Aesthetics

 

“Aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.’

Fairfield Porter 

 

I have always, it seems, done battle with personal taste in art. Either I’m trying to figure out just what I think about art or I am trying to understand someone else’s ideas. What has helped calm my mind is understanding the difference between one’s taste or opinions about art and one’s aesthetics about art. My opinions are simply that- opinions. My aesthetics are how I go about thinking and looking at art.

My first big battle with taste was in undergraduate school  during the early 80’s when I was a ceramic major. The department was split into two factions. There were those who made functional pots and those who made ‘art’. As a student there was this underlying  pressure to pick a camp and commit to its ideology.  If you were a ‘clay artists’ making pots was too old school and lacked the room for creative self expression. The potters, on the other hand, saw themselves as part of a valuable tradition and thought it sacrilegious to make something out of clay that wasn’t part of that tradition. Taste it seemed was both a personal judgment and a sociological concept. We were young, impressionable and frankly did not know our heads from holes in the ground. Neither did our instructors who were guilty of fueling the whole stupid debate. We were being taught taste.

Off to graduate school I went where I was exposed to more new things in the world than I could imagine but where I had to start making limiting choices. I had to choose the classes I wished to focus on, the teachers I wished to work with, the material I thought was interesting with the ultimate choice of writing a dissertation and orally defending the choices I made. We bolstered our own opinions about art by rejecting other people’s ideas. We were there to develop our own ideas. The problem was we were still all young and impressionable but were beginning to think we knew it all. We were developing our own taste.

Then it was off into the real world after graduating where I had my first exhibition at Northwestern Michigan Collage of a series of drawings I was doing at the time .  I thought I was radical in my desire to hang these drawings  unframed in the exhibition area, which was basically the hallway in the art building. The response from some of the art students was  to draw on my drawings and write on them how much the thought they were crap. I was even chastised by the administration for leaving myself open to such a reaction by not ‘properly framing” my work. They were expressing there personal taste.

Taste is ones opinion. There can be good opinions or bad opinions. The opinions about art I learned as a young student seem subordinate to the ‘aesthetics’ that Porter talks about. Porter’s idea of aesthetics implies a philosophy, a tool by which you sense things. A procedure by which you look. How you look and how you think about what your seeing is going to control what kind of taste you end up having.

It was the philosopher David Hume who believed that aesthetic judgment had to have both the ability to detect things with your sight and a emotional sensitivity to what you detect. You have to look first and be able to feel something about what your looking at. And it was Immanuel Kant who believed that  to aesthetically judge something depended on ones ability to be reflective on what you are seeing. All three of those qualities; sensations, emotions and intellect vary between people and are decisive factors how people decide what they like and don’t like in art. If you accept the notion that beauty is in the mind of the beholder then you also have to be willing to agree that not all of those minds may be firing on the same number of cylinders. The ability to see things varies from person to person. 

Fortunately there is a quality of being that isn’t solely dependent on how much you know. That quality is openness. Remaining open to the possibilities of art is what I believe Porter is referring to when he says that aesthetics “ implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.” You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to be interested in anything you don’t care to be interested in but you don’t get to automatically judge it as bad either. Aesthetics allows you to look, to inquire, to investigate. If you are going to be aesthetic about something it requires you to be respectful. If you  are going to make  judgments right away based on what you say your taste in art is you arr going to miss the whole experience. Here is a little test to use next time you are looking at something you may not understand – If It is easier to simply say you don’t like it than it is to explain why you don’t like it, you are probably not being aesthetic.

There is immense pleasure in going to a museum or an art gallery and simply looking.  Looking with the idea of beauty in your mind. There is a great sense of freedom to look and not be required to make a judgment. No one is going to give you a test. You don’t need to leave an opinion before you go out the door. You can form that later if you want. But the aesthetic experience can only begin if you are open enough to look.  And the joy of the aesthetic experience continues when you can later contemplate and think about what you have looked at and compare and contrast that with all the other things seen in the past.  Soon you have a history of looking and thinking about what you have seen. Possibly you will want to read about the artists and what they were thinking. You’ll want to read art history, buy art books, travel to cities just to see a exhibition. Its addictive. Its pleasurable. And if  you do so aesthetically you won’t have to fight with yourself so much anymore.

A new Fall

    Lets start again. From the beginning again with more emphasis. More complete with purpose. Better “throw’ as the painter Sam Scott says.

    A  painters work is cyclic like the seasons. I start a painting, work on it and eventually finish it to start something new again.  A new canvas, new beginning, new ideas.

   The geese are honking as they fly above my studio, headed to warmer southern climates. This really signals the coming of winter. The end of the busy summer season and the start of the short days of winter. Its November and there is the weight of snow in the air.  It has always been my favorite time of the year. As a boy I loved these dark days, the crispness of the outdoor air contrasted with the warmth and smells of indoor cooking. Now I like it for those same reasons but its also the time of year when the distractions of gardening and other outdoor activities has ended and the focus is on my studio. I was born in the fall and every fall I feel like I want to start  over.  Its not that what I did previously is wrong but its not where I want it to be.  I am coming to understand these thoughts more and more and now even welcome them. I realize that its the thread shared with all artists who have come before me. That longing for more, bigger, better.

   I have become more  of a studio painter over the last years. I’ve learned there is no automatic magic just because a landscape is painted outside.  I can’t call anything that I’m working on in the studio now completely new because the work is always a continuation, whether you realize it or not. Nothing  then is really new its just the next step. I’ve found old canvas from several years back that miraculously seem to have the initial seed of  current work in them. The future never seems planned but the past always feels meant to be. Its always the next group of paintings I’m excited about. All artist  feel hopeful about the future. Its where our best work resides.

   Melanie Parke, my wife and partner, tells me that astrologically I’ve started a ‘building year’.  Its a year where I’m to learn from the past and  construct something from those lessons learned.  Given the unpredictability of  life I’ve come to believe that astrology is just as dependable as anything else. At least it has plenty of potential built into the system. 

   Painting is a type of construction. A building upon action and reaction using pigments and mediums. Its not really about what we are painting. Its about how we are painting it. The subject is just our rationale for painting.   I like to paint  because it is the one act I can do where I don’t get to know where I’m going.  That can be both terrifying and terribly exciting.  Similar to the act of traveling – if you have to stay on schedule your just not going to have a very good time.

So I’ve stored the completed paintings in the studio, turning them to face the wall so as not to be distracted by their presence. I’ve cleaned my desk of paper work and bills. I ‘m starting a New Years resolution and its only November. My resolution is to throw all the crap out of my life the minute I deem it to be.  I’ve swept the studio floor, buttoned up the windows against the cold and rearranged the layout of my painting tables. I stopped listening to the news months ago. I’m eagerly awaiting the day in February when, I have been told,  something sinister is suppose to happen to my television and I won’t be able to get my local channels.  I see it as Gods recent gift to mankind – not being able to watch any type of  television news coverage of which we are told we can count on.  I’m emptying my head of useless facts and making room for useful ones. The artist, Agnes Martin went a step further. She said she gave up on facts altogether because they couldn’t be trusted. (Maybe we should tax things that can’t be trusted? Who would complain?) 

   Grace Hartigan one of the second generation Abstract Expressionist painters died this week at the age of 86. She once told an interviewer, “I didn’t choose painting, it choose me. I didn’t have any talent. I had genius.”   I don’t think Hartigan was referring to genius as ability but rather another definition of the word meaning “the prevalent character or spirit of a nation or age”.  She was referring to her good fortune to be a part of  a new movement, a new age in art. The hopeful excitement of the new.

Richard Kooyman

November 2008