Eidetic
(pronounced ahy-det-ik)
(1) Of,
relating to or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily
reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail.
(2) In
anthropology, political science, sociology etc, of or relating to eidos (the
formal content of a culture, encompassing its system of ideas, criteria for
interpreting experience, etc).
(3) In psychiatry
and neuroscience (as eidetic memory), of visual (or sometimes auditory) images,
exceptionally vivid and allowing detailed recall of something previously
perceived (most common in young children, the capacity appearing to diminish as
language develops).
(4) Relating
to or subject to such imagery.
(5) The (1)
essence or (2) perfect, vision of an object or concept.
(6) In
psychoanalysis (of dreams), as “eidetic memory”, a dream that can be “seen in
the mind” so vividly it appears to be “movie-like”.
(7) In philosophy
and phenomenology (as “eidetics”), the study of eidetic reduction (a technique used
to help identify the essential components of a phenomenon by attempting to
reduce it into its necessary essences).
(8) In
literary criticism, writing sufficient evocative as to create in a reader’s
imagination a “photo-realistic image” of what’s being described or discussed.
(9) In
visual art (painting), a technique used to produce a work close to
indistinguishable from a photograph (literally possible before advances in
photography and photographic reproduction); the work so painted.
1924: From
the from German eidetisch (pertaining
to the faculty of projecting images), from the Ancient Greek εἰδητικός
(eidētikós) (pertaining to images and
used also in the sense of “pertaining to knowledge”), from eidesis (knowledge), the construct being εἶδος
(eîd(os)) (form, shape) + -etic. The -etic suffix was from the Ancient Greek
-ητικός (-ētikós), from -έω (-éō) +
-τικός (-tikós). It was used to form adjectives meaning “pertaining
to”, derived from nouns, most of which end in -esis and -esy. Most English words formed with the suffix were
from words formed in other languages (sometimes mixed), including Old, Middle
and Modern French, Italian, Latin, and Ancient Greek. Eidetisch was in
1924 coined by German psychologist
Professor Erich Jaensch (1883-1940). The
back-formation dyseidetic refers to an individual found to be dyslexic (with
regard to the visual aspect of written words) while the adjective “noneidetic”
(not eidetic) seems one of English’s most significantly pointless words but
presumably it’s useful for clinicians making case notes. The now obsolete alternative spelling was edetic.
Eidetic is an adjevtive, eidetiker is a noun and eidetically is an
adverb; the noun plural is eidetikers.
The special case of eidetics (in philosophy the study of eidetic
reduction) is an example of a noun plural existing without a base noun
The term “eidetic
memory” is used as a synonym of the popular “photographic memory” and an individual
possessing the characteristic can in clinical use be described as an “eidetiker”
(one with an “eidetic memory”); the medical literature however makes clear
there is no evidence of any subject ever having exhibited a true “photographic
memory” in the way the condition of “total recall” has been depicted in fiction
and elsewhere in popular culture. Sometimes,
a subject may seem to have a “photographic memory” but, upon investigation, it has
always been found to be something less impressive. In the 1980s, one US television comedy had
the governor of a state astonished by his secretary’s memory:
Secretary:
“I’ve
memorized the telephone numbers of the entire US Senate.”
Governor: “What? All of them?”
Secretary:
“Well, there
are only two.”
That worked
also as a “blonde joke”, a breed now proscribed under threat of
cancellation. In general use, what
“photographic memory” usually indicates is “an exceptionally good memory” but often
this manifests in specialized fields of learning rather than general
experience. As something more
generalized, it’s most common in young children who have, by definition, a
limited length of memory from which to draw and the capacity appears usually to
diminish as language develops. In
adults, it definitely is a spectrum condition so the adjectival senses (the comparative
“more eidetic”, the superlative “most eidetic”) can be used and in neuroscience
publications “semi-eidetic (partly or partially eidetic) does appear. That said, in the literature, there are cases
of patients who suffer from being “unable to forget”, a genuinely disturbing condition
for those with memories of traumatic events.
Even then however, that is an instance not of “total recall” but rather
the recollected events being ones they’d prefer to forget but cannot.
