THE DRAMA OF PERCEPTION

Looking at Morandi

IN AN INTERVIEW WITH EDOUARD Roditi that was published in 1960, Giorgio Morandi said: “I believe that nothing is more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. We know all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.”1 This is a restatement of a similar comment he made in 1957 in a radio interview: “For me nothing is abstract. In fact, I believe there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality.”2 This slightly earlier and more cryptic comment has been quoted by many critics who have written about Morandi, because it seems to reveal something important about the painter’s aesthetic position. The question is: What did Morandi mean?

Images are not words, and artists are not always able to articulate what they do or even what they hope to do. Nevertheless, we know that Morandi carefully revised the interview he did with Roditi. Presumably, then, he said exactly what he wished to say, no more or less. Reading the interview is a somewhat comic experience. While Roditi is positively garrulous, meandering in and out of various subjects and bringing up one artist after another, Morandi is terse and often contrarian. He will be led nowhere he doesn’t wish to go. I believe that nothing is more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. This is plainly a philosophical statement. We can take it back to Immanuel Kant, who argued that we, human beings, will never get to the thing in itself. Seeing is not seeing the real world, but seeing the world through our perceptions of it, perceptions steeped in our meanings and, as Morandi explicates in his philosophy, those meanings are at least in part produced by language: We agree to call that thing a cup and that other thing a tree. How does Morandi use the word abstract? My Webster’s give several meanings: “1: a Considered apart from any application to a particular object; as abstract truth. b: ideal, abstruse. 2: Of words, names, etc. Not concrete. 3: Dealing with a subject in its theoretical considerations only, and 4: Art. Presenting or characterized by nonrepresentational designs depicting no recognizable thing…” My thought is that Morandi is saying that beneath our myriad experiences of the world, under our perceptual images, our language and emotions is something out there, matter, which is like abstraction in art, a fundamentally unrecognizable reality, which is unavailable to us.

One may ask, should any of this concern us when we look at a Morandi painting? Do we really care about his abstract reality? I think we do, and yet it’s important to ground that caring in some sense of what happens when we look at a work of art. A painting is there to be seen. It has no other purpose, and we can see it only in the first person. There is no third-person view, no objective He hovering above the image looking at it. The first-person experience is an embodied one. I don’t only bring my eyes or my intellectual faculties or my emotions to a picture. I bring my whole self with its whole story. The relation then is between an I and an it, but that it partakes of the artist’s being as well, his entire being, which is why we treat art in a different way from utilitarian objects like forks, no matter how attractive those forks may be. My position is a phenomenological one: looking at art can’t be separated from our lived experience of the world, and the image exists in my perception of it. In his essay “Eye and Mind,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty quotes Cézanne, “Nature is inside us,” and then goes on to say, “Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and the body welcomes them.”3 This is the pleasure of art, and doodling elephants and monkeys aside, it is a uniquely human one.

A painting can represent or not represent something in the world, but it is always generated out of the artist’s experience of the visible. Morandi’s work hovers at the threshold between what I recognize, say, as a representation of a cup, and a quality of alienation in that cup that has lost the illusion of solidity and realness that I may find in Chardin, for example. Morandi loved Chardin, and what the artists share, besides the still-life genre, is that both of them enchanted their objects, but in different ways. The magic of Chardin is that the coffeepot and the garlic appear to be representations of ordinary things, and yet, as you look at them, they become emotionally charged to a degree that seems almost supernatural. I attribute this to the gestures in his canvases, which are communicated to the viewer as visible touch. In fact, looking at the best of Chardin’s pictures is almost like being caressed. The artist affects us at a deep and wordless level of human experience that goes back to infancy—being held and touched. Paradoxically, this feeling is more potent in Chardin’s still lifes than in his images of figures, where the illusion is that we are looking at living, breathing people. Morandi, too, understood that painting the inanimate had extraordinary possibilities, because the very humility of the things represented allows greater room for the artist’s expressiveness. But the spell Morandi casts over his objects is different. His bottles, cups, cloths, balls, and various other things he collected and allowed to get dusty and set up before him to paint were not chosen because they are objects of daily human life. Looking at a Chardin still life of a sausage, knife, and bread, I am drawn to the fact that here is food and a utensil, something we human beings use daily. I could have left those same objects out in my kitchen. They summon the absence of the person who cut and ate the sausage and bread. In a Chardin still life, there are human beings just outside the frame. Morandi’s groupings of objects do not resemble everyday kitchen scenes. The things he chose are solely for his perception. That is their only utility. In Chardin, I know that a glass of water is for drinking, the garlic for food preparation. In Morandi, a cup is to be seen. I can say, “that’s a cup” or “that’s a representation of a cup,” but I feel a certain uneasiness when I name it. The cup has somehow been denatured of its cupness, not entirely, but partly. Only we know that a cup is a cup, a tree is a tree. Language is of course far more than naming; it is a symbolic, intersubjective self-referential system of signs we use to structure a meaningful existence among ourselves. If you and I are standing in my living room, you will suspect I am hallucinating if I tell you there is a frog on the floor and you don’t see one, but not if I point to the floor and say floor, because we are sharing that entity in our visual field and we both speak English. Language is also internal. We use it to carry on our running monologues or private inner dialogues as we go about our lives.

