readings from the
brightest and the darkest parts of the head, I measured the dark-light ratios during
different times of the day. The dark-light ratios kept changing as the light progressed
from day to night, and I found the contrast was three or four times greater at night
than during the day. And apart from the dark-light ratios, I found that when I would
focus on a small section (about an inch square) of the head, I would actually see
shapes morph into different shapes as the left eye tried to stabilize the experience of
the light. Between the restructuring of the seeing, dealing with the variables of the
light and the morphing shapes, and all the other considerations that were part of the
process, I was completely overwhelmed.
What I was experiencing was the total dissolution of everything I knew about
seeing. I was seeing things I had probably always seen without any awareness that
I had been seeing them. For the first time in my life I was consciously experiencing
something completely new and different. It was an intense and moving experience,
and my professional life has not been the same since. It was a perception where
everything was in flux and there was not a fixed visual certainty. It became a
reasonable possibility that the assumption of a fixed visual certainty was just a
construct, something we make up: a useful way to organize visual information. It
was not real.
To have experienced this was both a blessing and a curse. My intrinsic
understanding of just about everything has been affected. Seeing is the primary
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access to most everything we believe we know in our empirical culture. So, without a
fixed visual certainty all the other constructs that have grounded almost every aspect
of life are in question—a question that was both
exciting and disquieting.
In this didactic there is the object (head) and the
mirrored image with the orthogonals radiating
from the left eye of the object to seven points on
the reflected image. The relative positions of
these points when projected onto the drawing are
determined by where they pass through the circle
around the head. As the orthogonals pass through
the circle, they are deflected to a flat surface, which
is the drawing. Originally this drawing was simply
to explain the perceptual falloff (the fish-eye
appearance) of the drawn image. But it ended up
being much more significant than that.
Explaining the restructuring of seeing
required a didactic with a view from above
Didactic III, 8 ½ x 19 ½ in.,
the head, so I could draw the orthogonals (the
photocopy collage, 1980
perspective lines that radiate from a vanishing
point) radiating from the left eye. From this didactic came three profound realizations.
One: the perceptual orthogonals could radiate from the eye, putting the vanishing
point in the mind and behind the eyes and not on some distant horizon line. Two:
the fish-eye distortion of the head was the result of the lengths of the orthogonals
radiating from the left eye; the longer the orthogonals, the more the structure of
the head would diminish. The perspectival falloff was due to the fact the space was
expanding from the eye. Three: the two-dimensional representation was determined
on the circle around the head. It was two-dimensional because the circumference was
always equidistant from the eye. (Equidistance is important because variable lengths
would indicate a space that is not two-dimensional.) Also, the projected orthogonals
are always perpendicular to the circle. This little didactic initiated the ideas that
were to become the Centripetal.
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BILL RAMAGE
EMPIRICAL STUDY IV
The fourth and last
Empirical Study was another
attempt to be more objective
and truthful about the act of
perception. I was concerned
about the distortion of the third
drawing and I thought that just
using one eye might have been a
contrivance. So I decided to draw
the left side of the head using the
left eye and drawing the right
side using the right eye. Another
concern was hair. It seemed
drawing hair was a technique that
had nothing to do with seeing.
For the most part it was made up,
a distraction that had more to do
with drawing than perception.
So, I eliminated all the hair: no
eyebrow or eyelashes, and the
hair was just a dark mass.
Empirical Study IV,
5 x 10 ft., pencil on paper, 1981
Two things happened while
working on this drawing. First,
it seemed that the purpose of
this drawing was not that substantial, and there was not that much to be gleaned
from the process. However, I did find out that my left eye (the dominant eye) was
no less than five times more capable of seeing forms, tones, and values. My right
eye, by comparison, saw things as flat and linear. Second, I was really preoccupied
by the potential of the didactic from Empirical Study III. Intuitively, I knew that I had
happened upon something that I still believe is very significant. So halfway through
Empirical Study IV, I realized that there was no need to continue. I needed to focus
all my attention on the potential presented by the didactic of Empirical Study III. This
led to the drawings and installations known as the Centripetal.
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SEEING
PART TWO – THE CENTRIPETAL
“Perceiving is at once outside and at the center of thinking,
and thinking, likewise, passes through the heart of seeing
and surrounds it.”
--Goethe
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BILL RAMAGE
THE CENTRIPETAL
On March 25, 1980, I wrote: “Seeing is locked into a single understanding in
a fixed position (a vanishing point), which is strange, because there is the potential
latitude of tens of thousands of understandings if empiricism were subjective.”
This is the place in the story that I make the outrageous claim that I have
provided a more vital perceptual system that turns linear perspective inside out.
Although the iconoclasm of such a claim is disconcerting, in fact that’s exactly what
centripetal perspective does.
When we engage in the act of seeing there are two functions of that activity
occuring simultaneously and symbiotically: the peripheral vision that involves your
entire field of vision and the foveal vision, which is the very small (about the size of
a pea at arm’s length) part of your perception that is in focus. For the most part, we
are not aware of this duel-synchronized function of seeing. Most people don’t know
there is a fovea that is critical in creating a conscious perception.
Linear perspective is a system that gives coherence and form to the peripheral
field of vision, which is otherwise beyond and around what is focused. This structured
coherence and form causes the periphery to be an incredibly effective conduit; but
essentially that’s all that it is, a venue for the fovia. I contend that as incredible
as this structured field of vision is, it’s far from being a perception in and of itself.
Linear perspective, as the primary means of synthesizing a perception, objectifies
and consequently over-simplifies what is seen. The word objectify in this instance
has a double meaning. First it gives the peripheral measurable dimensions – like
an “object.” And secondly it turns that object-like field of vision into something that
is objectively, as opposed to subjectively, experienced. It puts most of the activity
and understanding of what is being seen outside of the perceiver. The structure of
linear perspective primarily places the determination of a perception on a far away
vanishing point radiating from a distant horizon.
The centripetal is a system that tries to articulate and understand the foveal
vision. The foveal is a perception that originates in the mind, putting the vanishing
point behind the eyes of the perceiver and then projecting that mind out into what
becomes a visual world. With our prevailing linear perspectival paradigm we are
unaware that this pea-sized ball of focused perception is always moving rapidly back
and forth, up and down, in and out, and all around the conduit of the structured
peripheral field of vision. It’s the function of the fovea to constantly connect,
synthesize, stitch together, and cause what is experienced as a conscious perception.
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SEEING
While these two systems (linear perspective and the centripetal) are symbiotically
connected, I believe the centripetal should be considered the primary source of how
we visually experience the world.
The word centripetal means to move towards the center and this system
moves the focus to the center of every perception; that is, in the mind of the observer,
where seeing, a living thought experience, really ought to be.
From 1981 to 1996, I produced twenty-five centripetal installations and each
one was an experiment probing the idea that the perceptual perspectival orthogonals
radiate from the viewer and not from some external faraway horizon line.
The early experimental installations provided a system that compares to
linear perspective as follows:
CENTRIPETAL PERSPECTIVE
* the orthogonals radiate from the
viewer
LINEAR PERSPECTIVE
* the orthogonals radiate from
an external source
* the view is from the mind to the
horizon
* the view is from the horizon
to the mind
* an active perception in which the
observer’s sight is projected from the
mind
* a passive perception in which
the observer’s sight is received
from a vanishing point
* primarily describes a fluid, expanding
space that is projected out to the
horizon
* primarily describes physical
objects and their placement in
a fixed two-dimensional space,
projected from the horizon
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BILL RAMAGE
CENTRIPETAL PERSPECTIVE
LINEAR PERSPECTIVE
* objects appear to diminish spatially
in size from the viewer because
they progressively occupy a smaller
percentage of the expanding space
projected from the viewer
* objects appear to diminish
spatially in size because they
are projected from a distant
vanishing point
* needs an actual space to be realized
* can only be realized twodimensionally
* is a perception that involves the
dynamic flux of time
* is a perception that is frozen
in time
* is a perception in which space is
kinetic
* is a perception in which
space is static
* seeing as an expression of the
viewer’s life experiences
* seeing as a description of the
space apart from the viewer
* is a perception in which the authority
that determines what is being seen is in
the mind of the perceiver
* is a perception in which the
authority for what is seen is
deferred to the consensus that
provides the distant vanishing
point
The didactic from Empirical Study III opened up a completely different inquiry
that needed something other than the head studies as a venue for consideration. An
interior space, like a room, with its conceptually accessible geometry of square and
rectangular walls (ceilings and floors), right angles, and perpendicular planes became
the most useful means to explore the concepts generated from that didactic. The
geometry of this conceptually accessible space also facilitates the use of geometry in
calculating the effects caused by the different lengths of orthogonals in an expanding
space. This means I could describe mathematically the perspectival falloff of a wall
by the measured lengths of its orthogonals.
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SEEING
At first, the notion of an expanding space was mostly an intuitive sense that
there was another way to think about our visual experience of space.
Studio Didactic, 15 x 33 in., pencil on grid
tracing paper, 1981
Didactic III, 8 ½ x 19 ½ in.,
photocopy collage, 1980
The thought was: if I could do it with faces, I could do it with spaces. So I
made a corresponding spatial didactic describing the walls in the studio, as if they
were being seen as a projection from the viewer.
