 Okay, hello again. Welcome back to our great text discussion of John Dewey's Art as Experience. Today we're discussing Chapter 5, The Expressive Object. Now the term expression refers both to an act, according to Dewey, or a process, you might say, as well as the result of that process, or the product of that act. And Dewey is fond of pointing out in various works that there are lots of terms that work this way. He mentions construction here, construction is the process, and a construction is what you create. Work, similarly, you do work and produce a work. History, the history unfolds, right, and then we talk about it as history. And experience, similarly, you have experiences, and then at the end what you have accumulated is experience. Now, last chapter focused mainly on the active expression, okay, and so it obviously focused more on the activities of making and doing that are involved in the creation of art. This chapter focuses more on the result, okay, and so also has relatively more about the appreciation or consumption of art than the last chapter did. Now, you'll remember that we discussed last time the question of what is expressed in an active expression, or we might put it a little bit differently here. What does the art object express? Another way to ask the same question is to ask, what does the art object represent? So we might think in terms of a few examples, right, like what does this portrait express or represent? Does it just express a representation of what this guy looks like? Albrecht Dürer in this case is the self-portrait. Does it just represent him or does it represent something else? What about this portrait, so to speak, if that's what that is? What does it represent? What does it express? Take this painting of a bridge that by Van Gogh, by Vincent Van Gogh, that Dürer refers to in the chapter, what does it represent? What does it express? Is what it represents different from what is represented in this photograph of a bridge? Or do they simply differ because the photograph is more recent, of a more recent bridge than Van Gogh, from a different angle, say. What does this painting by Mondrian represent? What does it express, if anything? One common or perhaps naive account of what an art object is supposed to represent is the subject matter it's about, right? You might think of this as a kind of copy theory of representation. And then the associated sort of aesthetic criteria would be how well does it depict, how accurately does it depict the thing that it represents, right? And we might see on this account modern art, which is non-representational, as sort of somehow defective. Now, Dewey obviously rejects this theory. He refers to Matisse, who by the way did this lovely lithographic portrait of Dewey. They're on the right side. So Dewey refers to Matisse, who's supposed to have said that the camera was a great boon to painters, precisely because it relieved them of any apparent necessity of copying objects, right? So the idea is that the painter previously had a kind of task set on them of copying the visual presentation of objects that the camera freed them from the necessity of that, something like this. A related view that Dewey talks about is the notion of representation in the sense of symbolic representation. So in a symbolic representation, meaning is a kind of standing for something else or a leading to, right? So algebraic symbols stand for numbers, quantities in a physical equation stand for measurable properties of things. Road signs point to or lead you to places and tell you how to get there, how long it will take you to get there and so on, right? So these kinds of symbolic representations represent or have their meaning by virtue of standing for something else that's different from them. Artistic representation, on the other hand, Dewey tells us, is somehow immediate or inherent in this experience itself. So art works create an experience and the meaning of the art is in the experience of the artwork. Now, of course, he qualifies this in a certain way. He tells us that a poem and picture present material pass through the olympic of personal experience. They have no precedence in existence or in universal being. But nonetheless, their material came from the public world and so has qualities in common with the material of other experiences. While the product awakens in other person's new perceptions of the meanings of the common world. So, you know, a poem or a painting, it has a subject matter. It has images or words in it that come with prior meanings, okay, from our common experience. But they put them into a new set of relationships. You might think of Dewey as saying in this passage that all art is a kind of remix. Although Dewey didn't know about remix, I think he might appreciate the sentiment there. Dewey tries to get at this distinction in a different way when he makes a contrast between science and art. So he says science, on the one hand, states meanings, whereas art expresses meanings. So the idea is that science is meant to somehow describe the way things are, apart from the description, whereas art expresses meanings through itself. There's no separation from the expression and the meaning of the expression. So let's come back to this picture by Vincent Van Gogh, this painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Now, Dewey describes Van Gogh, or he, sorry, Dewey quotes Van Gogh describing this image to his brother. He says, in a letter to his brother Theo, I have a view of the rhone, the iron bridge at Trin Quatale, in which the sky and the river are the color of absence, the quays a shade of lilac, the figures leaning on their elbows on the parapet blackish, the iron bridge, an intense blue with a note of vivid orange in the blue background, and a note of intense malachite green. Another very crude effort and yet I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken and therefore utterly heartbreaking. Look at the picture again for a second, you can see some of that, the lilac, quays, the absence, colored sea or water rather in air, the blackish figures, the blue bridge. You can't see heartbreak perhaps, but you can see a lot of the other things he describes. Now Dewey says, these words taken by themselves are not expression, they only hint at it. The expressiveness, the aesthetic meaning, is the picture itself. Okay, and he says, you know, he gives us the quote from the letter and the picture, or asks us to think about the picture in order to get at, quote, the difference between statement and expression. Okay, so the copy theory or the symbolic theory of art is problematic, okay, in terms of understanding the meaning of art. The alternative account, what he's in a way calls the esoteric theory of art, says on the other hand that the subject matter of art is irrelevant, what is depicted can only sort of distract from the value of art. And it's the esoteric theory that might be taken as holding up abstract art as sort of the primary example, because it's freed from those common associations and sort of the depictions of the everyday. So this is a piece by Kandinsky called Composition 7 from 1913. So Dewey may have been familiar with it, or other abstract work by Kandinsky. So Dewey rejects also the esoteric theory of art, and he does that because he thinks it ignores the way even in abstract art that the artist and the perceiver are bringing in pre-existing meanings. I mean, even, you know, look at these marks on a page. I mean, these are not fully pieces of art. They're just a drawing exercise taken off a random website, so different attempts at a drawing exercise. And you can ask, are these lines just meaningless marks on the page, or do they bring with them some kind of meanings from past experiences, some associations with either physical things that they resemble or emotional states that they might convey? And, you know, Dewey tells us that we should expect that to be the case, that we should have some associations, some meanings that we attribute to these lines in virtue of just their appearance, and that the artist uses that as raw material. You look at these lines, are they different from the first set, not just in their shape, but in how they make you feel, what they suggest? I mean, obviously they don't signify anything, they don't depict anything in particular, but do they nevertheless carry some kind of meaning, at least embryonically? You know, similarly, these different lines and marks, or these, right? Do these have some kind of weight, some kind of familiarity, some kind of meaningfulness or value to you? Okay, we'll probably talk about some of those examples in class. So, you know, just keep those in mind. How did you feel about all those line drawings or those marks on the page, and how were they different from each other? So that's all I really wanted to cover today. Of course, there are many more interesting things going on in the chapter that I didn't touch on, as there always are, but please feel free to raise them in class or in the discussion boards or in the comments of this video. That's it for today. See you again soon.