`...The theme, the lore, the tale, the political statement -- the concept, in other words -- should not be allowed to constitute the work of art. The aesthetic-sensuous experience is something ignorant of "missing pieces of cultural productions"; and being in the know, culturally speaking, should have absolutely nothing to do with whether one can enjoy the art in a work of art...'' Joanna Sheldon
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The usual excuses apply. This doesn't exactly follow from the quote, but opens it into other areas of interest and takes many tangents.
The aesthetic-sensuous experiences of the arts only exist within some cultural production or context. So, the complaint is misplaced. What you mean by art can not be enjoyed as a wide spread aesthetic and sensual experience today, because it no longer has enough of a common cultural context to exist. The whole basis of traditional art practices could be art because they existed within a production system based on hand craft skills, and therefore art was seen as the most technically sophisticated expression of that system. If I had to pick a single example to illustrate this point, I'd pick the violin.
Take a look at Amor Vittorioso and consider what is in this painting, in addition to the lurid pose of Caravaggio's boyfriend done up as Eros. On the floor are an early violin and viola gamba(?) and some musical scores, a framing square, calipers or compasses, and centering punch. Then in the more immediate foreground are the breast plates and helmet of armor. There is the suggestion that Eros has just stepped out of the armor. The awkwardness of the pose creates a strange kind of tension that heightens its homoerotic and pornographic effect. The entire ensemble is about the aesthetic and sensual experiences of life and their conflicting attractions, all laden with implicit passions and their potentials for dramatic violence. In short, life lived on the edge. [Most of the reproductions on the web are too dark to see many of these details, but they are there.] Musical instruments, armor, and the visual arts, including architecture were among the most sophisticated and exquisite expressions of the cultural production system and were all examples of various aesthetic and sensual experiences.
Carrol in his post mentioned that he didn't think that the concept of a work of art existed until the 19c. I've read this before in numerous places, and don't agree. What the 19c context added was a bourgeois and industrial society's concept of art which centered around much more explicitly capitalist conceptualizations. However, art and portable, privately owned art predate these particular developments. Vermeer and the Dutch masters are examples of a bourgeois social context in a predominately capitalist, but not yet industrial society. If you drop the conditions of portability and private ownership, then art as art, has existed during many different periods and peoples. Because of these examples it might appear that there is a universalism at work here. But again, I disagree. What connects these contexts is the shared sophisticated level of their skilled production system, where again, various activities and objects constitute their arts.
A great deal is made out of the distinction between arts, crafts, decorative arts and so forth and most older art histories seem to believe that art as art can only exist in some rarefied form like illusionist painting displayed in a gallery or museum. If you allow for the fact that most societies didn't have oil painting as a craft, were not particularly enamored with the rationalist ideal of an illustionist space and simply accept the notion that art is made out of whatever materials were in common use and made within the cultural contexts that were available, then the aesthetic and sensual experiences we associate with art, become much more common place in history. This requires understanding that we have rarefied both the expression and conceptualization of art, along with its materials of production, and its social context, and divided them out of their embedding in a variety of other contexts within daily life. In current terms such experiences are completely removed from our ability to reproduce them for ourselves outside the contexts of mass media and a variety of other machinations of capital. Part of this process has been at the behest of capital and its dictates within bourgeois society, but part of it was already accomplished long before capitalism came along to dominate every means of social reproduction.
So, then the arts per se can be seen as a consequence of a division and specialization of labor. This makes Chinese scroll painting from a thousand years ago, just as aesthetic and sensually pleasing as any impressionist painting. And, it opens up the likelihood that many other sorts of objects were enjoyed as art, for example Japanese war helmets, or armor from all over the world. Rather than considering art entrapped or imprisoned by ritual and ceremony, and thinking it must be freed in order to be art, it seems to me to be more realistic to consider that whole societies have often been engaged in vast extensions of ceremonial stylizations of many of their social activities like cooking or war---and part of the accompaniment of these ceremonial extensions, even their signatures were composed of various arts. So that entire collections of forms in pottery, textiles, and woven items, including of course dress and jewelry of various sorts become art with the addition of utility, touch, and handling added to the list of predominately visual aesthetic and sensual pleasures.
That we would not see these connections immediately, understand them, and never think twice about them, is probably more a reflection of our own alienation from any means of reproducing our society including the means to reproducing a large variety of possible aesthetic and sensual pleasures, than it is a reflection on other cultures and times.
