Where does my voice come from?

1. s Where does my voice come from? Where does art come from? How does my voice work? How does art work? Where does my art come from? Is my art meaningful to others? Why do I sometimes lose my voice? Why is it sometimes difficult to understand art?

2. A Story...

3. Red art experience demonstrates: Marks represent something other than their physical appearance; What they represent is intended by the maker; What is shared between maker and viewers is this intended representation; and Verbal language elucidates the meaning of what is represented.

4. Doingvs. Making • Doing – Repeated action simply for the “sake of doing”—for basic pleasure...curiosity. No conscious intent involved. • Making – Intention of action realized. “I can/will do it again.” • Consider: Not discrete as we “live them.” Instead they merge and coalesce into new intentions.

5. Process from unreflective to reflective action:

6. Why the leap? • Repetition– Rudimentary aesthetic structure. • Repetitionwhich occurs over an extended period of time allows for occasions of acts of intention. • Eventually the act is remembered. • This is the lesson of the “red painting story.”

7. An Important Component of the Story of Art:Originator Instinct • Martin Buber: “What the child desires is its own share in this becoming of things” (1965, p. 85). • Making something that did not exist before. • Beittel described it as “where the conversion from unreflective to reflective thought comes about.”

8. Peter Voulkos: “Most of the time when I work I work in the dark, but sometimes I have just a vague idea of something and I want to bring it into being.”

9. An Important Component of this Story:Inner Critic • Ben Shahn describes this “conversion” as the inner critic. • “On the one hand, the artist is the imaginer and the producer. But she is also the critic.” • The existence of an inner critic acknowledges the transcendence of intentions.

10. Susan Rothenberg: “Then I apply more paint, scrape some off, more paint, paint it out, paint it black, paint it white, paint it black again and I’m under way. I sit in front of it and think about it between all the painting, and then it starts clarifying itself to me.”

11. Constituents in this story of making art: • Originator instinct • Conversion from unreflective to reflective thought - Repetition • Transcendence of intentions: acknowledging and the resulting actions from the acknowledgement - Inner Critic • Reciprocity between maker and medium

12. Naming • Materials in and of themselves do not have meaning—we give them meaning. • Anne Truitt: “It interested me that inert material could be turned to the service of meaning. It is still a miracle to me that a pencil line, ipso facto a material mark, can have integral meaning.” • These marks simply do not have meaning we give them meaning.

15. “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees”

16. “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” • Art works can call into question our common acceptance of the link between language and objects, or, to put it another way, between visual and verbal representation. • Generally, young children do not have to forget a name in order to “see”. • For older children and adults, cultural conventions often obstruct our phenomenal experience. The name holds meaning rather than the art work.

21. Red Story

22. Praxis • Some form of action precedes or grounds conception. Our understanding achieved via actions. • Consider how young children learn to make marks, develop speech or walk. • Praxis is a dialectic (dance) between critical reflection AND action.

23. Symbol • Langer: Symbol-making is rooted in the human mind’s capability to synthesize, delay and modify our reactions, whether to objects, events or other creatures. • By interposing symbols between our perceptions and our responses, we construct order from the chaos of direct experience, and by means of symbols we can add the experiences of other people to our own.

24. Signis simply an indicator; it tells us that something exists, or did, or will in the future. It is a symptom, a part of a larger event or of a more complex condition, and it signifies the rest to an experienced observer. Thunder....close window.

34. Symbolleads us to conceive their objects and we respond to our conceptions of them rather than to them as immediate concrete phenomena.

39. The earliest archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization as well as the Mediterranean Classical Antiquity and Paleolithic Europe. • Swastika, a symbol of auspiciousness in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. • Four swirling arms representing the four directions of the manifest universe

40. Metaphor presents us with implied comparisonsopen to multiple interpretations grounded in intersubjectivity.

44. Discursive – Constituents presented successively, linear (written, spoken, formula). Allows for a theory of knowledge (information).

46. Non-Discursive – Conceived as presentational symbols. Constituents are presented simultaneously;structuregrasped aswhole.Allows for a theory of understanding.

48. Art as Presence Irwin’s thesis on how we “leave” reality; how we move from “pure” perception to compounded abstraction. Presence is understanding how our perceptions/conceptions are carried over to mean something wholly independent of their origins. Movement from subjective being (private access) to objective being (public access).

49. Perception/sense originary: We know the sky’s blueness even before we know blue, let alone sky.

50. Conception/mind:mental operations isolate but they do not name, zones of focus: this shadow, that house, that horizon...intuitive thinking. Form/physical compound:meaning occurs; able to communicate because of naming—signs, symbols, acts.