John Dewey, Art as Experience notes

John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2005.

Chapter 3: Having an Experience

No one ever arrives at such a maturity though he perceives all the connections [between undergoing (receptivity) and doing] that are involved. A play that "portrayed the whole endless duration of life after death as a living over of the incidents that happened in a short life on earth, in continued discovery of the relationships involved among them." (p. 46) Zeal for doing, lust for action experience becomes dispersed and miscellaneous. "the artist is controlled in the process of his work by is grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next. . . he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce." (p. 47) "As respects the basic quality of pictures, difference depends, indeed, more upon the quality of intelligence brought to bear upon perception of relations then upon anything else." - in the process of construction, "direct sensitivity" and "skill" 'Esthetic' is the central component of true experience: "The esthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but that it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience." (p. 48) Rising to the level of 'artistic': "Craftsmanship to be artistic in the final sense must be "loving"; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised." "To be truly artistic, a work must also be esthetic this is, framed for enjoyed receptive perception." (p. 49) Shaping: "Until the artist is satisfied in perception with what he is doing, he continues shaping and reshaping. The making comes to an end when its result is experienced as good and that experience comes not by mere intellectual and outside judgment but in direct perception." (p. 51)

Judgments on the fly: "Because of the relation between what is done and what is undergone, there is an immediate sense of things in perception as belonging together or as jarring; as reinforcing or as interfering." (p. 52) Unfolding/evolving in time: "The real work of an artist is to build up an experience that is coherent in perception while moving with constant change in its development." (p. 53) My note: It's not the point to somehow prove that the C practitioner is or has to be an "artist", but rather to follow Dewey and Schon in saying that this is the best way to understand fluent and effective practice.

Chapter 4: The Act of Expression

'Impulsion' and resistance: "The only way it can become aware of its nature and its goal is by obstacles surmounted and means employed Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feelings nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts creates irritation and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and when it is overcome and utilized; eventuates in elation" (p. 62) I like the "elation" part experienced when things really work in sessions

Sensemaking, and relate to Schon: "resistance and check bring about the conversion of direct forward action into reflection; what is turned back upon is the relation of hindering conditions to what the self possesses as working capital in virtue of prior experiences." (p. 62) What happens at these moments fuses past and present, new and old: "The junction of the new and old is not a mere composition of forces, but is a re-creation in which the present impulsion gets form and solidity while the old, the "stored," material is literally revived, given new live and soul through having to meet a new situation." (p. 63) Necessity of opposition, struggle to achieve actual expression: "There is no expression without excitement, without turmoil." (p. 64) Nature of inspiration, reaches into depths: "When excitement about subject matter goes deep, it stirs up a store of attitudes and meanings derived from prior experience. As they are aroused into activity they become conscious thoughts and emotions, emotionalized images. To be set on fire by a thought or scene is to be inspired. What is kindled must either burn itself out, turning to ashes, or

must press itself out in material that changes the latter from crude metal into a refined product." (p. 68) "They do not seem to come from the self, because they issue from a self not consciously known." (p. 68) Excitement, resistance: "To generate the indispensable excitement there must be something at stake, something momentous and uncertain." (p. 69) Events/situations that are truly experienced are always unique: "The unique, unduplicated character of experienced events and situations impregnates the emotion that is evoked." (p. 70) "A lifetime would be too short to reproduce in words a single emotion" (p. 70) - because of the specificity and uniqueness, so the artist builds up "a concrete situation and permit <i>it</i> to evoke emotional response." it's the emotion(s), not the moral intent or idea of the author, that provides the unity

p. 73 spontaneity in art What is brought to the artistic act from past and present: "Immediacy and individuality, the traits which mark concrete existence, come from the present occasion; meaning, substance, content, from what is embedded in the self from the past." (p. 74) " 'Spontaneity' is the result of long periods of activity not truly in the moment; "even the volcano's outburst presupposed a long period of prior compression, and, if the eruption sends forth molten lava and not merely separate rocks and ashes, it implies a transformation of original raw materials." (p. 75) Expression and art can't really come from intellectual and conscious intent: "The direct effort of 'wit and will' of itself never gave birth to anything that is not mechanical; their function is necessary, but it is to let loose allies that exist outside their scope." (p. 76) "Only the psychology that has separated things which in reality belong together holds that scientists and philosophers think while poets and painters follow their feelings." (p. 76)

