In Consideration of Aesthetics (1996)

Abstract

Dedicated to Marilyn Brakhage Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the works those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the emotions that they can feel-the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, instinctively they refer its forms back to the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as though it were a photograph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of the work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means to the emotion of life is to use a telescope for reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes and forms and the relations and quantities of colors. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colors, their relations and quantities and qualities; but only from these will they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than that can be given by the description of facts and ideas. - Clive Bell, from his book Art (Capricorn Books, 1958) The artist bending to the necessities of his/her creative process ought, for aesthetics' sake, eschew the strengths of the given medium. Every craft is best qualified to achieve a particular affect. Music most ordinarily presents human inward noises-the heart-at-beat, the nerves strumming-in-ear, the breath and all attendant throat-flute, glottal mucus slippage...the seepage of blood's pitch in veins, or breath's tone-cross-tongue and reverberations 'gainst dome of mouth, the inner snare-drum/trombone of yawn jaw's cartilage, the castanets of teeth, nasal wind hiss and moan, so forth (all noise approximate to the hairs of ear and inner ear's solitude). Painting presents perhaps a window, a cupboard of gathered flattened objects which one might (but cannot) touch, perhaps a likeness of ancestral ghost, a sign of what might have been, might be. Sculpture presents the very (coldly) touchable thing as object itself-a stand-in which might be mistaken on sight as such, for animal being (Pygmalion). Architecture, then, that which surrounds the living being and all such objectification as it has gathered-presents a womb, as it were, as well as tomb of the mind's mathematics...externalizing numbers into space, numb thought's otherwise endless flights of fancy. And Poetry?-the very exteriorization of thought process, both halves of the brain (the right, rhythmed, musically wired, and the compartment left) at one in ordering the chamber-music-muscularity of throat apparatus, tongue, teeth, to exquisite grunts of meat-thought-staccatos. Dance, similarly, best organizes the exterior body to mimic its innards, most usually prompted by Music's rhythm-mimesis of same. And Drama?-Drama, that least evolutionary of all the Arts, deserves our special study. Drama is, as everyone knows, that form of Human expression which most times presents our everyday-and-- nightmare-night's imagined outer world (the mirror held up to nature, as it were, is, and ever shall be). …