Beginnings of Aesthetic:
Through the beauty of what aesthetics provoke, whether it be the reason of the individual, uniqueness within a given constraint or the imagination come to life, there is a specific sense of perception that comes with any kind of aesthetic piece. In a systematic interpretation of what the presupposed identity holds, there is an individual contrast between any work that withholds significant responsibility of the subjective nature of the object. In order to draw on such ideas and complexities that ground the synthetics and rationalizations of aesthetic, there is a definitive and full purpose that remains a part of each assessment. What exactly is the universal within the individual experience, if there even is one? Does the nature of historical events relating to representation a part of what defines the aesthetic experience?
These concepts will be explored through the works of three theorists, Bruns, Dewey and Kant, whose search for a definitive sense of what a conceptually based value, whether it be taste, judgment, experience or beauty within the individual can be translated through the greater social construct, or indeed the construct is a realization within an inherent entity.
Ultimately, the experience within the construct of a societal translation is not reliant on the object’s form of beauty or aesthetic orientation, but instead the complexities of namely Bruns’ phronesis in relation to Kant’s judgment of the beautiful and Dewey’s aesthetic experience to inflict a break from the conventional way of viewing art.
In his work, “The Hermeneutical Anarchist: Phronesis, Rhetoric and the Experience of Art,” Gerald Bruns wishes to explore the ability of art as understood within a framework of the individual experience in relation to encountering art in a less inhibited way than conventional structures allow. He is encountering the work of art, not as a sophisticated work transcending into the realm of a “…pre logical condition in which cognition remains embedded in images, narratives, and the immediacy of feeling” (p. 45). In fact, Bruns explains that by way of the human Complex systems, which he believes are not governed by an identifiable mode of factors but instead correspond to the way we function as a part of the world.
In this way, there is a compound assertion he makes, that through the individual experience lies a specific conceptual unpredictability of events that are tied to one’s surroundings, environment and the circumstance that leads to such reflection. Similarly, in modern art, there is not a common thread to follow in relation to what definite truth should look like.
McQueen in the Fashion: Bruns in Form
With a similar concept in hand, British fashion designer, Alexander McQueen, posed a similar idea in regard to the limitations of the fashion industry by boldly stating that, “fashion should be a form of escapism, not a form of imprisonment.” As Bruns would agree, there is no medium with which to define a piece of art as self-subjugated, and therefore McQueen’s comparison of a caged, interdependency on value within artistic appeal is validated. “On this theory it is a mistake to think of the work as a self-contained formal object that merely persists in time and retains its work of art is not (or not just) an aesthetic object” (p. 61). The experience itself is not tied to the creator’s hand-picked definitive understanding of what the art piece should evoke, introduce or teach to the viewer, but instead the entirety of the viewing is based on the participation of the creator’s overall impression, the viewer’s construct in the moment of the viewing and the independent experience of the piece itself. McQueen’s uncanny ability to merge the viewer into the conscious adaptation of the art itself, sometimes willingly creating a perverse atmosphere of eeriness and perverse abstraction in order to remind the viewer that indeed their own sense of reality was not as concretely built as the perception instantiated.
The way that the art is perceived is not simply a viewer taking in the specific aesthetic object for the reasoning of shaping the current moment with a pyramid of ideas that subscribe to a predispositioned version of analysis. In Bruns and also McQueen’s theory, there is the need to conduct a rationally based connection between the work and the original message, but instead to derive a momentary interpretation of what is being seen and internalized in a developmental respect of what that individual’s concept of truth is in the instance.
Bruns draws on the work of Duchamp’s shovel, which is referred to as the “transfiguration of the commonplace,” or turning an otherwise ordinary object into an avante-garde piece of art. The question remains, where is the layer between the commonplace and the percepted model that is foreseen as the shovel itself is peeled back to reveal a realm of experience where the viewer is captive to the entirety of the situation. Bruns continues that, “the point is that participation must do the work of principles and rules” (Bruns 62) inciting that the shovel’s original purpose as the tool that most individuals know as being used to dig up dirt, or perhaps to someone who is seeing the shovel for the first time, and is perplexed as to what the object is used for, it’s material, shape and moreover, why it is evoking such a spectacle from a crowd of onlookers? The idea that the shovel can consequently engage an audience in more ways of interpretation than one is not just a resounding effect of what the object brings forth itself, but instead the modernist approach is refusing to remove the piece from the viewer but instead attempting to close the gap between what is rightly perceived, the instruction manual of sorts, and what questions are posed in relation to each individual’s conception.
