Gestalt psychologists stress the dynamic interconectedness of thought and
sight. "The laws of vision serve as the model of the fluctuating
processes of the mind engaged in problem-solving."
(John-Steiner, p.45) Arnheim
stresses the importance of using pure shapes to teach - a visual mode that
engages the student without erroneous connotations that have to be
un-learned to absorb the concept actually being taught.
The idea of pure shapes as a teaching tool is very interesting in that it
represents the concious integration of a visual language into the
normal academic context. Visual languages are used (and discarded)
frequently in both our culture as a whole, and in our classrooms. Quite
unconsciously, we learn to decode the symbolic languages of everything
from facial expressions to paintings, much as poeple in an oral culture
learn their history through speaking: we absorb the various versions into
our subconscious, where they fuse into a body of knowledge. And like the
history of an oral culture, the body of knowledge each individual
accquires is different, which in our culture translates into a fragmented
personal symbolic decoding of visual perceptions.
Certain conventions exist - such as set rules for how to arrange film
cuts so that people appear to speak to back and forth, or how to arrange a
composition so that it is aesthetically pleasing - but a set of
conventions do not constitute a communal language, and visual modes of
communicating are so volitile that the conventions have alredy been
deconstructed (for the examples above) by Dada-ist art and experimental
filmmaking, and a new set of symbolic conventions take precedence over the
old ones.
