Illusion: part 2 Point of view

At the end of the last post on illusion I left a blog link to the type of exercises that used to be undertaken on the foundation course at Leeds back in the 1980s. One of the key artists that were referred to at that time was Georges Rousse.

Georges Rousse

In the image above the red rectangle appears to float across the interior of a building that has been blackened by fire. The illusion of coherence is created by controlling the optical viewpoint and is only visible from one specific view point. Outside of this viewpoint, the shapes deconstruct and the viewer can see them for what they really are, patches of colour placed on various surfaces that are designed to line up when seen from the position from where the photograph was taken. Rousse would have used a camera viewfinder set up on a tripod to constantly check the construction of the piece, instructing his construction team to make a drawing that would line up from the point of view of the viewfinder, which when finished would be coloured in red. Some of the more complicated versions of these constructions which involve deep space also have to contain colour adjustments to overcome the way that atmospheric colour space operates. The areas much further back having to be painted in slightly brighter tones so that they optically move forward into the same space as areas painted on much closer surfaces.
An artist that operates in the same territory as George Rousse is Felice Varini.

Felice Varini

In the images above you can see that Varini's illusion only operates from one point and as you move away from that point the shapes that make up the image distort and break down into their individual forms. This type of illusion is totally site specific and can't really be appreciated unless you experience one 'in the flesh'. Varini at times works on a huge scale and the project management skills needed as well as the technology and workforce required are tremendous, but he would have had to start somewhere and I would suggest he developed these ideas by researching the history of anamorphosis.

Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. The word "anamorphosis" is derived from the Greek prefix ana‑, meaning back or again, and the word morphe, meaning shape or form.

Leonardo was supposed to have invented the first anamorphic image, called appropriately 'Leonardo's Eye'. I'm pretty sure a lot of artists around this time would have discovered anamorphic projections because they were all playing around with perspective, which was the new 'tool on the block' so to speak. If you look at Durer's images of perspective frames such as this one below, you can see how vital it was to have  a fixed point of view.

Durer

This (below) is what the artist could see.

We have a dislocation in space because of the side view of the situation and the actual view point of the artist are different. Two separate viewpoints of the same situation exist, one showing spatially the relationships between all the elements in order to show how it was done and the other from the viewpoint of the observer which is meant to show us how the completed image would look. Compare this situation to the Varini photographs.

Jean François Niceron in his book 'La Perspective Curieuse' is the first artist to formalise these issues.

From: 'La Perspective Curieuse'

As you can see in the image above the situation as set out by Durer has been reconstructed but this time in a long corridor space. The wall would have been strung (we have looked at the importance of chalk lines before) and instead of the artist filling in a flat regular grid, the artist works in a distorted grid that only lines up correctly when you look at the image from the end of the corridor. However when seen from the front the drawing is so 'pulled out' or elongated that it is almost like a landscape.

If you ever get the chance visit the Trinita dei Monti Convent in Rome you will find that the original anamorphic fresco is still in place. The fresco is of Saint Francis of Paula praying under a tree and it turns into a landscape as you walk down the corridor.

Jean François Niceron: Saint Francis of Paula praying under a tree.

What's so wonderful about this image is that you can go back and look at Niceron's 'La Perspective Curieuse' and work out exactly the process that he would have used to construct the fresco. I also think the way he added tiny boats and other landscape details is really well handled, to ensure that the gradual change from image of saint to landscape is extremely subtle.

In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries anamorphic images became extremely popular, and supplied an ideal means of camouflaging dangerous political statements, heretical ideas, and even erotic images because only those in the know would be able to select the right 'point of view'.

