Navigating Global Cultures: A Phenomenological Aesthetics for Well-Being in the Twenty-first Century

DAVID W. ECKER

The invitation by the editor of this journal to write a short review of Eugene Kaelin's contributions to the literature of aesthetics and art education from a multicultural perspective comes as a double challenge. First, there is the problem of objectivity. His distinguished scholarship in the field of phe­nomenological aesthetics is not easily separable in my mind from the ideas that arose from our many collaborations over nearly four decades. In vari­ous articles, institutes, and conferences we have addressed the topics of aesthetic education, the training of teachers in the arts, and the notion of aes­thetic inquiry as educational research. What is more stressful, however, is the fact that we are both nearing academic retirement. A critique of his teaching and writing is also by implication a kind of review of my own professional life as an art educator.

As a fairly aggressive Korean War veteran and newly enrolled as one of Fred Logan's graduate students in Madison, Wisconsin, in the Fall of 1957, I walked up the hill to Bascom Hall and found the chairman of the phi­losophy department. "Does anyone here teach aesthetics?" I asked. "Yes, Professor Kaelin. You will find him down the hall, last office on the left."

Within the week my fellow art students and I were bringing our paint­ings, sculpture, and prints to Kaelin's class to see whether aesthetics - and his teaching - had anything to do with what we were making. The follow­ing year Gene and I had our paper" Aesthetics in Public School Art Teach­ing" published in the College Art Journal. (1) But let's move this narrative "fast-­forward" to how my students have responded to "phenomenology in the arts."

To date, hundreds of New York University doctoral students in the arts and arts profession have tested "The Limits of Aesthetic Inquiry: A Guide to Educational Research," our 1972 essay, (2) in my classes in aesthetics and art criticism. Many Ph.D. candidates have made methodological use of the "levels of discourse" - criticism, metacriticism, theory, meta theory - to de­limit their investigations and to insure that their "knowledge claims" were grounded in their "aesthetic experience" of an "object/event," the first level. D.A. candidates have employed a phenomenological approach to the mak­ing of art in a critical context, and several Ed.D. students have devised teaching strategies built upon Kaelin's philosophical aesthetics. An early ex­ample is Barry Lieberman's" A Phenomenological Approach to Aesthetic Education in Secondary School Painting Classes. (3)

A recent dissertation is now a book, Larry Lavender's Dancers Talking Dance: Critical Evaluation in the Choreography Class. (4) But he had already em­ployed Kaelin's concepts - for example, "depth structures"- in his article "Understanding Interpretation," in Dance Research Journal.

Kaelin uses the term "depth" conceptually not spatially. Accordingly, the surface features of a dance - e.g., its movements, gestures, choreo­graphic patterns, the dancers' body attitudes, and movement quali­ties - may be experienced by a particular viewer as deepening into specific images and ideas. For example, a movement motif built around the raising of an arm may be experienced in the total context of the dance, as suggesting or as representing a greeting. When this occurs, we may say that the surface structure of the dance - the raised arm motif - has "deepened" into the image of a greeting, in much the same way that a series of vertical and near-vertical lines in a painting may deepen into a representation of a forest. (5)

Following Kaelin, Lavender argues that critics must ground their interpre­tation of dance's meaning in the visible properties of the work, and must direct critical attention back to the raised-arm motif, for example, and other surface properties, in order to describe how and why it is appropriately seen as a greeting. Thus interpretation is a continuation of phenomenological description.

