When I was about 11 years old (or somewhere around that specific time in my life), I was more interested than ever in the arts, especially the visual ones. Some of my earliest childhood memories that I can still easily recall today can include getting my first book about art — a DK publication catered towards younger audiences, if I remember correctly — or going to the Cleveland Art Museum during my childhood, making entire round trips throughout the whole museum with my dad, always lagging behind me while I just ran through galleries. I remember how our family used to go every summer to the ChalkFest put on by the Museum every September or spend at times more than 15 minutes in the gift shop, anxiously looking for some book to add to my ever-growing collection (times don’t change, do they?).
These kinds of memories with my family flashback to me every time I visit the CMA, which I had recently visited yesterday (as of this post) because of the annual blossoming of the cherry trees around Wade Oval. Just walking around the grounds surrounding the museum, as well as ambling within the familiar yet always metamorphosizing collections, has made a significant impact on my life. Each time I visit a gallery, I feel as if I’m on a constant search for what’s new on exhibit — recent acquisitions moved items, or newer works in galleries saturated with older pieces. It just always fascinates me how institutions like museums can develop new ideas about what to exhibit and where, and the reasons why certain pieces of art are on display to other seemingly disparate pieces. Yesterday’s visit can be summarized as one such case.
The Western wing of the museum houses the Southeast Asian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese collections, which I have always found fascinating due in part to my propensity to visit the Eastern European galleries. However, I was more able to comprehend what such works that I often didn’t pay attention to beforehand tried to say, especially for the many relief sculptures in the Buddhist sculpture collection. Being able to finally understand a work that I’ve been acquainted with (or something that I could say, “hey, that looks familiar”) with a much deeper appreciation behind its story or message is remarkable, to say the least. I argue that the more you learn about specific cultures and look at their art through that culture’s beliefs or beatitudes, something just “clicks” that feels so satisfying every time.
The picture used for this post is an example of moveable art used in temples entitled “Buddha Calling On Earth To Witness,” which, at first glance, might make it hard to understand what’s going on outside of a mention of the Buddha, Siddartha Gautama. When I came across this piece for the first time (probably years ago now, but I can’t precisely recall when), it didn’t look too special to me, maybe because it was just another intricately carved hunk of stone, like many of the surrounding objects in that gallery. However, over the course of this year, I decided to take a course on Asian philosophy — which I advise every fellow philosophy student to take at least once — I realized when encountering this piece again that this apparently regular sculpture glorifies the exact moment that Siddartha achieved awakening under the Bodhi tree, forcing off the devilish figure of Mara and his retinue which had been tempting him and realizing his oneness with the universe around him. Outside of that class, I still would have no idea what was going on, so finally realizing the intent and reason why such a work was made in the first place brings a higher degree of appreciation, outside of just the aesthetic ingenuity.
Art is the most direct way humans are able to express their beliefs, desires, expressions, and thoughts on life that other people can come to understand instead of suffering through prolix essays or ponderous treatises only accessible to the few to fully comprehend. It’s revolutionizing the power of mirroring the human experience in an engaging, unique, and interactive way that goes beyond the written word. Why is this so? Why are humans drawn so much to creating things that — in the minds of figures like the Buddha — are temporary? How do we come to know the artist’s intent or their context and willingly decide to synthesize those facts with what we’re seeing?
And, inevitably, what counts as art?
There has to be a reason for the myriad collections — private and public — around the globe that still attract sizeable audiences, a reason for schools of art and their respective degrees that propagate new artists, a reason for communities large and small on social media or beyond to gather and create. Yet there are so many who argue about what “art” is; if it should be beautiful or thought-provoking; if it’s functional or set apart; and if there’s even a purpose behind a piece or not.
Aesthetics, by far, is the most controversial philosophical branch due to humanity’s ever-growing conflict with ourselves and our convictions about what should or should not belong in certain categories. Yet why are we so convicted? Well, that’s a psychological issue that I’m not going to attempt arguing for here, but there is something that piques my interest here: what do we distinguish as art instead of a regular thing?
Oddly enough, one such aforementioned prolix essays seems to answer this question nicely.
In the middle of the twentieth century, German philosopher Martin Heidegger tackled this question head-on through his short essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (an excerpt of which can be found here) as a way to comprehend what makes a work of art representative of art. Catch my drift? “Art,” in Heidegger’s view, is the disembodied collection of “habits” that man has accrued over time, amalgamizing and morphing to form what we constitute as fine Art. But more importantly, how does this art come about? Well, “according to the usual view, the work arises out of and through the activity of the artist. But through and from what is the artist that which he is?” Not even at the beginning of the essay does Heidegger include such a pithy premise:
“Artist and work are each, in themselves and in their reciprocal relation, on account of a third thing, which is prior to both; on account, that is, of that from which both artist and artwork take their names, on account of art.