Erhart Schon Vexierbild 1535

The artist Erhart Schon's Vexierbild 1535 disguises the comic portraits of Charles V, Ferdinanc 1, Pope Paul III and Francis 1. When viewed from the front the picture appears to be of landscapes with coastlines, ships and villages and from the side you can see the four portraits stacked one above the other.  (We have come across Schon before in relation to artists' attempts to measure and grid the figure. Artists that have a strong understanding of the mathematics of perspective are also very aware of how perspective is not reality, simply a device to control a depiction of spatial relationships from one point of view)

Perhaps the most famous example in this country is Holbein's 'Ambassadors', a painting that was originally meant to hang on a stairway, so that viewers would first of all see the painting from above, close to and from an oblique angle.

The image of the skull above is what you would see as you descended the stairway, perhaps a reminder of the way all worldly things will pass away. This leads me to that other aspect of point of view, the fact that this is not just about a fixed point in space but that it is also about a view taken about how we think about the world. Several contemporary artists have extended the purely optical aspects of viewpoint into more political or contextual concerns.

Rub Kandy straddles a territory between graffiti, community art practice and point of view dependent illusion. He opens the issues surrounding illusion into a socially critical and political set of agendas and in doing so returns to a way of working with anamorphic illusions that was current in the past during times of political unrest. As he states;  ‘In my anamorphosis works I always try to put ‘the illusion’ (the anamor- phosis is a paradigm of illusion) next to a wrong element that unmasks ‘the illusion’, in order to reveal ‘the real’. I try to find a bug, to generate a short-circuit. I don’t want my works to be a showcase of virtuosity. The simpler, the better. My hand is not firm, my paint is not fine, my line is not thorough. With my rough style I try to use perspective destroying perspective. I just want to communicate my religious wonder about the mystery of space and perception’. Point of view in this case referring to both the way that optical illusions are point of view dependent and that fact that a political stance demands a ‘point of view’. Anamorphic projections demand a certain amount of geometric control, Rub Kandy contrasts this with the uncontrollability and reality of poor social conditions.

Rub Kandy

William Kentridge's film ‘Whatwill come’ is a combination of anamorphic projection and animated film projection. Kentridge uses the mirrored cylinder anamorphic illusion to reflect the various states of emotional disturbance brought on by political tension. 

William Kentridge: On Perception

Kentridge has used the mirrored cylinder anamorphic effect several times and was himself influenced by Scottish images of Bonnie Prince Charlie. In response to the brutal English crackdown on his followers when Scottish households who were found to contain a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie were imprisoned or worse, supporters turned to anamorphic portraiture. 

 Anamorphic portrait of Prince Charles

Again these distortions relate to the way images can be 'hidden' so that in times of political tension images of political favourites could be hidden in plain sight. 

These ideas don't always have to be about difficult emotional or political issues, they can sometimes simply be used to entertain. 

The use of anamorphic projections is seen across a wide spectrum of art and artists, including some artists that you wouldn't suspect would have an interest, such as Chuck Close. Perhaps what unites them all is research into how images are visually constructed.

Chuck Close

The Hungarian artist István Orosz specializes in these mirror anamorphoses, whereby conical or cylindrical mirrors are placed on the drawing to transform a flat distorted image into a three dimensional picture. 

István Orosz

Another closely related area of illusion is shadow play. Because shadows are the result of light being projected from a single light source, a shadow is in effect an anamorphic projection of the object that casts the shadow. Tim Noble and Sue Webster are perhaps the most well known of contemporary British artists to have explored this area.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

The practical issues surrounding this type of work are to do with first of all getting to grip with how perspective works and there is an extensive post on the technical aspects perspective here. 

However there is a very simple way of starting this sort of work and that is that you work with at least one other person and you direct them to make changes in relation to your viewpoint, usually by looking through the viewfinder of a camera set up on a tripod. 

Hopefully by exploring this area you can get your audience to 'look again', to become aware that what you see isn't always what you get. 

See also:

Illusion part 1
Richard Wright (Anamorphic projections)

 Rub Kandy pdf download of a wide range of his recent projects

This short video of 'Perceptual Shift' by Michael Murphy clearly explains how point of view works as well as illustrating how carefully a construction has to be built in order to make it work. 

