The Performing Arts in Western Civilization

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The Performing Arts in Western Civilization

• New York University

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Housekeeping (3/10/05)

• Quote(s) of the day
• All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my
  hand.
• I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at
  any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the
  Renaissance.
• Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the
  same time. I think I've forgotten this before.
• -- Steven Wright

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Agenda - 3/10/05

• Papers Returned - Comments
• The Origin of the Work of Art
• An Eclectic Analysis

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• REVIEW
• Edmund Husserl

• KANT ? HEGEL ? BRENTANO ? HUSSERL ? HEIDEGGER
• Phenomenology as pure investigation into the
  nature and content of consciousness Logical
  Investigations (1901-13)
• Back to the things themselves.
• Building on the works of Kant, Hegel, and
  Brentano, Husserl was determined to provide
  phenomenology with a viable method of
  analysisthe Phenomenological Reduction

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The Phenomenological Reduction

• Epoche - The suspension of the natural attitude.
  During this step, the analyst attempts to bracket
  out all previous assumptions or prejudices
  connected to the work
• Eidetic (Essence) - An attempt by the analyst to
  engage the essential characteristics of the work.
  This type of engagement will never be referential
  or formal in nature.

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Husserl (contd)

• 1913 - IDEAS - Husserl begins to discuss the
  Transcendental Ego which would enable one to rise
  above ones own experience and develop apodictic
  knowledge. Essentially a retreat back into
  Psychologism (subject at the center)
• Husserl thus creates a philosophical singularity
  by attempting to bifurcate the transcendental
  mind from human consciousness.

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Husserls Later Phenomenology

• Cartesian Meditations (1931)
• Exhibits a steady development from his earlier
  works.
• The problem of accounting for the Other (other
  egos) is engaged.
• Ultimately concedes the existence of communities
  of egos which form cultural bonds through common
  values and associations.
• Within this discussion, Husserl articulates his
  conception of the Lebenswelt or life-world.
• Lebenswelt
• Points to the concrete reality of a life-world in
  which the intersubjective community of my ego
  and other egos co-exist.
• Includes nature and all that is physical in the
  world.
• In Crisis, continues to develop this idea.

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Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)KANT ? HEGEL ?
BRENTANO ? HUSSERL ? HEIDEGGER Heideggers
Hermeneutic Phenomenology

• Builds on the foundations established by Husserl.
• Moves away from the Husserlian concept of
  Transcendental Ego.
• His addition of Historical Relativism creates a
  radical change in Phenomenology.
• Descriptions are never pure, but rather, are
  marked by an interpretation rooted in the
  analysts historic tradition.

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Heidegger (contd)

• For Heidegger, the question, What is Being?
  must be prefaced by an analysis of human
  existence.
• Heidegger ultimately concludes that a
  philosophical resolution of this question is not
  possible.
• Influenced by Husserl, Heidegger begins to look
  back to Aristotle and the Greek thinkers in their
  understanding of aletheia - the unconcealedness
  of what is present.

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1st Bifurcation (revisited)

• The Allegory of the Cave (Plato)
• FormsVirtual things, concepts, ideas - One must
  first grasp the concept before one can understand
  what we see and hear in the physical world
• SUBJECTCONCEPTOBJECT
• Turning towards the light enables the
  Philosopher-King to translate these forms into
  their physical manifestations.
• The Republic (Plato) causes a paradigmatic shift
  in the West, which breaks with philosophical
  development in the East.
• Turning point in which the West moves in a
  direction distinct from the East
• Asian culture / philosophy is not concept based.
• Bifurcation occurs which leads ultimately to
  Cartesian method and the Newtonian universe.
• In the Arts, this led to a domination of the work
  by rating it against a concept.
• Cave walltelevision?

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Pre-Socratics Revisited

• Lived in Asia Minor and various Greek Islands
• Usually described as poets rather than
  philosophers.
• Parmenides (b. 510 BCE) - reality is a single,
  unchanging substance.
• Anaximander (611-547 BCE), Anaximander speculated
  that all matter is an infinite, intelligent,
  living whole.
• Heraclitus (540-475 B.C.E.) (One can never step
  in the same river twice.) the world is
  constantly changing.