The legacy: Zur Eidetik und Integrationstypologie: Arbeiten aus dem Institut für psychologische Anthropologie an der Universität Marburg/Lahn (On eidetics and integration typology: Works from the Institute for Psychological Anthropology at the University of Marburg/Lahn, 1941) by Professor Rudolf Jaensch, Barth, Leipzig, Germany.
Although at
times one of the most cited and influential psychologists of the inter-war era
(1919-1939), Rudolf Jaensch is now remembered only for his work on eidetic
analysis, his “eidetic hypothesis formation” still one of the standard models
in psychology. His other work in the theories
of constitutional types are now little studied, largely because his reputation
was sullied by his enthusiastic commitment to and prosecution of the National
Socialist Gleichschaltung (coordination) and restructuring of professional
& academic life in Germany after the Nazi Party gained power in 1933. Although Jaensch joined the party only some
months after Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of
government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) was appointed chancellor
(the oft-quoted reference to the Nazis “seizing power” is misleading, the political
& military elite miscalculating in thinking having Hitler as head of a
government in which the Nazis were in a minority would leaving him “manageable”
and thus “handed him” the office)) and was thus susceptible to being derided by
the “old fighters” as one who joined the movement only for career advancement,
he’d been affiliated with a number of the party’s organs since mid-1932. However, he certainly made up for lost time
and in March 1933 was one of several hundred professors to sign a declaration
of support for the new regime but unlike many of them who genuinely were
seeking only to protect their careers and families, Jaensch was an activist,
denouncing those who dissented from the party’s new orthodoxies and was
particularly interested in excluding Jews from academic life, seeking not only
to secure their dismissal but also discredit their work. That of course resulted in the migration of
many Jewish and engineers and scientists, something that at least partially
realized Hitler’s core ideological obsession but greatly would come to
disadvantage Germany during World War II (1939-1945). Hitler may have disdained “Jewish physics”
but the British and Americans did not as the Irish-born UK journalist &
politician Brendan Bracken (1901–1958) would later (and not wholly facetiously)
explain: “We
won the war because our German scientists were better than their German
scientists”.
Portrait of Martin Heidegger (2017) by
Mathieu Laca (b 1982). A painter can use a retreat from photorealism for reasons that may be artistic or political.
Jaensch's involvement with the Nazis so tainted to his reputation that in the post-war
years only his seminal work in eidetic theory remained “acceptable” although
the “guilt by association” paradigm was never much of a feature of post Nazi
Germany and that he wrote a forward to the published version of Hans Bender’s
(1907-1991) revised doctoral dissertation Zur
Experimentalpsychologie des Unterbewußten und der außersinnlichen Wahrnehmung
(On the Experimental Psychology of the Subconscious and Extrasensory
Perception) seems not to have affected Dr Bender’s flourishing career in the
1950s. There may also been some appeal
in the English-speaking world, it being hard to think of a better name then
“Bender” for a psychologist working in the field of extrasensory perception. Unfortunately, in Germanic use, while the
name “Bender” was from the Middle High German benden (to bend; to twist), use was typically occupational and
applied to (1) a cooper (barrel-maker), with Bender a clipping of Fassbinder or
Fassbender (a cooper (ie someone who builds and repairs wooden barrels or casks
by bending staves) or (2) a craftsman or metalworker (the artisans and smiths
who shaped materials like wood or metal using techniques of bending and curving. Less commonly, it could be topographic (someone
who lived near a sharp curve or bend in a river or a road). Whether, had Professor Jaensch lived to
undergo the de-Nazification process of the post-war years, had he apologized
for his conduct, he’d have been “sort of forgiven” in the mood of selective generosity
that has seen figures like conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989) and philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to one degree or another rehabilitated is
unlikely; Karajan’s association with the regime was pure careerism while Heidegger’s
flirtation was brief and soon abandoned whereas Jaensch died an unrepentant
Nazi and his only legacy is eidetic theory.
