In this class we discuss the aesthetic theories of Viktor Skhlovsky and John Dewey.

1. Class 2
VISUAL ATTENTION
Paying Attention to Experience

2. quiz 1
Quiz 10% 9/11, by 11:59 PM on Compass
covers all class sessions and assignments from day one to
now.
Harrison, pp. 9 -45
"Artworld Prestige"
"Folk Art"
and ALL of the readings and weblinks from this week
expect 30 questions in a variety of multiple choice formats

3. agenda part 2
• what is perception?
• neuroscientific answer
• now, more of a psychological answer
• particular focus on what happens when perception becomes
too routine/habitualized/patterned
• if habit and routine are the disease, could art be a cure?
• Paul Valery
• Viktor Shlovsky
• John Dewey

4. Thomas EAKINS
The Gross Clinic
1875
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art
7'10" x 6'7"

8. “To see is to
forget the name
of the thing one
sees.”
—Paul Valery

9. Viktor Shklovsky
born 1893 in St.
Petersburg, Russia
died 1984 in Moscow,
USSR
literary critic and novelist

10. I. If we start to examine the general laws of perception,
we see that as perception becomes habitual, it
becomes automatic.
Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area
of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the
sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign
language for the first time and compares that with his
feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth
time, he will agree with us.

11. II. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in
ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and
words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in
algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete
words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial
sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers
the example of a boy considering the sentence "The
Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of
letters: T, S, m, a, b.

12. III. This characteristic of thought not only suggests the
method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of
symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this
"algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects
only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not
see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by
their main characteristics. We see the object as though
it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its
configuration, but we see only its silhouette.

13. things are replaced by symbols...
the example of a boy considering
the sentence "The Swiss
mountains are beautiful" in the
form of a series of letters: T, S, m,
a, b.

14. "This characteristic of thought not
only suggests the method of
algebra, but even prompts the
choice of symbols (letters,
especially initial letters)."

15. "the object as though
enveloped in a sack..."
...we apprehend objects
only as shapes with
imprecise extensions; we
do not see them in their
entirety but rather
recognize them by their
main characteristics. We
see the object as though it
were enveloped in a sack.
We know what it is by its
configuration, but we see
only its silhouette.

16. Tolstoy cleans his office
“I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the
divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it.
Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I
could not remember and felt that it was impossible to
remember - so that if I had dusted it and forgot - that is, had
acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If
some conscious person had been watching, then the fact
could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or
looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many
people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they
had never been.”

17. habit devours...
“Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife,
and the fear of war... ...art exists that one may recover the
sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make
the stone stony.
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique
of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because
the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and
must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the
artfulness of an object: the object is not important...”

18. "After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize
it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do
not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it.
Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in
several ways."
 defamiliarization

19. Dewey

20. John Dewey (1859-1952)
• well-known American
philosopher, educator, and
public figure
• resided in China for almost
2 years from 1919-1921
• lived to be 92 and
influenced many spheres
of American life (and is still
doing so!)
• significant contributions to
philosophy, logic,
psychology, education, and
aesthetics

21. • Dewey formed a
friendship with Dr. Albert
C. Barnes and was
granted access to his
collection of modern art
• Barnes Foundation
formed in 1922 as an art
school, rather than a
museum
• Dewey wrote Art As
Experience (1934) in
close connection with
his opportunities to look
at Barnes’s art
Dr. Albert C Barnes, art collector
and friend of Dewey

22. The Barnes Collection is now
located in downtown
Philadelphia in a new building.
The exterior is modern, but
interior is a fairly precise
replica of the previous
building in Upper Merion, PA.
The story of the collection, the
trust that Barnes created to
protect it, and the eventual
breaking of that trust is told in
The Art of the Steal (2009),
dir. Don Argott. Highly
recommended!

23. The Barnes Collection, interior view, with Seurat’s The Models and Cézanne’s
Card Players visible on the far wall.

24. Barnes Collection, interior view of a gallery with distinctive
arrangement of furniture, paintings and decorative objects

25. “In common conception, the
work of art is often identified
with the building, book, painting,
or statue in its existence apart
from human experience.’’
“Since the actual work of art is
what the product does with an
in experience, the result is not
favorable to understanding. In
addition, the very perfection of
some of these products, the
prestige they possess because
of a long history of
unquestioned admiration,
creates conventions that get in
the way of fresh insight.”

