For most people the arts belong to the humanities when it comes to placing them in the academic or scientific system. Humanities is in fact very much defined as the place for studies of the arts together with the languages. It has very much to do with how art is defined. The close relationship between the arts and humanities is demonstrated by the central art historian Erwin Panofsky:
In
defining a work of art as a ”man-made object demanding to be experienced
aesthetically” we encounter for the first time a basic difference between
the humanities and natural science. The scientist, dealing as he does with
natural phenomena, can at once proceed to analyse them. The humanist, dealing
as he does with human actions and creations, has to engage in a mental process
of a synthetic and subjective character: he has mentally to re-enact the
actions and to re-create the creations. It is in fact by this process that the
real objects of the humanities come into being. For it is obvious that
historians of philosophy or sculpture are concerned with books and statues not
in so far as these books and sculptures exist materially, but in so far as they
have a meaning. And it is equally obvious that this meaning can only be
apprehended by re-producing, and thereby, quite literally,
”realizing”, the thoughts that are expressed in the books and the
artistic conceptions that manifest themselves in the statues. [1]
Although the arts primarily have been studied by humanists, they have also been objects for social scientists. By a number of social scientists like P. Bordieu, Niklas Luhmann and others, the arts are viewed as a kind of social construction, a social field or system in which the artists are playing their roles according to the rules of the field or system.
Somewhere in between the humanities and the social scientists is the Critical Theory school with Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas etc. which has been dealing very much with the arts and the questions of how to define and place them in a broader context. For most critical theorists the arts are in contrast to modern technology and a rational goal oriented life. Habermas has divided human society into two parts, the life-world and the system-world. The arts belong to the lifeworld and the technology belongs to the systemworld.
If one follows the Panofsky argument as well as the Critical Theorists' approach to the arts it becomes problematic to deal with technical problems in the arts, to approach art as a physical phenomenon. Walter Benjamin deals with the work of art in the age of reproduction, the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Although Benjamin is talking very much about the different techniques and technologies, he stresses the importance of originality, authenticity and last but not least aura. The work of art is understood as a unique phenomenon, at least until the age of Benjamin with the introduction of mechanical reproduction technology like photography, moving pictures, gramophone etc. Benjamin makes a strong point out of the difference between the traditional manual techniques and the mechanical aspects. By using the latter, you loose the socalled aura of the art work. The work of art is viewed as a very unique phenomenon alongside the general view of human life and history as characterized by uniqueness in contrast to natural phenomena following the laws of nature. That means that a Natural Science of Art would sound very strange and contradictory to the very nature of the arts, assuming that Arts is not Nature, but Culture ! Culture is something made by humans, which is unique and historical, while the Natural world is reproducing itself through the rock, the plants and the animals.
Nevertheless, sculpture is made out of rock or another physical material; painting is often made on canvas or fiber material and human artists are not only thinking subjects, but also biological animals of flesh and blood. One can ignore these physical aspects of art and conceive them as trivial and unimportant practical issues, but they will always be there and be an ultimate precondition for the arts.
In the last 20 years or so, from the late 1970ies, the traditional dichotomy between the arts and technology seems to be challenged by a new kind of art, namely digital art, where the artist is using the modern computertechnology in the making of the art work. Even the position of the human artist is challenged by computers producing their own images, music or poetry. Technology is no longer something in opposition to art, but it is on the contrary an integrated part of the art work (as it has always been !) The new situation is that it becomes difficult to neglect the role of means, e.g. materials and tools, in the study of the arts.
It is difficult to speak about Art in general, since art can be many different things. One might distinguish between folk art and fine arts, but one strong tradition for defining the arts is of course given by the very discipline of art history. The traditional field for art history is the classical visual arts, including images, sculpture and architecture. But if you consider music, theater, poetry, film and dance as species of art, then art history actually only covers a part of the arts without making it explicitely in the name of the discipline. The other kinds of art have also their own academic discipline named in a more explicit way like literary studies, theater studies, musicology, film Studies etc. But what is the main distinction between these different species of art ? It is very much a matter of differences regarding what kind of materials and tools the artists are using in the creative process of making art.