Eidetic
memory has never appeared in the APA's (American Psychiatric Association) DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders), either as a diagnostic term or disorder, presumably because
it’s regarded as a natural variation in the human condition. Although an acknowledged psychological
phenomenon, the DSM does not regard an exceptional memory (however described)
as pathological, even when discussing the functioning of memory in the context
of neuro-cognitive or dissociative disorders.
Despite, that, the term “eidetic” is far from unknown in the psychiatric
& psychological literature (professional & popular) but many
publications cast a much wider net than the DSM that focuses on the diagnosis
of metal disorders rather than reviewing the range of “normal” human
characteristics. So, while there are
books devoted to discussing eidetic memory (and related topics) and the
“self-help” shelves in bookshops often have volumes on “improving memory” or
“developing a photographic memory”, that’s very different from “eidetic memory”. For example, psychiatric teaching material
describes eidetic images as visual memories of almost hallucinatory vividness
but the DSM’s editors applied the same rationale when not including Aphantasia
(an inability voluntarily to recall or form mental images) in their editions,
the DSM being concerned primarily with phenomena insofar as they constitute
clinically significant dysfunction or form part of a recognized disorder. The eidetic memory spectrum does though
remain a recognized psychological phenomenon and for clinicians that’s helpful
because of the need to differentiate instances from hallucinations, a very
different symptom.
In
painting, there is a long “eidetic” tradition of works so photorealistic that, unless
closely examined (and certainly when reproduced photographically) can be
assumed to be photographs, some artists in recent years even adopting the technique
as a signature. Those still able to view
art for pleasure can enjoy the perceptual ambiguity (and maybe even enjoy being
fooled) but art critics know paintings are there to be criticized and while the
sheer technical prowess of the artist can be acknowledged, photorealistic
painting often has been treated with hostility.
It wasn’t always so because photorealism predated photography as some artists
sought to achieve what would later come to be called the “hyper-realistic” and,
in a nice linguistic paradox, it would be decades (well into the twentieth
century) before technology had improved to the point at which a developed
photograph could match the “realism” achieved by the most skilled artists, a
group working not only in paint but also with pencils and, remarkably, even
charcoal, a substance uniquely suitable for emulating monochromatic images. The objection of latter-day critics was not
only the predictable: “Why not just take
a photograph?” but also it being known many artists actually took photographs
and copied these to create their paintings.
To many critics, that meant it was less “art” than “drafting”.
Telephone Booths (1967), acrylic on Masonite by Richard
Estes (b 1932), Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain.
The classic
exponent of the technique was US artist Richard Estes and Telephone Booths is his best-known work in this vein. At the technical level, the piece was most
accomplished because for a painter, intrinsically, a tree in a park is a less
challenging subject than some Manhattan telephone booths in their surrounds, the work demanding the rendering on a two dimensional surface, glass, shiny metal, reflections
and transparencies, a grab of multiple overlapping optical images of simultaneous
movement. Now on permanent display at
the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibit’s curatorial notes detail the production
process, the composition beginning with several photographs taken of a row of
telephone booths at the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and 34th Street,
subsequently combined as a montage. The
hyperrealism inherent in emulating photography owes something to the tradition
of trompe l'oeil (deceives the eye)
in that the works often were a deliberate attempt “…to confuse and disorient the viewer. Despite depicting a recognizable scene, the
complexity of the framing and the blurring of reflections require an additional
effort of concentration, since nothing can be grasped at a single glance.” The choice of setting does though hint at the
way artists are selective to make the effect work, glass having the necessary
characteristics to create ambiguities, the stuff simultaneously reflective and transparent. What Estes did was use the accumulation of
reflections as a “device of distortion”, some images sharply defined on the glass
while others appearing on metallic surfaces slightly were warped while still
allowing concurrent recognition of the booths before the eye and the buildings “behind us”, cues such as the signs of
the Macy's and Woolworth there as markers of familiarity. Making a painting from a photograph may sound
simple (for those with the skill and time) but what Estes did was not mere transcription
for he took his montage and rearranged it, Telephone
Booths depicting a scene no single photograph recorded. That didn’t exactly mean “montage beget collage” but it was an interesting take on
“appropriating and reconstructing reality”.
