Many books and articles on art begin with the question-
What
is Art? Not that that is a bad place to begin, but the
answer
that is usually given can be as confusing as the question
itself.
For example, Susanne Langer, in her essay, "The Cultural
Importance of Art," gives the following definition of
art-
Art
is the practice of creating perceptible
forms expressive of human feelings.
Langer goes on to explain that she is talking about the
feelings
which we all share as a culture, not just those of one
person. Therefore, it might be a good idea to take a look at the term culture.
After all, art is a large part of culture. Or is it that culture is a large
part of art?
Culture
Culture has several meanings, such as that stuff that grows
in the
bottom of a petrie dish in biology class. It can also
refer to a large
group of people (sometimes entire nations, even several
nations)
who share ideas and ways of doing things; for example,
the Hopi
Indian culture, or the "drug" culture, or the culture
created by everyone
who watches MTV. But, another sense of the word culture
is the
one we use when we talk about those ideas and ways of
doing things
that are shared by those groups of people.
To make these last two uses of the word culture a little
clearer, let's
use this class as an example. As a group, we make up
a subculture
which we could call the Sauk Valley educational culture.
We all share
certain things- we all live in the Sauk Valley Community
College district, we all come together at Sauk to learn, we all know where
Northland Mall is and what Northwestern Steel and Wire is. These are all
things we have in common and can use to, among other things, make conversation-
they make up our culture. But more importantly, they are also all things
thought of and/or made by humans. In other words, the Rock River is also
something which we all know about, but because it is part of nature, the
river itself is not a cultural thing the way the Mill is. But what we do
with the river is part of our culture because human thought went into deciding
what to do. Any activities we engage in on the river are cultural because
they were created or invented by a person or a group of people. So the
word culture can also be used to talk about the things humans do, build,
talk about, think, or feel.
So, people belong to cultures-- that is, groups of people--
which can be
named: Americans, Midwesterners, Generation Xers, Baby
Boomers.
But the thoughts, feelings, activities, objects, etc.
that make these various groups different from each other make up that part
of our lives which we also call culture. And it is this use of the word
culture which we will be talking about the most in this course. We will
be concentrating on this aspect of culture because it is through culture
that we create our lives. That is, by being born into a certain culture,
we automatically know certain things but not others, have certain experiences
but not others, and have certain objects, technology, and stuff available
to us but not others. But, most importantly, we also have choices about
what kinds of cultural objects, experiences, and
thoughts we will make a part of our lives.
For example, as Americans, we have TV in common, especially
in terms of how we get some of our information about the world. But that
information may be slightly different depending upon whether you are
an MTV kind of person or whether you prefer Public Television.
That is, someone who gets their ideas about life from watching "Bay Watch"
or "MST 3000" is going to think the world works differently than someone
who watches "Masterpiece Theatre" or the Discovery Channel, because we
do get our ideas about what life is like from the cultural experience of
TV. But we also get ideas from the cultural expressions called politics,
religion, education, next door neighbor, and, of course, school. As the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out-
Undirected
by cultural patterns- organized systems of significant symbols [like politics,
religion, education, or TV] - man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable,
a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually
shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just
an ornament of human existence but.......an essential condition for it
(1973 46).
In other words, culture is all of the man-made ideas
and things in our
"world" which help us to understand ourselves and what
is going on.
It also helps us to organize our social groups and give
us a sense of
belonging to a community. But- and here's the point-
we also have the
power to shape our culture. After all, we invented it,
so we should have the ability to make it into what ever we want it to be.
Therefore, it also makes sense for us to know something about how culture
works. That is where Art comes in. As Geertz explains it-
In order
to make up our minds we must know how we feel
about things; and to know how
we feel about things we need
the public images of sentiment
that only ritual, myth, and art
can provide (82).
 The
Laocoon
The
Cultural Activity Called ART
First, let's make clear what kinds of activities fall under
the cultural category of Art. Painting, sculpture, architecture,
literature, music and dance are the main historic art
forms.
All of these art forms have been around since the beginning
of
humankind and it has always been clear that art is very
important
to people. Before we had towns and cities, before we
had
economics or politics, even before we had agriculture,
we
had art. Art is the most obvious connection we have with
our
ancestors, with the first truly human inhabitants of
this planet.
When, as little kids, we drew on the walls of our room,
we
were expressing the same urge as the people who painted
scenes
on cave walls (the only difference
being that they didn't get yelled
at by Mom). And when, as kids, we built our tree forts,
clubhouses,
and so on, we were expressing the same urge to make something
as the early Greek architects.
So art is one of our earliest expressions of culture.
It helped early
humans to organize their lives, to understand the world
around them,
and to communicate those understandings. And that is
what art
does for us. It helps us to understand how we feel about
things
and helps us to organize our world. Which brings us back
to Langer's
definition of art- the practice of creating perceptible
forms expressive
of human feelings. But, some of the words she uses need
their own
definitions.
Perceptible- If something is perceptible, then
we can know it
either through our senses or our imagination. e.g. (this
is the Latin
abbreviation for "for example") We can perceive this
handout
because we feel it and see it, but we can also perceive
what we
are going to have for lunch or dinner because we can
imagine
ourselves eating it.
