Art As A Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production by Mara Ambrozic & Angela Vettese

by Mara Ambrozic

What is the contemporary relationship between art and thought,

Genres: Art

Paperback

First published September 1, 2013

Reviews

[Khalil · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little girl is drawing and her mother asks her “what are you drawing?”
And she says, “I’m drawing God.”
And the mother says, “How can you draw God when you don’t know what
he is?”
And she says, “That’s why I draw him.”
—Hedda Sterne, The Last Irascible1

This book is a collection of essays concerning the value of knowledge in art, and how art in itself could be a thinking process, answering the question, is art really a form of knowledge? also the book talked about art universities and the artistic researches, theses essays I found them a little bit boring and have no practical usage(for me)

We are used to believing that knowledge is the product of a thinking process,that thinking is in the head, and that art is a practice that produces artifacts and that art has to do with the hand and the eye. Since Leonardo da Vinci’s time, in order to support the idea that art can produce knowledge, it has been argued that visual artists are thinkers, and today it has even been claimed that art is vanishing into philosophy.

An essay called Art as a Way of Thinking by MarcoDe Michelis , talked about art's capacity "to free the world from its grudging extraneousness, and reveal mystic truths" or a certain “hidden” aspects of reality; aspects that art aids in once again making visible. They relate to life itself and to the power that art can exert upon it. From this perspective, art becomes a form of knowledge —a cognitive experience— a discovery of the world made of wonders and surprises, of body and sensations.

Another essay I loved entitled What the Scientist’s Eye Tells the Artist’s Brain By Paolo Garbolino. He made an analogy between an artist and a scientist and showed how exactly art in its own "laboratory" makes knowledge about the world the way science do, in Paolo's words:

"...science produces probable beliefs about the world out there in many ways, and one of them—the most effective—is by producing in a laboratory environment a phenomenon that does not exist naturally, at least not with the purity and saliency that can be obtained within laboratory walls. Both artists and scientists intervene in the world and intervention is a process in which an underlying causal reality is used to do, make, or change things"

Interestingly Paolo mentioned Thomas Kuhn's remarks on the subject ,in his famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn said that "visual forms of knowledge are ancillary for the scientist,because they are not knowledge in themselves but means to the end of obtaining knowledge" in Kuhn's words :

The paintings are end-products of artistic activities. They are the sort of object which the painter aims to produce […]. The scientific illustrations, on the other hand, are at best by-products of scientific activities […]. The artist, too, like the scientist, faces persistent technical problems which must be resolved in the pursuit of his craft. Even more we emphasize that the scientist, like the artist, is guided by aesthetic considerations and governed by established modes of perception […]. But an exclusive emphasis upon these parallels obscures a vital difference. Whatever term “aesthetic” may mean, the artist’s goal is the production of aesthetic objects; technical puzzles are what he must resolve in order to produce such objects. For the scientist, on the other hand, the solved technical puzzle is the goal, and the aesthetic is a tool for its attainment. Whether in the realm of products or of activities, what are ends for the artist are means for the scientist, and vice versa.

Paolo ended up his essay saying that "Artistic artefacts encode relationships among physical objects, people, and particular settings. These relational properties as well as physical objects are things of the world, and they contribute to shaping the forms in the sequences of artistic phenomena"

The one I like most was about John Dewey's great work Art as Experience entitled Experience as Thinking by Mary Jane Jacob.For Dewey, knowledge is produced through the experimental process of inquiry we call experience—knowledge production is experiential. Experience is cognitive in a wide sense and, for Dewey, knowing in the conventional sense of known facts or things is but one mode of experiencing. Within this realm of experience, the making and experiencing of art holds a special place.For Dewey, art is a particularly important mode of inquiry leading to knowledge production, because “art is the most direct and complete manifestation there is of experience as experience.”

Dewey found that artists care in a peculiar way for this uncomfortable, uncertain phase of experience. Artists are adept in moments of resistance and tension, as they throw open the act of making to experimentation and innovation. The “new,” a guidepost for the modern era, has come into contemporary art as a hallmark. Art, like science, has always been propelled by such creativity. In the creative process, artists employ unclear moments for the potential held by these periods of not knowing to bring to consciousness something new. In the attainment of equilibrium, in Dewey’s terms, when the process is resolved or a work of art created, a new relationship to the environment is initiated and meaning is formed.

I mentioned just the essays that was most interested to me, while the book contains a wide collection on the subject. There is also an essays about Proust which is a good example of the relation between art and knowledge.