Bu John Chmaj
[Remember, “art” and “art works” stand for any medium – there’s not a better word for this so I will use this general word, in a general context. “Painting” is a form of art. So it music, theater, sculpture, etc. You’ll get used to it.]
Introduction
Our experience of the world is at once objectively sensory and subjectively emotional. We draw meaning from our experience through the interplay of external events and internal correspondences. Aesthetic, or artistic experience, the experience of deeper meaning, truth and beauty, is particularly rich and complex, as it draws deeply from both subtle sensory experiences as well as the complete range of correspondences and responses available to our consciousness.
As such the experience of art is a direct synthesis of experience into meanings. Furthermore, the range of aesthetic sensory events, vocabulary of expression and range of internal correspondences varies highly from culture to culture, person to person, even moment to moment. This makes any generalized description of art, truth and beauty difficult. There is no ONE artistic truth, or truthful approach to absorbing meanings, much less defining what those meanings are.
However, this does not mean that the patterns of common experience, layers of aesthetic consciousness, or symbols and mechanisms of artistic expression cannot be explored and circumscribed. Art is among the great, if not THE greatest, languages of human history. It is our way to communicate our internal and external experiences to each other through the language of experience itself. So, as John Dewey so aptly described, art IS experience. It is a natural, inherent one – children begin creative expressive construction almost as soon as they are capable as a way of processing and clarifying their understanding of the world. We accept art and music as a natural accompaniment to places and events. We celebrate it as part of who we are.
We process the world in a large sense through the language of art. Yet very little attention (or TOO much in some academic circles) is given to this natural, fundamental way we experience and express the world. We commonly over-simplify our tastes, or give them little thought beyond what already surrounds us, which leads to ‘aesthetic atrophy’ (a myopic, stereotyped, walled-in view of what experiences are acceptable). “I only like rock ‘n roll”, or “THAT’S not music” are common ways we limit our experience to what’s comfortable or known. Or we can tend towards ‘aesthetic snobbery’, which is itself a form of atrophy: defining a potentially deep but very specific range of experiences as “art”, and only focusing on the aspects within that range that we define as meaningful. Whole tomes of aesthetic analysis have been written about “great” art that are often insightful, but also erudite, complex, and all but impenetrable to any but those who have the same complex vocabulary and set of aesthetic parameters to work from. To this day I marvel at the amount of time people have spent writing whole books on symphonic or other complex compositional music, in a definitive fashion, as if the experience of the patterns and language of that music could comprehensively be captured. Also as if anyone would really want to grovel through all that as a way to experience the music itself, for themselves. While art can often be rich and complex, the experience of it is a simple, direct affair we experience every day. It is neither incomprehensible nor easily captured in words.
Our goal is not to enumerate, judge or otherwise define the range of what constitutes art, or even what constitutes a good or bad aesthetic experience. What’s most interesting to explore about aesthetic experience are its building blocks, and how they play out to create the patterns and symbols that create meaning for us. If we can better grasp and notice how certain sensory patterns impact us, and what OUR correspondences are, we can derive deeper meaning and enjoyment from our artistic experience. It can also help us be more deeply creative in our own artistic endeavors.
We have layered so many cultural definitions over art that the basic value and goodness of the experience can easily be lost. I’m no anthropologist, but I get the sense that so-called ‘primitive’ cultures had a clearer and better understanding of the place of art in human affairs than we do. They understood it as a natural fabric of the culture, and used it where it hds the most impact – to explain why we are here, what we should value, and how to celebrate and impact the world around us. It often feels as if ‘modern’ culture has sequestered and either deified or commoditized art. We’ve stuck art in museums, bars, churches, created whole mythologies of the ‘great artiste’, the ‘superstar’, the ‘troubled genius’, the ‘good ol’ boys’, you name it. Somehow we’ve tried to DEFINE where and how art should be appreciated in relationship to the other cultural institutions we’ve built, instead of working from the cultural ‘primitive’s’ premise, that art is the language of our culture itself, and as such part and parcel of our human fabric throughout. But all this doesn’t really address how we see, and feel, and how we can see, hear and feel even more deeply. So let’s leave as much of our cultural baggage at the door as we can, and just ask ourselves the basic question: what IS this natural, beautiful, powerful and meaningful process we go through as we experience aesthetically?
