WORD AND IMAGE

ONE DEVELOPMENT IN AESTHETIC AWARENESS

By Paul Henrickson, Ph.D. © 2005

Over the course of several decades and in various geographical locations

where unbeckoned illumination took place, it gradually occurred to me
that my educational environment was faulty and that I had been ,
perhaps, unintentionally, but cruelly, misled.

Three decades had passed before the first illuminating breakthrough

occurred. I was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA wandering through
the rooms of The Minneapolis Art Institute which were hosting an
impressive exhibition of the work of six contemporary Italian artists. I
no longer remember their names, besides their names ceased to become
important once I had taken quick glance at the walls where large two-
meter canvases were hanging.

There was one in particular which commanded my attention because of

the energetic, nearly violent existence. The color range was relatively
narrow being made up of ochres, siennas, and whites, but the way the
artist had attached the paint to the surface, the record of his physical
process of laying the pigment on in massive levels and the varying
rhythms by which this was accomplished was most striking.

I tried, out of a sense of decorum, a talent I may finally have shed, to

pay courtesy visits to the other contributors to the exhibition. This
sounds like a horrible put down of the other works but I do not mean it
that way for there was not one incompetent work on exhibit, but this
one, this one work kept drawing me into its environment, and if I tried
to leave, it would pull me back to draw more of my bewilderment from
me. Finally I grew frustrated at having been kept from making decisions
on my own and more subject to the influences of an inanimate object.
After all, the responsibility imposed upon one born in Boston,
Massachusetts where the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the
Cabots only to the Lodges and the Lodges only to God, personal
behavior is defined by nothing if not self-control.

Then, like Paul of Tarsus who had been knocked off his horse by some
illumination I was “cut off at the knees” when what I had found so
attractive, appealing and valuable, that which I had very nearly fallen
in love with, with its subtle, dramatic and exciting variations, turned
magically malevolent, as the devil might do if he thinks he’s made his
capture, and revealed itself for what it was, the image of a dirty public
john.

This was my first really memorable experience with the broad

parameters of aesthetic response. Words I had grown accustomed to
and thought I understood, were suddenly incomprehensible to me.
Either I had been lied to and I had been a fool to believe in my mentors,
or those others didn’t know what they were talking about and what they
were talking about was not my experience. This, I believe, describes the
war between wordy intellection and sensual experience. This is the area
appropriate language must bridge if it is to function as an intermediary
between experience and communication.

The importance lesson for me from this experience was that, at the very
least, understanding of the meaning of the word “aesthetic” was
broadened. No longer was it possible for me to use the word “aesthetic”
and mean something attractive, pleasant, and desirable. I must now be
willing to include the ugly, the smelly, the dirty, crude and vulgar…in
short, the expressive.

There are new responsibilities attending this new aesthetic awareness,

responsibilities I’d not been aware of before I moved to southwest
Virginia and was teaching a group of young women about certain
periods in the history of art. In this particular case I was using as a base
line the ubiquitous subject matter of the Virgin and Child and
attempting to point out certain critical differences between the examples
we had before us. Because I was so intent upon not focusing on the
religious aspects of the works, but their formal qualities the message
intended was not the message received. When one of these works I
described as not really being “up to par”, that it was not really “a good
Virgin and Child” the reaction from those well-bred ladies from
Virginia was quite strong, but not because of any religious reason, fir
these girls were Southern Baptist, but because, in their minds, it simply
was not possible to be a bad virgin or child. They had also extended the
meaning of my statement to being critical of virginity and motherhood.
What this ultimately meant to me was that one’s private, sensual vision
will be sacrificed if there develops a contest between what one thinks
one sees and what one perceives the peer vision to be.
This behavior is a form of suicide.

I later put this to another test when I chose the names of ten well-known
and respected artists and asked the class to rank order them.
Rembrandt was one of those names and his name was universally
placed at the top of the list as being the very best of all. The I showed
them slides of little known drawings by these same artists and asked
them to rank order the drawings. Rembrandt was ranked at the bottom
of the list. From this and from other observations, I concluded that for
the sake of social solidarity most people would sacrifice their own
personal observations and deny their sensual experience.

Rembradt: “Lucretsia”
Rembrandt: study for Great Jewish Bride

From south-west Virginia of the twentieth century, which could never

forget the colonial eighteenth century, where upper class residences
were still being constructed of brick, were white shuttered, and the walls
of rooms where one received guests were painted a discrete pale green
trimmed in white, I left, like Gauguin, to luxuriate sensually for four
years on a tropical island paradise in the Pacific, where on some of the
islands the women are bare breasted until they spot a white man when
they then quickly grasp a square piece of cloth which the carry for the
purpose and deftly suspend it by two of its corners from their
compressed arm pits and where the men of status display the proofs of
their importance, their tattoos which cover their bodies from wrist to
neck to ankle, with only a bright red loin cloth with a long red tail
covering their groins. Here the language literally does not distinguish
between “love”, “like”, “want”, and “desire” for such refined degrees of
erotic attraction seem unimportant, or are non-existent. Here one did
not commit a form of suicide by not acknowledging the sensual. A fact
which was not too surprisingly confirmed by a very dear friend whom I
asked to tell me how many children he had. “I have ten” he responded
and then he looked me in the eye and added “…by my wife”. I persisted,
“…and how many altogether?” Well, he thought about it for awhile,
gave another number and when I told him about a few he hadn’t known
about the ultimate number was thirty. “Gaius”, I told him , “this has got
to stop. The world is already over populated.” “Yes”, he responded. I
wondered how this “new world order” was going to be promulgated.