In Morandi’s work, I feel a desire, at least partially, to unhinge the thing from its name, a desire that is closely related to Cézanne. Cézanne wanted to strip perception of conventional expectations, to see anew. Expectation, in its broadest sense, is vital to perceive anything. We see what we expect to see, which is shaped in part by our memories of having seen things before and in part by our brains’ innate neural wiring for vision. But we also see what we pay attention to, and we cannot pay attention to everything in an image at once. Anne Treisman, a scientist studying perception, has proposed a sequence for visual perception—a preattentive process: we are quickly able to scan a scene when elementary properties such as color, brightness, or an orientation of lines are present that make it possible for us to distinguish figure from ground. This cursory first look has obvious evolutionary value. If your eyes can quickly detect that the tiger is separate from the woods behind him, you are less likely to be eaten. Preattentive vision encodes qualities such as color, orientation, size, and motion. It is then followed by an attentive process which proceeds serially and more slowly. An example of Treisman’s work in the textbook Principles of Neural Science helps illustrate this. If she shows you a painting made up entirely of blue Ts interrupted by a single red one and asks you to identify the unique element, the red T will pop out almost instantly. On the other hand, if she shows you a painting of blue Ts and Ls, red Ls, and a single red T, the lone red T will not be apparent to you without a bit of searching. It requires a higher level of cognition to distinguish it. You have to shift your attention from one letter to the next to discover the lone red T.4

Visual perception is not fully understood. For example, it is known that the many visual areas of the brain specialize in certain kinds of recognition—color, form, movement—but how these various areas or neural pathways in the brain come together to create a coherent image remains a mystery and is often called “the binding problem.” What is known is that human beings are not passive receptors of the out there. Our embodied minds are actively both creating and interpreting what we see. This corresponds to a Morandian vision: We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. It is also not known how we become conscious of something out there in the world. There is unconscious vision, subliminal information that never reaches consciousness because it is seen too briefly, for example, but even an unconsciously registered image can affect us emotionally. The role language plays in consciousness is hotly debated, but it is safe to say that I cannot speak about something I am not conscious of (although, as Freud has shown, something may pop out of my mouth inadvertently into the light of day—a slip of the tongue that tells you what’s going on just below the surface). Nevertheless, I cannot identify a cup as such in a painting without a self-reflective awareness of that object.

Morandi, it seems to me, actively investigates the drama of perception, and he plays with both levels of vision—the preattentive and the attentive. He once said, “The only interest the visible world awakens in me concerns space, light, color, and forms.”5 These are what might be called the essentials of vision, but note that he does not mention content. The cups and trees he brought up with Roditi, which stand in for his two painterly genres, still life and landscape, are not mentioned. This is because the linguistic identities of the collection of things or the houses and gardens in the natural scenes don’t truly matter. It would be preposterous to say that Morandi didn’t know he was painting bottles, jars, cups, houses, and trees. He meditated on his still-life objects for years, made a world of them, shifted them around, put them in various lights, and painted them again and again. But if you have ever looked long enough at a thing, you will notice that one of the first aspects to vanish is the word for the thing. Other qualities come to the fore. I did a test with the Perrier bottle sitting on my desk. First I noticed its green color, the shape of its body and neck standing out against the clutter of my desk. Then I looked for a while at the vague print of its label on the other side. Then the light from my window illuminating its round side suddenly became a form in itself, as did a single ragged spot of light at the object’s base. The more I looked, the more I saw. I noticed tiny drops of water inside the round exterior and their pattern, the distorted line of my bookshelf seen through the glass as another shape with another color—a pale green. My attention transformed it. And that was five minutes. Imagine looking at it and some carefully selected cousin objects for years and then painting or drawing them. Even my brief experiment makes it clear that while looking attentively, I focused successively on the various characteristics of the bottle. My visual experience was one of roaming, moving my eyes to discover further qualities. It took time, and as time went on, there was an unfolding of the object in all its variety. And as I looked, the light in my room changed, so the glints, reflections, and transparency of the bottle were altered, too. This happened, and could only happen, in relation to me. As Edmund Husserl puts it in “Perception, Spatiality and the Body,” “The same unchanged form has a changing appearance, according to its relation to my body…”6

