From:
"Oscar Bearinger" <oscarbear@zzzzzzzzzzzz>
Date:
Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:42:01 -0500
Subject:
art + gestalt [response to Clive]
Dear Clive,
I am responding to your email of January 17, 2005.
It was interesting to write this - I spent 2 nights on my trip making
some notes, came home and promptly wrote 4 pages. As I mentioned a
couple times, I am writing a longer essay on this topic so this
activity has been useful for me. Here I'm making a couple short
points:
Quoted text begins..... Especially the idea that it is useful IN MAKING MEANING to
closely consider
the OBVIOUS. The fact that Art has not dared to consider the obvious
may easily be one of its current problems.
End of quote.
[snip]
Quoted text begins.I'm not sure that I really agree with your next points as I feel
that stone carvers often suffer from exactly the same problems as
every other kind of artists.
End of quote.
I agree with this. Stone carvers are no more susceptible to the
mind - body split than other artists or genres.
Quoted text begins.It is my belief that you can only make different art (and therefore
by implication new art) if you think differently.
I'd love a Gestalt psychology response to this observation.
End of quote.
The Gestalt approach is about the search for wholeness, in human
activity. Thinking and mental activity is part of the human process,
part of human wholeness. However, it is useful, maybe essential, to
consider the other modes of human experience at the same time - body
experiences (the 5 or 6 senses), emotional experience, and spiritual
experience or context (the supra-human meaning).
So I would say, yes. Yet not ONLY "thinking differently" but also
including these other modes.
Brief examples of including other modes:
* continually renewing our physical contact with the material
(including that 6th or gut sense),
* including emotional experience (frustration or excitement or euphoria
or whatever we are experiencing in the moment while working, and
including feelings from outside the moment that are affecting us,
eg, grief, sadness, determination, etc etc)
* and the spiritual dimension. here I like what Alfred Neumeyer
said: art needs to include "the element of the numb, the undeveloped"
for me this alludes to the context of human life, the much larger
unspoken universe that surrounds and cradles us and our life and our
experiences.
does this give you a glimpse into this perspective, Clive?
thanks again for your question. good carving to all.
Oscar
- Follow-ups
- message 00233: art + gestalt [response to Clive] - Clive Murray-White (27 Jan 2005)
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