The Power of Patience
October 23, 2013 10:55 AM   Subscribe

It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly—and that Copley was making some kind of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each. It was 21 minutes before I registered the fact that the fingers holding the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them. It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye, as if Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or imprinting themselves on the surface behind him. And so on. What this exercise shows students is that just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.
posted by shivohum (40 comments total) 39 users marked this as a favorite
 


Human pattern detection: Thinking really hard in order to make potentially spurious connections for at least as long as we've been examining ourselves.

At least, that's what my really hard thinking about observing people who make spurious connections suggests.
posted by belarius at 11:04 AM on October 23, 2013 [18 favorites]


Contrast with me, who didn't have the attention span necessary to make it past the editor's note.
posted by nathancaswell at 11:05 AM on October 23, 2013 [7 favorites]


I skimmed the first paragraph and then rushed here to comment on Metafilter before reading the article.
posted by Nelson at 11:14 AM on October 23, 2013 [7 favorites]


Who's you?

If by "you" you mean everything happening inside your skull plus somatic markers elsewhere in your body, then yes, you are seeing many things that you have not consciously registered. Reflection may call some of those to conscious attention over time. However, it might be more honest to recognize that the many perceptual and cognitive processes running inside your head are semi-independent, with, at best, some of the coherence of a flock of birds.

The belief that you see the world in front of you rather than a tiny cone of focused vision frequently interrupted by saccades is false and sometimes dangerous. I appreciate this article for pointing out that this belief that we can really see a picture at a glance can blind us to beauty as well.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:17 AM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]


Great piece; she makes an excellent point. I was already wildly impatient when I was an undergrad and the world has accelerated so much since then, I have a hard time imagining what it's like to be a late-teen/early-20s person today.

...some thoughts about teaching patience as a strategy. The deliberate engagement of delay should itself be a primary skill that we teach to students. It’s a very old idea that patience leads to skill, of course—but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned. Granted—patience might be a pretty hard sell as an educational deliverable. It sounds nostalgic and gratuitously traditional. But I would argue that as the shape of time has changed around it, the meaning of patience today has reversed itself from its original connotations. The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment—perhaps now patience is power.
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:18 AM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


I had a professor assign a similar task: go spend two hours staring at a painting of your choice and write about it. He was an English professor, not an art history prof, but he was trying to show us a similar thing, that there is usually way more to discover about something through just simple interaction with it than you realize at first. It was a very powerful and cool experience.
posted by aka burlap at 11:18 AM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Seeing the patterns, examining the work, and appreciating a single piece of art for an extended period of time is something that we often don't encourage, and possibly should.
posted by xingcat at 11:18 AM on October 23, 2013 [4 favorites]


Have you ever REALLY looked at your hands?
posted by blue_beetle at 11:18 AM on October 23, 2013 [9 favorites]


There's a famous anecdote of a scientist in the late 19th or early 20th century making his anatomy students do this - anybody remember what I'm talking about?
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:19 AM on October 23, 2013


Have you ever REALLY looked at your hands?

I did once when I was on mushrooms and it was horrifying.
posted by nathancaswell at 11:19 AM on October 23, 2013 [4 favorites]


And now having read the whole article, I strongly feel the value of what she's saying and teaching. Not just the point about slowing down to really appreciate something like a painting, but the value in reflecting on yourself and your own work without a constant external feedback loop. I truly feel this is a lost skill in the Internet era, at least for me, and I miss it.

The closest I've ever come to this kind of presence and thoughtfulness she extolls was when I was in high school, a typical overwhelmed and troubled kid, and I'd escape to the Rothko Chapel from time to time. And do very little but sit, and look at the majestic monochrome canvases, or maybe read the same page from the Tao Te Ching again. It was a period of calm in a turbulent part of my life and one I remain grateful for. I'd seek out the same kind of meditative experience now, but who has the time? (I do, of course, but I don't make it.)
posted by Nelson at 11:20 AM on October 23, 2013 [7 favorites]


I think it's worth taking apart the attention process the author reproduces to notice how much of it depends on particular knowledges from elsewhere, knowledges simply not accessible purely through the painting. To the extent that the painting can be a "time battery" or an "'exorbitant stockpile' of experience and information," it is so only because its viewers have constructed themselves as such also, and have access to other information not truly contained entirely within the painting. The scholarship here is impressive, but the lesson is not what the author claims it is.

