John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing 1857 created the expression “the innocence of the eye” which triggered any amount of comments, analysis, essays and artworks. But can it be that the eye is innocent? By Ruskin “The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, - as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.” (Ruskin, 1907:3) But with the development of the avant-garde and contemporary art scene, this concept was reconsidered. On the one hand, there are supporters of the idea of a child’s geniality and a man trying to reach the same clearness of child’s eye but on the other hand, today we can debate how someone who is in middle age can be physically and psychologically free of life experience? Mark Tansey in his work The Innocent Eye Test (1981) refers to this problem. But what is he trying to do, to make a point of it or at the same time posing a problem?
It is commonly believed that human and artist perception can’t be “innocent”. Ernst Gombrich (1960) asserts that “...It is the business of the living organism to organize, for where there is life there is not only hope, as the proverb says but also fears, guesses, expectations which sort and model the incoming messages, testing and transforming and testing again. The innocent eye is a myth.” (Gombrich, 1960, 251) For example the title of these essays “No title”. It could be perceived as a fact that there no title for this big quantity of words. But just because we know about “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” of Magritte and “One and three chairs” of Joseph Kosuth so prior knowledge let us think a bit further - Is this text really doesn't have a title or “no title” is a title with the idea that appearance does not always match with connotation? Is there a different sense of calling it this way? If you ask a child with his “innocent eyes” what could be the name of this work he for sure will reply that there is “no title”.
Having said that, there is a different opinion exists. Innocence is “a motivator” for the artist to create something outstanding and unlike anything else. According to supporters of this idea, for instance, Charles Baudelaire “... genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will” (Baudelaire, 1864, 8) or Jonathan Fineberg in The Innocent Eye (1997) cited by Taberham (2014) “Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists and members of the Russian avant-garde often played up the parallel and frequently exhibited their work alongside the art of children”. (Turner (2010) TATE online) As Christopher Turner mentioned in an article for TATE in 2010 that “An interest in children’s art would seem a logical outgrowth of this empiricism, but it was only in the craze for primitive art in the first decades of the twentieth century that artists began to look at children’s art seriously.” (Turner, 2010, online)
To put it another way, around the end of the nineteenth beginning of twentieth-century constructivist theory argued that our perception is based on our knowledge. At the beginning of twentieth-century innocence of children’s perception was used actively and in 1960 Gombrich declare that Ruskin’s “innocent eye” theory “is implausible”. Thereby subject of “the innocence of the eye” was deeply analysed before the year of the Mark Tansey’s painting and he knew about this as he used this metaphor.
In the work “The Innocent Eye Test” 1981 academics in an environment of a drawing atelier with artwork on which depicted three cows and one of them is alive. The artwork is accomplished in a monochrome and figurative manner. Feelings and subject are exaggerated and almost comic as in the down left corner one of the academics holds a mop in case something happens with a cow. Thereby this detail adjusts the viewer to approach this painting with humour.
Another key thing to mention, in the background of the painting, we can notice one more painting with a stack of hay. At this moment the surrealistic impression is rising. Probably academics will test this painting on its reality if cow wants to eat this hay?!
However, we know that this painting is by impressionist Claude Monet and not naturalistic. At that point, I think, the game of metaphors is starting in the painting of Tansey, because probably the cow would think that it is food. Is Tansey wants us to think if the cow will see it innocently?
Furthermore, the painting on the middle of the image is a work of Paulus Potter “The Bull” 1647.
Big size of the painting (height: 235.5 cm., width: 339 cm.) emphasizes the value of the Bull. The cow is gazing at the idol of the race similar as we look at Angelina Jolie our days. Is it again a metaphor? Do we need to go to the Museum for seeing the best individuals of our kind? Does it mean that Museum or academics decide what we see? And why in general these two paintings (Monet and Potter) represented in this way? If in front of the cow would be painting of Monet it is more naturalistic thinking. When the cow is in front of the Bull probably Tansey asking us about the dominance?? Bull over the cow? Academics over the viewer? Man over the woman?
What’s more, is it academics “testing” a painting or it is the cow which testing the Bull on a painting, as a symbol of the beauty of a cow’s genus? The curtain in the hand of one of the academics says that they first positioned the cow in front of the work, and then lowered the curtain. Thus, there was a presentation effect for the cow it means that the artist positions the cow as the main viewer, who with an “innocent eye” evaluates the work of art. Is it a parallel with uneducated museum visitors?!
Moreover, most likely, educated people on the painting “innocently” want to compare if the image of the cow as good as the real one. With this in mind if to apply the theory of Gombrich then there is no innocence in an old academic’s eyes. This scene in the painting only simulates the innocence of comparing two cows.
All things considered, I could conclude that Mark Tansey just used the problematic of the Ruskin’s phrase and made a point of it but he did not pose a problem because it was raised a long time before. At the same time, he amplifies obvious “innocence of the eye” of the cow in contrast to the experts and ridicules this situation. But if we assume that Tansey ridicules the viewer, and then maybe he calls him with an "uneducated eye" thereby this may be a new problem for discourse.
Bibliography and references
1. John Ruskin (1907) p. 3 The Elements of Drawing and The Elements of Perspective. Reprinted 1912 London: Published by JM Dent&Sons Ltd. And in New York by EP Dutton&Co
2. Gombrich, Ernst [1960] 2002: 251. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon Press.
3. Charles Baudelaire (1864) p. 8 The Painter of Modern Life , Phaidon press
4. Paul Taberham (2014) "Bottom-up processing, entoptic vision and the innocent eye in Stan Brakhage's work" The Journal for Movies and Mind.[Online] Volume 8, Issue1 (Summer 2014) p1-22 Available from: http://www.academia.edu/12257345/Bottom-up_processing_Entoptic_Vision_and_the_Innocent_Eye_in_the_Work_of_Stan_Brakhage [Accessed 28/06/18]
5. Christopher Turner (2010) Through the eyes of a child [Online] Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/through-eyes-child [Accessed 29/06/18]
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