Percieving Art - a really long one... beware

 

Katie 022110 - Negative Neighbor 1

After reading a very elequont and well written articles by Dr. L. over at What We Saw Today about the future of art, I got to thinking about the relationship between perceiving art personally and how we learn as individuals.   We all perceive things differently and that affects how appreciate create and learn.  How will our ability to perceive art in the future define what art will become? 

One learning theory emphasizes the different types of learners and trying to meet their needs. According to Howard Gardner, people learn best through one or more methods of interaction with the subject.  Gardner came up with a list of eight multiple intelligences with a couple more to consider as additional avenues.  The big eight are:

1. Bodily- kinesthetic - learning better by involving muscular movement (e.g. getting up and moving around into the learning experience), and are generally good at physical activities such as sports or dance.
2. Interpersonal -  people who have a high interpersonal intelligence tend to be extroverts, characterized by their sensitivity to others' moods, feelings, temperaments and motivations, and their ability to cooperate in order to work as part of a group.
3. Verbal - linguistic - People with high verbal-linguistic intelligence display a facility with words and languages. They are typically good at reading, writing, telling stories and memorizing words along with dates. They tend to learn best by reading, taking notes, listening to lectures, and discussion and debate. They are also frequently skilled at explaining, teaching and oration or persuasive speaking.
4. Logical - mathematical - While it is often assumed that those with this intelligence naturally excel in mathematics, chess, computer programming and other logical or numerical activities, a more accurate definition places emphasis on traditional mathematical ability and more reasoning capabilities, abstract patterns of recognition, scientific thinking and investigation, and the ability to perform complex calculations.
5. Interpersonal - People with intrapersonal intelligence are intuitive and typically introverted. They are skillful at deciphering their own feelings and motivations.
6. Visual - spatial - People with strong visual-spatial intelligence are typically very good at visualizing and mentally manipulating objects. They have a strong visual memory and are often artistically inclined.
7. Musical - Those who have a high level of musical-rhythmic intelligence display greater sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, tones, and music. They normally have good pitch and are able to sing, play musical instruments, and compose music. Since there is a strong auditory component to this intelligence, those who are strongest in it may learn best via lecture.
8. Naturalistic - This area has to do with nurturing and relating information to one's natural environment.  Those with it are said to have greater sensitivity to nature and their place within it, the ability to nurture and grow things, and greater ease in caring for, taming and interacting with animals. They may also be able to discern changes in weather or similar fluctuations in their natural surroundings. They are also good at recognizing and classifying different species. They must connect a new experience with prior knowledge to truly learn something new.

 -Wikipedia

I would say I perceive things best using my visual - spatial and musical intelligences with a touch of the naturalistic as well.  I also recognize times when the other ones work for me, but these are my key ways I perceive and create things. 

Katie 022110 - Negative Neighbor 2

 

How we perceive art is as deeply personal as how we experience food, sex, attraction, revulsion, and any other life experience, different strokes for different folks.  Can you tell me what blue looks like?  You can list examples of blue things, elaborate on how it makes you feel, and even tell me which wavelengths in the visual spectrum are assigned to the blue hues.  Thankfully art is easier to discuss how we perceive it, but I know your explanation of your perceptions of art contain only a small amount of what you experienced, felt, and interpreted into them.

The visual-still arts are the most concrete to describe and elaborate on.  You can spend time with the piece to interpret it for your own consumption.  Your eyes can gaze on each part as long as needed.  If you can touch it, then you can touch it as long as needed as well.  For some art, a second is only needed, for other art, a lifetime.  What I appreciate about this form is that I can come back to it and digest bits of the piece or the whole thing as I need to.   This type of art has a very slow temporal life, limited by the length of the show, life of the viewer, or the decomposition, fading, or erosion of the piece.  Last month I saw the Pantheon in Rome.  It will probably be there the next time I see it.  It will be around after me and has been around for thousands of years before me.

Performance/moving art with a visual component is the next most concrete.  You are absorbing sight, sound, movement, action and other sensations to form your own version of the narrative.  With all this though, it is temporal.  The dancer's move, the actor's line, and the dialogue are gone after they are performed.  Only our memory (or a rewind button) allows us to experience it again.  During that instant though, our visual and auditory worlds have to be open to receive all the information we are going to get.  We are living in the temporal existence of the piece.

Music is the most abstract, for me.  I play music, love it and try to have it around me all the time.  It has some similarities to visual moving/performance art.  The temporal existence is a challenge since it lasts only as long as the note is held.  When the music stops, the perceiving time is done.  We are left only with our memories and feelings created by the music to create an interpretation.  A challenge unique to music and other auditory arts is the lack of all senses involved other than hearing.  I can't use anything other than my ears to capture what happened.