Earlier blog post on Architectural perspectives 

In the college library we have Fred Leeman's: Hidden images: games of perception, anamorphic art, illusion; from the Renaissance to the present, which is an excellent introduction to the area. 

Illusion

There are two closely related but quite different approaches to the idea of illusion within the drawing canon. One is closely related to what we usually call optical illusions and the other is more to do with giving an illusion of reality or as it is often called trompe-l'œil or deceiving the eye. At times they may merge together and at other times they are clearly separate ideas. Both rely on an understanding of optics and therefore the history of working with illusions is often inseparable from the optical devices or optical theories that were used in order to be able to plot out possible illusionistic concepts and ideas.

The classic text in relation to these issues is Gombrich's 'Art and Illusion'; he sets out to explain why there was a constantly changing series of styles throughout art history and concentrated on how artists attempted to develop work that was rooted in an imitation of nature and how as they did this their working methods became embedded into the traditions of art practice. In this way he could explain how on the one hand artists were always referring to other art and on the other hand how artists could break with tradition and build upon it by developing new techniques in order to be able to more accurately reflect what they saw in nature.

This interrellationship between on the one hand the various traditions of art and on the other changing theories of visual perception has meant that various artists from many different periods in Western art history have found this a rich field to explore.

Optical illusions are quite common in mosaics from various regions of the Roman Empire.



The shapes circled in the image above can be seen as 3-D cubes that optically flip from the inside to the outside, an effect known as ambiguous or bistable perception. This is technically known as the Necker cube illusion, whereby cubes appear to simultaneously protrude and intrude.  

Necker cubes

Escher was of course very aware of this and used the duality of reading this type of construction has to create a series of complex visual conundrums. 

Escher

Escher

Escher is fascinated by optical illusions and realised that all you have to do is to provide secondary visual information that appears to stabilise the reading, such as placing figures in what appear to be convincing spaces, to make a spatial paradox. The optical flip is now compromised as his more three dimensionally solid figures 'inhabit' spaces that on second glance are physically impossible. Probably the most powerful of these optical illusions is the Penrose triangle.

Penrose Triangle

Escher used the Penrose triangle several times, most famously in his image 'The Waterfall'.

Escher: The Waterfall

You can get an idea of what he was doing by looking at the image above of two Penrose triangles superimposed on the original image. However it's also important to remember that he is also using the construction of a Necker cube, if he had tried using perspective to construct the image he would never have been able to achieve the optical flip. 

It was the 'optical flip', this propensity for an image to hover between two states that interested more abstract artists. What many artists were looking for was a way to give an image 'life'. By using this type of construction an observer was always having to work hard to see and in doing so was bringing into one 'gestalt' more than one experience. Picasso had already introduced one aspect of this as part of Cubism.

Braque

Like Picasso, Braque was very aware that you could put together two or more views of the same thing and if you got the balance right your viewer would have to be active in their perception of it.  The painting of a woman by Braque above, is a classical example of this, a realisation that was at the core of the Cubist idea. 

Like many artists I have used the idea myself as a way to keep an image alive. 

Plantar fasciitis

Hans Hoffman was deeply influenced by Cubism and introduced the term 'push-pull' into the language of drawing and painting during the middle of the 20th century. He was a very influential American art educator, carrying European ideas about painting across the Atlantic and at the core of his teaching was the effort to find a living visual form. This life had much to do with the Cubist legacy and relied on the way your eye seeks out form on a flat surface. By opening out the forms in a drawing, (and this was often the result of erasure) the eye was left finding a balance between structural elements of formal construction and the rhythmic elements of visual dynamism. Therefore a line that operated both as a vertical or horizontal and as a spatial indicator was to be valued. These drawings below were done in his classes and you can see how he was attempting to develop spatial junctures in order to enliven the surface. Sometimes going as far as cutting the drawing up so that when put back together new spaces and structures were formed. However at the end of the day, what he is seeking is a construction that allows the eye to flip back and forth in a similar way to how a Necker cube works. 