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BILL RAMAGE
THE STUDIO DRAWINGS
I followed this with the task of drawing the studio with the same scrutinized
acumen as in the Empirical Studies, carefully making observations without any
acquired constructs about how to see an interior space. (In this drawing, you can see
the abandoned Empirical Study IV.)
Studio Drawing I, 3 x 7 ft., pencil on paper, 1981
To approach this drawing, I put a string that was level with the height of my
eyes (sixty-five inches from the floor) all around the studio. Every decision and
observation for this drawing was made in relationship to this string, an approach
comparable to starting with the left nostril in the Empirical Studies.
That string around the studio can be seen as a straight, uninterrupted line
in every direction, with no discernable information in and of itself about the lines
and planes that could describe that interior space. That line was a circle around me.
Just as it was with the didactic from Empirical Study III, I quickly realized that all the
seeing that occurred while working on this studio drawing was seen through that
circle. I then drew a circle on the floor, and that circle and the eye level “circle” became
visually and two-dimensionally parallel. This presented a circular/cylindrical visual
plane that surrounded me. Because all the orthogonals to that plane were the same
radii, it was really two-dimensional.
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SEEING
Studio Drawing II, 3 x 7 ft., pencil on paper, 1981
I did a second drawing of the studio, for which I stretched four strings across
the space of the studio, in order to see what would happen to these lines and the
space they occupied. Would they be observed as though they were on that circular/
cylindrical two-dimensional plane?
I didn’t glean much about the string lines themselves. But later while looking
at the finished drawing, I realized that those spatial lines were actually drawn across
the drawn walls and ceiling in that drawing of the studio. Then it occurred to me that
if those lines were drawn on actual walls (walls that were mathematically plotted to
compensate for the expanding space), the four drawn string lines would appear to
be spatially strung across that three-dimensional space. It would be as if the actual
strings were stretched across the studio. The seed for the centripetal installations
had been planted.
The issue was to make a drawing as if it were on a circular plane around an
observer and then inscribe that drawing on the actual walls in a three-dimensional
space, thus forming a two-dimensional drawing on a three-dimensional space.
I was beginning to understand the two-dimensional/three-dimensional
conundrum that initiated this entire dialogue.
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BILL RAMAGE
THE INSTALLATIONS
Alternative Perceptions
Working with dimensional walls and actual physical spaces was the ideal
venue to develop an understanding of the three core ideas about an alternative
perception initiated by that didactic from Empirical Study III: (1) that the vanishing
point is behind the eyes and in the mind that sees, (2) that the perspectival orthogonals
radiate from the viewer and expand out from there, and (3) that a two-dimensional
translation of that space occurs on a circle or cylindrical plane (with constant radii)
around the viewer.
Over the course of the fifteen years that I worked with the centripetal
installations, those ideas evolved from a zealous exploration of an alternative
perception, to fairly elaborate visual events that were more about the viewer and the
mind from which the perception originated.
The initial thing I did was to make a couple of trial installations that were
not public, to see what they looked like and to figure out the math that was needed
to apply the centripetal concept to an actual space. These early installations were a
matter of trying to figure out how to construct a centripetal installation, and then to
determine what this alternative understanding of a perceptual space might mean,
and finally to develop the argument making this alternative perspective worthy of
consideration.
The VCU Piece
The first public installation was executed in 1982 in the Anderson Gallery
at Virginia Commonwealth University in conjunction with a group show that was
entitled “Aspects of Perception.”
Virginia Commonwealth University Piece, black tape in situ, 1982
This piece was nothing more than three drawn parallel lines. This was done
by mathematically expanding and contracting the width of the space between the
drawn lines by mathematically compensating for the expansion and contraction of
the actual space from a designated spot in the gallery.
| 23 |
SEEING
Although these projected parallel lines were
not perfect (the math was not totally resolved), the
accomplishment was important to me because these
lines would become a fundamental component in all
subsequent installations. They were the horizontal
lines of a grid that would be experienced visually
as two-dimensional circular/cylindrical planes
around the observer, even though they were drawn
on two or more walls in a room. This grid became
the basic armature on which to build, develop, and come to terms with the concept of
centripetal perspective.
The Bard Piece
The Bard Piece, colored tape in situ, 1982
The Bard Piece (executed in 1982 in the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard
College) was my first attempt using this cylindrical grid. The purpose of this piece
was to see what would happen to a few diagonal lines passing through that grid (like
the strings in the second studio drawing). I had still not resolved the concept and
the math; consequently, I did not learn much about the diagonal lines. However, the
experience I acquired doing these first two installations was definitely worth the
effort.
| 24 |
BILL RAMAGE
The Brattleboro Piece: The Mental Temple
The Brattleboro Piece, colored tape and chalk in situ, 1984
In 1984, I did a piece at the Brattleboro Museum in which I had, to a greater
extent, worked out the math and a method for the centripetal projection of the
cylindrical grid. After designing a simple hypothetical temple, consisting of two
stepped platforms with seven square columns on the first step and a column/lentil
structure behind that on the second step, I next produced four technical drawings to
prepare for the installation of the piece. My first drawing was an image of the temple
that had to be mathematically projected as though it was on a cylindrical grid. I next
made a drawing of the walls of the gallery that plotted the spatial expansion and
contraction of the physical dimensions of the gallery.
Third technical drawing, 28 x 33 in.,
pencil on grid tracing paper, 1984
Fourth technical drawing, 28 x 33 in.,
pencil on grid tracing paper, 1984
| 25 |
SEEING
The third technical drawing combined these two drawings, one on top of the
other. It was necessary for the fourth and last drawing to translate the temple image
of the third drawing onto a drawing of the rectangles that were the actual shape of
the walls. Finally, all the calculations (there were hundreds of measurements) from
the last drawing were transferred to the walls and the floor. The result was a twodimensional drawing of the temple on a
three-dimensional space.
As I carried out the installation
process, I realized that I could project
layers of these cylindrical grids. Each
layer was projected from a different
hypothetical
distance
from
the
designated spot in a room or gallery, and
consequently, each grid would diminish
in size to compensate for the expanding
space. This provided a dimensional grid
(like a jungle gym) on which to build an
installation.
The C.W. Post Piece, colored tape in situ, 1986
This piece is an example of the use of a dimensional grid.
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BILL RAMAGE
CONSIDERING TIME: USING MUSICAL FORM
The Ohio State University Piece, Sonata Form, colored tape in situ, 1985
The OSU Piece: Sonata Form
In 1985, while preparing for Sonata Form, the OSU Piece in the University
Gallery at Ohio State University, it became apparent that seeing this piece had to
involve time because it was going to be on three walls. The largest wall was fifty
feet long, so it would take real time to view it from end to end. Because of this time
element, there was an added subtext of music.
The nature of music requires a structure of time. One commonly used
structure is the sonata form. The sonata form is in three parts: (A) an exposition,
(B) a development, and (A) a recapitulation. A simple example of this ABA form is
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
 The exposition is “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.”
 The development is “Way up in the sky so high, like a diamond in the sky,”
 The recapitulation is “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you
are.”
Its structure in time could be thought of as architectural, similar to post and
beam construction. The exposition and the recapitulation are the posts or columns
that are connected to and supporting the development, the beam or lintel. Using
the metaphor of architecture as the sonata form, the OSU piece addressed its time
component.
| 27 |
SEEING
Music became a recurring theme in different ways in three other pieces.
The University of Akron Piece was Antoine Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, the Fleming
Museum Piece was Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, and the WCMA Piece was Mozart’s
Sonata in A Major. These three were not only about the structure of time in terms
of music, but also about the character and the content of the music. The idea of
employing the subtext of music and the purpose of that subtext evolved into another
kind of dialogue.
The University of Akron Piece: Bruckner’s Ninth
University of Akron Piece, colored tape and chalk in situ, 1988
The University of Akron’s Emily Davis Gallery is a large cavernous space
with walls that are about fifteen feet high. And Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony (his
last), particularly the scherzo, is a loud, bombastic, larger-than-life expression of his
profound spirituality. The hope was to bring these two, the gallery and a sense of
the music, together to turn that imposing space and the centripetal projection into a
viscerally experienced expression of his spirituality.
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BILL RAMAGE
The WCMA Piece: Mozart’s Sonata in A Major
The
Williams
College
Museum of Art (WCMA) Piece was
part of a two-year project called
WALLWORKS, which involved
four artists: Richard Haas, Mike
Glier, Sol LeWitt, and me. We each
installed a work in situ on a wall
that measured thirty-five feet high
and twenty-four feet wide, located
in the atrium designed by the
postmodernist architect Charles
Moore.
The stairs and the skywalk
in this space created a triangular
spiral that circled upwards in
a counterclockwise movement.
Using a centripetal perspectival
projection, it was my intention to
complement and move counter to
this spiraling space by causing the
large wall of the atrium to appear
to be split, with the top half of
the wall moving on a plane that
is angled clockwise to the bottom
half. I wanted to complement this
spatial activity that occurred in
time with a constant, so I employed
Mozart’s Sonata in A Major. In the
exposition of this initial theme,
the melody and the harmony pivot
The WCMA Piece,
around E, a note that is nearly
colored tape in situ, 1988
constant throughout the theme.
With a similar focus, the WCMA Piece is made up of twelve octagons, a constant
(note) around and through which the visual dynamics of the piece pivot.
