Art as Experience

It's finally Finished. After 5 months, i've finally finished reading 'Art as Experience' by John Dewey. The book is a total puzzle, 363 pages of text, everything you thought someone could say about anything is in this book. The language is a total tangle as well, the opening line,

"By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become and obstruction to 

theory about them"

sets the stall for a long and arduous book, in which the blend of american 1930's philosi-speak and a confusing subject matter sets a challenge that I was unprepared for. It usually takes me a couple of weeks casual reading to bang out a Papanek or a Norman, but this is another level of reading.

So why did I read it? It was put forward by Paul Rand in 'conversations with students', and in his Phaidon  monograph, as a book of unparalleled importance. He says "you are not an educated designer unless you read this book or the equivalent. You are just not educated. I mean, you just don't know" he likens reading and designing to eating bread and running - essential.

In my first blog post about the book (I intend to get some mileage out of it seeing as it's taken me so long) i'd like to discuss what is actually in the book. I couldn't find any brief but comprehensive information about it's contents when I went to buy it, so I'd like to offer the internet that chance.

The essence of the book is the proposition that art and aesthetic theory should not be about pieces of art. Art is an experience, a combination of viewer and material that results in a new perception. This experience, if of the right emotional quality, is an Aesthetic Experience. The book is a philosophical ramble through Dewey's ideas, with some moments of realisation, some large areas of tedium, and is of little direct inspiration for practical design. Fifty Chairs that Changed the World this isn't.


The Live Creature


The opening chapter sets the out the stall for his argument, which can be summarised by the quote

"By common consent the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet it has aesthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being"

To understand what is of aesthetic value, he points towards what he thinks are "the raw, the experiences that hold the attentive eye and ear of man" the best example of which is

"The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the fire burn better; but he is none the less fascinated by the colourful drama of change enacted before his eyes and imaginatively takes part in it. He does not remain a cold spectator"

These raw experiences serve as an example of how Aesthetic value in his belief is not something intrinsically created by humans. The thing he seems most passionate about is dispelling the apparent border that separates the Fine Art in museums from the every day experiences of the layman. Which has created a "chasm between ordinary and aesthetic experience".

All facets of life I suppose, can have aesthetic value. Perhaps the subsequent rise of Rock, Rap, Jazz and Pop music, and the introduction of carefully designed products and graphics that are today live in the house mark progression in this area.


The Live Creature and "Etherial Things"

In the second chapter, Dewey firstly looks more into the"ebb and flow", "fulfilment and consummation" rhythm that he established, here, talking in a non-mechanical way about the way he sees life. The language here is hard to follow for someone from a more technical background, as it says a lot without establishing a mechanism. He first takes note of the seperation of art and science, noting that science has risen in it's utility, but not in "the ultimate degree... an expanding and enriched life". The quote..

"I suppose the fetiches of the negro sculptor were taken to be useful in the highest degree to his tribal group, more so even than spears and clothing. But now they are fine art, serving to inspire renovations in arts that had grown conventional"

establishes that art and science do both have real value, a value that has been forgotten (or misconstrued)  in the modern world.

The crux of the chapter is do remove the idea that the supernatural practically exists, it rejects mind-body dualism.

"the all too easy reverison to the supernatural is much more of an affair of the psychology that generates works of art than of effort at scientific and philosophic explanation"

Basically concluding that it is "imagination and art" that exist, noting the current and historical connection of art with the 'spritural' and the religious, but rejecting the actual existence of those things. His basic point then is that he rejects the compartmentalisation of Art, Science and the 'Supernatural' as completely separate things, and choosing to reject the supernatural as an actual thing, merely an abstract tool used in the creation of art.


Having an Experience

In the third chapter, Dewey establishes mainly two things. Firstly he defines the concept of an experience. Apparently, most philosophy that came before this established experience as something continuous, but that is not, in Dewey's world what we actually perceive or remember.

"An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of variation of it's constituent parts."

He also includes thinking as an experience with aesthetic quality. So does nearly everything, and I think this is perhaps the biggie in this book in terms of it's time and place in history. To be wholly inclusive on what has aesthetic value is to really bring art 'back into the home'.

"any practical activity will, provided that is is integrated and moves by it's own urge to fulfilment, have esthetic quality"

This is a pretty big statement, it is wide, and it places emphasis on the fact that it is experiences that have aesthetic value and not mere objects.

The second part of the chapter is to address the gap between the 'artistic' and the 'aesthetic'. The artistic is assumed to be the doing or creating of the piece, and the aesthetic is the value it has in judgement. Dewey doesn't see this established way as right, this is also where we get a definition.

"The word 'esthetic' refers, as we have already noted, to experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying. It denotes the consumers rather than the producers standpoint"

So we have the right to judge however we want, and that's fine. But the artistic object  has been produced, carefully, with love, or through both, so how do we judge it's quality of production? And what of the artist's experience of production?

