Joseph Lankford
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| John Brown at work on a pictorial transformation |
How are we to read pictures? While many of us might reply, "We aren't," or, "Any way we want to," Professor John Brown is exploring technologies that present real challenges to these skeptical or subjectivist hypotheses. Brown is using image-manipulating software to help clarify just what it is that we are responding to when we say that a painting is beautiful or that certain features of it "work." Not only has Brown's new approach to reading pictures been well received by his students and colleagues in the philosophy department, but also attracted the attention (and funds) of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). MITH recently gave Brown a fellowship, sponsoring his proposal to make this exciting new technology fully accessible to his students.
Conceived in 1998, MITH is a program at the University of Maryland that describes itself as "a community of scholars, interdisciplinary institute, and electronic space devoted to exploring ways in which new technologies can be used in university research, teaching, and community outreach. MITH plays a pioneering role in developing advanced technological resources for revitalizing, reinventing, and expanding humanities research and education."
So what does philosophy of art have to do with techno-pedagogy?
Software like PhotoShop (and a good bit of patience) has enabled Brown to produce real visual examples that can give basis to various aesthetic or critical claims about a given painting. For those who read pictures and talk coherently about them, the challenge has always been to settle aesthetic questions by imagining what would have been gained or lost had the artist decided to do this rather than that, and try to reach some kind of consensus on what, if any, difference it would have made. The difficulties and problems that arise when one is dealing in imagination and counterfactual hypotheses are obvious and intractable; at the very least, they undermine the possibility of genuine scientific inquiry being applicable to art and aesthetics. With the use of Brown's modified images, these hypotheses can actually be tested.
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| Cubism decubed.
A student project for Brown's class |
Using a scanner, PhotoShop, and a high-resolution printer, Brown has digitized works of Cézanne, Matisse, Mondrian, and Escher to name but a few. The specific changes Brown makes to these pictures depends on what he is trying to show. In many painting there are apparently deliberate perspectival anomalies. Brown can use the software, to "correct" these anomalies to regularize the perspective. In these "corrected" images the aesthetic function of these anomalies often become quite clear. Equally as interesting is when it is found that certain changes and differences turn out to make no difference. In these cases, certain aesthetic pseudo-properties may be determined.
But for all this technology and all these images, gaining understanding requires some expert guidance. Brown's willingness and ability to provide this in a remarkably clear way was what impressed me most. Like a curator conducting a tour in a major art gallery, he walked me through many of the scores of altered images, interspersed with the original images, which line the walls of his office, floor to ceiling. (True, his office may only be about 8'x 12'x 8', but if you consider it in terms of paintings per square inch, Brown's office may in fact exceed the Louvre.) Brown matches his aesthetic insight with a warm enthusiasm for sharing it with others, which makes for a very pleasant tour.
Brown demonstrated the value of his work when he showed me Matisse's Red Studio. He drew my attention to its "ambiguous spatiality" and explained how it is usually attributed to certain features such as the "inconsistent perspectival cues, suppression of local color on the major space-defining surfaces, and the suppression light and shadow throughout the painting." And Brown grants that this standard interpretation is more or less correct. However, simply stating this to students is of little value. As Brown writes, "This diagnosis is plausible enough theoretically, and it satisfies observers who are widely experienced in viewing pictures, but it remains a somewhat alien theory to students. The compliant ones adopt it and the rebellious ones shrug their shoulders at it. Neither group experiences it on a deep level." Brown's alterations of Red Studio, however, actually correct these anomalies in perspective, color, and light and shadow. This makes the effect of the anomalies quite clear and the student is in a much better position to come to a real and meaningful understanding of the claims that critics and art historians make.
Brown also explained his work with various Mondrians. It is claimed that Mondrian sought, and in many cases achieved, perfect spatial, compositional, and color balances in his abstract paintings. Brown is testing these claims by altering these images and creating others with one or more specific changes (in color, shape sizes, line positions, etc.). Brown's approach not only gives him and his students the ability to determine the degree to which this claim is true but it allows for a precise exploration of the very concept of aesthetic balance through these examples.
After 38 years in the philosophy department, this spring semester marked
John Brown's last term as a full-time faculty member in the department;
he officially retired as of this summer. This will give him more time to
pursue his investigations of pictorial perception, but, fortunately for
the department, it won't deprive students and colleagues of the opportunity
to benefit from his insights. Brown will be teaching at least a course
a year in the department for the foreseeable future.