SEEING
| 29 |
ANOTHER CONSIDERATION: SIGHT, THOUGHT, AND DISPOSITION
Around 1989, after Akron’s Bruckner’s Ninth and WCMA’s Mozart’s Sonata, I
realized that there was another layer to this centripetal dialogue. For eight years I
had been concerned with the mechanics and dynamics of a projected “centripetal”
perception. But then the experience of Mozart and Bruckner turned in on itself. To
include music in that projected perception initiated the idea that what was being
projected was more than an alternative visual codification of sight. It was a projection
of all the relevant qualities of the viewer’s consciousness that responds to the content
of music. I believe that music is one of the most essential things we experience.
Practically everyone listens to music every day. And the music each person listens to
is an abstraction that has a defining effect on who they are and how they fit into the
general scheme of things. There is music that addresses just about every aspect and
event in life: love, faith, hope, aspirations, desires, death, etc. The music listened to
becomes a defining expression of the life that’s being experienced. And so it might
be with perception.
This initiated a very significant shift in focus on the entire centripetal dialogue.
Instead of tracking the seeing that radiates from a center in the viewer’s mind, my
focus became what is in the mind that sees. It was the content of the consciousness--the
myriad of thoughts, beliefs, and things known that was being seen. The mind does not
simply see; it images its visual experience.
This imaging becomes a defining expression, like the music, that is more
about our character and capabilities as we meet our needs and desires, and live our
lives, than it is about any phenomenological event. A perception is the triumvirate
of the physiology of sight, the complexity of thought, and our mental/intellectual
disposition, and it is these elements that determine what the seeing will be, what it
will look like, what it will mean, and how it will be applied.
The Fleming Museum Piece: Bruckner’s Eighth
In 1990, I did the Fleming Museum Piece, Bruckner’s Eighth. It was drawn
directly onto three walls (including two corners) of the large gallery in the University
of Vermont’s Fleming Museum. Although this piece explored the spatial dynamics of
centripetal perspective, its overall concern was an attempt to provide an experience
comparable to the luminous interior of the sacral uterine sanctuaries of the mother
church, such as the celestial interior of the sixth-century Basilica di San Vitale in
Ravenna, Italy.
In preparation for this piece I listened to Antoine Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony,
sometimes referred to as an aural cathedral, about fifty times while reading the score.
BILL RAMAGE
| 30 |
To augment these sounds, I visited churches to experience their sanctuaries and I
looked at many images of San Vitale’s sanctuary. With these references imbued in my
mind, I executed this piece in a search for the experiential qualities of a celestial space.
In the process of this search, I explored the context of human qualities that might be
involved in such an experience. Because a celestial space is not just indigenous to the
physical properties of a cathedral, it is also projected by the spiritual disposition of
the viewer.
The Fleming Piece, University of Vermont, colored tape and chalk in situ, 1990
At the center of the piece, there is a large red circle and a large red chair (about
six feet high). This was an attempt to invoke the energy and purpose of the ancient
fertility idol, the Venus of Willendorf, which I believe is the progenitor of a conscious
sense of transcendence, the essential purpose of a sanctuary. This is flanked on
either side with ethereal architectural structures (the Brattleboro’s mental temples),
some of which are surrounded by swirling vectors of energy that refer to the ether
or to some radical idea in modern physics, such as “string theory,” or the “zero point
field,” or maybe David Bohm’s “holomovement.” The floor of the inside circle is red in
reference to the foot chakra, where the temporal energy connects to the terrestrial.
And the top or the outer circle is blue-green, as though it might be a celestial space or
cosmic garden. Each of the two sides of the piece tries to exude gender qualities, the
left being female and the right being male. And these qualities converge in the sexual
vortex in the center occupied by the Venus of Willendorf, the essence of fertility.
This installation was the confluence of biology, sex, transcendence, temporal
and cosmic energy, and the activity of thought as the source and foundation of how
we image everything around us. It aspired to be the content of the mind actualized in
a perception: a weltanschauung that sees.
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SEEING
CONSIDERING BELIEF SYSTEMS
A weltanschauung is a world view that takes into account all belief systems
comprising a given culture, a world view that is a foundational orientation to our
understandings of everything on every level. It is my contention that within this
world view, there are two elemental types of belief systems. There are the functional
belief systems, like the grand narratives of religions, the Enlightenment, and political
and cultural ideologies that serve to structure the life from the outside. And there are
the core intuitive belief systems that are essential to the life we experience.
The core intuitive beliefs come from abstract deliberations that occur
somewhere in the core of the human mind. And these deliberations cause things as
fundamental as likes and dislikes, the scope of your personal space, your disposition
about the way things are, the foundation of your temperament, and your internalized
perspective of the world. These core beliefs then determine how the functional
beliefs will implement that life. I have the notion that core intuitive belief systems
are expressions of a life, created by that confluence of the biology, sex, transcendence,
temporal and cosmic energy, as well as the activity of thought (the confluence of the
Fleming Piece).
Just as music formed the subtext for earlier installations, the notion of a core
intuitive belief system became the subtext of the Hood and the No. B.I.A.S. pieces.
The Hood Museum Piece: Petrarch’s Threshold
The Hood Piece, Petrarch’s
Threshold,
was
installed
in
Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in 1992.
It brought together an excellent
example of a centripetal twodimensional drawing on a threedimensional space, and the subtext
of core intuitive beliefs concerning
our present-day circumstance. The
hope was to evoke the process of the
abstract deliberations that occur in
the core of the mind as we approach our contemporary version of Petrarch’s Threshold.
Our threshold is postmodernism, one of the most dynamic and demanding
circumstances we have ever had to deal with. In terms of the functional belief systems,
we are lost in the transition between what was the modern world to a world yet to
BILL RAMAGE
| 32 |
be determined. We call ourselves postmodern because the only thing our functional
belief systems are confident about is that we are no longer modernist, because we
sense that the tenants of modernism are no longer believable or useful to our wellbeing.
The postmodern shift is comparable in magnitude to the shift from the
institutional medieval church to the modern world of the humanist. That medieval/
humanist circumstance was intellectually progressive, leading to a period in which
within the span of one lifetime, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael made the
argument that to be human is to be magnificent: Columbus proved the world to be
round while discovering a new world, Luther challenged the church and began the
Reformation, and Copernicus hypothesized a heliocentric universe and initiated what
was to become the Scientific Revolution.
Today we deal with a shift that is more a matter of “do or die.” We seem to
be seeking something that lends purpose to life and is capable of dealing with “the
plasticity and constant change of reality and knowing” (Richard Tarnas, The Passions of
the Western Mind), while coping with the catastrophic issues of plutonium, pollution,
and population—issues that are seemingly unsolvable and insurmountable. It could
be argued that there is virtually nothing we do today that is sustainable. My core
intuitive understanding suggests that we might need a new and almost evolutionary
mindset to survive.
We are at a threshold. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch said: “Here stand
I as though on a frontier between two people, looking both to the past [Middle Ages]
and to the future [the Renaissance].” Today we stand on a frontier between two
people, but we are looking away from the past and not yet capable of projecting into
the future. We are at the brink of a world we cannot imagine. If there is a solution, I
believe it will come from those abstract deliberations that occur deep in the human
mind. It will come from a shift in the core intuitive beliefs.
The Hood Piece tried to visually and experientially simulate that intuitive
dialogue of a core beliefs’ deliberations, responding to a Lebenswelt in flux. First,
by providing a space that has been transformed by a very convincing centripetal
projection, it catches the viewer between an interior space of actual walls and the
projected ones experienced.
Second, the two-dimensional centripetal drawing, visually suspended in the
three-dimensional space of the corner of the gallery, is of an otherworldly interior.
In the middle of this ethereal space is a large circle with the appearance of being a
mechanistically closed threshold. This threshold is both an inviting and a forbidding
passage, depending on the disposition of your core intuitive beliefs.
SEEING
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If you were inclined to enter, the question would be how to open it. Is there
a hidden lever? Do you need to solve a perplexing riddle? Do you will it open with
psychic powers? Do you just wait for someone or something to open it for you? Will
it just open when the muse feels that you are ready?
If you are not so inclined, do you turn your back on it and pretend it is not
there? Do you throw up barriers to protect yourself and what you know from its
threatening potential? Do you try to destroy it? Do you pray to God for deliverance?
The Hood Museum Piece, Dartmouth College, colored tape and chalk in situ, 1992
Personally, I am very curious about what is on the other side. I think of the
blue-and-white interior to the threshold as a narthex to the cathedral of a world yet
to be imagined.
In the drawing, the threshold is on the back wall of this narthex. Flanked by
two other drawn walls, a floor and a ceiling that hosts eight gridded circular symbols
of a triadic dualism—a dualism in which A and B are opposites of each other, but both
A and B are opposite to C. This forms a cyclical, dynamic, and kinetic kind of sonata
form, in which the structure of time and the melodies are perpetually changing with
an endlessly shifting context. Ultimately, the desired effect of the Hood Piece was that
all these elements, in concert, would provide a sense of the machinations of a core
belief system at work.
BILL RAMAGE
| 34 |
The No. B.I.A.S. Piece: The Light Hole
In 1996, at the No. B.I.A.S.