For those who like the idea of telephone booths as subjects there are
now fewer from which to choose but in many cities there are survivors (some re-purposed
as Wi-Fi hotspots) and in Australia, one that provided vital communications
when cellular (mobile) services were disabled by bushfires has been granted “Protected
Heritage” status.
Central Savings (1975), oil on canvas by Richard Estes. Reflected images were a feature of the photorealists, the scenes providing a useful layer of “pre-distortion”.
Tellingly,
while Estes usually left his cityscapes devoid of human presence, in Telephone Booths there were four
figures, each partially visible in the temporary sanctuary of their booth,
backs to the viewer. As a trick on the
path to photorealism that was a wise choice because the almost flat expanses of
a trench coat’s fabric makes the effect easier to achieve than the contours and
colours of a human face. However, for
professional critic and ultracrepidarian alike, the meaning beneath (or perhaps
“beyond”) is there for the viewer to take from it what they will, those better-versed in critical theory, tending sometimes to impart meaning, seeking to “know the
mind of the artist”. The Italian art
critic Sandro Parmiggiani (b 1946) described those “on the phones” as “metaphors for
broken voices and a faceless humanity, remaining unknowable within those
impenetrable spaces, to which the stains that border their metallic edges
allude as a visual rhyme, increasing the mystery and the visual bewilderment.” Now we know.
The author John Updike (1932–2009) was no less a deconstructionist,
declaring: “We
know nothing about the two people on the far right, nothing except that their
clothing is light-colored; we know even less about the couple on the left—they
seem transparent in their oblique reflections. Thanks to the label of
metropolitan crowd, these people have been reduced to mere signifiers affixed
to telephone booths; like bytes. The
sounds of a computer or the strokes of a typewriter take their place and convey
information. The emptiness of this information contrasts with the visual
richness that the painter has imparted without sparing any effort, constructing
a profoundly tender artistic irony.”
It was the Anglo-Irish satirist & Anglican cleric Jonathan Swift
(1667–1745) who in the poem On Poetry: a
Rhapsody (1733) included the lines:
Or else perhaps he may
invent
A better than the poet
meant;
As learned commentators
view
In Homer more than
Homer knew.
That pair
of couplets became famous as a critique of overly obsessive literary critics &
scholars anxious to find in texts hidden meanings and profundity, the objective
perhaps not to inflate the esteem in which the author was held but enhance
their own reputations; wisdom displayed by pointing out what the professor down
the corridor failed to notice. Swift may
have made a famous point but mostly he was ignored and has of late been
steamrollered by the post-modernists & deconstructionists able to construct
“meanings in the meanings” although,
unfortunately, so jargon-laden are some of their texts the meanings these
formalist's documents sometimes barely are decipherable to all but fellow semioticians. The industry has of course moved on from
Homer and the words of figures like Bob Dylan (b 1941) and Jonathan Swift’s now
more famous namesake (Taylor Swift (b 1989)) have been analysed as closely as
any theologian has studied the Scriptures.
Dylan presumably was on occasions amused by finding out what “he really
meant” and was modest, telling one interviewer he was “just a song & dance man” and
another that those who “…called his lyrics poetry, probably hadn’t read much
poetry”. Still the critics
clearly prevailed because in 2016 the Swedish Academy awarded Dylan the Nobel
Prize in Literature, making him one of the more publicized laureates of recent
decades. Of Ms Swift’s oeuvre, meaning
may be easier to find: she’s of her generation so the songs are “all about her”.
Hot Fudge Sundae (1972), oil on canvas by Ralph Goings.
The US
painter Ralph Goings is sometimes said to have made photorealism “his signature” but it seems to have been
more “his calling”, drawn to the
technique because of a genuine “aesthetic objection” to the way pop-art artists
of the 1960s were tending to expressionism (and even mannerism) in their
depictions of simple, mundane objects.
