Arnheim begins Art and Visual Perception with a memorable gesture: asking the reader to cut out a disk and watch its dynamics with a square before her eyes. The exercise sets the tone for the experimental nature of the book but at the same time cripples it for a contemporary reader for being so preoccupied with pictoriality and other “modernist” concerns. But what if we aren’t just thinking about disks on paper, but a performance artist in a space, or an earthwork in a western landscape? Then balance, directed tension, and perceptual dynamics immediately become interesting again. 

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Much of what motivates artists after Arnheim is the open work, unbounded, in process or even conceptually without end. One may or may not agree with Arnheim that anything, to be a work of art, must have some degree of boundedness to become an object of contemplation in the first place. Yet one can also see that much art of the past fifty years has continued to have this degree of boundedness at the same time that it has outgrown the gallery wall. The field, as pointed out by Rosalind Krauss, has been "expanded," and the canvas has become the whole gallery (Lewitt), the city (Acconci) or the landscape (Serra). Emblematic is Robert Irwin's Homage to a Square (Dia Beacon). Clearly referencing Josef Albers's very Bauhaus (and Arnheim-friendly) concerns from his famous formal color studies, Irwin's installation expands Albers's two-dimensional investigations into a whole gallery. 

 

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[left: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1959, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/59.160/; right: Robert Irwin, Excursus: Homage to the Square3, 1998-2000, Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York]  

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Arnheim is famous for conducting perceptual analyses of works of art, as at the end of this chapter with his discussion of Cezanne's Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair [1]. In such diagrammatic expositions of artistic composition, Arnheim only becomes the last and perhaps most rigorous of those working in the formalist tradition. However, is it perverse to think that a compositional theory could exist for the most varied art? Would this no longer be a theory of visual composition but more of an attributional theory of agents in the art world? The fact that Vito Acconci was inspired by, among others, Arnheim's teacher of social psychology, Kurt Lewin, suggests that some kind of configurational accounting of the entire social field of art can still yield important results. 

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[left: Arnheim diagram of Paul Cezanne's Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair; right: Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci, diagram accompanying Following Piece, 1969] 

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Acconci was a pioneer in using his body as an element of performance, injecting issues of social display in public into the repertoire of the artist. His exploration of power in the social field indeed owes more to Lewin than to Arnheim. However, one could say that Arnheim and Lewin are doing the same things relative to their chosen object of study. Shifting the lens to use Lewin for what Beuys would call "social sculpture" (soziale Plastik) makes Arnheim relevant in a new and interesting way.