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Matthew Dallman POLYSEMY publisher Posted March 27, 2008 |
a manifesto of Great Artistry
By Matthew Dallman
Great Artistry is the general name I use for my project that aims to inspire artists to synthesize the traditional with the contemporary, as part of artists everyday habit. “Great artistry” is at once takes into account of what great artists of the past have produced (it “gives them a vote”) and allows living fine artists the room to make innovative and unexpected works themselves. Great Artistry is a project taken from the direct influence of Mortimer Adler. Adler, along with Robert Hutchins, noted that in the West, there exists an over 2,500-yr exchange of insights, concepts, notions, and thoughts between the best minds working in the Humanities (fine arts (those verbal), theology, philosophy, science, history), and this 2,500-yr exchange is called “The Great Conversation”. Adler and Hutchins oversaw the culling together of the 50+ volumes called The Great Books sold publicly in the 20th century. And Adler further wrote himself a book called The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, itself a monumental achievement of scholarship and reflection, that outlines 103 “Great Ideas”, or irreducible “objects of thought” explored by the best minds and thinkers in the Western tradition, throughout the Great Books.
To those verbal-based works of fine art, we ought add the enduring works of the non-verbal Fine Aesthetics (music, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry/literature, film, etc.) for an genuinely exciting Canon to which today’s aesthetics students can contribute, given certain standards achieved and certain expectations met. Simply put, “Great Artistry” might be a means to add to the Canon now and forever more; in large part because it appears to be the manner such as always happened.
To outline Great Artistry, let us note that here we refer to principles at the heart of all fine art disciplines, without prejudice. Let us further remember that the classical manner to fundamentally understand any discipline (or field of study) is from the complementary perspectives of, on one hand, Science, and on the other, Art. Science refers to the knowledge of what’s been done before in the discipline; Art refers to the craftsmanship of a new contribution to the discipline. In essence, every discipline has its knowing (Science) and its doing (Art). Finally, let us note the classical use of the organizing principles of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Grammar refers to the rudiments within a discipline; Logic refers to the relationships of the rudiments; and Rhetoric refers to the representation in some kind of whole form of the rudiment relationships.
Let’s take the example of discipline of music. How do the terms I just introduced operate within music? Very naturally, I think: it is easy to see that there exists the Grammar, namely tones (as tones). It is just as easy to see that in music there is Logic, namely harmony (or, the tones in relationship). And we can naturally see that there exists Rhetoric, namely orchestration (or, the tones in relationship as a final composition). And because there are clearly in music a knowledge of what’s been done before as well as craftsmanship to create new works, we see that the discipline of music is subject to the perspectives of its Science and its Art. But the Science and Art of music are not unrelated to the Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric of music, but instead wedded inseparably. Thus, for music and all disciplines of fine art, there are the Science and Art of Grammar, the Science and Art of Logic, and the Science and Art of Rhetoric. See the diagram below to more easily illustrate this.
The purpose of the preceding explanation and diagram is to draw attention to some of the underlying, invisibly forces at work within the making of fine art; forces that we usually don’t think about. We think, of course, about inspiration, about insight, and about intuition; these are crucial and irreplaceable to the creative process. But as fundamental as inspiration, insight, and intuition are to the artist, issues at play in the actual object, itself — what is actually made and left for others to experience — cannot be understood merely from “inspiration, insight, and intuition”, because these don’t speak to the fact that works of fine art very palpably “speak a language” as any form of human communication would, and works of fine art are forms of human communication. And what the above diagram spells out are the forces generally at work within an aesthetic discipline as the artist builds work of fine art, his vessel for communication.
There are two more principles to go along with the Disciplinary principle, seen in the diagram. Those two principles are Interdisciplinary, and Transdisciplinary.
The Interdisciplinary principle is where a fine artist learns from works of fine art that are not in his discipline. This kind of learning is grounded upon one’s Disciplinary experience, and requires some degree of disciplinary mastery in order to even be possible. To be specific, what the Interdisciplinary principle does is anchor study in the transferring of methods or practices (or “models”) from one discipline to another. For example, let us take the disciplines of Film and Music. “Jump cutting” in film can be modeled to music — such as artfully changing keys suddenly but believably, or cutting to a new tonal center, dramatically but persuasively. Likewise, Film can take from Music examples of how the latter uses a simple theme and builds variation upon variation upon that simple theme; Music can educate filmmakers in that way, and serve as a model for filmmaking of a new kind than the filmmaker had once previously conceived. See the diagram for the general illustration of the Interdisciplinary Principle:
In this way, we allow disciplines to shine models of deeper perspectives on ways to accomplish the making of the art object. And an interdisciplinary perspective is what brings forth genuine learning in a community of artists in other mediums.
