The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts
[1]
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
29 (2
Winter 1970, 155-168.
|
Content
III – Emancipation of Aesthetic Perception
IV – Art & the Industrial Revolution
VI – Aesthetics & the Changing Nature of the Arts
HHC: Titling and Index added |
PHILOSOPHERS have long been fascinated by the
strange power of the arts. Some, like
Plato, had an uneasy suspicion of their elusive force and were concerned over
the threat the arts seem to present to the rational stability of the social
order. When such men came to account
for the arts, then, it took the form of prescription and control.
Others, like Tolstoy, attempted to
harness the power of the arts to aid in expressing a religious vision and in
achieving a lofty social ideal. Still
others, impressed by the unpredictable yet fruitful creativity of the arts,
have sought to allow them to flourish freely and to make their unique
contribution to society in their own way. Yet
control, cultivation, and encouragement constitute but several of the many
philosophical reactions to the activity of art.
Despite such attention, however, the philosophy
of art has lagged far behind philosophical thought in most other areas.
It did not achieve an identity of its
own until the mid-eighteenth century when Baumgarten published his
Aesthetica (1750). Yet even after
this, philosophical thought about art remained encumbered by prior commitments
to doctrines and systems that had been developed with little regard to the
practice of the arts. Perhaps it was
felt that in dealing with one of the fruits of civilization, the theory of art
could be expected to derive its full sustenance from the roots of philosophic
thought.
This has not always been the case, however. Aristotle stands as one highly significant exception, basing the largest part of his Poetics on the empirical study of Greek tragedy. A recent instance is the case of critics and philosophers like Roger Fry and Ortega y Gasset, who felt called upon to explain and defend the new face of the arts early in the twentieth century. But in the philosophical literature these remain the exception rather than the rule. In fact, a strong impulse in recent aesthetics has been the influence generated by the interest in conceptual analysis. Here the limited area of discourse is staked out with attention confined to the meaning and significance of aesthetic concepts rather than to the materials and practices of the arts. This has led to self-defeating consequences for many since, as Morris Weitz claims to have shown, aesthetic theory is foredoomed to fail inasmuch as it is logically impossible to define the concept art. [2]
In contrast with such pessimistic allegations,
let us consider what may be a more promising alternative by taking an
empirical tack rather than a conceptual one. After
some brief reflections on the function of aesthetic theory, we shall develop
two constructive responses to the challenge thrust upon aesthetics by new
forms and movements in the contemporary arts.
The first of these responses arises out of the need to recognize the
consequences of recent artistic practice for concepts in traditional
aesthetics. The second is the need to
develop fresh concepts in aesthetics. These
new notions
[1] Arnold Berleant is professor of philosophy at
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must not only do a better job of accounting for
new art; they must also explain the data of past art more effectively than
traditional principles that originated not from an examination of art but as
the consequences of philosophic theories and assumptions that originated
independently of art.
What, to begin, is the point of aesthetic
theory? What is its function in
relation to the artistic activities in which people engage and the artistic
products that they fashion? These
questions can perhaps best be answered by turning first to the way in which
theories are used in areas other than art. Once
the typical function of theory becomes clearer, we can then inquire into its
proper use in connection with the arts.
In general, it is the task of any theory to
account for phenomena, and by accounting for them, to make experience more
understandable and consequently easier to achieve and control.
Whether the phenomena are falling objects, planetary motions, the
bending of light in interstellar space; whether they are fossil remains,
homologous forms among organisms, data about the distribution and modification
of biological species, the theories offered to account for such phenomena are
developed in creative interplay between the puzzlement that such data evoke
and the need to comprehend, and at times to function with and achieve control
over, these phenomena. Theorizing is
not primarily an attempt to define concepts unambiguously and to construct
coherent systems. Rather it is an
effort to identify, relate, and explain phenomena, an effort which proves
itself by its success in assimilating new data and by its fruitful
application. By first turning to those
experiences that both attract and puzzle us, theory defines the limits of
discussion by the relevance the phenomena have to our initial confusion.
Thus the theorist develops concepts
such as mass, force, motion, energy, organism, species, environment; he
discerns relationships, such as causality, natural selection; and he
elaborates the categories and structures that are most effective in dealing
with the issues with which he is coping, the data be is capable of acquiring,
and the success with which he can account for and control experience.
Thus it is to experience that we first
must turn (and with which we finally must end), and it is experience which
dictates the appropriate theoretical structures, meanings, and operations.
