There is a tradition in Continental thinking that retains a proper regard for the artistic/aesthetic dimension of art – its sensuous presentation of ideas. It comprises thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, Gadamer, Deleuze, and even Lacan (though this aspect of his thought is rarely discussed). However, all these thinkers approach art very strongly from the viewpoint of their own philosophies. This presents a very one-sided approach that does no justice to the importance of what is involved in the making of art. Artists change how the world appears and to recognize this transformation you not only have to look at the work in relation to how it represents things, you also have to understand the individual way it achieves this. Such understanding centres on how the artist uses the medium of which he or she is a practitioner, and this, in turn, entails knowledge of the comparative history of the medium. The point is that, in aesthetics, attention has to be shifted from the conditions of spectatorship to those of how art is created. This does not mean fantasizing about what the artist’s intentions were, but in looking or reading the work itself in relation to what it represents and how it represents it. This requires detailed discussion of particular artworks, and relating them to those transformative powers that produce effects distinctive to the individual media. These effects often have far-reaching ontological/aesthetic significance that is elided by more global terms such as Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s notions of ‘Truth’ or Merleau-Ponty’s ‘visible/invisible’ pairing, or Deleuze’s notion of the ‘Figure’. In order to bring out this ontological/aesthetic significance, the Continental approaches have to be conceptually unpacked, clarified, and extended by reference to historical and conceptual factors bound up with the relevant media. This latter feature takes us far beyond what the Continental tradition itself has attempted (with the problematic exception of Deleuze), and marks my major problem with it. True, the relativist approaches draw attention to the way things change , but in the context of the arts, we need to combine phenomenological attention to the works, with a proper critical analysis of the traditions of making within a medium. This why I advocate a post-analytic phenomenology rather than just working in the Continental tradition. The ontology of artistic media requires close analysis rather than immersion in an atmosphere of jargon and/or ill-defined terms (P. Crowther)
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 21:02:02 +0000
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