Interdisciplinary Artworks

Interdisciplinary artworks have grown recently in popularity in the artworld. The more one collaborates with other artists the more attention they seem to be given, and this seems right after all, one has much more of a chance of drawing an audience if they are using both dance and the visual arts, as opposed to just one or the other. Attention is not the only impetus though and many artists just like working with other artists in the creation process. The question though here is: Is just simply working with another medium a sufficient condition for a work to be interdisciplinary? The prima facie (on the face of it) answer to this is "Yes." However, there seems to be a problem with this assertion as some of the performing arts will many times include this as part of their art form. The two common instances of this are dance and theater. Each of these, will most of the time include collaboration with different artists. Most dances are set to music, most theater is accompanied by a set designs or costume designs. All of these instances incorporate different artforms or different artists, and it doesn't seem like we want to call them interdisciplinary. Otherwise, every time a choreographer creates to music, they are creating an interdisciplinary work. This seems to me to be a mistake, as people don't generally refer to such works as interdisciplinary works. A possible answer to this is to say that there has to be two artists of different mediums involved in the creation of the work. The problem with this line of argument rests in that even though multiple artists are involved in the creation of an artwork, it still can end up with the same problem as the previous one, in that the other mediums are only there for the purpose of supporting the main medium. In the case of dance, visuals and music can be there to just simply support the dance. Even though different artists may collaborate, the results often end up with one artform being the main medium and the others being supporting or subservient to the main. I have often heard the phrase, "Be careful the projections don't distract from the enjoyment of the dance." This statement underlies my concern. In that, how can an artwork be interdisciplinary if all the disciplines are not as important or close to important to be enjoyed? The importance of multiple disciplines seems to me to be the sufficient condition for an artwork to be considered interdisciplinary. Now, I feel it is time to say what makes a good interdisciplinary artwork as opposed to a bad one. To be clear, I am not talking about the artwork being good. I am talking about how does one determine the goodness or badness of the interdisciplinary aspect of a work of art. So there are two aspects of evaluation I am distinguishing here. I can evaluate a work of art on it being a good work or a bad work. This I can evaluate for any work of art. What I want to focus on here, is how do I determine if the artist(s) who created the work, worked with the different disciplines of art well? This, I think, lies in the idea of emergent properties. So good interdisciplinarianism lies in how the different mediums being used mix and match so that they create something new. The good interdisciplinary artist(s) are ones which create the new work which is not reducible to its individual parts. They complement each other well without either being subservient to the other, and create something new in the process. This is, what I think, makes a good interdisciplinarianism, the ability create a new work of art which is irreducible to the individual mediums. Why is it necessary here to not have one simply subservient to the other medium? After all, it seems like there is more that is added when a dancework has music as opposed to not having music (at least most of the time) so it doesn't appear to be reducible to its individual parts, movement and sound. The reason is simply that it still is dance in this instance. Since the parts are all subservient to the dance, we do not get something that is interdisciplinary, just simply a dance. So the parts, the music and the dance need to work together to create something new. The two forms need to meld and create something anew. That is what makes for good interdisciplinarianism.

On The Kantian Sublime

Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime seeks to analyze a certain aesthetic affect which he terms as the sublime. He describes this affect as a, “feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.” An inhibition of vital forces indicates a displeasure and a stronger outpouring of those vital forces indicates a pleasure. This means that the sublime is both a pleasurable and an unpleasurable affect. Kant seeks to explain both how the sublime is rendered within an individual and why it is both pleasing and displeasing. In order to do this, Kant distinguishes between two different types of sublime experiences: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime.

The mathematically sublime, Kant states, results from two actions of the mind: apprehension and comprehension. Apprehension refers to the mind’s ability to receive sense-experience of an object. Comprehension, however, refers to the mind’s ability to perceive an object as a whole in order to make sense to the mind. Apprehension, the sense-experience of an object, occurs first and then comprehension is added to make sense of what is perceived. Sublimity occurs when, according to Kant, the mind is unable to comprehend what is apprehended, when there is so much to perceive, the mind cannot possibly grasp or understand what is perceived. What produces the painful part of the sublime affect in the mathematically sublime, states Kant, is that it shows the limits of the human mind to be able to comprehend experience. However, what makes this pleasurable is it allows us to recognize humanity’s obedience to the transcendental laws of reason to consistently try to perceive and understand an object as a whole, even when it is impossible to do so.