Lavender cites the following passage from Kaelin's An Aesthetics for Art Educators which prompted his own thoughts: "A given artwork may be thought to express anything consistent with the structure of the work; and it is to this extent that a work of art may be said to express more than one thing for the author and for different viewers., (6) Larry has since stated that Kaelin's work was important to him in challenging author-centered inter­pretive strategies that assume that the central task of the critic is to deter­mine the author's "true" or "correct" meaning. That assumption, he wrote, "puts a chilling effect on the creative efforts of students who feel that they have to have something specific to say before beginning to explore the ma­terials of their medium." He continues, "My entire method for teaching critical skills ... is grounded on the idea that we must first describe the aes­thetic dimension of the work (Kaelin's surface and depth structures) and set aside (bracket) inquiry into the historical/ cultural dimensions. (7)

Here is a good place to interject four multicultural propositions, to con­tinue the dialogue with Larry and other former students who collectively represent the major cultures of the world, but especially with Gene Kaelin, my former teacher, in the pursuit of the lifelong interests we both share.

These propositions are the precipitate of intense discussions with stu­dents over many years as together we have rehearsed the successive moves of twentieth-century art theory: Wittgenstein, Weitz, Danto, Dickie; Croce, Collingwood, Dewey, Beardsley; Husser!, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kaelin. To some extent, the propositions also reflect the concerns of artists and art educators I have met in Beijing and Baghdad, Rome and Rio de Janeiro, Cairo and Cagliari, New Delhi and New York-especially the peo­ple of the multicultural community of the East Village in lower Manhattan, where the N.Y.D. art department is located.

1. The object/event (X) can be perceived as a work of art (Y) only in a cultural context (2). The "same" artifact or performance may/may not be viewed as "art" by the insider/outsider. In the context of Western aesthetics, for exam­ple, it could be argued that seeing an "X" as a "Y" is primarily a perceptual! imaginative act in pre-reflective/reflective consciousness.

2. Cross-cultural aesthetic inquiry requires participation in an artistic activity of another culture for the purpose of understanding it on its own terms. Western terminology is provisional. The student would learn how to think in the categories of another world view, if not how to empathize with the feelings and attitudes of other individuals and groups. He or she will learn that many non-Western languages have no word for art and that the Chinese civilization got along without a word for aesthetics until early in this century.(8)

3. A multicultural aesthetics, having no "universals" to investigate, can employ only alternative cultural concepts, rules, values in addressing intercultural issues. Appropriating images and ideas from other cultures may introduce "loan words" into critical discourse and yield hybrid art forms, but the critic can neither name nor point to essences that recover/transcend the conventions/ creations of a particular culture. Just as poems cannot be translated, their interpreted meanings cannot be transmitted across cultures intact.

4. A complete multicultural art education program would advance four irreduc­ible kinds of understanding: an inside understanding of the "arts" of other culture(s), but also an outsider's understanding of the arts of one's own culture; an outside understanding of other cultures, and (not least) an inside understanding of one's own cultural heritage.

With regard to this last proposition, my students have tended to identify the "outside understanding of other cultures" with survey courses of world art, with their infinite number of slides, which ultimately reduce the images projected to the Eurocentric terms of Western-now Postmodern-art his­tory. In different ways, each proposition raises for them the question of their own cultural identities (perhaps the eye of the storm over multicul­turalism in the United States). But it is learning to understand how others see us and understanding the other on the other's terms that would seem to place the most demands on "an existential aesthetic" aspiring to serve a truly multicultural art education. It remains problematic for me whether one can authentically participate, even momentarily, in an artistic activity from a cultural perspective other than one's own. And if one can imagina­tively escape one's native time, place, and horizon, what are the risks and rewards for achieving such understanding?

Now the suspension of one's own cultural perspective (Husserl's "natu­ral attitude") is, of course, the "bracketing" step in Kaelin's phenomenologi­cal method of art criticism. The aim is certainly not to gain another cultural perspective, but to describe the work of art as it presents itself to conscious­ness. From the multicultural concerns sketched above, my problem is not so much with surface counters as perceived but with depth counters as imag­ined. Seeing an "X" as a "Y" does require that phenomenological descrip­tion become interpretation, but it would seem that interpretations "for different viewers" are culture-bound-not to mention the possibility of radically divergent meanings attributed to the "same" object/event in lan­guages as disparate as Chinese and Arabic. As I read Heidegger's Being and Time, albeit with the guidance of E. F. Kaelin's "reading for readers," the hermeneutic circle of human understanding cannot transcend time, place, and culture. (9) In Kaelin's words, "We can only explain the novel entities in our worlds in terms of what we already understand, the unknown by the known. (10) But here I am already anticipating his response. So let me report how Brazilian professors of the arts responded to these same issues.

