Language of Vision

Gyorgy Kepes

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839744853
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

LANGUAGE OF VISION is a timely, courageous book without parallel in its field. It deals with present-day problems of visual expression from a realistic and human point of view, and endeavors to escape from the narrow confines of the laboratory, preserving the closest possible contact with our experiences of every day life. It makes an extensive analysis of the structure and function of the graphic image in painting, photography and advertising design. It inquires deeply into the laws of visual organization and evaluates in contemporary terms the various representation devices conceived by artists of all ages such as—size, vertical location, overlapping, transparency, perspective, interpenetration, light and color, movement, etc., etc.318 illustrations supplement the text. There is a great variety of subject matter, techniques and media. They include photograms, photomontages and collages; analytical diagrams, typography, calligraphy and lettering; pre-historic art, paintings and drawings by children; significant work of the old masters and contemporary artists including Arp, Braque, Duchamp, Degas, Juan Gris, Helion, Klee, Kandinsky, Leger, Malevich, Matisse, Moholy-Nagy, Miro, Mondrian, Picasso, Seurat and many others. Advertising design by Bayer, Binder, Beall, Burtin, Cassandre, Carlu, Doesburg, Lissitzky, Man Ray, McKnight Kauffer, Sutnar, Tschichold, etc., etc.LANGUAGE OF VISION with its completely new concept of appraisal and revaluation is a book of vital importance to every one who feels the urgent need for a clearer understanding of the structure and function of art in our society.

THE LANGUAGE OF VISION—BY GYORGY KEPES

Today we experience chaos. The waste of human and material resources and the canalization of almost all creative effort into blind alleys bear witness to the fact that our common life has lost its coherency. In the focus of this eclipse of a healthy human existence is the individual, torn by the shattered fragments of his formless world, incapable of organizing his physical and psychological needs.

This tragic formlessness is the result of a contradiction in our social existence. It indicates our failure in the organization of that new equipment with which we must function if we are to maintain our equilibrium in a dynamic world.

Advances in science and technology have created a new dimension. Today, all people of the world are neighbors, and natural resources on a hitherto undreamed of scale are within the potential reach of all. The inherited structure of a smaller, outgrown world, however, stands in the way of the integration of our lives in the terms of the present wider dimension. Totalitarian aggression, as the most destructive aspect of the resistance of the past, sought to direct the present and future toward an obsolete organization, of a necessity employing force in order to accomplish what was diametrically opposed to the principles of growth and development. These destructive forces, on the other hand, inevitably prepare the way for reconstruction. The more unbearable the strains and stresses caused by the contradiction between the potentialities of the present and the outlived forms of the past, the stronger is the compulsion toward equilibrating our life in the contemporary dimension. To achieve a liveable life today, then, we must reorient ourselves, and create forms in terms of present historical conditions. Instead of allowing both a further haphazard accumulation of scientific discoveries and a planless technological expansion, it is our task to establish an organic interconnection of the new frontiers of knowledge. Integration, planning, and form are the key words of all progressive efforts today; the goal is a new vital structure-order, a new form on a social plane, in which all present knowledge and technological possessions may function unhindered as a whole.

This new structure-order can be achieved only if man of today becomes truly contemporary and fully able to use his capacities. To be contemporary in a true sense demands a most advanced knowledge of the facts governing life of today. The understanding of vital aspects of our life, however, to most of us is still at the same stage as it was a hundred years ago. In the past, lightning, plague, and famine were believed to be visitations of Providence, but today, through knowledge and understanding, we are able to control them, in like fashion, if we should make social application of scientific knowledge, present obstacles to a contemporary human existence would be eliminated. We must dissipate the belief that war, economic crises, or psychological disintegration is unavoidable and due to blind, inimical forces of nature. The collective efforts of scientists have given us a richer and safer life in the biological and physical realms; we must meet them in socio-economic and psychological realms. Education on an unprecedented scale is imperative if man, who now lives in a wider world, is to be really contemporary.

But this new knowledge can only be the living fibre of integration if man experiences it with the wholeness of his being. Human faculties, however, have been dulled and have disintegrated in a climate of frustration. Experience has tended to become only a stepping-stone to an exploitation of nature and of man. Experiences are isolated pigeon-holes; they display only single aspects of human beings. To function in his fullest scope man must restore the unity of his experiences so that he can register sensory, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of the present in an indivisible whole.

The language of vision, optical communication, is one of the strongest potential means both to reunite man and his knowledge, and to reform man into an integrated being. The visual language is capable of disseminating knowledge more effectively than almost any other vehicle of communication. With it, man can express and relay his experiences in object form. Visual communication is universal and international: it knows no limits of tongue, vocabulary, or grammar, and it can be perceived by the illiterate as well as by the literate. Visual language can convey facts and ideas in a wider and deeper range than almost any other means of communication. It can reinforce the static verbal concept with the sensory vitality of dynamic imagery. It can interpret the new understanding of the physical world and social events because dynamic interrelationships and interpenetration, which are significant of every advanced scientific understanding of today, are intrinsic idioms of the contemporary vehicles of visual communication: photography, motion pictures, and television.

But the language of vision has a more subtle and, to a certain extent, an even more important contemporary task. To perceive a visual image implies the beholder’s participation in a process of organization. The experience of an image is thus a creative act of integration. Its essential characteristic is that by plastic power an experience is formed into an organic whole. Here is a basic discipline of forming, that is thinking in terms of structure, a discipline of utmost importance in the chaos of our formless world. Plastic arts, the optimum forms of the language of vision, are, therefore, an invaluable educational medium.

Visual language must be readjusted, however, to meet its historical challenge of educating man to a contemporary standard, and of helping him to think in terms of form.

Technological discoveries have extended and reshaped the physical environment. They have changed our visual surroundings partly by actually rebuilding the physical environment, and partly by presenting visual tools that are of assistance to our discernment of those phases of the visible world which were previously too small, too fast, too large, or too slow for us to comprehend. Vision is primarily a device of orientation; a means to measure and organize spatial events. The mastery of nature is intimately connected with the mastery of space; this is visual orientation. Each new visual environment demands a reorientation, a new way of measuring. Seeing spatial relationships on a flat land is a different experience from seeing them in a mountainous region, where one form intercepts the other. To orient oneself in walking requires a different spatial measurement than is required in riding in a motor-car or in an aeroplane. To grasp spatial relationships and orient oneself in a metropolis of today, among the intricate dimensions of streets, subways, elevated, and skyscrapers, requires a new way of seeing. Widening horizons, and the new dimensions of the visual environment necessitate new idioms of spatial measurement and communication of space. The visual image of today must come to terms with all this: it must evolve a language of space which is adjusted to the new standards of experience. This new language can and will enable the human sensibility to perceive space-time relationships never recognized before.

Vision is not only ori...