The dynamically sublime, by contrast, is produced by objects that arouse fear and respect due to how powerful those objects are. Kant states that though the object must arouse fear in us, we cannot be afraid of it to feel the sublimity resulting from our contact with it. For example, in order for us to feel the sublime affect from a thunderstorm, we must not be attempting to flee and fearful for our lives, but it does not reduce the respect for the power of the thunderstorm, just because we are not fearful for our own human lives. Kant states the pain part of this version of the sublime is a result of discovering our limits as human beings by encountering that which is much greater and more powerful than ourselves. The pain lies in the recognizition that humans are not the most powerful beings on Earth. The pleasure, on the other hand, lies in the recognition that in the presence of something greater, our Earthly concerns are small and insignificant. It makes us feel as if the worries and tribulations of the everyday are petty and insignificant in comparison to the greatness we are in the presence of.

I think that Kant gives us two good examples of the sublime and helps to illuminate the sublime by giving a theoretical framework in which to view such an elusive concept as the sublime. That being said, I do not think that Kant gives us a broad enough view of the sublime. It is unclear as to whether he thinks these are the only two varieties of the sublime affect. He does qualify his statements that these are the two types found in nature, and that all human-created sublimity is somehow an instantiation of these natural kinds of sublimity. However, this kind of statement relies upon Kant’s own metaphysical conception of the universe which may be drastically different from other metaphysical conceptions. I agree with Kant as to the affectual characteristics of the sublime (as quoted earlier); however, I believe I have a broader and more inclusive explanation as to how the sublime affect is induced in an individual. The sublime affect is induced only if the individual comes into contact with something which is not human, something which is not within the realm of the day-to-day existence of mankind, something which is not within the normal bounds of an individual’s comprehension of the world around us. Notice how this includes both Kantian types of the sublime, and is rendered from these types, but also recognizes the similarities between the two types: both types deal with things beyond and above human normal existence.

I also think that Kant mistakes, in his attempt to explain why the sublime affect is being aroused, the difference between an experience that is sublime and a revelation that is sublime. For example, I recently visited Rome and I saw the Pantheon, my experience in the Pantheon reflects Kant’s idea of the mathematically sublime. I was not able to comprehend what I was perceiving in the Pantheon due to how enormously vast it was, and the sublime affect was indeed induced within me to a great proportion. However, not once was I to think that I was limited and received pain or I had the power to obey transcendental laws of reason and received pleasure. Indeed, I do not think that the power of the human mind to obey transcendental laws of reason is even desirable, let alone pleasurable. This revelation which Kant talks about when in the presence of the mathematically sublime may in fact be a source of sublime pleasure. I do not deny that; however, what I do deny is that this recognition is the cause of the experience of the mathematically sublime to induce the peculiar pleasure/pain affect of the sublime. And what is really happening in Kant’s explanation, is two instances of the sublime affect: one of the experience and one of reflection upon the experience. It may be objected that these recognitions are actually subconscious recognitions and not ones we are aware of; however, I wish to give an explanation for why certain experiences are sublime which does not rely on speculations of subconscious activity. (For, if we are not aware of the thoughts how can we be so sure they are there?) The explanation is a rather simple one: contact with something that is not familiar is by its very nature pleasurable and unpleasurable. So, previously, I wrote that the condition which is required to produce the sublime affect is that we have contact with something alien, something inhuman, something foreign. Why does this cause displeasure? Well, because we generally like things which we have encountered before, things which are familiar, things which we understand, things that are foreign present a threat to how we learn and understand the world around us and we are likely to feel pain as a result of that. If this is painful, what’s pleasurable about it? Precisely the reason why it is displeasurable, it is not who we are, it is something new, something different, it brings us out of our normal everyday lives. Now something to note is that there are indeed exceptions to this. There are people who despise and find no pleasure in experiences which are foreign to them, and they are only a source of pain. Likewise, there are people who are the opposite, who love experiences foreign to them, and there is no pain involved at all. However the affect described by Kant, “[The] feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger,”still holds in these cases. What does not hold is the idea of the affect being both painful and pleasurable.

