Sensing, Perceiving, and Knowing in Modernism

Interest in German modernism has seen a resurgence in the UK, with exhibitions such as Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider at Tate Modern and Making Modernism at the Royal Academy. This has offered opportunities to reconsider perspectives and research approaches relevant to twentieth-century German art and European avant-garde circles.

Yet, a distinct strain of European modernism that emerged out of an active engagement with theories of sensation and perception remains overlooked. This session aims to recover the ways in which modernists deployed knowledge steeped in the philosophy of perception, psychology and science to negotiate the processes of orienting themselves and/or their spectator via visual forms. Walter Benjamin described Dadaist works as a ‘bullet’ attacking the senses of its spectator; August Endell formulated his architectural theory based on his knowledge of psychological debates on empathy and emotional expression (Alexander, 2017); Kurt Schwitters’s study of advertising ‘techniques of attention’ fed back into his own Merz practice (Stinton, 2021).

Whilst the foundation of this session builds from a focus on Germanic schools of thought, we welcome papers that explore artistic developments in the modern period broadly construed that highlight and move beyond the five senses. How was the act of experiencing foundational to artistic experimentation? How did a realignment of the senses via artistic means relate to agency? What artistic innovations were developed out of a ‘technologically mediated crisis of the senses’ (Danius, 2002)? We are interested in proposals that cut across disciplines, cultures, and European territories.

Session Convenors:

Alyson Lai, University of York

Anne Grasselli, University of Edinburgh

Speakers:

Jennifer Marine, University of Virginia and Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History

Good Vibrations: Sensing Sound in the Voice Figures of Margaret Watt-Hughes (1847–1907)

In 1891, Welsh singer Margaret Watts-Hughes published a book describing her process and findings in making objects labeled Voice Figures – images created by sound. Using an invention of her own design, dubbed the “Eidophone” or “sound-image,” she sang into a horn-like tube with sealed surface of elastic, covered in pigment, powders, and liquids. The vibrations of her voice moved the substances across the surface which were then pressed and fixed onto a glass plate, creating objects that attempted to mediate a sense of hearing within the sense of seeing. Watts-Hughes and the Voice Figures have largely been overlooked in the histories of sound, art, and the occult, despite her connection to all three of these disciplines. Displayed at the Arts and Crafts Society Exhibition, the Royal Society, and even cited in Theosophist Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater’s foundational text Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation (1905), Watts-Hughes’s Voice Figures offer an account of the period that centers on the visualization of vibration and theories of hearing and perception. In this paper, I describe how these objects connect to the history of sound recording devices, modern art, and ideas of perception through an analysis of their materiality and reception. I demonstrate that the Voice Figures show that underlying the history of sound and acoustics is one that shares an interest in sensation and image-making with the history of modern art, and that these are both histories were women’s bodies, acts, and voices are central.

Stella Gatto, University of British Columbia

The Children’s Toys of Alma Siedhoff-Buscher: Psychotechnics, Play, and Pedagogy at the Bauhaus

Produced in 1923 by Bauhaus designer Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, “Bauspiel Schiff” became one of the best-selling objects to come out of the Weimar technical school. Art historical literature regarding Buscher’s toys are relatively sparse, focusing primarily on her designs as emblematic of the Bauhaus’ preliminary objectives in design. My research contributes to the developing literature by addressing a parallel field to that of educational reform at the turn of the twentieth century: the newly developing science of applied psychology, known in 1920’s Germany as psychotechnics. Born out of Wilhelm Wundt’s 1897 psychology laboratory, psychotechnics aimed at measuring the sensory, reflex, and intellectual aptitude of individuals to assign work best suited to their physical and cognitive strengths. Understood as a bifocal desire for worker satisfaction and efficiency, psychotechnics was prompted by a desire to rationalize and optimize the mental components of labour power. Considering the deeply bound nature of Bauhaus pedagogical interests to psychotechnics, I examine the relationship between modernist discourses regarding play and pedagogy, primarily how reformist pedagogy and psychotechnics overlapped. Buscher’s objects reveal the interstice between two simultaneous and intertwined discourses, thereby anticipating the effects the new ‘science of the mind’ was going to have within her own educational landscape, let alone that of the child. Via a media theoretical approach, this paper elucidates the ways in which psychotechnics “cultivated” a way of mapping interiority externally through its measurement-critical operations and shows how its adoption into the Bauhaus presents a far more complex reading of objects produced for children’s play.

Aaron Richmond, Concordia University

Doctors of L’Espirit nouveau: Energy, Psychology and the Modern Aesthetic Subject (1920–1925)

This paper revisits the modernist periodical L’Esprit nouveau and its promises to remake art and architecture in service to a healthier life. In bold capital letters, L’Esprit nouveau proclaimed itself to be the first journal of its kind “truly consecrated to an esthétique vivante.” Under this banner, its authors described how cultural practices – from poetry and painting to architecture and rhythmic gymnastics – could be used to correct social pathologies and achieve new levels of societal health, solidarity, and production. In my presentation, I will return to the debates accompanying this suturing together of artistic and scientific traditions. I will tell the story of how medical psychology – a field shaped by 19th century concerns over energy hygiene – was inscribed into the art and architectural practices of the 1920’s avant-garde.

Referring to the journal as a curated sourcebook of medical images and concepts, my presentation will explain how L’Esprit nouveau was a journal uniquely poised to advance interdisciplinary exchanges between art and the medical sciences. Its editors solicited regular contributions from philosophers, psycho-physiologists, social-psychologists, and psychoanalysts, imagining a “laboratory of letters” culled from the nascent disciplines of modern psychology. Such experts included the Germanist Victor Basch, first Chair of the Science of Aesthetics at the Sorbonne; the philosopher and polemicist Charles Lalo, who succeeded Basch in that same Chair; Charles Henry, Director of the Laboratory for the Physiology of Sensations; and the homeopathic doctor René Allendy, a founding member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. These were but a few of the scientific elites tasked with making psychological concepts newly legible to the journal’s eclectic readership of artists, architects, intellectuals, and industrialists. They were, or so I would like to suggest, the Doctors of L’Esprit nouveau.

Paul Smith, University of Warwick

Cezanne’s personal way of seeing

Cezanne’s letters show that he thought hard about seeing, particularly his remark, “study changes our vision.” He also read about perception, lifting the phrase “a personal way of seeing” (“une optique personelle”) from his favourite novel, Manette Salomon. Similarly, Cezanne’s use of the word “optique” implies a familiarity with texts about perception by Helmholtz and other scientists with the word in their titles. And significantly, his work represents several phenomena these describe, notably Troxler fading and stereofusion. Cezanne’s ability to record such effects was also remised on experience, particularly on watching his perceptions unfold as he stared fixedly at things for up to twenty minutes, often while attending to what lay in peripheral vision.

The extraordinary perseveration involved by these viewing habits is indicative of autism. Similarly, Cezanne’s “inhuman” treatment of faces implied “schizoidia” for Merleau-Ponty. Numerous accounts of his shyness, anxiety, mistrust, and rage also indicate autism, as could Pissarro’s and Tanguy’s opinions that he was “a bit cracked” or “mad.” Cezanne also manifested a characteristically autistic hypersensitivity to noise and touch; and he claimed to experience “very strong sensations” of light and colour.

For autistic people (as we prefer to be known) gaining control over hypersensitivity is vital to wellbeing. Painting plausibly played this role for Cezanne since it required him to moderate his sensations for the purposes of communicating them to the audience he envisaged. The act of painting thus gave Cezanne agency by making his “personal way of seeing” public.