(the North Bennington Independent
Artist Space) Gallery, I constructed
a piece entitled The Light Hole. The
Light Hole was an invitation for
anyone who witnessed it to step
inside, walk around, and experience
an event of the Dagara culture, a
tribal community in Burkino Faso,
West Africa. The thought behind this
project was what better way to explore an expression of a core intuitive belief system
than to participate in a system from a culture so remarkably different from our own?
I once read an autobiographical account of Malidoma Patrice Somé and his
experience participating in the initiation rituals of his tribe. (Much of this section
is taken directly from his book, Of Water and the Spirit.) It is an extraordinary tale.
Seized by Jesuit missionaries when he was four, Malidoma was educated to assist in
converting more African people. From the Jesuits, he learned all about what he called
the white man’s reality: anatomy, geography, history, literature, mathematics, and
Christianity.
When he was about twenty, Malidoma found his way back over many miles to
his own Dagara tribe. The tribe was unwilling to accept him because he could barely
speak their language and had been educated by the colonists. He had forgotten what
it meant to be Dagara. Also, in the Dagara culture becoming a man and assuming the
responsibilities of adulthood occurs during an initiation ritual for boys when they
are about thirteen. Not having gone through this initiation, Malidoma could never be
accepted as a member of his tribal community.
Malidoma had to convince the elders to allow him to be initiated. The rest
is the almost unbelievable story of the Dagara initiation, told by a person who was
an articulate conduit between two extremely different cultures. During this ritual,
the initiates had to jump into a light hole. To be honest, I can’t really imagine what a
light hole might be. Malidoma talks about what is the greatest problem in telling his
story. It is that the things he talks about don’t happen in English but in a language
that has a different mindset about reality. In spite of this difficulty, he describes how
the elders create a portal by combining a piece of hide about a meter in width with a
green gelatinous substance. They conjure with chants and ceremonies to create this
opening to a light hole into which each initiate must jump. When an initiate enters
the light hole, he feels himself descend rapidly, about a dozen or so kilometers every
SEEING
| 35 |
second. Soon after that, he has to force his eyes open to see a powerful light: a light
that is a symphony of luminescent light wires that are bundles of light that seem to
be alive. His task is to grab onto a light bundle and stop his descent. It is important
to note that if he fails to grab one and falls too far, he will be caught in a nether world
for eternity and will never exit the light hole. This did happen to one of the initiates.
Never to return, he was dead to the living.
Once the initiate has a firm grip on a light bundle, he experiences floating
weightlessly. The initiate then loses any sense of his own physicality. He cannot see
or touch his body and becomes an invisible presence bathing in the light of his own
invisibility. He is visible only in his own consciousness. Due both to his own will and
the ceremonial chanting of the elders, the initiate is ejected from the light hole and
left lying on the ground with violet flames dancing on his body. Malidoma contends
that he still bears the scars from these flames.
I have no idea what this event really is or what it means, but I do believe that
the Dagara initiate believes to his core that it is a life-threatening, life-altering event,
as real as the scars on Malidoma’s body.
The No. B.I.A.S. Piece, wood frames, colored plastic strips, and lumber and saplings, 1996
While planning for the No. B.I.A.S. Piece, I knew that to address the idea of the
Light Hole, the installation had to be more physically visceral than a two-dimensional
drawing on a three-dimensional space. So unlike previous pieces, this one was not
drawn on the walls of the gallery, but was constructed in the space. The centripetally
projected drawing in the space was not tape and chalk, but strips of black-and-white
plastic stapled to the constructed frame. The piece also had dimensional components.
About three feet in front of the constructed centripetal drawing of plastic strips, there
was a dimensional centripetal grid made of one-inch by two-inch pieces of lumber
and saplings. Between two columns in the gallery, I suspended a constructed circle in
a square directly in front of the corner and cut out a round hole in the corner, a portal,
that revealed a colorful drawing on the wall behind the piece. Throughout the piece
radiated vines wrapped in white plastic.
| 36 |
BILL RAMAGE
All these layered elements of the Light Hole descended physically into the
space. The centered constructed circle in the square, the dimensional grid, the
walls textured with plastic strips, the hole cut in the corner of the piece, the colorful
drawing behind the piece, and the wrapped vines penetrating the space combined
with the spatial ambiguity of the centripetal projection. Plus, like the Hood Piece,
they were choreographed to provide a sense of the machinations of a core intuitive
belief system at work. But this one was a tribal belief system, different to the point of
being untranslatable from the machinations of our own core intuitive belief systems.
THE PORTALS AND THRESHOLDS
The large circles in both the Hood Piece and the No. B.I.A.S. Piece were
thresholds/portals to worlds outside and beyond the world we know. The Hood
Piece was an unimaginable future and the No. B.I.A.S. Piece was an exploration of the
mysteries of the Dagara weltanschauung.
The depiction of a circular
portal that first appeared in the Islip
Museum Piece II, The Host, was an
attempt to draw out the presence of
the muse, or the Venus of Willendorf.
Since the Host piece in 1989,
nine of the eleven remaining pieces
had this circle: the portal/threshold.
As these pieces evolved, I
became more and more convinced
that there was some kind of mental
The Host, tape and chalk in situ, 1989
mechanism, which could be a keeper
of the gate or a guide like Beatrice from Dante’s Inferno, to allow us entry or guide us
through the portals/thresholds. The next chapter of my story is my earnest attempt
to name, describe, and somehow establish a rapport with this mental mechanism.
SEEING
| 37 |
PART THREE – THE NEURALCHEMIST
“The voyage of discovery is not seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.”
--Marcel Proust
| 38 |
BILL RAMAGE
THE NEURALCHEMIST
From here on out, it all becomes a metaphor, a fantasylike description of the
premise, the content, the subject, and the drawing process, that is proposed after the
fact. And as it is with metaphors, it is only a shadow on the cave wall. A metaphor
is both a true and apt portrayal and an imaginary fabrication of a thing or an event.
It is a lie, but it might be the only way for me to describe something that eludes
description, so bear with me.
What started out as a simple question concerning a disconnect between
a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional response to a perceptual event, has
evolved (through the Empiricals and the Centripetals) to a concern that, on the face of
it, looks as though it has nothing to do with perception. It is not an analytical drawing
from life or a mathematically constructed alternative perceptual space. It looks as
though it aspires to be ART in the tradition (to name a few) of Wassily Kandinsky,
Kazimir Malevich, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Arshile Gorky, Piet Mondrian, and
Jackson Pollock.
This is because I have come to the same artistic arena as those modernists,
but from a different perspective and for different reasons. That perspective and those
reasons concern perception.
When you read the writings of Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, or many of
the artists of that era, you will get the sense that they created a metaphorical forum
in which to pursue a romantic, unquestioned belief that an artist making art was the
only conduit to durable universal truths. Also, in this forum, it is the confluence of all
that is in the life of the artist who makes the art that becomes that conduit. Jackson
Pollock said it best: “Painting is a state of being, self-discovery. Every good artist
paints what he is.”
My concern about perception (as seen in the Fleming Piece, the Hood Piece,
and the No. B.I.A.S. Piece) has led me to this forum, where painting is a “state of
being.” Just as it was for those modernists for whom making art was ultimately the
confluence of all aspects of the artist’s life, so it was with the perception expressed in
those last few centripetal installations; they reflected the confluence of biology, sex,
transcendence, temporal and cosmic energies, and the activity of thought. To put a
different spin on Jackson Pollock’s quote: “Seeing is a state of being, self-discovery.
Every conscious Being sees what he or she is.”
The primary difference in my approach to the modernist arena is that it
is not my concern to create a metaphorical forum to deliberate durable truths.
The modernists have accomplished that. I want to witness and participate in the
deliberations taking place in this forum, particularly in terms of how we image the
world around us.
SEEING
| 39 |
In the process of producing twenty-five centripetal installations, I have come
to appreciate that perception is an expression of all that is the life one lives, and I
have also come to realize that there is something in the core of the mind of that life
that affects, if not determines, that perceptual expression. I call this mental core
facilitator of all of life’s components, the Neuralchemist (neural alchemist). The
Neuralchemist sets the agenda and oversees and facilitates the deliberations of the
deep mind. I would like to come to terms with this Neuralchemist, as it officiates over
the deliberations, listens to music, ponders the core intuitive beliefs, and determines
what the seeing will be, what it will look like, and what it will mean.
THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE: A TWO-TIERED METAPHOR
The circle in the square is a two-tiered
metaphor that is both a portal through which one
can witness the Neuralchemist’s deliberations and a
threshold between a Lebenswelt in flux to a world yet
to be defined.
All the drawings that look to the
Neuralchemist (and there are hundreds of them)
start with a circle in a square. There are at least four
reasons for my commitment to this format.
First, this format is very useful insofar as it
provides a structure that sets limits, lending some
controls so I can more effectively and freely explore
the purview of the Neuralchemist. As Igor Stravinsky
said: “I fence myself in, in order to be free.”
Second, there are the dualistic implications
of
the
circle
in the square. The shapes themselves
Circle in a Square, 6 x 10 in.,
are dualistic: the square being the complement to the
watercolor and pencil on
circle. The square is often thought of as representing
illustration board
the earth and its four corners, while the circle is a
symbol for the heavens. In addition, Carl Jung looked at it another way: the circle, the
age-old symbol of the soul; the square, the temporal.
