Eli’s Abstract

I’ve injected a few comments and added some more suggestions at the end.
Eli plans to investigate mimesis in music within the context of questions I and IV. He posits two questions that he will track throughout the essay: “Does live music encourage mimetic exploration? What parts of a live music be evidence for can be considered mimetic art and what parts serve other functions?”[quotations from Eli’s abstract]. The paper will begin by inquiring into the nature of art-mimesis. The next move is to posit a series of postulations characterizing a species of mimesis unique to music.

The essay is divided into five movements.
I. Assertion that “mimesis is the reproduction of something or someone else” and that this process [or activity?] spawns a “micro-world.” [Can’t there be a micro and macro world in a given mimetic world? Why did you choose this terminology?]

II. Mimetic presentations [different from representations?] are simulacrums of the objects they depict—particularly with music.
III. “We use experiences from our lives to supplement the mimetic material that we are receiving” (e.g. “we appreciation love songs on a whole new level when we are in love.”)

IV. “When we experience mimetic art we appreciate the medium and the thing that the art represents. The medium of music is very powerful, the mimetic content may not be as strong as in a play or a book but people enjoy music much more easily then they enjoy the wordplay of literature or the brushstrokes of a painting.” [‘worldplay’ and ‘brushstrokes’ are very precise features relative to their medium. I think it’s more effective to juxtapose mediums on the same level.]

V. What mimetic content in a work, if any, has potential to inspire mimetic experiences? Eli suggests that art is mimetic and that “audiences coordinate imaginatively with the author” to appreciate this content.

VI. Inject further analysis extrapolated from personal experience with music.

Comments:
--Pick terms that you can narrowly define in order to avoid ambiguity. These notions were particularly ambiguous for me: ‘reproduction,’ signposts,’ ‘the thing that the art represents’ and ‘appreciating a medium.’

--In III you say that “love songs are perfect examples” and in IV that it is easier for people to enjoy music than other mediums.” These are really bold assumptions that may distract the reader from what you’re really trying to focus on.

--It seems like your essay is more focused on questions III and IV. It’s definitely worthwhile to start with an exposition of different theories to lay down a groundwork and arrive at a working definition of mimesis but since it doesn’t seem that you plan to develop your conception of mimesis, I think you should use question I in the capacity of supporting or providing a framework for your dialectical journey so you have more leverage to hone in on some of the specific points you bring up.

-- I think improvisation in music would be an interesting addition to V. Jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter said that when he improvises he often pretends he’s an auxiliary or background character in a movie such as the guy chillin in the corner of a bar away from the main action. This seems to be an interesting unison of real-world experience and participation in mimesis. Jazz musicians look both too both features in music, such as chord changes and interpretive acts of the other musicians, and real-world experiences for inspiration. Actually this speaks to III and V, which seem to be close cousins anyway. Maybe consider combining them?

--II-VI don’t seem to have potential to develop II. I really like II and think it’d be interesting if you can address it throughout.

Cool. This topic really speaks to me as a musician and I think you’ve thought up some interesting perspectives to approach mimesis at work in music.
Good luck!

Progress; Man’s single most greatest invention, yet

This past Saturday I photographed a dance performance at Royce (UCLA Live). According to the program, the piece “explores themes of power, free will and survival instinct through the story of a group of servants trapped in the basement of their abusive mistress’ home.”

Mimetic much?

A lot of ideas popped up in my head while I was shooting the performance. Some inspired by the performance itself and others retrospectively, which as an activity in itself raises some interesting questions. Do we re-enter a make-believe world created for us in retrospectively reflecting on a performance (or any work of art) or is this process an act of recalling the cognitive content and emotional states experienced during the performance? Do all mental states that arise during a performance result solely from the performance itself or can we have mental states while participating in make believe that aren’t manifested by the fictional milieu? Can any mental state come about independently of our sensory experiences? Maybe participation in make believe can yield an exception?

Something I've been thinking about since starting shooting performance is if this activity counts as art (?). Am I merely documenting performance or could my activity be compared to that of photographing in the real world or creating my own fictional world in the studio? Are my pictures just a simulacrum of the performance or do they capture the passion and meaning of the performance in a different form?

I consider my performance photography art but not to same extent as my ‘fine art’ and photojournalistic work--not necessarily because of how the photos are perceived by viewers but in terms of how I feel engaged to the process. I certainly employ the same technique and skill set while doing performance photography that I do in my other work. Variables like changes in lighting and the inherent precariousness of the performers--of human beings themselves demand the same sensitivity to these sorts of things as their real-world counterparts. Still, I don’t find photographing performers as sexy as choosing the ‘performers’ and milieu for myself. When my colleagues or the artists ask me if I got good pictures I always say half-jokingly that it would be impossible not to with the good stuff happening on stage.

