ART AND EXPRESSION

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ART AND EXPRESSION
Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity)
Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
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DIFFERENT USES OF EXPRESS

• There are many different uses of the term
  express.
• Some uses concern the artist, others the artwork,
  and still others the viewer.
• There may not be any overall theory of expression
  to cover all the different uses of express.

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THE COMMON PICTURE OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION

• a. An artist experiences an emotion, usually one
  which is deeply felt.
• b. He/she produces an artifact which expresses
  the emotion felt.
• c. A person perceiving the artwork which
  expresses the emotion feels the emotion
  previously felt by the artist.

4
ARTISTS ARE SPECIAL ON THE EXPRESSIONIST VIEW OF
ART

• Artists are people who are capable of having
  great feelings.
• Artists have the creative ability to express
  those feelings in public perceptible objects,
  that is, works of art.
• It is important to other people that such
  feelings be expressed.

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PLATO AND ARTISTIC CREATION

• In Platos dialogue Ion, the artist, in creating
  an artwork, is said to be possessed by forces he
  does not understand.
• Socrates, who represents Platos view in the
  dialogue with Ion, maintains that an artwork
  results from frenzied activity.
• Accordingly, art is irrational rather than
  rational
• The artist is emotional and the opposite of the
  thinker, who is calm and rational.
• Because an audience becomes emotional in
  experiencing artworks, artworks promote
  uncontrolled emotion and irrationality, not the
  rationality promoted by philosophy.

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PLATO, ART, AND TRUTH

• For Plato, art leads away from truth.
• Art is therefore dangerous.
• Philosophy leads us to truth, not art.
• Thinkers who disagree with Plato say that at
  least some art is rational, and one way of
  seeking knowledge is through the arts.
• These people also say that the emotions provided
  by art are healthy and necessary - people are not
  just thinkers, but have feelings, and feelings
  are important.

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DIALECTIC

• Dialectic is a method of reasoning using
  questions and answers to arrive at truth.
• Dialectic is also known as the Socratic method.
  This is a disinterested search for truth through
  discussion which sometimes involves Socratic
  irony.
• In Socratic irony, Socrates the main figure in
  many of Platos dialogues - pretends to be
  ignorant of something to show that what his
  dialogue partner thinks he knows is not in fact
  the case.

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SOCRATES AND ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

• Socrates says that Ion speaks of Homer without
  any art of knowledge, without using rules of
  art. (Here a rule of art concerns a skill
  acquired by learning, study, or observation.)
• Socrates maintains that Ions gift in speaking
  about Homer is not an art in the above sense of
  having an acquired skill, but an inspiration.
• This is the inspiration model of creation. In
  this model, the artist is moved by divine
  inspiration, not by knowledge, skill, or learning.

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OBJECTION TO SOCRATIC VIEW OF CREATIVITY

• Why attribute inspiration and creative ability to
  divine origin?
• We have prima facie evidence that some people can
  make artistic masterpieces. If we have evidence
  that people do these things, then why attribute
  their origin to anything else?
• prima facie df. at first view on first
  appearance apparent.
• Ockhams razor df. entities are not to be
  multiplied beyond necessity do not use anything
  you dont need work with the fewest assumptions
  necessary keep it simple.

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ART, INTELLECT, AND EMOTION

• Are artworks primarily intellectual or emotional?
• Romantics, like Wordsworth, think that art is
  primarily emotional, as Plato thinks.
• On this view, artistic creativity is subjective,
  emotional, and irrational.
• Art then is less important to the rational
  intellect than to human feeling.

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TOLSTOY AND EXPRESSIONISM

• Tolstoy (1828-1910) thought that science and
  philosophy are concerned with thought, and that
  art is concerned with feeling.
• For Tolstoy, the role of art is not to
  communicate ideas. Rather, art communicates
  feeling, and should communicate religious
  attitudes.
• Artists are not just people of great feeling,
  they must also know how to express the feelings
  which they have.

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THE POET EXPRESSES EMOTION

• According to R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), the
  artist proper has something to do with emotion.
  However, the artist does not arouse emotion, but
  expresses it.
• When a poet expresses an emotion, she is
  conscious of having an emotion, but is not
  conscious of what the emotion is.
• Feeling an uncertain emotion makes a person feel
  helpless and oppressed.
• She deals with this by expressing the uncertain
  emotion.

