Donald Richardson - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Donald Richardson
The lack of a coherent understanding of what constitutes art in Aboriginal Australia has dogged c... more The lack of a coherent understanding of what constitutes art in Aboriginal Australia has dogged curation and criticism for many years. While there have been a number of calls to rationalize this problem, all have gone unheeded. This paper is submitted as a first attempt at this rationalization.
Writings on Andy Warhol usually assume – although never argue – that the aesthetic and ethical ri... more Writings on Andy Warhol usually assume – although never argue – that the aesthetic and ethical rights that he exercised in his Brillo Box (1964) – i.e., to designate an apparently un-transmogrified, mass-produced, commercial object as 'art' – were derived from Duchamp's 1917 Fountain . The contention of this paper is that this assumption is insupportable because – in fact – there are significant differences in the way the two artists operated, in what they intended, and in the outcomes. It is a matter of extreme disappointment that – nearly a century after Fountain and half a century after Brillo Box – this has rarely, if ever, been discussed.
Erwin Panofsky, in his essay, Perspective as Symbolic Form (p.31ff), asserts the view that all ... more Erwin Panofsky, in his essay, Perspective as Symbolic Form (p.31ff), asserts the view that all modern schemes of perspective representation, because they are drawn with straight lines, do not represent how humans really see the world. This is an elaboration of an observation of the seventeenth-century German polymath and artist, Wilhelm Schickhardt (1592-1635), that 'all lines, even the straightest, which do not stand directly in front of the eyes….necessarily appear somewhat bent….' but that '….nevertheless, no painter believes this; this is why they paint the straight sides of building with straight lines, even though according to the true art of perspective this is incorrect….' [and] 'contrary to nature.'
Schickhardt concludes his statement with the challenge: 'Crack that nut, you artists!'
This paper will show that – contrary to Schickhardt's assumption – European artists at least since the Proto-Renaissance have been aware of the conflicting nature of the raw information that is presented to our visual perception and have come to terms with it in their own individual ways. They have done this just as our perception itself does – by a synthesising of multifarious individual perceptual fixes into a stable representation of the Euclidian world. Further, the artists have often been able to manipulate the disjunctions to suit their own pictorial ends (see Figure 2).
But, Schickhardt's challenge is a pseudo-problem, a mathematical abstraction that has no bearing on how we perceive the world or how artists represent it.
There are lacunae in the paragraphs of De Pictura in which Leon Battista Alberti describes his me... more There are lacunae in the paragraphs of De Pictura in which Leon Battista Alberti describes his method of perspective construction. Although this has been a matter of considerable discussion among Alberti scholars in recent decades, none has deconstructed the text enough to state unequivocally that the theory is both defective and circular.
This paper maintains that Alberti does not deserve his reputation as the originator of perspective theory and that the Western academic community stands condemned for allowing this situation to occur and to continue.
Title and précis of the abstract
In 1970, at a conference of art educators at Adelaide University, Donald Brook, then
The lack of a coherent understanding of what constitutes art in Aboriginal Australia has dogged c... more The lack of a coherent understanding of what constitutes art in Aboriginal Australia has dogged curation and criticism for many years. While there have been a number of calls to rationalize this problem, all have gone unheeded. This paper is submitted as a first attempt at this rationalization.
Writings on Andy Warhol usually assume – although never argue – that the aesthetic and ethical ri... more Writings on Andy Warhol usually assume – although never argue – that the aesthetic and ethical rights that he exercised in his Brillo Box (1964) – i.e., to designate an apparently un-transmogrified, mass-produced, commercial object as 'art' – were derived from Duchamp's 1917 Fountain . The contention of this paper is that this assumption is insupportable because – in fact – there are significant differences in the way the two artists operated, in what they intended, and in the outcomes. It is a matter of extreme disappointment that – nearly a century after Fountain and half a century after Brillo Box – this has rarely, if ever, been discussed.
Erwin Panofsky, in his essay, Perspective as Symbolic Form (p.31ff), asserts the view that all ... more Erwin Panofsky, in his essay, Perspective as Symbolic Form (p.31ff), asserts the view that all modern schemes of perspective representation, because they are drawn with straight lines, do not represent how humans really see the world. This is an elaboration of an observation of the seventeenth-century German polymath and artist, Wilhelm Schickhardt (1592-1635), that 'all lines, even the straightest, which do not stand directly in front of the eyes….necessarily appear somewhat bent….' but that '….nevertheless, no painter believes this; this is why they paint the straight sides of building with straight lines, even though according to the true art of perspective this is incorrect….' [and] 'contrary to nature.'
Schickhardt concludes his statement with the challenge: 'Crack that nut, you artists!'
This paper will show that – contrary to Schickhardt's assumption – European artists at least since the Proto-Renaissance have been aware of the conflicting nature of the raw information that is presented to our visual perception and have come to terms with it in their own individual ways. They have done this just as our perception itself does – by a synthesising of multifarious individual perceptual fixes into a stable representation of the Euclidian world. Further, the artists have often been able to manipulate the disjunctions to suit their own pictorial ends (see Figure 2).
But, Schickhardt's challenge is a pseudo-problem, a mathematical abstraction that has no bearing on how we perceive the world or how artists represent it.
There are lacunae in the paragraphs of De Pictura in which Leon Battista Alberti describes his me... more There are lacunae in the paragraphs of De Pictura in which Leon Battista Alberti describes his method of perspective construction. Although this has been a matter of considerable discussion among Alberti scholars in recent decades, none has deconstructed the text enough to state unequivocally that the theory is both defective and circular.
This paper maintains that Alberti does not deserve his reputation as the originator of perspective theory and that the Western academic community stands condemned for allowing this situation to occur and to continue.
Title and précis of the abstract
In 1970, at a conference of art educators at Adelaide University, Donald Brook, then