John Dewey: Art as Experience: Leonardo Drawings at Leeds City Art Gallery

Leonardo

The Leonardo drawings that have just been on show in Leeds City Art Gallery reminded me of the time when art and science were not such strange bedfellows. The philosopher John Dewey would often advocate their conjoining and similarities, a position that came out of his pragmatist approach to thinking and one that I have a lot of respect for.  

John Dewey was a ‘Pragmatist’ philosopher who wrote his most famous text on aesthetics in the 1930s, ‘Art as Experience’. This might seem a very long time ago but during the 1990s and early 21^st century several writers on art theory began to see that Dewey’s key concepts developed out of working from concrete experience could be very useful. I was very lucky in coming across Dewey quite early on in my career, reading him as an art educator rather than as an artist. It was in art education where his influence had always been strong, but at the time, because I was also a practicing artist, I saw his relevance to the drawings I was making about my experiences of being a young father with growing children. There didn’t seem to be many other theorists around that could help me with the building of a supportive theoretical framework for a body of work that focused on making images derived from watching my children grow up. 

Dewey ‘democratised’ my thinking about art practice. If everything that I could possibly think was the result of experience, therefore anything was potential subject matter. More recently Richard Shusterman (1989, 2012) in response to Dewey’s thinking advocated treating all art as fine art, in particular in his writings on rap. He has also used Dewey to support his own thinking about the ‘embodied mind’ another area of research that I have pointed to several times in these blog posts. Crispin Sartwell (1995, 2003) and Yuriko Saito (Saito 2007) have both used Dewey to support an idea of an everyday aesthetics. However my own interest in how aesthetics and ecology need each other in order to support a new approach to thinking about Nature, such as in the writings of Tim Morton, is why I’m particularly interested in returning to Dewey. In relation to this, although I find his writing too soaked in Romanticism, Thomas Alexander has shown in ‘The Human Eros’ how Dewey’s ideas are essential to an understanding of eco-ontology and the aesthetics of existence (Alexander 2013). 

For Feminist writers Dewey is important because of his emphasis on the importance of concrete experience and his exploration of how feelings are an essential aspect of how personal experience is received and understood.  He also prioritised doing and making and he wanted to eliminate the division between practice and theory in order to achieve some form of synthesis.

Dewey argued that all experience has an aesthetic, therefore it could be argued that our aesthetic sensibility is centred on how we ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ our day-to-day situatedness. Art therefore leads out of life and this being so, for a ‘good life’ and correspondingly ‘good art’ we need to cooperate with and nurture our environment, which in turn will shape us. For artists this puts aesthetics right at the centre of philosophical debate, therefore when trying to write about the nature of art as a means towards some sort of understanding, Dewey can be vital. 

As a Pragmatist that focused on human beings learning from experience, Dewey believed that art and science are very similar; both learning by doing in response to finding out about the world that surrounds us.  Because of the relativist nature of his interpretation of “what is art?” he will sometimes ask the question  “when is art?” and in doing so he reinforces my belief that we need to be looking more at processes than things, definitions such as ‘art’ and ‘science’ often standing in the way of forming new ways of thinking and acting. (I like to use the compound word ‘thacting’) 

Any of you thinking of going into art education ought to read 'Art as Experience', I believe it is a seminal text, and will help you begin that process of shaping and modelling sessions for your own future students, especially sessions designed to enable them to see how making art can also be about making sense of the world. 

The Leonardo drawings demonstrate beautifully how art and science can be conjoined in a synthetic response to the world. At times he is looking at how things work, at others how things can be represented and as his imagination is fed by his looking he begins to make new images constructed out of what he has learnt from his experiences of examining the world. As a process this is not hard to understand, but sometimes we forget that the modelling or shaping of experience relies on long periods of intense study. You are not required to dissect a human body any more in order to develop an understanding of how it works, however there are always other things to explore. Dewey's point is that everyday is filled with experience, but we don't usually stop to examine that experience, but when we do, science or art will emerge from this activity. It doesn't really matter what we call it, however the naming tends to shape the way we continue with our exploration, so perhaps, at least for a while, we should simply stop, look and listen and then see if we can do something that makes ourselves and others aware of the implications of existence. 

Goethe would have approved of Dewey, his poem 'The Metamorphosis of Plants' perhaps sums up everything I had to say in this post. Biology and art combine in a form that like Leonardo's drawings goes beyond both. 

References

Alexander, T(2013) The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of ExistenceNew York: Fordham University Press

Dewey, J (2009) Art as Experience New York: Perigee Books

Saito, Y. (2007) Everyday Aesthetics, New York: Oxford University Press.

Sartwell, C. (1995,) The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions Albany: SUNY Press.

Sartwell, C. (2003) “Aesthetics of the Everyday,”  In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, J. Levinson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 761–770.

Shusterman, R. (1989) “Why Dewey Now?,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 23: 60–67.

Shusterman, R  (2012) Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics, New York: Cambridge University Press.

See also:

Drawing and life

Just do it