New transdisciplinary visualities as an alternative to redistribute the power of thought.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Bustamante, Maris
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Bustamante, Maris

When certainty dies, truthfulness appears.--Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, Mexican poet

THE EXERCISE OF VISUALITY SURPASSES THE SIMPLE ACT OF OBSERVATION OR EVEN OF analyzing what is seen. We do not see what we see. We see what we have been made to see. Existence itself is an almost miraculous fact, the most overwhelming experience of every human being. Many efforts have been made to improve the development of human existence, and not all of those efforts have had the best results. Human action is always dependent on social and economic systems generated by individuals, and it is limited by the evolution of the ability and flexibility of those individuals to change course and take actions different from traditional ways. I believe that creating new ways of thinking through visuality and, above all, through transdisciplinarity, could transform the modes of interpreting, reproducing, and constructing the reality to which we have had access as a species. The following essay explores these ideas, drawing upon my experiences as an artist working within the particular realities of Mexico.

The Division Between Reason and Sensibility

The production of knowledge arose with the human need to understand reality. Our abilities to read and interpret reality--and to get answers from it--became more complex overtime, reflecting the growing sophistication of our cerebral, emotional, and motor skills. Systems of thought were created and advanced through efforts to resolve identified problems. The method for identification-explanation moved from the simplest to the most complex, that is, in inverse proportion to reality itself. As concepts were constructed, emotions and perceptions were subjected to reason.

Knowledge was made to conform to this divided structure, and thus began what would become Western European thought, with all its prejudices, resulting in the compartmentalization of our abilities. For a long time now, it has been widely asserted that while science relies primarily on intellective and rational reasoning, the arts rely on intuition and the senses. It has been claimed that the arts fundamentally drive us to develop the emotional side of our lives.

A European version of Rationalism was imposed in the Americas with great contradictions beginning in 1492. From the beginning and into the present, this provoked contestational postures informed by different, indigenous ways of thinking about conflictive reality. Nearly four decades ago, Harvard psychologist Rudolf Anaheim (1969) demonstrated in Visual Thinking that the supposed separation between thought and sensibility was a cultural inheritance that had been converted into myth. He discovered that all thought is by nature perceptual and that artists handle intelligence and thought through images, just as scientists in their work also visualize images and use intuition as an unconscious method. He came to the conclusion that, since visual perception is a form of intelligence, science uses images to create its mental sketches. Since forms also function as concepts, human beings also exercise visual thinking and intelligence.

In Latin America, the separation between the processes of perception and intellect is still being reproduced through economic, social, and cultural structures. That can be seen...