A Young Man from Kosrai

When I returned to civilization as it was practiced I the mid-west state

of Iowa and concerned myself with the nature of creative thought one of
the discoveries revealed to me showed me exactly how this “new world
order” was to be achieved and Aldous Huxley was right when in 1958 be
observed that the “Brave New World” he had foreseen was to come
about methodically.

[One of the more interesting statistical outcomes of my study was the

interesting relationship between the 4% of the more and the 4% of the
less creative subjects. The more creative subjects who were in their late
‘teens achieved a grade point average which consistently from the last
years of high school into the first two years of college was one grade
point lower than the less creative subjects who were also in their late
‘teens. The less creative subjects, on two out of three lie scales, achieved
significant correlations with measures of creativeness suggesting that in
order to achieve acceptable course grades, and to appear to agree with
their judges suppressed the sensual data they received in favor of status.

R.D.Laing did a study of schizophrenic teen age girls in England and

found that there seemed to be a relationship between the modes of
verbal sexual instruction as controlled by the mothers, subsequent
adaptation to social constructs, and the information the girls had been
receiving from their own bodies. So, there may be something good to say
about calling something by what it is.

This brings me to that point where my comments may be seen to border

on sophistry, when I might test the flexibility of your thinking about the
contemporary art scene when I try to get you to see that what is “real”
is really “abstract”, and what is “abstract” is really “real”.

With the examples included here, one a nineteenth century painting

attributed to the German-American painter, Albert Bierstadt and a
twentieth century painting by the German painter Hans Hoffman. I
would wager that 90-odd% of contemporary commentators would agree
that the Bierstadt painting was a realistic work and the same 90-odd%
would agree that the Hoffman was abstract. I shall attempt to point out
that these conclusions are inconsistent with the facts.

In both these instances, the Bierstadt and the Hoffman, the artist had
been working with “real” materials, the paint, the canvas; the solvents
were all “real”. To this extent, at least, the two artists’ approaches to
their art do not differ. Both artists manipulated the medium to bring
about certain visual results. These results differ significantly, but the
kinetic behaviors do not.

Bierstadt, whether or not he completed this landscape while confronted

with the objective world, was obviously concerned about how that world
appeared and he adjusted his behaviors to achieve, as closely as
possible, a visual resemblance to that world. However, it is only
appropriate to point out that the reality of the painting does not offer
the viewer a replicable scale, temperature, or odor of pine. To that
extent, then, this landscape is a fraudulent work if we insist upon using
the terms “real”, “realistic” to describe it. On the other Hans Hoffman
offers us colors, shapes, arrangements, which do not mislead the viewer
who may, however, due to the still prevalent expectations of his social
environment –that art aught to re-present the outside world, discount
Hoffman’s achievement by the extent to which he fails to represent the
objective world. This latent prejudice has interfered seriously with our
comprehension, in spite of the efforts of artists like Pollock, deKooning
and Kline.

Albert Bierstadt: “Yosemite”

Hans Hoffman: “Red Sky”

These observations should exalt the observations of the eighteenth

century hostess Madam de Stael, to the effect, that those who demand
that painting have a subject matter were missing the point. Her
observation is enhanced when remember that for the most part her
contemporary art world was populated by Fragonard, Boucher, and
Watteau. She did not have, as we do, the works of Pollock, deKooning
and Kline to instruct her. Our ability, at the elementary level of
observation, to understand what we see, have been so warped by the
pressures of various peer groups to have all see the way the majority
have agreed everything should be seen that we, to, continue to deny the
reality of our perceptions.

Although I am loath to give the man credit, Brezhnev was correct when
he explained to the American painter Jamie Wyeth that one should not
underestimate the power of an image.
Wyeth.Jamie: “Fog Bound”

Wyeth, James: “Pig”

This power can be illustrated by yet another expression of peer pressure

when an organization as influential as Daimler-Chrysler features the
work of the American Andy Warhole and furthers his undeserved
reputation as a “genius” with the undisguised self-aggrandizing
motivation of profit, monetary and reputational with no regard for the
effect upon a thoughtless population in so far as their aesthetic
perceptions may be enhanced. When I was seven years old, or six, I
would cut out the images of Cadillacs, Buicks, and Pontiacs from
advertising brochures and drive them at exorbitant speeds with great
motor sounds coming from my childish mouth, but I knew what the
reality was and that I was allowed to do what I was doing without a
driver’s license.

The difference between that legitimate childish activity and the

Daimler, Chrysler, Warhol conspiratorial behavior to join in the minds
of the general public the acceptability of the aesthetic values of the
democratic mean to the inherent values of an automobile manufacturer
may make sense to the accountant and an evil behavioral psychologist
but is totally unacceptable to an idealist in any discipline, academic or
not.
The Daimler-Chysler Collection: advertisement

To sum up, if that is possible, disengaging the artistic process from its
historic attachment to “another reality”, be it political, religious, or
product centered, is an essential quality of intelligent creative behavior
which is guided by humanitarian interests.

Another aspect of the development of an aesthetic response system is

the tendency to measure artistic excellence by technically good behavior
misses the point and would encourage preferring the “divine” Raphael
to Michelangelo, Jacque Louis David to Rembrandt, and, in sculpture
Houdin to Rodin.
Raphael Santi: “Madonna and Child”

Michelangelo Buonarotti: “Portrait of a youth”

Jacques-Louis David: “Armor and Psychi”
Rembrandt van Rijn: “The Night Watch”

Houdin: Portrait of George Washington

August Rodin: “Burghers of Calais”

Language appropriately used to clarify perceptions can affect an

important change in our cultural development.