Invited to address a national conference in Brasilia on the teaching of arts in higher education, I distributed a "hand-out" depicting the levels of aesthetic inquiry (fig. 1) and individuals in different cultures responding to the "same" object (fig. 2). By way of a critique of monoculturalism in the arts, I had intended merely to describe what NYU. was doing to build a community-based art education program. But a debate arose in the audi­ence over how to understand the overlapping ellipses. Some saw the verti­cal ellipse as representing the "dominant" Western culture "marginalizing" non-Western cultures, while others applied the diagram to Brazil itself with "colonialists" displacing indigenous and African cultures in educational institutions, if not in the society.

Projecting this debate on the world at large will suggest the concerns a multicultural aesthetics must address. "Navigating Global Cultures," a collaborative effort in cross-cultural art making, criticism, and education involving new technologies is now in its second year at N.Y.U. Initiated by the Commission on Experimental Aesthetics of the School of Education, the project now has working agreements with institutions in Italy, Brazil, China, and the United States, with cultural exchanges underway. The co-­directors planned interactive art events via satellite transmission for the 1996 Summer Institute: Carl Schmidt directed "creative experiences in the arts"; John Gilbert, "the creative process in music education"; and I, "technological experiments in the visual arts."

The Consortium for Well-Being in the Twenty-first Century was formed in Cagliari, Sardinia, in December of 1995, by US. and European institu­tions (including the World Health Organization) to develop projects for en­hancing cultural, nutritional, and environmental aspects of global well-be­ing. My working group contributed the following objective: "To promote and encourage the bringing together of artists of various cultures to interact with each other, to collaborate on projects to bring about a better under­standing of different peoples and living conditions within their respective communities.(11) Phenomenological inquiry has made a difference at home, as I've reported. Making a contribution to well-being as defined by others is the challenge.

Notes:

1) David W. Ecker and Eugene F. Kaelin, "Aesthetics in Public School Art Teaching," College Art Journal 18 (1958): 382-91.

2) David W. Ecker and Eugene F. Kaelin, "The Limits of Aesthetic Inquiry: A Guide to Educational Research," in NSSE Yearbook, Philosophical Redirection of Educational Research (Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education, 1972), pp. 258-86.

3) Barry Lieberman, "A Phenomenological Approach to Aesthetic Education in Secondary School Painting Classes" (Ed..D. diss., New York University, 1979).

4) Larry Lavender, Dancers Talking Dance: Critical Evaluation in the Choreography Class (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics Publishers, 1996).

5) Larry Lavender, "Understanding Interpretation," Dance Research Journal 27, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 27.

6) Eugene F. Kaelin, An Aesthetics for Art Educators (New York: Teachers College Press, 1989), p. 25.

7) Larry Lavender, in a personal communication, 13 December 1995.

8) See Xiao-ai Chang, "A Cross-Cultural Interpretation of Artistic Terms in Chinese and Western Art Theory and Practice: A Semiotic Analysis" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1994).

9) Perhaps the most explicit expression supporting my reading is the following exchange between a Japanese student (J) and Heidegger (I) as recorded in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 5: "(I) 'Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If a man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastern man.' (J) 'Assuming that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other in nature, and radically so.' (I) 'And so, a dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible.'"

10) Eugene F. Kaelin, Heidegger's Being and Time: A Reading for Readers (Tallahassee:

The Florida State University Press, 1988), p. 323.

11) "Statement of Purpose," Consortium for Well-Being in the Twenty-first Century (FAX, F. P. Corongiu, 22 January 1996), p. 5.