ONE DEVELOPMENT IN AESTHETIC AWARENESS

8/14/2019 ONE DEVELOPMENT IN AESTHETIC AWARENESS

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ONE DEVELOPMENT IN AESTHETIC AWARENESS By Paul Henrickson,2002

Over the course of several decades and I varying geographical

locations where unbeckoned illumination took place, itgradually occurred to me that my educational environment wasfaulty and that I had been, perhaps unintentionally, misled.

Three decades had passed before the first breakthroughoccurred. I was in Minneapolis. Minnesota, U.S.A., wanderingthrough the rooms ofThe Minneapolis Art Institute which were hosting animpressive exhibition of six contemporary Italian artists. I nolonger remember their names, besides, their names ceased tobecome significant at all once I had taken a quick glance at the

walls where large two-meter canvases were hanging.

There was one painting in particular which commanded myattention because of its energetic, nearly violent existence.The color range was relatively narrow beings madder up ofochres, siennas, and whites, but the way the artist hadattached the paint to the surface, the record of his physicalprocess of laying the pigment on in massive impasto levels andthe varying rhythms by which this was accomplished was moststriking.

I tried, out of a sense of decorum, a talent I have finally shed,to pay courtesy visits to the other contributors to theexhibition. This sounds like a horrible put down of the otherworks but I do not mean it that way for there was not oneincompetent work on exhibit, but this one, this particular onekept drawing me into its environment, and if I tried to leave, itwould pull me back to draw more of my bewilderment out ofme. Finally, I grew frustrated at being unable to makedecisions on my own and subject to the pull of an inanimateobject and tried to take matters into my own hands. After all,the responsibility, we have been told, of one having been born

in Boston, Massachusetts , demands intelligently responsiblebehavior. After all, this is where the Lowells speak only to theCabots, the Cabots only to the Lodges and the Lodges only toGod, personal behavior is defined by nothing if not self-control.

The fact that my self was not in control of my behaviortestified to the pull of aesthetic influence and that was an


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important discovery. After having been compelled a dozentimes to return to gaze upon this work which had captured myfancy, forced my admiration and demanded my adoration itsuddenly revealed itself for what it was. It was not thepowerful orchestration of non-objective forms it had, at first

appeared to be, but the near faithful reproduction of a dirtypublic john. What had at first been attractive, appealing andtreasured because of its exciting variations and subtleintonations had suddenly turnedmalevolent, disgusting and threatening and I thought I heardthe devil laugh as he saw I had been deprived of my innocence.

This was my first really memorable experience with what itmeant to be aesthetically moved from at first one extreme toits opposite. The experience needed explanation. Words I hadgown accustomed to and thought I understood suddenly had

no meaning for me. My trust in my teachers was destroyed.Either I had been lied to and I had been a fool to believe mymentors or they, themselves, hadnt known what they hadbeen talking about, or, what they had been talking about hadnot been my experience. This is the area that appropriatelanguage must bridge if it is to function as an intermediarybetween experience and communication.

The important lesson for me from this experience was that, atthe very least, my understanding of the meaning of the wordaesthetic was broadened. No longer was it possible for me

to use the word aesthetic and mean something attractive,desirable and pleasant. I must now be willing to include theugly, the smelly, the dirty, crude and vulgarin short, theexpressive.

There are new responsibilities attending this new awareness,responsibilities Id not been aware of before O moved tosouthwest Virginia and was teaching a group of young womenat Radford University about certain periods in the history ofart. In this particular case I was using as a base line theubiquitous image of the virgin and child and attempting to

point out certain critical differences between the examples wehad before us.

Because I was so intent upon not focusing on the religiousaspects of the works, but rather their formal qualities, themessage I intended was not the message received. When oneof these works I described as not really being up to par thatit was not really a good virgin and child the reaction was


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come about methodically and that one of that statesinfluential educators who, reapplying the statistical resultsobtained by others, was advocating the use of drugs to controlhyperactive, divergent, and independent loners among boththe pupil and teacher populations.

