Aesthetics - session narratives

Art as Expression - Art as Experience

The readings for this week are taken from one philosopher (Tolstoy) who explicitly takes art to be the expression of the artist's feelings for the benefit of a reader, listener or viewer, and from two philosophers (Nietzsche and Dewey) who in very different ways made art and the aesthetic the basic theme of their philosophies. For more about Nietzsche and Dewey, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on-line) and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Both Nietzsche and Dewey, in different ways, emphasize aesthetic experience rather than the work of art. Before the artist creates, the artist lives, and the work in some way embodies that lived experience in a way that can convey to the audience (the viewers or listeners or readers or other receivers) a similar experience.

The work to be viewed in this session is expressionist work. Here the artist definitely has something to say. It may not be a rationally ordered message; more likely it is an experience or feeling that cannot well be put into words. But it is a compelling image that may also stir or shock or otherwise connect with the perceiver. The dominant characteristic of all this work is that it departs from classical realism in order to express the intensity of some experience or perception.

The first piece is Francisco de Goya's Eating, one of his cartoon sketches. It is a very early example of its type, made well before most western painters began making such images, although Hieronymus Bosch and certain medieval painters are exceptions. The second, made almost a century later, is Van Gogh's Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background. Notice how the trees, the mountains and the sky are almost alive. Like Cezanne before him, but with much more intensity and visible passion, Van Gogh wants to capture the spirit of the landscape. Albert Pinkham Ryder's painting of Jonah similarly throws the viewer into an emotionally overwhelming world of violent storms and unavoidable divine power. The next two pieces are by Edvard Munch. Munch is most famous for his painting The Scream. But he was capable of far more subtle treatments of psychologically difficult themes, as in The Sick Child. The Vampire embodies his own conflicted attitudes toward women.

The next two images, by Rouault, express a strongly realistic and religious view of the world. The Nude with Raised Arm is a prostitute, whose existence Roualt sees as unhappy, oppressed, fallen but calling for some sort of pity and recognition. Rouault's Head of Christ is similarly rough in appearance, but clearly conveys peace in the face of suffering. Rouault is giving us his view of the world in these paintings, a fallen world to be seen head-on without polite cover-ups, in which salvation by Christ really happens. Finally, Egon Schiele, another expressionist painter, portrays himself in something very like the (rather obnoxious and arrogant) character he actually had.

The next paintings, by the Fauves or Wild Beasts are dramatically expressive in their use of color and shape. Notice how Frans Marc's work moves toward the completely abstract in Fighting Forms. Expressionism can be used to make political statements, like the sarcastic Loreley by Oscar Kokoschka painted in early days of WW II. The Lorelei is a maiden who sits by the side of the Rhine river and lures sailors to their deaths. The painting, almost a cartoon, mocks British claims to naval supremacy and empathizes with the fate of those who trust Britain for protection. The next Kokoschka shows the painter confronting his own death in the figure of a bartender at the end of the evening saying "Time, gentlemen, please." Kokoschka shows himself standing up to the message, though he knows perfectly well he will eventually have no choice but to obey it. The two paintings by Emil Nolde again show the powerful emotional content the expressionists put into their paintings. A similar spirit is present in expressionist music, what Arnold Schoenberg was writing before he arrived at his tone-row method of composition. His composition Pierot Lunaire is a good example of this. (We'll listen to some of it when we talk about music.)

The next image, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, comes from the great contemporary British painter Francis Bacon. Bacon's figurative work expresses his view of the world and of human existence. It is a consistent and powerful view, realized with great painterly mastery, even if it is not a view to everyone's taste. One might say that Bacon has continued to work in the expressionist tradition in a vital way up to the present day.

The sketch of the head of a horse in agony is a study for Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica, made in memory of the terrible bombing of the town of that name during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso used a wide variety of styles and techniques throughout his career, often switching back and forth from one to another depending on what he had to say. This horse could hardly be more expressive. The techniques of cubism, invented by Picasso and Braque, are not purely about expression; used in other contexts, they are more analytic, a way of reflecting on the act of translation from three dimensions to two that a painter must perform. But here they are brought into the service of Picasso's grief and anger at the outrage at Guernica.

Miro, Dali and Chagall, each in his own way, show the connection between expressionism and surrealism. What does the painter express? Perhaps it is a directly experienced emotion. But perhaps it could be the turmoil of subconscious emotions, or the strange symbolic reality of dreams. With the advent of psychoanalysis and the discovery of the subconscious, such images can have the force of revelation. Such surrealist work also fits well with Nietzsche's thoughts about art, his notions of the dreamlike calm of the Apollonian, which has an order all its own, and the orgiastic chaos of the Dionysian approach.