But still, maybe I am in a sense cheating in marketing my concert work as mine. Legally the work is mine. I hold exclusive rights to these images. Does the law match our concept of ownership in this case? Where does our concept of ownership come from? Is assigning/valuing ownership intuitive, an inherent part of our nature, to structure our world via formulization and nomenclature? Do copywrite laws exist because we see fairness in financial compensation, or social transgression in stealing ownership? And from a mimesis standpoint, to what extent must mimetic representation differ from actual form until we can perceive it to be interpretive enough to credit the artist?

These questions first occurred to me when after shooting behind the scenes for a music video, the director, Luck Gilford, who is also a fantastic photographer (http://lukegilford.com/), said that my photos were great, not as documentary material but as works of art in themselves. I was surprised that he would give this compliment because all I had really done was parasite off his work. I told him so. He replied that arguably all photography is parasitic in this way--that the photographer can only apprehend the tangible formal properties of what lies before him.

Luke's comment seems to suggest that perhaps a process that doesn't involve interpretation and is only a process of mimetic representation.

It took several years before photography was generally accepted by the art community for this reason. Many artists, particular those in the business of portraiture (fearing loosing business), complained that photography was too mimetic to be art.

Now of course photography is ubiquitously accepted as an art form. But the original controversy surrounding photography calls attention to a general trend of correlation between how close an artist can come to realistically imitating real world form and the reluctance to accept these mediums as ‘art.’ A big part of this is the perceived ‘ease’ by which new art forms can faithfully capture real world.

In a big way these controversies are a product of our times. The spirit of advancement, of progress, has seeped into our attitudes and expectations of art. Technology advances so quickly now that mediums don’t have time to fade before new ones begin. The introduction of photography would have seem like magic to 99.9% of our ancestry. The technology we have today is unbelievable compared to what was going down a decade ago. As a result we’ve come to value things in measure of superiority over their predecessors.

This phenomenon has profoundly influenced how we appreciating, shifting our perception of innovation from prospect to expectancy. For the first of ever in Western art there is a division between art conditioned for aesthetic appreciation alone and art recognized for its innovative potential. ‘Modern art,’ art that seeks to redefine itself through our contemporary cultural values, is accordingly mimetic of our value of progress and held notions of temporal advancement in art, either in critique or accordance with.

The notion that art advances like technology (especially by way of new technology) has pitted generations of artists against one another, which in itself is representative of what has become art’s guiding force and quintessence. Critics of contemporary forms and in particular those utilizing technology complain that such forms cheapen the cultural value of art--that art is becoming more prized as a pageant for the latest technology or for its shock value.

As a photographer I am both sympathetic to and resentful of these sentiments. Since the move into the digital age there has been a trend among many photographers to use powerful software like Photoshop to distort images from their likeness into computer enhanced spectacles, IMO. Many photographers lament this shift, complaining that overly post-processed images cheapens photography to a technological spectacle and draws the appreciators attention away from traditional artistry such as composition, attention to detail and command over natural lighting.

Adding to this apprehension is of the millions owners of ‘smart’ cameras that automatically adjust for exposure. All the technical prowess needed is literally at the tip of one's fingers. Photographers worry viewers will lose their appreciating for the artistry of the medium, who can now apprehend form with the ease of pushing a button. A parallel in music is GarageBand, software that allows the user to make (or compose?) music by drag and dropping pre-recorded loops.

On the other hand, I am also resentful of having these sentiments myself. Many artists recognize that they too were often distained by giants on which they stand yet they antagonize emerging mediums with the same distain. Some film traditionalists, especially at the introduction of digital photography, complain that digital photography bypasses the multitude of creative work that can be done in the darkroom. Many earlier film traditionalists who used large and medium format film had similar complaints of their successors who abandoned these high quality formats in favor of 35mm film for its portability and stability. And this doesn’t even bring us back to the original photographers who faced criticism from the art world for their use of technology.

This paradoxology has generated a huge amount of discourse examining art qua art and calling attention to what has become the crux of controversy in art; the terror that many artists and audience feel when something seems to be blurring the lines between an art and non-art. I'll pick up on this in my followup post.

-Shalev

Sup 161. I’m Shalev.

I guess I’m pretty late on this. I missed the last two lectures and I was going to wait untill after next class to write something but I’ve been reflecting on my impression from first lecture and the readings and have some thoughts to share.

This class combines two of my favorite things, aesthetics and philosophy.