I love both listening and playing this piece - the tuba line is the best at  5:17 to 6:48 - I  get chills hearing and playing that part.


Another challenge with instrumental music (and dance) is the lack of words.  Everything exists in a temporal moment and demands the audience to truly make their own interpretation of the moment.  Music with lyrics may be abstract, but by listening to the words and how they flow with the music, I can get a deeper sense of the creator's message.

Flamenco music and dance flow with a passion that always stirs my heart, loin and spirit.  It can be inspire and heartbreaking all at once.


With all the above said, I have to go back to Dr. L's post.

Art is real. Its essence cannot be conveyed by pixels. The story of its time and place and purpose and moment resides in its physical package, the medium.

and

This is serious business if we come to accept a virtual gallery as a primary venue to show any kind of art. Nad's words "quickly forgotten" tell us all we need to know. We are not talking about just the end of literature. We are talking about the end.

I can see her point, but don't feel it is as widespread or absolute as may be feared.  If all art becomes an online gallery, it will be the death of art.  That wont happen though.  Viewing live sports events on location is still a preferred experience over watching it live on TV.  The televised version is probably closer to the action than the person in the stands, but experiencing it live is truly a richer experience.  Overall, I think people will always prefer the real thing to the recorded/digital version.

I think the impact of the internet on art, and any other form of communication and information, is similar to the printing press and the first recorded sounds.  Before printed words, all books were hand-written and most stories were passed down through oral traditions.  Before recorded sound, all music was experienced by live performers.  The temporal moment made it a cherished treat.  Within one minute, I can listen to pretty much any audio thing I want because of the ease of the internet.  While I may enjoy hearing Bach or Bachman Turner Overdrive through my computer speakers, listening to the real thing live is much better.  Seeing Ansel Adams Moonrise Over Hernandez on my screen reminds me of when I saw a real print of it, but since I don't have $40,000 to buy one, the virtual experience is better than none.

In considering the future of art, we always need to look at the technologies available to the artist.  Early photography was not considered art.  To make it more artistic, the pictorial photographer tried to emulate painted art.

Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes

Wikipedia

Along came Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and many other photographers stating, "bullshit" to the idea that photography had to emulate other arts of the time.  They defined a new genre of art that emphasized contrast, tonality, and clarity of image.  They created the concept or philosophy of the fine art print. In a previous post I wrote about a digital photography pioneer who challenging the concept that the traditional fine print is truly the only fine art photograph.  In the future, we may look back at the fine prints created by film photographers as garish, over-saturated, and with too much contrast.  Who sees true black in the real world?

It took some time and now photography is widely accepted and appreciated as an art form.  Very few cutting-edge artists exploring new media will have their art considered seriously in their lifetime.  This is the challenge of the new artists who is inventing the new art.

In the future, there will be new types of art that solely live in the digital world.  They may have no tactile, permanent existence. They will only be exhibited, performed, and created in the digital world of electrons and pixels.  We will only be able to absorb it through the machine that it lives in and puts it out onto the device we use to interact with it.  That same device may be what we use for communication, making lists, and doing our taxes.  Like music, they may be temporal and live only within one sense.   It may become something like a holographic universe that we absorb virtually through a connection to a computer.  Imagine if you could create a piece of art that a person could truly enter and be surrounded by to experience it.

Candace Nirvana 022110

All of this does not mean the death of art as we know it.  As Dr. L stated:

In the beginning was NOT the word, despite what we've been told. In the beginning was the image - those we saw before our eyes, and those we filed inside our heads.

Humans have been transferring images to walls for thousands of years.  We have been banging things together to create music and dance to a rhythm.  The piano, while made with better materials and engineering, is basically the same as the first pianofortes from centuries ago.  Every time a new form of art or technology/technique in art is created, we must make one of five choices, ignore it, accept it, accept parts of it and use it with the old methods, alter it for something even newer, or try to destroy it for all others.  There is some music I can barely consider music, so I ignore it or avoid it.  I've accepted using a digital camera.  I want to try making silver prints from digital negatives.  I would love to try taking digital photographs of my thoughts someday and push the format further.  I will always speak out about art that promotes hatred and persecution like many speak out about the nude art we create as dangerous.

In conclusion, humans will always need to create art and to experience it in whatever way is best for the individual.  Some will be tactile, or aural, or visual, or a mix of all the senses and types of intelligence.  Some will be using methods we can not fathom yet and others will be using the oldest techniques of art, a simple smudge on a flat surface.  Art is not going to die from new methods of exhibitions.  If it dies, it will be from others suppressing the artist's ability to make it.