《Art as Therapy》 by Alain de Botton
This book identifies the consequence of my artwork. It points out some functions of art, especially - Rebalancing and Sorrow. “Art can put us in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves… Art can save us time - and save us lives - through opportune and visceral reminders of balance and visceral reminders of balance and goodness that we should never presume we know enough about already.” “Many said things become worse because we feel we are alone in suffering them. We experience our suffering has no dignity; it seems due only to our freakish nature. We need help in finding honour in some of our worst experience, and art is there to lend them social experience… Art can offer a grand and serious vantage point from which to survey the travails of our condition…” After I read the book, I feel I know what I am doing and how my artworks work to myself, to audience. At the same time, I began to learn Agnes Martin and I realise her ideas about art, life, love… have something in common with this books’.
<<Josephine the Songstress>> Franz Kafka
I was overwhelmed by this story. It is a story identified the position artist in the society, how art activity be treated and understand, what is the role for artist and how artist should judge themselves, in which way audience/people realise art (from different position) ... I have to read it again and again. The ideas are never behind the times.
Here are some sentence I listed out:
- " If it were to be true that Josephine doesn't sing but just whistles.
Test this out in the following manner: if Josephine is singing amongst a group of others and if you should give yourself the task of making her voice out from amongst these others then without fail you won't be able to distinguish anything else but a typical, middle-of-the-road sort of whistling...
If you stand there in front of her so it's not merely whistling, there's yet another component that's absolutely required if one is to understand her art properly, namely that you don't merely listen to her, rather you also have to see her. Even if it were to be nothing more than our everyday whistling, still there's this oddity of how she presents herself, the drama and theatrics of her performance-that someone would put on such airs and then do nothing more than what's typical, the ordinary, middle-of-the-road sort of whistling..."
The main character performs a simple, daily activity in front of people. By the time she continue doing this people start to think about her activity as an art with idea/intention behind.
<<Hold It Against Me : Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art>> by Jennifer Doyle
"The more a work looks like relationship, the more important the place of affect and emotion may be to critical engagement with it."
“Relational Aesthetic" "Affective Labor"
"This is what many of the people around artist do for a living: they work in a service industry, educating, writing, selling. The receptionist, the bartender at an opening, and the person parking cars all provide services that have an affective dimension, as do curators, critics, and teachers. This is artist so as well; their work make people feel good, smart or important (for example). Work based in process or collaboration, work that present itself as a service explicitly positions itself in relation to the affective labor already present in the production of the art experience."
By the time artists making artwork they site life experience as direct reference. Their creation represent themselves as ordinary as they truly are in society.
<<Philosophy of art: A contemporary introduction>> Noel Carroll
"Neoformalism is superior to formalism because it can acknowledge the importance of representational content for art. Conversely, it is superior to representational theories of art because it emphasizes that content alone is not sufficient of art status; form is at least equally indispensable. Neoformalism is also alert to the expressive dimension of artworks, regarding expressive embodiment... All in all, neoformalism is a powerful theory of art. It is the candidate as a comprehensive theory of all art reviewed thus far. But even so, it has its problems." The most immediate problem is: not all artworks have both content and form at the same time.
I think when we want to define something is artwork or not, we should choose position firstly: Artist or Spectator. (to clarify this idea I made a list below)
Meanwhile, I think content appear before form. Form exist as element to support content works more efficiency. For artist (artwork creator), both content and form are necessary condition. By referencing "Dialectical Materialism"： ideas could arise only as products and reflections of material conditions.(materialism meant that the material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality independent of mind or spirit.) Content in artwork is related to life events. Because the artwork's content is purposeful, form is way to express that purpose which is decided by mind.
-Explanatory (Function) vs Descriptive
"Our ordinary conception of artistic form is explanatory rather than descriptive. It does not aim at listing every relation in the total web of relations discoverable in an artwork. It selects out only those elements and relations in the work that promote the point or the purpose of the artwork. Our ordinary concept of artistic form seems to be functional. The form of the artwork is whatever functions to advance or to realize whatever the artwork is designed to bring about. The form of the artwork is what enables the artwork to realize its point or its purpose."
"The artistic form of an artwork comprises the collection of formal choices that enable the realization of the points or purposes of the artwork."
In my opinion, when we are judging which role is artistic form playing: descriptive or functional explanatory, we should define them from different angles. (Because not every spectator can understand artist intention from artwork. But every artist has their purpose for creation.)
E.g: If we are artists, the artistic form should be functional: it has duty to explain the aim/purpose of artwork.
If we are spectator, the artistic form should be descriptive: audience can see every single elements in artwork which are depict by the form even they are not clearly understand the purpose for that. Audience can receive basic information through the descriptive form goal.
<<Aesthetic Functionalism>> Sven Ove Hansson
"art can in general be characterized by its function to provide aesthetic satisfaction."
-The Thesis of Aesthetic Duality
The benefit of considering aesthetic functionalism: "These limitations can force the artist to be more creative, and our knowledge of them may therefore enhance our appreciation of the object."
<<Art As Experience>> John Dewey
"Esthetic experience is imaginative. Imagination is the only gateway through which these meaning can find their way into a present interaction; or rather, as we have just seen, the conscious adjustment of the new and the old is imagination. Interaction of a living being with an environment is found in vegetative and animal life. But the experience enacted is human and conscious only as that which is given here and now is extended by meanings and values drawn from what is absent in fact and present only imaginative."
"The work of art, however, unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather than in the realm of physical existences. What it does is to concentrate and enlarge an immediate experiences."
According to this philosophy idea about esthetic experience and how imagination progress form to react presented experiences. It strongly explain the process and how concentration activity ( for example: repetition can be seen as concentrate activity) can figure out aesthetic form to depict experiences. And enhance the phenomenon with feelings and emotions.