Customer Reviews

Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

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In "Echo Objects" Barbara Stafford, has at last published what many artists, arts researchers and art teachers have long believed - The phenomenon that the brain can decipher images, symbols and emblems long before it can decipher language and written text. This complex and comprehensive study looks at new discoveries by neuroscience on how the brain reacts to imagery and symbols and and gives a much needed update on the workings of the brain. Stafford relates the findings throught the book to a variety of art images, emblems and symbols and questions some of the outdated current ideology of art history and art theorists, it's about time the art establishment had a bit of a shake up!

Congratulations to the author on a much needed update into the importance of the Visual arts in the development of the brain and human identity! This book inspired me so much I bought her previous book "Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting", in my opinion both of these books are 'must haves' for any serious artist, arts researcher, lecurer or teacher of art and arts institution. I cant wait for Stafford's next book. Highly recommended

Echo Objects exceeds my expectations. I first learned of the impact of Barbara Maria Stafford's work through a 1984 NYTimes review of her Voyage Into Substance: "This is a book that has a permanent effect on one's way of looking at things." Every 5 years or so, Stafford has been picking an interface between philosophy, imaging, broadly taken, and visual studies (which she is given credit for creating) and such disciplines as cultural geography, history of science or medicine, architectural history, and body studies, and has written a book opening new areas. Each of her past seven books, and often each chapter, has dozens of ideas for dissertations or for re-examining how one thinks about one's own work.

Echo Objects moves well beyond Stafford's past work by engaging modern neuroscience and cognitive research. Arguably, only she could have written this book. It identifies key issues for the brain sciences as well as pointing out how research -especially image-based research--in the humanities could enrich scientific inquiry. Echo Objects maps out how biology and culture could come together around shared issues that require both disciplinary sides to resolve.

Just as Echo Objects offers a sort of topographic map to enable the enterprising reader to venture from one discipline into the terrain of another, it poses the challenge of learning the terrain, vocabulary, and essentials of a new discipline. Those who accept this challenge will find the effort to be transformative.

I'm quite interested in the synthesis of knowledge between various fields of research into the mind and consciousness, but you won't find much useful information here. Mostly written in "critic-speak", it's a loose connection of factoids with little evidence of real understanding by the author. Open the book at random and get paragraphs like:
"Because conceptual binding is innately 'checkered', artworks that systematically couple heterogeneous elements also open a 'conduit allowing [us to see how] environmental magnitudes exert constant influences on behavior'. Further, compound patterns, I believe, reveal how neuronal oscillations facilitate synaptic plasticity. That is, they make manifest something of the labor of spatial coherence: how transient rhythms function in the coordination of cross-domain mapping."
The author is just trying to say that art that is complex and contradictory is harder work to understand and that she thinks this is related to work the brain must do to reconfigure itself to make sense of what is being perceived. Bafflegab and conjecture are not useful or enlightening.

As a serious artist, I found this work to be useless. The author has an enviable vocabulary and is able to reference many artists as she tries to make her point. It's just not clear what the point of the book is.

Another reviewer put it perfectly: "Bafflegab". I agree. If you are a person who feels the need to impress your friends and colleagues with confusing pretentious expression then buy this book and commit it to memory. But please, I'm not interested.