Finally, there is the Transdisciplinary principle, which rounds out the fundamental principles of Great Artistry. With this principle, we see an immersion study in the “great conversation” that has occurred and is occurring between all great artists of the past and present. In literature, it is not hard to see how there is a great conversation at play: the topic of “Love”, for example, animated works of literature throughout human history, and one writer dealing with Love inevitably is in conversation with all the other writers who have shed light upon Love. But I assert that the truly Great Conversation is about Ideas, but also Themes, Sensations, Myths, Forms, Symbols, Shapes, Sounds, and even Tastes. In other words, fine artists of all stripes, not just the literary disciplines, have been throughout time in conversation with one another. There is a “great exchange” of perception at play throughout all of the fine arts, and this great exchange forms our aesthetic vocabulary.
For the artist well-bred and mature through disciplinary and interdisciplinary experience, the deep subjects of the entire Humanities light up as a flowing continuum of cultural achievement and timeless discourse. All the works of Fine Aesthetics, of Philosophy, of Theology, of History, of Languages — the Humanities comprise a vast treasure trove of conceptual and perceptual referents of the human condition deemed inspirational, insightful, and intuitive. And the Transdisciplinary Principle allows us to participate in the great conversation, both in knowing the specifics of the conversation — what artists “have said” — and in offering our own perspective to the mix — namely, making works of fine art that add to the conversation, and add to the wonderment at play in truly great art. See the diagram below:
The Humanities are nothing less than a mine of imagination, and transdisciplinary study discloses this mine to the fine artist equipped to start digging, harvesting, and polishing true gems. Patterns are seen across the ages — such as Plato talking to Dostoevsky, after a chat with Job, who just came from a meeting with Shakespeare and Homer, all of which related to us by Emily Dickinson — this is what transdisciplinary study offers because vividly apparent to the student is content: the source material, as, for example, the Geneva Bible was for Shakespeare, or as Hildegard von Bingen plainchant was for Bach, or Rembrandt was for Picasso, or Homer for Plato (and the rest of us), and so on.
Again, what is the point of all this? The point is not merely to make, say, a piece of music that works as music, in the conventional, disciplinary expectation. That is a good goal, of course, but it is not at the limits of human accomplishment, not nearly. Nor is the point merely to add an interdisciplinary experience to raise the work of music beyond conventional expectation and make it clever, innovative, or novel; also, a good goal, yet still there is more.
No, the point is to understand what it is, as artists, that we do when we make works of fine art, from a communication standpoint. And the point is to understand our discipline so deeply that we can make timeless fine aesthetics, that speaks in many ways, many times over and thus is inexhaustible, to make works that offer full and enriched experiences, even when returning time and time again. It is about swimming through the rivers into the ocean of our tradition of cultural achievement that is the Humanities, and then building one’s own vessel to sail its waters based in part on the models and materials of the greats — the questions they explored, using what they found, seeking what they sought. The many signs you study, so shall your work become.
The student, rigorously disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and having developed her relationship with the great works of aesthetics, those that unmistakably evoke the great exchange, has received inspiration, insight, and intuition from these works, and in making their vessel that is their own object of experience rendered aesthetic, passes on energy — to their audience, and future generations of artists — in the form of entertainment, education, and enlightenment. The artist seeks to give transport to these energies so that others, the audience of beating-heart humans, are swept into mimesis and thus share in common timeless sensations, perceptions, and conceptions — whether the art object is presented in a social context, a serious context, or a sacred context. Works of Great Artistry are holonic — fine objects both whole in mimesis evoked to audiences, as well as part of tradition, and a part (or seed) of what makes future works of art. Thus Great Artistry in general can be an engine of sustainability in the world of aesthetics; all received is given forth again.
Great Artistry is, I believe, perhaps the only sturdy means of genuine aesthetic originality; for originality requires not merely mastery of a discipline, or novelty of style or character, but having traced back to the origins, plumbing the depths of thought and being to ultimately return to the surface to share the transformation that can be shared in no other way than to make this electric object. To be able to fashion original signs, one must follow what is long posted. Purely speaking, originality is a reaction, born of learned immersion in classics and guided by intuition.
At the end, Great Artistry is more than mere self-expression. It is easy to misunderstand this point, because self-expression and personal innovation are important and valuable, even programmed into the human condition. But, make no mistake, mere self-expression without transformation from the bathing in greatness likely won’t be timeless, classic, or an pinnacle of culture. For these qualities — which hook us in great works of art whether we are aware or not — are not given to every work of art, but deserved by those born of, and thus evocative of, the great exchange, the great elaboration, the great exploration of the common ground of the human condition through all ages of life as we can know it.