The way something looks, no matter what it is, has huge relevance to the way in which we perceive it. What a person wears, the shape of their body and the complexities of their face can, whether they should or not, have a signifi cant impact on how we view them and even how we treat them.
This is no different in the world of culture. From 40,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain to the latest Captain America fi lm, visual spectacle has always impressed us. And it’s not just man-made images and visuals that have an impact on us. The beauty of nature has long been a subject dear to Man’s heart. Frescos from Minoan Greece dated around 1500 BC include loving depictions of leaping bulls, mythical creatures and swimming dolphins. Like ancient David Attenboroughs, doubtless these artists were considered national treasures.
Of course, some of the earliest art was devoted to the improvement of architecture. Designing impressive and beautiful buildings was, for the ancients, one of the best ways of displaying their power and Ancient Greek architecture remains to this day some of the most beautiful. Furthermore, one only has to take a trip to Canary Wharf to see that we still display our power through the impressiveness of our architecture.
Beauty for beauty’s sake is not the sole purpose of art, however. In Ancient Greece, most art was created as a form of worship – the iconic Parthenon in Athens and the temple at Delphi are prime examples. Some of the greatest works of art throughout history have been in the service of religion, from the Sistine Chapel and da Vinci’s The Last Supper to the first sculpture of Buddha, which began to appear in the 5th century BC (though none would represent him in a full anthropomorphic manner until the 1st century AD).
Though religion would seem to be an inherently spiritual phenomenon, concerned with how one feels on the inside rather than how things look on the outside, visual culture has always played a large part in the worship of deities. Even aspects of culture which do not seem to explicitly involve visual representations are intricately tied up with what they look like. Yes, we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, but it seems unlikely that Harry Potter would have been as successful if it had had a vomit green cover and no writing or pictures.
Even the look of the words on the page is important, as any member of Cherwell staff (who has obsessed over which of two almost identical fonts to use for the culture spread) would tell you. In poetry, it is often vitally important how the words are presented – see Simon Armitage’s poem, Ankylosing Spondylitis, which resembles on the page the twisted spine which it describes.
Early novelists such as Laurence Sterne liked to experiment with ideas like this in their books. In his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Sterne uses numerous visual subversions of the traditional novel. A black page “mourns” the death of one character, squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line and at one point the author off ers an empty page to the reader so that they can include their own description of a character’s beauty.
And in our technologically advanced age, visuals have begun to play an ever-increasing role in various forms of culture. Every other film these days is described as a ‘visual spectacle’ for its special effects, its use of 3D, its CGI monsters. But visual effects have always been important in performance art. Ancient Greek actors wore exaggerated masks to show what emotions they were supposed to be feeling, for those audience members who were too far away to see.
In the Middle Ages, dramatizations of Bible stories demanded accurate costumes for the participants. Despite modern perceptions of the theatre as a place where one has to use one’s imagination, high-tech stages like that of the National Theatre show that technology is advancing the visual potential of plays as well. What’s more, concerts are getting more and more extravagant. Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience World Tour involved an insane light show, massive visuals of Justin’s face and a section of the stage shaped like a bridge going above the audience. Lady Gaga seems to break some performance boundary or other every time she takes to the stage.
Visual culture is an expansive study, and the philosophy of aesthetics is a popular school covering many of the ideas about beauty and images over which the human mind naturally obsesses. The way our world looks is vitally important to us, and we are constantly transfi xed by its beauty.
The aim of art is at its most simple level to add to or reflect the beauty already in the world, and as technology advances, the scale of visuals that
we can create increases exponentially. It seems we will never cease to be entranced by wonderful and spectacular pictures both natural and man-made.