The painting is about its own patient passage through time and space. Look at that squirrel. As the strange shape of the belly fur indicates, if one takes time to notice it, this is not just any squirrel but a flying squirrel, a species native to North America with obvious thematic resonances for the theme of travel and movement. (The work’s full title is A Boy with a Flying Squirrel.)

So you can examine its belly fur (and, presumably, a field guide, since most people will not spontaneously learn to spot squirrel species even over long periods of time). Or you can learn the formal title of the work, a function of either independent research or the efforts of a good curator. The title of the painting, like the title of an instrumental work of classical music, is typically not contained within the art work itself. Here, you have plugged in your "exorbitant battery" to recharge it from another source of power.

Moreover, squirrels in painting and literature were commonly understood to be emblems of diligence and patience.

This claim requires both a general knowledge of period motifs and enough knowledge of Copely to safely say that he was conventional enough in his use of symbolism to intend the same thing unironically or uncomplicatedly.

Then: the glass of water and the hand. Across his long career, this is the only glass of water that Copley ever included in a painting.

This, one would not find out staring at the painting; almost by definition, it requires the viewer to make a survey of Copely's work. (It might also require the above knowledge of motifs of the period; what if squirrels in paintings and literature typically come alongside glasses of water for some reason of idiom, forgotten folklore, or popular anecdote?)

Why? Well, for one thing, this motif evokes the passage of a sensory chain across a body of water and thereby presents in microcosm the plight or task of the painting itself.

This is not a claim anyone makes after three hours with one painting. This is an entire, unpresented argument drawing on a whole lot more than a single painting, relying on a broader sort of archaeology of knowledge of the period that views it as governed by a cultural logics of microcosm and macrocosm, a great chain of scalar analogues.

Or think about the profile format of the portrait—unusual for Copley.

Again, if this is the only Copely you've seen, or even just one of a handful of Copely paintings, you won't know this and will not soon know this.

It turns out that in the eighteenth century, the profile format was very strongly associated with persistence in time and space.

This is another claim that relies far more on deep scholarship about the period, not on a prolonged span of deep attention to one painting.

Where was one most likely to see a profile? On a coin. What is a coin? In essence, a coin is a tool for transmitting value through space and time in the most stable possible way. Coins are technologies for spanning time and distance, and Copley borrows from these associations for a painting that attempts to do the same thing.

Here it becomes clear that the author has read Continental philosophy, whence derives the sense of "technology" employed here. One could, perhaps arrive here from a study of Aristotle and a lot of long-term reflection, but it would not be a precise reconstruction; real people have considerable trouble rewriting the Quixote as an original work in such a manner.

It was 21 minutes before I registered the fact that the fingers holding the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them.

Ah, but here you cannot say "exactly," save with a very trained eye...and even then, measure to confirm before making the claim.

It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye, as if Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or imprinting themselves on the surface behind him.

Without the "great chain of scalar analogues" idea drawn from a deeper study of the entire period, this idea would not function as it does. We could say just as easily that it shows that Copely used a particular object to draft curves and another particular object to govern his straight lines. In fact, he probably did use some kind of fixed measure to produce these exactitudes, but the notion that he did so to invent a particular meaning requires outside information to prove. The idea that we can through pure attention simply reproduce the painting's meaning as an inherent property of it or that we can perfectly reconstruct the intentions behind each technique is simply false.

It turns out that the painting is not a reservoir unto itself, but more like a nodal point across and through which pass the knowledges we and others accumulate, often producing distinct and different patterns of idea and connections of thought depending on the viewer. There are plenty of external feedback mechanisms here. They're not loops, but inputs and outputs.Attention, deep attention, is part of this, but it must be attention fueled by often rather specific study. The naive viewer might spend a lifetime before this painting and achieve little, and miss much beyond the painting in the meantime.

The argument that immersive attention is required is absolutely true; but it's merely necessary and not, of itself, sufficient. The author also misleads, unintentionally, by the convention of stating that Copely did or intended such and such. The painting does these things; Copely might do them, but we'd need evidence of his intentionality beyond a reflection on one painting for that (as indeed the author brings in, though not all of the evidence alluded to or assumed by the claims).
posted by kewb at 11:22 AM on October 23, 2013 [44 favorites]


Ah, it's Agassiz and the sunfish - in which Agassiz exhorts his grad students who have already spent a week exhaustively describing a fish specimen to keep going - "look at your fish."
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:28 AM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


There's a famous anecdote of a scientist in the late 19th or early 20th century making his anatomy students do this - anybody remember what I'm talking about?