Aesthetic theory, in particular, has the task of
accounting for aesthetic phenomena. Its
purpose is to render the experiences of art and the aesthetic perception of
nature more understandable. This
it can do satisfactorily only by constructing conceptual tools which derive
directly from the arts and from aesthetic experience, and which return to
clarify and enhance our future experience by helping us to recognize, order,
and respond to it in ways that are appropriate to the phenomena.
This might appear to be a task that could be
undertaken in a straightforward fashion. Yet,
as philosophers are fond of observing, appearances are often deceptive, and in
this case no less so theoretically than perceptually.
Aesthetic theory has not been a
particularly fruitful region of philosophical inquiry, in part because of its
subjection to philosophical commitments unrelated to artistic practices, and
in part because of the complexity of these data themselves.
When we turn to the practices and
experiences of the arts, the fascination that we feel at first often turns
into bafflement, for the arts confront us with a disconcerting array of
materials and perceptual activities. And
when we look at the contemporary arts, this variety seems to take on the
character of a mélange. Aesthetics
seems at a loss to account in any coherent, systematic way for the use of
sharply new materials, such as plastic, acrylics, electronically produced
sounds; for novels and plays without plots, and for the deliberate elimination
of other devices of order from various arts. Even
the distinctions among the arts have broken down, and we are often unable to
decide where a new development belongs - whether, for example, environments
are sculpture or architecture; assemblages, paintings or sculptures;
happenings, theater, painting (as the outgrowth of action painting), or an
entirely new art form synthesizing elements of theater, sculpture,
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dance, painting, and music.
And within the arts, too, basic
distinctions fail to hold, for we are no longer able to draw the line between
design, decoration, illustration, and fine art, and between musical sound and
noise.
With this plethora of data, how can aesthetic
theory respond? Whatever answer it
makes, one thing is certain: it cannot legislate these data away.
The philosophy of art, if it is to
fulfill its function as theory, must account for these developments, not
discount them. Yet how are we to
proceed? Perhaps we can discover a
clue in the very source of our aesthetic confusion, the contemporary arts
themselves. What are these arts trying
to achieve? To what are they
appealing? How do they confront us?
What perceptual demands do they impose
upon us?
III – Emancipation of
Aesthetic Perception
A number of influences in the history of modern
aesthetics have, until fairly recently, moved art steadily away from any close
association with the objects, experiences, and appearances of the world of
things and events that surrounds us. The
romantic nineteenth century expressed in many different ways a concern with
individual sensibility: a proclamation of artistic independence, autonomy, and
self-sufficiency, especially in music, in painting, and in poetry.
With the introduction into painting of
abstraction approaching that of music, which spilled over into sculpture,
dance, and some of the other arts, and found its theoretical expression in the
doctrine known as formalism, that which is recognizable, realistic, suggestive
of life became by principle unessential and, indeed, distracting.
A survey of recent thought about art might then
seem to make secure the view that art has gradually and steadily emancipated
itself from features that can be seen as catering to the uncultivated
observer. The need for special
training, often long and technical, may seem unavoidable if one is to
appreciate the intricacies of some of the more esoteric movements in the arts
of our day. Here one thinks
perhaps of abstract expressionism in painting, serial and electronic music,
and the like.
Yet it may be possible to view developments such
as these as somewhat more distant expressions of a quite different tendency, a
constant dynamic in the direction of a remarkably intimate association of the
artistic experience with the forces and interests of the world outside of art.
There is a thread which runs through
the history of the arts since its earliest origins which must be taken with
the utmost seriousness. This is the
connection that objects and experiences of art have with the range of human
activity outside the artistic, with the forms and qualities of the cultural
environment. It is possible that
pursuing this strand we may achieve an illuminating way of viewing the
confusion and conflict that seem to prevail over the meaning and significance
of the contemporary arts for the history of the arts and for aesthetic theory.
For against the movement in recent
times of what might seem to be an ever greater autonomy and narrowing of the
arts, a trend has developed during the past several decades toward extending
the range of what we have been willing to accept as art.
This has happened too rapidly,
perhaps, for us to have been able yet to re-establish clear lines and limits
for comprehending our relationships to art.
With this extension of our aesthetic embrace has
come the need to reappraise our relations to those objects we have come to
call art and our ideas about these relationships.
For cherished doctrines have come into
question, and the validity of guiding principles has encountered serious
challenges. A challenge has been laid
down in particular to that set of related ideas that codify the distinctness
of art from life, ideas like the disinterested attitude for regarding art, the
removal of art from practical uses, and the deliberate deletion of all
non-artistic associations from artistic products.
It has been observed [3] that the
point in history at which the aesthetic attitude began to be characterized as
disinterested, that is the eighteenth century in England, coincided with the
point in history when modern aesthetics first emerged.