There are no parameters, no rules of interpretation in the piece of the shovel, and in order to formulate an understanding, there needs to be a grounding of raw and unforeseen thought and constituted relation to the intuitive open space that the unstructured view endows. Thus, Bruns’ transfiguration is pivotal in creating a new and untapped virtue of responsiveness, where the experience itself does not pertain to a grander scheme of comprehension of knowledge, or techne, but instead on the correct action of how to experience the new and unknown experiences. Bruns incites that through the experience that tangles the senses, there is a vulnerable and instinctual idea of what can and should be a condition of social experience, which is namely, that which is lived through and not watched. He gives the example of falling in love, and becoming a father, such situational descriptions that cannot be conceived until the experience is had by the individual.
Therefore, the dialectic of such experiences are based not on the knowledge tied to the predecessing formation of the appearance, but in the openness of the individual to gain new experience from each ensuing experience. Bruns’ argumentative claim is not that through fruitful and modernistic experiences, one can reach a level of superior in the expertise of the subject, on the contrary, he is saying the goal is by no stretch of the imagination a game of hierarchical peddling.
He creates a conclusion upon which to call such a self-identified form of thought, which is primarily articulated through taste and judgment of the aesthetic. He writes, “what is required in this event is something like phronesis, the more so since clearly there is a game without rules and without precedent and whose end or return cannot be calculated in advance,” (p. 19) phronesis being the state at which the self-representation of the piece of art is not stagnant or presupposed by any given audience, that in fact, with the changing contextual representation, tastes of judgment and environmental development, tastes will inevitably change as history does. For Bruns, the art is left shapeless and malleable to the hand of the one who views it, “a judgment based not on universals but on our understanding and responsiveness to the complex historical situation in which the work comes into appearance” (Bruns 65) with no prior connotation attached to its being until the observer’s private outlook unearths the independent contrast in their own world.
Phronesis In Correspondence With Experience
The concept of having the observer create their own justification for the momentary situational piece, is in fact putting art and phronesis in line with each other, as synonymous entities. In turn they are defined by the possibility of being tied to a greater entity other than the simple image of an aesthetic objective that carries the definitive truth within it’s portrayal. Thus, Bruns connects the turbulence of phronesis within art to the real world and it’s properties of historical change, in a way bound to the definitive order of the complex system that each individual carries to the experience. Alexander McQueen’s expertise of dramatizing his pieces into works that would silence audiences with his controversial yet brilliant perspectives that sparked the fuse for an original uprising of anarchist fashion. A prime relation tying seamlessly to the freedom incorporated within the complex systems that Bruns describes, transcends past traditional methods of looking at art. In his style of anarchist rebellion, where limits of gravitation and pulls of aesthetic appeal reared his vision, McQueen’s images were infamous for their lasting effect on the observer. His works, whether brilliant or vulgar contained the ability to, “at the very least, open oneself to new possibilities of experience,” (Bruns 64).
At the finale of his show, Savage Beauty, taking place in London, the ghostly hologram of the haunting Kate Moss floats ethereally in a pyramid of light and smoke, with the soundtrack to Schindler’s List playing softly in the background. There is a distinction between what can be noted as a relic of the beautiful or the profound emotion that Dewey so rampantly recovers in his folksy tales of what the threatening, depressing or emotive being exerts.
Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” opens with the overall argument of a specific categorization of the mental senses as judged by the object. Like Bruns he incites that each perceived object, as seen by each individual is woven subconsciously into the unique biases of each individual’s personal experience of which is linked to the emotion and this entitles the object of the beautiful to a perceptible truth that is dictated by each individual who encounters it.
He is asserting that even with the tastes being the ability to make judgments, there is a resounding correspondence between the senses of reason, understanding, sensibility and imagination in order to determine the type of judgement one is undertaking. The image of Kate Moss’ hologram, portrayed as a frame within a fashion show, has no defined or indicated purpose by the creator in part because the scene’s aesthetic sense was tied to the perception , or more simply, that the inherent aesthetic nature of beauty itself was separate from the object by which one deemed as beautiful.
