In her book, Dewey for Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Mary Jane Jacob admirably attempts to explicate the philosophy of John Dewey--not just Art as Experience--as a useful guide for artists (and also curators and art teachers) in considering the implications of their own practices, as well as the social and cultural role of art in a democratic society. The book effectively explicates the main ideas of Art as Experience and also provides a generally reliable (if brief) synoptic survey of Dewey's thought as a whole. However, in correctly emphasizing Dewey's abiding commitment to democracy, both political and cultural, and his equally abiding dedication to upholding human rights and achieving social justice, Jacobs misrepresents Dewey's conception of "aesthetic experience" and leaves the misleading impression that Dewey believed art was most beneficial as an aid in effecting social and political change.
Jacobs appropriately devotes her first two chapters to "Making" and "Experiencing," Dewey's twinned activities that when bound together through an act of perception is the realization of art. Jacobs is right to emphasize the extent to which Dewey wanted to challenge then-standing distinctions between "high" and "practical" art, which he did by defining "art" not as the product of certain long-established forms but as a process. In the maker's case, the process is one of heightened care for the very act of making, a fully engaged attention to the act in and for itself--any human creation most immediately carried out not to accomplish a utilitarian purpose but to validate its own creative integrity (by, in Dewey's terms, becoming an "integrated" experience) can be regarded as art. Activities that might have been considered merely "artisinal" rather than "artistic" can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities (as long as the artisan was him/herself preoccupied first of all by aesthetic quality) just as readily as the greatest masterpieces of traditional art history. There are still differences between these kinds of artistic practice, but one of Dewey's ambitions in Art as Experience is to establish that the making of art is not confined to the chosen few but is something that is available to all, in whatever medium they might work.
To this extent, the "democratization" of art is certainly one of Dewey's aspirations as expressed in his writing about the aesthetic, but it is a misreading of Art as Experience to maintain that "democracy" in art entails that all artistic activity is inherently equal simply because it is available to everyone. Effort and attention are required in both the making and experiencing of art, and rendering each of these in the way that Dewey prescribes is an exacting task that some people are not willing to undertake. Dewey indeed believed the satisfactions of creativity and aesthetic experience were widely attainable human aspirations, and that existing social arrangements too often impeded their fulfillment, but even if those arrangements were altered (something Dewey tried diligently to effect in both his public activism and his other writing), obstacles to the creation and the vibrant reception of art might remain.
These obstacles would arise from individual human imperfections, not from social constraints. When every citizen is finally free to cultivate whatever kind of artistic inclination he/she might possess (or perhaps acquire), some will succeed less readily than others. Some will not succeed at all, although not necessarily because of lack of the requisite "talent" as conventionally understood. "Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception," Dewey writes in Chapter 9 of Art as Experience ("The Common Substance of the Arts"), and here is the explanation of the potential for failure. By "sensitivity to a medium as a medium," Dewey does not mean some sort of exquisitely calibrated sense of "taste," but the ability to achieve something like a pure state of attention. Attention to "medium" entails not just appreciation of the particular raw material of the artist's chosen form but a kind of a radical attention in itself, a state of being rather than an artistic act per se.
There will always be failures of attention. On the artist's part, such failures could originate in cliched or rote execution, a lack of insight into the possibilities of the medium, but also in devoting disproportionate attention to the subject of the art work, the "message" or "statement" to be taken from it. Efforts to treat art as "communication" and "expression" can also misdirect the artist's interest, replacing concern for the "medium as a medium" with the opportunity to "say" something or convey "inner feelings." Dewey would not deny that art can communicate or express, but these are done indirectly, as the secondary effects of "making," giving order to emotions and integrating message and means. In this way, the making of art, a general human capability, remains a rigorous act, or else it would not be the source of such profound value of the sort Dewey ascribes to it.
This value inheres in the experience of art as well, thus a focus on medium in and for itself is also a prerequisite for "esthetic perception." If the making of art requires diligent attention by the artist, so too does aesthetic experience if such experience is to redeem its full potential, both for aesthetic appreciation and for the consummation of experience itself. And, since for Dewey "art" takes on substance only in the meeting of a perceiving consciousness and the artist's effort as manifested in the work, art is, most immediately and unavoidably, an existentially particular phenomenon, an individual encounter not a social project. Indeed, Dewey describes it as an almost inescapably personal abandonment of inhibition: "I do not think it can be denied that an element of reverie, of approach to a state of dream, enters into the creation of art, nor that the experience of the work when it is intense often throws one into a similar state" (Art as Experience, Ch. 12).