"If all meanings could be adequately expressed by works, the arts of painting and music would not exist." (p. 77) Relate to Arnheim quote re what separates artists from regular people: "What most of lack in order to be artists is not the inceptive emotion, nor yet merely technical skill in execution. It is capacity to work a vague idea and emotion over into terms of some definite medium." (p. 78)

Chapter 5: The Expressive Object

'motor preparation' as an element of expertise in both artist and perceiver: "To know what to look for and how to see it is an affair of readiness on the part of motor equipment." (p. 102) "Those who are moved feel, as Tolstoi says, that what the work expresses is as if it were something one had oneself been longing to express." (p. 109) Artists don't go for 'popularity' people that won't see because of their perceptual blinders (similar to people not seeing the value of a C representation): "Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say. But they are animated by a deep conviction that since they can only say what they have to say, the trouble is not with their work but those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not. Communicability has nothing to do with popularity." (p. 109)

Chapter 6: Substance and Form

"the artist finds where he is going because of what he has previously done; that is, the original excitation and stir of some contact with the world undergo successive transformation. That state of the matter he has arrived at sets demands to be fulfilled and it institutes a framework that limits further operations. As the experience of transforming subject-matter into the very substance of the work of art proceeds, incidents and scenes that figured at first may drop out and others take their place, being drawn in by the suction of the qualitative material that aroused the original excitement." (p. 116) (and also p. 208) It's in the details and the relationships between them: "The characteristic of artistic design is the intimacy of the relations that hold the parts together." (p. 121)

This feels like a better way of describing the quality of the aesthetic how all the relations and parts fit together, the necessariness and economy of them integrity of the whole: "In the work of art, the relations cannot be told apart from what they relate except in later reflection. . . . A work of art is poor in the degree in which they exist in separation; as in a novel wherein plot the design is felt to be superimposed on incidents and characters instead of being their dynamic relation to one another." (p. 121) "Only when the constituent parts of a whole have the unique end of contributing to a conscious experience, do design and shape lose superimposed character and become form." (p. 122) "Sense qualities are the carrier of meanings, not as vehicles carrying goods but as a mother carries a baby when the baby is part of her own organism." (p. 122-3)

Chapter 7: The Natural History of Form

"Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment." (p. 142)

Chapter 8: The Organization of Energies

"It is the way the thing is related that counts." (p. 180) "A melody is a chord deployed in time." (p. 191)

Chapter 9: The Common Substance of the Arts

Relationship of part to whole: "The intuited enveloping quality" that relates the parts in a "resulting sense of totality" that is "commemorative, expectant, insinuating, premonitory." (p. 200) 201: background and objects in focus "The background which is more than spatial because it enters into and qualifies everything in the focus, everything distinguished as a part and member. . . . We suppose the experience has the same definite limits as the things with which it is concerned. But any experience the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects, are only focal points in a here and now in a whole that stretches out indefinitely. . . .There is something mystical associated with the word intuition, and any experience becomes