In fact, the swirling grace of Moss’s dress directed the exact notion, similar to Bruns’ idea of a more complex system of understanding within an essentially resonant tie to the condition of “being experienced.” Thus, each creative thinker, designer or aesthetically trained individual that was viewing the show had a background of constructs. These exerted intimacies with the aesthetic field could in theory allow them to be a complexly oriented within the music and pyramid, transcending as participants to the work. As Kant’s notion of the beautiful complicates what aesthetic judgment is distinguished from logical cognition or the feeling of a pleasurable and insurmountable ability of taste, then the framework with which the conceptualized subject, that is Kate Moss swirling through the tunnels of the holograms light and shadow, would invoke in each individual’s concept of beauty.
Kant In Judgment of the Beautiful
The movement within the frame as a freely posed attempt not related to the purposiveness of instruction as Kant would asses was a definitive feature of which allowed experience would be more openly and freely established. He writes, “We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence,” (Kant 46) which in turn draws back on Bruns’ own analyzation of Kant’s regards to the matter of objection and scenario justification.
Bruns cites with an effortless taste of confidence that, “In Gadamer’s theory the experience of art is not a contemplative experience, but an experience of play in which we are caught up and carried away in the self-presentation of the work. In contrast to the Kantian account of the aesthetic experience, which presupposes a model of perception, this self-presentation is not something we stand apart from as observers but something in which we participate- and this is true whether the work is a Renaissance portrait or an avant-garde provocation.” (Bruns 46) thus indicating that although there is similarity in the reflection of the Kantian judgments of taste, there is a definitive contraction between the model of what the aesthetic cognition holds to be rational or not.
Kant’s categorization of the mental faculties or the avenues of which an individual grounds perception and realization, is not bound to reason or imagination. In fact, the subjective nature of the different judgments that Kant touches on, whether it be the judgments of taste, with a realm in disinterest or the judgment of the agreeable where pleasure dictates personal action, there is a significant subjective concept of purpose within the individual. Kant and Bruns’ notion of true aesthetic relying namely on the experience within a comparative judgment is one that transcends through beauty.
Perhaps the question remains then, what is the purpose of a beauty that does not seek an end or a definitive goal that allows for a set outcome? To this, Kant would reply that there is not a point relating to the unconditional possession of an object, in fact, there is no need for the beautiful to even be a real or tangible sight. Through this analysis, McQueen’s beautifully haunting image of Kate Moss’s body suspended in a sea of silky cloth, defines the subjectivity of a free interpretation, whether it is contained as a truly distinguishable beauty if an entirely different matter. The scene could be depicted as a complex concept that overruled an overarching seed of pre-established concepts within the conceptual construct.
Dewey’s Consistency in the Every Day
In relation to the aesthetics in Kant and Bruns’ theoretical concepts, there is a significant stance on the illustration of what an individual can imagine with a certain construct framed by the aesthetic in a tumultuous accordance. Dewey perceives the notion that in the everyday creation of a systematic routine lifestyle there lies many artistic products in the ordinary experience. “The stone starts from somewhere, and moves, as consistently as conditions permit, toward a place and state where it will be at rest– toward an end,” (Dewey 41) which dictates his mechanism of the building blocks to the ultimate movement within a condition. Whether it be for the popular arts, or the subtleties in the abstractions of day to day life, there are significant relations between the “continuous merging” of the entirety of the succession with which an individualized quality of internalization occurs. Dewey relates the “own particular rhythmic movement” (Dewey 37) of the empirical philosophers who paved the way for a transformative factor in the opposition of what experience is in a general sense and what the experience brings forth to understanding. The individual is not completely responsible for the emotion within the aesthetic form of a piece, but it is the vision that the observer relates to the work. Therefore the contribution of the individual is organically seeping into the representation of the daily routinized experience. The situational expression of emotion within the realm of experience is noted in the mere comparison of Kant and Bruns’ definitive relation between the unaltered and complexly related biases ranging between individual psyches.
Ultimately, the emergence of aesthetic experience as a movement to be freed within the individual’s own perception, whether it be in the implication of objectification or the prowess of unconscious contribution, the aesthetic is notably understood as a means of pursuing a freely found experience. And in the exemplary model of McQueen’s work, these aspects of individual perception, taste and beauty all collide in a vision of profound emotion to the observer.
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