Orange Story: Another instance of a child’s adept accommodation to adult expectations.

1. Orange Story: Another instance of a child’s adept accommodation to adult expectations. First the Making

2. Orange 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.

3. Doing vs. 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.

4. Process from unreflective to reflective action:

5. Why the leap? • Repetition – Rudimentary aesthetic structure. • Repetition which 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 “orange painting story.”

6. An Important Component of this Story: 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.”

7. 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.”

8. 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.

9. 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.”

10. Constituents in this story of making art: • Originator instinct • Conversion from unreflective to reflective thought • Transcendence of intentions (acknowledging and the resulting actions from the acknowledgement) • Reciprocity between maker and medium

11. Then the 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.

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

15. “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.

20. Orange Story

21. Art as 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. • Consider Megan’s story! (Pp. 7-8). • Praxis is a dialectic (dance) between critical reflection AND action. • Other stories! (Pp. 9-10)

22. Art as 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.

23. Sign – is 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.

33. Symbol – leads us to conceive their objects and we respond to our conceptions of them rather than to them as immediate concrete phenomena.

38. Two forms of articulation: • Discursive – Constituents presented successively, linear (written, spoken, formula). Allows for a theory of knowledge (information). • Non-Discursive – Conceived as presentational symbols. Constituents are presented simultaneously; structuregrasped as whole. Allows for a theory of understanding. • A work of art is... (p. 13)

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

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

43. 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).

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

45. 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.

46. Formful/objective compound: relational patterns are developed among these named things. (History is written and studied as fact/knowledge “out of context.”) • Formal/boundaries and axioms: patterns are reified; mental constructions become reality, confused with life itself... colorwheel, clock, calendar time, weight measures, grammer, government, religion...

47. Reason: individual, intuitive and feeling. Logic: Communal, intellectual and mental.

48. Formalized stage: completely estranged from direct perceptual experience and these standardized measures begin to dictate our behavior. (Irwin questions their contributions to human and social concerns.) The movement from perception to formalization implies a loss. When we mistaken an abstraction for the real thing, then that real thing is concealed.

49. Essential Conditions for Making Art: Artistic Causality • The artist feels like an origin, not a pawn • “I am what I do. I am what I make” • Suggests “originator instinct” • Read bottom of p. 19!

50. Essential Conditions for Making Art: Idiosyncratic Meaning • Subjective • Bound to a particular person and situation • Decisions specific to the individual