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Friday, February 23, 2007
Carrier's search for a universal aesthetic
Posted by George J. on February 23, 2007 at 04:08 PM | Permalink
David Carrier's Keynote-- the search for the universal aesthetic
“Philosophy’s task,” Arthur Danto has written, “is to say something true and essentially true of artworks as a class, however stylistically they may vary.” David Carrier’s keynote address, describing his own quest for a “world art history,” incorporating a kind of international pan-aesthetic, is in this spirit.
Carrier’s aspirations are so epic they excite me. But are they quixotic? Many doubt that one universal concept of art common to all human cultures could be found.
My own experiences in Beijing suggest there is one. David, however, may find his teacher Richard Kuhns’s work, the Psychoanalytic Theory of Art, offers a shorter path to finding a pan-aesthetic than does his teacher Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace. I’ll start with an anecdote, and end by suggesting a method David Carrier might himself follow, during his frequent trips to China.
My family spends summers in Beijing with in-laws. When my son was only five, I took a year off and we stayed longer. I wasn’t too concerned that he’d be isolated, because we’d already discovered that Andrew could run downstairs to the courtyard of his grandmother’s building, and play happily with the other Kindergarten kids there.
That had been a surprise, for he speaks no Chinese. They spoke no English. Indeed, they had no experience of Westerners. This was in an unfashionable non-tourist suburb of Beijing comparable to Brooklyn, called Xizhermenwai. How nervous I was, the first time in that courtyard playground he approached some little boys his age.
One of the other five year olds simply grinned at Andrew, handed
him a little toy dinosaur, lifted his own plastic toy, and made a
theatrical roar, menacing Andrew’s toy with it. Andrew instantly
recognized that they were Playing Monsters, roared back on his
dinosaur’s behalf, and then the boys went joyfully on, staging the mock
battles that little boys that age always play. I reflected later that
communication was so easy because they were not only largely
pre-verbal, they weren’t even different cultures yet, “Chinese” or
“American.” Andrew was pre-American, the boys were pre-Chinese.
But I also looked at this encounter through a lens David Carrier knows
as well as I do: that of Arthur Danto’s friend of sixty years, Richard
Kuhns. It was Kuhns, to whom Danto dedicated our conference’s topic, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. And it was Kuhns who has, in turn, quietly been creating the strongest post-end -of-art, post-Transfiguration defense of why art continues to matter, post-historical or no.
Kuhns-- in the work he subtitled "a Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles"-
was making his own attempt to provide a universal base for a philosophy
of art. He followed clinicians like D.W. Winnicott back to early
childhood to find, in children’s use of dolls and toys, the Ur-versions
of drama, sculpture and the arts. Kuhns’ main point, which even his
friend Danto now apparently accepts, is that humans use certain objects
to “metabolize” experience-- get hold of it, relive it, chew it over,
digest it, take the value from it. Whether art history is over or not,
humans need art as a kind of “spiritual metabolism” for experience, and
we can no more give it up “than we can give up physical metabolism.”
(1)
Kuhns’s art theory is endlessly suggestive. For instance,
re-read Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” stanza VII in
Kuhns’s light. Wordsworth-- as selfconscious an aesthetician as ever
lived-- seems to coming to the same conclusion. In his poem about the
growth, maturation, and possible decline of the Poet's mind, Wordsworth
describes in clinical detail the origins of dramatic art in a six year
old’s serious play. The Child begins conscious life as Artist: “As if,”
Wordsworth observes, “his whole vocation/ were endless imitation.”
Wordsworth agrees that from early life we use art to metabolize
experience.
Well before the incident in Beijing, I had already discovered how well
Andrew’s interactions with objects confirmed Kuhns’s predictions. What
looked like playing “with trains”, for instance, had turned out to be,
in reality, an Ur-version of puppet theater. True, these puppets had
four wheels-- but also faces, names, and evolving histories. Once, when
a girl had refused to play with Andrew earlier that day, he “played”
Thomas the Tank Engine (revealing word!), and instructed me, “Play
Mavis!”-- the girl engine of the group. He didn't have to watch dramas
to learn how to play a role. Dramas had evolved out of this early
childhood make-believe and still retained its vocabulary. "Play Mavis!"
