The Aesthetic Field
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THE AESTHETIC FIELD ARNOLD BERLEANT THE AESTHETIC FIELD A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience Cybereditions Cybereditions Corporation Christchurch, New Zealand www.cybereditions.com [email protected] Cybereditions welcomes comments from readers. In particular we wish to be informed of any misprints or errors in our books, so that we may correct them. Copyright © 2000 Arnold Berleant The moral right of the author is asserted. All rights reserved. This publication is copyrighted and protected by International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Other than for personal use, no part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of Cybereditions Corp. The unauthorized reproduction, storage, transmission or commercial exploitation of any material in this publication may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution. ISBN 1-877275-25-5 The fi rst edition of this book was published by Charles C. Thomas in 1970 Printed in the United States of America. PREFACE FOR CYBEREDITIONS THE AESTHETIC FIELD develops a distinctive way of understanding the arts, an approach that differed sharply from the prevailing thought thirty years ago, when the book fi rst appeared. The idea that art could best be understood as a complex fi eld consisting of a number of interdependent factors seemed to me, from my background in music, both obvious and unfamiliar—obvious since it offered a luminous refl ection of the experience of music and the other arts, and unfamiliar because the art object or the emotional response of a largely passive appreciator were the poles that usually magnetized discussions of art. Formalism and expression theories dominated accounts of art then and are still widely held. Occasionally, the focus was directed toward the artist, but this often took a psychological or biographical turn and was spurned by most commentators. These orientations, while providing some illumination, seemed to me partial at best, for art has more complexity and theoretical depth than these accounts seemed to realize. This led me to develop an approach that could accommodate the many contextual factors that enter into every aesthetic situation, and the idea of an inclusive aesthetic fi eld became my guiding concept. It offered a way to provide a full and fair account of the workings of art by recognizing the functions of artist, art object, appreciator, and performer as the central features of a homogenous aesthetic fi eld. These factors seemed to me not only to be inseparably interconnected in our experience of art, but also to function under the pervasive infl uence of social, historical, cultural, technological and other such ambient forces. What I could not have known in 1970 was how strong and fruitful this insight would turn out to be, and at the same time how persistently traditional ways of thinking would oppose it. The Aesthetic Field had 6 THE AESTHETIC FIELD unexpected relevance in several directions. It was one of the fi rst books to recognize explicitly the importance for aesthetics of the performative aspect of the arts, not only overtly in music, theater, and dance, but also as a constitutive factor in all aesthetic experience. This prefi gured the active role given the appreciator in more recent art and theory, where that person participates directly in actualizing the work. We find this in the recognition by reception theory of the importance of the reader’s substantive contribution and, more broadly, in the audience’s energetic participation in the many modes of interactive art. Moreover, by spreading aesthetic value over a wider fi eld to include the functions of artist, appreciator, and performer, as well as art object, The Aesthetic Field challenged the hegemony of the work, anticipating the pluralism of feminist aesthetics and the creative interpretations of hermeneutics and post modernism. For my own work, too, The Aesthetic Field had consequences I did not anticipate at the time the book was written. The idea of a contextual aesthetics was confi rmed repeatedly as I pursued many specifi c studies in the years that followed. In essays and books written after its publication I developed this approach in the visual arts, music, dance, architecture, fi lm, literature, and environment. The concept of an aesthetic fi eld also cast light on diverse theoretical areas, such as criticism, morality, human relations, and metaphysics. Elaborating the implications of this idea led me to the notion of aesthetic engagement, a concept that challenges traditional aesthetics’ insistence on disinterestedness. Aesthetic engagement, in contrast, expresses the kind of perceptual involvement that extends appreciation beyond the conventional limits of art and into broader domains of human experience. One of the new directions to which it pointed was the environment, and environmental aesthetics became the focus of a good deal of my work in the ‘80s and early ‘90s at a time before much had been done in this area. I construed environment as broadly as I did art, and this carried me to unusual regions of environmental experience, such as outer space and virtual space. It also suggested ways of re-conceiving environments, from the more customary landscapes and gardens to canoeing and community. I continue to fi nd environment, like aesthetics itself, endlessly rich and inclusive. The Aesthetic Field has thus had broad pertinence. Its republication in electronic form suits the forward-looking cast of its ideas and their many unexpected applications. I hope that it will lead others to recognize the usefulness of this approach and to extend it in still new directions. The Preface for Cybereditions 7 year of this republication may be as appropriate as it is fortuitous. Finally, it seemed advisable in this edition to keep close to the original text in order to preserve the book’s relation to the development of its leading ideas in my later work. While its basic theoretical position has proved its validity in accounting for subsequent developments both in the arts and in aesthetics, I no longer believe that the strongly cognitivist thrust of this book can deal adequately with the demands of a comprehensive theory. This orientation refl ected the infl uences of the period in which the book was written, both personal and those that pervaded academic philosophy at the time—in particular, logical positivism. I am now convinced that other factors in both the experience and judgment of art must play a more prominent role, factors such as intuitive perception, pre-conceptual factors (that is, those that can be recognized but have not been identifi ed or examined), and recognizable but essentially non-conceptual aspects. These have emerged in the work I have done following the publication of this book. Stylistically, too, the book refl ects its times, and it seemed best here, as well, to maintain its integrity and not attempt any revision. Those changes that have been made are minor editorial ones done for the sake of clarity. A.B. Castine, Maine May 2000 PREFACE THE RANGE OF ART has changed radically in recent years. Not only has it widened to include objects that once seemed totally foreign to anything artistic, but it has also become more diffi cult to separate the fi ne from the practical arts, for functional considerations have infused both. Art, too, has tended to become socially involved in ways that extend far beyond the drawing room, and we are no longer able to keep our composure in the face of the involving, even infl ammatory materials and methods of the modern arts. Yet the boundaries of art have been extended vertically as well as horizontally. Instead of regarding art as the fl ower of civilization, we now see it as part of the very roots. It is not just that we have found in primitive art of the past and present a major source of new vitality in modern painting, sculpture, dance, and music. We have discovered that art of a high order appears in primordial societies and under the most primitive conditions of human life, rather than being the luxurious indulgence of wealth and ease. Indeed, the aesthetic impulse can be discerned in artifacts that date from the appearance of paleolithic man, as in the fascination with shapes in stone tools combined with a high degree of workmanship, in the patterns and designs in ivory engravings, and in the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira that date back 20,000 to 40,000 years. Artistic skill and aesthetic sensibility are no recent acquisitions. Ancient, perhaps as ancient, are the origins of attempts to explain such activities. Mytho-religious at fi rst, theories of the nature of art have come to abandon their animistic overtones and assume greater intellectual and abstract content. There has been no limit to ingenuity, and interpretations of art have covered the gamut from metaphysical revelations of Being, to cognitive theories of art as symbol, and hedonistic ones of art as pleasure. Moreover, the constant dissatisfaction with 8 Preface 9 these explanations not only shows that the phenomena of art allow widely differing interpretations; it also testifi es to the lack of success in providing a suffi ciently convincing account. One of the principal diffi culties with aesthetic theory has been its failure to respond suffi ciently to the arts themselves. And as the arts have extended their range and become a pervasive force in modern life, traditional boundaries and restraints of aesthetics have become increasingly irrelevant. Aesthetic theory seems more at a loss than ever before to deal adequately with the challenge of artistic inventiveness. Yet it is certainly not inevitable that theories of art must trail dismally behind the activity of art, or that they must change with the prevailing intellectual winds.