This chapter forms part of my conceptual framework. It considers aspects of the effects of the museum experience on today’s young people, and suggests how these might happen and why they might be beneficial. At the beginning of this chapter I indicated the need for rigorous well-justified evidence of the cultural and
educational value of series of museum visits for all primary school children. Policy makers and other powerful stakeholders have to be convinced before such visits can become mandatory. I made the case for aspects of personal-emotional and socio- cultural learning and development referencing some major influences. Falk and Dierking’s ‘Contextual Model of Learning’ was introduced.
The study I conducted was very much about young people looking at and responding to original works of art in situ. Since both visual elements and aesthetics are
important in fine art, I continue by questioning why aesthetics is elemental to art? In Chapter Three, ‘Aesthetics and Art Appreciation: connecting perceiving with thinking and feeling’, I examine more closely the nature of aesthetics in learning about art, and consider how aesthetics might connect with thinking and feeling.
Chapter Three
Aesthetics and Art Appreciation: Connecting perceiving and responding with thinking and feeling
Introduction
As noted at the end of Chapter Two, the study I conducted was about young people looking at and responding to original works of art in situ. Because aesthetics is a core element of looking and responding, an examination of the nature of aesthetics is incorporated into my conceptual framework. Eagleton, drawing on the writings of the mid-eighteenth-century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten as the ‘inventor ’of the concept ‘aesthetics’, asserts aesthetics is about the distinction between:
the material and the immaterial: between things and thoughts, sensations and ideas, what is bound up of our creaturely life of perception as opposed to what belongs to the mind (Eagleton1990: 13).
I like this description of aesthetics and its association with perception. In its combination of the use of the mind to connect with material, it echoes Dewey’s ideas regarding everyday experience and aesthetic experience as noted earlier in Chapter One. Just as perception is central to the concept of perceptual awareness so too it inhabits the experience of art appreciation. As an example of this
phenomenon Dewey recalls a childhood memory of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the seventeenth century American writer, in which Emerson describes an evening walk that incited ‘exhilaration’ and ‘fear’ (1934: 29). Dewey connects with this complex elemental experience.
I do not see any way of accounting for the multiplicity of experiences of this kind (something of the same quality being found in every spontaneous and uncoerced esthetic response), except on the basis that there are stirred into activity resonances of dispositions acquired in primitive relationships of the living being to its surroundings, and irrecoverable in distinct or intellectual consciousness (Dewey 1934: 29).
Here, Dewey highlights the diverse complexity of the aesthetic experience and notes the vital role that early experiences play in stimulating a state of heightened awareness and perception in relation to the environment. The receptive aspect of experience is a prime consideration for Dewey with regard to the nature of ‘having an experience’ (1934: 36-59). Dewey informs us that ‘esthetic’ and ‘intellectual experience’ cannot be treated easily as separate entities because intellectual experience must feature aesthetic quality ‘to be itself complete’ (1934: 40). This idea of completeness is prominent in Dewey’s definition of the ‘ideal’ esthetic experience (1934: 17). Dewey explains that on the journey to this completeness of experience, our faculties and senses are, as it were, on high alert. Thus we absorb and consume information with a conscious and heightened awareness that is integral to how we make sense of our previous experiences and understandings. This study was designed to facilitate numerous opportunities for a group of young people to visit and revisit the experience of engaging with artworks in a museum environment. The intention was to explore if and how these artistic engagements might affect the young people’s aesthetic and intellectual growth. By including six consecutive museum visits for artistic engagement and by incorporating practical art activities as follow-up sessions to art viewings, I hoped to offer the participants opportunities for aesthetic and intellectual stimulation and to encourage a state of ‘high alert’ in their artistic and aesthetic senses and faculties.
According to Dewey, part of developing an experience can include a sense of ‘struggle’ and ‘conflict’ and both these states will support and intensify the ‘taking in’ of an experience (1934: 42).Throughout the research process for this study, some of the participants expressed a sense of struggle and conflict when explaining their responses to artworks. For example, in Week Four, when explaining to another child how he felt when viewing the real-time art installation in GoMA, Child Two responded ‘excited’ and explained that viewing the installation made him feel that he could produce something similar quite easily yet he recognised that the artwork ‘must have been hard to do for the artist’ (Child Two, Week Four). For Child Two, this experience stimulated a conflicting sense of a thing that seemed to be two contrasting things at once: easy yet simultaneously difficult to produce. By Week Four it is possible that Child Two is beginning to understand the time and effort involved in producing an art installation and that while the production of such an artwork may appear easily within his capability, its production may, in fact, have involved a far more complex and committed undertaking on the part of the artist responsible. Child Two’s experience seems to mirror Dewey’s assertion that
aesthetic experience is ‘appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying’ (Dewey, 1934: 49). Though clear that the aesthetic and the artistic are entwined, Dewey also insists that the aesthetic experience signifies the ‘receptive’ stance rather than the producer’s stance (1934: 49). He suggests that the artist gains satisfaction from the response to his/her work on the part of those who consume it (1934: 49). He claims that a work is only ‘truly artistic’ if it is ‘esthetic’ and, for this to be so, the artist must have crafted the artwork in a loving way (1934: 49). Without this love, the work may simply be crafted in a cold, mechanical way (1934: 49-50).
Echoes of the relationship between artist and viewer, characterised by
appreciation, perception and enjoyment as highlighted by Dewey, are to be found in Duh and Bowen’s assertion (2014) that art appreciation is about children’s perceptive and receptive skills when they refer to children’s engagement with the artistic experience. Offering a detailed explanation of art appreciation, they continue:
It indicates the complexity of the phenomena by observing and accepting artworks as a process of art evaluation. Art evaluation is not just passive observation, but a dynamic process that allows for the establishment of a relationship between a work of art and the viewer. Art appreciation is based on feelings associated with experience and acceptance of the harmony and expressiveness of artistic elements (2014: 43)
Duh and Bowen are clear that art appreciation is an interactive process that employs the senses. My experience as an art educator leads me to concur with this
definition of art appreciation as a complex and multifaceted process. I believe it also illustrates the interweaving and overlap between aesthetics and art
appreciation highlighting the shared feature of perception that characterises both. In order that I might appreciate and understand the children’s contributions in relation to both aesthetics and to art appreciation I now attempt to clarify how each domain might be distinct yet simultaneously reliant on the other. I will start by considering aesthetics as a theoretical concept before exploring the relationship between aesthetics and art.
The children interviewed for this study are asked what they think and feel about their selected works of art in and post-situ and I thereby question how aesthetic awareness and art appreciation might inspire the exercise and development of emotions and cognition, highlighting notable models of aesthetic and artistic development. I endeavour to deconstruct what happens when people look at art; what skills, dispositions and emotions are involved and why. The idea human beings are intrinsically conditioned to find patterns in what we look at are examined from the perspective that we perceive art through the senses.