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Commentary
The civic importance of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934)
Abstract
In the Harvard lectures that became Art as Experience (1934) Dewey developed a democratic account of art that not only expanded the range of creative experience (watching a huge digger, the architectonics of a mutually satisfactory conversation, are included in the reach of art) but developed an account of art that was vitally reciprocal, participatory and social. Maker and perceiver are equally interactive creators as they mutually develop new modes of feeling and thinking. For Dewey this relationship necessarily re-makes the experience of community and, just as important, creates a civic space for interrogation and critique. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
artexperiencedemocraticparticipatorysocialcommunityciviccritique As time is short I have tried to resolve Dewey’s thinking into ten points.
1. Art as Experience 1 began life as a series of lectures at Harvard in 1931. Its evolution was roughly contemporary with New Deal America. Dewey explored his theme in idiosyncratic terminology (some of it drawn from Pragmatism) and with a clumsy passion that makes him difficult of access and meant that his ideas never circulated widely. But he is one of the few 20th-century critics to try to bring together aesthetics and civic values in a democratic account of art.
2. Dewey made immense claims for the formative power of art and the shaping agency of culture in his final chapter, ‘Art and Civilisation’. It is through art that ‘the first stirrings of dissatisfaction with the world begin’ (348), through art that change is possible, ‘redirections of desire and purpose’. If workers were to be granted autonomy in a new economic system that dispensed with capitalist structures, these possibilities would be even greater.
How did he reach these conclusions in fourteen densely argued chapters?
3. It is an unusual text, widening the category of the aesthetic to include the excitements of seeing a fire engine pass by or a digger at work on an immense hole, the grace of a ball player, conversation, debate and even social movements. And Dewey is unusual in going well beyond the forms of Western art in his range of reference. He recognises that there will always be, importantly, unofficial arts beyond what is officially recognised as art. He explicitly abandoned the concepts of traditional Kantian aesthetics—beauty, contemplation—and he repudiated the aesthetics of his contemporaries: the formalism of Roger Fry and the solipsist subjectivism of Vernon Lee. These belonged to realms of esoteric fine art ‘separated by a gulf from everyday experience’ (85).
So what was Experience?2
4. He meant art as Experience literally.
‘Experience’, exhaustively explored, is a complex cognitive and emotional process. And it is not until quite late in the book that one realises that for Dewey the location of ‘art’ is not primarily the material book, the concerto, the opera, jazz, the drama, the poem, the picture, the ceramic vase, but in the processes of perception that respond to them—Experience. He shifts the substantive artwork from the maker to the perceivers of it. The responsibility for art is the perceiver’s. It is a shared responsibility, but Dewey sometimes writes as if the perceiver is wholly responsible for making the artwork live.
[This democracy of perception is no idealist stance because it involves the energies of the body and the mind.]
5. ‘Experience’ of art, Dewey wrote, is ‘prefigured in the very processes of living’ (30). Experience is nothing less than an intensified awareness of being alive. Living or experience is a reciprocal process of making and perceiving, of ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’ (as he put it, enabling oneself to be acted upon) and of recognising and reincorporating that activity in the self. It is ‘linked to the activity of which it is the consequence’: ‘what is done and what is undergone are thus reciprocally, cumulatively, and continuously instrumental to each other’ (57). As a first-hand creative activity doubling and re-making what the work offers, experience is saturated in emotion. It is ‘an act of transforming material into a new subject matter’ (175).
6. Experience is also—as an act of recognition—a profound act of mind. Dewey constantly brings the work of science and the work of art into alignment. He argues that the conceptual handling of symbol and the handling of the direct materials of perception are analogous because both submit to process, to time, but makes a distinction between the intellectual abstracting activity of a science and the reflexive thought that creates ‘relationships’ (171) in the work of Experience. But he is less interested in making these claims than in his understanding of experience as an act of mind that continuously opens up new relationships. ‘A well conducted scientific enquiry discovers as it tests, and proves as it explores… and conversation, drama, novel, and architectural construction… reach a stage that at once records and sums up the value of what precedes, and evokes and prophesies what is to come. Every closure is an awakening, and every awakening settles something’ (174). We are not speaking metaphorically when we describe a painting, for instance, as ‘alive’ (182). ‘Art has no existence outside the energy it organises’ (195). The release of energy that occurs in the full perception of a work, its correlative experience, brings with it a reflexive recognition. Dewey recurs to the act of mind and thought in experience again and again, clearly anxious about this issue. But I think that for him the reflexive act of experience, felt immediacy, cannot but be a form of thought. The form of music, for instance, becomes form in the act of listening (188). Mind, he says, is an ‘active modification of the self’ (270). Art is a mode of knowledge and the transformation of knowledge (293).
7. Throughout these chapters his aim is twofold: first, as we have seen, to lock the artwork into the processes of consciousness itself as a mode of everyday thinking and feeling in which thought and cognition is a prerequisite. Second, as a consequence of ‘Experience’, to lock art into civic relationships, and thus to suggest that a mutual interaction between art and culture is inevitable and necessary. (Once you have claimed that it is every individual in a society who is responsible for art you have already conferred a social status upon it.)
8. It was necessary for Dewey’s understanding of the cultural importance of art to claim ‘Experience’ for civic life. He reiterates throughout his work that art is a fully civic matter, a fully human social relation (249), since art, and consequently Experience itself, is part of the objective world (151). Not the product of an isolated self, it belongs to a common world, ‘the common world in all its fulness’ (138). It creates communication in a world of gulfs (110). That world is necessarily interactive and it is a world that the artist has participated in making (163) and that ties him to ‘collective cultural life’ (333), a ‘public object in a common world’ (279).
9. Art is a language and language intrinsically requires a listener (111). The materials of all thought and belief come to the artist from others (274). And here is where Dewey moves from celebration to a reading of critique. If art is a ‘remaking of the experience of community’ (87), it cannot conform to already developed systems, moral or otherwise (350). Resistance, conflict and friction (341–2) are a necessary predicate of this interactive world, driven by the very nature of Experience as a full engagement of mind with its environment. Dewey assumes that art ‘breaks through barriers that divide human beings’ (248) even when it subverts accepted systems. What makes resistance and conflict still paradoxically civic acts and not acts of private subversion is that they require an act of communication, and communication is necessarily a participatory act. ‘Communication is not announcing things. Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular’ (248). Even subversive art is an act of participation. All art turns on communication.
10. It was obvious to Dewey that policy decisions followed upon his theory: his work on what was once called ‘progressive’ education, and with his friend, Albert C. Barnes, in disseminating art, were congruent with his aesthetics. And if we took his ideas seriously policy decisions would follow.
Conclusion
Dewey’s language is often clumsy and idiosyncratic and he has a habit of not knowing when predicates should stop. But I have preferred to write in his own terms as they suggest the depth and independence of his views (and I rather like his awkwardness). One of his favourite writers was Keats. And I will end with Keats’s language, celebrating democratic participation, quoted by Dewey in his last chapter:
man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results to his neighbour… every human being might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furze and Briars with here and there a remote Pine or Oak, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Eva Watson Schütze and is Public Domain.
1
John Dewey. The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 10, 1934, Art as Experience, ed. Jo Ann Boydston & Harriet Furst Simon (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
2
Dewey did not capitalise ‘experience’ in the interest of seeing it as an integral part of daily life. But I have violated his practice in this short piece as an expedient to emphasise its centrality.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a42
Published on: 17 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 162
Article download count: 18
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Armstrong, I. (2024), ‘The civic importance of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934)’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a42 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a42Crossref
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July 2023
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