Aesthetic experience is neither tied to any art form, style or approach, nor is it even tied to art. “Aesthetic experience” as I describe it here is any situation where we go beyond a basic sensory experience or thought and begin to associate and develop deeper meanings about the world, and about ourselves, through our experience. One often has such experiences amidst nature, when the power and grandeur of a natural setting transcends the sights and sounds around us, and we begin to feel a deeper harmony. Such environments welcome the more open, associative and symbolic state of attention that draws out meanings. But one can also have an aesthetic experience in a supermarket, or on a bus. It’s not the place but one’s state of mind that largely drives what comes from experience. As we begin to explore the layers of perception that drive our aesthetic experience it should become clear how much of it is up to us: to our ability to be attentive, receptive and creative about what we’re seeing or hearing. Great art has been written about sparrows, and about the Glory of God, and everything in between. The subject matter is just one of the tools of expression.
And yet, even after a complete examination of the facets of expression and ways in which we might draw meaning, art and the process of creativity will largely remain a mystery. That’s as it should be – it’s one of the attributes and gifts of art that its meanings shift, that no one meaning can forever be pinned down, that artistic experience itself is a living, evolving thing. All we can really do is be grateful for the opportunity to share in the journey, and for those of us who want to experience even more deeply, that we find ways to extend our capabilities to ‘speak its language’, and so participate in that sacred dialogue between artist and observer. One of the fundamental tenets of the philosophy espoused here is that the observer is a critical, necessary part of the cycle of artistic communication. If a sonata is played in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, in this sense it does NOT make a sound – other than to the performers as their own audience(!) And so, without trying to deify, over-analyze, stereotype or otherwise define WHAT art means, let’s explore HOW it creates meaning for us. In doing so we should hopefully find out a bit more about ourselves, and ideally expand the ways in which we can enjoy one of our most important sources of communication and expression.
Thesis
Aesthetic experience is multi-faceted. It takes place in multiple layers, or dimensions of consciousness.
These layers exist simultaneously in experience, and can be channeled in and out at any point:
• The Sensory layers concern the immediate impact and interpretation of the experience of color, line, rhythm, tone, etc. An immediate experience or set of experiences that in themselves can have emotive power and meaning.
• The Analytic (Associative) layers are deeper mental activity in the Sensory dimension, where the patterns and parameters of experience are digested and further rendered to the observer. Form, language, style, association with other known works and patterns occur here. Fundamentally leverage’s the minds reflective power over time to synthesize experiences.
Additional ‘cultural contextualization’ can occur in relating the patterns and “DNA” of specific works within known styles of art, contemporary trends, and cultural memes and language. Art often draws from, refers to, and evolves known stylistic symbols and gestures. These are often rapidly identified through association and used to effectively interpret and organize perceptions (e.g. “that’s the blues” immediately implies a musical vocabulary, rhythmic styles, forms, even lyrical patterns…)
• The Emotional layers are subjective but also relatively immediate – the energies, gestures, moods, vocabularies of expression common to the work and familiar to the observer/participant generate internal subjective responses. Memories, environment of observation, related experiences also play a part in the subjective experience, linking to the observers’ past and present interpretation of reality.
• The Holistic layers concern the perception of whole meanings – generalized, perhaps non-linguistic forms of understanding, such as archetypal symbols, fundamental emotions, spiritual messages/meanings. This is our sense of the meaning of a work as a whole: what it is communicating to us. At this level of perception we are synthesizing and processing all of our experience thematically, to add up our understanding.
In actual experience perceptions flow to, through and among these layers organically, as our attention moves from moment to meaning, from event to pattern, from objective real-time events to subjective, reflective associations. The senses, mind, heart and soul interact with each other, as the art work acts on them. There are also infinite gradations of attentiveness, that themselves suggest varieties of participation of aesthetic perception in one’s current reality. Sometimes the art work serves as a springboard for reverie, in which case it triggers memories, moods, ideas that themselves become the object of contemplation and remembrance. In another less present state, the art can serve as a backdrop for a class of perceptions – for example, putting Bach on can create a backdrop for well-ordered, fugual thinking while one works, or gentle new age washes of sound can create the background of calm and flow best for a medical office.
