On Jun 6, 2008, at 10:40 AM, William Conger wrote:
I think it's true that to understand an artwork involves a kind of active experience of it, different from experiencing it passively. Mostly we experience art passively, or assume to. But when we are active in the way I'm suggesting, we begin to vicariously recreate it. We examine it for its formal elements, its modes of presentation, its codes and devices. And this may in fact lead us away from the work's expressive quality to an "understanding" of it (as a grammarian understands syntax). To submit to the work's expressive authority (to be led by it) is to experience it passively. Perhaps we can't make hard boundaries between active -passive in this context and perhaps we continually move from one to the other, as if they vibrate to and fro, (and enhance each other) but essentially I think we can sense the difference. I think Derek's speaker failed to answer his question by not distinguishing between the active and passive participation of the audience with an artwork.
What is there in a WoA to "understand"? I believe it's just a matter of seeing (or hearing) it better.
Have you noticed the perceptual fact that you don't notice how many, say, Deux Chevaux there are on the road until you buy one, and then there seems to be thousands of them--even though they were there all along? Have you noticed the near impossibility *not* to comprehend the meaning of spoken or written words in your own language, but if the speech or writing is in a completely unknown language (that is, not a cognate language like French or German), then you hear sounds and see squiggles, with hardly a thought to the vacuum of "meaning" in the words? Have you noticed that the more you learn the intricacies of, say, American football, the better you are able to see and appreciate what the other players without the ball are doing? (I should have used the analogy with cricket, which is completely unfathomable if you're not a British subject!)
"Understanding" a painting means being able to see it with greater clarity, by being able, as your brain processes and interprets the perceptual inputs, to distinguish the salience of the differences in the parts of the picture--or the interaction of sound elements in the concert, or words and actions in the play, etc.
All encounters with WoA--or for that matter, all encounters with everything--entail a decision on your part at some level to engage the stimulus, postpone engagement, or ignore it. I believe Damasio and others use the term "foregrounding" to identify the ability of our cognitive faculty to focus on one array of stimuli and not on other arrays.
When it comes to art or any cultural experience, how well you know the discipline or genre enables you to engage a particular artifact at a certain level of intricacy or intimacy; and how predisposed you are to pay attention, regardless of how conversant you are with the kind of artifact, also affects your active engagement.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
