Visual Music Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900
Brougher Kerry Olivia Mattis Jeremy Strick Ari Wiseman Judith Zilczer
Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900
. London :
Thames and Hudson
,
2005
,
272
pp ., 344 colour + 32 b&west illus., $50.00 cloth . 
This large (twelve and a half by ten inches) volume is based on, but goes beyond, a traveling exhibition that originated at the Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Gimmicky Fine art in Los Angeles. The exhibition traced the influence of synaesthesia and musical analogies on the development of visual art since the early twentieth century. The book, correspondingly, provides, amidst other things, a distinctive have on visual fine art by focusing on the evolution of brainchild, understood as a way to "purify painting by applying formal and compositional elements of music to visual arts." More generally, as one of the authors says, the book discusses the manner that the idea of synesthesia serves to "mediate" between music and visual art. It consists of five essays, two by curators at the Hirschorn, two by curators at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and one by a musicologist, "Scriabin to Gershwin: Colour Music from a Musical Perspective," which traces the influence of synesthetic ideas throughout Western music from what appears to be the first instrument to perform color music, the clavecin oculaire, congenital by the French Jesuit monk Castel around 1740, to the present. Information technology besides includes more than 350 illustrations—some well known paintings, some bottom known paintings, some stills from synesthesia inspired films—and a cracking bargain of interesting (art ) historical information. The most noun pieces are by Jeremy Strick, Judith Zilczer, and Kerry Brougher.
From a philosopher's perspective, the synesthesia influenced works and ideas discussed in Visual Music course a somewhat loose, though not haphazard, collection. Some involve synesthesia straight and some much more indirectly or analogically (for example, the fact that, in nonsynesthetes, colour and line can evoke certain sounds, and conversely); the contributing writers are not always scrupulous nigh cartoon these sorts of distinctions. Just whatever sense, philosophically, is to be made of synesthesia, the post-obit are all surprising, and family related, facts. (1) A nontrivial number of great painters and musicians accept been either synesthetes or explicitly interested in exploring cross modal identities/similarities/analogies in their ain medium: Wagner, Kandinsky, Picabia, Kupka, Scriabin, Ciurlionis, Klee, Messiaien, Schoenberg, Mondrian. (ii) A nontrivial number of artists and composers accept attempted multimedia works inspired by synesthetic ideas: Scriabin, Messiaen, Varese, installation artists such every bit Jennifer Steinkamp. (3) People take stretched the boundaries of moving-picture show by attempting nonlinguistic, abstract representations of music: Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, Brakhage, the Whitney brothers. (4) Technically minded people accept been interested in synesthetic ideas since at least the 1740s, when the starting time color organ was developed. This volume has many interesting fine art critical and art historical things to say about (1)–(four).
I might naturally be inclined to wonder—or at to the lowest degree the reviewer was so inclined before reading this book—whether and to what extent explicitly philosophical ideas direct influenced synesthetically inspired artists. Non all that much, as far as I can make out. The chief philosophical presence in this history seems to exist theosophy, which influenced Kandinsky, the architect Claude Bragdon (an advocate of color music who organized evenings of "Song and Light" in New York City), and the filmmaker and "visual music practitioner" (and so on) Harry Smith. (Bragdon, with the help of a wealthy theosophist, founded the Prometheans, a lodge dedicated to "promoting light as a medium of expression." One of the Prometheans was Thomas Wilfred, who designed an instrument for light projection he called the "clavilux." In 1930, Scientific American published a photo of him seated in front of the dwelling house model of the clavilux, which seems not to accept been a huge success. Wilfred was non obviously a crank: he collaborated with Leopold Stokowski, and in 1948 published an article, "Light and the Artist," in The Periodical of Aesthetics and Fine art Criticism.) Theosophical ideas as well get mentioned in Brougher'southward essay, "Visual Music Culture," which emphasizes the fashion that synesthesia inspired fine art and music passed over into popular culture. Brougher traces the history of people who, by painting or otherwise modifying conventional celluloid, attempted to fuse film and painting: Arnaldo Ginna, Bruno Corra, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Hy Hirsh, Stan Brakhage. Brougher too traces the stream of visual music culture that tried to exploit a more direct connection between sound and nonsound past technical means, focusing in item on the machines of John and James Whitney, in which pendulums of "differing lengths fitted with adaptable weights were attached past a wire to an aperture in the photographic camera which recorded their movements." The Whitney brothers, interested both in "Eastern metaphysics" and in innovative technology, used this system to create a four octave range of electronically produced tones. (1 of the strengths of this book is that it whets the reader's appetite for more: the stills from James Whitney's 1963–1966 pic Lapis, which Brougher calls "i of the most convincing nonobjective works in the history of modern art," certainly make one want to run across information technology.) Finally, a theosophical treatise entitled Idea Forms is quoted in Mattis'southward essay "Scriabin to Gershwin," which traces colour music up through the "New Age composer" Kay Gardner; so the theosophy/synesthesia connection is non merely adventitious.
Synesthesia is puzzling in lots of means. Information technology is not shocking, accordingly, that Visual Music contains a number of statements that volition puzzle people, like philosophers, who tend to exist hands puzzled. Some examples: "Synesthestic experience inheres to the experiencing subject" (p. twenty); Arthur Dove in his 1929 painting Fog Horns"went beyond illustration or musical transcription to fuse the auditory and visual senses." (p. 62); filmmakers such as Fischinger, Hirsh, and Smith recognized that "with the correct stimuli, the nigh potent class of syesthesia could occur on a personal level, right inside your head" (p. 120); Lero Villareal's installation Lightscape"causes a dislocation of perspective and spatial relationships in the viewer that transcends 2 dimensions" (p. 190).
Withal, given the strangeness of the phenomena information technology focuses on, it would exist inappropriate to fault Visual Music too much for this sort of thing. Readers volition get a lot of art historical and artful stimulation and nourishment from this book. Readers of this journal who are mainly interested in synesthesia from a nonpsychologistic perspective or from a meta philosophical perspective that sees aesthetics as in some fashion subordinate to the philosophy and metaphysics of mind will not take their philosophical thirsts quenched. Simply the book does not aim to do then. Information technology would be nice to run across more people working in aesthetics thinking hard about synesthesia, and any such thinking should be informed by the history that this book ably and interestingly discusses.
© The Writer(s) 2020
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