Why ORIGINS?
ORIGINS offers a vision of art guided by a common-sense formalist approach.
We maintain that art is a visual medium, and the only requirement to access its meaning is the sense of sight. Formalism, therefore, concentrates on the art object and its formal properties—line, color, texture, composition—and is specifically interested in how the arrangement of these elements creates resonant expression. We hold that primary to art is the profoundly emotional and transcendent experience a viewer enjoys when confronting a highly expressive composition directly.
The central truth is that our earliest and most decisive engagement with a work of art is embedded in its sensual, formal qualities. Everything else builds upon this foundation or fails for lack of it.
Recent advances in neuroaesthetics provide empirical evidence of what we believe. This relatively new science utilizes brain imaging to trace how the brain processes a work of art. The brain evaluates form first, and if it finds a composition compelling, reward systems are engaged. This judgment of form arrives in about one-third the time it takes to blink, before conscious thought can construe ideas and subject matter.
When the brain finds a work of art compelling, networks ordinarily given to inward thought and self-reflection remain in play—a result scientists did not anticipate. The brain does not treat a great work of art as a mere object in a room, like a piece of furniture. It takes an art object’s formal structure into the viewer’s inner life, as something profoundly meaningful, deeply satisfying, and worthy of prolonged contemplation. That deepening of the art experience is what the eminent art historian Lorenz Eitner described as the object’s "power to rouse our senses to a state of responsive happiness which communicates itself to our whole being.”
Quality, formal excellence—even beauty—describe something in the object: a highly expressive organization of form that does not come and go with fashion. The brain is built to recognize that organization. When the formal composition of a work is strong and compelling, the brain responds, and that capacity to react to highly expressive form is part of every individual’s biological origins. Our innate ability to recognize and emotionally react to expressive form—the beauty of an object—is a critical part of what defines us as human.
Ideas, biography, historical context, political theory, and ideology are all values that attach to art. Are these ideas worthy of study? Absolutely, but they do not create the power of the art experience—form does.
ORIGINS believes that if an object is formally compelling, the response will come—involuntarily, deeply felt, and personal. That is not naïveté. It is placing trust in a capacity that every human being possesses innately.
The biology of form is real. We just have to let the experience happen.
That’s easy, and it’s natural—it’s in our human ORIGINS.
