Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 1, April 2003

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de Bolla, Peter, Art Matters, Peter de Bolla, Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2001. 145 pages, ISBN 0-674-00649-6, Hardback £23.50.

Reviewed by

John Danvers

This is a book about “the poetics of wonderment” or what the author calls “mutism” – “being struck dumb” by a work of art. It is an inquiry into a particular aspect of aesthetic experience, that is, the affective or emotional encounter with artworks - ‘aesthetic’, in italics, denoting this particular use of the term. The inquiry is focused on three works: Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis; Glenn Gould’s second account of Bach’s Goldberg Variations; and, Wordsworth’s poem, We Are Seven.

 

De Bolla argues that the inarticulateness of the aesthetic experience of art can be articulated. The mute response can be described and analysed intellectually in verbal form. Indeed de Bolla’s response is anything but mute and this begs a question about the real value he places upon ‘mutism’. How significant is the experience of “being struck dumb” given that de Bolla deploys most of his eloquent argument to other, less radical, aspects of experiencing art?

 

At the centre of the argument is the notion that a particular kind of aesthetic experience is fundamental to art, and is symptomatic of our relationship with artworks. Not all encounters with art are ‘aesthetic’. Economic or political responses to a painting aren’t “aesthetic in the strictest sense, and they are not responses to the ‘art’ component of the object (since that is defined in terms of the aesthetic response it elicits).”  This means that for one person an object may contain the ‘art component’, while for another the same object may not contain the ‘art component’. This essentialist notion of defining art in terms of some kind of aesthetic experience has a venerable history, particularly within modernist accounts of art – usually aligned with some version of formalism or expressive theory.

 

Once this kind of notion is introduced we quickly come to the question as to how we recognise the ‘aesthetic component’ that distinguishes the art object from other objects in the world. This usually involves some process of aesthetic education. We have to learn to experience the aesthetic dimension, a “training [of] the eye or ear” which seems redolent of Bell, Fry and ‘significant form’. Aesthetic experiencing is tied to a degree of special preparedness, not unlike the association between educated taste and art education.

 

In de Bolla’s case this leads to a potential problem. The need to work at engaging with art is acknowledged and emphasised early in the book. However, despite the sympathetic reference to Weitz’s idea that art is an ‘open concept’ (“accommodating the permanent possibility of change, expansion, or novelty”) de Bolla argues that “it may take many years of patient practice to grasp some works fully”. Surely this misses the key quality of art as an ‘open concept’ – the fact that it can’t be fully ‘grasped’, precisely because it is open to endless change, redefinition and ‘expansion’? Also it is not clear how aesthetic experience, let alone ‘mutism’, can be seen as an acquisitive (grasping) process.

 

Any essentialist account of experiencing art tends to stumble in the face of the plurality of experiences that a particular artwork engenders. De Bolla makes a connection between ‘transcendence’ and aesthetic/affective experience. He argues that Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta, has an “elemental beauty” that seems to transcend cultural context. This is quite a claim, and doesn’t take account of those (even those firmly located within western European culture) who may feel disconnected, bored or ‘put off’ by the subject matter and form of the ‘pieta’ genre. Unless of course this is seen as evidence of a lack of aesthetic education.

 

Some of the questions asked by de Bolla are rather surprising. For example, “What does this painting know?” The art object is ‘subjectivised’, in the sense of appearing to be accorded capacities, knowledge and mysteries that lie beyond the observer’s or participant’s ability to recognise. This is an entertaining idea but may leave us wondering how we can know what the painting knows, if it knows.

 

De Bolla’s analysis of Vir Heroicus Sublimis, seems to adopt the position of a rather naive observer/audience. He writes about the painting as if we have not seen, let alone become familiar with, abstract paintings – despite the ubiquity of such images in museums and galleries across the world. This reinforces a view that the kind of affective experience being promoted is one in which we are asked to forget what we have previously experienced in order to come at the work afresh. This is a laudable strategy but it runs the risk of turning us into uncritical observers, having superficial or narrow-minded encounters with artworks – which is very far from de Bolla’s intention.

