Günther Kebeck, Andreas Karl Schulze: Übersummativität

Perception between scientific analysis and artistic work

Vision is so natural to us that we do not ask how our visual world is created. But the retinal image, the starting point of human perception, bears little resemblance to what we see. Our image of the world is created in the brain according to fixed rules: the laws of organisation and grouping. These are fast, automatic processes to which our consciousness has no access. They generate the order of the visible world. Max Wertheimer's ground-breaking research on this subject was published in 1923. And what is the current state of research? Organisation and grouping are topics of both science and art. The artistic works shown here by Andreas Karl Schulze play with the laws of vision. On the one hand, they create new "shapes", on the other hand, they provoke the very ambiguities that have to be avoided in everyday life. They bring the rules of construction of the visual world into productive contradiction, allow unfamiliar combinations and reorganise the familiar world. Coloured cotton squares measuring 5 x 5 cm allow almost infinite variations in their arrangement. Sorted by colour, the squares are stored in cardboard boxes and travel around the world as energy packs. They form a mobile and flexibly deployable piece of artistic equipment that remains extremely concise in the conceptual reduction of its formal means. Their perception, on the other hand, is complex. They are both image and object, nothing can be closed off as a form, everything has rhythm and is in motion. The viewer sees what is visible. This concentration on what is visible does not mean a limitation, but is - as the art historian Erich Franz put it - "an unfinishable extension of what can be recognised". Seeing itself becomes an experience. For this book, 34 photographs of Andreas Karl Schulze's painting installations from the years 1998 to 2016 were selected. Günther Kebeck's text explores the question of how ambiguities can be reduced with the help of structuring and grouping processes and how the order of the visual world is gradually built up. How parts are put together to form a whole in such a way that this ultimately results in a supersummative quality: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Reflections on the productivity of human perception are the starting point for questions of aesthetics. Why do we perceive things as beautiful? What is special about the perception of works of art? At first glance, the contrast between the scientific text and the artistic works could not be greater: reading versus viewing, reflection versus contemplation. Text and images remain autonomous. What they have in common is their focus on seeing as a fundamental act of cognition.