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. 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. I find it very interesting because he approaches this idea from an angle of art psychology. With my text Visual Thinking meets Queer Theory I would like to make a connection between Rudolf Arnheim's point of view and central ideas of the Queer Theory which I like to refer to in my artistic practice. 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 from 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 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)

FAZIT: 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.

Now I would like to give a basic introduction of the concept of Queer Theory and explain then why I find it a helpful resource to think about art and make a connection to the central idea of Rudolf Arnheim"s book Visual Thinking.

Queer is a poststructuralist concept that emerged from gay and lesbian studies at the end of the eighties 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.

In the 90ies the term Queer booms in the US and 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. Coiming 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 changes. 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. It's subversive potential is to continuously break through fixations and open up for the excluded. (Hark)

Describing basic ideas of queer theory

Making the connection between the two

Applying it to my work

FAZIT One could say that Rudolf Arnheim has a queer approach because he opens the term perception against common definitions.

Bibliography:

Vgl. Sabine Hark, Queer Studies in Gender@Wissen, S.285 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory Eine Einführung, S.9 Vgl. Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim (1969) 12) Vgl Sabine Hark, Queer Studies in Gender@Wissen 13) Vgl Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory. Eine Einführung, S.14 11) David Halperin in: Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory. Eine Einführung, S.13