Louis Agassiz
posted by neroli at 11:29 AM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Great article thanks, but now I really want a flying squirrel I can keep on a golden chain. :(

kewb: The author also misleads, unintentionally, by the convention of stating that Copely did or intended such and such. The painting does these things; Copely might do them, but we'd need evidence of his intentionality beyond a reflection on one painting for that (as indeed the author brings in, though not all of the evidence alluded to or assumed by the claims).

I think the author is participating in her own advice to her students: "...spend three full hours looking at the painting, noting down [...] observations as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations." They are phrased as fact, but that's just a convenient way to speculate in the moment.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:18 PM on October 23, 2013


Ah, but here you cannot say "exactly," save with a very trained eye...and even then, measure to confirm before making the claim.

And if you do measure it, you'll find that it's not "exactly," or even all that close. Likewise with the "precisely echo" and "perfect copies" claims. There are similarities, yes, but they are neither precise nor copies.

The author's point may be valid, but she lost me with her imprecise language.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 12:20 PM on October 23, 2013 [4 favorites]


This reminds me of In Search of Lost Time's episode of the madeleine. The popular conception of the scene has the narrator eat a pastry dipped in tea and recall, at once and in detail, his childhood home in the country. In fact, the narrator, having tasted the madeleine, which has reminded him of something, has to mull over the sensation to remember that he used to eat the same thing with his Aunt Leonie on Sunday mornings, and only then does his childhood come back.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 12:20 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


And if you do measure it, you'll find that it's not "exactly," or even all that close. Likewise with the "precisely echo" and "perfect copies" claims. There are similarities, yes, but they are neither precise nor copies.

I should clarify that I'm not really trying to dissassemble the claims, but rather to suggest the nature of the processes and its dependence on inflows of prior or contiguous knowledges and associated understandings.

It may indeed be worth considering the question of exactitude in 18th century art, or even why and how -- as can be demonstrated with wider reference -- the optics of the European 18th century tended to find and claim quantitative and analogical exactitudes in inexact resemblances. If Roberts's terms takes inexactitude for exactness, they reflect her attentive immersion in the painting as a specimen or material artiact of the cultural logics of that period and place.
posted by kewb at 12:28 PM on October 23, 2013 [3 favorites]


I feel that there is definitely value in slowing things down, taking time to appreciate craftsmanship, mastery of the arts, notice the play of texture and light and color and design that artists put into their work.

But I think this professor does her students a disservice in assigning them to look at a single work of art for three hours BEFORE conducting any readings or research. I think more is to be gained--as kewb's comment eloquently demonstrates--from greater knowledge of the subject going in.

Given this assignment, and going in blind as they are, it seems (to me, anyway) pretty obvious that students will gravitate toward works of art that are, in essence, busier on the surface level, with more to initially attract the naked eye. If they are going to spend so much time simply staring at a work of art (and I will wager my right arm that very few students actually meet that three hour mark, or even two hours, and wonder if the professor herself has ever done so, given that her own reflections seem to cap off at the 45 minutes mark), then they will most likely pick portraits full of figures and action for their study.

With a better grounding in the arts, though, those same students might choose a work with more substance. Which I would argue offers a greater educational experience for them.

If I were the professor who ends up grading those research papers at the end of the year, I'd consider another approach. Ideally, don't you want to minimize the odds of your students all writing their papers on just a few pivotal, popular works of art they vaguely knew about before your class?

Who really wants to spend their grading period reading 99 papers on The Last Supper, written by students who spent that time looking for evidence of the "Da Vinci code" that Dan Brown might have missed?

Obligatory Metafilter Last Supper parody link: pjern's The Last Round.
posted by misha at 12:37 PM on October 23, 2013 [4 favorites]


Have you ever REALLY looked at your hands?

It's the safety dance, oh it's the safety da-ANCE...
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 1:16 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


You can look at something for a long time without seeing it, if you lack the language and experience to describe and structure what it is you are looking at. Migratory warblers, for example, may land in your backyard twice a year, but if you don't know how to listen for them, and what colors and behaviors you're looking for, they merge into the background noise of "little brown birds."

