Is Art Natural or Cultural - Assignment Example

Question 10: Is Art Natural or Cultural? At first glance it would seem to be most obvious that the prima facie answer, in its simplest form, to this question, is 'both.' We are all human, we all have the same five or six senses, and to a greater or lesser degree the senses we have are similar among all of us in their range and frequencies. We seem, most or all of us, to at least have the capacity to be able to appreciate art, to know how very special it is, whether or not our appreciativeness itself constitutes the act of a separate sense, or some conjoining of the senses; sense here being used in both its physical and psychic 'senses.' So without going too deeply into things, it seems that we can creditably grant ourselves at least the option of concluding that on some fundamental level art is natural to human beings. Now we can take this a step further, after deciding that art is indeed a human faculty, a gift, as it were, and start exploring some ideas that appear to follow. For example, the idea of an 'essence' of art, a pure esthetics of some kind, as well as the idea of an isomorphism between art itself, the pure esthetics of it, and the makeup, whether human or divine, of its patrons and creators. Granted all that, we are in this so far innocent realm going to have to face the inevitable problems of the unfoldment of political and cultural history over the centuries, and this means grave complications. We are bound to witness the idea and ideal of a pure esthetics, a 'natural' art, whether understood as something constant in all possible worlds, or as something a little less universal, still grand, but nonetheless differentiated, by such 'things' as the 'Occident' or the 'Orient,' become progressively more complex. What is the relation between artistic paradigm shifts and artistic essence? Do the similarities outweigh the differences between African and Asian art? Does history unroll and gradually reveal, like a parchment handed down, eternal imperatives and correlatively determinate artistic forms or do humans create history out of thin air or whole cloth and impose their will on the arts as well? Now remember, we think we have already established above, at least prima facie, that there is some genuine, a priori thing we call art and artistic essence. We can use this in an operative fashion, conceive it as the center of a line connecting the two polar opposites of 'natural' on one end, and 'culturally acquired' on the other, so that we can determine the relative proportion of these elements in any particular artistic phenomenon by its position along the line. And we can further enhance the dynamic aspects of this concept by remembering that the question 'Is art natural or cultural,' is our question, at least for today and that there is therefore some a priori called 'art.' that is being assumed in the present essay. And that whatever this particular a priori may be, whether it is essence, or praxis, or conditioned, or miraculous, we can restate the idea contrariwise by stating that it is what is left over on our line at the vanishing point of the cultural or historical element emanating from the right, (assuming the work is not, e.g., an abstraction of an abstraction) and even altogether of, what Roger Fry (Fry 35) calls the psychological element, which is to say, what is being portrayed in the picture, poem, play, or sculpture. This then would seem to solve, once again, the question of whether art is natural or cultural, by simply making that question a question of degree, or of a more-or-less, an assumption that art is a compound of the natural and the cultural, with the relative participation of the two elements made evident by the placement of the artistic phenomenon along the line. But hold on, we must back up; perhaps we don't have the right to think even this, because we discover that Fry maintains that there is no special esthetic sense; or "mental disposition" (Fry 6) and that indeed, of all the faculties, psychic or sensory, with which we react to art of any kind, whether it be opera, poetry, sculpture or painting, not one of these faculties cannot also be engaged elsewhere in the less specialized experiences of life itself, life in general. What has happened on the 'natural' end of our progressive line? What now makes for naive artistic experience, or, for, for that matter, the in-bornness of art in the human psyche as well as in the universe itself? Well, we can explore some other parameters that we find implicated in our original question. Fry posits that artistic experience is emotional experience, and that it has nothing to do with sensation. (Fry 5) In this Fry is citing, rightly so, I think, that the sensuous aspects of architecture, music, poetry and sculpture, may be sumptuous indeed, but if they are not employed in a skilful, that is to say, artistic, way, they can be jarring and even repellent. It will be in their combination, their internal relatedness, their organization, the structure and form they are given by the artist, that the esthetic experience will be found. These observations appear to me to have made out a very fair a priori case for the existence in all esthetic experiences of a special orientation of the consciousness, and, above all, a special focussing of the attention, since the act of esthetic apprehension implies an attentive passivity to the effects of sensation apprehended in their relations. (Fry 5) He goes on to liken this experience to that of the response to mathematics, differentiating it from artistic experience only by the fact that the intention of art is to elicit an emotional response, while the effect of mathematics is to elicit an appreciation of universal law. Once again, we are back to the quantum question, which is, what is the relation between this focussing and orientation of the mind to the existence, and the actuality of, that on which the focus is on, the art that is the focus of our question. We have merely established the logical possibility that there is some more or less pure entity and experience that we may call art and that in talking about it we may be making a substantive statement about something that is actual. We may never be able to isolate it, or even adequately define it, except, as we have already tried above, or, alternatively, more exclusively via Fry's vehicle, which is to say by the 'apophatic' principle of stating what is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the perception of art and for art itself; (i.e.,) that it be visible, or audible, or rhythmic, or pleasing, etc.) and then, proceeding to remove all these from the equation, call the fabric of relatedness that is left over, 'art.' One can readily see that this debate was destined to be repeated over and over, in different forms, as in the conflict between realism and idealism in art. But for Fry one of the most interesting