An "intense" aesthetic experience is not something that suddenly happens but again, as in the making of art, requires concerted concentration. Jane Jacob acknowledges the requisite effort involved in this process, noting that "Dewey was clear that perception involves hard work" and quoting his warning that "the one who is too lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to perform this work will not see or hear." Yet at times in Dewey for Artists she seems to deny Dewey's admonition in favor of a more comfortable appeal to "real life" as source of art's attraction, both for artist and perceiver. She takes Dewey's insistence that both the creation of art and the ability to appreciate are natural impulses continuous with other forms of human experience to mean that the practice of art should make explicit connections to the "everyday," as if "life experience" itself somehow needs to be made art's explicit subject, so that we don't forget that life and art are inseparable.
The work of art offered by the artist and our attentive experience of that work are continuous with "life" simply because they proceed from the activity of what Dewey calls a "living creature"--a human being. When Dewey maintains that art and life are not separate, he is trying to extricate art from the ossified carapace of its "classic status" that has accumulated over time and to return it to "the human conditions under which it was brought into being" and "the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience" (Art as Experience, p.1). I think Dewey would have it that all art is connected to the "everyday" as long as it is an honest response by the artist to his/her experience of the world that is transformed through the "ordering" the artist provides. There is always "a direct transmission of experience at an aesthetic level" in successful art, notwithstanding that Jacob seems to think this is some special accomplishment of what she calls "social practice art." What else would the artist be transmitting?
According to Jacob, Dewey is urging us to accept that "When we have an aesthetic experience, we experience the world in a revitalized way," but it is difficult to know whether she is saying that after an aesthetic experience we are more open to heightened experience in general (which certainly could happen), whether during the aesthetic experience we are somehow encountering "the world" as depicted in the work of art, or whether she is speaking not of art at all but of the aesthetic response we can have to elements of the "real" world. Since she makes this statement while discussing "socially engaged art" that "goes directly to the source--to life itself--drawing out the aesthetic experiences that the everyday affords and bringing life for a time into the frame of art," it is likely the second, but the assertions she is making verge on incoherence: Why go to everyday life for its sort of "aesthetic experiences" that are then reproduced in a work of art? Why is the art needed if life itself has already provided the experience? And what can it mean that the socially engaged artist "goes directly to the source--to life itself?" Where are all the other artists going for subjects or inspiration? Somewhere other than life?
One of the examples of this socially engaged art that Jacob cites is Future Library, by Katie Paterson, an installation employing "a forest of spruce trees and library of books." This work "is not an avant-garde gesture but. . .a reinvestment in the world around us through art. . .The duration required to grow a forest suggests it is worth investing in the future, expressing the hope that humanity will survive another hundred years and more. . . ." Everything about Jacob's description here suggests that this art work is making a political statement, that it exists in order to advance that statement, not to offer an aesthetic experience of the kind Dewey describes in Art as Experience. One could very well agree with the statement, even find the installation itself inspiring, but also consider it to be something other than art, unless it does in fact invite the viewer to consider it first only as a work of art--at which point its status as "a reinvestment in the world around us" becomes irrelevant. If instead a work's primary ambition is to "express the hope" that we make such a reinvestment, it is not in that aspiration functioning as art.
Nothing in my reading of Art as Experience suggests to me that Dewey thought the goal of art is to "revitalize" or "invest" in the world, or to "express hope" (or despair). These are all gestures, pronouncements made by the artist through the art but seem to have little room for the perceiving consciousness that must complete the process by which art comes to be. It certainly might happen that an ancillary effect of the experience of a work of art would be to further think about the work's subject or theme, even to be energized by a presumed "message." But if these are the only felt effects, then the point of art has been lost. Although Jacob goes beyond "making" and "experiencing" as topics in Dewey for Artists, providing a rather wide-ranging (especially for a fairly short book) discussion of Dewey's thought as she believes it might apply to art practice and curation, these are the crucial concepts underlying his theory of art as articulated in Art as Experience, his most thorough and most essential inquiry into the subject. In my view, Jacob distorts this book's careful delineation of the nature of aesthetic experience by overemphasizing John Dewey's concern with social context and underemphasizes his recognition that art is first a phenomenon of human awareness that can become aesthetic only when the social drops away in the experience of experience itself.
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