I would like to return now to a claim I made earlier: that there is both the sublime induced through experience and the sublime induced through reflection of an experience. This statement, if true, contradicts the Kantian assumption that the sublime exists only in the mind, only in the process of reflection. However, this idea that one way the sublime is instantiated is through the process of reflection has implications as to whether or not post-modern works of art should be considered works of art at all. The provocation of the sublime and the beautiful affects were once attempted to be used for defining art and differentiating what is art from what is not art. However, with the advent of modernism, and more specifically, post-modernism, those criteria have come into serious issues in that it does not seem like any works under the ‘post-modern’ category can induce the sublime or the beautiful affect. This is interesting in that ‘post-modern art’ is also sometimes described as ‘conceptual art’, in that the work provokes questioning of many different things, from metaphysics to politics to even the question of ‘What is Art?’ itself. So, if these works induce these questions, that means the audience must attempt to answer those questions, and if they do answer those questions, I wonder if the audience will achieve a sublime affect with the answer to the question. I wonder if when we discover a certain truth about the world, if we are not also experiencing the sublime affect of ‘[a] feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.” It certainly seems like the audience will; I know I have definitely felt the sublime from epiphanies in my contact with works of art. It seems like discovering truths about the world meets the prerequisite for the sublime, in that contact with the truth, with some kind of absolute truth is a foreign thing to many human beings, if not all human beings, in that humans live in a world of subjective experience, so the epiphany of objective truth would be an alien concept. The interaction with that alien concept could cause a sublime affect. So maybe it is still possible to differentiate art and non-art in the sense before the advent of post-modernism, in that post-modernism exists in order to inspire inquiry which may lead to a sublime epiphany.

