Aesthetics; A Beginning (of sorts)

For the last three weeks, I had the opportunity to drive up to UC Berkeley, live in a house with 40 of my amazing classmates, and be forced to read books all day long. Not really forced, mind you, but deadlines are always helpful in motivating one to actually finish a book, rather than come to the end of the summer and find out that there's no way you're going to power your way through the rest of that Dickens or Dostoyevsky novel in the 2 days before school starts. To be entirely honest, my three weeks spent up at Westminister House were quite possibly three of the most amazing weeks of my life. Granted, I haven't lived very long, but the truth stands regardless.

Why, you ask? Partly because it was a breath of fresh air after a rough semester, partly because I had the chance to live with amazing, crazy, and altogether brilliant people, and partly because there were 5 or 6 used book stores within walking distance stacked to the ceiling with more books than I could ever hope to read. But most of all, the curriculum was right in the center of my proverbial wheelhouse; Creation and Creativity. Basically, we were trying to understand what it means for God to be the Creator of all things, and how we ought to view our own creative capacities in light of that truth. It was especially impacting for me because it served as a catalyst for thought in an area which I was always interested in but terrified to ever actually pursue in earnest. As a musician, my job, on its most basic level, is to create beauty. But I, along with most other musicians I know, have spent most of my time on the technical level - working out fingerings, fixing ensemble problems, practicing shifts, and so forth, but having little or no idea what is happening on a philosophical level in the process of creating and performing art. So here I am, after this lengthy introduction and in an attempt to keep my brain from turning into jelly during the summer, writing about art and aesthetics, or, to be more accurate, talking about writing about art and aesthetics. Anything that sounds remotely intelligible is most likely from my friends and tutors from Berkeley, seeing as we spent much of our time batting around ideas on this topic. This is, as I said earlier, the beginning of something. It is entirely possible that I will be more confused by the end of this post than I was at the start, but if these were questions that could be answered in one blog post, than they either weren't questions worth asking, or the post is too long.

Question 1: How do we interpret the meaning of a particular piece of art?

When trying to interpret art, be it visual art, written word, or a piece of music, it seems that there are three things from which art cannot be divorced; Authorial intent, historical/social context, and the recipient of the art.

First off, it should be self-evident that when an artist creates something, he does so with some sort of meaning in mind that is to be conveyed through his work. If something is created without intentionality or without meaning, than we have grounds to question whether or not that thing is art. Intentionality and meaning seem to be central to the definition of art, simply because of the nature of the creative act as an action. If we understand the creative process as an action, then there must necessarily be someone making the decision to act; no painting, no sonata, no novel ever spontaneously came into being independent of the will of its creator. At this point we can tentatively say that art is tied to the intentional act of its creator, but it could be asked "Is art so essentially tied to meaning as well? Is it possible for an artist to intentionally create something without meaning?" I would posit that the same necessary relationship between art and intention also exists between art and meaning. In his essay on the "Fantastic Imagination" which deals specifically with the work of Faerie tales, George MacDonald asserts that art "cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the fairytale would give no delight." In the case of the man trying to create something with no meaning, it may be the case that the act of removing meaning from his art may be a meaning in itself. I find it terribly ironic that we have definitions for things like Nihilism, or even the word Meaningless, because a definition necessarily gives meaning, even to something that claims to be without it. The alternative is that if the art truly has no meaning whatsoever, it is probably bad art, or not art at all.

After understanding the essential relationship between the intent of an author and corresponding piece of art, we must next understand where and when that piece of art was created, leading us to the next factor in artistic interpretation; historical/social context. This is important because of a simple truth that I had not thought of until Dr. Jensen pointed it out to me. We cannot divorce art from its context because everything exists in context. To try and take a piece of art and look at it independent of its context is to take the art outside the realm of reality. Of course when one looks at art outside of reality, it can mean anything you want it to mean, but I think we can all agree that it is best to stay within the bounds that reality has set for us. Outside reality, you can assert that the laws of gravity are just a social construction, but in the context of reality and the laws of the universe, gravity will work no matter how hard you may fight it. I believe this same concept applies to interpreting art. In order to truly understand what Dostoyevsky was trying to say in his novels, you must understand the character of the Russian people; in order to understand the work of Van Gogh, you must understand the sad events of his life; and in order to truly understand the music of Beethoven, you must understand that he was stone deaf by the time he wrote the Ninth Symphony. Without these details, exploring the meaning of art becomes an almost impossible exercise.

Lastly, we have to understand the relationship between the meaning a piece of art is conveying and the reader, viewer, or hearer of that particular piece of art. This is something I am still trying to understand, as it seems to lead to an extremely relativistic view of artistic interpretation. I was even more surprised to see it proposed by MacDonald in that same essay I referenced earlier. He makes this statement; "Everyone, however, who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another." His imaginary interlocutor interrupts, asking "If so how am I to assure myself that I am not reading my own meaning into it, but yours out of it?"
"Why should you be so assured?" answers MacDonald. "It may be better that you should read your meaning into it. That may be a higher operation of your intellect than the mere reading of mine out of it: your meaning may be superior to mine . . . A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean."
However discomforting this may sound, it is a reality that is very important to grasp, especially understanding how we understand the meaning of art "after [our] own nature and development." Ask an architect, a poet, and a philosopher all to listen to one piece of music; the first might comment on the symmetry in musical construction, the second might comment on the profundity or beautiful simplicity of the melody, and the third might comment on the dialogue between the instruments, almost as if they were engaged in a musical dialectic. All these differing observations may lead to different interpretations, but each of them brought their respective skills and natures to bear on the art and came up with valid interpretations. What did not happen was this; no one found meaning that contradicted the authorial intent or context. We cannot allow our interpretations to contradict the intention of the author or the context the art was created in. There can be an infinite number of interpretations, but only those within a certain scope can be considered right interpretations. MacDonald addresses this later on in his essay, saying that men cannot draw whatever he pleases from art, but only "what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I meant them or not?" In the interpretations of art, there is a certain level of subjectivity that is inherent, but that subjectivity should never become relativity.




Well, that was fun . . . I'm not very good at this whole philosophy thing, so I'll leave you with one last, unrelated observation. In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard relates this experience to us; "I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance . . . Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

When looking at art, or any representation of beauty, please do not treat it like a cryptogram, or "begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means" - Rather, let the beauty you see play on you, and take you where it will. You will most likely not end up where you expected to; you may suddenly understand the beauty of a single blade of grass, you may experience that strange sensation of "being seen" for the first time, but it is of first importance to let the art speak for itself.

It will gladly speak to you, as long as you aren't trying to torture a confession out of it.