DSDN 171 Assignment 5

Without the experimentation of artist and scientist through out the last 300 years our understanding of how colour-vision works would not be at the stage it is at today.  It started with Isaac Newton who studied how the colour actually reaches the eye, but did not study how people subjectively see colour. Artist then began to study subjective colour observations in order to get a greater understanding of how it was perceived.  Goethe studied the how an after image and other subject observations were perceived and worked in his 1400 page paper Farbenlehre.  His study then lead two painters to expand on his work, Phillip Otto Runge and J.W.M. Turner, who expanded on Goethe's work by adding light and shade as a component of colour and giving colours symbolic meanings.  Ogden Rood, in the early 1900's released a book which became a handbook for artists which took the ideas of the previous perception of colour and put it in a way which was easy to read.  He also stated that colour does not need to mixed on a palette but just by putting two colours next to each other on a canvas the eye would mix them together.  The artist from then on started painting more emotive paintings rather than those based off narrative and so colour was used more to get an idea across rather than an accurate representation of the subjects of the painting.

Reference

Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson.

DSDN 171 Assignment 4

Figure 1 Arad, Ron (2008) Voido, retreived from http://furniture.architecture.sk/

I believe that Adolf Loos argument that "the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use" is untrue.  His belief is that the more cultured and civilized a race was the less ornament they should use, as ornament was the product of criminals and degenerates.  He says this as he believes that ornament adds work to the making of an object and that by doing this a man earns less money making the same object and that this is criminal to the person who makes the object.  But in removing the ornament from the object it can also make it less desirable, and to counter this the form of an object has become more important than the ornamentation when it comes to aesthetics.  So people spend more money on materials that get a nicer finish, such as shinier metals, and more time working on them to get this finish, and when the object is finished it is in itself an ornament.  An example above shows this as while it is a chair and works well as one, it looks like a piece of art as well.  While it is true the ornament has been removed off the object, the object itself is presented so that it takes the place of the ornament and still does its function, which is why I believe Loos' argument to be false.

References

Loos, Adolf (c. 1910) Ornament and Crime

London: Arts Council of Great Britain (1985), 100-103