A phenomenon, popularly speaking, is something that teases people into thinking about it. In this sense, there are phenomena of art. I could call them the data of art, but this expression does not feature whatever it is that generates questions. Yet, both phenomena and data are given. They are the starting points. The difference is that a phenomenon is a datum with a penumbra of questions around it.
What, then, are the phenomena of art? This seems to be a request for specimens or examples. Here are some. Consider the medium of a painting or a statue. You see it as something. You see something in the pigment or bronze; it is animated with an image. But the strange thing is that this is not owing to any transparency of the medium.
There is no analogy with seeing something either through a window pane or even in a mirror. A mirror image is not embodied in a medium; it is curiously disembodied, quite unlike an image in art. Or if you insist that the mirror is the medium, then you must notice that the image is not related to the glass and other materials of the mirror as the mountain image in, say, Cézanne “Mont Sainte-Victoire” is related to the pigmented canvas. This makes the mirror image an intriguing phenomenon in its own right, and it teases the epistemologist; while the opaque work of art, coming to life under the manipulations of the artist, becomes a phenomenon for the philosopher of art.
Connected with this is the phenomenon of the space of a work of art. Even music and poetry are voluminous in a sense, and the teasing question is, in what sense? A moving-van operator sees a work of art in terms of space and time properties that seem not to be compatible with its space-time properties as an object of aesthetic experience. I have in mind such properties as flatness, depth, etc. The pigmented canvas is flat in one view, but you see a solid apple “in the picture.”
These considerations present a phantom phenomenon that haunts all philosophies of art: just what is the work of art as an aesthetic object? Is it, in this capacity, really there confronting one, or is it an illusion in some sense? Does Othello really suffocate Desdemona? What is teasing about this is that both alternative descriptions can be, and have been, given, in view of obvious characteristics of the phenomenon. Which is correct is not decidable without a more sensitive examination of the key concepts involved in the statements and of the phenomenon itself.
Then there is the phenomenon of the curious way in which a work of art is like something or resembles it. This remarkable sort of similarity may be appreciated and confirmed without first looking at the work of art and then at what it represents, in a comparison. You must somehow or other see the thing represented as located in the art work, if the representation has any aesthetic status. This is certainly not the way in which one would see or confirm the resemblance between, say, a Chevrolet and a Buick of the same year’s vintage.
Moreover, artistic representation can, paradoxically, be achieved without there being in existence anything that is represented. So another phenomenon presents itself, namely, how representation in art is to be distinguished from expression (its expressiveness) and how they are related. It frequently seems as if it is only the expressiveness that counts, under a strictly aesthetic consideration.
More than this, many works of art seem to depend neither on expression nor representation. These are the formal ones. In such cases, what gets expressed, if anything, is an acute question, while it seems obvious that nothing at all gets represented. So here the really hard questions about expression in art are driven home: is the work of art expressive of feelings only, may certain characteristics of things also be expressed, or can the latter be only represented? Moreover, there are many expressions of feeling that have nothing to do with art, as in the case of your neighbor giving you an angry look over the expensive new fence. The phenomenon of expression in art simply vibrates with the penumbra of questions around it.
Speaking of form: you encounter a bit of music or a painting for the first time, yet can say of it at once and unerringly that it is a Mozart or a Cézanne. Is it the form of the piece that enables you to do this? Or is it the style? What is the difference between these, if any? And the medium and subject matter of a work of art, this seems to fuse with the form and content of the art work, making it self-sufficient; yet is it not precisely the subject matter that lies outside it and that the composition represents?
Connected with this phenomenon is the paradox of the artist’s ambiguous relation to everyday life and its values. On the one hand, the artist seems remote from life, caught in the self-sufficiency of his works of art and not knowing how to live, really; yet, on the other, he seems to be more intimate than nonartists are with life, so that he can reveal its secrets. (There is the old adage: he could save others; himself he could not save.) This distance-proximity relation of the artist to the world is quite phenomenal. And it seems to be this puzzling sort of relation to his work of art that others must get into if they are to experience it for what it is worth as art.
Continue Reading: We need a philosophy of titles of works of art
Hits: 116