As the artist is the origin of the work in a necessarily different way from the way the work is the origin of the artist, so it is in yet another way, quite certainly, that art is the origin of both artist and work…Where and how does art exist? Art – that is just a word — to which nothing real any longer corresponds. It may serve as a collective notion under which we bring what alone of art is real: works and artists.” (p. 1-2)
The only reason Art manifests in what we perceive to be works of art is because of its presupposition through the media of works and artists. Because the artist creates something through work, Art becomes manifested in a way humans can experience and interact with it; the artist acts as a mediator.
Yet this doesn’t get down to the distinction of what sets works of art from regular things, since “every work has this thingly character. What would they be without it?”(3) Heidegger describes this difference as such:
“Given that the artwork is something over and above its thingliness, this inquiry will probably be found unnecessary and disconcerting. This something else in the work constitutes its artistic nature. The artwork is indeed a thing that is made, but it says something other than the mere thing itself is, ἄλλο ἀγορεύει [lit. “it speaks for itself”]. The work makes publicly known something other than itself, it manifests something other: it is an allegory. In the artwork something other is brought into conjunction with the thing that is made…The work is a symbol.” (3)
Thus, an artwork emits the presence of Art proper through its own autonomy of something more than just a “thing,” even if it possesses, as Heidegger puts it, “thingly” characteristics. It is through this connection with Art that artwork is elevated beyond a simple object into something more, yet “The interpretations of the thingness of the thing which predominate in the history of Western thought have long been self-evident and are now in everyday use” (5), subsequently diminishing the importance of the artwork. We have become so accustomed to seeing works of art in the media, advertising, and other more commercial-oriented flashy displays that the essence of Art itself is not as transparent compared to before.
And I think living in a modern society focused exclusively on personal gain or profit only worsens this. It’s why so many people just gloss over seemingly “uninteresting” galleries like I had many times in the past; since it doesn’t automatically appeal to our senses, it isn’t really worth paying attention to since we have better things to prioritize our lives on.
“The reliance on the customary interpretation of the thing is only apparently well founded. Moreover, this conception of the thing (the bearer of characteristics) is applied not only to the mere, the actual, thing but to any being whatever. It can never help us, therefore, to distinguish beings which are things from those which are not. But prior to all reflection, to be attentively present in the domain of things tells us that this concept of the thing is inadequate to its thingliness, its self-sustaining and self-containing nature.” (7)
I think the key part of this excerpt is how we need “to be attentively present in the domain of things” to properly distinguish Art from the mundane. Awareness of all the objects around us actively makes us consider if something is beautiful or not, but it goes beyond just physical beauty; the mundane has the preternatural ability to evoke beauty, and thus can become something the artist can work with to manifest Art.
Heidegger uses Vincent Van Gogh’s painting “A Pair of Shoes” as an example to illustrate this exact point (as illustrated in, surprisingly enough, the Wikipedia article in this essay). The mundane can easily be elevated to the status of Art Proper since the shoes portrayed in Van Gogh’s painting aren’t just average shoes but a glorification, a mirrored image of the Platonic “shoe” in whatever setting the artist chooses to set such shoes in. Therefore, art phenomenologically serves as a reflection of the world around us, sometimes in very direct, upsetting ways.
There was another work of art that was displayed in the Korean gallery — directly adjacent to the Japanese collection — that is a strikingly modern work titled “A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird” by Kim Beom, involving a good-sized boulder affixed to a thick branch stemming from a wooden platform. A video plays next to the piece, which shows the artist talking to the sculpture, reflective of the work’s title — a reaction to the brutal military takeover of South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.
I think this work (which I cannot sadly post here due to the artist’s copyright) perfectly illustrates Heidegger’s thoughts about how Art is made. This sculpture takes two seemingly unrelated objects — a stone and a pruned branch (which, oddly enough, Heidegger uses as examples of artistic mediums to architecture and woodcraft, respectively) and creates something with depth and a distinct connection to a distinct time in a distinct socio-political context.
What forces our assumptions of what Art is, and who has the ability to establish a set canon law on aesthetics? Maybe, in the creation of Art, “something over and above [something’s apparent] thingliness,” doesn’t necessarily need to be beautiful. I argue that a sculpture like “A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird” has beauty, but not in its conventional sense. There’s just something about it that attracts me to the piece. Maybe, just maybe, that’s what Art should be for. ❧