mystical in the degree in which the sense, the feeling, of the unlimited envelope becomes intense as it may be in experience of an object of art." (p. 200-201) "Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not <i>understood</i> to obtain its full effect." (p. 201-202) Particularity of the medium: "Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception." (p. 207) Relate to Arnheim and Schon: "The medium is a mediator. It is a go-between of artist and perceiver. Tolstoi in the midst of his moral preconceptions often speaks as an artist. He is celebrating this function of an artist when he makes the remarks. . . about art as that which unites. The important thing for the theory of art is that this union is effected through the use of special material as a medium. By temperament, perhaps by inclination and aspiration, we are all artists up to a certain point. What is lacking is that which marks the artist in execution. For the artists has the power to seize on a special kind of material and convert it into an authentic medium of expression. The rest of us require many channels and a mass of material to give expression to what we should like to say. Then the variety of agencies employed get in the way of one another and render expression turbid, while the sheer bulk of material employed makes it confused and awkward. The artist sticks to his chosen organ and its corresponding material, and thus the idea singly and concentratedly felt in terms of the medium comes through pure and clear. He plays the game intensely, because strictly." (p. 207-208) "Degree" of art the coalescence of means and ends ideas and their expression through the medium are not separated "The true artist sees and feels in terms of his medium and the one who has learned to perceive esthetically emulates the operation. Others carry into their seeing of pictures and hearing of music preconceptions drawn from sources that obstruct and confuse perception." (p. 208) Particularity of the medium: " artists create effects by command of a single medium. In ordinary perception we depend upon contribution from a variety of sources for our understanding of the meaning of what we are undergoing. The artistic use of a medium signifies that irrelevant aids are excluded and one sense quality is concentratedly and intensely used to do the work usually done with the aid of many." (p. 208-209) Nature of a "medium":

"What makes a material a medium is that it is used to express a meaning which is other than that which it is in virtue of its bare physical existence: the meaning not of what it physically is, but of what it expresses." (p. 209) Aesthetic 'diagnosis' looking at a landscape aesthetically, diagnosing what makes it not "compose well" how individual parts don't look "right" ripple effects of changes to the parts on the whole: "Physically the things . . . are part of the scene. But they are not parts of it if we take it as an esthetic whole. Now our first tendency, looking at the matter esthetically, would probably be to assign the defects to the form, to the side of inadequate and distancing relationship of contour, mass, and placing. And we should not be wrong in feeling that jar and interference arise from this source. But if we carry analysis further, we see that defect in relationship on one side is defect in individual structure and definiteness on the other side. We should find that the changes we make in order to get a better composition also serve to give <i>parts</i> an individualization, a definiteness, in perception they did not have before." (p. 210) Nature of a particular medium: "Take any art one pleases, and it will appear that the medium is expressive because it is used to individualize and define, and this not just in the sense of physical outline but in the sense of expressing that quality which is one with the character of an object; it renders character distinct by emphasis." (p. 211) Beautiful statement re relationship of parts to the whole: " our most familiar experience that no whole is significant to us except as it is constituted by parts that are themselves significant apart from the whole to which they belong that, in short, no significant community can exist save as it is composed of individuals who are significant." (p. 212) "every part of a work of art is potentially susceptible of indefinite perceptual differentiation." (p. 213) Reminiscent of film class, looking at a film like Citizen Kane, how one little element of a film or play, how it is formed in and of itself and how it relates to and both recapitulates and helps to create the whole: "The more definition of parts contributes to the whole, the more it is important in itself." Aesthetic diagnosis different levels too much "in the head" rationality not correct, approach it from whole/parts interrelation in the specific medium: "To look at a work of art in order to see how well certain rules are observed and canons conformed to impoverishes perception. But to strive to note the ways in which certain

conditions are fulfilled, such as the organic means by which the media is made to express and carry definite parts, or how the problem of adequate individualization is solved, sharpens esthetic perception and enriches its content. For every artist accomplishes the operation in his own way and never exactly repeats himself in any of his works." (p. 213) 213-214: examples from various specific artists Space-time, common to all art products: "the fine arts seek out and elicit this quality of all the things we experience and express it more energetically and clearly than do the things from which they extract it." (p. 214) What makes up the expression of significance: "There is another significant involution of time and movement in space. It is constituted not only by directional tendencies up and down, for example but by mutual approaches and retreatings. Near and far, close and distant, are qualities of pregnant, often tragic, import that is, as they are experienced, not just stated as measurements in science. They signify loosening and tightening, expanding and contracting, separating and compacting, soaring and drooping, rising and falling; the dispersive, scattering, and the hovering and brooding, unsubstantial lightness and massive blow. Such actions and reaction are the very stuff of which the object and events we experience are made. in experience they are infinitely diversified and cannot be described, while in works of art they are <i>expressed.</i> For art is a selection of what is significant, with rejection by the very same impulse of what is irrelevant, and thereby the significant is compressed and intensified." (p. 215-216) "Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action. It is a matter of proportions qualitatively felt." (p. 217) Summary: "Distinction of elements and consistency of members in a whole are the functions that define intelligence; the intelligibility of a work of art depends on the presence to the meaning that renders individuality of parts and their relationship in the whole directly present to the eye and ear trained in perception." (p. 221)

