One of the most dramatic events in the history of art was the transition from the demand that artists make only pictorial images, to the acceptance (and sometimes even demand!) that they make non-pictorial images. Somewhere along the passage from the 19th to the 20th century, paintings were no longer required to look like the physical world, but were rather expected to present nothing more than a flat arrangement of paint on a canvas. Many of the works of the painter Piet Mondrian are extreme examples of this.
In some cases, however, paintings can not quite clearly be defined as either pictorial or non-pictorial. These are paintings that – depending on how we look at them – can either reveal a visible world that seems to lie behind their surface (i.e., a ‘pictorial image’); or instead, they can appear to be nothing more than a pleasant smear of paint on a flat surface (i.e., a ‘non-pictorial image’). In other words, whereas fully pictorial images pull the viewer’s gaze into their space and the details it contains, such ‘semi-pictorial’ images make it possible for the viewer to let their gaze go only as far as the surface of the image and just enjoy the overall visual experience of it as a flat colorful object – as if it actually were a non-pictorial image.
When the making of such ambiguous or ‘dual-mode’ images is successful, it can result in fascinating works of art. An example of this is Claude Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise (which later came to also stand for a whole new approach to the making of paintings, but that is another topic):
During the 20th century, such tension between pictorialism and non-pictorialism within the same image was the driving force behind the work of many painters, who searched for ever new ways to achieve it. A beautiful example of this is Lyonel Feininger’s painting Bridge I:
This search for the ambiguity between the surface of an image and the space seen through it is not limited only to the medium of painting. As newer mediums developed – and ever more so from the last decades of the 20th century – other forms of image-making have dealt with the same issues. For example, in the music video of Fujiya & Miyagi’s song Ankle Injuries, the visual contents are basically nothing more than an arrangement of game dice on a surface. All we see is a pattern of dice in one of eight colors, where each shows a face with up to six dots on it. Regardless of the question of its technique of production (physical dice or computer-generated) it presents a clearly flat arrangement. And yet it is also carefully made so as to provide the impression that what we are seeing through this arrangement of dice is the band performing their song, along with other spatial visual content:
From the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory, then, where is the visual content of such paintings and videos? Is it inside the virtual place that is seen through them, or is it on the surface of an image in physical space? Well, what makes such images so special is precisely that they can be seen either way!