While this is certainly a suggestive
correspondence, it
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is worth asking further whether the
identification of an aesthetic attitude might not signify the point at which
men first began to recognize aesthetic experience as a distinct mode of
experience and attempted to locate that feature which makes it distinctive.
Yet assigning an identity to such a
mode of experience does not entail making it ontologically distinct, nor does
it necessarily commit us to a particular formulation of how it is expressed.
Rather, awareness of an aesthetic mode of experience emerges
historically as one event in the development of human perception and
awareness. And it was in the
eighteenth century that aesthetic perception finally emancipated itself from a
long tradition of subservience to ritualistic, utilitarian, and other
non-aesthetic modes of experience. [4]
It is possible, in fact, to trace a gradual
refinement and a clearer identity of aesthetics from that time forward,
culminating in the early decades of the twentieth century with the development
of the aesthetic of formalism. Here
the relevant features in the object are only the formal qualities which emerge
out of the materials and techniques of the particular art involved, and the
experience of art consists in an emotion peculiar to apprehending these formal
qualities. Once aesthetics and the
objects and experiences it elucidates achieved an identity of their own, it
might appear that the question of the connections of art with other human
activities and interests had been answered in favor of aesthetic isolation.
Important as this development was, it carried
the additional implication that the perceptual distinctness of aesthetic
experience meant the ontological discreteness of aesthetic perception and a
corresponding removal of the objects of such perception from the other objects
and activities which surround us. This
belief finds concrete expression in what one might call the “museum
mentality,” the compulsion to isolate the objects of art physically in order
to encourage us to isolate them perceptually.
This parallel between isolating the object and
disengaging our perception of it from practical associations may in fact be an
excessive reaction to the earlier subservience of the arts, in our search for
aesthetic identity and our discovery of the aesthetic mode of experience.
It may well be that the presence of an
aesthetic dimension in primitive artifacts and in religious ritual
does not signify merely a stage in the development toward an art unencumbered
by extraneous uses and associations. Rather
it may stand as an early phase of something that has always been present in
the arts in one form or another - the expression of the major role that the
arts play in the full range of human experience and of their function as
integrative forces in that experience. Rather
than assuming a strange and wonderful uniqueness, the object of art is a
product of what has always been a dimension of human life, although often
obscured and unaware. That dimension
is a vital and vibrant sensitivity to what is direct and qualitative in
experience, a role art shares in its own way with serious human
relationships and with objects of nature.
Thus for aesthetics and its objects to have an
identity does not entitle one to conclude that art is ontologically discrete,
set apart by its very nature from the rest of human experience.
Distinctive though art is, it
possesses an identity only within an underlying continuity of experience.
It is here, in fact, that an
examination of contemporary arts suggests an idea that is not limited to them
alone. The idea is simply this: The
traditional separation of art from the other activities and interests of men
is incapable of providing a convincing account of the experience of
contemporary arts. Indeed, such common
descriptions of the aesthetic attitude as being contemplative, disinterested,
employing psychical distance, isolating the object, all such accounts distort
the experience of the traditional arts as well as obscure their human
significance. Stated positively,
contemporary arts bring home to us the functional relation that holds between
all the participants in the experience of art - the creative artist, the
audience, the art object, and the performer - and they reaffirm the
connections between this experience and the experiences and concerns of men
outside the world of art. Let me
suggest how this has come about.
The historian of the arts is often im-
158
pressed with the ways in which the arts draw
upon changes in the conditions and quality of human life, and
how they mirror these changes in the perceptual forms peculiar to the arts.
Careful but suggestive studies have
revealed important relationships between, for example, Greek sculpture of the
fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Gothic architecture, Renaissance painting,
and characteristic qualities of experience that marked Hellenic humanism,
medieval spiritual aspiration, and the re-birth of secularism, naturalism, and
humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The same can be done with many of the
contemporary arts. Yet here the
discontinuity with the past history of the arts is rather more acute.
Of the many changes in cultural experience, two seem to have had
special significance for the arts. The
first is the rise of industrial production, which has transformed the
characteristic features that objects possess, and has led to the use of new
materials, objects, and techniques in artistic practice.
Second, there are the fundamental social changes that have come about
through increasing democratization, in particular the emergence of population
masses and a corresponding mass culture, generating new perceptual activities
and reaffirming a social function for the arts.
Together, new artistic materials and objects and new perceptual
activities have been embodied in some strikingly different forms and movements
in the arts themselves, and it is these that present the challenge to
aesthetics. In their negative
consequences the contemporary arts insist on the rejection of aesthetic
isolation; in their positive consequences they offer the opportunity for a
renewal of aesthetic relevance and for the reintegration of the arts into the
mainstream of contemporary culture.
