“ART AS EXPERIENCE”

Taranaki Daily News, 15 July 1935, Page 11

“ART AS EXPERIENCE”

CONCEPTIONS OF TO-DAY PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY. BEAUTY NOT LUXURY FOR FEW. When someone complained to Matisse that she had never seen a woman who looked like the one in his painting, the artist replied simply: “Madam, that is not a woman; that is a picture.” Here in one pithy sentence is a whole philosophy of art, and it is the more valuable in that its obvious truth is still unrealised, writes “T.1.M.” in the Sydney Morning Herald. It is with such issues as that raised by the French painter, such problems as the nature of art, using the term in its widest sense, that John Dewey is concerned in his latest book, “Art as Experience.” He is not, of course, a critic of any of the arts, but he is the leading philosopher and educationist in America and one of the keenest and most penetrating , . thinkers in-the world to-day. At Peking he has been acclaimed “the Second Confucius.” His book is philosophical, analytical, and, to some extent, technical. It does not put forward a new dogmatic theory of aesthetics; it has no novel or ' arresting theme; but it discusses general problems of art from a viewpoint which enables Professor Dewey to give us some firft-class analysis. The new approach, needless to say, is dynamic, telelogical, and pragmatic. “Art as Experience” originally consisted of a lecture series at Harvard University, given in memory of William James, and that great humanist would have been delighted to see his pragmatist outlook applied to art in the way John Dewey applies it, especially when he begins by attacking the “museum conception of art” to-day. In this attack and in,certain other chapters he gives us a number of ideas which have general importance and, to my rpind, especial value and relevance for Australia. AUSTRALIAN ILLUSTRATIONS. The’philosopher points out that in the modem world art has become something divorced from life, remote from social needs, isolated from ordinary desires and joys. It is not part of the common exsee this very forcibly illustrated in this country. We see it in the struggles that have' to be made to awaken the community to. the 'idea that symphony orchestras and opera companies and ballets are necessities of a civilised life and not quaint luxuries for a few “highbrows” who actually enjoy good music, good singing, and that delicate “assault upon space” we call ballet. , t A tour of our country towns would oe a harrowing experience for a sensitive architect. What place have the arts ,in our schools and universities? Does not our education waste time on useless mumbling of Latin; tenses and Elizabethan archaicisms whilst the senses and emotions are neglected? The artistic treasures of the world are .ignored to make room for logarithms. . ■ It would be interesting and illuminating to conduct a questionnaire upon the artistic knowledge of our pupils and students—and teachers. _ And when an of European pictures goes to Sydney, painters who have been accepted. by the world as classes are reviled here as “modern,” despite the fact that, some of .them won recognition in Paris over half a century ago. Yet Australia only provides a particularly depressing example of a general modem phenomenon. - y , In the past, as John ■ Dewey stresses, the arts'were® “part of the significant life of the organised community,” whether it was that of Yucatan or Athens, of the Mycenaean, the Egyptian, or mediaeval peoples. The main cause of the divorce between art and life is found by the philosopher in the industrial, revolution. , “Industry has been mechanised and an artist cannot work mechanically for mass production. Machinery has separated the useful from the beautiful, and the artist, driven from social purpose, becomes eccentric, and so widens the separation between himself and his fellows still further. We can overcome this aloofness of the modern, arts, John Dewey believes, by recognising that art is an expression which is a natural part of human experience. SENSE, SPIRIT AND FORM.

John Dewey, goes on to point out that art •as experience has a special form, and form is “the operation of forces • that carry the experience of an event, object, scene and situation to its own integral fulfilment.” But this aspect has been lost sight of by a wrong emphasis in the past on the subject matter. This was due. to a mistaken dualism between sense and spirit, the Pauline error which regarded things of the senses as “corrupt” and inferior to the “incorruptible” things of the spirit. Thus a good work of art was one which expressed nobility in his subject, according to Ruskin. Moral, religious, patriotic and other sentiments intruded upon judgments 'cf art. Frank Rutter in “Art in My Time” on the same point states: “So had Whistler Shocked people in the seventies when he described the portrait of his mother as ‘An Arrangement in Grey and Black’.” The art critic also supports the philosopher of aesthetics when he notes how the term “Expression” is now related to Form more than Idea, and the dividing line between Expression and Execution has gradually been narrowed down. . This means that art is coming to stand on its own legs as self-sufficient experience. We see this change in the abandonment of programme for abstract music and expressionism as in Schonberg or for tone-colouration as in Debussy. In painting, pictures tend to become abstract and decorative. There is a gulf between say, the sentimental “Life and Love” of G. F. Watts and the self-ex-pressive apples of Cezanne or passionate landscapes of Van Gogh. Art is no longer mere representation,'photography with pencil, brush, or chisel. “The fatal defect of the representative theory is that it exclusively identifies the matter of a work of art with what is objective,” writes Dewey. “That is not a woman;.that is a picture,” says Matisse, Yet how many of those who go to a gallery expect to see, not pictures, but •wpmen> and cows, and trees? On the other hand, Dewey warns against mere self-expression beyond communication, maintaining that art as an experience should be an integration of th?. objective and subjective into a new unity which is aesthetic form. And this work of art can be appreciated for itself since its qualities of melody and rhythm, colour, line, design, light and shade can be' enjoyed by those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Beauty is not a luxury for the few.