"Mere perfection in execution, judged by it's own terms in isolation, can probably be attained better by a machine than by human art" ...  "In short, art, in its form, unites the very same same relation of doing and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience to be an experience"

So, in brief (there is a lot more in this book), the artist produces work, and in the very production aesthetic experience can be attained. The consumer has the ultimate right of judgement, but that isn't to say that perception of art can be done without apprenticeship.

"In some bald sense, the [objects] may be 'seen'. They may be looked at, possibly recognised, and have their correct names attached... they are not percieved, certainly not aesthetically. A crowd of visitors steered through a picture gallery by a guide ... does not percieve, only by accident is there even interest in seeing a picture for the sake of the subject matter vividly realised"

So to perceive aesthetically a piece of fine art we have to be involved and take place, creating our own experience, and bringing our own knowledge. It may seem a little condescending, but I can vouch for the fact that a little reading seems to have given depth and pleasure in my own viewing of art and design.

The Act of Expression

Another big chapter, this one focuses on the way in which the artist themselves generate a peice of art. This comes in two main phases, the impulsion, and the undergoing. The impulsion is the beginning of the piece of art, the moment of inspiration or innovation. But 'expression', according to Dewey, is not a term to be used generally, it is not something easy to come by. Using the example of a man in a 'storm of passion' ...

"An onlooker might say 'What a magnificent expression of rage'... But the enraged being is only raging, quite a different matter from expressing rage ... the last thing the man is thinking of is to express his character; he is only giving way to a fit of passion"

Dewey makes it clear that he belies an act of expression must be a considered one.

"To discharge is to get rid of ... to express is to stay by, to carry forward in development, to work out to completion"

This part of the book is a great one for actual creatives, as it spoke directly to me, and confirmed things I had learned in my own dabbling in the arts. Art can be done passionately though, some of the best artists are known to carry out work in gushes of spontaneous action, again though, not the layman. I remember being 7, and having invented the 'electro-piston', I was eager to get it right out onto the market, my passion lasted perhaps days, until the weight of the task (and the fact it was a crap idea) got the better of me. This inability of the inexperienced to produce real, quality, passionate works is explained though a quote from Van Gough:

"Such fullness of emotion and spontaneity of utterance come, however, only to those who have steeped themselves in experiences of objective situations; to those who have long been absorbed in observation of related material and whose imaginations have long been occupied with reconstructing what they see and hear"

Maybe give me a few more years then. But this does form an important message to artists and creatives, although it does worry me that it is the ones putting weight into reading such theory that would be most inclined to self-congradulate.


Of the next few chapters, The Expressive Object, takes the form of the already mentioned concept that the piece is not the art itself, but the artwork serves, through it's qualities, to clarify and purify any confused meaning of prior experiences, that is, it serves to enhance or challenge beliefs through a blend of both emotion and scene, in contrast to theories that art is purely abstract or purely representational.

Substance and Form, a chapter about the medium and the nature of art, and the fact that the art appears when percieved, it is where Dewey plays around with the definition of what beauty is. He accepts that perceptions of beauty vary from person to person, and he professes that beauty is also something "at the furthest remove from an analytic term" and he goes on to come close to a definition of art; something which provides a full and intense experience "by reducing the raw materials of that experience into matter ordered through form".

From this chapter I must also share what must be the greatest example of Dewey's complicated language, it serves as a half decent definition, but a sentence that took me about a day to get my head round. I'll just leave it here:

"...  In that case, beauty is the response to that which to reflection is the consummated movement of matter integrated through it's inner relations into a single qualitative whole ..."

...

Having set out his stall, the next few chapters seek to answer a few specific questions.

The Natural History of Form is real design thinking fodder, but i'll save most of it's best bits for a more dedicated post. It seeks to define form and provide an account of how form is related to various 'rhythms' - those long term ones such as day and night, the passing of fashions,  to those such as the pumping of blood, or perhaps in the way a painting is looked at - as well as the obvious musical and poetic rhythm. His definition of form, for completeness, is 

"The operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to it's own integral fulfilment"

- which prioritises the whole, not a mere collection of parts.

I will not go into depth with the chapter The Organisation of Energies, but in this chapter, Dewey takes interest in the way that 'energies' and 'rhythms' in art must be balanced and organised. Artistic skill is good organisation of energies, giving contrast, variation and creating relationships.

The Common Substance of the Arts looks to find out what is common to all forms of art, and therefore, in a way, what art is. The book was written at a time when it was clear that the boundaries of art were being widened (although not to a post-modern extent) and he is very open to accepting things into his definition, as long as they provide an aesthetic experience. The core components of art seem to be: a whole made up of singnificant, individual parts; manipulation of a medium - colour in painting, tones in music; and finally, that it provides an experience in time and space - it is not instantaneous.

We then look to the next chapter, The Varied Substance of the Arts, to find that Dewey is against compartmentalising art into different, solid 'genres' based on traditional ideas, but rather an understanding of the tendencies that different forms of art have, in their medium and in the way they are confined.