The painter is using colours and different surface materials for the painting. Both the sculptor and the architect use concrete material like rock, clay, sand, steel etc. The composer use the piano and the notation sheet etc. I could continue, but the general question can already be formulated like this: why is or why has the issue of materials and tools, in other words: the technical issues, been a relatively underestimated issue in the academic discussions of the arts compared to the discussions of the meaning and the aura of the art work? I think this situation can be related to three phenomena.
The first is the understanding of the (accomplished ) art work as a unique phenomenon, which as such has an "aura", an existence in itself here and now of the very distant as close as you can come, almost independent of the materials and tools being used in the process through which the art work was made. [2]
The second thing is the dominant perspective of the critique and the connoisseur, the public or the audience, not the artists themselves. The audience is not primarily interested in the different qualities of canvas compared to other surface materials or to the different possibilities by playing different violins etc. They are interested in the art work as a whole, in the final result and not in the process behind the final result. The problems of making fine art is only a problem for the artists themselves.
That leads to the third issue, which may have caused the devalorisation of the technical aspects of the art, namely the distinction between art and handicraft. Since the renaissance and the birth of the professional artist, art has been superior to handicraft due to its ability to present the pure beauty, " the very distant as close as possible ", while handicraft can only present good craftmanship, but not the special original and sublime quality of the art work.
This leads alltogether to what one could call a post-work approach, where the study of the arts begins at the moment when the artist has finished his work. The study starts at the final work and is by this also a study which does not consider the contingent conditions of the artist and the contingency in the arts in general. If one goes back to the process of making the art work, there will always be an element of contingency, a possibility of choice. This choice is of course not unlimited, but this option means that the unique work of art could have been different in some way or another.
A craft can be learned, but making a unique piece of art is more a kind of magic phenomenon due to a artistic genious. It is a great paradox, that despite the fact that most artists have to learn a kind of craftmanship in relation to their art, like playing music, painting a picture, dancing a dance etc. you consider the craftmanship as inferiour to the question of being a work of art. The craftmanship is a practical issue, a technical issue of minor interest for the interpretation of the work.
In contrast to the dominating post-work approach in the traditional studies of arts, one could say that a craftman approach is a pre-work approach. It begins at the same time as the artists begin.
Following the Panofsky argument, art begins with the thoughts, but it is a question whether this is the case all the time. For the Belgian artist Paul Klée, the creative process never began with a thought:
Assuming wrongly that I had a
poetic (lyrical, philosophical, literary) idea often led me into choosing a
"subject" in advance and to executing it. And what happened? Either I
was not at all as disposed to the figurative invention as I had imagined, being
truly poetically stimulated - or I was disposed and invented something
figurative, which could not be reconciled in any way with the "poetic idea".
I found myself in an apparently awkvard situation in that I had to change the
subject in relation to the figurative invention, against which my artistic
conscience rebelled. It would have remained silent had it not relied on the
insufficient and false basis of a wrong assumption. For visual art never begins
with a poetic mood or idea but with building one or several figures, with
harmonizing a few colours and tones or with calculating spatial relationships
etc. And whether an idea then, belonging to that other extraneous area, joins
in or not, is completely irrelevant: It may do, but it doesn't have to.[3]
Like his colleagues at the Bauhaus project in the beginning of the 20th century, it was a question of exploring the different possibilities in the creation of art. An important consequence from this is the acknowledgement of repetition. This is also very important in being an apprentice who has to repeat the same exercises every day in order to learn the craft of painting or playing. At the same time it is quite contradictory to the conception of the Work of Art as a very unique work made only once. By primarily focusing on the very unique properties or aspects of one work of art you miss to consider in many cases the largest part of the work, which is a result of the craftmanship, the repetitive elements in almost all work of art. It is difficult to imagine a work of art with absolutely no repetitive elements. Especially in the art of music, some kind of repetition will always be a part of the work. The uniqueness of each piece of music may be the specific combination of tones and chords, but if you do not know just a little bit of the technique of playing the tones and chords on a musical instrument, you are not going to make very much progress in being a musician, a musical artist.
One of the important issues in the apprenticeship is to learn to master the specific techniques of the art. The notion of technique is very important here since as I mentioned earlier, the word technique and its derivations have been placed in opposition to art and human values.