Deep concentration on space, light, color, and forms necessarily alienates things from their linguistic identities. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning, such as we attach to it. What my cursory attention gleans first, the figure of the bottle in front of my bookshelf, loses its importance as other qualities capture my eyes. After a while the shifting light has changed the thing entirely, creating what is almost another object, certainly a visually different one. Morandi’s still lifes, particularly his late works, the achievements of a master’s eyes, seem to depict the experience of perceptual duration inside a single canvas—that is, his art appears to include the shifts of attention that reveal various qualities of a single thing or a group of things in the narrative of looking, including what was with what is. The bottle illuminated by the light of a minute ago isn’t identical to the light on the bottle now, but the image can carry both. The painting can preserve the memory. And so Morandi creates ambiguity about both the where and the what in his images. There are many examples of this. When I first look at one of his pictures, I pick out objects against a background. I identify some things by name. My eyes see an object in front of another, but as I continue to look, I imagine that it has receded or that what I identified as a thing may in fact be a shadow. Shapes begin to bleed into one another or appear to push against the object next to it, invading its space. There are deep shaded areas between objects that pull me in and separate them, and other times I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins. A bottle begins to look as if it is teetering on top of another, or a box rests just at the horizon or table line, so the thing and the line merge. It is as if different moments of perception over time have been remembered in the same image. Gottfried Boehm, in his essay “Giorgio Morandi’s Artistic Concept,” refers to this as “the pulsation of pictorial elements” and notes that despite this illusion of movement, “a calm overall impression keeps reestablishing itself.”7 This is undoubtedly true. My ambivalence about where or what doesn’t create chaos or distress in me.

Boehm discovers a paradoxical reality in these images: “In his pictures Morandi allows us to participate in a temporal order that is optimistic and immaterial at the core of its experience. The objects are disembodied as they embody themselves. In the midst of fleeting time the artist is able to create a place with solidity and presence.”8 It is half of the paradox, the sense of the immaterial and the disembodied, which has led me to speculate about transcendent meanings in Morandi.9 The experience of looking for a long time at one of his paintings can begin to feel as if one is looking at the representations of ghosts of things, not of things themselves, but then it is also true that the objects may reappear again as representations of matter. Those fluctuations are also vital to the curious emotional world of the pictures, which I am not at all sure can be characterized as optimistic.

All perception is accompanied by feeling, even if we sense a kind of neutrality or equilibrium about what we’re looking at, what the neurologist Antonio Damasio calls “background feelings” that are always present in us as subjects.10 Good art necessarily has an emotional component, and because emotion consolidates memory, it also helps us to remember a work of art—take it with us in our minds, not an identical copy, but some version of it or recollection of the experience. Henry James articulated this idea beautifully: “In the arts feeling is meaning.”11 Morandi does not produce in me the emotional waves I feel when I look at Chardin, whose work has brought me close to tears. The project is different. But, as with Chardin, the traces of Morandi’s brush on the canvases or the stroke of a line in a drawing act on me emotionally and are crucial to the dialectic of stillness and movement which in the end create subtle alterations in mood. Hints of disturbance and imbalance are here, quivers, hoverings, and somber colors that evoke melancholy. Color falls into the preattentive visual scheme. Before we can even name a hue, we have felt it as a sensory reality in our bodies. Blue and green affect us differently from red and yellow. As Kym Maclaren argues in an essay on embodied perception, “That the stimuli of short duration produce an effect in persons’ bodies before a color is explicitly sensed, suggests that it is our sensitive-perceptual motor body, and not a knowing, thinking subject, that senses colors.”12 Color acts in us, and Morandi is a nuanced observer of color revealed by light and its essential instability.

To feel Morandi, it’s important to see the actual paintings and not look only at reproductions. And it is also, I think, vital to re-create to some degree the perceptual drama of the studio—to stand and look long and hard at a single picture and see what happens. Apparently, this is what Morandi himself did with his own works even after they were done. According to Janet Abramowicz, who knew the artist, after he had become famous and his pictures were in great demand, he made his collectors wait for them. Once he had finished a painting he did not let it go right away. Instead, she writes, he “would hang it on a wall with others that explored the same theme and observe the sequential development of that particular series. At that time he would often write the name of the future owner on the wooden stretchers of the finished painting, but the canvas would remain on Morandi’s wall until he felt he had studied it sufficiently.”13 He didn’t alter the images; he meditated on them.

