Essay Draft: VISUAL THINKING MEETS QUEER THEORY

With regard to my work I usually like to claim that an image is more than just an image but it shapes our understanding of the world. Images of naked bodies for example reflect and influence the way we think about sexuality and gender, which are topics that I deal with in my work. I’ve always placed importance on the viewer and his/her viewing position. I think the viewer is an active part of giving meaning to an image and I see subversive potential in this concept. The idea of perception as an active performance is a central theme in the book Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim. I find his perspective very interesting because he approaches this idea from an angle of art psychology, which I haven't engaged with before. With my text Visual Thinking meets Queer Theory I would like to make a connection between Rudolf Arnheim's research and a the notion of negotiated reading that becomes useful when applying a queer perspective on art. I like to refer to Queer Theory in my artistic practice therefore I also would like to give an outline of its central ideas.

Rudolf Arnheim was a German born art theorist and perceptional psychologist who used science to understand art. His book Visual Thinking from 1969 deals with the sense of sight and is grounded on his earlier works "Art and visual perception" and "Toward a psychology of art" which deal with the psychology of perception. In his eyes "the great virtue of vision is that it is not only a highly articulate medium, but that its universe offers inexhaustibly rich information about the objects and events of the outer world". He considers vision as the primary medium of thought. (Arnheim)

In the preface of Visual Thinking Arnheim describes visual perception as a cognitive activity. He states that artistic activity is a form of reasoning and that perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined (one could say that artists think with their senses). Arnheim quotes a review that points out that the way our senses understand the environment is the same as the operations of thinking. Arnheim claims that real productive thinking takes place in the realm of imagery. According to him a problematic split has taken place between the senses and thoughts a long time ago that still exists today. "Sensory perception and reasoning were established as antagonists, in need of each other but different from each other in principle." (Arnheim)

In the first chapter Arnheim states that in order to cope with the world, the mind has to fulfill two functions: gather information and process it. Whereas he thinks that the collaboration of thinking and perceiving is essential for cognition he says that popular philosophy still insists on a division. Gathering data is recognised as the higher cognitive function whereas perceiving as the inferior one. According to him our whole educational system is based on that idea: young kids learn by seeing and shaping before they enter the school where education discriminates perception. "The arts are neglected because they are based on perception and perception is disdained because it's not assumed to involve thought." (Arnheim) In his view art is the most powerful means to strengthen perception which in turn is essential for productive thinking and our reasoning power.

Rudolf Arnheim argues that cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. Operations of perceiving such as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion correction, comparison, problem solving, combining, separating, putting in context is not a matter of mind but of how cognitive material is treated. There is no basic difference between looking at the world and thinking. (Arnheim) By "cognitive" Arnheim means all mental operations involved in receiving, storing and processing information: sensory perception, memory, thinking and learning (in contrast to that, general psychology excluded activities of senses from cognition). His central claim is that visual perception equals visual thinking. Arnheim acknowledges the reasons for the distinction between seeing (the pure reflections of retina) and thinking but he points out the difference between a passive reception and an active perceiving. According to him active perceiving is contained even in an elementary visual experience. As an example he asks "Is the raw image on the retina (sky, water, tree etc) the essence of our perception?" And concludes "No! It's only the scene on which perception takes place. Through that world the glance roams, directed by attention, focusing the narrow range of sharpest vision now on this now on that spot." (Arnheim) This active performance is what is truly meant by visual perception.

Keeping the idea of perception as an active performance in mind I would now like to give a very basic introduction of the concept of Queer Theory.

Queer is a poststructuralist concept that emerged from gay and lesbian studies at the end of the 80ies in the US. It understands heteronormativity and the binary structured separation of gender as mechanisms of suppression which not only organize forms of desire but also structure privileges granted to certain social institutions such as marriage, law and family. A central concern of Queer Theory is to separate sexuality from its assumed notion of naturalness and make it visible as a cultural product that is object to regulation by politics. Therefore Queer Theory likes to point out cracks in the supposedly stable relationship between sex, gender, desire and identity. Another central aspect is the critique on identity politics. Queer Theory is against a way of thinking that defines characteristics and identities. As an example one could ask what's the similarity between a white lesbian who works as a manager and a black lesbian who works as a cleaning lady? Applying attributes to identities based on sexual orientation or gender or other categories are always misleading and create exclusions. So Queer does not equal being gay or lesbian but it's about a solidarity beyond this (self) categorizations. US Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claims that the term Queer can not be used to describe someone but only be used in the 1st person. (Jagose) In the 90ies Queer becomes a collective term for the LGBT community including people who don't identify with heteronormativity. From gays and lesbians who don't identify with the gay commercialized lifestyle to intersexual, pansexual, asexual, transsexual, BDSM but also heterosexual people who don't identify with the sexual norm. They all share the idea of a heteronormativity that's forced upon society and that oppresses a sexual diversity. Because the term Queer is not tied to a specific sexual orientation its use increases in the discussions about sexuality in the 90ies. Coming from the established gay and lesbian studies Queer becomes a new concept that is significantly affected by feminist theories and gay and lesbian emancipation movements. Still the Queer Theory is not a closed model, it rather is a term that's ever-changing. Judith Butler warns to use Queer as a new identity category that can be adopted. It's not about defining the term as clear as possible but rather understanding it as a field of possibilities. What most Queer theorists share is the idea that Queer unfolds its potential in social and cultural practices - not in theory. Art is a major field of negotiating and transmitting queer content in different ways.

What I find crucial about the idea of perception as an active performance formulated by Rudolf Arnheim is the fact that the viewer of an image becomes an important part of the art itself as it unfolds its meaning within the viewer. In cultural studies there is a similar idea called negotiated reading. I came across it when I was writing about the concept of Queer Theory and it's visibility in the arts in Europe and the US of the 20th century. With regard to a queer content for example it states that it can only be as queer as the audience can decode it as queer. So the impact of an artwork depends on the previous knowledge, the viewing habits, expectations and also the desire and affect of its audience. The meaning of an artwork is not fixed but flexible. It's meaning originates through social agreements. In different social contexts some readings are more likely than others. In a society that ignores homosexuality for example, a photograph by Fred Holland Day showing a young naked boy lying in the sun will be reduced to the romantic depiction of idyllic nature and its homoerotic notion will be embezzled. Making all these decisions of what to focus on in the image, in what context to put it and judging it as an active performance just like Rudolf Arnheim describes it in his book.

Bibliography:

Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim (1969)

Gender@Wissen, Queer Studies, Sabine Hark (2005)

Queer Theory Eine Einführung, Annamarie Jagose (2001)