The third reason is the installations themselves. The structure of these
centripetal projections goes back to that little didactic from Empirical Study III in
which any two-dimensional translation occurs on a circle or cylinder (with equal
radii) around a viewer. It is that circle inscribed in a square room that is the essential
premise of all the centripetal installations. For fifteen years, I stood in the center of a
circle in a square. It is a perspective I know well.
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BILL RAMAGE
Finally, the circle in the square was a significant conceptual and compositional
element (portals/thresholds) drawn on the walls in nine of the last eleven centripetal
installations, including the Hood Piece, the Fleming Piece, and the No. B.I.A.S. Piece.
The simple format, the dualism, the structure of the installations, and the
conceptual and compositional elements—all add up to the circle in the square as the
most perfect, logical, meaningful, and almost inevitable venue for the Neuralchemist
dialogue.
THE DRAWINGS
The early Neuralchemist drawings were executed while I was still producing
the centripetal installations. There was an overlapping of concerns from the subtext
of music and core intuitive beliefs of the Centripetals to the Neuralchemist, just as
there was from the Empiricals (that little didactic from Empirical Study III) to the
Centripetals. There came a point in the dialogue that these installations had served
their purpose and there was no longer any need to pursue the centripetal perspective.
I needed to focus all of my attention on the perspective of the mechanism inside the
mind and behind the eyes that see.
The very first drawing looking to the Neuralchemist was entitled Dynamism.
It could be thought of as something
comparable to a mandala. It was an attempt
to provide a beacon and then to consider
our interaction with some very influential
belief systems. Finally, it posed this crucial
question: How much of our thinking
is prescribed by these beliefs and their
symbols?
This drawing started with the
dualism of the circle (a self-contained shape)
in the square (a shape that points out in four
directions) and then layered it with visual
symbols representing some fundamental
beliefs embedded in our collective psyche.
Dynamism, 30 x 40 in.,
pencil on paper, 1997
It features the yin-yang, the universal
symbol of dualism. But this yin-yang is
the triadic symbol referred to in the Hood
Piece—the third element with its all-seeing
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SEEING
eye and implied mysticism: the Masonic symbol in the center. This all-seeing eye is
viewable on the United States one-dollar bill, and this legal tender could be considered
a symbol of a monetary belief system that provides a quantitative means to measure
our human and spiritual worth.
There is a target, which I think of as a symbol of purpose, and a diamond,
which is a square turned on its end to represent the idea of a dynamic transformation.
Two perpendicular elements of the simple cross convey a sense of reassurance,
like the Red Cross, the Blue Cross, or the White Cross. This cross then extends its
vertical element and becomes the Christian Cross, with all sorts of implications for
the western psyche and its need for transcendence. The serpent and the fish refer to
the dualism of good and evil: Christ and Lucifer. Finally, the image of a solar eruption
and a landscape represents the dualism of the celestial and the terrestrial, the cosmic
and the temporal.
The thought behind this drawing is that any deliberation of the Neuralchemist
will have to take into account the overwhelming influence of all these functional and
fundamental symbols and their content.
With the Neuralchemist drawings, just as with the Empirical drawings,
I knew I was searching for something, but I had no specific idea what to expect.
With the Empirical drawings, I was trying to come to terms with how we see.
The Neuralchemist drawings were an attempt to come to terms with the mental
mechanism that determines what that seeing will be. The process of both of these
resembled a type of scientific research in which I would experiment with a thought or
a question and then monitor where the activity of making the drawings would lead.
But unlike the Empiricals, the Neuralchemist dialogue does not lend itself so
readily to description and explanation. Why? Because the Neuralchemist function
is in the unlanguaged core in the mind and has to be addressed in a more intuitive
and subjective way, comparable to the modernist method. Consequently, when I
bring a thought or a question to the experiment, it is more a matter of kneading and
massaging the idea than a direct inquiry. This intuitive process continues until the
experiment is satisfied in some ineffable and fruitful way. These experiments rarely
present an explicit answer that I can readily draw.
THE DYNAMISMS #2 THROUGH #8
After that first drawing, I executed a series of seven yin-yang drawings entitled
the Dynamisms, #2 through #8. This series considered the idea of a yin-yang, because
I was struck by how dualistic the first drawing (Dynamism) was.
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BILL RAMAGE
These Dynamisms asked the following questions of the iconic symbol of
duality:
 What would happen if a third element were to be introduced to the yin-yang to
disrupt its perfect balance?
 What if a yin-yang were simply to let go of the tension that maintains its otherwise
eternal flow?
 What does a relativistic yin-yang look like?
 How does the Neuralchemist deliberate without an intact yin-yang?
 How might a disrupted yin-yang affect the expressions (perception, music, and
core intuitive beliefs) of the confluence of biology, sex, transcendence, etc.?
A yin-yang is also a symbol of energy visually represented by an isometric
swirl or flow of force. Nietzsche, Jung, and others said that energy is caused by the
tension between two opposites. So, I thought of these drawings as depictions of an
energy caught in the disruption of that tension and its dualistic origin. Each of these
drawings was a yin-yang responding to a dynamic occurrence of disruption; each, a
response made by a component of the confluence expressed in the Fleming Piece.
Dynamism #2 is sex
responding to the dynamic
occurrence of disruption.
Dynamism #2, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
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SEEING
Dynamism #3 is
transcendence (faith)
responding to the dynamic
occurrence of disruption.
Dynamism #3, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
Dynamism #4 is the
terrestrial responding to
the dynamic occurrence of
disruption.
Dynamism #4, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
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BILL RAMAGE
Dynamism #5 is the temporal
responding to the dynamic
occurrence of disruption.
Dynamism #5, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
Dynamism #6 is
transcendence (death)
responding to the dynamic
occurrence of disruption.
Dynamism #6, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
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SEEING
Dynamism #7 is biology
responding to the dynamic
occurrence of disruption.
Dynamism #7, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
Dynamism #8 is the cosmic
responding to the dynamic
occurrence of disruption.
Dynamism #8, 58 x 48 in., carpenter crayons, pencil,
and paint on canvas, 1998–1999
BILL RAMAGE
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There is also an underlying activity concerning dualism that is a substructure
for these Dynamisms. In each, there is a layered underdrawing of a Cartesian-like
vortex with its energy that is methodical and systematic. And on top of that, there
is a drawing that is a chthonic energy, an energy caught in that disruption. This
underdrawing appears in the Dynamis Triptychs, the Venus of Willendorf Triptych, and
in the Death and Ecstasy of St. Theresa.
It is an exploration of all these energies that became the focus of the next
series of drawings: the Dynamis Triptychs.
THE DYNAMIS: THE SPIRITLIKE VITAL FORCE
ANIMATING THE HUMAN ORGANISM – DR. SAMUEL
HAHNEMANN, ORGANON OF MEDICINE, 1842
From the body’s 98.6 degrees to the ineffable projection of a person’s mojo,
from pheromones to auras—essentially it is all about energy. It is just as Jackson
Pollock said, “We’re part of it all, like everything else.” These drawings consider the
possibility that everything we do, think about, and experience (including perception),
can be thought of as a projection of that animating force.
It has been my experience that when it comes to something as simple as
talking to someone, the activity of that conversation is just as much an exchange
and mingling of energies, as it is a verbal interaction. In teaching, I find it is more
than a simple matter of disseminating information. The learning that takes place is
conveyed on the back of the personal energy I am able to project.
Just as it is for conversing and teaching, seeing is more than the simple act of
receiving light. Merleau-Ponty describes perception as a full-blown sensory system of
the human animal. He believes seeing to be a whole body experience. Seeing cannot
be understood apart from being in the world as a thing that breathes, moves, touches,
hears, smells, feels pain, experiences love, knows happiness, and so on. MerleauPonty’s notion of perception is sometimes described as a primordial openness to the
Lebenswelt. For Merleau-Ponty and for the purpose of these drawings, seeing is the
dynamis and the dynamis is seeing.
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SEEING
Dynamis Triptychs I & II
Wakonda
Ruin
Ruach
Dynamis Triptych I, 5 x 15 ft., watercolor and colored pencil, pencil and paint on
canvas, 2001
Ki
Baraka
Mana
Dynamis Triptych II, 5 x 15 ft., watercolor and colored pencil, pencil and paint on
canvas, 2001
The titles of the pieces of the first two triptychs are words from different
cultures that embody the dynamis: Wakonda is Sioux; Ruin is African; Ruach is
Hebrew; Ki is Japanese; Baraka is Sufi; Mana is Hawaiian, Kahunas.
All of the drawings, going back to the empirical studies, were searching
for something; yet, I had no specific idea what that was or what to expect. While
working with the dynamis, I found myself unexpectedly led to a sensibility that was
sexually charged. It wasn’t something I overtly intended. What became apparent
while processing these drawings and experimenting with the dynamis was that sex,
as a powerful function at every level of consciousness, was central to and predicated
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BILL RAMAGE
on a melding of biological, mental, and spiritual imperatives. Sex was a significant
component of the spiritlike vital force.
After this unexpected turn of events, I could no longer work with or consider
the Neuralchemist without considering the need of human beings to participate
sexually. Since these triptychs, most of the drawings have been imbued with this
sexual sensibility. Another unexpected quality of the first two triptychs is how
fundamentally female and chthonic they are. It was as though I intuitively saw the
feminine as the most essential and natural quality of the dynamis.
