SHAPE 2017 TateExchange Book FINAL Draft - Flipbook - Page 13
Tom Sutcliffe 2 (2000) points out: there is always someone looking at the
shower fittings. The writer and academic Georgina Kleege 3 (2008), who
is herself blind, says: “In medieval art – the untrained eye will see multiple
figures in identical poses. The trained eye will see many representations of
a single figure at different moments in time.” Eye-tracking shows this to be
true: the trained eye scans for pattern and form, the untrained eye dwells on
recognisable objects.
It is easier for a describer to concentrate on recognisable things because
these are things we have words for rather than the aptly-named inexpressible
– a movement, a look a gesture for which we lack terminology. This is perhaps
why AD started out prioritising fidelity. Yet just as art has moved on, so too
has AD. I like to think that the History of AD tracks the History of Art, so, just
as Art moved from an emphasis on fidelity and realism – such as Albrecht
Durer’s hare, to the renaissance interest in rendering an accurate perspective
shown by Giotto & Brunelleschi to History painting, Biblical scenes and
Victorian narrative painting, AD more recently has come to emphasise the
narrative questions: Who? What? Where? When?
But movements in Art are cyclical: the impressionists returned to painting
what they saw: Cubists all the more so. Picasso’s faces look “wrong” but are
an attempt to convey multiple viewpoints simultaneously. This has also been
proposed for AD as a way of escaping Hannah’s dilemma. Description from
multiple viewpoints could be said to lead to greater authenticity because
it dilutes subjectivity. If one of those viewpoints belongs to the artist, the
curator, or any member of the creative team, it may be deemed more
“authentic”. Like an artwork created by the hand of the artist rather than one
manufactured by an apprentice in his workshop.
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