Chapter 10: The Varied Substance of the Arts

Relationship of art to medium, subject matter, expression: "The important thing is that a work of art exploit <i>its</i> medium to the uttermost bearing in mind that material is not medium save when used as an organ of expression. The materials of nature and human association are multifarious to the point of infinity. Whenever any material finds a medium that expresses its value in experience that is, its imaginative and emotional value it becomes the substance of a work of art. The abiding

struggle of art is thus to convert materials that are stammering or dumb in ordinary experience into eloquent media. Remembering that art itself denotes a quality of action and of things done, every authentic new work of art is in some degree itself the birth of a new art." (p. 237) Art and communication: "Every art communicates because it expresses. . . Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular; and part of the miracle it achieves is that, in being communicated, the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen." (p. 253) "The expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled form. Art breaks through barriers that divide human beings, which are impermeable in ordinary association." (p. 214)

Chapter 11: The Human Contribution

"In an experience, things and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through its intercourse with things previously external to it." (p. 257) Criticism of dualistic modes, in the head of the person: "Experience is supposed to something that occurs exclusively inside a self or mind or consciousness, something self-contained and sustaining only external relations to the objective scene in which it happens to be set. Then all psychological states and processes are not thought of as functions of a live creature as it lives on its natural surroundings. When the linkage of the self with its world is broken, then also the various ways in which the self interacts with the world cease to have a unitary connection with one another. They fall into separate fragments of sense, feelings, desire, purpose, knowing, volition." instead of "Intrinsic connection of the self with the world through reciprocity of undergoing and doing" and "a continuous, though varied, interaction of self and environment." (p. 257) "it is the office of art in the individual person, to compose differences, to do away with isolations and conflicts among the elements of our being, to utilize oppositions among them to build a richer personality." (p. 258) "Prejudice, preconceptions and desire influence native tendencies in judgment to such an extent that especial pains must be taken to become aware of them so that they may be eliminated." (p. 259)

Aesthetic experience integrates self and object, organism and environment: "the unique distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and object exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears." (p. 259) "Whenever anything is undergone in consequence of a doing, the self is modified." [i.e. not just a rote or throwaway action] "The modification extends beyond acquisition of greater faculty and skill. Attitudes and interests are built up which embody in themselves some deposit of the meaning of things done and undergone. These funded and retained meanings become a part of the self In this substantial sense, mind forms the background upon which every new contact with surroundings in projected; yet 'background' is too passive a word, unless we remember that it is active and that, in the projection of the new upon it, there is assimilation and reconstruction of both background and of what is taken in and digested." (p. 275) Definition of artist: "The native constitution of the artist is marked by peculiar sensitiveness to some aspect of the multiform universe of nature and man and by urge to the remaking of it through expression in a preferred medium." (p. 276) Place of 'tradition' as central component to the mind/"background": ". . . each great tradition is itself an organizational habit of vision and of methods of ordering and conveying material. As this habit enters into native temperament and constitution it becomes an essential ingredient in the mind of an artist. Peculiar sensitiveness to certain aspects of nature is thereby developed into a power." (p. 276) The way in which, the depth to which the 'background' fuses with consciousness is a determinant of the actual artistry as opposed to imitation: "This dependence is an essential factor in original vision and creative expression. The trouble with the academic imitator is not that he depends on tradition, but that the latter have not entered into his mind; into the structure of his own ways of seeing and making. They remain on the surface as tricks of technique or as extraneous suggestions and conventions as to the proper thing to do." (p. 277) 'Mind'/ is background; 'consciousness is foreground: "Always in rapid change, for it marks the place where the formed disposition and the immediate situation touch and interact. It is the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience." (p. 277)

