The Natural Attitude Norman Bryson Ch1 Visual Culture the Reader

In this chapter, Bryson explains how art became a succession of schools aiming for ever greater approximation to reality. 

He commences with a quote from Pliny describing a competition to teest the closeness to reality between a painting of grapes by Zeuxis, and one of curtains by Parrhasius. The former was close enough to reality that birds sought to eat the grapes, the second fooled Zeuxis himself, who was gracious enough to admit that Parrhasius had deceived not birds, but another artist.

This continued until recently: in 1967, Francastel stated:

"The goal of representation will be appearance, and no longer meaning."

"In its perfect state, painting approaches a point where it sheds everything that intefreres with it reduplicative mission." It depicts "the universal visual experience."

The problems of painting are merely executive - it is what Husserl calls the 'natural attitude'. 

Bryson points out that the natural attitude approach is essentially negative: each advance is seen as a removal of barriers to the 'Essential Copy'. The artist works in a social void and his work is invloved only with other painters, not other members of society.

There is no such thing as style - "appearing as an inert and functionless deposit encrusting the apparatus of communication."

The aim of the image, in the natural attitude, is the communication of perception from a source replete with percptive material tio a site of repcetion eager for perceptual satisfaction.

Evaluation

A useful chapter to set out the bais for the universal visual experience. It has shades of 1984, year 0 and all that, insofar as subjectivity is seen within the natural attitude as the antithesis of painting. Many others, notably Marxists, have subsequently argued that there is no such thing as objectivity even in science. In painting terms, there are value judgements in the selection of subject, background, lighting, props etc. so the painter cannot possibly be entirely passively reproducing what he sees, as what he sees is affected by his own choices and value judgments.

 

In context, this is Bryson's opening chapter and he goes on to revoke this view of painting.