Aesthetcs because I’m a musician, photographer (www.shalevnetanel.photoshelter.com), and human.

Philosophy because of my existential crisis...and the money :D

I’ve also got a page with some of my favorite quotes about aesthetics and philosophy on my website. Let me know if you have any good ones! (Besides "an original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotes.")

Coming from the aesthetics side, I’m very interested in the psychology of art; what mechanisms are in play when we appreciate or create art? When does inspiration become conception and conception become form? How does an artist, or audience, perceive the journey of mental state to form? Is inspiration impoverished because we can only manifest into the socially constructed forms of art, or are we inspired because these forms exist as vehicle for expression? Creativity is recognized as the chief faculty for producing art; what other faculties, if any, are in play, intrinsic, or necessary to the creative process? I think the faculties we employ to appreciate art are the same we use in our moral decision making (?).

As for philosophy, I’m interested in the philosophy of language treatment of aesthetics. What is meaningful dialogue about art? Do aesthetic statements have any semantic content? Can an aesthetic statement be verifiable, true or false, in virtue of its semantic content? How can we assert aesthetic thoughts if they are not? Is it right to compare the semantic content of aesthetic statements with those employed in everyday speech?

I’m also really interested in how evolutionary psychology bears on aesthetics. So maybe I’ll do some posts about that if there’s something cool going on with mimetics.

Mimesis.

Probably the most technical and pendantic post...but mimesis ties to gothr some of these things I’ve been thinking about. Some of my ideas here were also roused by the Shakespeare excerpt at the beginning of Walton’s article. Particular the lines:

“Doth glance from heaven to earth from earth to heaven.

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation, and a name”

Mimesis gave me some insight to these language/aesthetic things I’ve been thinking about...so this posts is more focused on a general philosophy language picture of form vs. non-from. I do but I hone in on aesthetics towards the end. The conclusion (of this post) I reach about mimesis and aesthetics is: Every form is mimetic. And ‘art’ is art in virtue of possessing a special species of mimeticism unique to it.

I’m using 'art' here in a very vague and ambiguous sense to avoid the discussion of what forms are art. The content of this post doesn’t require a determined definition so whatever’s art to you goes. Though, I am more focused on tangible art forms in this post although I feel my ideas can apply to any sort of art (literature, music, performance arts), but its a lot tricker to deal with these forms, at least with the ideas I’m working with, so I’ll save this work for another post.

My working definition of mimesis is ‘comprehension of form in virtue of its nature.’ I’m conceiving nature to be like Greeks physis, which in a very loose way can described as entities that are what they are without external influence. As I conceive them, these ‘entites’ exist as intangible qualities that we give form and meaning to by sublimating these qualities into properties. In aggregate these properties come to represent an object or subject in natural language. Form is this sort of unique collection of features inherent features by which we recognize and talk about it. For instance, we perceive the form ‘tiger’ in virtue of a class of properties that represent its ‘tigerness.’ These properties are not intrinsic to Dthat* (entity that we call tiger) [*demonstrative], a non-form in physis, which has no properties; but become inherent to form as constituents of its meaning. Obvious examples of form are tangible things like art, architecture, cookies, guitars, tiger. Less obvious are forms that have a mix of tangible and abstract properties like music, literature, government, education. The most complex, and probably controversial forms are those to that have no tangible form but that we perceive to have properties; virtues or demerits of character ‘bravery,’ ‘moral fiber;’ concepts ‘justice;’ and mentalities faculties; mental illness, bravery, creativity; or concepts like justice, moral fiber, piety.

The transition of non-form to properties occurs on the individual level but it is the social consensus of what properties represent a given form that give it a (more or less) fixed meaning. While the first step occurs on an individual level, most individuals don’t directly have the opportunity to contribute properties to a given form. Most of us comprehend form by learning about its properties from people who have first hand acquaintance, such as with Dthat(the thing we call tiger) contribute properties to the literal meaning of ‘tiger.’ Anyone can contribute properties to intangible forms or metaphorical meanings of the simple sort but not everyone has the same wherewithal or prowess to do so. APA has more power to construct form from mental phenomena than the layperson. I guess this is sorta like the knowledge by acquaintance in the sense that psychologists are trained to look out for these sorts of things and hence have first hand access the apropos discourse.

We don’t think through this process whenever we learn about new things or as our concepts of certain entities evolve. However, we often do take a step back and consider form (Dthat(x)) in relation to non-form (Dthat (entity)) when examining the meaning of a form. When psychologists inquire into the nature of the mind, they pose the question of 'what is the nature of the mind; have apprehended the correct properties of Dthat[entity] that we call schizophrenia (for example) or are we missing something?'