A "readjustment" in consciousness "effected suddenly by means of a quick and unexpected harmony which in its bright abruptness is like a flash of revelation; although in fact it is prepared for by long and slow incubation. Oftentimes the union of old and new, of foreground and background, is accomplished only by effort, prolonged perhaps to the point of pain." (p. 277) Interest, imagination, intuition (p. 278) "the background of organized meanings also convert the new situation from the obscure into the clear and luminous." (p. 277) "Because interest is the dynamic force in selection and assemblage of materials" Interest gives the "push and centralizing energy" (p. 277) Imagination: "designates a quality that animates and pervades all processes of making and observation. It is a <i>way</i> of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole." (p. 278) "There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination." (p. 278) Also (p. 280) where the "inner vision" meets the "objective vision" as "imagination takes form the work of art is born." 279-280: Struggle between the depth and breadth of what is felt and thought within, and the limitations of trying to express it externally. "The history of science and philosophy as well as of the fine arts is the record of the fact that the imaginative product receives at first the condemnation of the public, and in proportion to its range and depth. It is not merely in religion that the prophet is at first stoned (metaphorically at least) while later generations build the commemorative monument." (p. 280) "Philosophy is said to begin in wonder and end in understanding. Art departs from what has been understood and ends in wonder." (p. 281) "Every intense experience of friendship completes itself artistically. The sense of communion generated by a work of art may take on a definitely religious quality. The union of men with one another is the source of the rites that from the time of archaic man to the present have commemorated the crises of birth, death, and marriage. Art is the extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life." (p. 282)

Chapter 12: The Challenge to Philosophy

"The work of art unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather in the realm of physical experiences. What it does is to concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience." (p. 285) "Saturation means an immersion so complete that the qualities of the object and the emotions it arouses have no separate existence." (p. 288) Centrality of purpose: "It is in the purposes he entertains and acts upon that an individual most completely exhibits and realizes his intimate selfhood." (p. 288-89) 289-92: Arguments against art as make-believe and art as play "art is the fusion in one experience of the pressure upon the self of necessary conditions and the spontaneity and novelty of individuality." (p. 293) Centrality of resistance from "actual conditions"

Chapter 14: Art & Civilization

"works of art are means by which we enter, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own." (p. 347) - purpose of Compendium "the new features are not mere decorative additions but enter into the <i>structure</i> of works of art and thus occasion a wider and fuller experience. Their enduring effect upon those who perceive and enjoy will be an expansion of <i>their</i> sympathies, imagination, and sense." (p. 347-48) "We accomplish this result when . . . we install ourselves in modes of apprehending nature that at first are strange to us. To some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is reoriented. Barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away . . . ." (p. 348) This is what I have always thought re the 'miracle' of communication between humans: "The possibility of the occurrence of genuine communication is a broad problem of which the one just dealt with is one species. It is a fact that it takes place, but the nature of community of experience is one of the most serious problems of communication so serious that some thinkers deny the fact. The existence of communication is so disparate to our physical separation from one another and to the inner mental lives of individuals that it is not surprising that supernatural force has been ascribed to language and that communion has been given sacramental value." (p. 348)

(and what follows about how communication is so close to us that "we are least likely to reflect" on it and "we take them for granted") (p. 348) "Communication through speech, oral and written, is the familiar and constant feature of social life. We tend, accordingly, to regard it as just one phenomenon among others of what we must in any case accept without question. We pass over the fact that it is the foundation and source of all activities and relations that are distinctive of internal union of human beings with one another." (p. 348) Friendship: "The problem in question is not unlike that we daily undergo in the effort to understand another person with which we habitually associate. All friendship is a solution of the problem. Friendship and intimate affection are not the result of information about another person even though knowledge may further their information. But it does so only as it becomes an integral part of sympathy through the imagination. It is when the desires and aims, the interest and modes of response of another become an expansion of our own being that we understand him. We learn to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, and their results give true instruction, for they are built into our own structure. . . . . . . The verb "to civilize" is defined as 'to instruct in the arts of life and thus to raise in the scale of civilization.' Instruction in the arts of life is something other than conveying information about them. It is a matter of communication and participation in values of life by means of the imagination, and works of art are the most intimate and energetic means of aiding individuals to share in the arts of living." (p. 350)