Feeling- Langer means those sensations, sensibilities,
or emotions
that ideas and activities bring out in us, like when
we read a sad
story or see a dog run over by a car. Both situations
will make us
"feel" something, even though the story is not real.
It still has the
power to make us feel emotions and learn something about
what it
means to be sad.
Creating- Making, constructing. Obviously, this
can apply to
many, many activities- from cooking to landscaping to
painting
to composing music.
Form- An apparition given to our senses or imagination
which has
a unity, a self-sufficiency, and an individual reality.
e.g. a shape in
the fog may be unclear, but it still exists as a form,
as a shape in
the fog.
Expression- There are two kinds of expression.
One is self-
expression which gives vent to our feelings. It is a
symptom of
what we feel, a spontaneous reaction to an actual situation.
The
other is conceptual expression, that is, the presentation
of an
idea through a symbol system such as language or painting
or
music. For example, written words are symbols for spoken
language, so this whole text is a conceptual expression
of the idea
of art, created through the symbol system of written
language.
Look at the detail from Edvard Munch's The Scream
below. It is a
conceptual expression of the idea of feeling great emotion
created
through the symbol system of the visual arts.
Symbol Systems
So what are these symbol system things? Well, again we
need to turn to Clifford Geertz for a definition.
A symbol is- any object [like
writing or painting],
act [like dancing],
event [like a rock concert],
quality [like loud!],
or relation [like getting involved
with a soap opera] which
serves as a vehicle for a
conception- the conception is the
symbol's meaning.
Symbols are tangible [able
to be perceived] formulations
of notions, abstractions from experiences
fixed in
perceptible forms, concrete embodiments
of ideas,
attitudes, judgments, longings or
beliefs (91).
A symbol system, then, is a group of symbols which make
up
cultural acts, and cultural acts are the things like
religion or sports
or TV or hanging out that we participate in without even
really
thinking about how they effect us. That is, symbols and
cultural
acts, or patterns, are the ways we exchange information
with each
other about "how life goes." But we arent always aware
of the
fact that who we are, both as individuals and as a culture
(group),
is determined by our culture (man-made things, ideas,
events, and
so on. You know- symbol systems). And since art is a
symbol
system just like any other, it is also able to tell us
things about
ourselves that we wouldn't otherwise know.
Language
As A Symbol System
In speaking of language as a symbol system, Langer points
out that- "Acting as symbols, language will formulate
new
ideas as well as communicate old ones. Symbolic expression,
therefore, extends our knowledge beyond the scope of
our
actual experience" (77). Using anger as an example, Langer
tells us that to feel anger is a symptom of how a situation
affects
us, but to talk about that anger is to express the anger
in a symbolic
way in order to share it with someone. The things we
can say are
the things we can think. Without words, sense experience
is only a
flow of impressions. Words help us to organize and make
sense
out of what goes on around us. "Words make sense experience
objective- make it into facts and things" (78). In other
words, if
we didnt have the word anger, we wouldnt know what we
were
feeling, and we wouldnt know what to do about it. But
to know
what to do about it is also made clear through language.
Someone
who grew up listening to and watching Mom or Dad scream
at the
top of their lungs whenever they were angry would naturally
think
that that was the normal way to express anger. But if
that same person
also listened to, watched, or read about other ways of
expressing
anger, they would learn that we have choices about how
to express
anger. For example, in Shakespeare, anger is usually
expressed
through strong but elegant words which almost turns anger
into an
art form itself. The English take great pride in expressing
anger through beautiful speeches that make the person to whom the anger
is directed
feel worse than if they had simply been yelled at.
But we can also share the feeling by painting a picture
or writing
a poem about anger. These symbol systems tell us something
about anger which merely talking about it cannot. Again,
as
Langer points out-
But- there is an important part
of reality that is quite
inaccessible to the formative influence
of language;
i.e.,"inner experience." .....Feelings
and emotions only
seem irrational because language
does not help to
make them conceivable. The natural
form of language
does not reflect the natural form
of feeling. Language
only names very general kinds of
inner experience.
[But] human feeling is a fabric,
not a vague mass. It
has an intricate dynamic pattern
with possible combinations
and new emergent phenomena.This
dynamic pattern finds
its formal expression in the arts......
The primary function
of art is to objectify feeling so
that we can contemplate
and understand it (80).
Imagination
One final
word on the arts and culture--imagination. As
Langer tells us, imagination is the oldest typically human
mental trait- older even than what we call logical reasoning.
As the common source for dreams and social acts of all
kinds, imagination is still a very important part of
how our
minds work. Would we ever come up with new ideas if we
didn't have imagination? But here is the really neat
thing.
Although imagination is what we need to create the arts,
the arts also create the imagination, by giving us new
things
to think. For example, an artist creates a painting of
a flower or
an historical event. This act transforms those scenes
into "a
piece of imagination," which then adds to our enjoyment
of the
real things. This also happens when we read good literature.
We imagine the scene and the characters as we read, but,
by
creating new images for us to think about, the literature
also
makes us see things in the world around us in different
ways. It
even helps us to see things we might never have noticed
before.
The Fall of Icarus by Pietr Breughel
For a further discussion of culture and of Clifford Geertz, go on to
What
Is Culture and be prepared to use the material from this
site in a quiz or an Agora posting.
 
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