Previously, I have stated that I believe that an essential quality of
a work of art is the fact that it does not have to satisfy external
judgments of truth. Art is a fiction, it doesn't have to be that way.
A woman can have a green strip in the middle of her face, a goat-man
can play a wooden pipe, human figures can fly with large wings, etc.
Another absolutely critical part of a work of art is its limit, its
finitude. A work of art *ends*, whether at the frame or the pedestal
or the footlights. It ends in space and in time. Life goes on
endlessly in our spatial-temporal continuum. When Shane rides off into
the distance, the movie ends, but when anyone else rides off into the
distance, he keeps riding, the people in the town do something else,
and life continues.
When Aristotle described the three parts of a drama, namely, the
beginning, middle, and end, he could do so because plays were limited
in time and space, which allowed him to mark out those components of
them.
Aesthetic attributes--the so-called experience, the rules and guiding
canons, the discussions--exist because various qualifying artifacts
are finite and set apart in some way from the entire flux of life.
Rauschenberg famously said he wanted to work in the gap between life
and art, but the problem with that is that art in enfolded within
life. There is no gap between them, as there is between buildings or
books on a shelf.
We can comprehend art because, literally, we can: we can see the thing
in its entirety from the plinth up, from edge to edge, from curtain to
curtain, from first page to last, and content ourselves that we have
seen all of the work. Then we can reflect on it, remember it,
renavigate its various parts. We cannot do that with life: the
earliest part of our life is unremembered, fading backwards into
indistinctness, much as our visual field merely fades into the
imperceptible edges at the periphery. The end of life can, at best,
give us an opportunity to grasp 99% of the entirety. And even then, we
cannot know what extends laterally from us, other people's lives,
other experiences. Life it way too big to grasp as a unity.
But art is manageable: it is defined by manageable limits, it is a
fiction that allows us to contemplate it rather than act on it (as
Aristotle describes vicarious fear of the dramatic action); and it is
a representation, which means that it is composed of intentionally
chosen approximations, averages, condensations of larger experiences,
that is, a mapping of one thing (the subject or referent) onto another
(the work itself).
I can't think of anything else that consists of these three. Even our
entertainment is *for us* not a representation. We are actually amused
or not, excited or not, by the movie or the basketball game, the
Picasso or the jete or triple-somersault in the pike position.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
