Art and perception

"The role of perception is to make sense of sensation. Perceptual processes extract meaning from the continuously changing, often chaotic, sensory input from external energy sources and organise it into stable orderly precepts. A precept is what is perceived - the phenomenological, or experienced, outcome of the processes of perception. It is not a physical object... rather, [it is] the psychological product of the perceptual activity".

- Psychology and life (Philip G. Zimbardo and Richard J. Gerrig) -

Within every artist, some would say every person, lies the impulse to create. Of course this impulse is not confined to the arts, as creation takes many forms but for the artist it lies at the core of what they do. In the wake of the creation impulse follows a concept, an idea of what might be. It need not be a fully formed idea, perhaps it is just a notion the seed of something yet to develop, but it is always there. Some artists develop there pieces in there entirety prior to the creation process, others develop the concept simultaneously, allowing it to evolve in a more organic fashion. What follows of course, is the process which eventually leads to the production of a piece of art. Whether the art is conceptual, sculptural, or even performance based is not of primary concern. It is the development process of the concept behind a piece that we are interested in.

At the beginning of this piece is a quote from Philip Zimbardo and Richard Gerrigs' excellent book, 'Psychology and life'. The quote describes perceptual organisation as the process of 'making sense of sensation'. Sensation here, referring to the conversion of external energy into the neural codes recognised by the brain. It can be understood as a first pass representation of the basic facts of our immediate environment. Perceptual organisation takes this first pass information and develops precepts, categorisations of the information as objects, people and things. These precepts are developed over a life time and all have some emotional attachment, depending on the life experience of the person in question.

As artists, we take our own set of precepts as a starting point and from here, use our creative impulse to develop the concepts that drive our work. It is through perception and experience that we develop these concepts, and through perceiving our own and others creative exploits that we can add to our well of inspiration.

It is the role perception has played in art, both from the angle of the artist and the viewer, that has fueled some of the most interesting movements in art over the years. Art has gone from slavish reproductive work, to impressionist lustre, to conceptual analysis of the systems of art. Yet all these processes have perception at there core and in my opinion always will. Even if an artist managed to create a piece of work that avoided any of her own perceptual input, it would instantly be categorised on viewing. Inevitably, any attempt to sidestep the loop of perception is doomed to fail, but the question I would like to pose is this. Should we stop trying?

The Morpheus Muse