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
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.