Dainel Quall King

A well-known musician talking about the composer, Bela Bartok, remarked that Bartok was like Leonardo, who could not have painted a figure without knowing the details of what was underneath.¹  The musician, Yehudi Menuhin, was referring to Bartok’s obsession with collecting and cataloguing Hungarian folk music, which he assimilated and used as an ingredient in his own process of composing music.  That Bartok’s way of becoming sure in his details, like Leonardo’s way with anatomy and perspective, was essential for what he needed to accomplish is unquestionable.  But folk music was just one component, one type of input for Bartok’s creative processes, and although the relationship between sources and new music is clear in feeling, that relationship is never imitative, intrusive, or obvious, any more than is the case with Leonardo’s sources.

In a broadcast interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, Carl Andre distinguished between how artists and non-artists typically react to a work of art.²  Andre described the non-artist’s reaction as being something like, “Oh, I could do that”.  Andre didn’t say what kind of work was being looked at, but perhaps we can take it that it was a piece of his own.  Maybe if Bernini had been the maker, the reaction might be, “Amazing!  I could never do that”.  The inference is that non-artists make judgments about works of art, at least typically, according to whether or not they think that if they had the experience and opportunity, they could acquire and exercise the same manual and imaginative skills with the same result.  But when an artist responds to another’s work, his reaction is to want to achieve as much, or more, but differently, in his own way.  He uses the work of others to clarify and stimulate his own thoughts and imagination in order to mobilise his own will to do something.  Art, of course, begets art.

Andre didn’t extend the thought any further, but naturally enough, the way artists use the work of others is no different from that of other people, journalists, scientists, politicians, or whatever.  We all respond imaginatively to what others do in terms of our own gifts, abilities, inclinations, opportunities, and needs.  We use our acquaintance with art and with the world, seen partly from the viewpoint of our other ways of knowing, scientific, political, ecological, religious, or whatever, to fertilise the conceptual space of our own minds.  We get energy and method from the fermentation of what is within and without ourselves to realise our work.

Now all this may seem no more than a certain kind of common sense; but artists aren’t famous for their common sense, and being an artist, I’m interested in how I and others and the world are made and how they operate, and specifically, in artistic meaning.  During the last few years, the kind of work I have been doing has led me to reflect on certain questions, and among them are questions about how it is that we think we know something and what we might mean by that.  I think there are many kinds of ways of knowing, and among them are some kinds and ways of knowing that many people would consider to be inadmissible in a line of reasoning like this.  But I think the shortcomings are with what are considered to be acceptable ways of using verbal languages, and not with the nature of experience.  Thus, when trying to discuss knowing, I am inclined to be inclusive rather than exclusive, provided only that such knowledge stand the test of time.

Returning to Bartok, Leonardo and Carl Andre, though, and questions of artistic “knowing” and how people may react to content, I seem to be led in the direction of two interesting questions.  What parts of our evaluative mentality do we use to distinguish between art and applied art (or, if you prefer, design, decorative works, or crafts)?  And how are art and knowing related?  I don’t believe there is any one viewpoint sufficient to the task of exploring such questions, since knowledge, and particularly verbally conditioned knowledge, is always partial.  The job is made vastly complicated by social and historical factors affecting our present situation, a situation which is in many ways novel, problematic, and often difficult to understand correctly or to come to terms with.  But I do not believe that just because language gives only partial access to our artistic concerns, it cannot be useful to us in exploring our work.  There are collections of aspects of things which, if properly thought out and tested, might help us to gain greater or different kinds of access to works of art.

