Tom McCormack <[email protected]> wrote: > Granted, there's much to question and even quarrel with in there. But I urge > that those points do not keep you from finding what is helpful or encouraging > for you. For example, I'm now finishing (I hope) a play with a great deal of > complexity on several levels. A strong challenge for me comes from my > motivation to make it as accessible as I can. However, there's a part of me > convinced that its ability to engage my ideal intended audience will depend on > my retaining as much of the complexity as I can. In other words, the > exhortation Simplify! Simplify! may be exactly the wrong guide for me to > follow strictly.
The process of seeing relies a lot on change--in fact, it depends on it. Remember the tyranosaurus scene from Jurassic Park. "Don't move. He can't see you if you don't move," the doctor says. The visual receptors are triggered as the light that falls on them changes, which is why optical illusions, such as the after-image, work best if the viewer stares at a fixed point, i.e., not allowing the image to move to and fro on the retina. At the edges of our field of vision, color sensitivity is reduced to only dark and light sensitivity, and at the extreme periphery, even that is reduced to simple movement. Uncomplicated. I would suppose that complexity is a form of congnitive engagement, which sometimes takes the form of mere numerical addition (name all the faces on the cover of the Sgt. Peppers album, or identify all the saints by their attributes) and sometimes takes the form of intracacies (e.g., the carpet pages from the great Irish gospel books or the densely intertwining foliage of a Neil Welliver forest scene). Sometimes the sheer simplicity of a painting provokes the viewer to scan it carefully for small difference (e.g., Malevich's White Cross or, for me, a Ben Nicholson low-relief sculpture or painting, or many of the big color field paintings of the 50s). For the painter, the canvas size is pretty much the ultimate limit: Put whatever you want within this rectangle of 2 feet x 3 feet. You can paint it in one solid color, or paint the most meticulous image (e.g., Ivan Le Lorraine Albright). So, too, I suppose for authors of temporal art: Within this two hour span, your characters can speak constantly, in a form of Gilbert and Sullivan patter, or sparsely, as in Waiting for Godot. Or the musicians can play furiously, a 2-hour flight of bumblebees, or minimally. The audience or viewers will engage the performances as they wish. I tend to see artworks within my own typical or normal range of complexity, but I expand it if I find the image particularly compelling and stare at a piece as I search it for its internal differences and changes. And I will infuse complexity on the apparently simple, but that complexity (as I recall examples) tends to shift into a meditative state in which differences become clearer to me. (Otherwise, I wind up merely mentally mapping brushstrokes.) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
