Situational Aesthetics - Victor Burgin, 1969
In moving through real, “sensorial,” space we may touch immediately near objects. Distant objects in real space are “touched” in the mind (we say the mind “reaches out”). The manner, therefore, in which we make our mental approach to a distant object of attention is styled through analogy with, and expectation of, the bodily experience of near objects.
Kinesthetic analogy then, an understanding in terms of body, is constant to our reception of perceptual experience, which shifts freely between sensorial and psychological data in the life-world “tangled, muddy, and perplexed,” which precedes the ordering of experience.
Schematically and in terms of discrimination, any path of consciousness through time might be represented as a meander. Attention to objects “out there” in the material world is constantly subverted by the demands of memory. Willful concentration is constantly dissolving into involuntary association. Even beyond familiar types of conscious association there are more subversive mechanisms at work: “. . . we now have direct evidence that signals become distributed within the input system. What we see . . . is not a pure and simple coding of the light patterns that are focused on the retina. Somewhere between the retina and the visual cortex the inflowing signals are modified to provide information that is already linked to a learned response. . . . Evidently what reaches the visual cortex is evoked by the external world but is hardly a direct or simple replica of it.”
Each day we face the intractability of materials that have outstayed their welcome. Many recent attitudes to materials in art are based in an emerging awareness of the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth. The artist is apt to see himself not as a creator of new material forms but rather as a coordinator of existing forms, and may therefore choose to subtract materials from the environment. As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behavior so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than of quality.
The identification of art relies upon the recognition of cues that signal that the type of behavior termed aesthetic appreciation is to be adopted. These cues help form a context that reveals the art-object.
Perception is a continuum, a precipitation of event fragments decaying in time, above all a process.
To focus, like this, upon preobjective experience is to be aware of movement, and attention to motion reveals the ephemeral, emphasizes the inconstant: “The invariant component in a transformation carries information about an object and the variant component carries other information, for example, about the relation of the perceiver to the object. When an observer attends to certain invariants he perceives objects; when he attends to certain variants he has sensations.”
Permanence is revealed as being a relationship and not an attribute. Vertical structuring, based in hermetic, historically given concepts of art and its cultural role, has given way to a laterally proliferating complex of activities that are united only in their common definition as products of artistic behavior. This situation in art is the corollary of a general reduction in the credibility of institutions and many find much recent art implicitly political.
It seems rather less likely that the new work will result in the overthrow of the economy than that it will find a new relationship with it; one based, perhaps, in the assumption that art is justified as an activity and not merely as a means of providing supplementary evidence of pecuniary reputability. As George Brecht observed, we are used to judging a work by its suitability for the apparatus. Perhaps it is time to judge the apparatus by its suitability for the work.
Works may be proposed in which materials are deployed and shifted in space in order to create compressions and rarefactions in time. Such a work would be perceived in the “extended present” within which we appreciate music. In this state of awareness the distinction between interior and exterior times, between subject and object, is eroded.