In looking at the question, “How do we distinguish art from applied art?”, consider first how we distinguish art from non-art in general.  Art differs from non-art in that (1) it is capable of giving us occasion for aesthetic experience which is non-ordinary in kind, in degree, or both; and (2) it is brought into being with this intention.  Also, we address works of applied art as things, but we relate to works of art in a different way, somewhat as if they were persons.  This suggests that there are certain values we expect to find in our experience of one, but not necessarily in the other.  For instance, we can usually put a price on “things” fairly easily and realistically, but we would expect Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years or even one of Brancusi’s birds to be spoken of as being priceless in a quite different sense from the crown jewels or a Greek vase.  The matter of ‘knowing’ also seems to me to be a promising way to approach both questions, but with a difference in each case.  For the first question, I want to ask, “What kind of knowledge do we seek from a decorative work, and what kind from a work of art?”  For the second question, I would ask “How do artists use knowledge (in Menuhin’s sense)?”.

It is characteristic of works of art that they often set out to delight, but also to question and inform – and in so doing, take risks of a certain kind and of a certain order.  It is characteristic of decorative works that they set out essentially to confirm what we already know, and perhaps in so doing they take a different kind of, and order of, risk.  In works of art, should risks be calculated in they way they perhaps should, or must be, in decorative works?  Are we, in the practice of art, specifically licensed to take (and specifically responsible for taking) non-calculated risks, to pursue our purposes ruthlessly regardless of the cognitive consequences?  If so, this would resemble a kind of total honesty, or self-honesty, and courage.  And if not, just what is our job and what are we to use as points of reference in determining its limits?

When we look at a decorative work, what we usually find is a question about style, or life-style, but not usually a question about style itself or life itself.  Designed work is evolutionary in specific practical ways; it depends on social and economic continuity, on continuity of physical or psychological needs, or both; its ultimate aim is economic.  To what extent could we helpfully think of art as also being dependent upon such continuity? People become designers or craftsmen in the first instance in order to make a living.  Can it be said meaningfully any more that people become artists for the same reason?  Now that the avant-garde is an institution, perhaps so.  But our divided society’s divided approach to art makes it unavoidable that almost any art worth bothering about comes out of very high-risk situations, and risky also in terms of the demands of a particular part of that society.  What are the alternatives?  To work as a muralist, a community artist; as an artist supported by a special-interest group; or as a sub-contracting supplier of paintings to Boots; or to aim for the kind of connections that lead to the big and often all-too-mediocre public commissions.  And so on.  The problem is pointed up by asking the question, “Does the residue of this kind of activity usually come out of a process of questioning and risk, and if so, of what order?”.

But to summarise so far some of the ways we distinguish art from non-art;

1. According to whether or not it is capable of giving us occasion for aesthetic response which is non-ordinary in kind, in degree, or both, and whether or not it was brought into being with this intention;
2. According to the mode through which we address the work, and the nature of our expectation: as of a thing, or as of a person;
3. According to what it appears to do to our sense of knowing, causing us to confirm, or to question and extend what we think we know;
4. According to the type and extent of risk, and whether the risk is calculated mainly in terms of economics or in terms of what is said.³

 

And now, how are art and knowing related?  I would like to begin with an approach from inside the artistic process, and it may be instructive to look at Leonardo and rationalistic knowledge.  It is now generally accepted that Leonardo’s mathematics and optics are scientifically incorrect; to quote from Leonard Penrice, “…but that they were productive is beyond question”.⁴  He also observes that art needs theories which are problem-generating rather than problem-solving.

Leonardo’s work succeeded because it was pursued rigorously as a discipline in its own right; it threw up its own problems, achieved its own solutions, and imposed its own evaluative procedures…Leonardo’s enthusiasm for a theory of picture perception that most theorists now reject can be attributed to three distinct but related factors: first, it was consistent with a convincing explanation for a previously somewhat mysterious fact; second, it had practical implications that could be tested; and third, it was culturally relevant… it is productivity rather than truth that we should look for.

What is interesting is his conclusion that that artistic technologies may legitimately derive from theories that are scientifically (or sociologically or theologically) incorrect and still be “true”, or productive and useful, in terms of rather different purposes.

What is the nature of artistic purpose?  I am strongly inclined to think of aesthetics and ethics as being closely related in their nature, and I have elsewhere developed a line of thought that the ethics of art and the ethics of living, morality, are isomorphic.  I believe they are both functions of our adaptive tendencies and capacities.

