I grew up believing that art was based on perception and vividly recall paintings by a local artist of whipped lines synthesising what he had seen of tall grass. The multiple layers of lines created a forest that filled the canvas.  I also recall sitting in the roof restaurant of Parliament House in Canberra on a scorching summer’s day and being fascinated by the shadow patterns created as the sun passed over the metal chairs. I’d like to believe that everyone experiences such moments and yet not only is so much art derived from wants, desires and memories but the audience sems to have forgotten how to relate to perceptive moments and responds only to symbolism and codes. As soon as the audience asks ‘what does it mean?’ we are dealing not with perception but perceptual blindness.

Brett Whitely said that his problem as an artist was not what to make art out of but that anything and everything could be the basis for his art and the problem was choice. His most successful work began as observation, particularly birds, animals and Sydney Harbour, but when he ventured into conceptual relationships between elements and explored grand themes as with the complexities of The American Dream, he tested the audiences’ ability to follow him.

But in the end does any of this matter? People may not understand art but ‘know what they like’ – anything that reinforces their world view. Artists for their part may derive a lifetime’s work from one perceptual moment but that one moment is what sets them apart. Rothko’s understanding of the relationship of colours to one another fuelled hundreds of works. Monet immersed himself in his garden at Giverny and the flickering light on the surface of the water seen though his increasingly blurred vision. Renoir for his part had an acute appreciation of the young female form in nature while Picasso read about how we actually see and accordingly proceeded to lay out the moments of his life as fractured Kaleidoscopes although how much of this was style and how much was perception, is open to question. Perhaps the opposite can be summed up as something Eric Fischl wrote in Bad Boy, his account of his art and life.  He recounted how a well-known painter in a lecture in the 80s explained a triangle in one of his paintings as representing the day his dog died. How he justified that statement was lost in stifled sniggering – the point being that whatever the reasoning, the justification was beyond both the belief, perceptual alignment and understanding of the audience but then again, he wasn’t alone in assembling objects on a surface and inviting the audience to make of them what they will.

As a one person audience, I recently spent a day touring around exhibitions in local galleries. The experience left me dispirited. I had hoped to come back feeling inspired but, for the most part the offerings were derivative, conservative and essentially Abstract pattern-making. It was the endless array of Abstractions that bothered me the most. The starting point hadn’t been a perceptive moment and whatever after-the-fact title had been applied they were about paint on a surface. At one point in my life I accepted this as a valid mode of expression, as when I saw my first examples of gestural expressionism and found them so refreshing when compared to the dark portraits and landscapes in museums and country houses. The same was true of the room-sized field paintings of the early 70s that so proliferated through the studios of my art school. The works of one student stuck with me. He was using a plastic template to cover a canvas with coloured ovals after Larry Poons reproductions in Studio International . Whatever optical effect he hoped to achieve, his work was based on the examples of someone else’s perception. Larry Poons may well have observed the play of light through the leaves of a tree as it created patterns of light on the ground but this once-removed approach produced nothing but shallowness.

The general art audience is and has been trained to read without depth or understanding and to filter out anything that detracts from the shopping experience. In fact, we are essentially being told what does not require our attention. Social media exacerbates the problem with the sheer flood of information as does the speed of the news cycle where nothing is news for more than a moment. People balk at lengthy newspaper stories and even the longest story on the evening news is a minute with most lasting thirty seconds or less. We’re faced by a world dominated by noise, the pre-packaged digital experience, the need for speed and consumerist anxiety driven by the market. There seems to be no place or time to contemplate or notice anything. Anything could and should be of interest from an unusual shape, a piece of crushed paper, reflections after rain, cracks in walls or pavements, city rectilinearity, accumulated rubbish, leafless trees in winter, whimsical or threatening clouds, endless patterns of light and the sounds that accompany all of it. Perhaps the most compelling exhibition that I saw on my city ramble consisted of neon tubes against a stark white wall and as the artist said in the blurb, the works looked like they ought to be useful or at least to have had a function.

The philosopher Merleau-Ponty considered that perception, the discovery of the world in which we live through our senses, had failed or had been subverted. Film, television, gaming and fantasy continues to deliver pre-packaged experiences which are entirely absent from ‘normal’ life. The thesis that we cannot conceive anything that has not been perceived or is perceptible, is reinforced by the idea that all ideas are rooted in experience. The contemporary world of game play fantasy, ‘reality’ TV and escapist cinema denies the value of perception as experience. It is no wonder that the audience asks ‘what is it supposed to mean?’ as the formulaic answer fails to provide any answer at all. The disconnect is palpable. Whether the opposite of perception is misperception or not, perceptual blindness has become the norm.