parts of the issue, and most illustrative for my purpose here, is what has been understood among some artistic circles as a competition, in a painting, for example, between technique, including composition (for Fry this latter is taken to be the placement of volumes within and among other volumes)(Fry 3, 11) on the one hand, and thematic or psychological material, "psychological volumes," (Fry 11) on the other. And in this he is more content and settled than the authors of Ways of Seeing, who state at the outset that words and knowledge can never describe or account for our seeing (Berger et al. 1-2) and therefore, I would add, our being, of and in, the world. Since, these authors maintain, there is no art form nor individual representation thereof that is free from a historically or culturally determined point of view, either on the part of its creator (and thus within itself) or its witness, there is also no, or very little, art history or criticism in which any reference to composition that refers to the "emotional charge of the painting," (Berger 13) can be valid, because once consideration of that emotional charge is brought into play, the critic can no longer describe the painting as a satisfying unity unto itself. If he does, if he proclaims a constitutional, compositional triumph of graphic unity and intensity in what is also and actually a painting intentionally, 'radically,' politically and even angrily depicting social and economic deprivation among poor people and perhaps of the artist himself, that critic will be emending, adumbrating, and altogether reducing the work and its creator to innocuousness. The issue is not between innocence and knowledge (or between the natural and the cultural) but between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline. (In decline, not before the proletariat, but before the new power of the corporation and the state. (Berger et al. 32) Fry is more forgiving. His understanding of the 'tension' between the 'plastic' and dramatic (psychological or thematic) elements of a picture is that there can be a balance between them, but that it is very hard to blend them in such a way that there is a single issue. He posits a similar relation between the plastic and the 'ulterior' features of a work of art. Where, for example the purpose of a painting or a poem seems at least nominally to incite Christian feeling, he finds at once an exception in Rembrandt's 'Christ Before Pilate.' Here the figure of Christ is set in the background so that the concentration is on Pilate's relation to the Rabbis, each of which is shown in the immodest terms that are appropriate, while Pilate himself is a modest civil servant simply wanting to calm things down. Fry also uses this painting to show that 'ulterior motives' such as the inducement to Christianity can, when in their proper place, add immeasurably to the very worthwhile, extra-ulterior value, of the work. "Perhaps, as in the case of El Greco, in process of time the psychological elements will, as it were, fade into the second place, and his plastic quality will appear almost alone." (Fry 25) And there is yet another turn with regard to capitalist and/or other ulterior qualities so decried by Berger, this time exemplified in opera. Fry cites "Semele," lyrics by Congreve and music by Handel, as an example in which both music and lyric are toned down, so that composer and author do not "presume" on one another (Fry 32) My comments here, are not to 'materially solve' the question of whether art is natural or cultural, but to explore the nature of that question, for it is indeed a valid question. Most any artistic work will find its place somewhere on the line that is the continuum between the two poles, combining them in various proportions, and on various places on other lines which may also be posited, with different polar opposites. But this conclusion will be too simply expository for the authors of Ways of Seeing, and they have a point, even when it comes to Fry who can seem over-complacent when it comes to fully acknowledging that there are political, plutocratic, and chauvinistic viewpoints embedded in many of the most seemingly innocent, non-capitalistic paintings. Ways of Seeing is all throughout pointed and provocative, but it avoids acknowledging the continuum, most notably in the chapter on the oil-painting tradition which held sway between 1500 and 1900. Even here, however, the authors do take pains to distinguish between average works and masterpieces, the latter being largely guiltless of any capitalist agenda, being 'puritanically,' I might say, simply examples of truly great art. The book is filled with truths, but they are usually barbed and therefore sometimes unduly over-laden with what the authors themselves most object to; that is, an overly political insemination that situates a work of art, in this case a valuable book - and its consumers. The result is that the authors have overdetermined the artists and works they refer to, especially in that same chapter on the oil painting 'tradition.' I cite as only one example of this possibly regrettable tendency their exposition of the paintings (unattributed) on pages 85, 86, and 87. In each case the subject is a vast room filled with paintings - a truly astonishing feat by the artists who have here painted hundreds of little paintings with seemingly as much detail as the paintings in which they appear. While the authors believe (and I cannot prove they are mistaken) that these paintings are displays of the very heights of the acquisitive, capitalistic spirit of their owner-consumers, I cannot help but think that the concept of a painting of paintings is something that sooner or later had to be explored, a materialism of materiality to be sure, but only marginally a display of covetousness, unless museums themselves really need to be reviled for political reasons. These are truly beautiful paintings, I think, regardless of what they may reveal about their owners, even if indeed they were commissioned. Clearly I can be accused in this of missing the whole point, of being overdetermined myself by a kind of capitalistic gyroscope of my spirit, in which case I stand corrected. On the other hand, the exposition beginning on page 89 of Holbein's The Ambassadors, is very well taken: The gaze of the ambassadors is both aloof and wary. They wish the image of their presence to impress others with their vigilance and their distance. The presence of kings and emperors had once impressed in a similar way, but their images had been comparatively impersonal. What is new and disconcerting here is the individualized presence which needs to suggest distance. Individualism finally posits equality. Yet equality must be made inconceivable. (Berger et al. 97) Works Cited Fry, Roger. Transformations. New York: Brentano's, 1926. Berger, John, et al. Ways of Seeing. New York: The Viking Press, 1973. Read More