Making Color Sing by Jeanne Dobie (review)

I. Book Reviews Book h i n u Panel: G e vAgoston, RudolfAmheim, John E. Bowlt, Hans Brill, Donald Brook, Patricia Butler,John Cooper,Robert Dixon, Elmer Duncan, Alan Lee,Joy Turner Luke,John Mallinckrodt, leo Narodny, David Pariser, YehudaSafi-an,Allan Shiekis, David Topper,Slephtlz Wilson. MEANING AND INTERPRETATION Charles Travis, ed. Basil Blackwell, New York, NY,U.S.A., 1986.306pp. Trade $49.95.ISBN: 03-61-14644-X. hiewed by k o Narodny, Martin’s Bay, St.John, Barbados, WestIndies. Have you ever given a passing glance to one of Bill Bell’s “Lightsticks”?At the exit of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, there is a vertical line of light 2 l / 2meters high. Those who give it a passing glance usually stop and exclaim , “Aye“,often causing their companions to ask why, until they are told to stop staring and give it a passing glance at 10radians per second. Only then do they see a large red eye behind the Lightstick [11. What relevancedo the 1 0essays in this book have to readers of konardo? These contributions by 11 eminent scholarsopen a new world in the philosophyof language and mind worth a passing glance by those interested in the relation of art and science and technology.To stare at the complex problems raised by semanticsleaves me staring at a Lightstick ,but a passing glance at the essaysgives me a saccadicglimpse at language and the proper use of words in achievingthe objects in kcmardo. This collection of essaysfollowed a 1982convention at Tilburg, the Netherlands, on the psychological content of logic. Does the understanding of understanding require an understanding of structure?It isa difficult problem for an art critic, let alone a scientistexploring new art forms.Do language and structure get in the way?My only criticism is that the language of these learned scholarsgets in the way of my understanding their arguments after a saccadic reading about roles and connecting paths, inference and implicature, ambiguity and semanticpragmatic distinction, domains ofdiscourse and metaphysics, tacit knowledge , conceptual structure, truth bearing and content, meaning and constructivism,to name most of the titles. The link between artist and scientist is a linguisticlink, but to impose upon language a requirement for structure, when it is properly a condition of thought, leaves me staring at the Lightstick. I like to be aware of the importance of structure and communication in philosophic terms, but I wonder whether our thoughts on art should be structured, at least in this decade. Who cares about rule-following , inference and implicature, beyond that there must be considerations of language in any wedding ceremony between Art and Science? This book, which costs $49.95, is certainly worth a good look in a library. But I can only repeat the quotation from Leonard0 da Vinci given on the editorial page of Ixonardo: “My subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words;and (experience) has been the mistress of those who wrote well”. As De Beaugrande and Dressler have written, “Humansare evidently capable of intricate reasoning processes that traditional logicscannot explain:jumping to conclusions, pursuing subjectiveanalogies, and even reasoning in the absence of knowledge”[2]. This seems to satisfy most readers of L.eunardo. Those who need deductive reasoning should glance at Meaning and Interpetation. References 1. Bill Bell w i t hTheodore E. Parks and Robert B. Post, “ElusiveImageryof the Lightstick”. h a r d o 1 9 , N o . 1,%10(1986). 4. R De Beaugrandeand W. Dressler,Introduction Lo TextLinguistics (London: Longman, 1981) p.93. MAKING COLOR SING byJeanne Dobie. Watson Guptill Pub lications,New York, NY,U.S.A., 1986. 160pp. Trade, $29.95.ISBN: 0-82302993 -X. Reviewed by Leo Narodny, Martin ’s Bay, St.John, Barbados, West Indies. This book on the technique of watercolor painting uses the brain more than the brush, by the use of simple scientificprinciples, such ascomplementary colors, to enhance reality and produce an outstanding result. The frontspiece, which uses a window and a refrigerator in a dim kitchen to show that any subject can be made outstandingly beautiful, is an example of the author’s method. The 31 chap ters give a multilayeredvision with a simple...