Artistic perception can also drive much deeper absorption, both in the work, and often at the same time, deeper into one’s own self-reflection. Deep spiritual experiences, emotions, and insights can occur when an artwork ‘penetrates the soul’ – when the correspondences are so powerful, and the perceptions so strong, that one is literally swept into a deeper state of consciousness, of Presence. At that point a wider, fuller range of fundamental experiences are possible – art has stimulated a semi-mystical state.
While we KNOW when we are affected by a work of art, or what we like, often we have a hard time explaining why, or having any explicit understanding of what’s happening when we’re engaged in that experience. There are several reasons that aesthetic experience can be a slippery thing to comprehend or describe:
• We are not much trained to attend to or process the elements of our experience, especially in today’s high-speed, attention-parceled communications-heavy world. To develop deeper, multi-faceted experiences offered by works of art requires a level of absorption and attention to the work, a capacity for self-reflection even in the midst of powerful immediate experiences: the ability to apply ones’ experience and education to interpret a work without losing connection with the experience it provides as it happens.
• Many of the elements of such experience are non-verbal – they appeal and resonate with emotions, general ideas or symbols, or perhaps abstract memories or associations. The more holistic and emotional elements of aesthetic experience exist in a different dimension of time, or perhaps out of time. Holistic, archetypal energies such as “sacred”, or emotions such as “angry”, etc., are hard to quantify and define. Of course, much of the POINT of art is to give expression and embodiment to these holistic elements of our experience, precisely through non-verbal communication. But explaining exactly how one feels ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’ beyond that moment of experience can be quite hard to pin down using the tools of discursive language.
• The mind tends to process the layers of aesthetic experience simultaneously, and leverage experiences from each layer to validate or complete understandings and interpretations in other layers. Just as we try to think through every specific thing we’ve seen en route to a location to construct a complete mental model of a path from one point to another, our minds use our sensory and analytic reflections to validate our emotional and holistic associations, which in turn can spawn further sensory and analytic reflections. Often times a work of art’s greatest contribution (and intention) is to spawn this internal dialogue with its observers. Once this loop of inner mental activity initiates, however, it becomes harder and harder to cleanly disambiguate ones’ internal assumptions and additions/embellishments from experiences purely engendered by the work of art. This is a good thing – the work of art is communicating – but summarizing and describing how this all takes place can be difficult, if not impossible, especially due to the non-verbal nature of much of the communication described as factor #2.
• Even when we are capable of identifying and describing specific elements in any layer, our understanding of the forms, vocabularies and conventions of a work may be limited and thus limit our ability to better and more completely comprehend how they work together to sustain an artists’ meaning. Here is where arts education helps to provide tools to help us process both the cultural and technical focus of particular works, so as to help us completely and clearly identify the thrust and elements of works of particular mediums, styles and/or artists. However, such tools can become an empty shell of understanding in themselves without the personal commitment to take in works of art into our own souls, and process how the artist is speaking towards understanding that message for ourselves.
To summarize, works of art can be powerful, critically important elements that represent our contribution to the human experience. They are both how we reflect ourselves, and reflect on ourselves. As such they serve as gateways to deeper understanding of our own experience as well as those of artists of every time and era. They are the distillation of our culture, who we are and how we are, which is why they are so highly revered. In our time, artistic endeavors and experiences continue to be highly valued but have become progressively separated from our mainstream activities as core aspects of our capabilities and education as human beings. Thus the ability for educational programs to cut arts programming, as if it were an auxiliary, not fundamental, set of capacities for all humans to engage in.
At the same time, the tools and technologies available to enhance and extend the reach of artistic expression and education have never been greater. We have only to revisit these principles of artistic understanding, give them the focus and priority alongside all other facets of human experience we have elevated to 21st century rendering, and provide platforms and methods for people to create, process and share their aesthetic experiences, and we can deepen and extend our internal and shared capacity for art, as well as widen the works we can engage with and with whom we share these experiences.