The Apollonian Triptych
Raphael
Giotti
Pollock
Dynamis Triptych III, The Apollonians, 6 x 18 ft., mixed media on canvas, 2002
The third Dynamis Triptych, The Apollonians, consciously and self-consciously
addresses a male manifestation of this energy. As much as it was a reaction to the first
two triptychs, I had a need to address and celebrate what turned out to be something
you could call the “Sky God” (Camille Paglia’s thought) of the dynamis. The intuitive
source of these Apollonian drawings is thinly abstract, ethereal, and aloof from the
more chthonic feminine energy. The decision-making that became these drawings
seemed to originate more from the frontal lobe than from the more essential depth of
the mind. The activity of drawing this triptych was an entirely different experience
from that of the first two triptychs. Both reflections, the feminine and the masculine,
enhanced my appreciation and understanding of how the dynamis might work.
Drawing these three Dynamis Triptychs provided me some access to the
Neuralchemist’s deliberations. At least I caught a glimpse of the machination of
some very powerful source material and how it plays a role in the deliberations
that determine how we image the world. The next thought was to approach these
energies on a first-person basis—a self-portrait, so to speak.
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SEEING
THE SELF-PORTRAITS: THE NEURALCHEMIST FROM THE INSIDE
Several years ago, I experienced a devastating, life-altering event in my
personal life that resulted in nothing short of the death of my person. What I was and
who I was, was lost forever.
This next series of drawings was to consider and bear witness to the rekindling
of the vital force that animates the energy that had nearly been extinguished in
me. In these drawings I wanted to use this circumstance to come to terms with the
Neuralchemist from the inside.
As part of this introspective
exploration of the Neuralchemist, I
considered the idea of transverberation.
I have always been drawn to Bernini’s
Transverberation of Saint Theresa, where
you can witness her experiencing death,
sex, and transcendence simultaneously,
as she anticipates another life—a life
characterized by a euphoric, expanded
interior mental and spiritual awareness.
I was also attracted to the idea of an
infusion of this mental and spiritual
energy into my own anticipation of
another life.
The titles of these drawings speak
to a celebration of revitalizing the
anima within me: I Am the Phoenix, The
Conception (a reference to a rebirth),
Joy of My Desiring, and The Death and
Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.
Bernini: Transverberation of
Saint Theresa, 1647–1652
BILL RAMAGE
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I Am the Phoenix, 8 x 8 ft., watercolor,
colored pencil on canvas, 2004
The Conception, 7 x 7 ft., watercolor,
colored pencil on canvas, 2004
Joy of My Desiring, 8 x 8 ft., watercolor,
colored pencil on canvas, 2005
SEEING
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The Death and Ecstasy of St. Theresa, 6 x 12 ft., mixed media on canvas, 2005
I found that reigniting the vital force within me was not a wildly dramatic chthonic
event; it was neither an exploding yin-yang nor a primordial openness. Although the
process was about an incredible infusion of energy back into what had become the
dysfunction of mind, body, and spirit, this transverberation was more like a methodical
reconstruction and a systematic reigniting of that animating vital force. All this led
to the idea that it was possible that the Neuralchemist and the deliberations could
complement its visceral libidinal energy with a careful, methodical manifestation of
the dynamis. I believe the circumstance of my condition, and what was necessary to
reengage the vitality that had been lost, provided the opportunity to reveal the other
rational and methodical side of the Neuralchemist. This also provided a whole new
breadth of possibilities to the Neuralchemist deliberations.
In this next series of drawings I wanted to think about the Neuralchemist as
an iconic symbol that embodies the full spectrum of the deliberations that determines
how we experience seeing, as well as the life that we live.
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Bill Ramage
The Venus of Willendorf: A Series of Iconic Drawings
I have always held great reverence for the Venus of
Willendorf. I see her as the milestone that indicates the most
significant transition to date in the history of our species.
Although one can only speculate about the intention and
significance of this little piece of limestone, I personally signify
her as the beginning of art, the awakening of the metaphysical,
and the initiating of the quest to try to understand what it
means to be a human being.
So it was with the Venus of Willendorf in mind that
I executed a series of drawings, inventing iconic symbols
which attempt to embody all the operative capabilities
(chthonic, dynamic, libidinal, methodical, primordial,
rational, systematic) of the Neuralchemist. The idea was to
picture the Neuralchemist employing all of these operative
capabilities as it presides over the confluence of biology,
sex, transcendence, temporal and cosmic energies, and the
activity of thought.
Venus of Willendorf Triptych
(center panel), Eleanor of Aquitaine,
7 x 7 ft., mixed media canvas, 2007
Venus of Willendorf II, 7 x 7 ft.,
pencil on canvas, 2007
SEEING
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At the conclusion of this last series of drawings, I realized that I was as close
as I was ever going to get to giving form to the Neuralchemist. After twelve years of
trying to find this Neuralchemist, I still cannot describe it; however, I have acquired a
good sense of its presence. I am certain that the Neuralchemist is there and it always
has been there. It is a real and fundamental function of the mind.
Since the advent of the Venus of Willendorf, which opened this dialogue,
philosophers, poets, priests, scientists, shamans, and artists have been negotiating
with and channeling the Neuralchemist. Aristotle and Plato; Descartes, Hume,
Kant, Locke, and Nietzsche; Homer and Sappho; the authors of the Bible and other
sacred documents; Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and Bohm; Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and
the Beatles; Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto, Michelangelo, Picasso, Pollock, Beuys, and
Nauman—all of these and scores of others, over the centuries, through great effort
and meditation have framed questions that bid access to this fundamental function
of the mind. The Neuralchemist has revealed its deliberations to some, and these
revealed deliberations have become the core intuitive beliefs—the beliefs that have
been the underpinnings of the way we see, understand, and live in the world.
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BILL RAMAGE
A POSTSCRIPT
As a postscript to my story, I humbly asked the Neuralchemist two questions, the
specificity of which was unlike the pursuit of my forty-year concern with perception.
One question concerns modern physics; the other, romantic love. I think questions
put to the Neuralchemist are essentially the same: What does modern physics or
romantic love or any other perplexing issue of a weltanschauung mean? How do we
effectively address it?
Question #1: What Is Real?
The first of my questions was a concern for the mental, spiritual, and psychic
conundrum we face as we deal with modern physics and its impact on how we
understand the world we perceive and live in.
How do we address the idea that the physical world of modern-day physics
is not the great knowable machine Newton told us it was, but rather a great elusive
thought? In his book, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, John Gribbin calls it a participatory
universe. “The whole universe can be thought of as a delayed-choice experiment in
which the existence of the observer who notices what was going on is what imparts
tangible reality to the origin of everything.”
I thought the controversial twentieth-century physicist David Bohm would
be a good venue to query the contemporary conundrum of the physical world being a
great elusive thought, because he tried to answer it. Bohm challenged the standard
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, for which he was marginalized by his
colleagues. He proffered a revision of quantum theory that included a wholeness that
was fundamental in what he called the “holomovement” or the “ground of all that is.”
He also restored an objective reality in the enfolding-unfolding of the implicate order
as it ephemerally manifests itself as the explicate—an expression in particular form
and experience.
The David Bohm Quintet, 7 x 35 ft., colored pencil on canvas, 2009
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SEEING
The David Bohm Quintet is my intuitive exploration of Bohm’s interpretation.
It has a “ground of all that is” that extends as connecting lines and a radiating field
across the five pieces. In each piece there is an explicate event of the implicate order
that is unfolding from a square or a circle or a circle in a square. Each of the five
explicate expressions is a drawing of one of the invented iconic symbols of the last
series of Neuralchemist drawings, with all their intended content, and each of them
also unfolds from a circle in a square.
Bohm stated in Wholeness and the Implicate Order: “I would say that in my
scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the
nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole,
which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and
unfoldment.”
David Bohm extrapolated a philosophy of consciousness from his theories
concerning physics. The implicate order became a propositional template for plotting
the emergence and dynamics of both matter and consciousness, which he thought
had the potential to be transformational. (Much of this section was taken directly
from The Essential David Bohm, edited by Lee Nichol.)
Bohm once wrote: “I would say that as a man perceives, so he is . . . So the
transformation of man must come through a new vision, a new understanding.”
Question #2: Male Transcendence?
Sextus Empiricus Suite I, Drawing 10,
Oil Crayon on Canvas, 7 x 7 ft., 2010
Sextus Empiricus Suite II, Drawing 12,
Oil Crayon on Canvas, 7 x 7 ft., 2010
The second question is concerned with the idea that romantic love is waning
and that male creative genius is in decline. The two suites of twelve drawings each
that explore this question are named after the third-century skeptic, Sextus Empiricus
(160–210 A.D.), who argued that we can’t know anything, and to pursue trying to
BILL RAMAGE
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know would only cause discontentment and unhappiness. It is an idea that I thought
might be germane to the character of this question, since the idea of knowing is such a
significant part of male transcendence. The drawings themselves are, simultaneously,
a celebration of male transcendence and a lament for its passing.