Let us explore this functional exchange of the
activities of art with the fuller context of human experience by examining two
significant influences. I shall begin
by noting some ways in which new materials, objects, and techniques that arise
out of the technology of industrial production have entered into the art world
and have profoundly influenced the vocabulary and practice of artists.
Second, I shall attempt to discover
how certain fundamental social changes in the modern world have come to shape
our perceptual activities in the arts into new and different forms.
Finally, I shall try to assess the
implications these developments carry for aesthetic theory that tries, as
theory should, to account for these changes.
IV – Art & the Industrial
Revolution
It would be strange indeed to suppose that so
sensitive a cultural barometer as the arts would alone of all the dimensions
of modern civilization be unaffected by the industrial transformation of
modern society. What is in fact most
surprising is how powerful traditional ways of making and enjoying art have
been able to persist so long without serious change.
But now that such changes are upon us,
we find it as difficult to explain them in traditional terms as to account for
the power of a nuclear generator by the principle of the lever.
Industrialism has transfigured the object of art just as it has
transformed the other articles of human invention.
Yet in what ways?
One can with little difficulty single out
features that are typical of art objects of the past, features that arise in
large measure from the fact that these articles were produced by skilled
craftsmen using relatively simple hand tools. [5]
Such objects
combined workmanship that was intricate, a design unique to the object, and
rarity and expensiveness that were the result of the large quantity of labor
required to produce a small output. Because
of their manner of production, traditional art objects possessed signs of
human workmanship and fallibility, displaying considerable irregularity, and
providing maximum opportunity for unstudied, intuitive decisions in the
process of fashioning them. And since
these art objects performed a variety of functions, such as contributing to
religious worship or recording people and events, artists were forced to
accept severe limitations on their choice of subject matter, in their
ability to abstract, and on the sorts of audience responses they could evoke.
Yet at the same time the celebratory
character of the fine arts, associated as they were with ritual and
159
with various forms of social privilege,
encouraged the development of a sharp distinction between the practical
activities of men, which demanded an unqualified commitment to utility, and
the artistic activities of aesthetic enjoyment, which were cut off from
practical affairs and regarded for their own intrinsic worth.
Along with such regard went a sharply defined difference between the
objects of utility and objects of beauty. Art
objects, then, were treated with special care.
They were treasured, honored for their age and for the status they
conferred on their patron or owner, and safeguarded as possessing value that
was inherent and permanent. Moreover,
these were not only descriptive features of past art; they carried in addition
a powerful normative connotation. It
was just such traits that art was expected to possess.
Industrialism has changed all this.
It has generated an entire set of new
features in the things that surround us, and these traits have been reflected
in the objects that are emerging out of the contemporary arts.
In place of unique objects which
possess an intricate structure produced in small numbers and at great cost, we
now have uniform articles manufactured in enormous quantities having
simplicity of design and economy of price. The
irregularity, and fallibility, the intuitive manner by which they were
formerly fashioned are giving way to a flawless precision governed by careful
calculation. And in place of objects
treasured for their age and permanence, we value instead the newness of things
that are expendable in the light of changes and improvements.
Like the traits of traditionally produced art,
these new features have also assumed the character of aesthetic standards, and
have given birth to new materials, objects, and techniques of artistic
production. The emancipation of the
arts from subservience to historical accuracy and religious devotion has
encouraged their propensity to abstraction, while at the same time their
integration into the traffic of daily life has replaced the isolated object of
art with one integrated through its function into the course of ordinary human
activity. Artists are making free use
of materials from the new technology, like plastic, acrylics, machine parts,
electronic sounds, and foam rubber. They
are taking up everyday articles and situations, like newspapers, kitchen
utensils, factory work and assembly lines, and theater marquees.
They are utilizing impermanent
materials, like tree leaves, paper, light, balloons, and elements of mass
culture produced by or taken from this new technology, such as comic strips
and street noises. They are drilling
and welding, dripping and splashing, transfiguring recorded sounds, splicing
tapes, and composing by computer.
Yet behind the use of the materials, objects,
and techniques of an industrial culture lies the inspiration of the science
and technology that have produced it. This
is hardly recent, and we sometimes overlook how responsive many of the arts
have long been to the material transformation of the modern world.
We forget how Georges Seurat, Paul
Signac, and Henri-Edmond Cross, in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, developed pointillisme as a method of producing paintings
which drew upon the mechanical techniques of technology, the analytic method
of scientific inquiry, and the principles of optics.
