For Arnheim, shapes are the visual objects around us, the products of external stimuli, light and environmental conditions, and our brains. Gestalt theory was founded on the decoding of the complex rules that group stimuli into percepts and Arnheim uses these rules to explain how shapes come about. One might say that Arnheim is mostly concerned with how works of art are built up, whereas more contemporary art is preoccupied with the paradoxical way in which they sustain their fictions, or meta-artistically play with them. 

 

Gestalt theory and Cubism emerged at more or less the same time and Arnheim shows how Gestalt principles can explain the substitutions that can occur in a Cubist work to create a paradoxical illusion. Similarly, Arnheim's principles can be used to show how the building blocks of perception help develop meanings that are important to the post-modern generations. An important point about the constructive features of gestalt perception is that percepts are sharpened and leveled for maximum clarity, or prägnanz. Especially in memory, unstable or ambiguous percepts need to be encoded in a more compact format. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kim Dingle, The United Shapes Of America, (As Drawn From Memory By California Grad Students), 1990, Oil on Birch Panel, 42 x 60 in]

 

American artist Kim Dingle has executed a number of participatory art projects with art students around the United States in order to think about place and the mythology of nationhood. Her collaboratively produced "maps" always show interesting distortions of land masses like the "United Shapes of America" above, in which omissions and exaggerations are the mental traces of the myths that we live. In other words, the gestalt memory mechanism becomes the basis for an identity-based project. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Willie Cole, The Sole Sitter, 2013, Bronze, Edition 1 of 3, Newark Museum  

https://newarkmuseum.wordpress.com/category/newark-museum-collections/african-art-collection/]

 

Typically, in contemporary art we find the use of the traditional gestalt principles of grouping - size, proximity, similarity, common "fate" - not explored for their own sake but to undergird the active construction of deeper meanings. Much in the way that Arcimboldo constructed portraits with objects whose spatial forms suggested human features, Willie Cole has constructed figures of deep personal meaning - African masks and statues - with discarded shoes. In The Sole Sitter (2013), what looks to be a recognizably central African wooden statuette of a thoughtful figure with hands on chin is discovered to be constructed of women's shoes. The ostensible identification then is layered with connotations of gender and commodity culture. If this is a rumination on Cole's African American identity he has layered his identity through a prism of new encultured meanings.