26. Dewey on prestige
"Prestige goes to those who use their minds without
participation of the body and who act vicariously through
control of the bodies and labor of others." (21)

27. Dewey on autopilot
"We see without feeling; we hear, but only a second-hand
report, second hand because not reinforced by vision." (p.
21)
"For while the roots of every experience are found in the
interaction of a live creature with its environment, that
experience becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only
when meanings enter it that are derived from prior
experiences. Imagination is the only gateway through which
these meanings can find their way into a present interaction;
or rather, as we have just seen, the conscious adjustment of
the new and the old is imagination." (p. 283)

28. Ordinary experience is often infected with apathy, lassitude and
stereotype. We get neither the impact of quality through sense
nor the meaning of things through thought. The "world" is too
much with us as burden or distraction. We are not sufficiently
alive to feel the tang of sense nor yet to be moved by thought.
We are oppressed by our surroundings or are callous to them.
Acceptance of this sort of experience as normal is the chief
cause of acceptance of the idea that art cancels separations that
inhere in the structure of ordinary experience. Were it not for the
oppressions and monotonies of daily experience, the realm of
dream and reverie would not be attractive. No complete and
enduring suppression of emotion is possible. Repelled by the
dreariness and indifference of things which a badly adjusted
environment forces upon us, emotion withdraws and feeds upon
things of fantasy.
(pp. 270-71)

29. Dewey proposes a new definition of art:
art is not the thing itself (a noun) but a process of
interaction between a given viewer and the thing (it is
dynamic, more of a verb)

30. a wall around art
“When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of
origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around
them that renders almost opaque their general
significance, with which esthetic theory deals.”

31. art should not be a
separate realm
“Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from
that association with the materials and aims of every other
form of human effort, undergoing and achievement. A
primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to
write upon the philosophy of the fine arts.”

32. restore continuity
with the everyday
“This task is to restore continuity between the refined and
intensified forms of experience that are works of art and
the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are
universally recognized to constitute experience.”

34. “raw aesthetics”
“In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and
approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the
events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of
man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as
he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd—

35. http://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2013/06/03/ladies-and-lawns/
“the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous
holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the
men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-
hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be
learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-
player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of
the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of
her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the
house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning
on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and
crumbling coals.”

36. “The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the
fire burn better; but he is none the less fascinated by the colorful drama of
change enacted before his eyes and imaginatively partakes in it. He does not
remain a cold spectator.”

37. "By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet it
has esthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience
for a human being. And, if one is to go beyond personal
enjoyment into the formation of a theory about that large republic
of art of which the building is one member, one has to be willing
at some point in his reflections to turn from it to the bustling,
arguing, acutely sensitive Athenian citizens, with civic sense
identified with a civic religion, of whose experience the temple
was an expression, and who built it not as a work of art but as a
civic commemoration. "

38. The turning to them is as human beings who had needs that
were a demand for the building and that were carried to
fulfillment in it; it is not an examination such as might be carried
on by a sociologist in search for material relevant to his purpose.
The one who sets out to theorize about the esthetic experience
embodied in the Parthenon must realize in thought what the
people into whose lives it entered had in common, as creators
and as those who were satisfied with it, with people in our own
homes and on our own streets. (pp. 2-3)

39. We can know the building
in great detail as an object
without ever understanding
it.
To understand it, we must
imaginatively connect with
the human beings who
made it.

40. As works of art have lost their indigenous status,
they have acquired a new one--that of being
specimens of fine art and nothing else. Moreover,
works of art are now produced, like other articles,
for sale in the market. Economic patronage by
wealthy and powerful individuals has at many
times played a part in the encouragement of
artistic production… Objects that were in the past
valid and significant because of their place in the
life of a community now function in isolation from
the conditions of their origin. By that fact they are
also set apart from common experience, and serve
as insignia of taste and certificates of special
culture. (8)