We fail to recall how Zola regarded
the novel as the model of a scientific experiment and transformed the novelist
into an observer and an experimentalist, and how the naturalistic novel at
the same time responded to the ideas of evolutionary biology and revealed
the conditions of an emerging industrial society.
Science and technology have continued to
exercise a profound influence on theories of artistic production and on their
results. Léger and the cubists went
from the geometry of the machine to the geometrization of nature.
Gropius and the Bauhaus discovered in
the machine the modern medium and principles of design.
More recently, painters have applied
scientific concepts and terminology to their work, as with optical artists
associated with the Nouvelle Tendance, who create uniform patterns of
many small geometric units that they call “periodic structures,” and speak of
elements of their works as “information” and of their
160
compositional arrangement as “programming.”
Composers, too, have responded in
similar ways when they term the musical score “time-space,” and use graphs,
statistical charts, symbolic codings, and laws and formulas from mathematics
and the physical sciences. Technological
tools like the computer and the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer have been
used, and recording, especially on magnetic tape, has rendered the performer
assistance and, at times, has made him obsolete.
Recording techniques, in fact, have transformed
the musical object by the variety of ways in which it can be
manipulated, such as through the balance of microphones, echo chambers, and
multi-track recordings. It can
even be said that recording has turned music into a group product, the results
of collaboration between the composer, the performer, and the engineer.
As a result, the requirements of
performance have so changed that recorded music has become a rather different
art from live music. Tempos,
for example, are regularly taken faster in recordings to help eliminate dead
spots. Whereas in a live performance
one can observe the player preparing during a pause for what will
follow, the visual spectacle obviously does not exist in a recording and this
pause must be “filled in” by pushing ahead to the next notes.
Moreover the technical excellence of
recorded performances results from and conveys a mechanical achievement.
The music does not live and grow as a
freshly recreative act; it is instead run off like the product of a machine
that it is.
Mechanical precision and standardization have
also come in for acceptance from other directions, as when minimal, optical,
and some pop artists use repeated patterns and mathematical exactness of line
and arrangement. Even when objects of
contemporary art appear to deny some of these features, such as may occur with
Happenings and Pop art, they are still most understandable as commentaries on
and reactions to industrialism in the arts and the mass commercial culture
that has accompanied it, rather than as spontaneous developments with no
direct origin. [6] The Industrial
Revolution has finally reached the arts.
While it is true that the mechanization of the
arts diminishes the personal creative element, this is not a sign of the
intrinsic failure of technology. It
may rather suggest new forms and directions to creative imagination.
Recording techniques, for instance,
may lead to new types of musical composition, as indeed they have already
begun to do, utilizing the opportunities that recording and sound equipment
offer. There are parallels here in
other contemporary arts. Traditional
techniques of sculpture, for example, employ a craft technology in which the
individual sculptor designs and executes his own marble from the crude
unshaped block of stone. As bronze
became a desirable material, the sculptor began to produce wax or clay models
from which molds were made and bronze cast by artisan casters.
The point has now been reached at
which sculptors not only have others cast bronzes from their models but have
them make sheet metal sculptures from small paper cut-outs (as Picasso has
done), build large constructions from designs and sketches (as in the case of
David Smith), and utilize, sometimes simply by selecting and mounting, the
prefabricated products, new and discarded, of an industrial technology (as in
the work of the dadaists, constructivists, and junk sculptors).
Yet probably the most striking and suggestive
parallel is in the transformation given the dramatic arts by the advent of
photography and the motion picture. While
a traditional performing art has continued to function, albeit more weakly and
with less influence and smaller audiences, a new technology has created a new
art in which the actual movement and discourse of people has been replaced by
images fixed on a celluloid strip and shown in rapid succession so as to
create the illusion of movement. The
old rapport between actors and audience is replaced by a film audience which
enters a new world, loses touch with itself, and by superb mechanical
contrivance is able to dispense with the conventional illusions so
necessary to the proper appreciation of traditional theater.
It might
161
indeed be said in the case of the film that
technology has helped us achieve a fuller humanity.
V – Art & Social Change
This transformation of the materials and objects
of art through the pervasive influence of industrialism has been paralleled by
new perceptual activities that are the result of fundamental social changes.
Here the relationship is still
somewhat obscure, although the different manner of response is an established
fact. Aristocratic art has had to
respond to increasing democratization; no longer is art fit only for kings.
Demographic isolation has given way to
enormous population masses, and local and regional cultures have retreated
before the onslaught of mass culture that has radically altered the size and
type of audiences, and the communication, production, distribution, and
consumption of art. Out of these
changes a new mode of perceiving art has emerged.
