Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception by Davis Duane

Author:Davis, Duane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Hand/La Main

How is the hand implied in the eye’s perception of the world? Is seeing derived from touching, yet at a distance? The hand grasps things, writes letters, and points out nuances. Is it perhaps an extension of sight? Either way, contact with the world through the hand is more immediate. Running a hand across rough stone or a smooth metal railing evokes different feelings toward the surround, and summons different gestures. These gestures are already expressive, in a kind of excess over practical use.

Merleau-Ponty would draw attention to our felt sense of ourselves as kin to the materials we manipulate. He picks up on Husserl’s example of clasping one’s own hand, as the evidence of embodied yet self-aware being. The gap between the hand held and act of holding confirms that we are objects like other objects within our horizon, yet we have dimensions that remain opaque to sight or touch. Our contact with others through clasping their hands lets us infer their separateness yet similarity to us. Merleau-Ponty does not extend his analysis in “Indirect Language and Voices of Silence” to the implications for intersubjectivity, but Noguchi’s sculpture and its arrangement in his museum supports this direction in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Noguchi’s intentionally heightened “place” is set aside for experience of embodied perception and a crossing over of environment/perceiver.

The architect’s hand in design displays a style, whether in small drawings, models, or large buildings. Yet architecture is fundamentally collaborative. Prosaic speech is implicated in architecture’s collaborative nature. We have in common our human bodies; cultural, linguistic, and other differences register in our styles. Since we each have a style and can recognize each other as having a style, we can respond as complements to one another. Gestures can meet, with respect for different heritage and customs, as well as for variations in the natural environment. (Obviously, negative reactions to contrast in custom and style, and ignorance or violation of the environment are all too prevalent.)10

Here we see a significant difference from painting, at least. Both the working style and the lack of narrative tradition distinguish architecture from its two-dimensional cousin. Merleau-Ponty continues Hegel’s priority of the singular genius, like Vermeer, who captures the sense of cloth or softly lit skin on canvas, and who sets out a “structure, a style and a meaning.” This meaning has an expressive function beyond the objects represented, in the way that narrative poetry too acts as sign for a lived reality.

Merleau-Ponty notices that modern painting does not attempt to resemble things but, as in the case of Van Gogh, it “no longer indicates some reality one must go towards, but what still must be done in order to restore the encounter between his glance and the things which solicit it, the encounter between the man who has to be and what exists” (S, 57/92). This restoration shows itself in the work of art.

In Merleau-Ponty’s view the encounter between the glance and the soliciting world is characterized by the vivid fluidity of a conversation as opposed to a written text.

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