Useful extracts (Rudolf Arnheim)

An extract from Cabinet magazine. (Issue 2)

THE INTELLIGENCE OF VISION: AN INTERVIEW WITH RUDOLF ARNHEIM

Gestalt psychology was basically a reaction to the traditional sciences. A scientific experiment was based primarily on breaking down its object into single parts and defining them. The sum of the definitions then corresponded to the object. By contrast, the Gestalt psychologists, referring among other things to the arts, emphasized that there are common connections in human nature, in nature generally, in which the whole is made up of an interrelationship of its parts and no sum of the parts equals the whole. Every science has to work with the whole structure. Gestalt theory also says that the factual world is not simply understood through perception as a random collection of sensory data, but rather as a structured whole. Perception itself is structured, is ordered. This also concerns art. The work of art was a prime example of a Gestalt for my psychology teachers.

You see, this is the fundamental difference between me and Siegfried Kracauer. For Kracauer the world was raw material; from this concept he, in his Theory of Film, derived the definition of the photographic and filmic image as contributing to the “rescue of outer reality” and introducing physical nature in its original state. But images do not imitate reality, they hint at it. They have the ability to make the essential part visible, and are thereby a fundamental principle for understanding the world. Vision and perception are not processes that passively register or reproduce what happens in reality. Vision and perception are active, creative understanding. You have to imagine the following: When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. And our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn’t understand at all. Thus in my opinion the world is not raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed.