[MD] Art as Experience

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ian]
The context for a given experience includes specific remembered 
contexts as well as the immediate and cultural contexts. (Somewhere 
between the specific remembered and cultural contexts there are the 
archetypical idealised collage of "memories" too - the way you'd like 
to remember it as well as the actual memory.)

[Arlo]
I renamed the thread to make it more in line with what we're talking about.

Yeah, I think that if see "context" as a "dynamic event" (I'm not 
using "dynamic" to refer to DQ), we can see that it is not temporally 
isolated. That is, "context" includes histories (past), immediate 
"reality" (present) and also expectations and intent (future).

The "subject's" historical context would include not only the larger 
cultural values assimilated over the course of a lifetime, but the 
ongoing interpretive narrative of the subject, shaped by this 
person's unique "proprietary" trajectory. I call this a "narrative" 
for the reasons you mentioned previously, namely that our "memories" 
are never cast objectively and finalized, but are recast and 
reinterpreted continuously often involving idealization, 
highlighting, and selection. Our "memories" are an ongoing story we 
tell ourselves, a story that is never written, but always in flux. A 
"never ending story", if you will... cue Limahl.

And this narrative produces intent, we act towards a future 
negotiated by how we want this narrative to unfold. We never respond 
without an eye towards the future dialogue. Bakhtin called this 
"dialogism". "This means that everything anybody ever says always 
exists in response to things that have been said before and in 
anticipation of things that will be said in response. We never, in 
other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language [I'd say 
"all activity" - Arlo] (and the ideas which language contains and 
communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of 
endless redescriptions of the world." (Wikipedia)

I'm reposting short responses to Khaled and Micah because I noticed 
that they posted quite delayed, and may have been missed. Also, I 
think there are relevant themes there that are pertinent and worth repeating.

[Khaled]
Museums. in a way have become like zoos. They take things from their 
element and put them in an enclosure and expect the visitor to enjoy 
the full experience. Watching a couple of zebras chew their cud is 
different tan being there and seeing a few thousands on the march.

[Arlo]
Like Pirsig points out in ZMM, "A few square feet of grass, after 
Montana."  As Dewey points out, Art is a _Lived Experience_, a 
central theme for both Dewey and Pirsig (see Granger, Robert Pirsig, 
John Dewey and the Art of Living). Like you, museums have always made 
me feel like I feel when I see butterflys pinned to a board. Its like 
taking the beauty of experience and attempting to isolate it, and all 
it does is render (to paraphrase Pirsig) "the putrescence of 
something long ago killed." Worse than zebras in zoos, its like 
skeletons of animals in museums of natural history, neatly arranged 
to provoke response. Dead carcasses of what was once a vibrant, 
dynamic, living thing.

Oh don't get me wrong. I think they have their place, but its not "to 
see art". For me its to see the dead remains of what was once living, 
breathing art. It can teach us a lot about ourselves and our world, 
but it can only carry us so far. Indeed, the value for me lies in 
imaging the hand that once moved, the heart that once loved and hurt 
and the eyes that saw the world in such a way as to try to represent 
it as such.

Yes, maybe he should have stayed and played in the subway. By making 
"art" a commodity to be consumed and doled out to patrons in nice 
clothes for the price of admission, all sitting neatly like gentlemen 
and ladies in tailored clothes, acting all smug at their patronage of 
"the arts", we effectively kill it (Marx would argue, of course, that 
this is part and parcel of the commodity fetishism of capitalist societies).

[Micah]
Quality is in the individual viewing the performance, not in the performance.

[Arlo]
I think this view is still trapped in the S/O dualism we are 
struggling to overcome. "Quality" is neither "in" the individual or 
"in" the performance. Quality is the experience that brings "the 
individual" and "the performance" into awareness. This is precisely 
the benefit gained by considering art as "experience" rather than as 
"object". The value of that experience is determined only by the 
degree to which the experience shatters one's static barriers.  As 
such, both the "individual" and the "object" play a role. The 
individual is not "passive" to the "art", which impacts her/him in 
un-mediated ways. Nor is the individual "active" in constructing the 
experience in solitude. Both play an active/negotiatatory role the 
experience, and experience which must always be remembered to be 
unavoidably contextual.