There is vastly greater inclusiveness in
experiencing art, both in the type and range of perceptual qualities and in
the objects admitted to aesthetic perception.
We are asked to perceive the interaction of color areas arranged in
stripes or panels, with virtually no other pictorial quality present in a
visually important way. We are asked
to discriminate among the subtle gradations of value in monochromatic
canvases. The frequency range of the
sounds we encounter has been greatly expanded through the use of electronic
instruments. We are blinded by lights,
startled by mirrors, inflamed by dance, transported in fascinated absorption
by film. We walk through sculptures,
readjust our sense of spatial order in environments and in daring
architectural structures, sit alongside the actors in a theatrical or dance
performance. We are made to view the
sacrilegious, the obscene, the mundane, the commercial; to hear the sound of
traffic, of water dripping from a leaky faucet; to vibrate bodily from the
impact of intense volumes or cringe before the physical force of high
frequencies.
Not only have the contemporary arts vastly
extended the range of the traditional aesthetic senses and objects; they are
drawing upon sensory capacities never before allowed (or at least recognized).
Certainly the appeal to the tactile
and kinesthetic senses represents a major shift in expanding the limits of
aesthetic perception. Along with the
enlargement of our sensory responsiveness has come the breakdown of aesthetic
prohibitions, and none is more significant than that against the sensual. [7]
It is easier, however, to be a visual spiritualist than a tactile one,
and with the inclusion of the contact senses, the presence of the erotic has
been admitted and intensified in large regions of aesthetic experience, such
as dance, sculpture, and the novel.
This enlargement of aesthetic sensibility has
produced, I think, at least two major shifts in the perceptual experience of
the contemporary arts. First,
there is the deliberate elimination of perceptual discrimination between the
principal participants in aesthetic experience.
The art object has imposed itself
inescapably upon the audience through the use of many new devices.
These include electronically amplified
music of deafening volume (as in Robert Joffrey’s ballet Astarte), the
blinding flash of spotlights on the audience, the entrance of actors and
dancers through the audience, indeed at times from the audience,
environments into which one enters or through which one passes, sculptures and
assemblages containing mirrors or polished, reflecting surfaces which
incorporate the viewer into the work both as image and as participant through
the very act of perceiving it, direct addresses to the theater audience
instead of mere asides, and optical art which twists the eyes into painfully
futile conformity. In the case of
plotless films, the visual movement alone does not give shape to the passage
of time. A dramatic element is
necessary, and it is only through the participation of the viewer that this
dramatic factor is introduced. In a
similar way the creative artist and the object have been integrated, as in
action painting; the creator and the perceiver have joined, as in some forms
of modern and folk dance; and the performer has been assimilated with all the
others, as in Happenings.
A second shift in perceptual experience
162
consists in the deliberate integration of
features from ordinary life into art.
The relationship between life and art has always powered the novel, [8]
but it has become a main theme in a good deal of contemporary art.
One of the most striking ways in which
art is made to reflect these features is through the use of chance elements.
Aleatoric music, action painting,
literary works (such as by Mallarmé), which require the reader to choose from
among alternative endings, all incorporate this trait of ordinary experience
in an artistic format.
Another way in which art and life are integrated
lies in using the materials of everyday life, such as prosaic events and
commonplace objects. Here many
instances come to mind. There is the
music of John Cage, who is responsive to sounds of all sorts and considers any
kind of noise as musical material. There
are Happenings, which not only synthesize all the elements of the aesthetic
field into a creative activity but deliberately draw their themes and
materials from the ongoing course of ordinary life and from industrial objects
and activities. Cage, himself an
influence on the development of Happenings, has observed that “one could view
everyday life itself as theater.” Here
the audience is a part of the work - the spectators are drawn into the action
and, in one way or another, are forced to respond to a new environment, to a
strange adventure, to a parody of customary things and events.
The Happening may be reaching its
fullest extension in Regis Debray, who regards a revolution as a coordinated
series of guerilla Happenings. Some of
his admirers, in fact, take part in Happenings, feeling that they are training
for future happenings when they will use guns and grenades.
One thinks here of Wilde’s dictum that
Life imitates Art. There are objets
trouvées used in collages and sculpture which intentionally draw in
associations from prosaic sources of the most unlikely sorts, leading to
parody, satire, or direct criticism of social traits, as well as to an
enhanced awareness of one’s daily environment.
There is the contemporary dance of Merce Cunningham and others, who
choreograph their work using the materials of ordinary activities and
commonplace gestures, as in Cunningham’s “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and
Run,” which, incidentally, employs music written by Cage.
