Learning by seeing
It is the folly of art criticism to search for the positive benefits of art. We read it time and time again; art edifies, instructs, points to (often uncomfortable) "truth"... and so the stage is set, comfortable vs. uncomfortable... none of this is meaningful. Art is. Artist after artist will tell you so, or fail "to explain."
That said (as if we could proceed without judgment) what art may do, is demonstrate. My friend Ben has invented a term, objectivate, to describe what artists do. Not "objectify:" we know what that means, but to show something, a meaning, a feeling, an idea, through production, of a thing, action, event...
It is difficult to say this without making it sound like an explanation, a justification, that art may serve a purpose. It doesn't, or rather this question, purpose or non-purpose, misses the point. Yet, still, we know practically nothing about how we learn and how we "know." Visuality, or visualness, are aspects of experience that are, to say the least, poorly understood. So maybe there is something there, in art, about learning.
"...Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Althusser said that one always catches the world's train on the move; Deleuze, that "grass grows from the middle" and not from the bottom or the top. The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his life (his links
with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture, to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression'."
- Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud (1998)
actually, forming imaginary and utopian realities never was art's role, where do people come up with this shit???
still, something, about learning by watching, by seeing... permanent link
That said (as if we could proceed without judgment) what art may do, is demonstrate. My friend Ben has invented a term, objectivate, to describe what artists do. Not "objectify:" we know what that means, but to show something, a meaning, a feeling, an idea, through production, of a thing, action, event...
It is difficult to say this without making it sound like an explanation, a justification, that art may serve a purpose. It doesn't, or rather this question, purpose or non-purpose, misses the point. Yet, still, we know practically nothing about how we learn and how we "know." Visuality, or visualness, are aspects of experience that are, to say the least, poorly understood. So maybe there is something there, in art, about learning.
"...Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Althusser said that one always catches the world's train on the move; Deleuze, that "grass grows from the middle" and not from the bottom or the top. The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his life (his links
with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture, to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression'."
- Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud (1998)
actually, forming imaginary and utopian realities never was art's role, where do people come up with this shit???
still, something, about learning by watching, by seeing... permanent link
Posted by howboy at 9:04 PM.
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