Kinaesthetic Knowing by Zeynep Çelik Alexander

Author:Zeynep Çelik Alexander [Alexander, Zeynep Çelik ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-48534-8
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

1. Fill in these three forms with the colors yellow, red and blue. The coloring is to fill the form entirely in each case.

2. If possible, provide an explanation for your choice of color (plate 1).59

Student notes from Kandinsky’s lectures confirm the centrality of psychophysical thinking in Kandinsky’s classroom.60 The conceit of such pedagogical techniques was, in Kandinsky’s words, to build the “bridge between the inner and the outer.”61 In the Bauhaus-published book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) Kandinsky repeated some of the assertions about the correlation of form to affect that he had made in his influential text Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) from 1911.62 In his books and lecture notes, there is no shortage of examples: he associated the right angle with the color red, while acute angles were yellow and obtuse ones blue (which explained, of course, why the triangle had to be yellow, the square red, and the circle blue). Kandinsky endorsed other forms of affinity between forms, lines, and colors as well: the graphic form of the horizontal line corresponded to the painterly form of the color black, the vertical to white, and the diagonal to red.63 Much has been made of the role of synesthesia in Kandinsky’s work.64 What made synesthesia possible, however, was a universal language of form and color that transcended any particular sense, a language whose grammar was dictated by the predictability of the body’s response to stimuli. To put it differently, according to Kandinsky, the sensation of triangle accompanied the sensation of yellow precisely because the body responded to them in identical manner: the body’s response measured what he called the “inner pulsing of the work.”65 Hence the revealing scribbles in a student’s lecture notes: the yellow triangle, the red square, and the blue circle corresponded to the musical tempos of presto, andante, and grave, the student wrote, precisely because these form-color combinations triggered the pulse rates 135, 75, and 50, respectively. (The same student also noted—apparently not without a hint of irony—that the theory was yet to be proven [plate 2].)66

Even Moholy-Nagy, despite his differences from Klee and Kandinsky, accepted Fechner’s basic psychophysical formula. He argued that the elementary feelings making up an expression were registered physiologically and psychologically.67 Humans who expressed their feelings of envy with yellow and hope with green (color associations that obviously did not translate well into the English language) were no different from bulls that could not help but be attracted to the brightness of red.68 Of all the physiological effects registered by the body, however, Moholy-Nagy put far more emphasis on those that related to the sense of touch. Like nineteenth-century theorists who had added the “muscle sense” to the more established five to resolve the epistemological quandaries of empiricism, Moholy-Nagy identified a “sixth sense,” which, he argued, played a crucial role in registering pressure, temperature, and vibrations, thus helping humans orient themselves in the world.69 His interest in faktur, the material

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