The Irwin link again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajsEebw89g
Some more art rambling.
What Irwin is talking about is very relevant to the narrative, anti-narrative. His example: start with David's Coronation of Napoleon and then end with Malevich's White on White. He asks how do you explain that transformation?
The very crude outline for Irwin is narrative with two point perspective to flat surface with square shapes, follows an arc of narrative-logic, to psychological-logic to perceptual-logic, then conceptual-logic. Irwin uses Piet Mondrian as an example. This is a good example because Mondrian started off in late impressionism and transformed his art into abstractions that continued to evolve along the arc that Irwin describes. Here is a link to a blog on Mondrian. It is pretty good but it doesn't explicitly cover Mondrian's tree series and its evolution into abstraction:
http://madamepickwickartblog.com/strange-habits-of-visual-neurons/
Sorry I can't find a place with the important sequence of images. Here is an image list to look up if anybody feels like it:
1908 Molen (Mill); Mill in Sunlight 1908 Avond (Evening); Red Tree 1910 Amaryllis 1911 Gray Tree 1913 Composition No. II; Composition in Line and Color 1915 Ocean 5 1918 Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1 1918 Composition with Gray and Light Brown
What I am talking about with this narrative-logic bullshit? It's just short hand to indicate story telling which has a beginning, middle, and end. That is a dynamic form or pattern in time and is known as linear logic.
Shane is right in the restricted sense that painting can not use time directly as part of its repertoire. However, we do spend time looking and studying the painting, and that `real' time can be manipulated by the painting and or painter. The Coronation is so big I am told, you have to walk from one end to the other to see it. When my friend saw it, she said it was hanging in a hall and she couldn't get far enough away to see the whole thing.
The painting tells the story of Napoleon crowning himself as emperor. It takes time to study all the characters. I wish I had a character guide to name some of the people in the background because tracking down those names would probably tell an interesting political story. It is a frozen moment, and yet it isn't. When I spend time with this painting (its reproduction), it is like I am watching a play, opera, or movie. Napoleon bargining with the Pope is the prologue and looming in the near future is Russia 1812.
There are a lot of other dimensions to narrative, or what we call the master narrative of a period. The Coronation represents the beginning of empire as David intented. But to me it reads as some tradgic farce of neoclassicism gone crashingly mad. Goya sure got that version of the master narrative right.
I learned to use the arts as a motion picture on history in order to understand the dynamic-cultural elements of a period. I have Tolstoy, Velasquez, Goya and David to thank for this idea. The Coronation is constructed as a stage set, and the drama is the coronation. You are invited to walk into the tableau by the structure of the painting's space composition. In other words, you the viewer are made into one of the guests.
This movie illustration approach was paricularly fun to do with Strauss in Weimar and Spinoza in Amsterdam---because I liked the arts, music and writings of both periods. If you follow the math history you find something astonishing. Math development closely tracks the flourishing periods of the arts. How does that happen?
The psychological logic, is simply the psychological effects. You can learn how to creat these effects for example by painting or drawing portraits and studying some of the famous portraits like Rembrandt's self portraits. The method is to notice how expression is given forms in the human face that are associated with various psychological states. The kid drawing of a frowning face, for example as mean teacher. This learning process can be vastly speeded up by using a combination of photography and computers.
The perceptual logic follows the illusionism of 3-D perspective and the pattern making of abstraction. If you play with these elements enough and work with them you discover the conceptual sort of logic, which is tied up with geometry. The uses of geometry are not restricted to creating illusional or representational space. It can be used to develop space relations between primary elements of line, shape, and color. In 3-d reality, you use geometry to build architecture and sculpture. In this perceptual-conceptual realm computers don't work too well as learning tools, but the old fashion drafting machine, and or the common straight edge and compass does.
Irwin's Getty Gardin is an example. I'd like to hear if this is a wonderful place to visit or does it fall kind of flat? Scale is really important. You can underscale a form or overscale it.
Most of the above will probably not make much sense, unless you have played with art in some ways suggested to get the feel for these ideas.
CG