The Sage Forge

Yesterday I discussed the problems I have with Art Theory as revealed by the writing of a young philosopher well versed in the "best" ideas of the early part of this decade.  What one finds in Micah Sparacio's paper- "The Artcore: Aesthetic Scaffolding and its Disjuncts" http://astro.temple.edu/~sparacio/artcore.html  is a well planned, well thought out, well constructed conceptual edifice.  It fails, however, to explain art.

As I said at the time this is not Sparacio's fault.  It is the fault of the whole field of Aesthetics/Philosophy of Art and the practitioners thereof.  As a college boy Aesthetics struck me as little more than a theology of Modern Art.  There were ad-hoc assertions such as 'there can be no art associated with smell' which seemed stupid to me then- and have not improved with age.  Additionally, we were immersed in such unverifiable metaphysics as Clive Bell's immortal "Significant Form".  (See: http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r13.html )  The whole field was fraught with statements only loosely connected to the art it meant to explain and often connected to the beings from which art emanated not at all.

Bell's assertion is a good example.  Art has a significance in and of itself that we somehow detect.  In an earlier age it would have been deemed a kind of holyness.  Art was, in a way, transcendent.  Bell does not require that art's significance be totally independent of human perception, but he ventures close to the flame.  In doing this he fails as art theorists have failed in every age.  He seeks to find a rationale for our aesthetic response to what is essentially a local phenomenon- art as we self-consciously know it.

Art, and in a larger manner, the aesthetic sense is not a local phenomenon, though.  It has a range beyond our personal horizons.  Strangely, we are able to recognize it when we see what came from beyond that edge of the known world.  This is the reason the young Mister Sparacio has something to write about.  Art is virtually universal among human cultures.  Among those divergent cultures it takes widely divergent forms.  If we formulate a theory of art that explains to some satisfaction the work of the Minimalists, as we see those works, the same theory would probably have no application at all the the art of seventeenth century Chinese landscape painters.  Still, we recognize both sorts of creation as "Art".

Bell places the significance in the form of the work, and in so doing drifts dangerously close to giving inanimate objects something akin to a 'soul'.  Though more than six decades separated us from Bell's writing on Significant Form as I took my Aesthetics coursework the field had advanced little in the time since.  The significance of Art somehow remained in the objects themselves.  To the best of my current understanding this appears to be the case today as well.  It was from this singular feature that my mind flew in the late seventies.  At the time I had no theoretical foundation from which to form a compelling alternative theory, but I knew where the foundations of that theory would have to be built.

It would have to come from cognitive sciences.

In yesterday's discussion I brought up the matter of the aesthetic apprehension of natural objects.  In my family home natural objects such as rocks and pieces of driftwood were displayed for their aesthetic value alone.  This blurring of the line between art objects and natural objects (The natural object, purposely taken out of context and presented as an aesthetic object, becomes a work of art.)   This is a challenge to most prevailing understandings of Art.  But there are other, more serious challenges.

In the sciences there is a term, "beauty" which refers to the conceptual power or authority of an idea or theory.  This is what Gallileo was up against in his attempt to explain his theory of the motions of the planets.  The planets, including the Earth, rotating around the Sun simply and beautifully explained the motion of the planets against what had once been thought to be the sphere of the heavens, however terrifyingly it magnified the size of the creation.

Einstein spoke of the same beauty in his utter confidence at the correctness of his General Theory of Relativity.  This sort of beauty has, in the sciences and Aesthetics alike, been described as being different from the beauty of art or aesthetic appreciation.  Is it really different, though?

The discussion yesterday also spoke to the matter of conceptual models.  Both of the scientific theories mentioned above are conceptual models.  Utilizing them to comprehend events happening in the larger world, the world outside our heads, helps to bring the picture we have of that larger world inside our heads in line with the behavior of the real larger world.  My personal experience at such realignments of my conception of the universe is that these moments are psychologically powerful aesthetic experiences.

Also as I was a college student I served as a student assistant at the Meadows Museum of Art on the campus of Centenary College of Louisiana.  There I worked with the Despujols Collection of paintings of French Indo-China, a series of paintings by the classically trained French artist Jean Despujols.  The experience, as a painter-in-training, of seeing these works is difficult to describe.  As I learned how to accomplish some skill in painting I would recognize his accomplishment of the same thing.  Seldom was I able to see techniques for what they were far in advance of my capacity to accomplish the same skill.  The fact of the matter is that most people would not be able to recognize the techniques at all.  They would simply see these paintings as a kind of impenetrable sorcery in paint.

With each advance as I developed greater understanding of the skills of painting I would experience a new aesthetic epiphany at seeing Monsieur Despujol's work.  As I developed a more sophisticated model for applying paint to make more effective images, and that new "software" became part of what generated awareness in my personal experience, I would have an aesthetic reward.  My world had become larger.  Not only would I sense a larger cognitive world, my consciousness would be literally expanded.

This has been part and parcel of my experience as an artist.  As I learned how to DO what I could see my experience of seeing itself changed.  I not only saw, I experienced HOW I saw.  The experience of greater scientific understanding is not substantially different.  I not only know, I know HOW I know.  This expansion of comprehension is the seat of aesthetic awareness.  it is all the product of the mind being able to plug our worldly witness into a more sophisticated modelling of that world.

Tomorrow I will try to talk to that process a little more deeply.