Art of Cognitive Incoherence

”An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound ‘sensation of the absurd,’ and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of ‘something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.’ ”(Benedict Cary, N.Y. Times ) In other words, being caught in an ambiguous psychological terrain.

Mark Jenkins, Belgrade, 2009

Mark Jenkins, Belgrade, 2009

 

 

The tape sculptures and street installations of Mark Jenkins and other  environmental street artists such as George Segal and Joshua Allen Harris pierce the veil of accepted notions of perception and replace them with new contexts and unsusual juxtapositions resulting in a narrative that is somewhat disorienting since the notion of death and alienation is often the central theme.’‘The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.”

 An intentional disorientation that catalyzes a creative response from the viewer; a confrontation with an unsettling dilemma requiring implicit learning, as the urge for order will seek some form of coherence, or crystalize into the imagination of patterns where none exist as an infinite black hole of illusion.
 


”The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.”( Benedict Cary, N.Y. Times )

Is the medium  subordinate to the emotion it is trying to portray ? Creating a work of art begins with an idea, an inner emotional experience, and the painting, music, poem, dance or whatever form then becomes a symbol for that experience. As a result of this model we do not look at the creation, but look for underlying emotional resonance and vibration. The act of physical creation of art becomes the evidence for the inner aesthetic meaning and our task is to interpret this meaning and in street art or public art, within the social context from which it is to be evaluated.


tyle="width: 490px">Mark Jenkins

Mark Jenkins

 

 

 ”There is opposition, and risk [in street art],”  ”It’s good for people to remember public space is a battleground, with the government, advertisers and artists all mixing and mashing, and even now the strange cross-pollination taking place as street artists sometimes become brands, and brands camouflaging as street art creating complex hybrids or impersonators.” . I think it’s understanding the strangeness of the playing field where you’ll realize that painting street artists, writers, as the bad guys is a shallow view. ( Time Magazine )

Mark Jenkins

Mark Jenkins

 

 

Mark Jansen :” In the surreal sense it’s a sort of religion in that I’m manifesting fictitious ideas to warp the social fabric. And for me since it’s my own body a lot of the time, it cuts deeper into my psyche–this sort of self-projection in the landscape. But still even though its very surreal, it’s more psychological than spiritual.” ( Myartspace.com )

This type of street art fits conveniently and interestingly into the framework of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Rules and private language theory which validated sceptical solutions to sceptical paradoxes as those found in the work of Mark Jenkins, “the sceptical solution does not allow us to speak of a single individual, considered by himself and in isolation, as ever meaning anything.” Passing experience cannot be explained.

Mark Jenkins, Malmo, Sweden ( 2009 )

Mark Jenkins, Malmo, Sweden ( 2009 )

 

 

”The locus classicus for sceptical solutions is of course Hume’s Enquiry.( David Hume ) His solution is a sceptical solution to his sceptical problem because it accepts the legitimacy or the upshot of the sceptical doubts concerning reason or the understanding. More specifically, Hume’s sceptical doubts purport to show that neither reason nor the understanding are what we use to assure ourselves about future “matters of fact”, nor do we use them to draw our “causal conclusions”, e.g., bread will always nourish us. A straight solution to this problem would consist of showing that Hume’s sceptical doubts are faulty and that in fact reason or the understanding is the source of our assurance or our causal conclusions. Hume proposes however, that custom or habit is the source of such assurance and conclusions. As such, Hume has accounted for our assurance and our conclusions without having to go back on any of his earlier sceptical doubts about reason or the understanding. As such, he has provided a sceptical solution to the sceptical doubts. ” ( Saul A. Kripke )

George Segal, The Execution

George Segal, The Execution

 

 

Another way in which art can affect us is in a way that we cannot talk about. This idea is paradoxical and difficult to grasp because although it exists, it is not really comprehensible in terms of our minds. Art can be symbolic of things in the world that we name. Emotional issues, political issues and personal issues can all be reflected in a work of art. There is a chicken and egg analogy to the theory of art.Tthe first says that the feeling or meaning of the work came first and the work was then created to represent that meaning. Somehow it produced a “thing” inside us which cannot be linguistically referred to, similar to Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Like a private language, art is a medium through which inner sensations are “named”. Or,  private language is by definition is a linguistic concept, whereas aesthetics is not meant to be so though it can be poetical, lyrical etc. The other theory  can claim that meaning is inherent in a work of art and that a sensation is produced, but that sensation is not independent of the work itself.
 

 Art seems to be a paradox; it merges the private, personal phenomenon called emotions with physical objects located in the public, observable world. By this definition the concept of art is fictive and imaginary , and yet works of art exist empirically in the world; there is a chasm  or gulf between the inner mental entity of the artist  and what is eventually expressed through art.

To return to Wittgenstein on art and aesthetics:

” Much like Wittgenstein saw the need for commonality among members of a class as a shackle of philosophical investigation, Weitz saw this same idea as the barrier for defining a concept of art. In the introduction to “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, Morris Weitz states his purpose:

I want to show that theory – in the requisite classical sense – is never forthcoming in aesthetics, and that we would do much better as philosophers to supplant the question, “What is the nature of art?,” by other questions, the answers to which will provide us with all the understanding of the arts there can be.6

Weitz is rejecting any form of closed concept concerning art. He states this in three ways. First, he moves to show that traditional theorists are misconstruing the logic of the concept of art.7 Second, he uses a historical argument that throughout history we have yet to find a theory that is sufficient to encapsulate the whole of the concept of art.8 Finally, he wants to show that the definitions of art come first from recognizing items categorized as art, then defining a concept to explain art, and finally using that concept to evaluate art.9

The first form of evidence against a closed concept of art is that the logic of art demands that the concept remain open. He does this by instead of asking, “What is art?” to asking, “What sort of concept is art?”10 It is at this point that Weitz uses Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances to discern why the concept is to remain open. In trying to define art, Weitz maintains that the nature of art is one of family resemblances, in which there are no necessary and sufficient conditions that exist to define art, and thus cannot be closed. Art is an empirically descriptive concept, and as such can only be arbitrarily closed in order to use the concept.11” ( Wittgenstein and the Open Concept of Art, Project Aristotle, 2003 )

George Segal, Gay Liberation, Sheridan Sq. Greenwich Village

George Segal, Gay Liberation, Sheridan Sq. Greenwich Village

Related Posts

This entry was posted in Miscellaneous and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.