With the dissolution of modern humanism, I believe there has been a
significant shift in the relationships of the sexes. This is a cultural dynamic that
has changed a few times over the centuries. During the Classical Age, women were
property. When Saint Paul said, love thy wife, it was a truly revolutionary idea. During
the Middle Ages, the dynamic was contractual; there were arranged marriages for a
variety of social, political, and economic reasons. Since the twelfth century, with the
troubadour’s singing of love and the iconic love story of Héloïse and Abelard, the
dynamic has been characterized by a humanist concept of romantic love . . . a dynamic
in which the male is driven beyond reason to prove himself worthy.
In our postmodern world, romantic love has gradually morphed into a kind of
commerce. With the sexual revolution, and now texting, email, and social web sites,
the dynamic for both males and females has become a transient matter of brokering
the best deal (socially and sexually) with as many options as possible, and with
everybody on somebody’s social/sexual back burner.
The waning of the humanist concept of romantic love could be considered
a lamentable circumstance. What Camille Paglia (in her book Sexual Personae:
Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson) refers to as an Apollonian
transcendence—from Michelangelo to Picasso, from Copernicus to Einstein—was a
manifestation of the forces of romantic love in action. But as the dynamics of romantic
love wanes, that male transcendence could become all but extinguished. It is not
chauvinistic to think that this may potentially affect what we are, how we function,
and how we image and understand the world.
While drawing these Sextus Empiricus Suites, I wondered: How significant is
the waning of romantic love and the loss of male transcendence to the individual and
collective psyche? What might this mean? What, if anything, could or should be done
about it?
My presumptuous and all-too-simplistic attempt to channel a Neuralchemist
with these questions is a proposition I never would have anticipated when I asked my
first question about how I processed two- and three-dimensional visual information.
I didn’t so much navigate my way from my first question to the last, as I was led
through that maze by something that was well beyond my control.
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SEEING
PART FOUR – WHAT WE SEE
“We animate what we see,
we only see what we animate.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
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BILL RAMAGE
WHAT WE SEE
It has been forty years that I have been thinking about, working with, and
lecturing on another way to experience the act of seeing. My attempt to understand
how we see, (the Empiricals, the Centripetals, and the Neuralchemist) could affect
how we animate what we see. To question what we animate when we see has been
my primary purpose for most of my professional life.
During this time I have found it almost impossible to convince anyone to
consider another way to codify the visual experience. An argument that brings
into question the way we see is often met with incredulity. Because we are so
entrenched with the way we understand seeing, to think it might be something else is
incomprehensible…literally unthinkable. Our collective imagination is not equipped
to think this thought. Even though philosophers have argued for thousands of years
about the source and reliability of the senses, as a whole we believe that we see what
we see: that the chair we see across the room IS that chair across the room. It is
simply “it is what it is” and there is no other way to think about it or see it. We accept
that visual experience as an unquestionable perception without giving it any thought.
We open our eyes and we just see.
A hundred years ago the Cubists made
the argument that all things, including the chair,
exist in time and space and have hundreds of
simultaneous visual identities. To simply see a
chair is not seeing it; it is just identifying the object.
It was a profound idea, but since seeing hundreds
of simultaneous identities was not our experience,
Cubism ultimately had no impact on how we think
about seeing. Cubism and its notion of multiplicity
was embraced as a revolutionary aesthetic, which it
was, but it had no practical application toward our
perceptual understanding of that chair.
When I was at all successful in providing
an alternative (the Centripetal installations) to the
visual experience we now have, it was generally
thought of as an illusion, a trompe d’oeil (a trick
Picasso: Accordionist, 1911
of the eye). I found it interesting that people would
override what they actually saw, when provided a
visual alternative to what they think they know and believe to be true. If a visual
experience is presented that does not comply with an “it is what it is” experience,
this is simply disregarded as a curious phenomenon, maybe even interesting as was
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SEEING
Cubism, but not applicable to how we see the world. At present, it seems as though it
is just not in our collective imagination to consider an alternative perceptual system
because there is no experiential foundation for it. The “we see what we see; it is
what it is” paradigm precludes this possibility. We cannot see beyond the prevailing
fifteenth-century system of linear perspective because it works so well, or so it seems.
But ask yourself: Do I really see everything there is to see, the only way it
can be seen? Do I truly believe my perception can be an unquestionable perception
of reality? I would venture to say an honest response to these questions is NO, even
though we still believe we see the chair with an absolute “it is what it is” certainty.
This cognitive dissonance is the result of a tacit belief in a convincing visual world
described by the constructs of linear perspective. The function of linear perspective
is to structure seeing. Its purpose is to describe, in an intelligible way, the physical
world two-dimensionally. And this two-dimensional translation is an oversimplified,
accessible description of a perception caught in a millisecond of time and devoid of
any actual physical space.
Piero della Francesca: Ideal City, 1470
Piero della Francesca’s Ideal City is ideal because it is a perception you can see
with certainty. “It is what it is”: a picture of a conceptually accessible, systematically
constructed space. It is absolute. When you look at it, you see a structured perception.
It is a very convincing “city” in linear perspective that is frozen in time and in a space
that can only exist on a flat surface. If an artist could produce such a piece as The
Actual City (and the Centripetal installations came close), it could not be translated
two-dimensionally because it would have to exist in time and space to be “actual.” And
every TIME an observer moves in this SPACE, even a fraction of an inch, all the objects
would visually change their shape and shift in the space. Nothing could be seen as
absolute, because there would be too many variables. The “Actual City,” just like the
chair across the room, would trade in its oversimplified and accessible single identity
for a shifting multitude of simultaneous identities, as the Cubists said it would.
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Presently, we see and understand our visual experiences as if there were a
two-dimensional, linear perspectival lens between our visual cortex and the world
outside. All our visual thinking is processed through this two-dimensional lens.
When we see a space, a landscape, a street scene, an interior, it is presented to our
consciousness as a fixed pictorial space, as with the Ideal City. This frozen spatial
image in the mind is a convincing translation of the linear perspective complete with
horizon lines and vanishing points, and we get to move around its fixed orthogonals.
This fixed space is what we are convinced we see, and consequently, we are virtually
unaware that we don’t process this space in the flux of visual time and space. We see
the chair as though it was Piero’s Ideal Chair—simplified and accessible, absolute and
knowable, fixed in time and space, an unquestionable, structured perception. This
perception is a true trompe d’oeil.
One overwhelming reason why we cling to and cannot see beyond our tacit
belief in the linear perspectival description of our visual world is that it complies
with our thinking that the physical world is fixed. We are confident that the walls
in a room do not physically change shape and shift in that space, and it is this fixed
Newtonian physical space that linear perspective conjures in the mind. It becomes
what we know we experience.
But it is not how we visually experience it. If I were to place nine people in a
semicircle in front of a rectangular wall (the space) and then drew a perfect square at
eye level in the middle of that wall (with the sides of the square parallel to the edges
of the wall), the odds are that all nine people would see the square on the rectangular
wall because they know that is what it is. But only the person in the middle of the
semicircle and perpendicular to the wall would actually see the square; the other
eight would see trapezoids. Or I could reverse that by drawing a trapezoid in the
middle of the wall (with the top and bottom lines of the trapezoid at angles to the floor
and ceiling). And perhaps it is the second person on the left side of the semicircle and
only that person who, while believing she sees the trapezoid she knows to be drawn
on the rectangular wall, is actually seeing a square. Or to put it yet another way, all
nine people each see a different shape when they look at the square or the trapezoid,
even though they believe they are all having the same experience. Why? Because
they know they are seeing the same square or trapezoid. Or better yet, if they were
to walk the path of that semicircle while looking at the square or trapezoid on the
wall, the shape would gradually morph into the nine different shapes that the nine
people in the semicircle saw, even though the whole time they would believe they
were just seeing a square or trapezoid on the wall.
What we know and what we visually experience are usually two very different
things. My overall purpose has been an attempt to reconcile the two, because our
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perceptual understandings, devoid of visual time and space, are limited by what we
know we see. Now we can ask, how is it possible to see another way than what we
do? How can it be that we do not experience visual time and space, when we live in
time and space? Or that we do not know we do not experience visual time and space?
Or whether there is such a thing as visual time and space, since we do not experience
it? Implied in these questions is the belief that seeing is simply seeing, and that as
human beings, we have always experienced sight in much the same way as we do
now. We open our eyes and we see.
But it is likely there was a time in the history of our species when we were
unaware that we were seeing at all. We could see, but we did not have the conceptual
wherewithal to appreciate seeing as a knowable experience that we could think
about, consider rationally, and eventually try to structure. A conscious awareness
of sight had not formed in our collective mind or imagination. How is it possible to
see and not be aware of it? I think it is reasonable to assume that a fish or a gnat or
possibly even a dog can see without any conceptual awareness that it is experiencing
sight. So it is possible that at one time we could see and not consciously know it.
One of the more interesting speculations explaining the cave paintings of the
Paleolithic period was that they were a celebration and exploration of a newfound
awareness that humans were experiencing sight—a
virtual evolutionary shift deserving a celebration on the
scale of Lascaux.
Although the two-dimensional constructs of
linear perspective presently obstruct our ability to
experience visual time and space, its impact over the
last six hundred years has been profound. To structure
seeing has had an immeasurable effect on how our
culture has developed.
Uccello: Perspective
Drawing, 1450
This is a good example of
a fifteenth-century artist
teaching the culture how
to see. It addresses a need
to structure perception.