As we pushed our wooden engines down the tracks, he directed me,
“Daddy, say, ‘Thomas, play with me!’” I did, and he yelled, “No!” and
raced past me. We did this several times, in his little skit the girl
begging the boy to play and being rejected, to his great satisfaction.
(That Art can provide happier endings than Life has provided, is one of
its famous attractions.)
Reading David Carrier’s keynote to the conference I remembered afresh
Andrew’s "play" in Beijing. I knew even then that what the little boys
had invited him to do was act with them in an improvised puppet drama.
I had watched the pre-Chinese and Pre-American boy effortlessly
performing a kind of Ur-drama together whose conventions they fully
understood without communicating. In Winnicott and Kuhns’s work, art
begins well before ethnicity, as early as language.
Anyone who has sat for years, watching his son in playgrounds in Asia,
has easily recognized the enactments that the children around him were
creating. There's a significant, verifiable fact. An Ur-aesthetic, at
the least, is evidently out there in those playgrounds.
Is it not likely that a pan-aesthetic is built on top on the
childhood aesthetic base? Higher drama is built upon those primal
dramas and its powerful emotions; at least, good drama is. Great drama,
like Oedipus Rex, is built on emotions so primal we can’t
consciously face them, any more than we can stare at the sun. All we
can bear is the sight of the shadows they cast on the stage. Asian
audiences have had no difficulty understanding Lear's sadness and rage.
As Ecclesiastes says, one thing happeneth to them all. We don’t reflect
how distant we actually are from the non-Judeo-Christian culture that
originally responded to Oedipus or to Odysseus. Only at the very top of
the tree do the branches divide into oil paintings West, and ink on
rice paper East. But as the Confucius of the Analects says, the wise man works on the trunk of the tree, not all the little branches. (1.2)
Carrier notes that Wollheim’s theory is an “appeal to a grammar of
language,” comparable to Chomsky’s appeal. Might we say that an
aesthetic based on Kuhns would appeal to a universal grammar of early
childhood development, such as Piaget’s?
The Beijing "play" incident also suggests a method. Perhaps David should consider (at least for a chapter) duplicating Winnicott’s and Kuhns’s experiments in a Beijing pre-school, to see how the conclusions based on Western children hold up in China?
If there is an international pan-aesthetic, David Carrier-- who has
himself visited with my inlaws in Beijing, and who is strenuously
educating himself in Chinese culture-- is the scholar who could
discover it.
George J. Leonard’s Into the Light of Things: the Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage
( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) is often cited
in English departments and Concept Art circles. Written with Danto’s
and Kuhns’s help, as well as John Cage’s, it begins with Danto’s
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and reinterprets it, with John Cage
playing Warhol’s role, and 4’33” in place of the Brillo Boxes. Leonard
also identifies Cagean desires for the “end of art” as far back as
Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Carlyle, Ruskin.
Endnotes
1. Richard Kuhns, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Art: a Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also Kuhns’s Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). A fuller discussion of the Danto-Kuhns dialog appears in my Into the Light of Things: the Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage
(Chicago, London: U. of Chicago Press, 1994). Both my teachers seem
mildly amazed by my observations about this implicit dialog between
their works, but I insist on it. My long consideration of David
Carrier’s development as an “art writer” appears in the San Francisco Humanities Review, posted online at http://www.sfhreview.com/articles/40
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Comments
Posted by: undying | May 2, 2007 7:30:28 PM :
“Philosophy’s task,” Arthur Danto has written, “is to say something true and essentially true of artworks as a class, however stylistically they may vary.”
Chance gives you now one huge philosopher (me). Let's see if any of you can understand something from his words:
www.scatteredpiecesof1dying.blogspot.com
