A New Year...

"Hand Signals" 70x70cm

The Artist’s Dilemma (one of them anyway).

It’s the Object/subject thing. The subject of the artist’s attention is an object while being studied. The work of art is an object. The artist is a subjectivity, or a self-consciousness. If the object studied is a person, then the artist will, at some time or another, be confronted by a ‘look’, and become aware of the other’s subjectivity, or something like that. (Intersubjectivity).

How does he confront his object/subject? With what kind of humility does he approach his study? When does the object, which is separate from the artist, become a subject? What kind of subject/object connection is made?

It matters not if the artwork is a made thing, or simply remains a concept (conceptual art), as the same dilemma arises. If a painting is non-representational, and is meant not to refer to anything outside of itself, it will still contain the subjectivity (and the objectivity?) of the artist. The paradoxical situation of what the French Existentialists referred to as the being for, and the being to, being interchangeable according to a viewpoint, can be paralyse creativity.

At one moment, the work-in-hand is part of the artist, and the next moment it is a separate object in its own right, standing alone. Observing his own work, the artist becomes aware of the work’s subjectivity, and of his own. These relationships are multiplied by the addition of the viewer…

This all hardly matters to the amateur, who usually has no idea of what they are doing in any case, but it can heap confusion on the artist. The creative act is a mysterious process. Where does it begin or end? Something is made that did not exist before. Where did it come from? Does it have any purpose?

Humans seem to be compelled to make art as soon as they begin to think. Early cave paintings of the Stone Age (Palaeolithic) are as sophisticated as anything made today, bearing witness that the species has changed very little in its thinking over the last thirty thousand years or so. Why compelled? Is it to reassure ourselves that we do actually exist? Is a work of art evidence of our own consciousness? Why do we get so much pleasure/pain from art, both making it, and experiencing it? What exactly is the nature of the experience of the viewer? What is the relationship between the artist, the work of art, and the audience, and can any of the three exist without the other two?

Pip,pip,

The leg

The Other and the Look

The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and that this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only from "over there", the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same as them. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).

While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by them, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of one's freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: At first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.

Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive them.

Wikipedia