The Aspect Aspect: or, What You Leave Out.

If there's one Obsessive Compulsive behaviour trait I'll admit to, it's watching movies in their correct aspect ratio. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the letter-boxing (the black strip of masking at the top and bottom of a TV screen) that occurs when a wide screen format (16:9 ratio for example) is shown on a less than widescreen telly (4:3 ratio), but only a few people will know the spectacle of me wrestling with remote controls until I'm satisfied that we're watching what the film-maker originally intended. The problem is that since the 1960's there have been scores of different screen shapes to increase the sensation of cinema by widening our field of vision in the hope that this might attract us into theatres and away from the box. Now we're full circle - TV's have gone wide screen and home-cinema systems can deliver an impressive punch. What this is about, though, is not the difference between the collective experience of cinema against the less-than-a-crowd one of home viewing, but rather the importance of the frame of an image to both the maker of that image and those viewing it.

My school physics teacher - something of a mentor to me - once pointed out with a vacuum cleaner that there's no such thing as sucking; it's actually blowing in the opposite direction (you can see, though, with mentoring like that, why I might have problems in later life). The history of the image needs a similar flip in thinking because it seems to me that it is defined as much by what is left out as much as what is put in. It's easily demonstrated; next time you're using a digital camera or a mobile phone camera don't look at what's inside the screen - keep looking towards it - but take in what's all around it. Whatever kind of image is being made it's a massively reduced field of view compared to the human eye (alright, fish eye lenses might exceed it but their view is extremely distorted).

So, the image maker's first role is as editor - making choices about point of view (and all that that implies). It would be easy to conclude that the shape of the image is unimportant compared to this choice of what to put inside the frame. But that frame contains a powerful and complex dynamic - one on which there have been libraries worth of publications - the elusive art of composition.

Actually, most people probably have an intuitive sense of composition. Visual grammar is now so long established and professionally photographed images in print or onscreen so pervasive that we absorb hundreds of well composed images daily. It's little wonder that most people are a bit sheepish about their own personal snaps - they are easy to compare unfavourably with 'proper' photography. But, the mobile phone camera and digital photography have made taking pictures a less precious (certainly quicker and less expensive) activity and radically altered our attitude to photography because this new genre of personal image-making focuses on the recalling of an event, the familiarity of faces and places. These are images without ambition to express or manipulate. Composition is about containing essential facts within the frame - they are, in the majority, private archives - documents in time and place, not artistic endeavours.

Common to all images though is how they are looked at - the observer's eye sweeps and scans an image for recognisable handles. Certain things are magnets in this process - eyes, light sources, contrast. The analysis of this is also a huge subject, but the point is this - image makers (abstract included) seek to direct this scanning of images - lead it by the composition of elements - in order to heighten the viewer's experience. Read reviews of an old master and you'll come across phrases like 'the eye is led up this diagonal', or, 'the viewer is drawn'. This kind of processed structure can be seen in most painting from the Renassaince to the 2oth Century - sometimes to great effect (Rembrandt for instance). Sometimes it's just nakedly manipulative (take the arch-propagandist Jacques Louis David). The apprenticeship's of artists and the acquisition of this visual grammar was consolidated in academic painting around Europe in the 18th and 19th C. and reached a stultifying peak (high-Victorian art) just as new ideas were being informed by new technologies: photography offered an escape route from this stifling formalisation; oil paint in tubes offered portability and freedom from a studio. Many works by Degas for example are believed to be derived from or influenced by the accidental cropping of the subject in photographs. In fact, influences poured in from outside art. Subjectivity, intuition and spontaneity were in - objectivity and academies were out - it was an era of individual points of view and in many ways has defined the course of modern art.

But, back to that frame thing and the scanning eye. It stands to reason that the eye will scan around a circle in a different way than it will across a wide rectangle. The words are the clue: around; across. I remember during still-life classes at art school, a lecturer pointed up that a square is the hardest shape to compose an image on. The reasoning was that a square is perfectly balanced between horizontal and vertical - you have to be more clever to create and control eye movement around the picture space. Place your subject at the left hand edge of a cinemascope screen, however, and your eye is immediately drawn left. At the same time the right hand side becomes an area of latent movement. You've got less room to manouevre in a square. It's no co-incidence that portrait has given it's name to the vertical rectangle generally used in individual figure paintings - after all, we look people up and down. This portrait and landscape orthodoxy makes sense when looked at in that kind of anthropological or physiological way - we scan people vertically, the horizon horizontally. It states the obvious but, our eyes are side-by-side so our field of vision is wider than it is high (shut one eye to check this).