All the drawings above were done in classes held by Hoffman and they remind me of the type of life drawing often seen in art college when I was a student; this area of abstraction was key to how a life session might be taught when I first entered teaching. It might appear as if I've by now wondered far away from a debate about illusion but the issue of optical illusion that began this post was the illusion of something being capable of being at one moment one thing and in another moment something else. The drawing above in one reading creates a body and in another creates a space. Interestingly the hands are more illusionistic, i.e. are closer to what we might call an illusion of reality and these two hands don't allow for the 'flip' between one reading and another.  

When making a drawings from marks and lines there is almost a 'resistance' to pictorial illusion, the viewer has to do a lot more work in order to grasp the relationship with the 'real' world. For instance there is no colour, a series of lines can be made to stand for a hand. Lines and marks are clues for the mind to unpick and therefore there is always a certain level of ambiguity as to the way you might understand what they represent. In this very ambiguity lies the effectiveness of the Necker cube illusion and the use to artists like Hoffman in their struggle to find 'life' within an image. You could say that the 'life' they found was therefore a type of pulse, a pulse of flicker backwards and forwards, in and out of the space, at one moment one thing and then another. This was the visual heartbeat of the drawing and if it wasn't there the drawing would effectively be dead. 

One optical illusion that illustrates this point is the ability of a drawing to be read as one recognisable entity and then another, the classic version of this being the duck rabbit illusion. 





There are several of these types of dual read images such as the young/old lady version above and several artists have made use of them in their work.

However one of the most subtle and effective two way illusions is from nearly a thousand years ago. The Airavatesvara Hindu Temple is located in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and it is covered in the most wonderful carvings and amongst them is a fantastic optical illusion of a cow/elephant. 

Cow/elephant: Airavatesvara Temple

The placing of this image within the confines of a temple devoted to religious worship reinforced for myself the idea that all things are an illusion. The flicking backwards and forwards of cow/elephant identities both giving life to the image and forever melding the two creatures together, suggesting the deep interrelationship that all things have in this world. 

Jasper Johns has long being fascinated by these illusions and has used them over and over again in his work.

Jasper Johns

Johns has used the Rubin vase illusion several times, sometimes using his own profile and at others Duchamp's and occasionally using his own profile to make one side of the vase and Duchamp's the other. This idea was taken even further by the artists group 'FAT' their 2 vases entitled “Heroes of the Invisible” is made from the profiles of Mies van der Rohe and Marconi.

FAT Heroes of the Invisible

The fact that a new 'invisible' or concrete space is made from the gap between the two vases alluding to how we can think about space, van der Rohe as a visionary architect and Marconi as the inventor of the radio transmitter.
Another way to think about these issues is the figure/ground duality. At one moment an image can read as if it is an image that sits on a ground plane and at the same time it can be read the other way round. Put down a mark on a blank sheet of paper, and it is immediately read as a figure in space, the one defining the other. This is perhaps why so many artists have been fascinated by this area of illusion, it sits right at the centre of what happens when you begin to make a drawing. The observer always completes the circle of reception when you make any artwork and their interpretation is based on what they perceive. Because of this many theorists have spoken about 'the death of the author', in effect once you have made something, you have to let it go, and your audience will see in it things that you never intended. This can be liberating and you might because of your awareness of this, purposely leave elements of your work open to a duality of reading.
In order to see the 'Heroes of the Invisible' negative face you have to of course be in the right place and this brings me to another aspect of optical illusion, one that is focused on viewer position and spatial relationships, but this will have to be elaborated in a future post.

It depends on your point of view

If you want to read more about these issues a really good starting point is the catalogue of the Hayward gallery exhibition 'Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception'.


A much earlier post on colour illusion in relation to foundation course teaching can be found on my Art and Pedagogy blog

See also:

Illusion part 2
Richard Wright (Anamorphic projections)