Art and Identity: Essays on the Aesthetic Creation of Mind PDF
Preview Art and Identity: Essays on the Aesthetic Creation of Mind
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
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