By way of contrast to that I had learned from my studies thatabout 4% of the more and 4% of the less creative among thepopulation were exhibiting important differences among whichwas that the least creative of the student populationconsistently received one grade-point higher in their coursework than did the creative students and I wondered why until,using other psychological measures, I learned that those whogot the higher grades and were the less creative also toldmore manipulative and misleading lies than the other group.This confirmed for me what I had already started to learn

which was that society, probably any society, functions likemost organisms in survival mode and that it reacts defensivelywhen challenged.

In other words, the less creative and the less honest amongthe students recognized what their mothers may have alwaystold them was true, that if you want to get ahead you must dowhat superiors tell you to do and tell them what they want tohear. This advice, however, as caringly meant as it may havebeen, stands in direct opposition to what the individual mayfeel the need to respond to in his own evaluations of reality

and the requirements of his own evolving moral structure. It isprecisely this process the creative artist goes through whenhe, responding to his own collection of sense data, decideswhat his next move will be.

The implications for mental health in this structure must havebeen obvious to R.D.Laing when he did a study of adolescentgirls in England and found that there seemed to be arelationship between the modes of verbal sexual instruction ascontrolled by their mothers, subsequent adaptation to socialconstructs , and the information that the girls were receiving

from their own bodies. The euphemistic phrasing used by themothers was found to be the source for misinterpretation anda consequent borderline psychosis. So there may be a virtue incalling a spade a spade.

This brings me to the point where my comments may seem toborder on sophistry, when I might test the readers flexibility inthinking about the contemporary art scene. Even among an


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audience of sophisticates I have tried frequently to get themto accept, understand and use the concepts that what theyhad thought was abstract was really real and what theyhad called realistic was really abstract. Very few canstand with those ideas foremost in their minds for any period

of time. But I am going to give it another try.

With the examples included here, one a 19th century paintingatttributed to Albert Bierstadt and a 20th century painting byHans Hoffmann. I would wager that 90-odd % of contemporarycommentators would agree that the Bierstadt painting was arealistic work and that the same percentage would agree thatthe Hoffman was abstract. I shall attempt to point out thattheir conclusions are inconsistent with the facts.

In both these instances, the Bierstadt and the Hoffman, the

artist had been working with real materials, the paint, thebrushes, the canvas the solvents were all real. To thisextent, at least, the two artists approaches to panting do notdiffer. Both artists manipulated the medium to bring aboutcertain visual results. These results differ significantly, but thekinetic behaviors do not. These still involve muscularcoordination, an understanding of the appropriate mixes ofpaint and thinner, but the mental governance differs and thisis related to the eidetic ideal in the mind of the individual.

Bierstadt, whether or not he completed this landscape while

still confronted with the original in the objective world, wasobviously concerned with how that world appeared and headjusted his behaviors to achieve, as closely as possible, avisual resemblance to that world.

However, it is only appropriate to point out that the realty ofthat painting does not offer the viewer a replicable scale,temperature of air or odor of pine. To that extent, then, thislandscape is a fraudulent work. On the other hand, Hoffmanoffers us colors, shapes arrangements which do not misleadthe viewer who may, however, due to the still prevalent

expectations of his social environment expects art to representthe outside world, discount Hoffmans achievement to theextent that his work falls short of that expectation. Thisprejudice has interfered seriously with our comprehension, inspite of efforts of artists like Pollack, de Kooning and Kline.

These observations should exalt the statement by the 18th

century hostess, Mme.de Stael-Holstein to the effect that


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Jean-Honore Fragonard: painting


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Francois Boucher: painting

Although I am loath to give the man credit, Breshnjev wascorrect when he explained to the American painter JaimeWyeth that one should not underestimate the power of animage.