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EXPRESSION, LANGUAGE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS

• Collingwood says that the expression of an
  indeterminate emotion has to do with both
  language and consciousness.
• When the emotion is expressed it is no longer
  unconscious, and the person whose unexpressed
  emotion it was no longer feels helpless and
  oppressed.
• An emotion is not expressed to arouse a like
  emotion in someone else rather, the intention is
  to make it understood how the person who has
  expressed the emotion felt in having the emotion.

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EXPRESSION, COMMUNICATION, AND UNDERSTANDING

• An expressed feeling is communicated to someone
  who understands the expression.
• This includes the poet. So the expression of
  emotion makes the poet understand the feeling
  which he has expressed.
• Thus a person who expresses an emotion treats
  himself and another in same the way in treating
  each as members of a conversing community, and as
  members of community of persons who experience
  similar emotions.

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THE AUDIENCE AND THE INTELLIGIBILITYOF EXPRESSION

• Collingwood asserts that expression is not
  addressed to any particular audience.
• However, it is addressed primarily to the person
  whose emotion it is, and only secondarily to
  others.
• An emotion must be expressed in a way which is
  intelligible to the poet so it can be
  intelligible to others.
• Expressing emotion is not the same as arousing
  emotion, since a person arousing emotion sets
  out to affect his audience in a way in which he
  himself is not necessarily affected, by making
  them angry, for instance.

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EXPRESSION, EXPLORATION, AND KNOWLEDGE

• For Collingwood, the act of expression is an
  exploration of the poets own emotions, and
  until a man has expressed his emotion, he does
  not yet know what emotion it is.
• Thus the artistic process begins with an
  unexpressed emotion that the poet attempts to
  clarify through expression.
• Through expression, the poet comes to understand
  the emotion.

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NO TECHNIQUE OF EXPRESSION

• Collingwood maintains that the process of finding
  the troubling emotion to be expressed it is not
  foreseen or preconceived.
• The poet does not know which emotion she is
  trying to express to free her from her hapless
  condition.
• Because of this, expression is an activity of
  which there can be no technique.

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EXPRESSIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE

• Collingwood Expressing an emotion is not the
  same thing as describing it.
• Collingwood A genuine poet never mentions by
  name the emotions he is expressing.
• Description is bad for poetry because description
  generalizes, but expression individualizes.
• For Collingwood, the true poet attends to
  individualizing particular emotions, attending to
  their particularity.

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ART AND CRAFT I

• Art as the expression of emotion differs from
  craft.
• Collingwood The end which a craft sets out to
  realize is always conceived in general terms,
  never individualized.
• Craft is the production of a thing having
  characteristics that could be shared by other
  things.

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ART AND CRAFT II

• For Collingwood, art does not look to produce
  emotions of a certain type.
• Art is the expression of particular emotions in a
  way which emphasizes their particularity.
• A poet or artist does not want a thing of a
  certain kind, he wants a certain thing.

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EXPRESSION AND EXHIBITION OF EMOTION

• Collingwood says that expressing an emotion is
  not the same thing as exhibiting symptoms of it.
  For instance, one does not express fear in the
  appropriate artistic way by turning pale and
  stammering. That is to exhibit symptoms of fear,
  not to express fear artistically.
• Collingwood The characteristic mark of
  expression is lucidity or intelligibility. A
  person who expresses something thereby becomes
  conscious of what it is that he is expressing,
  and enables others to become conscious of it in
  himself and in them.
• According to Collingwood, art is an artists
  exploration of her own emotions.
• And these emotions are communicated to others in
  an understandable way.

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Black Square, Kasimir Malevich, 1913
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SUPREMATISM

• Malevich (1878-1935) says that Suprematism, which
  he named the style of art seen in Black Square,
  represents the supremacy of pure feeling in
  creative art.
• For Malevich, objective visual phenomena are
  insignificant as objective or realistic, and are
  only artistically important to the extent to
  which they produce feeling.
• And he says that the importance of artworks of
  any school or kind resides in the feeling which
  they express.

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NONOBJECTIVE ART I

• Because, for Malevich, objective concepts are
  inferior to pure feeling, art reaches a stage at
  which it evolves beyond representation to pure
  abstraction.
• In pure abstraction art reaches it truest, most
  important, and most mature state. And in pure
  abstraction the state of pure feeling is
  attained.
• Nonobjective art is a kind of desert where
  forms exist not to be seen but to be felt.