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Pre-Socratics (contd)

• Unfettered by a post-Platonic paradigm (dichotomy
  between subject and object), Early Greek thinking
  is characterized by gathering or apprehension
  and collection.
• Heideggers concept of meditative thinking
  attempts to release the will, in order to
  ensure a responsiveness to things. This creates
  the possibility of waiting upon an object and
  allowing it to reveal itself.
• One does not experience a thing by re-presenting
  it through a concept but instead remains directed
  to it.
• Heidegger explores these ideas in greater depth
  in the essay, The Origin of the Work of Art.

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PHYSIS Physical Things are

• Ever-changing
• Emerging
• Dynamic
• For 2500 years in the West we have described
  PHYSIS as inanimate

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Heidegger on Physis

• this is what I mean by the EARTH
• Dynamic, Changing, Emerging
• In the Modern Era, one measures and literalizes
  the EARTH.
• As a result, the EARTH closes

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Preliminary Conclusions

• Heidegger
• Builds on concepts of Husserlian phenomenology.
• Avoids the subtle bifurcation of Husserls
  transcendental ego by positing the existence of
  Dasein - mans being in the world.
• Heideggers radical phenomenological shift lies
  in his effort to reveal the perceivedness of the
  perceived.
• The focus of his phenomenological model is
  therefore, ontological.
• Heidegger will next leap out of the metaphysics
  outlined in Being and Time in his essay, The
  Origin of the Work of Art from Poetry, Language,
  and Thought

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Heideggers Turn

• Following the publication of Being and Time, it
  was clear to Heidegger that the philosophical
  community did not recognize the radical shift in
  his conception of Da-sein.
• Da-sein was not simply a new take on an old idea,
  rather, it was a concept that was prior to any
  existing philosophical view of the transcendental
  subject.
• Therefore, Heidegger concluded that only a
  radical leap out of Western metaphysics was
  required in order to clarify the concept of
  Da-sein.
• Heidegger introduces the concept of waiting
  upon phenomena in order to allow them to lie
  before us and show themselves.
• For Heidegger, this is precisely what the Western
  mind has forgotten how to do.

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The Origin of the Work of Art

• Art, for Heidegger, refers to visual art, music,
  architecture, drama, sculpture, poetry, etc.
• All Art is Poesis
• The Question
• What is the origin of the work of Art?
• On first view, the work arises from the artist.
• But the artist is defined by the work!
• Art, therefore, encompasses both the artist and
  the artwork.

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Arts thingly character

• There is something
• stony in a work of architecture
• wooden in a carving.
• spoken in a linguistic work.
• sonorous in a musical composition.
• How is this thingly quality of art the same or
  different from other things?

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Being and Time revisited

• Three types of being
• The ready-to-hand equipment, e.g., an automobile.
• The present-to-hand (junk), e.g., a pile of
  leaves.
• Da-sein - human existence
• No clear answer was forthcoming, so Heidegger
  decided to abandon theoretical positions in favor
  of a description of a particular piece of
  equipment. He thus moves from meta-theoretical
  levels to the level of art criticism.
• As an example of equipment, he chooses a pair
  of shoes as depicted in the painting Les
  Souliers by Vincent Van Gogh.

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Shoes

• Physical Characteristics
• Made of leather
• Strung together with laces
• Joined with nails.
• Form is based on use.
• However, we have now circled back to the
  matter-form theory.
• Heidegger recommends that we
• Ask not what shoes are made of
• Ask instead what are they made for.

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Vincent Van Gogh Les Souliers Oil on canvas /
Paris early 1887
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Les Souliers(contd)

• The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field.
  Only here are they what they are. They are all
  the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman
  thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or
  looks at them at all, or is even aware of them.
  She stands and walks in them. That is how shoes
  actually serve. It is in this process of the use
  of equipment that we must actually encounter the
  character of equipment. (Last sentence moves
  from the level of criticism to the level of
  theory.)
• The shoes in Van Goghs painting are out of use,
  and their context is ambiguous.
• Therefore, how can one understand their use?
• This appears to be a painting of an isolated pair
  of brown shoes, but for Heidgger, there is much
  more

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Heideggers Critique of Les Souliers