If we take productivity to be the criterion, then for Bartok, Hungarian folk music, and for Leonardo, perspective and anatomy, were simply the appropriate “facts” needed for their developing languages of musical and visual articulation.  When we use such “facts”, or in other words our technically developed content, we do so out of our beliefs; out of our acquaintance with social concerns and objectives and how we relate to them; out of our own needs and desires; out of our “scientific” knowledge about the world and what it consists of and how it functions; in fact, in terms of any ideas and in whatever form they may be available to us; and in terms of what used to be called our ideals, that is, the way we would rather things would be.

But because of our risky and uncertain situation, we are very susceptible to doubts thrust upon us from other activities, the sciences, art history, philosophy, art criticism, sociology, and the media.  In seeking our artistic identities, it is valuable to bear in mind that it is the performance or the physical object we make or experience, and how we use it to perceive, know, and feel, that is at the heart of our sense of reality.  Any other kind of knowing that we experience in relation to the work or the artist must be tested against this criterion and no other.  That way, we have as good a chance as Bartok did with his folk music.  I have a hunch that Leonardo knew this with his use of mathematical theory (which I am certain he loved doing), not just because it may have been fairly good mathematics for its time, but also because it felt right.

And yet, all these musings seem to deflect one from the heart of the matter.

Jerome Bruner, in an essay entitled Art as a Mode of Knowing, discussed four aspects of our experience of art.⁵  Briefly, these are connectedness, effort, conversion of impulse, and generality.  Concluding, he suggests two ways in which life imitates art that are more than trivial.  Art has the effect of making us want to seek in the conduct of life the wholeness we can experience in art.  The second is the self-nourishing quality of experiencing art, “…so that having sensed connectedness one is compelled to seek more of it”.

Of course, art is a manifold of ways of knowing.  I am inclined to think that what we call “knowing” is the totality of our processes of perception in a given field of attending, not simply what can be proven or disproved in a conventional sense.  Reality is whole; it is often our ways of perceiving, if unduly conditioned by the way we use verbal languages, which tend to fragmentation or partialness.  Since what is within and what is without are essentially seamless, “knowledge” of the whole is not denied us.  I believe it is one of the principal values of non-verbal and poetic modes of utterance that they can be cultivated as a useful corrective to the fragmenting tendencies so characteristic of the way we have come to use verbal modalities.

Bruner also observes that there is a certain fear we have of “knowing” about works of art, and that there is a profound question “…whether the possible meanings that may emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art”.  And “…Whitehead may not have been altogether wrong…in suggesting that…for the exploration of the metaphysical and the poetic, the language of the poet may be the only appropriate medium”.

I strongly suspect that this rich subject is more profitably a subject of insight than of discourse.  I therefore propose only this:

Art fabricates unknownness; knowing transmutes our experience of art from interest into insight.

Love fabricates unknownness; knowing transmutes our experience of love from fascination into grace.

Also, there seem to be few people who have an adequate appreciation of Leonardo’s qualities as a humanistic philosopher:

The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love, for love of anything is the offspring of knowledge, love being more fervent in proportion as knowledge is more certain, and this certainty springs from a thorough knowledge of all the parts which compose the whole.⁶ 

NOTES

¹ Bela Bartok Centenary Concert, BBC2, 27 March 1981.

² “Conversations with Artists”, BBC Radio 3, 15 March 1981.

³ There are, of course, countless ways to make the distinction.  For example, because of

technological change, a designed product, or rather, the way a designed product performs its function, its overt job, becomes obsolete.  A work of art, on the other hand, if it has any serious value, does not become obsolete, although its relevance to the needs of a given time and place may vary considerably.

⁴ Leonard Penrice, “The Background to Perspective”, Information Design Journal, Vol. 1, 1980, pp.198- 203.

⁵ Jerome S. Bruner, On Knowing, Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962, pp.59-74.

⁶ Quoted in Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, the Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. London, J.M. Dent and Sons, 1981, p.349.