Victor Burgin (b. 1941) is a conceptual artist and theorist. Due perhaps to his academic background and extensive teaching experience, he is able to conceptualize the approach of artists more clearly than most. Some quotations, all taken from his essay "Situational Aesthetics" re-printed in Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000, p. 894, originally published in 1969. His approach owes a lot to phenomenology.
Accepting the shifting and ephemeral nature of perceptual experience, and if we accept that both real and conceptual objects are appreciated in an analogous manner, then it becomes reasonable to posit aesthetic objects which are located partly in real space and partly in psychological space. Such a placing of aesthetic objects however involves both a revised attitude towards materials and a reversal of function between these materials and their context.
Cage is hopeful in claiming, 'We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use'; attitudes towards materials in art are still informed largely by the laws of conspicuous consumption, and aesthetic commodity hardware continues to pile while utilitarian objects, whose beauty might once have been taken as conclusive proof of the existence of God, spill in inconceivable profusion from the cybernated cornucopias of industry.
Perceptual fields are not experienced as objects in themselves. Perception is a continuum, a precipitation of event fragments decaying in time, above all a process.
Visual information concerning duration is gained, as it is gained when we observe motion, from observations of shift in perceptual field. In travelling past an object we are presented with an apparent configurational evolution from which we may abstract a number of discrete states. Comparison of expired configurations with the configuration of the moment tells us we are in motion relative to the object.
Time, in the perception of exterior events, is the observation of succession linked with muscular-navigational memories -- a visceral identification with change ... All behaviour has these space-time parameters in common. To distinguish, therefore, between 'arts of space' and 'arts of time' is literally unrealistic. The misconception is based in materialism, it springs, again, from a focus upon the object rather than upon the behaviour of the perceiver.
Vertical structuring, based in hermetic, historically given concepts of art and its cultural role, has given way to a literally proliferating complex of activities which are united only in their common definition as products of artistic behaviour.
Art intended as propaganda is almost invariably both aesthetically tedious and politically impotent. The process-oriented attitudes described here are not intentionally iconoclastic and one should be suspicious of easy comparisons with Dada.
One might note that while one's experience of a painting is time-oriented in the sense that it unfolds over a span of time, contrary-wise in making theoretical plans of the structure of a piece of music, one is converting or reducing a time-oriented experience into a synoptic, spatial view.
3 comments:
"Time, in the perception of exterior events, is the observation of succession linked with muscular-navigational memories -- a visceral identification with change ... All behaviour has these space-time parameters in common. To distinguish, therefore, between 'arts of space' and 'arts of time' is literally unrealistic. The misconception is based in materialism, it springs, again, from a focus upon the object rather than upon the behaviour of the perceiver."
The permeability of time and space in sensory perception and cognitive integration is a basic reason I don't treat all conceptual art as the work of "charlatans" a la the former Future Symphony Institute guys. I wasn't surprised to discover that the guys over there reject the very idea that we can or should dissect the cognitive/sensory process that creates the gestalt of the images we see when we look at a painting because in their take on things it "adds nothing" to how we appreciate art and "destroys" our confidence in our sense perception (Borstlap at his blog). This is mistaken at multiple levels but the most basic reason is, to grant progressives a point here, old white guys with binocular vision who are stuck in the 1970s in terms of whatever they remember of medical research haven't bothered to keep up with breakthroughs in research into eye/brain relationships that conceptual artists have clearly and obviously tried to actually pay attention to all along.
For that matter, as Chiara Bertoglio put it in one of her books, the history of thinking about how in music we translate time into space and space into time through reading scores and hearing music as it is performed goes back for centuries. If anything visual artists taking time to think about the temporal constraints the eye is subject to in looking at a painting sounds like someone who's thinking things through. I don't have binocular vision so I have become acutely aware over the course of my life I can't just "look" at a painting and "take it all in" the way people who have fully binocular vision seem to be able to take for granted. I've thought off and on that people process visual information so quickly they often don't stop to think that it takes place in time, which is why the quote above seems commonsensical to me.
I'm pretty open to different aesthetic approaches which is why I am reading that hefty volume on Art in Theory. Many, many of the essays are obscure, confusing or just inarticulate--not surprising as the writers are mostly visual artists. But a few of them are brilliant insights into some thorny questions--such as this one! I think I quoted almost half of the essay.
I honestly don't see why you cannot value tradition highly and at the same time value new concepts highly.
It's easy to value both tradition and new ideas but it seems the capacity to do so is a discipline that has to be cultivated. Robert Frost had that little poem about how he dared not be radical when young for fear of being conservative when old. :)
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