Art and Identity: Essays on the Aesthetic Creation of Mind

219 Pages·2013·1.23 MB·English

by  Tone Roald

Art and Identity
Consciousness
32
Liter& ture
the Arts
General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Jade Rosina McCutcheon
Art and Identity
Essays on the Aesthetic Creation
of Mind
Edited by
Tone Roald and Johannes Lang
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover illustration: Gerhard Richter, 1025 Farben, 1974. 120 x 123,50 cm,
oil on canvas. Catalogue Raisonné: 357-3. © Gerhard Richter.
Cover design by Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3634-5
ISSN: 1573-2193
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0904-5
E-book ISSN: 1879-6044
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents

7
Introduction
Tone Roald and Johannes Lang

15
Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art
Mark Johnson

39
Acts not Tracts! Why a Complete Psychology of Art and Identity
Must Be Neuro-cultural
Ciarán Benson

67
I Am, Therefore I Think, Act, and Express both in Life and in Art
Gerald C. Cupchik

93
Sense, Modality, and Aesthetic Experience
Simo Køppe

113
Reading Proust: The Little Shock Effects of Art
Judy Gammelgaard

133
Becoming Worthy of What Happens to Us: Art and Subjectivity in
the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
Kasper Levin

167
Art and Personal Integrity
Bjarne Sode Funch
199
Steady Admiration in an Expanding Present:
On Our New Relationship to Classics
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
213
List of Contributors
217
Index
225
Acknowledgements
I. Introduction
Tone Roald and Johannes Lang
University of Copenhagen and
the Danish Institute for International Studies
Art has the capacity to shape and alter our minds. Those who have had
aesthetic experiences know this intimately; politicians also have an
awareness of art’s powerful effects as revealed through their efforts to
support or censor certain kinds of artistic expression. But what are
aesthetic experiences and how do they influence us? These are the
questions that the authors of this book, philosophers and psycholo-
gists, seek to answer.
The Danish artist Per Kirkeby has described one of his own aes-
thetic experiences:
Earlier today I went to see an exhibit at the Museum of Prints and Drawings
showing Bottichelli’s drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Then you don’t
have to think too much about it. I just put on my glasses. When something
really important touches me, I can get quite emotional and well up. My tears
flow freely […].The way he sat very meticulously and drew with a fine
pen—it is as if the line touches me. Twenty seconds pass where I feel I know
why I am alive. At this point in time everything flows together into one and
becomes a harmonious moment of experience which justifies an entire life.
(Quoted in Pilgard Johnsen, 2000)
For Kirkeby, the aesthetic provides him with a sense of intense signif-
icance—a harmonious mind, a reason for being, a reason for being
like he is. It creates an emotional experience of meaning-density.
Reading his narrative we feel the power of the work of art and, alt-
hough the description leaves out philosophical and psychological ex-
8 Tone Roald and Johannes Lang
planations, we know intuitively why the experience is important to
him as an artist.
Aesthetic experiences are obviously not limited to artists. Here is
another potent description of an intense experience with art by There-
sa, a museum visitor we interviewed who does not have a formal edu-
cation within the arts. For her, seeing Francis Bacon’s pictures is
“completely fantastic.” She says that the pictures “touch many things
in one’s attitude to life,” and that “they rise above the mundane and
become something. It somehow gives birth to something which
changes one, right?” But the experience and its consequences for her
cannot be fully captured in language: “I don’t know whether I can
formulate it,” she claims. The furthest she gets in this difficult task of
making her experience explicit is to say that the paintings are “fasci-
nating because they contain a whole lot of human nature,” and “they
contain a whole lot of messages that I cannot explain. Do they move
me? I cannot say whether they make me more tolerant, but I believe
that the more people you get to meet and experience, the more you
know about diversity.”
Without a doubt, Theresa’s experiences with these pictures are
significant to her. This significance indicates that Pierre Bourdieu and
Alain Darbel, in The Love of Art (1991), diminished and ignored aes-
thetic experiences in their claim that museum goers visit museums to
become distinct and distinguished. What they forgot was to ask
whether the visitors also had distinct experiences. In their attempt to
understand why we love art, they forgot the essential dimension of
aesthetic experiences and their effects upon the human mind.
The consequences of aesthetic experiences are the topic of this an-
thology. The chapters focus on the creation of subjectivity, identity,
and self-development through aesthetic experience, inviting a dia-
logue between philosophical and psychological approaches. A dia-
logue between psychology and philosophy was precisely what Alex-
ander Baumgarten (1734) imagined when he inaugurated the field of
aesthetics. Seeking to establish aesthetics as a philosophical disci-
pline, he regarded psychology as particularly useful. Psychology was
indeed that field which Baumgarten believed had the tools to com-
plement philosophy in moving the study of art into the domain of the
rational. However, such a juxtaposition of philosophy and psychology
has not always been embraced.
Introduction 9
Modern philosophy frequently ignores psychology in its quest for
understanding the consequences of art. The philosopher, Hans Robert
Jauss, for instance, said that he wanted to “avoid the threatening pit-
falls of psychology (1982: 22),” and Martin Seel claimed that “neither
the reality accessible to aesthetic consciousness nor the presence at-
tainable in this consciousness can be treated properly within the
framework of other disciplines than philosophy” (2005: 17).
To these philosophers, individual psychological descriptions of
experience are too transitory and too singular, not able sufficiently to
support general statements for the creation of a philosophical system.
Psychology, in this view, does not offer rigorous proofs, but only
vague answers and possibilities. Such a dismissal of psychology might
involve a desire for the (sometimes flattening) generality of philoso-
phy present in the metaphysical search for universal categories, sys-
tems, and arguments. Yet, when philosophers reject psychology as a
useful dialogue partner on questions of aesthetics, it is not always
clear what it is that they reject. For aesthetics has hardly been a psy-
chological field of inquiry. Instead art has been treated as a marginal
topic at the fringes of the various psychological schools of thought.
But if it is correct that we get to understand experience and identity in
general through understanding experiences with art, then why has
psychology, to which experience is so central, still not investigated
this epistemological potential—in fact largely ignored it? Perhaps
aesthetics was lost as an acceptable area of research in psychology’s
quest for scientific legitimacy. Experiences with art were seen as too
subjective for the scientific psychological community, which admits
truth only in the form of facts.
As psychologists, we find it regrettable that psychology, in the
study of art, has remained too closed-off from the insights of philoso-
phy. We hope this is beginning to change with an increased focus on
philosophical aesthetics in a theoretical psychology which, neverthe-
less, also takes the empirical seriously. Philosophy has a long and rich
history on the topic, and although many philosophers reject the reduc-
tion of art to its subjective potential for experience, philosophical aes-
thetics contains several assumptions about the psyche, both in relation
to psychic structures as well as to psychic functions. Philosophy has
often searched for the functions of art in rational and general systems,
while psychology, with its more empirical nature and much shorter