Those approaches were of course “just
another path to meaning” but for his bank buildings, diners (condiment sets
very much a theme) and pick-up trucks, Goings emulated the camera’s objectivity
although, without the original photographs, it’s not known if some licence was
taken although almost certainly that happened. While a dent in the tailgate of a parked pick-up truck is unexceptional,
maybe it was added for some optical verisimilitude. Estes’s Telephone Booths was admitted not to
be a “pure” piece of eidetic imagery but a compositional piece that was a
construct of what such an image might
have been; Goings by contrast claimed always to be “true to the original”.
That should
be treated as a statement of intent but Goings never exhibited the 35mm color
slides that were his “intermediate tool” but he admitted going “beyond
the photographs” in tweaking details such as light and color saturation or
adjusting an inconvenient shadow. That he
used slides was also of significance because frequently, in a darkened room, he
would project the images onto a primed, blank canvas, enabling him to bypass
freehand drawing, instead with a pencil “tracing
the grid”, meticulously rendering every the edge of every shape, contour or
shadow. That done, what’d he’d have was
a kind of “paint-by-numbers” set, the canvas now an assembly of outlined shapes
awaiting paint, the original photograph a legend of the color scheme. So it could be called “craft” and the much
skill and patience was demanded but whether that meant it should be called “art” divided critics. However, an
artist’s relationship with the critics is just one aspect of life and there’s
also the relationship with the auction houses and the customers; the current
record sale price for a painting by Goings was some US$700,000 and his stuff
definitely is now part of the “art market”.
Airstream (1970), oil on Molino by Ralph Goings (1928-2016), Mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Museum of modern art, Ludwig Foundation), Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria. Molino is a fabric-based support, often a plain-weave or un-primed textile material akin to
the specialized canvas or heavy cotton & linen weaves used in Europe. It's known also as “cotton duck canvas” but
that has nothing to do with Anatidae feathers, "duck" from the Dutch doek (cloth).
More
eye-catching still was Airstream. Still in production after 90 years, vintage
Airstreams are a collectable, distinguished by their polished aluminium skins,
a dramatic look that has at times been controversial because, on sunny days,
the reflections from the large surface area were thought to be “distracting”
for other road users. Some owners of latter-day Shelby American Cobras (the originals (1962-1967) all painted) who opted for the expensive option of polished aluminum bodywork
also came to rue the decision, the seductive curves showing every
fingerprint. The big Airstreams did
however make a great photograph and, as Ralph Goings knew, a great photo had
the potential to be a great painting though in his genre, it had to be the right photo. Airstream
was one of his favourites because he thought it best represented the
possibilities in his technique and although what he did was in a sense
“mechanical”, it could also be exacting, a few square inches of canvas
sometimes taking days to complete. For
Goings, the paintings are best thought of as his “love affair with America”.
Lindsay Lohan rendered in the style of nineteenth century Impressionism (right) by Gemini.ai. The digital version was based on a photograph (left) of her in a Jill Sander (b 1943) gown in light chartreuse from the Spring 2023 collection (with a Tyler Ellis (b 1984) Clutch, Joseph Saidian & Sons Vintage Marquise & Baguette Cut Diamond, Anabela Chan Orchid Diamond Cascade Earrings and Piferi Fade Sandals by Alfredo Pīferi (b 1987)) while attending the Disney Legends Awards ceremony, Anaheim, California, August, 2024. On the day, although the environment was not optimized for photography, the light and breeze cooperated, the gown’s fabric swishing in a way the Impressionists would have painted, even had the air been still. In the 2010s, as video cards became more powerful, software emerged to allow users to take photographs and re-create them in a wide variety of modes including pencil sketches, water colors, oils and even styles such as cubism. This was the opposite process from that used by hyperrealists such as Estes and Goings; now generative AI makes possible just about anything able to be displayed on a screen.
The paradox
of course was that Airstream was the exemplar of a painting functionally indistinguishable from a photograph thus illustrating the usual
critique: What’s the point? Why not just produce prints of the
photograph, something able to be done in limitless quantities and at marginal
cost? That’s a classic utilitarian
question and one that ignores a concept like l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) but then, other than as
generators or economic value, utilitarians likely thought society gained little
benefit from movements such as vorticism, cubism, abstraction, expressionism
and such. There was also elitism in the disdain;
photorealism associated with craft, folk-art, advertising, ordinary
consumer objects and other fields tainted by commercialism (although the art-mafia was
untroubled by their business being focused on money like few others). Still, contemporary conceptual and abstract
art was thought intellectually sophisticated in a way “copying photographs”
could never match, the technical virtuosity less valued than the imagination of
the “true artist”. Despite all that, photorealism
did find a niche and is now an accepted part of the industry.