In The Human Contribution Dewey begins by explaining that he sees no reason that the sensing and thinking are seen as two completely different things he puts a lot of energy into criticising the idea of the separation of mind and body. He uses his theory to, in a way, flesh out his theory on the aforementioned interaction between the human and the piece. If there is no separation of sense and mind, then we do interact directly with art pieces as we perceive them. We imagine, we bring our pre-conceptions, and the art necessarily communicates with us. The conclusion is that art is valuable as a way for (ahem) men to acknowledge and feel their union to one another.

The Challenge to Philosophy is a chapter in which mainly attempts to criticise other theories of art, as well as to see the implications that his theory has on philosophy as a whole. One thing I will pick out of this chapter is a part where Dewey seems to clearly state what he sees as the value of art:

"Tangled scenes of life are made more intelligible in esthetic experience: not, however, as reflection and science render things more intelligible by reduction to conceptual form, but by presenting their meanings as the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or "impassioned" experience."

Art, in letting us see the essential nature of things, can give us a different kind of understanding. This apparent real value of art now gives weight to the idea that is is not something that should be separate from life, but something that should continue to give meaning to our every day lives, as he argued in his first chapter; for example, how fairy tales can help children to understand common situations as they develop and grow. Perhaps modern, adult life doesn't offer this as vividly as it should.

Criticism and Perception, the penultimate chapter, (yes we're nearly there!) is where dewey criticises criticism. He objects to judicial criticism, in which the verdict is the most important part, as it tends to prioritise rejection or acceptance of art, rather than understanding. He also raises the question of "whether the masterpieces of the past are accepted as such because of personal response or on the authority of tradition and convention" noting that judicial criticism tends to prioritise classicism without question, and is not agile in accepting new movements.

He does think that criticism is important though, rather than just reporting your own impression of the  piece, as "the insight of a cultivated mind and the gush of the immature enthusiast stand on the same level" in that case. Dewey's model for criticism holds that what is important is to "search for the objective properties of the object that may justify the  direct reaction". Good criticism then, is something that states a reaction, but then helps us through the piece (or game, or film, or holiday), looking at the parts and seeing how they work. Direct and badly explained judgement limits the personal experience of the reader and non-critic in their own experience of the piece. This chapter sends a message that is very helpful in a general way, to anyone who writes and reviews things, although it seems to be only loosely connected to the rest of the book.

The final chapter, Art and Civilisation, closes the book with a look at art in relation to civilisation as a whole. We can get two main points from this chapter. Firstly, Dewey sees art as the best way to communicate with other cultures, as, due to it's close and deep method of communication, it dissolves barriers caused by time, space and language. We can perceive aesthetically some of what they think and feel as a culture by experiencing their art. This conclusion is very closely linked to what he set out in the challenge to philosophy.

His second point, focusing on the development of art though time, and on the future, reasons that the development of art though civilisation over time is linked to progress in other fields, and the conclusion form this, remembering that the book was written in 1936, is that art still needs time to develop in order to accept and develop organically in the recent developments in science and industry. This is a very modernist persuasion, although it is also clear that he thinks that mass production is a very serious challenge to aesthetic appeal. This part of the book is, finally, one that is of direct implication to Engineers and Designers. He also looks at the way that the new industrial movement affects quality of life, and his view that "the basic problem can be solved merely by increase of hours of leisure is absurd", is very interesting, as it contrasts very sharply with Le Corbusiers plans for the future, as well as with Marxism.

***

Okay, so I must now bring this extraordinarily long blog post to a conclusion. The book is basically a tedious, difficult mess of ideas. It has taken an in-fathomable about of time and effort to read and comprehend, especially for someone uninitiated in these kinds of art criticism and aesthetic philosiphy. And despite the difficulties in structure and writing style, I certainly can't say that Dewey was wrong. In fact, the fact that he is so very right, and that it seems almost all of his ideas have silently, and comprehensively, slipped into mainstream belief, adds tedium to the reading process.

For a Product Design Engineer, what does this book bring? Was this the right time to read and analyse this book? B is for Bauhaus, by Deyan Sujic, is a book I read in my first year, and conceptually and intellectually it is a division lower than Art As Experience, but what it was was a 'halo effect' book - the valuable experience was in all the background googling I had to do to get a grasp on the design theory, history and characters. That reading experience single handedly introduced me to the majority of the world of design. Art as experience has done the same, but for philosophy, history of art, criticism and aesthetic theory. Now I don't really want to become an art and design critic, so perhaps I would have been better reading, say, several books on technical matters, or on specific designers, but what I have noticed, picking up my next book, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, is that I find myself being able to make better inspections of his arguments, noting philosophical sides he is taking, relating his observations to more conceptual ones and being able to make my own analysis, rather than taking his word for it and merely comparing his views to others.

I still wouldn't recommend this to all 3rd year PDE students, as there is more applicable reading to be done, perhaps read more Victor Papnek, or deal with the more direct writings of people like Loos, Corbusier, and Venturi, but hopefully what I have gained is a critical backbone which will enhance my understanding of all creative pursuits, and give me a better platform on which to build my own criticisms of designs old and new.