ART AS IMAGE AND IDEA

Edmund Burke Feldman The University of Georgia Prentice-Hall, INC. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1967 For Art continues to satisfy 1. Our Individual needs of personal expression 2. Our Social Needs for display, celebration, and communication 3. Our physical needs for utilitarian structures and objects (Page 2-3) To communicate our ideas or sentiments, we use many kinds of languages. The visual art constitute one of those languange (page 4) Art also embodies personal views of public objects and events that are familiar to all of us (Page 4) The personal functions of art may seem today to constitute the very essence of art for artist and viewer (page 6) Visual images preceded written language as a means of communication. Here, however, we are not primarily interested in art as a vehicle for imparting communication, since other languages have evolved as more effective, or more precise, instruments of communication. But we are interested in visual art as a means of expressing the psychological dimension of life (page 6) Art is not merely a language for translating thoughts and feelings inside of people into conventional signs and symbols outside of them which others might read; ... but it also involves finding and forming lines, colors, shapes, and volumes so that they seem to mean something significant to the artist (page 6) Art can embody distaste and aversion too (page 7) The artist always hopes, secretly perhaps, that there is a discriminating and perceptive public which will admire and prize his work (page 36) ... Art performs a social function when : 1. It seeks or tends to influence the collective behaviour of people; 2. It is created to be seen or used primarily in public situations; 3. It expresses or describes social or collective aspects of existence as opposed to individual and personal kind of experience (page 36) In other words, art can influence the behaviour of people in groups, affecting the way they think or feel, and sometimes, the way they act (page 38) ... So long as there are political wrongs to be righted and unjust or ugly social conditions requiring change, art must participate through visual education and persuasion in the development of popuilar attitudes which can lead eventually to a better society (page 39) One of the social functions of art is performed by works which simply describe facets of life without necessarily implying that there is an urgent problem to be considered (page 49)

Satire : The social purpose of satire is to radicule people and institutions so that they will change (page 55) Satire is aggresive in intent. It makes fun of its object sometimes bitter, derisive fun (page 55) Altough laughter is involved, satire is a serious art form, serving to puncture pretension, to cut the mighty down to size, to dramatize the gap between official purpose or promise and actual peformance (page 55) The capacity of responsible persons to accept satirical criticism gratefully and without efforts at suppresion is probably a good index of their ability to exercise non-coercive leadership (page 55) First, to be the object of radicule is probably more difficult to bear than scolded. To belaughed at by a community or by substantial groips in the community is very much like being ostracized. It is an exceedingly severe kind of humiliation. Second, laughter is both a physiological phenomenon; it involves the total organism and thus implicates an individual more completely in an act of radicule (page 56) But as we have already seen, visual art also constitutes a language-a language which is useful for a variety of social and institutional purposes. Forms and images can be organized so that they communicate with extraordinary effectiveness, and, in conjunction, with verbal language, their explicitness and precision of meaning is maximized (page 61) Problems of art communication : 1. The matter of arresting the attention of a portion of the public 2. The difficulty of gaining attention, is over all psychological and sociological strategy: identifying the particular group which is addressed and knowing its interests and motivations 3. Characterizing the use and the meaning of the produst, idea, or service which is to be sold or communicated 4. The problem of the content and amount of verbal material (page 63) The functions of Art : 1. Personal Functions : Art and Psychological Expression. Love, Sex and Marriage. Death and Morbidity. Spiritual Concern. Aesthetic Expression 2. Social Functions : Political and Ideological Expression. Social Description. Satire. Graphic Information. 3. Physical Functions