Week 6: Isolating the Senses

Something William Gallagher said at the Tate Britain that really struck me was this simple, obvious statement: paintings are silent.  He also talked about how paintings are motionless and often have to imply motion, an idea I've thought about before with Greek sculptures in the contraposto pose.  It had never really occurred to me, though, that paintings make no noise!

(An example of contraposto--one knee bent, the foot slightly raised, the other leg straight):

Polykleitos, Doryphorus, 450-440 BC

However, just as paintings can imply motion, they can imply sound.  I'm thinking of Munch's The Scream, which implies sound through not only its title and the figure's classic 'O'-shaped mouth, but through the intense, swirly colors--perhaps a shrill yet echoing scream.

Munch - The Scream (or, as Spanish Wikipedia here in Barcelona calls it--El Grito)

That sense of visual art as silent really opened up Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for me, too.  When I first read it at the beginning of the semester, it seemed Keats was going on and on about how the depictions in the urn were still and so on.  I'm not sure why, but that stillness just came to life to me this time.

Also, I noticed the title this time as "Ode ON a Grecian Urn" rather than "TO".  Is that out of the ordinary?  I was wondering what to make of it--I guess just that the poem's thoughts don't revolve totally around the urn but seem to suggest thoughts on life in general--but then again, don't most poems or odes do that?

Grecian Urn

(http://maggiefelisberto.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/urn.jpeg)

One other thing: thinking of how paintings (and other visual art) isolate the actual sensual experience to the single sense of the visual reminded me Tom Espiner's talk in class.  He talked about how they isolate the aural sense, but how it can intimate space as well--a kind of visual quality.

I got to thinking--are there arts that appeal to simply one of the other senses--the "secondary" ones as we might call them?  Taste, smell, touch.  Are they just too close to "home" or the body for art to be able to interact comfortably with them?  (Food is definitely an art, but it is always meant to be pleasing--never to make one think or be sad or horrified, as far as I know.)

This seems like too easy an answer to me--after all, revolutionary art has always been extremely uncomfortable at first even to the visual and aural senses.  I'm thinking of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and of some Manet works, like Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe:

I talked about this idea with my parents, and the only "arts" we could think of that appeal to those other senses were:

-Eating chili peppers or spicy food

-Roller coasters--a rush of wind

Yeah, so not much.

Could there be an exhibit of many different textures on the walls?  Of rooms of different smells?  It would be really interesting.