Seeing/Naming

“Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” is the title Lawrence Weschler gave his book on the contemporary California artist Robert Irwin, who, manipulating light and space on a scrim, created works that defied being verbally described. Irwin once said: We know the sky’s blueness even before we know it as ‘blue’. let alone as “sky’. Weschler’s title happily encapsulates in one sentence the most fundamental tenet in my teaching about art. You gotta see first to know whatever it is you see; before saying anything, you gotta really see it -- intensely and systematically. In reverse, I also say that naming something is the most efficient way of knowing what it is in relation to other things and phenomena in the universe of named things and phenomena; it is a taxonomical act. But naming generalizes, and is as such less efficient way of understanding what a thing or phenomenon really is. A familiar face, unfailingly recognized, often resists description, and a face fully described veils the visual reality of that face. Description is no substitute for experience. Life fully lived is experienced intensely; it is only approximately recollected in writing.