The Hay Wain (1821), oil on canvas by John
Constable (1776–1837), National Gallery, London (left) and Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour (circa 1811), oil on canvas
by John Constable, Royal Academy of Arts, London (right).
John
Constable was among the last generation of painters to live before the age of
photography and although now regarded as one of the greatest of Britain’s
landscape artists, in his lifetime he enjoyed only modest commercial success; not
until the age of 52 was he elected to the RA (Royal Academy of Arts). The two paintings above are examples of the
different ways he painted, the high Romantic Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour noticeably less “realistic”
than The Hay Wain, a work among his
most elegiac. Viewed retrospectively, as
the technology of photography improved, there would have been times when each
of these paintings could be deemed photorealistic (if, for purposes of
comparison, rendered in gray-scale or sepia) but that was not the dominant artistic
measure of the era. It’s not
known when Constable made his remark: “My pictures will never be popular for they have no
handling, but I do not see handling in nature” (the quote appearing
(undated) in Memoirs of the Life of John
Constable, Esq (1843) by the UK-based US genre painter Charles Robert
Leslie RA (1794–1859)) but it’s tempting to think it might have been before painting
Flatford Mill, a work executed with
notable “handling”. Constable used “handling”
(then trade jargon among the critics) to describe the painter’s visible manner
of applying paint, the brushwork, facture, finish and characteristic “touch” by
which a viewer could see how the
artist worked their brush. The
comparison was something like the difference between watchmakers who took care
to conceal their creations’ movements and those who made visible the wheels
& cogs, Constable in effect saying “nature
shows no painterly technique, so why should an artist?” Time of course doesn’t display the mechanism
of how it works any more than do the clouds in the sky: both just are. The critics though were society’s opinion-makers
(especially among those who actually paid arts for their work) and in Constable's
time, an academic landscape painter of renown was expected to demonstrate
skilful, controlled brushwork that made visible the mechanics of the action. Not all did it in the same way but the most commercially
successful had their ways of making obvious how the oil was blended and modulated,
clouds, rocks, foliage and all the elements of landscape rendered through
established conventions. As well as the
beauty of what was being depicted, the artist's execution was there to be
admired.
The Opening
of Waterloo Bridge seen from Whitehall Stairs, 18 June, 1817 (circa 1832), oil
on canvas by John Constable, Tate Britain, London. In the industry’s classification system,
Constable is listed as a painter of landscapes, in the Romantic tradition but
as much as anything, he was a painter of skies and cloudscapes.
Constable made
no secret he thought these conspicuous displays of artistic virtuosity as “bravura”,
preferring to be what he called a “natural painter” depicting the “natural environment”. Discarding, the bravura taught during his
student years, he eschewed “showing off” and let nature do the talking; nature
having no brushstrokes and trees, clouds and sunlight without “handling”, manifesting
only as optical phenomena. That was what
Constable wanted to paint. He was though
a realist and in some of his work there is much of his signature “handling”, rough,
broken, apparently (though doubtlessly not) spontaneous brushwork applied in
flecks, dabs, flecks, streaks and thick impasto (paint applied thickly to
create a topography of peaks and crests that, in physically extending from the
surface, lends something of a 3D (three-dimensional) effect), sometimes
obviously using paint unmixed and straight “from the tube”. Constable didn’t change his view that he wanted
viewers to focus on the painting rather than the independent performance of the
painter but whether “Constable 2.0” was an evolving artist or one adapting to
commercial reality in “surrendering art to artifice” can be debated
but what no historians dispute is that the later impressionists owed a debt to
this exemplar of the Romantic movement.
Constable now is more highly regarded than ever he was in his lifetime.
