Thursday Post 3-19-09

Visual Analogy

According to the essay on Matta in Crosscurrents of Modernism, the inscapes' evocative forms "are visual analogies for the artist's psyche"
- Professor Claude Cernuschi

Stafford, Maria. Visual Analogy: Consciousness As the Art of Connecting. MIT Press: Cambridge, 2001.

This book talks about the dire need, in all fields including and beyond art, "for ways of seeing sameness-in-difference". Stafford states that "it is impossible to have a theory of difference without an equally nuanced conception of similarity. Even the fact that you chose two things to compare means they must have some aspect in common which is why you chose to compare them. If you decide to compare the differences in strippers and rocks, there must be some element that the two ideas share, or else there is really not much point in pointing out the differences. Of course anything we can think of shares the aspect of 'things we can think of'. Analogies relate to art, because as Stafford says, "First, I propose that both the proportional and participatory varieties of analogy are inherently visual. It requires perspicacity to see what kind of adjustments need to be made between uneven cases to achieve a tentative harmony. It also presupposes discernment to discover the relevant likeness and unlikeness in things. To the best of my knowledge, the optical necessity driving the entire system has not been pointed out before in the analyses devoted to this venerable conundrum. This brings me to the additional, novel claim that the visual arts are singularly suited to the nature and function of the analogical procedure." The basis for perceiving analogies is visual. In my art I am using this natural brain functioning to trick the eye. By using photographic material (that renders in the viewer as photographic and therefore at least somewhat depicting what it appears to depict) that I manipulate to more strongly represent something to which I can create a visual analogy with the original photograph, and combining it with drawings (that eventually register in the viewer as drawings and therefore possibly not congruent with reality) that are clearly representational, I take visual analogies further and present them as completely alike instead of simply similar.