Not included in this picture are natural urges like ‘hunger,’ ‘pain,’ ‘pleasure;’ and the sorts of raw feeling-sensations triggerd by tangible or intangible stimuli such as the sensation of experiencing a sunset or being moved by a speech. These things are physistic, having no external influence (only causation) that give or maintain form. Thus the best we can do to talk about sensations is to construct lexical allusions that only denote sensations but doesn't attribute properties to Dthat[demonstrative](sensation). We use words to provide expression for what has not yet been committed to form but are still comprehensible in language as awareness of these sensations is a property of sentience, which is a formalized concept. Such terms can only be predicated to take on metaphorical or figuartive meaning. “Happiness is a warm gun’ is palpably metaphorical but is nonsensical as a literal statement. Sensations may seem similar to the forms of the third (complex) sort but these forms can be predicated in virtue of its properties; “bravery is being scared being acting anyway,” “creativity is a capacity to perceive non-standard analogies between things.” On the other hand, pain cannot be predicated beyond the scope of what the word ‘pain’ serves to identify. We are limited to stating “‘pain’ is a bodily sensation.” Although we can substitutes the words in this proposition for ones with similar meanings; “agony is something we feel;” but it is words and not properties that are being replaced and therefore this operation has no bearing on semantic content. Thus we have to resort to metaphors to talk about sensations like ‘hunger,’ ‘pain’ and the sensations. We say things like “the pain is sharp” or hyperboize (also a kind of metaphor) “I’m hungry enough to eat an elephant.’ We also rely on metaphors (and art) to express interpretive sensuality; “the poem is so powerful it cries before me,” “love is a maze,” “surfing is a way of life.” These simulacrumic forms exist in a sort of purgatory between form and non-form and are sources of tension in language due to our inability to properly define them but our desire and need to talk about them.

Aesthetics.

"Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest."--Friedrich Nietzsche

The foremost appeal of art is it a vehicle to construct form representing the intangible qualities that language fails to capture. Art is a vehicle for manifesting the intangible sensations; Dthat sensation(‘hunger’), Dthat(‘pain’) and ones we don’t even have names for: Dthat(the sensation I get from watching a sunset), into forms that we can treat in language as we do actual forms. Art allows us to manifest our raw sensations into form while simultaneously bypassing and invoking real-world form.

The force guiding this phenomenon is mimeticism.

Art is mimetic on two levels. The first level is on the same pier as non-forms of art as we can predicate the forms of art in virtue of tangible features (including soundwaves and human movement) and social value, as we would actual forms.

Inside the art world a special of mimesis at play that allows us to predicate sensations with features of art. We do so by using features of art to predicate Dthat(sensation) by stripping an actual form of its properties in exchange for a select group of properties that is represented in art as features. An indication of this is that we perceive features as being true to the sensations the artist intends to represent or as failing to capture the intended thought content. We just know that a painting of a rainbow and unicorns flocking in a meadow cannot represent sorrow. On the other hand, a painting heavy in dark blues, gray and black is fertile for statements of this sort and we can predicate ‘sorrow’ in virtue features; “sorrow has broody colors ” Maybe these kind of aesthetics statements are still a sort of metaphor. But regardless, they allow us to talk to make the same sorts of propositions about sensations that we use to talk about actual forms.

Of course we also treasure art for aesthetic appeal. This goes with out saying. But my idea that art primarily serves as supplement to natural language might be more controversial. Some art certainly is created just for our aesthetic appreciation, but I believe we are not invested in art purely for aesthetic pleasure alone but as a platform giving leverage to talk about what can’t be expressed using everyday language.

We appreciate art by making an activity of measuring the depiction of an object to its features in the real world in virtue of art-mimeticism; both in relation to Dthat(sensation or entity) and to non-forms of art (actual forms), which pose as physistic relative to art form. In relation to art, these non-forms of art exist without external influence until the artist grabs hold. Art exploits this tension between non-form (physis) and form by asserting a distinction between forms of art and forms that are non-art by treating actual form(properties) as art-form(features) or Dthat(sensation) as art-form(features).

Art is a spectacle of contradiction. We are captivated by art because of its inadequacy to be what it is not; an invariably ill fated attempt to capture the intangible qualities of physis--qua asserting actual forms to be art-form and representing physis in these forms; fundamentally mimetic and a vehicle to express the intangible in language by way of exploiting this dialectic.

Thoughts?

Forthcoming: Mimesis and controversy in art; a starving dog, urinal, September 11^th and the early twentieth century photography scare.