I do think it's odd that Roberts approaches the painting through the history of the painter and of the symbology of the contents rather the formal aesthetics of the painting -- the stuff you can learn to see in any painting, without knowing anything of the subject or the painter.

There's a weak focal point to the painting, e.g. -- two diagonal lines, one from the jawline (that continues down the right arm), the other a shadow on the neck, move the eye to the bottom of the boy's ear. That's a strange place to fix your gaze. I wonder why that is. The ear itself is described using shadow and negative space, as are the folds of the curtain behind, and the cuffs of the boy's sleeve. Again, interesting (in fact, you can spend some time switching your eye between figure and ground by looking at the shape made by the shadow inside the ear, it's kind of a trippy thing to do). The squirrel's belly ruff is outlined in a single strong white line, that mimics the lines in the ruffled cuffs. There are no horizontal lines at all in this painting - everything's a diagonal or a curve. And so on.
posted by PandaMomentum at 1:49 PM on October 23, 2013


It took me 57 minutes to notice the beans.
posted by Flashman at 1:50 PM on October 23, 2013 [4 favorites]


It's all about oranges.

Have you ever REALLY looked at your hands?

Only to make sure the blood's completely gone.
posted by BlueHorse at 2:19 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


High five for Kewb, who took that apart at the seams.
posted by klangklangston at 2:23 PM on October 23, 2013


Have you ever really looked at the screen while playing Super Mario?

The clouds are just white colored bushes.

What could Nintendo have meant by doing that?
posted by ymgve at 2:31 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


Kewb's take-down reminds me why I only sat through one art history class in college.

Professor: "Don't you see X which means A (at time t) because the author meant to remind the viewer of idea K?" No!
posted by Luminiferous Ether at 2:44 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


High five for Kewb, who took that apart at the seams.

... Sort of. The piece's point on the value of patience stands. And as kewb said:

I should clarify that I'm not really trying to dissassemble the claims, but rather to suggest the nature of the processes and its dependence on inflows of prior or contiguous knowledges and associated understandings.

It may indeed be worth considering the question of exactitude in 18th century art, or even why and how -- as can be demonstrated with wider reference -- the optics of the European 18th century tended to find and claim quantitative and analogical exactitudes in inexact resemblances. If Roberts's terms takes inexactitude for exactness, they reflect her attentive immersion in the painting as a specimen or material artiact of the cultural logics of that period and place.

posted by Rustic Etruscan at 2:47 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


There's a nice anecdote (which I literally just remembered I used to be convinced was called 'ancedote', huh) by Michael Pirsig where he talks about a creative writing class he taught. One student was stuck writing about a city - Pirsig suggested focusing on a street. Still nothing. Together they narrowed it down until the essay was about a single brick in a particular wall. The student filled a notebook.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:20 PM on October 23, 2013


And yet nobody's mentioned the whale that can be seen as a pattern in the lacquer of the table? I think it's a Blue Whale, but I'm no expert.
posted by jepler at 3:29 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


Ew, now I can't stop seeing the artist's reflection in the table.

He's naked.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:34 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Painters often provide precise or imprecise echoes or reflections of other linear figures/outlines/masses in a composition. Most often it's just a way of having the composition gel, of having patterns of line and tension call to one another. It's a way of animating the plane of the picture with lines that seem to call to one another. They don't have to *mean* anything other than what you might read into the activity of animating the 2d plane. I'm seeing a lot of that here. There are imprecise echoes of the highly-organised forms of ear and eye, or the buildup of architectonic features by having the watch chain follow the edge conour of the glass somewhat. They help build a composition. But they needn't be precise - and in fact they aren't. There my be something to be said also for the painter's art in concealing art. He's trying to create a harmonious but not dull composition. If you start noticing all the machinery that makes that work, gold star for you, but it may not be the effect the artist initially intended, i.e. of 'effortless' harmony and life. I'd love to dig up examples, but life is short and I have an IKEA catalogue to peruse.
posted by aesop at 4:09 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Kewb seems to be misreading the article. The writer presents some observations based on spending three hours with the painting. Then later in the article she expounds on why Copley's work is especially relevant to the context of thinking about patient learning. Those historical details are never presented as part of the three-hour observation.