In order to understand the production system of a craft a little better, revisit it and enjoy it, I went back to the most traditional oil practices I could manage about ten years ago. I had my son make some raw pigments when he was a chemistry major at UCB. He couldn't produce enough quantity to fill small 35cc tubes, but he made enough pigment to grind small quantities into linseed oil and use in a glazing medium made of damar crystals dissolved in turpentine. In this exercise I discovered why cobalt blue was such an expensive color. The basic materials were not all that expensive. However cobalt (cobalt aluminum oxide) requires extremely high temperatures to produce. This also explains (in my mind) why it wasn't available until 1820-30s. Viridian, another synthetic pigment he made also depended on high temperatures and was introduced in the 1850s. Ultramarine blue is yet another example although he didn't make any.
An amusing and I think quite interesting side effect of this experiment was that a couple of years later, while I was reading an Italian cookbook, I discovered that I already had the tools for making pesto, as well as the basis for many other sauces, except, the tools were in my painting outfit. So, I cleaned off the mortar and pestle and ground sweet basil and pine nuts with them, instead of small quantities of pigments in linseed oil. Same process, same tools, same general skill set. When I was grinding the viridian, I kept thinking of chocolate syrup. When I was grinding pesto, I kept thinking of the viridian or green earths.
``Battuto. The name comes from the verb battere, which means `to strike' and it describes the cut-up mixture of ingredients produced by `striking' them on a cutting board with a chopping knife. At one time, the nearly invariable components of a battuto were lard, parsley, and onion, all chopped very fine. Garlic, celery, or carrot might be included, depending on the dish. The principal change that contemporary usage has brought is the substitution of olive oil or butter for the latter. However formulated, a battuto is at the base of virtually every pasta sauce, risotto or soup, and of numberless meat and vegetable dishes...'' (Essentials of Classical Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan, Knopf, NY, 1992, 7p)
Not to diss Marcella, but I found that using a mortar and pestle was much better than just chopping and I suspect it might pre-date the idea of chopping, especially for anything needing garlic. [Battere in my Italian dictionary fills up an entire column about bashing.] A basic vinegarette made with finely crushed garlic mashed in with salt, pepper corns and a little basil in a mortar has a kind of unbelievable intensity. If you use lemon juice instead of balsamic vinegar with olive oil, you can whip it into an opaque cream like consistency.
The basic principle of grinding some material into a paste or liquid is so old and universal that it is undatable. The same basic approach is used in making staple flours and breads from wheat, rice, corn, and many other grains and seeds like acorns. For example up in the Berkeley hills, at the bouldering area I use, called Indian Rock (naturally), there are bore holes and large smoothed out pockets in the boulders were Indians made acorn meal, which they washed in baskets to leach out the tannic acid. My work buddy Larry G explained method---he is also a cooking nut.
Switching again to another craft and culture, but using a similar method, traditional sumi sticks are used to finely grind ink pigments (the stick is the pigment) on a soap stone or slate stone slabs with water. So calligraphy and painting start with the same ritualistic grinding of ink. The entire process of writing and painting becomes a form of ceremony. Given the extreme tolerance for boredom needed to endlessly grind out ink---time enough to imagine and worry whole worlds into oblivion---then, when this is followed with the almost instantaneous and irreversible commitment needed for the few brush strokes on rice paper that create either a poem or painting, it's little wonder the entire process is considered something of a religious practice.
What's the point to all these examples? I don't know. Probably that our ideas about what constitutes art are so screwed up by our exposure to an endless stream of utterly commodified and trivialized sensorium that are bought and sold as pleasurable when in fact they are mostly boring, and we are so alienated and removed from any contact with or understanding of the crafts and skills necessary to produce art in any form, that we are hardly in a position to pronounce upon the arts---ours or anyone else's. And yet, we are all critics?
So, then the reason that the arts are blind to many different ideas about them in a particular sense, is not because we can immediately apprehend their essence as art, but because the arts arise directly from the processes of making as a kind of stylized end in itself. Knowledge of and experiences with those processes are essential to fulfilling the promised aesthetic and sensual pleasures of art, because that knowledge and those experiences are the basis of the apprehension of the arts, their cultural context, and the means to their expressive powers.
Chuck Grimes