Essay Draft

VISUAL THINKING AND QUEER THEORY

With regard to my work I like to state that an image is more than just an image but it shapes our understanding of the world. Especially images of naked bodies 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 the 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 which I find very interesting because he approaches it from an angle of art psychology. With this text I would like to make a connection between his point of view and central ideas of the Queer Theory. I also would like to reflect on my work in connection to that.

Rudolf Arnheim was a German born art theorist and perceptional psychologist. Gestalt psychology? who used science to understand art??

His book Visual Thinking (1969) deals with the sense of sight and is grounded on earlier works such as "Art and visual perception" and "Toward a psychology of art" which deals 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. Therefore he considers vision as the primary medium of thought. Furthermore he states that the facilities of the sense of vision are not only available to the mind but are indispensable for its functioning. (Visual Thinking)

In the preface of Visual Thinking (1969) Rudolf 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. He quotes a review that points out that the way our senses understand the environment is the same as the operations of thinking. Rudolf 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. He refers to Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle who wanted perception to be evaluated by reasoning. "Sensory perception and reasoning were established as antagonists, in need of each other but different from each other in principle." (Visual Thinking)

In the first chapter Rudolf Arnheim states the 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 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 educational system 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." (Visual Thinking) In his view art is the most powerful means to strengthen perception which 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 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. By "cognitive" Rudolf 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 sense from cognition). Visual perception equals visual thinking. Rudolf Arnheim acknowledges the reasons for the distinction between seeing (the pure reflections of retina) and thinking but he talks about a 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 (sky, water, desk etc) the essence of 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." This active performance is what is truly meant by visual perception. (Visual Thinking)

What I find crucial about the idea of perception as an active performance is the fact that the viewer of an image becomes an important part of the art as it unfolds its meaning within the viewer.

Describing basic ideas of queer theory

Making the connection between the two

Applying it to my work

Bibliography: Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim (1969),