This interplay with the conditions of
daily experience has long been engaged in by the film, and nowhere with such
intensity as in much of the contemporary cinema, with its intimacy of
ordinary detail. The film, in
portraying real surfaces with free movement in time and space, is an
artistic medium that approaches the directness and randomness of life.
Pop art, too, has seized on the
intimate relation between art and life. [9]
Robert Rauschenberg
denies, for example, any division between Sacred Art and Profane Life, and
insists on working “in the gap between the two.”
Indeed, as he once remarked, “There is
no reason not to consider the world one gigantic painting.”
Theater, too, has joined the other
arts here. Everything is a fitting
subject, and in the most candid, graphic terms, from liberalism and race
relations to homosexuality, deformity, marital problems, and the sex act.
The distancing logic of a plot has
receded and in its place appear phenomenologically the ordinary details
of life which we never trouble to notice, as the series of movements by which
a man sits in a chair, a woman handles a cup or moves her lips.
Pinter is a master of this.
Dramatic shape is replaced by the
mystery of the mundane, and instead of resting on a structure that the
playwright has provided, we must move on the crest of our own attention. [10]
All this illustrates what has become a motif in
a good deal of twentieth-century art - a deliberate dethroning of art and its
re-integration into the course of normal human activity, giving the
contemporary arts both a humanistic and a diabolical aspect.
The childlike, the primitive, the
fantastic and dreamlike, the utterly simple have appeared in painting,
sculpture, and film, accompanied by their obverse, the grotesque, the brutal,
the perverted. Gone is the ideal of
beauty and in its place appears the mundane and subterranean.
Music, dance, and the plastic arts
have joined the other arts in a kind of theater of life in which we are told
nothing and presented everything.
There is another way in which art has
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become integrated with the lived environment,
and nowhere is it more apparent than in the two arts which perhaps more than
any others embody the artistic vitality of the present, architecture and the
film. Renoir once commented that
“Painting, like carpentry or iron work, is a craft and as such, subject to the
same rules.” That the arts are
technology, involving, with etymological literalness, a joining, fitting
together, is something that artists have always known.
But it is in modern architecture and
the film, offspring of our industrial technology, that this integration has
asserted itself most impressively.
Both architecture and film embody an aesthetics of function, the one an
explicit concourse for human activity, [11] the other an absorbing reflection
and commentary on it. The steel and
glass skyscraper is a mechanical building, a “machine pure and simple,” as
Frank Lloyd Wright called it, and has a reflexive force as both the embodiment
of industrial activity and a monument to industrial power.
Gropius compares the low-ceilinged
air-conditioned cells of the modern skyscraper with the low-ceilinged humid
cells that form the remainder of the Gothic cathedral.
As the latter reminded man of his
humble position before God, so the former reminds him of his humble condition
before the dollar. By stressing the
continuity between the technological aspect of artistic production and the
functional aspect of the social uses of the arts, the arts have again
reaffirmed their affiliation with the basic activities of human life.
Thus in a multitude of ways the
aristocratic diffidence of the traditional arts has given way to democratic
acceptance and involvement.
VI –
Aesthetics & The Changing Nature of the Arts
We come, finally, to the significance for
aesthetics of these developments that have transformed the arts.
As I noted at the outset, we cannot
ignore these data, however confusing or distressing they prove to be for our
artistic comfort and our aesthetic tranquility.
Nor can we legislate them away by
appealing to traditional concepts and principles.
At the same time, by setting ourselves
to account for them we need make no prior commitment to their value.
Great achievements in the arts appear
in the same modes as lesser ones, and it is our task at this juncture to
explain rather than to judge.
Once we acknowledge this, we must further
recognize that a new aesthetics must be developed, one which by its greater
breadth and generality can account for the contemporary arts while at the same
time absorb the traditional ones as limited cases.
It is perhaps too soon to set forth a
theory of the contemporary arts now. Yet
it is possible, nonetheless, to suggest the outlines within which an
aesthetics of the contemporary arts will probably take shape.
We meet, on the one hand, the demand to cast off
the shackles of traditional restraints, and this takes the form of a series of
denials. There is the denial of the
importance of unity and harmony, at least as these are restricted in their
application to the art object. Such
aesthetic standards (of formal beauty, really) contribute to the independence,
indeed to the isolation, of the art object. The
relevance of these standards must now be to the entire aesthetic situation and
to how the object functions in that situation, rather than to the art object
alone. [12] Then there is
the rejection of the ideal as the end of art.
Gone is the standard of beauty, and in its place are standards of
considerably greater breadth and inclusiveness.
