MOVEMENT
"If influence from a particular direction predominates, there results a pull in that direction. When the disk is put at the exact midpoint between center and corner, it tends to strive toward the center."
Arnheim's chapter on Movement is focused on the way in which motion lives and detaches itself from physical reality. Movement does not suggest real actual movement, while even phenomenal mobility need not suggest sequence, and artificial forms can suggest organic movement. The emphasis on the dissociation of experience and reality was amenable to a modernist aesthetic. The way in which artificial forms could introduce pure expression gave a justification to experimental filmmaking and animation.
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[Andy Warhol, still from Sleep, 1963]
Arnheim uses a phenomenological argument to argue that change reverts to spatiality unless sequentiality is specially created by the artist. Arnheim was interested in parsing different experimental experiences. Experimental film artists in Arnheim's wake were interested not in using psychology to enhance story telling in film but to explore limiting cases of experience. In Warhol's extended static films like Empire or Sleep, the time and inherent expressiveness of filmed action is stretched beyond focused attention. The film is not so much interested in what is in the frame but what this very lack can induce outside of the frame. In an odd way, Warhol confirms Arnheim's ideas about spatiality - not for aesthetic but rhetorical effect.
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[Golan Levin, Double-Taker (Snout), 2008]
When Arnheim expounded on Albert Michotte's experiments exploring induced organic movement with visual displays, one could see the direct application to non-figurative animation. Uncannily human response has been interesting to contemporary art but as explorations of the hyper-real. Such works are not instrumentalized to make more human creations as in the entertainment industry, but as forebodings of technological dystopia. Golan Levin's Double-Taker is an interactive installation using sensors to respond to passers-by. A relatively minimal technical apparatus creates a distinctly human sense of being watched, causing a "double take."
[Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, 2010, performed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/arts/design/31diva.html?_r=0]
In addition to artificially created movement, Arnheim also discusses the body as a bearer of expression and also as a personal kinesthetic body image. For Arnheim the body brings certain advantages and disadvantages for building meaning. In contemporary art, the body is no longer primarily a vehicle for inherent expressiveness, but more a token of the real. Bodies pass ambiguously between life and performance, and the symbolism exists in this very gesture of passage of the artist. In Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present, the artists sat for hours, granting visitors a chance to sit across from her silently. Her body was immobile and her intense gaze slowed time and focused attention upon each moment strangers spent with her. Many found the experience deeply moving and poignant. In a sense, Abramovic did not offer her body as a site of expression for beholding, but entangled visitors in a direct social interaction. Her act of staging these encounters itself became a reflection on time, anonymity, and fleeting yet penetrating engagement.
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