Breaking that orthodoxy can be powerful and disorienting; the effect of a massive high definition screen flipped on it's side for a vertical composition by American video-artist Bill Viola in his exhibition 'Love and Death: The Tristan Project' had a stunning, surprise impact which then acquired a rich emotional impact as the subject is carried aloft out of the top of the screen. It was a perfect match of subject and composition.

When cinematic language was in its infancy, the pioneering Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein proposed using an infinitely adjustable camera which could photograph scenes within any aspect ratio - squares; vertical rectangles; horizontal rectangles - the frame could be perfectly married to subject rather than fixed for every shot. In contrast, the German academic Rudolf Arnheim makes a case, in his classic 1930's text on the cinema Film as Art, in defence of the classic Academy ratio screen (roughly the shape of a standard 4:3 TV) as the ideal norm. Even colour film was too much for Arnheim. Black and White silent film had power, he argued, because by leaving out aspects of reality, it presented a compressed, poetic view of the world which was universally understood; the Less is More principle. Talkies, he argued, took cinema backwards, towards theatre. Colour introduced an element of reality which diminished the imaginative engagement of the viewer by overriding it with sensation. Wide-screens extended this by aping the human field of view, increasing what could be accommodated in the frame and the giant IMAX screens take this even further. In later issues of the book Arnheim is appalled by the developments in 3-D movies (Aldous Huxley satirises this trend in Brave New World by imagining the citizens of his future utopia going to the feelies). Each step towards an impersonation of 'reality' was a step away from art.

I've got a lot of sympathy for that view. Powerful art forms don't show all of reality - they compress it. And in the process of engaging with that compression - decoding it - viewers might return to reality with a fresh perspective.

In terms of images, I wouldn't want to see that compression based on the formulaic strictures of the 19thC. French Academy. Nor am I wholly sympathetic to Arnheim's view. But it does annoy me when I see the lazy use of the frame across much of contemporary screen culture. Too many directors of film and TV currently favour the shaky, 'realistic' wobbly-cam affectation to bring a fake sense of urgency and realness in anything from action movies to cookery programmes (the final irony in this was seeing a BBC documentary last year set in the middle-east in which interviews in an official's office used an 'edgy' hand-held camera). And, if squares are hard to compose in, it's a short step to realise that wide screens are easy; you can place a subject almost anywhere in a wide screen format and it will look good - whether it leads the eye on a meaningful journey is another thing. Any movement, any diverting activity within the frame has become a substitute for considered composition. There are many exceptions of course, and many fine cinematographers. But perhaps we've reached a new academicism - a new orthodoxy in screen and image culture which asserts a drive towards fact and an impersonation of reality as opposed to the essence of what art is - artifice. Art is a compression of reality and not its imitator. The power and impact of art is in what bounds that compression and how original it is. In image making, that boundary - the frame - is the first and arguably most important aspect in containing and revealing that compression.

But really, what all this mildly obsessive criticism reveals is an aspect of my own prejudices and priorities.

Composition - making art - lies somewhere between analysis and intuition - skill and accident - rational thought and emotion. To contain those aspects - to isolate their results - requires a stripping away of all unnecessary elements. To see them cleary requires a reduced form, uncluttered by the busy-ness of reality. Painting is a very particular fission which is contained within the frame. Subtle changes can set off new chains of reactions within a frame that hugely affect the impact of the whole. For a long time though, I felt other forms must do things better than painting. Maybe it's a Scottish thing, but painting came too easily for me - it wisnae hard enough. The irony is, I've come full circle - the challenge of juggling these things was there from the first oil painting I did at high-school. Other forms are bigger in one way or another, but painting fuses everything for me - it's an alchemical process that draws on aptitudes I have by accident or have developed through education. And, in my own particular OC universe, you have clues and illustrations towards the reasons why the visual and emotional content within a frame hold me in such thrall.

But, if there's one thing that strikes me above everything else - it's not so much what you put in a frame, so much as what you leave out. Sucking? Or blowing in the opposite direction?

GJ
June.2009

Illustrations from top: Screen aspect ratios; Dyson vacuum cleaner; Rembrandt Self-Portrait; Jacques Louis David Death of Marat; Bill Viola, still from Love and Death: The Tristan Project; my first oil painting (after Goya) c. 1986.