The Perception and Logic of the Artist’s Body

Journal of the Institute of Engineering, 2019

Philosophers of different ages have made rigorous attempts to define art aiming to establish a set of characteristics applicable to all kinds of fine arts. However to point a definite meaning of art is elusive task. Similarly the question whether art can be didactic to provide knowledge, or insight is as old as philosophy itself. Art can be appreciated, enjoyed and loved for the powerful emotional values it reflects to the beholders. The production of art deals with creativity, imagination and innate ability of an artist. Art evolves from the culture that inspires artistic expression and art is born from the inner necessity of the artist. To determine the coherent ontological status of works of art has been a problematic issue despite the consistent philosophical practices. The metaphysical categorization of art as "the imaginary experience of the total activity" of the artist recreated by competent viewer is not all inclusive perception of art. The more liberal outlook of art as abstract cultural entities that are created at certain time through human activities seems convincing and relevant.

1997

The artist uses herself as the object of study. Her subjective position is validated within a theoretical framework provided by feminism, existentialism and Freudian theory. The three world views provide the context for an analysis of sculpture produced between the years 1988 and 1997. Three one-person exhibitions held in 1990, 1993 and 1996, are examined in terms of their iconographic emphasis and their theoretical bias. The role of the unconscious in the genesis of the sculptures and the problem of author/reader dichotomies in interpretation are dealt with as thematic threads throughout the dissertation.

The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of 'revelatory narrative'. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.

Art Without an Author. Vasari's Lives and Michelangelo's Death, 2011

Art as experience of the living body, an East/West experience, 2023

This book analyses the dynamic relationship between art and subjective consciousness, following a phenomenological, pragmatist and enactive approach. It brings out a new approach to the role of the body in art, not as a speculative object or symbolic material but as the living source of the imaginary. It contains theoretical contributions and case studies taken from various artistic practices (visual art, theatre, literature and music), Western and Eastern, the latter concerning China, India and Japan. These contributions allow us to nourish the debate on embodied cognition and aesthetics, using theoryphilosophy, art history, neuroscience-and the authors' personal experience as artists or spectators. According to the Husserlian method of "reduction" and pragmatist introspection, they postulate that listening to bodily sensations-cramps, heartbeats, impulsive movements, eye orientation-can unravel the thread of subconscious experience, both active and affective, that emerge in the encounter between a subject and an artwork, an encounter which, following John Dewey, we deem to be a case study for life in general. Ce livre analyse la relation dynamique entre l'art et la conscience subjective, selon une approche phénoménologique, pragmatiste et enactive. Il vise à faire émerger une nouvelle approche du rôle du corps dans l'art, non pas comme objet spéculatif ou matériau symbolique, mais comme source vivante de l'imaginaire. Les contributions théoriques et les études de cas sont prises à diverses pratiques artistiques (arts visuels, théâtre, littérature et musique), occidentales et orientales, ces dernières concernant la Chine, l'Inde et le Japon. Selon la méthode husserlienne de « réduction », en écho à l'introspection pragmatiste, les textes témoignent que l'écoute des sensations corporelles-crampes, battements de coeur, mouvements pulsionnels, orientation des yeux-mises en jeu par l'oeuvre, permet de dénouer le fil de l'expérience inconsciente, à la fois kinesthésique et affective, qui émerge dans la rencontre entre un sujet et une oeuvre d'art, une rencontre comprise, à la manière de Dewey, comme un cas d'école de la vie en général. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) is an art historian and museum curator (emeritus). She is an Associate researcher with Héritages (CYU) and a member of the Doctoral School 628-AHSS. Her research relates to the capacity of art to transform representations within an individual and in the collective mind, through embodied, mnemonic, and affective processes, in a global, comparative (East/west context). She works at the crossroads of art theory, anthropology, and neuroaesthetics. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) est historienne de l'art et conservatrice de musée (émérite). Elle est chercheur associé à Héritages (CYU) et membre de l'ED 628-AHSS. Ses recherches portent sur la capacité de l'art à transformer les représentations au sein d'un individu et dans le cadre collectif, à travers des processus incarnés, mémoriels et affectifs, dans un contexte global et comparatif (Est/Ouest). Elle travaille au croisement de la théorie de l'art, de l'anthropologie et de la neuroesthétique.

Published by the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts Leiden University, 2022

This article was written as a lecture for the emeritus celebration of prof. Janneke Wesseling (Leiden University) in June 2022 One must distinguish between asking 'what a work (does or does not) say' (= its 'meaning') and asking 'what the work is about' (= its aboutness). The subject or issue of a work, what it is about, is not a 'message' that is said. Art is always about something, and that means that it presents something, raises something, talks about something, opens a conversation... One cannot limit the 'aboutness' of art and inscribe it in an essentialist definition of what art is. But art is indeed - retrospectively, historically and therefore factually - mainly about certain issues. History has excavated a bed in which art flows today, and which serves as a frame of reference for what art can be and can possibly do. Art concerns issues that every society faces because, anthropologically speaking, they concern basic facts of human existence and the human condition. This historical ‘aboutness’ of art concerns, schematically, three issues. First of all: art is about the image. Art still remains the only or most important place where the understanding, production and use of the image can be historically and critically framed, and discussed. Art is therefore relevant and potentially interesting, when it deals with what an image is and does. Secondly: Art is about the aesthetic gaze and the aesthetic approach of the world: that special, artificial kind of attention to the way in which reality immediately presents itself, and isolates it, abstracts it from the meaning, use and value of things. The exclusive focus on 'first appearance' places this basic condition in brackets, and places us in a hazardous and potentially dangerous relationship to things can be socially very disrespectful, cruel and disruptive. In Western culture, the aesthetic gaze has its own well-defined place and play field in the arts. Within art, it is then possible to experiment fairly freely, without great danger, with the appearance of things, and to test the elasticity of the aesthetic approach. Finally: art deals with the 'poetic'. The poetic is the effect of meaning that comes with the failure, with the not immediate succeding, of ‘reading’ the work of art, when this is experienced as an obstacle and a riddle. The poetic is in the language what the distance is in the landscape. Riddle games exercise in enduring and mastering incomprehensibility. Art is interesting when it is, in some way, about what images are and do, and thus contributes to the 'taming' of the image; when it is about experimenting with the 'aesthetic'; when it varies on reenacting the confrontation of the profoundly incomprehensible.

Here are a few thoughts on Otto Rank's Art and Artist. The first chapter, on Creative Urge and Personality Development, is the kicker to the book's title. Two themes are developed on the work of art historians Alois Reigl and Wilhelm Worrington who helped Rank with ideas about a will-to-form and the forming of a will. Artists in all eras are inspired individuals in a social context with an interest to eternalize their personality, and their will develops in the act of imprinting this interest on concrete materials which drives the early movement from abstraction to humanization. The basic thesis is that development in the meaning of art forms parallels development in soul belief.

To My Wife most modern scholarship has made available, the idea behind the whole work must (as M. Faure himself explains in the preface to the new edition before cited) be tinged with the personality of the writer and by the character of his time. "The historian who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of folly." In these matters judgment is inevitable, for to write the history of art one must make one's decisions as to what it is. The writing of it is in itself a work of art-as the style of Élie Faure is there to prove. Only one who feels the emotions of art can tell others which are the great works and make clear the collective poem formed by their history. It is precisely because Élie Faure is adding something to that poem that he has the right to tell us of its meaning.