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NONOBJECTIVE ART II

• Malevich claims that nonobjective forms are
  liberating, while representation is confining.
• Feeling is the substance of life for him, and
  nothing is real except feeling.
• Malevichs rejection of art as imitation and the
  sensuous use of the medium to produce pure
  feeling is opposed to Plato but close to Hegel.

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NONOBJECTIVE ART III

• Malevich Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure
  art. This means getting away from the
  sophisticated imagery of realistic art and back
  to the energy and rhythm of primitive art.
  Primitive art is more pure than representational
  art.
• According to Malevich, feeling is the source of
  every great creation, and human emotions need the
  outlet of art to be expressed.
• Suprematism does not create a new world of
  feeling, but gives a new way of representing or
  expressing feeling.

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ART FOR ARTS SAKE I

• Malevich maintains that art comes into its own
  when it rejects religious, social, and political
  ideals.
• Further, art comes into its own when it rejects
  imagery for pure abstraction, when it stops
  trying to copy objects and concerns itself with
  pure feeling.
• Art is supposed to be impractical, and it is art
  which endures, not practical things.

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ART FOR ARTS SAKE II

• Arts value is lasting, the value of practical
  things is not.
• Art is purest and greatest when it is autonomous,
  or when it has its own sphere of interest.
• Art which is put to a practical use is devalued.
• The proper place for true art is the museum.

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BLACK SQUARE I

• The forms of nonobjective art exist to be felt,
  not seen.
• Malevich Although the Black Square is
  non-representational, it is not empty, but is
  full of feeling.
• Malevich the square feeling, the white field
  the void beyond this feeling.

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BLACK SQUARE II

• JS Could this work be less about feeling than
  about aesthetic experience assuming that these
  are different? If so, could we respond to Black
  Square intellectually, or respond to it as a
  visual design, or both?
• JS Could one see the black square as
  representative of the pupil of the human eye,
  surrounded by the whiteness of the sclera, each
  geometrized to fit visually the edges of the
  canvas on which they are situated?

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BLACK SQUARE III

• All visual art rests on seeing, and here we are
  given a reduced, abstract, and geometrical
  representation of the organ on which human seeing
  depends.
• Apprehension of art depends on mind in addition
  to seeing, minds which can understand that an
  object is meant to be seen as a work of art.

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BLACK SQUARE IV

• The geometry of the work can be seen to be
  representative of the mind in that one does not
  find the rectangle in nature, but human effort
  puts it there.
• Man is then the agent of geometry, and the use of
  geometry here to bound the forms representative
  of the eye could be interpreted to be a sign of
  the agency on which making and apprehending
  artworks depend.

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DEWEY/LANGER ON MUSIC

• For both John Dewey and Susanne Langer, music has
  nonverbal meaning.
• Dewey (1859-1952) says that if the meaning of
  music could be expressed in words we would not
  need music.
• For Langer (1895-1985) music gives wordless
  knowledge.
• According to both Dewey and Langer, music
  expresses or communicates something which cant
  be expressed or communicated in any other way.

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MUSICS INEFFABLE KNOWLEDGE

• Raffman asks if music gives ineffable knowledge
  knowledge not describable in words - what is it
  we know ineffably?
• In asking about the nature of musics ineffable
  knowledge, we are asking about the nature of
  musical experience.
• Thus we are talking about a psychological
  process, namely hearing.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HEARING

• On one theory, humans have an unconscious set of
  rules for organizing sound into music.
• We hear music rather than sounds by unconsciously
  making a mental picture of notes and rhythms
  which is analyzed according to unconscious rules.

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THE SOUND OF MUSIC THE MENTAL GRID

• Sounds do not arrive at the ear neatly divided
  into notes and rhythms.
• Rather, the ear organizes a stream of
  undifferentiated sounds into notes and rhythms by
  filtering the sounds through a kind of mental
  grid.
• The mental grid separates the stream of sound
  into individual bits.

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THE MENTAL GRID AND MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE

• Through musical training you can learn to say
  things about what you hear in a piece of music.
• BUT you can only verbalize what your unconscious
  analysis specifies - what your mental grid makes
  it possible for you to hear.
• That is, you can only learn to talk about what
  your unconscious mental grid has provided for
  possible discussion.

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THE INEFFABLE KNOWLEDGE OF MUSIC

• Although the mental grid makes musical analysis
  possible, you cannot verbalize everything you
  hear.
• The ineffability of musical knowledge - your
  inability to express linguistically everything
  that you hear - comes from fact that you hear
  more than you can analyze.