A historian writes a thoughtful article encouraging "...a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances," and MetaFilter's collective reaction seems to be mostly quick dismissal for spurious reasons (because she used the word 'exactly' in an imprecise way?).

I guess it goes without saying that MetaFilter doesn't need a lesson in "skepticism about immediate surface appearances." We might want to work on the "critical attention" and "patient investigation" parts, though.

I thought it was a very thoughtful article, and refreshingly accessible, which is not always true of art writing. I'm going to spend some more time with it.
posted by oulipian at 4:37 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


I don't think I called it a spurious piece -- see my second post and Rustic Etruscan's response to it -- but I also don't think you can get out of the painting what Roberts brings forth from it by patiently looking at it if you don't have at least some background. If you strip away the historical context she brings to the painting later in the article, what she reports from her 45 minutes of observation really wouldn't tell you anything. Indeed, someone could easily arrive at trivial, perhaps even false claims about the painting from those same deep visual observations.

Critical attention is not just about patience or even about skepticism of the supposed immediate availability of visual information; it's also about knowing how to ask good questions, knowing how to look for the answers, and most of all knowing where to look and how to evaluate what you find. It doesn't really happen inside the three hours so much as the three hours is made possible by years of practice at critical attention to other paintings and the various other kinds of work that permit such attention to produce new knowledge or extended critical statements about it.
posted by kewb at 6:19 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


Sometimes while working on a painting, I'll notice myself echoing one form in another and I'll think, "Heh. Now I just have to repeat that shape a few more times and some yutz will write her thesis about it a hundred years from now."
posted by kitarra at 6:28 PM on October 23, 2013 [2 favorites]


It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly

Yeah, kind of ... but not sufficiently to read that much into it. See TinyPic clip juxtaposing them:
posted by raygirvan at 6:35 PM on October 23, 2013


> but I also don't think you can get out of the painting what Roberts brings forth from it by patiently looking at it if you don't have at least some background.

It's an art history class. So, conducting this exercise through the lens of art history seems pretty appropriate.
posted by desuetude at 8:57 PM on October 23, 2013


kick-ass. I have verified each assertion. said assertions are hyperbolic, but accurate.
posted by mwhybark at 10:43 PM on October 23, 2013


"Kewb seems to be misreading the article. The writer presents some observations based on spending three hours with the painting. Then later in the article she expounds on why Copley's work is especially relevant to the context of thinking about patient learning. Those historical details are never presented as part of the three-hour observation. "

The essay bugged me for a couple of reasons. She presents patience as a skill and purports to use patient observation to support this claim, but it doesn't, actually, for reasons Kewb described. It relies on extratextual conjecture, skipping an indispensable part of the process of interpreting art: Asking questions. The squirrel's belly isn't an exact echo of the shape of the ear; it's an allusive one that could have just been one of the basic tools of composition, that of repeating shapes. So, to prove that, she'd need to first ask whether the ear was an intentional echo — that's what patient observation can give you, the question. She elides this step, either because she came to the painting knowing it or researched the question after looking at the portrait.

Second, the conclusions she reaches are of the category where they're impossible to be false and trivial if true: "Changing the pace of the exchange would have changed the form and content of the exchange." Well, yes. If he'd painted a beaver, symbolizing hard work or some such, the painting's form and content would be different. If he'd painted a hat on the kid, the form and content would have been different. Even without that, assuming that the difference without waiting would have been significant, that doesn't argue that waiting was a positive. Perhaps with quicker instruction, Copley's painting might have been even better.

So, what we've got from all the patience is a misleading description of its utility and its significance.

The thing of it is, I do agree with her: It's really important when you're thinking about a piece of art to spend some serious time with it and be patient as you look at it. Patient observation is a valuable skill, and one that's gotten somewhat deprecated. But this essay isn't necessarily a strong case for why that's true.

(I'd also say that this is something that's particular to a certain conception of art: Spending three hours staring at One and Three Chairs isn't going to reveal as much as thinking about it for three hours; the visuals are not necessarily the point.)
posted by klangklangston at 11:09 PM on October 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ah, New Criticism. My favorite in this area is Hugh Kenner's brilliant The Pound Era. Virtuoso reading par excellence.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:59 PM on October 23, 2013


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