There is also the denial of distance
and of the contemplative attitude which thrives under conditions of aesthetic
aloofness. And perhaps most
significant, there is the denial of disinterestedness and of the consequences
this notion has had in quarantining the art object from creative interplay
with the ongoing concerns of human living. Along
with this, too, has come a reection of the notion that art is unique, and a
scoffing at the “museum mentality,” and those institutional arrangements and
attitudes designed to safeguard that uniqueness.
Yet coupled with these denials of traditional
restrictions have appeared some powerful affirmations.
One of these, as we have seen, centers
on the continuity between art
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and life. An
aesthetics of function has emerged which draws sustenance from this
connection, and which extends the domain of artistic accomplishment with
Greenough to the sailing ship and with Marmnetti to the speeding automobile
and beyond them to the skyscraper and the modern city.
Along with functionalism has come the
temporalizing of all the arts, seeing art as process rather than as stasis, so
that even the so-called spatial arts have either adopted movement, as in the
case of kinetic sculpture; have taken on the semblance of movement, as in op
art; or in one fashion or another have insinuated themselves into the ongoing
course of experience.
This activity of the art object contributes to
the second positive feature of the new aesthetics, the perceptual integration
of all the elements in the aesthetic situation into the procession of a
unified experience. Not only have the
distinctions between the creator of art, the aesthetic perceiver, the art
object, and the performer been obscured; their functions have tended to
overlap and merge as well, becoming continuous in the course of aesthetic
experience.
These observations suggest the need for new
concepts, for a theoretical vision which is able to encompass the broader
extension of the arts, their fuller integration into the other activities of
men, and their greater generality and inclusiveness
Such a concept may perhaps be found in
the notion of the aesthetic field, which delineates the functional
relationship that holds among the participants in aesthetic events and which
identifies the basic referent in aesthetic discussions as a general field of
experience instead of the more restrictive object, perceiver, or artist.
But this is really a subject for
another paper, and this one contains enough that is controversial for one
occasion.
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[1] Earlier, shorter versions of this paper were read at meetings of the Long Island Philosophical Society on
[2] M. Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,”
JAAC, 15 (Sept. 1956): 27-35. This
has been widely reprinted, most recently in Problems in Criticism of the
Arts, ed. H. G. Dufileld (San Francisco, 1968), together with several
critical replies, including one by the present author.
[3] Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of
‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” JAAC, 20 (Winter 1961): 131-44.
[4] “Up to the time of Kant, a philosophy of
beauty always meant an attempt to reduce our aesthetic experience to an alien
principle and to subject art to an alien jurisdiction.
Kant in his Critique of Judgment
was the first to give a clear and convincing proof of the autonomy of
art.” Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man
(Garden City, N.Y., 1956), p. 176.
[5] This discussion derives in part from the
highly suggestive observations of Lewis Mumford. Cf. Technics and
Civilization (New York, 1934), parts of which have been reprinted in M.
Rader, ed., A Modern Book of Aesthetics, 3rd ed. (New York, 1960), pp.
354-64.
[6] Cf. J. P. Hodin, “The Aesthetics of Modem
Art,” JAAC, 26 (Winter 1967): 184-85.
[7] Cf. my “The Sensuous and the Sensual in
Aesthetics,” JAAC, 23 (Winter 1964): 185-92.
[8] George Lukacs, for example, distinguishes
between ecstasy, which involves a radical break with everyday life, and
aesthetic catharsis, in which there is a ‘streaming back and forth.”
Cf. V. Maslow, “Lukacs’ Man-Centered
Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 27 (June 1967):
545-46, and notes.
[9] John Cage has noted that pop art takes its style and subject matter from the world of commerce and advertising, a setting devoted to making one go out and buy, and disengages such material from this context. Still, the practical claim persists, and it is from this that pop art derives its satirical relevance. Cf. “An Interview with John Cage,” Tulane Drama Review, 10 (Winter 1965): 66. “More,” Cage has observed, “the obligation - the morality, if you wish - of all the arts today is to intensify, alter perceptual awareness and, hence, consciousness. Awareness and consciousness of what? Of the real material world. Of the things we see and hear and taste and touch.” “We Don’t Any Longer Know Who I Was,” an interview with Cage, New York Times,
[10] Cf. Walter Kerr, ‘The Theater of Say It! Show It! What Is It!” New York Times Magazine,
[11] A good discussion of this occurs in John
Dewey’s Art as Experience (New York, 1934), pp. 290-92.
[12] Cf. Art as Experience and D. W.
Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order (New York, 1962), among other books.
A systematic attempt to develop a
contextualist aesthetic along the lines sketched out in part V of this paper
appears in my Aesthetic Experience (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C
Thomas, 1970).
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