Richard Latto’s chapter on “The Brain of the Beholder” is a good example: it seemed clear and absorbing to this (non-scientific) reader. The author is a scientist with an obvious understanding of visual art who uses examples to clarify the processes of perception and understanding the visual. The collection’s editor psychologist Richard Gregory’s interview with the sculptor Elizabeth Frink was disappointing, sticking at the conversational level. With the primary source, the artist, there, a more rigorously investigative approach might have given us a corresponding illumination of the creative process. But the final section “Artistry” fails to deliver. It promises to provide a bridge from the mechanics of perception to the mechanics of art. It succeeds, but it does not give us anything too exciting or new.

David Phillips’s piece on the recognition of fakes is accurate enough, but does anybody really care about forgeries apart from the few people who make or lose money by trading in them? And Philip Steadman’s detective work on Vermeer and his supposed use of the camera obscura seems to have little relevance to the way artists work now. This said, his detailed models and full-sized photographic reconstructions of the spaces in Vermeer’s pictures have a kind of obsessive, unhinged charm that is shared by some contemporary conceptual art. In general, the quality of contributions remains erudite and thorough, but their subjects seem peripheral to the business of contemporary visual culture. Paradoxically, I suspect sight and its mechanisms play a surprisingly minimal role in the artists work.

They reoccur as props in the video shown in three sections on three overhead monitors in which Barney and his players act out a complex and allusive circular pantomime that takes in the science of bodybuilding, team games and the physiology of the body The narrative thread of this wonderfully imaginative piece is passed around like a football between bizarre metaphoric tableaux that manage to link (among others) bagpipes, abseiling, hypoxia, hubris and Jayne Mansfield. The original piece was filmed and exhibited in the vast curved ramps of an underground car park and this recreation fights bravely against the anodyne white box the Tate has set aside for Art Now. This is definitely the best piece of new art in town and sets a dauntingly high standard for the rest of the series to live up to.

The work of the German artist Rebecca Horn, showing at the Tate Gallery and
the Serpentine until January, taps this vein of familiarity and identification
with the mechanical in what deserves to be a popular and accessible show,
without losing the depths and complexities she shares with her
contemporaries.

Early work from the 1970s focused on the body. From a range of materials,
Horn constructed strange extensions to the head or shoulders, fan-like wings
and odd adjuncts to the respiratory and circulatory systems. “Pencil Mask”
(1972) in the Tate is a kind of facial harness bristling with pencils. The
wearer can draw with his or her head but is unable to speak – a simple machine
ends up taking away as much power as it gives. These have the look of adaptive
mutations for evolutionary alleys we have yet to come to. In later works the
machines and extensions seem to detach themselves from the body to become
autonomous: a recurring device is the small, constantly tapping metal hammer
that features in many of her site-specific works in the past. Here, in “Ballet
of the Woodpeckers” (1986), the hammers peck in constantly changing rhythms
against huge mirrors.

There are machines that pump mercury around endless tubes and boxes, and a
grand piano suspended upside down from the ceiling which periodically spews
out its inner mechanism through the keyboard. Other pieces emit small,
controlled bursts of lightning: between writhing copper snakes in “Orlando”
(1988) and between cast metal rhinoceros horns in “Kiss of the Rhinoceros”
(1989). The “machines” remain resolutely concerned with humanity and human
emotions – anxiety, desire, the need to communicate. They have been built in our
image, like most of the things we make.