Perfectionism

Román Gubern. Cinema theorist, Barcelona, 1934

 

Perfectionists (such as Stanley Kubrick or Georges de La Tour, for example) tend to be obsessive neurotics, which goes to show that mental health and creative capacity are not one and the same thing. “A tree may be marvellous..., but it is not a Doric column,” wrote Oscar in Dios lo ve. The tree grows and develops subject to the influence of many random factors, i.e., it is not under the control of a designer - with the exception perhaps of certain bonsais (and I am no expert in this area). Perfectionism arises from the totalitarian control which allows the designer to be the god of his creation. And now, ethologists and perception psychologists suggest that there is a natural correlation - and not just a cultural correlation - between aesthetic perfectionism and the historical tenets of classicism. The Gestalt psychologists of the 1960s had intuitively pointed in this direction, and today it seems their views are corroborated by ethologists, neurologists and anthropologists on the evidence of aesthetic experiments carried out with chimpanzees, babies and primitive tribes. There is, it seems, an innate sense of order and form, which we could perhaps even call an “aesthetic instinct”. Essentially, of course, it was only logical that homo faber should develop this psychological faculty for optimisation of his perception of symbolic forms. However, the neo-classical movements, with their obedience to certain perennial formal rules, tend towards déjà vu. And how can déjà vu avoid redundancy and monotony? By introducing what the Russian Formalists called “estrangement” (or the “deautomatisation of perception”). Example: a cubist Auditorium on a tropical beach in Las Palmas, which for all the world reminds me of the strange landscapes of De Chirico.