 

The descriptions of the author’s own encounters with his three examples are full of interesting detail. We get a strong sense of someone working at experiencing, of wringing out of the work as much as possible. Much of this describing of experiencing seems oddly at a tangent to the '‘poetics of wonderment", indeed much of it is the familiar territory of formal analysis. In the case of the Newman painting this involves being carefully attentive to scale, size, colour, pictorial organisation and rhythms. A process that, for all its interest and sensitive insight, doesn’t tell us much about the mute wonderment we might also feel in the presence of Newman’s work. De Bolla implies as much when he writes that Vir Heroicus Sublimis “shares the same regime of looking – the devotional – as the illustrious works of art Newman claims as his touchstones”. He also makes some interesting comments about Newman’s orchestration of the act of looking and how his consideration of notions of the sublime led him to aim at engaging the viewer through presence – “the time of the sublime is the present, the now”.

 

De Bolla makes hardly any references to other authors who have shed light on the phenomenological dimension of our encounters with artworks (eg. Merleau-Ponty or Paul Crowther) or on ‘art as experience’ (Dewey isn’t even mentioned). This is curious given his obvious knowledge and erudition.

 

The distinctive qualities of Gould’s piano playing are analysed through a careful dissection of the processes of attentive and inattentive listening. He describes the uncanny ‘fit’ between Gould and Bach (perhaps they should be re-titled the Gouldberg Variations), and the sense of somatic presence in Gould’s recorded performances.

 

The chapter on Wordsworth’s poem begins with a question about the right way of addressing a specific piece of literature, what it is appropriate to ask of a text. Indeed de Bolla describes his ‘affective encounter’ with a poem as being in an interrogative mode. He isn’t proposing a “new interpretive model” but rather finding a way of “pushing past this reading in order to open out my affective experience.” The interpretive analysis of the poem, despite its detailed attention and its attention to detail, contains little that is unexpected. The clash between the two discourses of adult and child enacted in the poem, is related to the clash between the poem as incantation or “citation” and the poem as proposition or expression – the difference between naming and numbering (we are SEVEN) on the one hand, and narrating and explaining on the other.

 

This dichotomy is emblematic of what seems in the end to be an unbridgeable dichotomy in de Bolla’s own argument. Despite his objective of writing a book about the “poetics of wonderment” or “mutism” what he gives us is an interesting contribution to the literature of interpretation and exegesis. The ‘affective experience’, particularly in the Wordsworth section, seems to be rendered in terms of a fairly typical literary reading of the work. The “wonderment” seems relegated, as it usually is in such texts, to the margins, or becomes a coda to the main business.

 

And maybe this is where it will remain, embedded in the mute and enigmatic experiences that occur before, after and around the processes of analysis and interpretation. This thought raises a question about the viability of de Bolla’s project. He ends the book by reiterating his purpose, emphasising that he has focused on ‘aesthetic experience’ and on the state of ‘wonder’ that he considers integral to it. This sense of wonder seems to be categorisable in terms such as, serenity, clarity, equanimity, and other states of feeling.

 

Despite de Bolla’s attempts to define and locate aesthetic experience as something distinct and discrete from other kinds of experience of art I am not convinced by the argument. Affective experience, critical analysis, prior knowledge, association, interpretation, receptiveness and attentiveness, mood and modes of address, seem to me to be inextricably intertwined in our experience of art. It is this complex interweaving of many strands that constitutes the particular richness of our art experiences. To attempt to define (in rather a vague way) and isolate one aspect of this tightly-knit matrix as the essential and sole-defining characteristic of art seems misguided. Paradoxically, de Bolla provides more evidence and argument against his own case, showing by example that the privileging of the ‘aesthetic’ over other modes of experiencing art is neither justified nor possible.

 

John Danvers

University of Plymouth, UK.