There are two
kinds of thinking. There is one that we are aware of and another that accompanies us unnoticed. This
other thinking is the automatic, preconscious activity that constitutes our
world: it makes the structure before us into a table, the brown surface into
polished wood, the complex sensation of colour into brown, the texture into
oak. It puts everything in place and places us against it. This thinking
co-creates the world, shapes it to the specifications of our culture, time and
circumstance. This activity provides the foundation for conscious thoughts and
the framework for perceptions. The moment we open our eyes we see through its
lens.
For the young
child this preconscious thinking is not yet fully in place. She learns it in
stages. It is the same with someone born blind who is then operated upon. The
world is not just there the moment he opens his eyes. He has to learn to adjust his newfound visual
perceptions with the concepts at his disposal. It takes time to match inner and
outer. In some cases this new world proves threatening. The mind withdraws its
activity and the person reverts to blindness, although his visual organs work.
This shows how
much we shape what we see. What we take as matter of fact, as unshakeable
reality, is an acquired response. Reality is a culturally sanctified and
continuously reinforced interpretation.
Even something
as commonplace as spatial perspective with its here and there, front and back,
is construed in this way. The child and the born-blind acquire it in stages, as
did our culture. Perspective emerged at the end of the middle ages. Giotto was
the first painter to place his figures into the emerging three-dimensional
architecture of space. When Renaissance artists brought his innovations into
line, perspective fell in place. The world was spatial thereafter and has
remained so since; at least to European eyes informed by a European mind.
Such set ways
of seeing are culture-specific and not easily changed. Early Australian artists
painted the Australian landscape with a decisively European brush. Eucalypts
looked like oaks and the outback resembled English parks. Only later did
painters begin to see the landscape in new terms: the scenery becomes
Australian and colours pale in southern light. At last eucalypts look like
themselves. That is, to us, to the western eye, the European mind, to a culture
habituated to a particular kind of perception.
Aboriginal dot
paintings prove that there are very different ways of seeing the same thing.
They too are portraits of landscape. But nothing even remotely resembles
anything we would expect. These art works take the pulse of the land, capture
the scintillating currents of life, mark the acupuncture points of the earth.
Landscape, ecology, maps, directives, story and history coincide on these
dazzling tattoos. Nothing is external. Every mound is understood, every feature
read like a book. Time is not linear and space not abstracted.
These artworks
are furthest from the habitual perceptions of western civilisation and
therefore uniquely healing for the cultural bias associated with it: the assumption
that reality coincides with the way this civilisation has come to interpret it.
Indigenous artefacts are declarations of independence against western
imperialism in its most pervasive form: that is, against the worldwide
acceptance of reality in its present state and all the rights and conclusions
derived from it.
The true
paradigm of today is the reality we accept. And the real paradigm shift the
realisation that this reality is not fixed.
2 comments:
Hopefully we can unlearn our habits of perception, as least a little bit!
Beautiful post. I was amazed when I was flying up to Broome many years ago in clear weather, how like some of the traditional art of Aboriginal Australia had captured an aerial view of the landscape - and long before human beings took to the air! It is truly mysterious and just one indication of how much we have to learn from this ancient and highly sophisticated culture.
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