The next several artists may all be grouped loosely as abstract expressionists. Like the older expressionists, these artists too are making an emotional statement. Unlike them, these painters depart from figurative work, and express the emotion or perception in an abstract way. Jackson Pollack famously switched from more figurative work (like the somewhat surreal and symbolist Moon Woman) to dripping paint on canvas in no representation of anything. For him the experience was like a ritual. The painting shown here, Eyes in the Heat, is not a "drip" painting, but has the "all-over" quality that led him to choose the drip technique as the natural next step. (For a drip painting, go back to Autumn Rhythms on an early page). Pollack's friend Willem de Kooning also made messy abstractions, though not with paint drips; and de Kooning was always drawn back to some form of representation (especially in his very expressive paintings of women). Cy Twombly continues to paint using scribbles and scrawls as well as swirls and blobs of paint. By contrast with his messy, apparently (though not really) childish modern style, his subject matter is often taken from classical mythology and history, making an interesting comparison with classic traditional painting. This particular piece, Leda and the Swan, depicts the rape of Leda, a Greek queen and the mother of Clytmenestra and Helen, by the god Zeus who has taken the form of a swan. (W.B.Yeats has a famous poem about this same story.) You can see the neck, head and bill of the swan in the painting, along with some feathers, a suggestion of wings, some hearts, some suggestions of a female figure, and the window of the room in which the act takes place. The scribbles have a strong energy to them; it's an active painting.

The first images on the next page are also from abstract expressionists. The differences in style and approach are great, as is the amount of dependence on representational elements. Rothko and Newman, for example, have no representational elements at all. Franz Kline's NY, NY is certainly representationally evocative, and Milton Avery's Spring Orchard is almost like a Gaughin or at least a Matisse in its direct simplification of representational elements. All of these painters, in one way or another, convey a sense of pure emotional power through the forms and colors they put on the canvas.

The page closes with a series of Chinese and Japanese paintings, watercolors and ink drawings. The expressiveness of these images is very clear. So, too, is the commonality between them and modern western painting, especially abstract expressionism. As in the case of modern western painters, Chinese and Japanese painters have always sought to convey an emotion or a sense of things rather than to represent objects exactly as the eye would see them. As a result, their work was a powerfully inspiring source for Western artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In turn, abstract expressionism has obviously inspired the modern Chinese and Japanese painters whose work appears in the last two rows of this page.

Expression has always been a part of any visual or auditory art, in traditional as well as modern systems. The differenc between the two may lie in the individualism of the modern system, and its lack of connection with the rest of society, its lack of an established place in ordinary life. While it has its down side, this independence has also allowed the emergence of remarkable works that would surely never have existed otherwise. One can see this beginning to happen in these recent Chinese and Japanese works.

Here are a couple of philosophical questions related to these themes of art as expression and art as experience. The first is about the expressive or communicative potential of visual (and also of musical or movement) art. As you look at these images, think about what each expresses (without needing to read the title) and ask yourself how it manages to express what it does. What visual vocabulary does the piece use, and how does it function to communicate the message? Ask yourself, also, whether you think what the piece expresses is a culturally dependent matter, or is likely to cross cultures. And ask whether you think a work should communicate clearly without anyone having t to see the title. Finally, ask whether you think a work of art must express something, or if it is enough simply to say that it can epxress something. (As an example, it was either Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly who responded to questions about the spiritual in art in the twentieth century by saying that that was fine for Kandinsky, Mark Rothko and others, but no one should think that all abstract painters were trying to express transcendent themes, or even anything at all. With his work and that of others like him, he said, what you get is just a big blue curve (or whatever). If you like a big blue curbve, great. But that's all it is.

Here is another set of questions, related to John Dewey's philosophy of art as experience. Dewey emphasizes the idea of a complete experience. This is what is central to art, as far as he is concerned. At first, to correct an unbalanced emphasis on the work of art by itself, he seems to be saying that the work only matters as a means of communicating a complete experience. But later he points out that the work is important, and that the experience of making the work, for the artist, may be exactly the experience that is the art, rather than some independent experience that the work communicates. The same might be said for experiencing the work. In this way, the process of art making become very important in Dewey's theory.

How important is the process of artmaking, in your view? Think about it in the context of some very different kinds of art (novels, improvised dance, composed and improvised music, easel painting, add a few more). How do experience and process figure in these different kinds of art?