Dewey's Art as Experience - Ch 9: The Common Substance of the Arts

Hi everybody, welcome back to Great Texts, John Dewey's Art as Experience. Today we're talking about Chapter 9, The Common Substance of the Arts. And as the title suggests, this chapter concerns what is common to all forms of art in terms of their substance, right? So what do all works of art have in common in terms of their substance? Now Dewey starts off the chapter with this question, what subject matter is appropriate for art, right? What kinds of things can artworks be about? And in a sense, I mean, Dewey has no really interesting answer to this question. To give it away, right, anything that creates an impulsion in an artist is a suitable subject matter for art. So anything really, potentially. But it's an important question for Dewey to ask about insofar as one historically prominent answer to the question of the chapter of The Common Substance of the Arts concerns precisely this, that art concerns certain subject matters that are appropriate for representation among the finer things. So on this view, the appropriate subjects for painting, for example, are things like royalty and nobility, historical events of great heroism, tales from scripture, Greek and Roman mythology, and so on. These are the kinds of things that artwork should be about. Now Dewey brings up several examples of painters who broke that convention and effectively revolutionized the art of their time just by painting ordinary themes. So for example, here's a painting by Bruegel the Elder. It's called Peasant Wedding from 1567, rather. And Bruegel loved to paint these sort of scenes of everyday life of the peasantry, not nobles. And this was, in a way, revolutionary. Here's another work in this vein by Chardin, 1738. This is called Women Cleaning Turnips, or sometimes called The Kitchen Maid. And it's just a scene from everyday life. So Dewey sums up his view on this in the following way. He says, Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist's work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience. Refusal to acknowledge the boundaries set by convention is the source of frequent denunciations of objects of art as immoral. But one of the functions of art is precisely to sap the moralistic timidity that causes the mind to shy away from some materials and refuse to admit them into the clear and purifying light of perceptive consciousness. So there, I think it's quite clear that Dewey is saying that any restriction from a moral sense or conventionality or a sense of what is appropriate to the finer things of art is always going to be a problem that art needs to overcome. Now, Dewey spends a lot of time in this chapter expanding on the notion of pervading qualitative unity or pervading underlying qualitative wholes or an inclusive qualitative whole or a unifying pervasive quality in different ways he expresses the same basic idea. So this idea that the work of art has a pervading qualitative unity is another common element of the substance of the arts according to Dewey. I'm going to call this quality for short because of the different formulations and the various you know, the sort of wordiness of it. But you'll know when I say quality in a technical sense I mean this particular unifying pervasive quality. The quality is according to Dewey what controls our perception of and attention to the artwork, controls in some sense also the production of the artwork. This quality is unique to each work of art, undefinable in any direct way, indescribable in that sense, even unnameable he says at one point. It can be felt, that is it can be immediately directly experienced which makes sense because the pervasive quality is after all the quality of the work of art and the work of art is an experience. He also says it's intuited, so he takes this traditional philosophical notion of intuition and applies it here. The quality, the pervasive quality is a background and a setting on which particular things or objects or aspects are discriminated and in a sense it's prior to the parts. The quality which is a feature of the whole is prior to the parts. In line with that he says the different elements and specific qualities of a work of art blend and fuse. Parts are discriminated, not intuited, yet the organism which is the work of art is nothing different from its parts or members. I think that should be or there, not of. So in a certain sense the quality, the background is prior to the parts which are discriminated within it. In another sense there's nothing but the parts, no additional thing, which makes sense. Again the quality is the quality of the parts. On the other hand, when the unifying quality is not fully at work, you have disconnects or interruptions that hamper the work of art. So he says if the recipient is aware of seams and mechanical junctions in a work of art, it is because the substance is not controlled by a permeating quality. Without the intuited enveloping quality, parts are external to one another and mechanically related and there's lots of points like this throughout. So I mean recall though there's nothing else in addition to the parts that is a part of the work of art. The quality is the quality of the parts in relation to each other forming a whole, which is why if you lack that sort of overall qualitative unity, you're going to have those disconnects. The two things are the same. Now Dewey connects quality with mystical and religious experience in this chapter as well. He specifically points to the notion that quality is related to the background, to the setting of experience. So the mystical quality or the religious quality of experience is connected with the sense of the limitlessness of the horizon or the setting of our experience that is made particularly obvious through art. Now the next major element that Dewey talks about in the chapter is medium. So this is another feature of the substance of art. The different arts use different media, whether it's music or visual art or performance. But having a medium is common to all arts. Without a medium you have no expression, you have no art. And so although we've talked a lot about medium in previous classes, he emphasizes here again that one of the common features of art is that it is done through a medium. Another common quality of all works of art is space and time or space-time. You remember he's already told us that art unlike, well art like science, in fact prior to science, reveals the connection between space and time. So for Dewey all works of art are both spatial and temporal, which makes sense because our experience is spatial and temporal. Space and time in art at least are not only formal or relational but also substantial features of material. So that it's not just about the abstract relation of things to one another in positions in space or in order in time, but it's about directly experienced qualities like roominess or enclosedness, claustrophobic quality. We also directly experience movement as the qualitative change of objects and their relations in time. So there's also this qualitative character to movement as a backwards and forwards, as nearness and farness, as expanding and contracting and other qualities of the material of art that are spatial and temporal. These qualities are full of meaning and value in their own individual way. Dewey provides some pretty interesting examples of the spatial quality of certain artworks in the chapter. I'm just going to hit on two here. He refers to Chinese landscape painting and unfortunately again when Dewey refers to non-western art he tends to refer to it as if it's this homogenous thing. But I think we know the kinds of examples he has in mind, like this painting by Xinzhu from the Ming dynasty. This is a work that's called Lofty Mount Lu from the year 1467. Here you can see the kind of emphasis on spaciousness, also a certain kind of unboundedness that suggests sort of striking out and sort of perusing the space or moving through the space. These long scroll paintings are common in a long tradition of Chinese landscape painting. I think Dewey is quite attuned, despite the lack of kind of art historical nuance, to this really interesting way that such paintings play with space. Another interesting example, this is a painting that he references specifically in the chapter by name, which is unusual actually. This is a painting by Van Eyck. He's a member of the Flemish school, which Dewey also refers to as a group in this chapter. Dewey says that here, despite the sort of enclosed, almost kind of tight feeling of the space in the picture, in this room, in this bedroom that's depicted, even here the painting communicates sort of life beyond the walls, the sort of space outside of this particular area. It does it through lighting, through the very thin window here, but also by using the mirror on the wall, the kind of rounded mirror, which lets you see more of that space outside. You get a really good sense of the light coming in from outside. These are the kinds of things Dewey's talking about when he says the way that this painting communicates space. Dewey says specifically about that piece, that it may convey within a defined compass, the explicit sense of the outdoors beyond the walls. I think that's pretty clear even when we just look briefly at this painting, what he's talking about. That's pretty much all I have for you today. A lot of interesting ideas in this chapter, and I've just sort of scratched the surface. As always, please help me continue the conversation on the discussion board or the comments of this video. I will see you in class to discuss it further. Otherwise, goodbye. Have a good evening.