Rudolf Arnheim

<p>Recent writings about art have tended to focus on the intention of artists and the effect their artworks have on viewers, as well as the social consequences of these effects. Often, these writings do not speak about the artworks themselves, but about curatorial positions in art today, constituting a meta-artistic discourse. A question, then, might be how to reconnect with the visual, structural, and phenomenological analyses of the twentieth century without sacrificing the political and social dimensions of recent art theory.</p> <p>After more than a decade of these discourses, mainly dedicated to curatorial practices or to broader cultural studies and postcolonial theory, it is pleasurable to re-read, for example, Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) and the gestalt theories of perceptual psychologists. According to these gestalt psychologists (the German word Gestalt indicates a “whole” impression), perception is not just retinal vision, and a “visual pattern” is not simply the sum of retinal registrations (the physical process of light refracting from objects in a space, captured by the ocular lenses that project these images onto the retina; from there, the images are transmitted to the brain). Perceptual psychology is interested in the mental experience of vision: you think while seeing, you see only while thinking, thought and perception are not two distinct moments, and vision-thought is based on the apprehension of a hidden field of energy forces. For the gestalt, a line or a shape mobilizes space and perception, with all of its psychological and emotional expression…</p>