I first posted this on New Savanna on December 18, 2010. I'm bumping it to the top for Leanne, who's written a not-yet-out article on Dürer's rhino.
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I first wrote this back in the early 1990s, before the internet. I firstpublished it at The Valve a few years ago.
In his classic book, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Ernst Gombrich argued that drawing and painting realistic representations required the creation of numerous schemas from which to craft the image. In particular, the repertoire of available schemas often overwhelmed actual observation. As an example, he offers Dürer's famous print of the rhinoceros (from 1515), which was rather fanciful in its depiction of armor plating. Yet that image seemed seemed to have dictated how European artists depicted the rhinoceros over a century and a half later. Gombrich remarks (pp. 66-67).
When Dürer published his famous woodcut of a rhinoceros [59], he had to rely on secondhand evidence which he filled in from his own imagination, coloured, no doubt, by what he had learned of the most famous of exotic beasts,the dragon with its armoured body. Yet it has been shown that this half-invented creature served as a model for all renderings of the rhinoceros, even in natural-history books, up to the eighteenth century.
When, in 1790, James Bruce published a drawing of the beast [60] in his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, he proudly showed that he was aware of this fact: ‘The animal represented in this drawing is a native of Tcherkin, near Ras el Feel . . . and this is the first drawing of the rhinoceros with a double horn that has ever yet been presented to the public. The first figure of the Asiatic rhinoceros, the species having but one horn, was painted by Albert Durer, from the life. ... It was wonderfully ill-executed in all its parts, and was the origin of all the monstrous forms under which that animal has been painted, ever since.... Several modern philosophers have made amends for this in our days; Mr. Parsons, Mr. Edwards, and the Count de Buffon, have given good figures of it from life; they have indeed some faults, owing chiefly to preconceived prejudices and inattention.... This ... is the first that has been published with two horns, it is designed from the life, and is an African’.
If proof were needed that the difference between the medieval draughtsman and his eighteenth-century descendant is only one of degree, it could be found here. For the illustration, presented with such flourishes of trumpets is surely not free from ‘precon- ceived prejudices’ and the all-pervading memory of Durer’s woodcut. We do not know exactly what species of rhinoceros the artist saw at Ras el Feel, and the comparison of his picture with a photograph taken in Africa [6] may not, therefore, be quite fair. But I am told that none of the species known to zoologists corresponds to the engraving claimed to be drawn al vif!
The story repeats itself whenever a rare specimen is introduced into Europe. Even the elephants that populate the paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been shown to stem from a very few archetypes and to embody all their curious features, de- spite the fact that information about elephants was not particularly hard to come by.
These examples demonstrate, in somewhat grotesque magnification, a tendency which the student of art has learned to reckon with. The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.
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ReplyDeleteit is silly if you think/view it in the traditional sense
ReplyDeletebut it has a snazzy feel effect when you do it
[it's maybe that you are doing what is the current moment (extended moment of decades)
or maybe it's the feeling of stealing
you get an immediate rush then you want to return it back
but usually it's forgotten and recovered by the next generation or laters
]
it's a second order effect a meta-theorem a theorem about theorems
you can't prove any more theorems in that system or you can prove theorems such and such
you are using another work to create a work
and maybe there will be a third order / using the remixed to create a remix
but seems we usually stop at three
distance velocity acceleration
there are fourth order or degree and so forth but who cares
and then it devolves into technique (breadth-wide)
like if you took the columns from a temple and rearrange them put them together to create something construct whatever a new (nobody will allow you to do that but you if go at night or kill the guards and so on
then you can't publish it because everyone will know
i guess that's many artists' fantasy but they can't really do it so they have to content themselves with the plastic, reproductions etc
now you can access the virtual which you can steal and use, whether you keep it to your own private world or publish it
there is a state of disorder which encourages stealing
disorder gives rise to pillage
the youth wants to destroy everything bacause [so that] they want to institute themselves
that's not a "noble" thing that the older generation projects and propreates to them
it's a retro back projection of their own idealistic (that they wanted to)
or is it the urge instinct of pillage that creates the disorder?
the pillage urge becomes so intense and impending that it creates disorder so that it can materialize itself
and that's not a far fetched theory and we can see it in our everyday lives
when you are upset you want to break everything down to destroy
but are kept by the others the way to do it is if you throw everybody out but then it will not have the same effect because
for something to happen it has to be viewed
directly if possible immediately
or get drunk to the point where you can't consider the thought of others
or get the others as drunk as you or in a state of mirth so that they won't object to your everything bringing down
or rile somebody to the state where he will take it upon himself to be the sole objector and defendor of the state
and thus you can defeat him that's easier
i.e. the being creates the space for his own doings
there is no causality
causality exists only when you enter the field of measurable and you have to prove yourself
why did you do that?
because so and so and so
[
the american pragmatism brings the rationalization to new levels where the fake is the new real
what you prove is what you are what is
I don't know if complexity will arrive at such levels that will break down and start over
or it's the direction things will take
and a preparation for the next stage of evolution
]