It has been said that a fifteenth-century artist
taught the culture how to see. When Brunelleschi
introduced linear perspective around 1425, he provided
a structured visual language that allowed people to have
a dialogue and share experiences about how they see
the world and everything in it. Before this, sight was a
matter of faith. We experienced what Arthur Zajonc (in
his book Catching the Light) called a “moral space and
spiritual light.”
During and before the Middle Ages it was not
in our collective imagination to structure seeing. The
mental mechanism, the Neuralchemist, that governs
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BILL RAMAGE
what and how we see was
metaphysically based and had
little cause to consider the
physical space in which human
life and all that it means exists.
It is not that we could not see
that physical space, but like the
cave dwellers not being aware of
sight, it was just not part of our
cognitive awareness.
However, things were
changing in the heliocentric
world. The geographical, philosophical, political, socioeconomic, and theological dynamics of
the culture were shifting from
a God-centered to a humancentered
world. This new world
Duccio: Temptation of Jesus on the Mountain,
needed
another
way to see and
1308–1311
think about what was physically
Duccio’s painting deals with “moral space and
knowable, because how we see
spiritual light.”
determines how we know what
we know. As Rudolf Arnheim
once said: “Vision is the primary medium of thought.” In other words, perception
is the foundation of thought. This new perception was first addressed in 1305 with
Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel.
Giotto: The Arena Chapel,
1305
It is interesting that the
subject of these paintings is
an enclosed space.
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SEEING
Then there was the legend of Francesco Petrarch, a fourteenth-century
scholar who climbed a hill and on the summit experienced dimensional space for the
first time. He was so overwhelmed, that he gave penance when he returned home,
because he believed he had transgressed against God.
By its very nature, linear perspective and its new visual dialogue combined to
make the best voice in which to describe our newfound humanist culture. It was an
empirical dialogue that evolved into the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
This fifteenth-century system of linear perspective anticipated and facilitated the
weltenschauung of the modern world.
But once again things have changed. We now live in a new postmodern world
in which the geographical, philosophical, political, scientific, and socioeconomic
dynamics of the culture are shifting from a human-centered to a scientifically driven,
technology based, globalized collective identity. This requires a new way to see and
think about a physical world that is practically ineffable.
Jackson Pollock: Autumn Rhythm, 1950
To quote Jackson Pollock, “The modern artist. . .is working and expressing
an inner world—in other words, expressing the energy and other
inner forces.”
In one way or another, much of the art produced during the first half of the
twentieth century was making an argument that the life we experience is not the
life we know. The Bauhaus, Cubism, Dadaism, De Stijl or Neoplasticism, Fauvism,
Fluxus, Futurism, Suprematism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism—all these
movements were seeking a new way to see and think about the world.
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Now more than ever, we need a new visual dialogue and foundation of thought
that speaks to the dynamic flux of a world in which, as the physicist P. W. Bridgman
states: “The structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought
will not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it.” Or as Richard
Tarnas writes: “One cannot regard reality as a removed spectator against a fixed
object, rather, one is always and necessarily engaged with reality, thereby at once
transforming it while being transformed oneself.”
It’s time to realize that when we open our eyes we don’t see the world as
it is — we see a world that is essentially imaged by the mind. We have to move
beyond the fixed “it is what it is” language conveyed by linear perspective. Because,
as Wittgenstein points out, “language is a cage” and this cage impedes our ability to
adapt to our contemporary circumstance.
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PART FIVE – CONCLUSION
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in
between are ‘The Doors of Perception.’”
--Aldous Huxley
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A RECAPITULATION
“For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of
his cavern.” —William Blake
Through the Empiricals, the Centripetals, and the Neuralchemist, I have
witnessed the interactive and cyclical activity of sight and mind. The process of
discovery involved in all the work I have produced since the initial question has
convinced me that what happens when we see, as well as what happens when we
create cognitions from the Neuralchemist deliberations, is symbiotic. We see the
cognitions we create while creating the cognitions we see. Also symbiotic is our
connection to the Neuralchemist, our circumstance and its deliberations. Our
circumstance affects its deliberations, as its deliberations affect our circumstance. In
addition, our seen cognitions and our connection to the Neuralchemist are symbiotic.
A cyclical cause and effect connects sight and mind.
After forty years of thinking about perception, one thing of which I’m certain
is that given the opportunity, seeing has the potential to be anything it needs to
be. It is not the fixed “it is what it is” perception that our fifteenth-century (linear
perspective) way of seeing has caused us to believe. And as it is with perception,
the Neuralchemist’s deliberations and the subsequent cognitions we create have the
potential to become anything they need to be.
But presently this cause-and-effect cycle seems to have stalled partially
because the way we visually interpret our place in the world (and the subsequent
cognitions we create) is imbued with an ingrained sense of knowing. This knowing
constricts the Neuralchemist’s deliberations, prescribes our perception, and
preempts any thought, reason, or impulse to reconsider seeing, as well as most other
elemental things that affect how we experience the life we live.
When we know something, there is really little need to think about it. For
the most part, there is not even anything in the mind or the collective imagination
to consider that it could be something to think about. And when that knowing is
embedded so deeply in the mind that we are not even aware that it is there, the
mind becomes closed to the myriad of possibilities for our circumstance and for the
Neuralchemist’s deliberations. My forty-year saga has convinced me that this knowing
limits the scope and complexities of the cognitions we are capable of creating—
cognitions potentially more capable of seeing our way through the demands of our
postmodern transition.
This engrained knowing that is embedded in our prevailing fifteenth-century
sense of perception is not just a matter of how we see. It is a fundamental mindset
as to how the world and everything in it is understood. This mindset is a significant
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barrier between where we are and where we need to be. It blocks the threshold
between the modern world that was and the Lebenswelt yet to be imagined. It is the
closed threshold . . . Petrarch’s Threshold.
We need to challenge the circumstance of knowing what we see and become
receptive to the infinite possibilities available were we to wash away the constructs
that obstruct our vision. As the ever prescient William Blake wrote: “If the doors of
perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
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EPILOGUE: “A PROSPECTIVE BRAIN”
Recently I have become aware of the work of Marcus E. Raichle, a professor of
radiology and neurology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
His research is concerned with what has been coined “The Brain’s Dark Energy.” It
is what happens in the brain when we daydream, just stare into space, or when the
mind is simply idle or at rest. (Much of this material is taken from Professor Raichle’s
February 2010 article in Scientific American, “The Brain’s Dark Energy.”)
Presently, neuroscientists are discovering that this at rest or default mode is
a very important function of the brain. It is not a background murmur, as was once
thought; it is the brain doing most of the brain’s work and using twenty times more
energy than any conscious function of the brain. When we perform a task, the brain’s
energy consumption increases less than five percent of the underlying baseline
activity. Most conscious activity, like sitting down to a meal or making a speech, is
only a small departure from the baseline activity of the brain.
The default mode activity functions throughout a collaborating group of brain
regions neuroscientists now call the default mode network. It was perception that
initiated neuroscientists’ interest in this newfound default mode network (and the
brain’s intrinsic activity), and it was perception that suggested just how important
this mental activity that occurs when the mind is unfocused might be.
Here is how Marcus Raichle addresses this issue:
The question of neural dark energy arose when observing
just how little information from the senses actually reaches
the brain’s internal processing areas. Visual information, for
instance, degrades significantly as it passes from the eye to the
visual cortex.
Of the virtually unlimited information available in the
world around us, the equivalent of ten billion bits per second
arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic
nerve has only a million output connections, just six million bits
per second can leave the retina, and only ten thousand bits per
second make it to the visual cortex.
After further processing, visual information feeds
into the brain regions responsible for forming our conscious
perception. Surprisingly, the amount of information constituting
that conscious perception is less than one hundred bits per
second. Such a thin stream of data probably could not produce a
perception if it were all the brain took into account; the intrinsic
activity must play a role.
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As it turns out, it not only plays a role, but this default mode network is the
function that provides a coherence that becomes a conscious perception and the
coherence necessary for all other conscious departure from the baseline activity.
But what I find most interesting and significant is that this default mode
network prepares the brain for future contingencies. When the brain is not departing
from the baseline activity, it is constructing a context to prepare us for when we are
confronted with actual sensory information. Or as Alvaro Pascual-Leone of Harvard
says, “The resting activity seems to create images about what to expect from the
outside world.” The default mode network is critical in providing the necessary
content for what we experience in such a small window (less than one hundred out
of a possible ten billion bits per second) of conscious awareness.
Professor Raichle’s metaphor for the default mode network is an orchestral
conductor who is issuing timing signals, organizing the activity among different brain
regions to make a coherent sound, cueing the visual and auditory parts of the cortex,
and ultimately making sure all the regions of the brain are ready and prepared to
react in concert to any and all input stimuli from the outside world. The default
mode network is an “orchestrator of the self.” Or it could be what Randy Buckner of
Harvard refers to as “the prospective brain.”
So neurologically, it seems as though we do image the world around us and
how we understand and place ourselves in it. And this imaged world does affect
everything else. As David Bohm states: “As a man perceives, so he is.”
The default mode network just might be the source of our core intuitive
beliefs. It could also be the modernist metaphorical forum that deliberates durable
universal truths, and as for the “orchestrator of the self”—that’s the Neuralchemist.