In his critical studies, Benjamin focuses on the consequences of the new reproduction technology in relation to the risks for the authentic art work. At the same time, Benjamin has to modify his critical analysis regarding a number of arts, like music and literature. In fact it is primarily painting, which is implicitly being viewed as the most real piece of art with an aura and authencity. Dealing with music as well as literature leads necessarily to dealing with technology, whether musical instruments or printing machines and nowadays computers in both species of art. There is, as Benjamin admit, also an element of reproduction before the very age of reproduction in the 20th century. One could say that visual art through the age of reproduction becomes more like the other kinds of art, who have used reproductive technology in their works for centuries.
It might be wrong to claim that the existing academic disciplines of the arts have neglected the technical problems in the Arts. In art history, literary studies, musicology and so on, you study the different techniques the artist has used to make the art in order to interpret the art work, to find the meaning of the art. A technique can be a relatively abstract phenomenon like the composition of a portrait, a novel or a symphony without in the first run caring very much about the physical materials and instruments being used in the actual creative process. The material aspect is inferior to the problems of meaning. The literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt comments in the Journal "Word and Image" the problems of being too interested in the material aspects of print in this way:
Materiality driven into the
body, into ink, into paper, has the power to decouple books and images from
representation, reference and meaning. And that is replacing the hidden
anti-materialism of the old materialism. This is the new paradox - that to talk
too much, as it were, of materiality means to give up representation, reference
and meaning.[4]
and the French book-historian Roger Chartier adds to this by commenting other contributions:
On the other hand, these same
essays caution us against the temptation to invert inherited hierarchies, and
thereby privilige the materiality of symbolic productions at the expense of
meaning. Joseph Leo Korner observes that approaches focusing on the modalities
of textual and pictorial inscription might be " a way of saving the soul
by looking at the material".
This is a forceful reminder that the understanding of the meanings
invested in works remains the first priority of decipherment. In a sense,
then, the hermeneutic project
remains entirely in place. And yet, as the present studies indicate, it can
only be fully realized by retrieving, in all their singularity, the categories
and materialities that give any work its historical identity." [5]
The meaning is claimed to be the superior element although it is admitted that the work cannot exist without some kind of materiality. But one could also ask if it is necessary to make it a question of priority? An alternative approach might be a complementary perspective, which could led to an equalizing of the meaning and the means and thus perhaps an equalizing of the Art and the Craft.
The whole question of meaning is very much related to the verbal language and its function of representing the world through speech and writing. To find the meaning is very much a question of verbalizing the meaning and an example of logo- or lingocentrism. It gives the Art of literature a position of first priority compared to the Arts of music and the Visual arts, which are supposed to be "translatable" into some words representing the meaning of the Painting or the symphony.
In the following I will present a general complementary theory for the creative process as well as for the results of the artists work.
The whole concept of complementarity is very much
related to the work of Niels Bohr. He developed this concept in order to cope with
Quantum Theory:
The very
nature of the quantum theory . . . forces us to regard the spacetime
coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the
classical theories, as complementary, but exclusive features of the description.
complementary pictures of the phenomena. . . only together offer a natural
generalization of the classical mode of description
Further Bohr says:
There is no quantum world. There is only an
abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of
physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about
nature.
As mentioned above, what one finds depends on what
kind of experimental arrangements and concepts one is using. By one
arrangement, light can be observed as particles and by another arrangement,
light can be observed as waves. Both observations are correct, although they
exclude each other. They complement each other.
If one move to the arts, one could view the arts from three different, but equal, perspectives. That means that one can see the creative process as a physical process just as much as a mental and a social process. The same thing is the case for the products, the works of Art.
I will use the general model for documentation processes and products, documents and try to apply it on the arts.
