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Part 1: A Graphic Designer, Philosophy Student, and Sommelier Walk Into A Plant Store
On Easter Sunday, I attended a Sensory Sunday session at Signa Rare Plants with Martin Gil as the host and Phong Tran as a fellow attendee. The session was great and the intimate number of participants made it all the richer. Near the end of our session, we began a conversation centering on art and the senses. My opinion was largely informed by a book I am currently reading, Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Judgment. Kant claims that aesthetic experience is something empty of definite concepts and primarily a feeling in the mind. Consequently, I believed that an aesthetic experience was delivered through an interaction between the mind and the bloc of sense data that makes up the beautiful thing (the visual form of a sunset, the olfactory parts of a rose, etc.). In my mind, the sensory content of the art was the aesthetic element of the object. Martin provided a good example to clarify the idea: the popular paintings done by elephants or seals or whatever other animal, only deliver an aesthetic experience through the end-result painting and its visual components. The added context of its animal origins really does not contribute to the aesthetic experience (although, according to Kant, it may contribute some other type of pleasure).
Phong disagreed with this characterization. While he could agree with the particular example, he could not concede to the extrapolation of this example to exclude context from the aesthetic experience. Phong had recently curated a photo gallery at Demo Arts and Books called “AS IT WAS, IS, AND WILL BE” and became familiar with the background of many local photographers and their pieces. He claimed that the contextual understanding contributed to his aesthetic experience of the pieces. In particular, Phong highlighted how stylistic choice in a gallery gains a large part of its importance from because of the pieces it's surrounded by (an aesthetic valuation of themes and galleries) and the subject that was chosen in relation to the style. For example, one may leave a film negative if they are photographing their childhood bedroom to relate something about childhood to the dissipation of memory. This combines stylistic choice with the subject and the context that is involved in both. After supplying more examples, I felt there was something to context but that my sensory understanding of art was historically/academically supported. I left Signa wondering if there was any bridge between contexts and sense experience to be crossed in art.
Part 2: From Context to Sense and Back
If I want to continue down a Kantian train of thought, I would say that while there is a pleasure coming from the addition of context, it is not in addition to Aesthetic pleasure. Instead it is something more like the pleasure you get from texts like a book. It deals directly with concepts and it pleases by way of those concepts. However, I do believe Phong’s testimony when he says he is having a heightened Aesthetic pleasure and I think that the Kantian understanding of
contexts as text gives us a good place to start bridging the senses and context through an art piece1.
There are two avenues I’d like to take, one starting from context leading to the senses and the other starting from the senses leading to context. Before I begin, I want to call attention to the etymological origins of context: to weave together. This points to a feature of contexts that brings unrelated information into order - an orderly context. Statements begin to make sense when put in their proper context, which is to say when they are joined with information properly. When Martin, Phong, and I were using context, we were referring to the joining of information about the assemblage of the artwork either as a process or as it appears to the viewers, to the pieces as they are in front of us. This is related to the earlier Kantian take in that a text is a conjoining of information whether it is a novel or a work of nonfiction. It is this joining of information that delivers the satisfaction derived from reading. A page taken in isolation rarely delivers the punch that reading a whole book will, and an argument made with scant evidence or few applications typically fails to catch our mind. If these things do manage some effect, it is because we are conjoining information from our mind to them.
Part 2.1: The Role of Baja Blast In Aesthetic Experience
All context that contributes to aesthetic pleasure has a sensuous dimension. If context (in the form of information that when joined with the art piece contributes to an understanding of the piece, sometimes translated as aesthetic pleasure) is hoped to deliver some pleasure in conjunction with an art piece, it must do so with content that rouses sympathetic experience. If I am talking about my childhood bedroom, that you have some understanding via a shared experience is essential to the potential for this information to deliver any feeling or effect. The same goes for the familiar details of an image of a childhood bedroom. What is shared is not the bedroom (in most cases it will be very different from yours) but may be the memory of events that occurred in your childhood bedroom. If memory, on the way to sympathy, is what is needed to deliver an emotion then the components of memory may be the conceptual bedrock we can stop our investigation into context at. This bedrock, I claim, is the collection of the sense inputs.
Sense experiences are often accompanied with an associated emotion. This is not because of the sense data on its own, but rather because it is related to memories of similar sense experiences which were accompanied with that emotion. For example, at Signa, Martin related a story about a scent he extracted from Mountain Dew Baja Blast and childhood rides home with his parents. This example of a commercial product also points to the cultural patterns among sense responses2. That there are cultural norms and customs (formal or informal) that connect certain sense data with certain emotional responses. This is how the earlier mentioned childhood room
1 Kant also relies on testimony to verify that people are having an aesthetic experience.
2 There are many studies on the sensory differences between Japanese and American culture. Here is one done by local researchers in Davis.
makes its way to emotional intensity for a wider audience, especially for those sharing the same cultural norm of having a childhood bedroom to themselves.
Part 2.2: Sense and Associability
All sense experience has a contextual dimension. There is an idea of the senses as a traceable, material bit of electrical signal that is brought up to the brain and then translated into sense information; while this illustration of the senses isn’t false, it fails to capture the more immaterial attributes of sense experience that complicate the tracking of perception. It has been shown that perceptual preferences have connections with more psychological/epistemic preferences. For example, researchers Marshall McLuhan3 and Walter Ong4 attribute the development of the Enlightenment preference for objectivity in Europe to the consequence of the increased use of vision as a result of the printing press. This claim implies that visual experience has something about it which causes us to associate perception and knowledge with objectivity. What McLuhan and Ong hadn’t explored is the many ways experiences with senses can be associated with different values. Martin Jay5, as just one example, points to the different associations formed around vision immediately after the printing press that focused more on the investigation and overwhelment parts of visual experience. Jay’s investigation highlights that as rich as a sense is with qualities or potential applications, it is in equal measure or more so, rich in associations.
Association here can be understood as constituting potential contexts that can be deployed to make sense of some information. Vision’s association with investigation can be used to make sense of some set of paintings while vision’s association with objectivity can provide a different context that lends itself to a different set of paintings. We are provided with different associations to use for contexts. The determining factor for what sensory associations may win out over others is mysterious and one I admit not to know. It is clear enough, however, that some contexts do win out over others, especially in the present case of vision and objectivity.
3 The Medium is The Massage
4 The Presence of The Word
5 Scopic Regimes of Modernity
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| The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505) by Hieronymus Bosch disregard for perspective in landscape lends itself to investigation. | The Goldweigher (1670) by Cornelis de Man concern with recreating a singular, visual point of view lends itself to objectivity. |
Part 3: Weaving It Altogether
Sense experience acts as an effective way to bring contexts to a piece - when a piece is communicated as related to the experience of the artists it is also related to the experience of the audience and the two share some sensory collection of data. Contexts itself is a dimension of sense perception that is neglected but inevitable - the cultural patterns of developments associated with the heightening or lowering of the use of a sense show that associations that sense modalities contain are non-trivial aspects. These two come together to show two things: If contexts is a part contributing to aesthetic pleasure then it is through shared sensory markers that it can hope to deliver an emotional response and that if one wants to subscribe to a sense-exclusive theory of aesthetic pleasure, they inevitably run into the associations and consequent context that sense experience comes packaged with.
TLDR; Sense and Contexts interpenetrate together to bring about aesthetic experience of beauty because one is made up of the other,
This is the first writing he's submitted online to be published but is looking for more local opportunities for this type of work. If you'd like to see more of his work, you can read his interview with a local blind photographer in Local Currency (sold at Demo Spot) or follow his Instagram: @doorstilling
Shout out Beatrice for early conversations on this topic!