• From the dark opening of the warm insides of the
  shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares
  forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the
  shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her
  slow trudge through the far-spreading and
  ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw
  wind. On the leather lie the dampness and
  richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the
  loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In
  the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth,
  its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its
  unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation
  of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded
  by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of
  bread, the wordless joy of having once more
  withstood want, the trembling before the
  impending childbed and shivering at the
  surrounding menace of death. This equipment
  belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the
  world of the peasant woman.
• Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art (33-34)

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Heideggers Critique (contd)

• Heidegger assumes that the shoes project and
  crystallize the existence of the peasants world.
• The shoes are out of use, but by means of the art
  work, the Being of equipment is revealed.
• This process of coming to unconcealment
  corresponds to what the Greeks called, aletheia,
  which translates as truth.
• Heideggers ideas as exemplified in his analysis
  of Les Souliers are a radical shift from
  traditional Western theories about aesthetics

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Aesthetics

• Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762)
• In this system, Art is a collection of objects
  (Aesthetic Objects)
• Aesthetic objects exists for one purpose onlyto
  be looked at for their structure alone (Aesthetic
  Perception)
• Posits an Aesthetic Experience which is
  Universal.
• Bracketing out an art object from its context.
• Baumgarten thus modifies the DOING, MAKING
  definition of Art.
• Meyer Schapiro (1905-1995)
• As an art historian, Meyer Schapiro attacked
  Heideggers philosophical interpretation on one
  of van Goghs paintings of shoes. He maintains
  that he finds nothing in Heideggers fanciful
  description of the shoes represented by van Gogh
  that could not have been imagined in looking at a
  real pair of peasants shoes.
• In defense of Heidegger, Jacques Derrida states
  that, it is not the truth of a relationship (of
  adequation or attribution) between such-and-such
  a product and such-and-such an owner... art as
  putting to work of truth is neither an
  imitation nor a description copying the
  real, nor a reproduction, whether it
  represents a singular thing or a general
  essence. Derrida, J. (1987) Restitutions of the
  truth in pointing pointure, pp.255-382 in The
  Truth in Painting. Chicago University of Chicago
  Press

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Meyer Schapiro Responds to Heidegger

• As an art historian, Meyer Schapiro attacked
  Heideggers philosophical interpretation on one
  of van Goghs paintings of shoes. He maintains
  that he finds nothing in Heideggers fanciful
  description of the shoes represented by van Gogh
  that could not have been imagined in looking at a
  real pair of peasants shoes.
• Heideggers original intention was to elaborate
  his philosophical value, and not to discuss the
  origin of the artwork. His argument is based on
  imagination, which is a part of aesthetic
  experience.
• Schapiros claim may assert his capability as an
  art historian, however, the statement
  inadvertently reveals that he has poor
  sensibility to aesthetic quality. He would not be
  capable of enjoying subtle feelings created by a
  certain atmosphere, nor would he contemplate,
  extend imagination freely, nor amuse himself by
  pleasant surprises all found in everyday life. He
  would only be impressed by a work of art and dry
  facts, and he would not appreciate any aesthetic
  quality until someone frames it and places it in
  a museum.

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Physis

• Heidegger on physis this is what I mean by the
  EARTH
• Dynamic, Changing, Emerging
• In the Modern Era, one measures and literalizes
  the EARTH.
• As a result, the EARTH closes
• Heideggers World
• Heideggers 2nd essential element in a work of
  art.
• The work is a symbol the something else is the
  World.
• Parallels Husserls notion of lebenswelt.

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Ontological World

• We live in a stream of history that connects the
  past and future.
• The historical life-world that surrounds an
  artist of the past is connected to contemporary
  viewers / listeners and their present through the
  historical tradition that encompasses both.
• The contemporary viewer / listener experiences
  art through the stylistic and expressive norms
  that have developed in the historical tradition
  in which his past and present are conjoined.
• Ones historical tradition acts as a filter
  through which a contemporary person engages art.
  A tradition provides the initial stance for
  aesthetic understanding.
• Ones present context continually causes the
  viewer / listener to modify the original
  significance of past worksart is always
  understood in some relation to the present, e.g.,
  Music and Technologyhearing the music and the
  means of reproduction Crosby / Microphone Les
  Paul / Multi track etc.
• The time and place in which an analysis occurs
  impacts on what an art work can mean.

