(excerpted from the essay Art as Experience by John Dewey)
Science states meanings; art expresses them. Matisse said that the camera was a great boon to painters, since it relieved them from any appartent necessity of copying objects. Every work of art has a particular medium by which, among other things, the qualitative pervasive whole is carried. In every experience we touch, the world through some particular tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with it, it comes thome to us, through as specialized organ. The entire organism with all it´s charge of the past and varied resources operates through a particular medium, that of eye, as it interacts with the eye, ear, and touch. The fine arts lay hold of this fact and push it to its maximum of significance. Photographs to primitive folk have, so it is said, a fearful magical quality. It is uncanny that solid and living things should be thus presented. To one who is not rendered callous by common contact with pictorial representations there is still something miraculous in the power of a contracted, flat, uniform thing to depict the wide and diversified universe of animate and inanimate things. ´Medium´in fine art denotes the fact that this specialization and individualization of a particular organ of experience is carried to the point wherein all its possibilities are exploited. Medium first of all signifies an intermediary. They are the middle, the intervening, things though which something now remote is brought to pass. Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception. When, for example, paintings are looked at as illustrations of historical scenes, of literature, of familiar scenes, they are not perceived in terms of their media. Analysis of the former becomes a substitute for enjoyment of the latter.
Physcially, a brush and the movement of the hand in applying color to canvas are external to painting. Not so artistically. The difference between external and intrinsic operations runs through all the affairs of life. One student studies to pass an examination, to get a promotion. To another, the means, the activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it. The consequence, instruction, illumination, is one with the process. Sometimes we journey to get somewhere else because we have business at the latter point and would gladly, were it possible, cut out the travelling. At other times we journey for the delight of moving about and securing what we see. Means and end coalesce.
The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works. To say that a work of art is or is not representative is meaningless. It is absurd to ask what an artist really meant by his product; he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development. If he could articulate, he would say Í meant just that, and that means whatever you or any one can honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience, get our of it.´ Craftsmanship to be artisitc in the final sense must be ´loving.´It must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised
By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the couse of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theorry depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often indentified with the building, booking, painting, or statue in its existence apart from the human experience. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience. When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical. A large part of popular revulsion against utilitarianism in moral theory is because of its exaggeration of sheer calculation.
Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. An actual poem is a succession of experiences - sounds, images, thought - through which we pass when we read a poem. And it is also true that it exists in unnumerale qualities or kinds, no two readers having exactly the same experience.
Art denotes a process of doing or making. This is as true of fine as of technological art. Art involves a molding of clay, chipping of marble, casting of bronze, laying on of pigments, construction of buildings, singing of songs, playing of instruments, enacting roles on the stage, going through rhythmic movements in the dance. Every art does something with some physical material, the body or something outside the body, with or without the use of intervening tools, and with a view to productions of something visible, audible, or tangible. So marked is the active or ´doing´ phase of art, that the dictionaries usually define it in terms of skilled action, ability in execution.
.
To have form marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.
When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrised adaption of the meaningt of the here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience. Unless the sense were immediate, we would have no guide to our reflection. The sense of an extensive and underlying whole is the context of every experience and it is the essence of sanity. For the mad, the insane, thing to us is that which is torn from the common context and which stands alone and isolated, as anything must which occurs in a world totally different from ours. Without an indeterminate and undetermined setting, the material of any experience is incoherent. Steam did the physical work and produced the consequences that attend any expanding gas under definite physical conditions. The sole difference is that the conditions under which it operates have been arranged by human contrivance.The work of art however, unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather than in the realm of physical existences.
The uniqueness of esthetic experience is a challenge to thought, in particular the systematic thought called philosophy, for esthetic experience is experience in it´s integrity - experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse it´s development as experience; freed from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. But it is shown that the system in question has superimposed some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing estheic experience to tell its own tale.
Science states meanings; art expresses them. Matisse said that the camera was a great boon to painters, since it relieved them from any appartent necessity of copying objects. Every work of art has a particular medium by which, among other things, the qualitative pervasive whole is carried. In every experience we touch, the world through some particular tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with it, it comes thome to us, through as specialized organ. The entire organism with all it´s charge of the past and varied resources operates through a particular medium, that of eye, as it interacts with the eye, ear, and touch. The fine arts lay hold of this fact and push it to its maximum of significance. Photographs to primitive folk have, so it is said, a fearful magical quality. It is uncanny that solid and living things should be thus presented. To one who is not rendered callous by common contact with pictorial representations there is still something miraculous in the power of a contracted, flat, uniform thing to depict the wide and diversified universe of animate and inanimate things. ´Medium´in fine art denotes the fact that this specialization and individualization of a particular organ of experience is carried to the point wherein all its possibilities are exploited. Medium first of all signifies an intermediary. They are the middle, the intervening, things though which something now remote is brought to pass. Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception. When, for example, paintings are looked at as illustrations of historical scenes, of literature, of familiar scenes, they are not perceived in terms of their media. Analysis of the former becomes a substitute for enjoyment of the latter.
Physcially, a brush and the movement of the hand in applying color to canvas are external to painting. Not so artistically. The difference between external and intrinsic operations runs through all the affairs of life. One student studies to pass an examination, to get a promotion. To another, the means, the activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it. The consequence, instruction, illumination, is one with the process. Sometimes we journey to get somewhere else because we have business at the latter point and would gladly, were it possible, cut out the travelling. At other times we journey for the delight of moving about and securing what we see. Means and end coalesce.
The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works. To say that a work of art is or is not representative is meaningless. It is absurd to ask what an artist really meant by his product; he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development. If he could articulate, he would say Í meant just that, and that means whatever you or any one can honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience, get our of it.´ Craftsmanship to be artisitc in the final sense must be ´loving.´It must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised
By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the couse of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theorry depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often indentified with the building, booking, painting, or statue in its existence apart from the human experience. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience. When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical. A large part of popular revulsion against utilitarianism in moral theory is because of its exaggeration of sheer calculation.
Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. An actual poem is a succession of experiences - sounds, images, thought - through which we pass when we read a poem. And it is also true that it exists in unnumerale qualities or kinds, no two readers having exactly the same experience.
Art denotes a process of doing or making. This is as true of fine as of technological art. Art involves a molding of clay, chipping of marble, casting of bronze, laying on of pigments, construction of buildings, singing of songs, playing of instruments, enacting roles on the stage, going through rhythmic movements in the dance. Every art does something with some physical material, the body or something outside the body, with or without the use of intervening tools, and with a view to productions of something visible, audible, or tangible. So marked is the active or ´doing´ phase of art, that the dictionaries usually define it in terms of skilled action, ability in execution.
.
To have form marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.
When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrised adaption of the meaningt of the here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience. Unless the sense were immediate, we would have no guide to our reflection. The sense of an extensive and underlying whole is the context of every experience and it is the essence of sanity. For the mad, the insane, thing to us is that which is torn from the common context and which stands alone and isolated, as anything must which occurs in a world totally different from ours. Without an indeterminate and undetermined setting, the material of any experience is incoherent. Steam did the physical work and produced the consequences that attend any expanding gas under definite physical conditions. The sole difference is that the conditions under which it operates have been arranged by human contrivance.The work of art however, unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather than in the realm of physical existences.
The uniqueness of esthetic experience is a challenge to thought, in particular the systematic thought called philosophy, for esthetic experience is experience in it´s integrity - experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse it´s development as experience; freed from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. But it is shown that the system in question has superimposed some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing estheic experience to tell its own tale.
