Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
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looking for something firm in a world of chaotic flux
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Stephen David Ross Interview#8
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February 27, 2004
In the eight part of his interview with Stephen David Ross over at Artrift Rick raise the old question of autonomous as an art for art's sake.
Rick asks:
"You say ‘beauty is one name for an infinite multiplicity of questions, possibilities, experiences, and meanings.’ And so are goodness and truth. And that beauty is also ethical and political. In his essay, ‘Artistic Commitment’, Isaiah Berlin says, “The doctrine of art for art’s sake, and the corresponding denial of social responsibility or function of the artist..... the notion, that is, that the justification of art is art itself – is a late doctrine, a reaction to the older, traditional view grown oppressive or, at any rate, no longer convincing.” (Berlin, The Sense of Reality, 196-197) Does ‘art for art’s sake’ have a place in this infinite multiplicity of questions and demands of which you speak?
This is an old issue in aesthetics that has been made irrelevant by the work of Bellmer and Mandy Martin and Bill Henson. Ross acknowledges that this form of aestheticism is an historical one. He says that the implication of Berlin's intervention is that the conception of the autonomy of art as art for art's sake, is that it "someone's, some group's, view of aesthetics. Not everyone's. And not forever."
Well, we know that. Ross goes on to make a good point. He says:
"...though it is not my view, that the view that art is for art's sake and nothing else's---one reading of the autonomy of art---is not necessarily extreme and irrelevant aestheticism. That is one possibility. Another is that the aesthetic and artistic point of view refuses to succumb to the powers that surround us. If art has no place of refuge, no room of its own, no shelter from the storms of economics, scientific expertise, the state, and divine authority, what can allow it to be?
My own view is that art has no place of refuge, and is besieged by all these powers and threats. Art is institutionalized everywhere, and institutions both support it and suffocate it. For a moment, however, let's keep our eyes on the support and on the ways in which art, no matter how institutionalized, offers a different way of being, different ways of knowing, perceiving, sensing, thinking, feeling from economics, science, etc."
The question is:' in what way is art a different mode of knowing today from the instrumental reason of natural science and economcs. It is not clear that Bellmer, Martin or Henson are working in the same way of perceiving, sensing, thinking, feeling, knowing. It is one that Adorno called mimesis. (More here.)
Ross does not say. What he does say is that:
"Aesthetics is the name of two interrelated human perspectives and practices. One is productive of images, poems, all the things we think of as art, but other images, sounds, poems as well. I think of this under the headings of the aesthetic, the image, and exposition. The other is the institutionalization of the aesthetic as art, in museums, concert halls, poetry readings, the university, but also other institutions such as corporate design, advertising, etc."
So how is art in both of its aspects a different mode of knowing to a hegemonic positivist economics? Aesthetics does need to spell that claim out. The surrealists have given one answer--the unconscious. Is that a viable one?
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