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Heideggers Aesthetic Dynamic

• EARTH?(tension-rift)?WORLD
• 2 Elements
• 1) Earth
• Work materials (subject of Phenomenology)
• Crafted and formedproto-formal
• The more training one has, the more the EARTH
  closes.
• 2) World
• IDEATIONAL WORLD (wants to open up the Earth)
• In Heideggers model, the EARTH opens, and then,
  the WORLD is grounded.

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Greek Temple
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Heidegger on the Greek Temple

• The building encloses the figure of the god, and
  in this concealment lets it stand out into the
  holy precinct through the open portico. By means
  of the temple, the god is present in the temple.
  This presence of the god is in itself the
  extension and delimitation of the precinct as a
  holy precinct. The temple and its precinct
  however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It
  is the temple-work that first fits together and
  at the same time gathers around itself the unity
  of those paths and relations in which birth and
  death, disaster and blessing, victory and
  disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape
  of destiny for human being. The all-governing
  expanse of this open relational context is the
  world of this historical people. Only from and in
  this expanse does the nation first return to
  itself for the fulfillment of its vocation.

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Greek Temple (contd)

• The physical building encloses and conceals the
  ancient Greek sense of god(s).
• By means of the temple the ancient god is still
  present.
• The temple, in its standing there, first gives
  to things there look and to men their outlook on
  themselves. This view remains open as long as the
  work is a work, as long as the god has not fled
  from it.
• Openness is used here in two ways
• Any ontological world is open insofar as it is
  ideational. The world that frames and permeates
  an historical people is not a physical thing.
• The work itself must remain open to be a work.

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Langer on Architecture

• In Feeling and Form (1953), Langer describes
  architecture as a mode for creating Virtual
  Space.
• A plastic art - its first achievement is always
  an illusion.
• A machine to live in.
• As scene is the basic abstraction of pictorial
  art, and kinetic volume of sculpture, that of
  architecture is the ethnic domain.
• Articulates the virtual place by treatment of an
  actual place.

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Langer on Architecture (contd)

• Quotes Le Corbusier
• Architectureshould use those elements that are
  capable of affecting our senses, and of rewarding
  the desire of our eyes, and should dispose them
  in such a waythat the sight of them affects us
  immediatelythose elements are plastic elements,
  forms which our eyes can see and our minds can
  measure. (Feeling and Form 96-97)
• Plastic elements EARTH

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Physis revisited

• Heidegger on physis this is what I mean by the
  EARTH
• Dynamic, Changing, Emerging
• In the Modern Era, one measures and literalizes
  the EARTH.
• As a result, the EARTH closes

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Heideggers Aesthetic Invariables

• EARTH? (rift-design)? WORLD
• Form
• 1) Earth
• Work materials (subject of Phenomenology)
• Crafted and formedproto-formal
• The more training one has, the more the EARTH
  closes.
• 2) World
• IDEATIONAL WORLD (wants to open up the Earth)
• In Heideggers model, the EARTH opens, and then,
  the WORLD is grounded.

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Aesthetic Object vs. Art Object

• Aesthetic Object
• The viewers intention makes an object aesthetic
  or not aesthetic.
• The viewer sends an aesthetic intention to the
  object.
• An object becomes an aesthetic object when a
  person directs an aesthetic attitude towards that
  object. (Ferrara 36)

• Art Object
• Inherently possesses the strife between EARTH and
  WORLD which the appreciator is allowing to occur
  (Heidegger)
• Example a Rembrandt is viewed in terms of its
  value as an investment rather that its value as a
  work of Art. Heidegger says that in this case, it
  is not an art object since the viewer is not
  engaging the WORLD.
• Merely engaging the syntactical elements in a
  work leads one away from the WORLD.

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Upcoming Assignments

• Goodman, The Ways of Worldmaking one full page
  summary due Tuesday 3/22/05
• Ferrara, Phenomenology as a Tool for Musical
  Analysis, one full page summary due Thursday
  3/24/05