Nietzsche, the Sublime, and Artistic Processes

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”, Nietzsche seeks to characterize Greek tragedy by appealing to two archetypal creative impulses: the Apollinian and the Dionysian impulses. The Apollinian is associated with the arts which seek to represent images or dreams, such as painting or sculpture. Nietzsche also seems to associate the Apollinian with the impulse to build and refine along with the impulse to create civilization and to impose law and order on the world. The Dionysian, by contrast, is mostly associated with arts which seek to intoxicate and are more elusive than the Apollinian. Examples of this would be arts such as music and dance. The Dionysian impulse would be associated with a more primal notion of art, one that is both destructive and life-renewing. It would be destructive in that it counters the taming impulse of the Apollinian while life-renewing because it allows a less refined and more innately ‘natural’ impulse to come out, behind the images of the Apollinian. Nietzsche uses these two art impulses to explain ancient Greek tragedy as a fusion between these two seemingly opposing forces. I am reminded at this point of the Heraclitus quote, “The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.” It seems that Nietzsche agrees with this sentiment (and from what I’ve read, he tends to refer to Heraclitus quite a bit). This quote seems to give us an insight into the reverence that Nietzsche gives tragedy throughout the book as a great art form. However, despite this, Nietzsche recognizes a third impulse, one he claims is essentially unartistic, the Socratic impulse. This impulse, Nietzsche claims, underlies all or most subsequent thought about the world. The impulse is that which seeks to classify and understand all things through the use of logic and reason. This is reflected through much of Western philosophy and science and Nietzsche seems to harbor a rather intense dislike towards this impulse as it tends to destroy the artistic impulses of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, and especially the latter. Insight in how the artistic impulses are suppressed by the Socratic impulse can be found in Kant’s, “The Analytic of the Sublime.” In it, Kant speaks about the mathematically sublime. This type of sublime affect is created by the experience of something so vast, that we cannot possibly comprehend how vast the experience is. However, Kant writes that if we are able to reduce our experiences into some kind of logical or break it down into parts which are manageable for the mind to comprehend, then we no longer receive the feelings of the sublime. Complete understanding for Kant is contrary to the human experience of art. Indeed, it does seem that at least prima facie, that if we understand a work of art it ceases to be able to give us aesthetic experience. It seems that if we ever discover the secrets of art, we will cease to enjoy art as much. This is why Nietzsche dislikes the Socratic impulse so much, is because it hurts our ability to appreciate the world as art, and we then see it as a scientific, reductionist world where everything can be determined empirically and reduced to mere numbers and equations. However, Nietzsche realizes that something about the Socratic impulse is actually inherently a Dionysian impulse, that to discover the world and be able to understand the world, to face a world of so many different unknowns with rational thought, to resist staying in an obscure world, in which there seem to be many more questions than there are answers, is in fact a sublime task in and of itself. So what motivates this Socratic impulse is, in actuality, an art impulse. It seems like what Nietzsche may be concluding in this book is that to be an artist is inevitable to being a human being. Even when we attempt to compartmentalize and reduce the world to numbers and pure reason, we are being motivated by essentially artistic and irrational impulses, not the rational. But Nietzsche leaves us at the end of his book with a problem: science and rational thought pushes at epistemic boundaries. This means that science and rational thought cannot possibly account for all of the mysteries of the universe, even theoretically. And rational thought inevitably will understand that it has its own limits. This can be seen today as the philosophy of science is beginning to see certain problems that arise from its positivistic and naturalistic approaches to philosophy. There are certain things that logic, reason, and trust in an empirical world simply cannot tell us. Nietzsche uses an example from the narrative of Socrates that we receive from Plato. He gives us a scene where Socrates receives dreams from the gods commanding him to play music, and although Socrates condemns playing music as essentially worthless, he cannot help but think that maybe he just simply cannot understand why music is not worthless, that there is something about art and its impulses that cannot be understood through logic or reason. This demonstrates and symbolizes to Nietzsche the limits of logic to understand the world and how logic itself leads to the embracing of that which we cannot understand, the embracing of art and its mysteries. This leads us to a strange dilemma though: how do we move on from here? It seems that science and rational thought propelled us forward, and still continue to do so, but it seems like we are steadily pushing up against its boundaries. Should we just simply embrace the fact that we cannot possibly know everything, even with the most rational and logical approach? And let ourselves be dragged down into nihilism? Should we continue to attempt to approach the world rationally and logically and attempt to learn all we can, even when rational and logical thought itself has shown the futility of this? It seems like we are in an age where we have to both accept the futility of rational thought but still use rational thought to search for the answers we cannot obtain, in hope that we can make the best out of the situation we have. We have to be ‘agnostic’ much like the Socratic ideology wishes us to be, we must at the same time attempt to know what we can and admit that we cannot know for absolute certainty any of it. But I sense a bit of optimism in the end of Nietzsche’s work: What if we can find a way to fuse both the Socratic impulses with the artistic impulses of the Apollinian and the Dionysian? What if we can do like what the Ancient Greeks did and fuse two opposing forces together? What results from art and science working together? How do we even go about attempting to achieve this cooperation of the two impulses? How do we negotiate these two opposing impulses into propelling us to lead happy and fulfilling lives? Is there something ultimately sublime and fulfilling about existing at a perpetual standstill between reason and art? I wonder if art becomes greater when it exists at the edge of the possible knowledge we can obtain. If we push the limits of our rational and logical knowledge to its greatest boundaries, then it seems as if art can benefit by being as great as it possibly can be, by holding out on the edge of reason. This way no one can understand art completely, no matter how hard they try. But art and the irrational pushes on the boundaries in the opposite way by showing truths that cannot be possibly be captured through reason, and gives reason a challenge for it to attempt to understand. Now we are left with a beautiful duality of knowledge. We have nature being challenged to become so great it cannot be understood by reason and reason to attempt to understand what is brought to it by nature. (I’m using nature here to symbolize the irrational or the artistic impulses). This way we are in a perpetual conflict, but one which is mutually beneficial to our understanding and our appreciation of the world.