You may not weep when you look at these pictures, but you will be fascinated by the delineated spaces, the muted colors with the surprise of a yellow or blue, the openings and relations among apparent objects, the wobbles on a fluted form that act on the body like a tremor, solid blocks that begin to vanish into blur, houses that resemble blocks, boxes or blocks like houses, bottles like buildings, dense areas that might be things and might be space, and with continued study, all of this does take on a spiritual quality. Spiritual is a difficult word, but I am not using it as a stand-in for the supernatural or God, although Morandi was a Catholic and did go to church. I am thinking of something far more common, which is that if I open myself fully and turn my whole attention onto these canvases for an extended period, if I shut out thoughts about what I’m going to have for dinner, or the book I was reading yesterday, or the fact that my shoes are pinching me, or the comments of fellow spectators, and give myself over to what I am seeing, there will be an accompanying feeling of strangeness and utter muteness, even transcendence, rather like what happens to people who meditate and speak of sensing their deep connections to things in the world, of an empty self, and vanishing boundaries. Indeed, if you look long enough at a single object, you yourself, your “I-ness,” will vanish in the fullness of the image you are looking at. I am not proposing Morandi as Zen master, but rather suggesting that the pictures themselves partake of a psychology of vision that occurs when the ordinary semantic meanings we ascribe to things have not disappeared entirely but have loosened their hold, and through an open embracing vision of what appears, the ordinary acquires the attributes of the extraordinary.

Morandi’s images do not dissolve into total abstraction, although some of his late watercolors get very close. The artist’s flat rejection of metaphysical realism—the idea that we can truly know the real—is not the same as saying that we don’t see the world, but rather that what we see is filtered through us. Subject and object are not so easily separated in this view. I think Morandi’s insistence on the abstract character of the real is a way to say: This canvas is my perception, is my reality. It represents what I have actually seen. From this perspective, Morandi is not clinging to the figurative but acknowledging that figure remains part of his understanding of what had been there for him in its fluctuating temporal reality, and which is now an immutable record or form of that experience.

Abramowicz writes that in 1955 Morandi confessed to her that if he had been born twenty years later, he would have been an abstract painter.14 Roditi pressed Morandi about abstraction and Mondrian in his interview, but Morandi refused to acknowledge any connection to the Dutchman or his project. But then he was reluctant to be linked to any artist he didn’t explicitly acknowledge as important to him, and actively tried to suppress a monograph that had been written about him by his friend, the art critic Arcangeli, because it placed his work in a historical perspective. Whatever the artist’s speculations on his fate had he been born later, by 1955 abstraction had had a long history, and Morandi was deeply interested in what his fellow artists were up to all over the world. If he had wanted to cut all links to representation, he would have done it. My belief is that Morandi needed objects of scrutiny, because the act of looking and painting, not the act of painting alone, is the true subject matter of his work.

When I draw a thing in front of me, I have always felt that it is as if I am touching it. My hand traces what I feel is its shape. I am not thinking about where my hand is moving. I am looking and rendering. The two acts aren’t separate but one and the same process. The work involves my whole attention. I don’t narrate the process usually; it doesn’t seem to need words in order to do it. Let us say I am drawing the Perrier bottle; that bottle becomes paramount, completely absorbing. The sight of the bottle and my hand on the paper merge in a single action. And I lose myself. As Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi point out in their book The Phenomenological Mind, “The body tries to stay out of the way so we can get on with our task; it tends to efface itself on its way to its intentional goal. We do not normally monitor our movements in an explicitly conscious manner, although … we do have a prereflective awareness of our body in very general terms … but this prereflective awareness is not very detailed. I can say that I am reaching out to grasp a cup, but my sense of this is oriented toward the goal or intentional project I am involved in and not toward the specifics of my movement. I can’t say very much about how I shape my hand in order to pick up a cup.”15 This is because we have a proprioceptive sense of our bodies, a body schema, which does not require explicit consciousness. If we had to think through every gesture, our lives would be a misery. Unlike reaching for a cup, art requires editing and thought as well, but finding the rightness one is looking for and knowing when to stop is a mysterious process and emerges from places in the mind that are often hidden. The result—the art we hang on the wall—becomes the tangible record of that dynamic embodied experience of perceiving and making. Nature is within us, said Cézanne. “We speak of ‘inspiration,’” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted.”16

Morandi’s cast-off objects, his bottles, cups, boxes, coffeepots, saucers, and cloths, often asymmetrical and worn, became vehicles in the inspiration and expiration of Being. The humbler, the blanker, the dustier, the more undistinguished the things, the better, because they offered themselves up to the eyes of the painter without context or assigned meanings. He knew he wanted to paint the unknowable—that abstract objective reality—which we have parsed and articulated for ourselves as cups and trees. When I visited the Morandi museum in Bologna, I looked into the small space where the artist’s workroom has been reproduced, and was seized by a terrible poignancy. The strangeness of the project became obvious. There was something withdrawn and retentive at the core of this bachelor’s personality, and stubborn, too. He did what he did. I looked at his chair, his hat, and the jumble of pedestrian objects that he had carefully gathered and saved to paint. They looked so abandoned, so unremarkable, so irretrievably banal that in that moment they summoned for me only the artist’s death, the great gaping absence of the man whose Being had enchanted them.

2008