If one looks at three species of art: visual art, literature and music, one can talk about different types of producers like a painter, a poet and a composer.
|
producer |
painter |
poet |
composer |
|
technology |
brush, paint, canvas |
pencil, paper, print |
piano, pencil, paper |
|
technique |
stroke, perspective |
rhytm, metaphor |
harmony, rhytm |
|
documents |
painting |
poem |
score |
All three producers need to be physical humans capable of producing some real products, some works of art. They also need to be recognized to some extent in the community as artists if they are going to make a living out of it. Thirdly, they have to think about what they do, but it does not have to be a special idea before the physical creative process. A thought like: "what happens when I make a stroke with the blue colour?" is not about a special meaning of a painting, but a thought related to a process of experimental groping. The concept of experimental groping is from the French pedagogue, Celestin Freinet, but I think it can also be used in general for human life. [6]It opens up for more possibilities and especially for recognition of the contingency, the principle of possibility for the other. One can imagine the artist groping among different possibilities of colours, patterns and figures.
If one continues to look at the technology, the producers are all using physical objects like brush, pencil and piano. But these physical tools are also social in the sense that they are recognized in society as communication media. The interesting thing in relation to the new computer technology is that you can use the computer instead of all the three tools. This gives artists today a very new chance to combine the different kinds of tools and thus mixing the different kinds of art. This means also that the tools, the instruments, become more recognized as an interesting issue in the discussion of art than before. It also leads to an interest in the process of making art.
The third element in the model is the technique. A technique is a way or mode of using a certain kind of technology. A technique is a kind of tradition since it needs to be developed and tested through repetition. To execute this technique can be recognized as a specific skill the artist must acquire through her apprenticeship.
The fourth and last element of the model is the result of the process, the document. You have no process without some kind of result. Even in the case of performance art, characterized by its "here and now" nature, you have the performance act as a resulting document of the improvisation process.
As a whole it might be a problem of isolating a single process of art creation. Many processes will be intertwingled into each other. In the case of literature and music, you might need to see the process of making the art work like an ongoing complex of processes. When a poet makes poetry, he might make one attempt, which he rejects and then make a new try to see if that works better and so on. In other cases, the poet makes a poem and it just works. The same is the case in music.When Miles Davis should make a sound track to a movie, he just started to play when the movie started on the screen and it did not need to be changed. It was just perfect the first time. The case is very different in most music. In classical music you usually have a composer making a score and then you have the performers interpreting the composition. When a piece of music is performed, a new process of creation is started and a new result, the concert, is created. A third process of creation related to the first process of composition, is a recording of the piece for either sound tape or video. In this way you have three interrelated processes of creation resulting in three different documents, a score, a live concert and a recording. You have also a complex of producers, technologies and techniques in these three different processes.
"I Ching" is a piece of music made by the Danish composer, Per Noergaard, but also to a large extent, by the Danish percussionist Gert Mortensen. This is, in a broader perspective of music history, not very special. Many of the great classical composers composed their music for specific musicians, who were involved in the creative process of composing the music.
The score is made in a very special way. The score is one document, showing the music in a specific way with very special notations. At the same time, the score is only one way of showing the music. The live performance is another document. Following the discussion by Nicolas Cook about the score as a script, one must acknowledge that the performer has an active creative role when he plays the piece.
If one understands techné in the classical sense, embracing the Arts and Sciences as well as the very act of creating and the reflections about the act of creating, one could see Documentation Science as a discipline offering a scientific framework for comparative art studies emphazising the creative process, the materials and instruments at disposal and the resulting artistic documents. In the first run it might be a science more for the artists than for the audience. The artists could work very specific on their techniques, but also be able to make experimental research in a comparative perspective. That means that one could in fact develop a combination of an Artistic workshop and a scientific lab. This has already been done in many places, but there has often been a problem of making theories about the experiments.
Benjamin, Walter
Bohr, Niels
Drucker, Johanna
Habermas, Jürgen
Lubbock, Percy
Luhmann, Niklas
Lund, Niels Windfeld
Panofsky, Erwin
[1] Panofsky, Erwin: Introduction : The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline (1955), 1970, p. 37-38
[2] Benjamin, Walter: The Artwork in the Age of Reproduction p.
[3] Robert Kudielka: Paul Klee : The Nature of Creation. 2002. p. 32
[4] Word and image vol. 17, no.1-2 Jan. june 2001, p. 64
[5] op.cit. p. 183
[6] FREINET, Célestin (1993): Education Through Work [L’Education du travail] Lewiston, NY, Edwin Mellen Press, ISBN 0-7734-9303-4 [traduction: John Sivell]