Image, Empathy, Motion
From Warburg to Experimental Aesthetics
In 1872 Charles Darwin's book La expresión de las emociones en el hombre y en los animales The book presented a detailed study illustrated through photographs of the human gestural universe. The influence of Darwin's theory among social disciplines is sufficiently well known, although this book has been curiously forgotten. The interest in emotions and their bodily expression was also a subject of study for artists, a recurring place in sketches and drawings. From the History of Art, shortly after Darwin's book was published, in Germany and Austria a field of study began to take shape based on the contributions of psychology and ethnology of the German aesthetic tradition (Lotze, Vischer, Bastian, Warburg) and the tradition of the biology of art (Pitt Rivers, Haddon, Holmes, Stolpe). These approaches raised the possibility of studying visual thinking in human beings, rather than the interpretation of European art, and influenced theorists such as Aby Warburg, for whom the mental representation associated with a material impression can go far beyond what is contained in the image. In his notes on his visit to the Pueblo Indians in 1895, Aby Warburg expressed his weariness with an “aesthetic art history” that was based on formal treatments that did not take into account the image. The library that he took such care to stock had a clear objective: to be “a collection of documents that refer to the psychology of human expression.” For Warburg, art history had limited its vision, leaving aside what was for him, a “historical psychology of human expression.”
Most modern theories of representation have taken different approaches, emphasizing what Ernst Gombrich has called the beholder’s share. Krois (2012) points out precisely how in these theories, attention has shifted from the represented object to human activities: seeing-in (R. Wollhein), the experience of similarity (C. Peacocke), symbolic interpretation (N. Goodman) or the perceptual capacity to recognize (F. Schier, D. Lopes, J. Kulvicki or L. Wiesing). In the late 1980s, David Freedberg again raised the question of the behavior and reactions of art viewers to a work of art. At that time, Freedberg’s work was oriented towards emotional responses to images as symptoms rather than the relationship between how images are seen and the responses they provoke. In his most recent work, he has begun to evaluate the potential of a formal analysis in relation to how objects are seen and how people respond to them. The relationship between visual configurations and emotions is far from being a resolved issue. The approaches are truly diverse and the long list of classifications proposed throughout history configure the coordinates of a debate that is still not considered closed
Current studies from the contributions of neuroscience have reopened the question of the connection between emotion and image. From the history of art, works such as those of James Elkins have begun to investigate this aspect, allowing us to glimpse differences between paintings and sculptures in their way of producing emotions and responses, something that is undoubtedly linked to the relationship between vision and touch. On the other hand, Freedberg has proposed to think about the connection between art, emotion, body and brain incorporating the contributions of neuroscience. Without a doubt, in the concept of Pathosformeln In Warburg's work, these elements are also a common theme, since it is a concept that seeks to understand how the body engages with images and how it responds emotionally to them. Warburg and other theorists such as Vischer, Lotze and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty, explored the idea that the feeling of physical involvement in an image provoked both a sensation that tended to imitate movement and the generation or accentuation of emotive responses in viewers. These ideas have given a central role to the body, recovered with great interest in the field of neuroscience (Gallese, 2002; 2012;2017) (Rizzolatti, 1992) (Zeki, 1999) and cognitive archaeology (Renfrew, 2008).
This line of research is based on the recognition that there is an intrinsic power of form that forces us to understand that the image cannot be placed before or behind reality since it is not its consequence but the form of its condition (Bredekamp, 2015). The image as an act refers to how and why images influence the way people think, act and feel. This ego of the image as created artifacts has the capacity to form the subject. In this sense, according to Krois (2012), images are active as long as they are capable of incorporating information and our body is a sensory-motor perceptual complex. Confronting an image is testing our knowledge about visual configurations, adapting our analysis methods to understand the specificity of the visual dimension
The publication The neurology of kinetic art E. Zeki and M. Lamb introduced the concept of neuroaesthetics. In general terms, these studies have pointed out that perception is not an act of recording stimuli but a reconstruction. The brain reworks and interprets from cognitive schemes and internal representations. Perception is influenced and transformed by a complex series of processes that demonstrate that perceiving is an act of imagining. The suggestive contributions of Vittorio Gallese from the perspective of the experimental aesthetics, open up new questions for the study of a model of perception based on the concept of simulated embodiment. As Vittorio Gallese points out, current studies show that seeing is not an act of recognizing or capturing in our brain what is before our eyes, but a complex construction whose result is the product of the fundamental contribution of our body with its motor potential, our senses and emotions, our imagination and our memories. The body-brain relationship, understood as a system, has shown how corporality plays a decisive role in cognitive processes, unlike the perspectives linked to classical cognitivism, according to which our sensations and emotions acquire meaning only when they become the object of a representation in linguistic terms.
Publications
Marina Gutiérrez De Angelis; López de Munain, Gorka. «Patrimonio cultural y entornos virtuales. Aportes teóricos desde los estudios de la imagen y la estética experimental», III Simposio Internacional de Cultura Visual 2020-2021, La interdisciplinariedad en el estudio de la imagen, Valencia,27-29 de octubre de 2021.
Marina Gutiérrez De Angelis; López de Munain, Gorka. «Patrimonio Cultural y conocimiento: Propuestas para el diseño de una experiencia inmersiva basada en Realidad Mixta para el sitio arqueológico Cueva de las Manos (Argentina)», HDH2021, Santiago de Compostela, España, 4-8 octubre de 2021.