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We might ask ourselves, just what it is that these artists, all ofthem are doing. To begin with Boucher, Fragonard and Watteauare telling us stories about people. Kline, de Kooning andPollack are not doing that, except by implication, and a lot ofobserver possible reconstruction as to the genesis of such

images. What both groups of artists have done, however, is tomanipulate the materials and the main differences in the waythey have done that is that Kline, de Kooning and Pollack havedone so without misleading (or fooling) the observers eye intoaccepting a false reality. The reality of the pigment is there tobe measured and assessed. The visual events which take placeon the canva have been attested to by our neural constructs.Our eyes, our own eyes verify the events on canvas which is aresponse we cannot attribute to the works by the three 18th

century Frenchmen.

Now, the difference between those three artists and someother contemporary artistss is the degree of success they haveachieved in teaching the observer something new about theneurology of vision and the psychology of perception. It is inthis respect that the work of Kline, de Kooning and Pollack isfar superior to the work of the 18th century painters and it wasthat socialite woman Mme de Stael-Holstein who gave us theclue when she pointed out the naivety of the belief that thevalue of painting was in what the subject illustrated.


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Vigee Lebrun: Mme deStael


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Friederich Tiehl: Mme deStael

This power can be illustrated by yet another expression of peerpressure when an organization as influential as Daimler-Chrysler features the works of the American Andy Warhol andfurthers his undeserved reputation as a genius with theundisguised self-aggrandizing motivation o profit, monetaryand reputational with little regard for the effect upon athoughtless population in so far as their aesthetic perceptionsmay be enhancedor discounted. When I was eight years old,or seven I would cut out the images of Cadillacs, Buicks, andPontiacs from sales brochures and drive them at exorbitantspeeds with great motor sounds coming from my childishmouth. I knew what the reality was and that I was allowed todo what I was doing without a drivers license.

However, the Warhol-Daimler-Chrysler association isnt ashonest in its imaginative relationship as is the child with hispaper cutouts.


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To sum up, if that is possible, disengaging the artistic processfrom its historic attachment to another reality be it political,religious, or product centered, is essential to an understandingof an aesthetic response.

The tendency to measure artistic excellence by technical goodbehavior misses the point and would encouraging preferringthe divine Raphael to Michelangelo, Jacques Louis David toRembrandt and, in sculpture, Houdin to Rodin.

Language appropriately used to clarify perceptions can affectan important change in our cultural development.

Using the material of language, people make new symbolicmodels of reality (scientific theories in particular) such asnever existed as neural models given us by nature. Language

is, as it were, an extension of the human brain. Moreover it is aunitary common extension of the brains of all members ofsociety. It is a collective model of reality that all members ofsociety labor to improve, and one that preserves theexperience of previous generations.

---C.Joslyn, V. Turchin, F. Heylighten;Social Evolution in/at:http://pespmc.vub.ac.be/SOCEVOL.html
http://pespmc.vub.ac.be/SOCEVOL.htmlhttp://pespmc.vub.ac.be/SOCEVOL.html


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Albert Bierstadt: landscape

Hans Hoffman: untitled painting


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Jackson Pollack: painting

Willem de Kooning: painting


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Raphael Santi: Madonna and Child

Michelangelo Buonarrotti: Sistine Chapel


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Jacques Louis David: painting


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Rembrandt van Rijn: painting

Jaime Wyeth: Wolf fish


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Jean-Antoine Houdin: portrait sculpture


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August Rodin: portrait sculpture

To sum up this essay I decided to show two of my own workswhich, actually, are results of putting these observations intopractice.

Paul Henrickson: Rape of Europa (Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New

Mexico)

Paul Henrickson.assemblage,2002, Gozo, Malta


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Titian: painting: Rape of Europa

Were I in a position to hand out assignments to theintellectually curious I would suggest their making an in-depthanalysis of the two rapes, the Titian and the Henrickson.

The Henrickson one which is now in the collection of the FineArts Museum at Santa Fe, New Mexico was produced as aresult of a conversation the artist had had with another artist,Kenneth Burge, on the merits of the Titian in maintaining asense of the intact, un-violated canvas, while others , such asCaravaggio, for example showed no interest whatever in thatquality. Henrickson, evidently, decided to take quite theopposite approach to that of Titian.

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ONE DEVELOPMENT IN AESTHETIC AWARENESS

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