Today (which is to say Monday), Genevieve Durham DeCesaro led us through a variety of activities that got us to thinking about the role of the audience in art. We also discussed movement and did some exercises. Below is the text of a summary e-mail that she sent to the class that summarizes the day better than I could:
Major themes:
1. Exploring concepts of art as: human-crafted artifact; aesthetic experience of the audience; inherent characteristics of an object.
2. Identifying problems with locating “art” as something external to the audience: this is the “tree in the woods” question...if there is no audience to receive the art, is it art at all? In other words, is the audience what gives art its meaning?
3. Challenging ideas about the body as separate and less valuable than the mind, while negotiating the practical paradigm of “body as object” in reference to identifying the artifact of dance.
4. Embracing the centrality of the arts to education by virtue of their dependence on imagination, without which (as argued by Greene), students passively receive, rather than interact with and participate in, their educations.
So, all of these things have to do, more or less, with questioning: why do we call objects art? How can the human body be valued in dance when claiming that dance is art requires looking at the body as object? Why are math and science more academically valuable than the arts? How does the association of various academic subjects with gender characteristics function in the way those subjects are perceived and valued? (And on and on...)
In closing, the Bill T. Jones work is, I think, a rather nice summation of this complex web of ideas that we’ve gotten ourselves into: here is a human telling his story in a dance/spoken word performance. The audience for this artwork, this artifact, is challenged to hear the implications of racism and prejudice while watching a gay, black man engage in an art form that is perceived as distinctly feminine. While aesthetic experiences may, at first, seem to emerge in the form of sympathy for this man’s suffering, or appreciation for his skill, I would argue that those experiences are, at their roots, realizations of similarity between audience and performer. Is this, then, art? A series of intangible, ephemeral, totally subjective moments wholly dependent on the lived experiences (meaning body and mind) of both the artist and the audience? I don’t have a good answer for this, but I encourage you to ask the question!
Major themes:
1. Exploring concepts of art as: human-crafted artifact; aesthetic experience of the audience; inherent characteristics of an object.
2. Identifying problems with locating “art” as something external to the audience: this is the “tree in the woods” question...if there is no audience to receive the art, is it art at all? In other words, is the audience what gives art its meaning?
3. Challenging ideas about the body as separate and less valuable than the mind, while negotiating the practical paradigm of “body as object” in reference to identifying the artifact of dance.
4. Embracing the centrality of the arts to education by virtue of their dependence on imagination, without which (as argued by Greene), students passively receive, rather than interact with and participate in, their educations.
So, all of these things have to do, more or less, with questioning: why do we call objects art? How can the human body be valued in dance when claiming that dance is art requires looking at the body as object? Why are math and science more academically valuable than the arts? How does the association of various academic subjects with gender characteristics function in the way those subjects are perceived and valued? (And on and on...)
In closing, the Bill T. Jones work is, I think, a rather nice summation of this complex web of ideas that we’ve gotten ourselves into: here is a human telling his story in a dance/spoken word performance. The audience for this artwork, this artifact, is challenged to hear the implications of racism and prejudice while watching a gay, black man engage in an art form that is perceived as distinctly feminine. While aesthetic experiences may, at first, seem to emerge in the form of sympathy for this man’s suffering, or appreciation for his skill, I would argue that those experiences are, at their roots, realizations of similarity between audience and performer. Is this, then, art? A series of intangible, ephemeral, totally subjective moments wholly dependent on the lived experiences (meaning body and mind) of both the artist and the audience? I don’t have a good answer for this, but I encourage you to ask the question!