Drawing dancing A field trip in experiments in beauty

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1 Drawing dancing A field trip in experiments in beauty By Denis G. Pelli Claudia Alvarez and Terry Rosenberg Page 1 of 18

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5 Drawing dancing By Denis G. Pelli Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University Copyright You can comment at denispelli.com On Wednesday, December 9, 2009, I took the 19 students of my Experiments in beauty class to Terry Rosenberg s painting studio in SoHo, half a mile south of NYU, to sketch Jody Sperling dancing. Most of the semester was devoted to learning what science is by doing it. This class was devoted to learning what art is by doing it. Movie of Jody Sperling dancing (36 s, 45 MB). Taken by Claudia Alvarez. Accompanying music is Mikel Rouse s Quorum Part 1. Click on the movie to start it. If your browser fails to play the movie, try YouTube. Or download the whole PDF file (2 MB) to your disk and open it in Acrobat. This is a class about beauty. Art is an important case. We can look at art, in books and museums, and ask about beauty in the viewing experience, but we can also ask about the role of beauty in making art. For that, it s important to have the experience of creating art. Page 5 of 18

6 Preparing for this trip, we read and discussed an essay by and an interview with Arthur Danto (philosopher and art critic at Columbia University) in which he discussed what is art? and claims that beauty is incidental. For a contrary position, we read interviews of Robert Irwin in the book Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. A life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin (Weschler, 1982). The public record of science primarily articles and textbooks tends to give the misleading impression that every experiment by competent scientists proves a point. In fact, performing experiments is messy, with lots of wrong ideas and unexpected results. It s scary and uncertain. The confident clear conclusions come later, in the write up. Museums give a similarly misleading impression of art. The messy scary uncertainty that the artist experienced is nowhere to be seen. My view is that this omission is best addressed by the experience of actually creating art. The role of beauty in art is controversial. Arthur Danto claims that beauty is merely incidental to art. To the contrary, Robert Irwin insists that physicality (which he seems to find beautiful) is essential to his appreciation of art and nature. The Southwest desert attracted me, I think, because it was the area with the least kinds of identifications or connotations. It s a place where you can go along for a long while and nothing seems to be happening. It s all just flat desert, no particular events, no mountains or trees or rivers. And then, all of a sudden, it can just take on this sort of... I mean, it s hard to explain, but it takes on an almost magical quality. It just suddenly stands up and hums, it becomes so beautiful, incredibly, the presence is so strong. (Irwin quoted in Weschler, 1982, p. 160). Danto claims that beauty is incidental to art, as noted above, and that only meaning is essential. Irwin again claims the opposite. Irwin reports that meaning kills art for him. He sees an opposition between physicality and imagery. Physicality is the energy of phenomenal presence, whereas imagery is literate connotation, i.e. meaning. For me, the moment a painting took on any kind of image, the minute I could recognize it as having any relationship to nature, of any kind, to me the painting went flat. (Irwin quoted in Weschler, 1982, p. 61). Danto is an influential writer on art, sensitive to his times. Most of my students accept his claim that beauty is incidental to art. However, having accepted Danto s notion of finished art, in which beauty plays only a minor inessential role, they may yet be challenged by the practical question of creating art. While looking at art, museum visitors and critics are passive consumers. The fluency of their judgement of the art and its beauty has no obvious immediate consequence. However, an artist creating a piece must decide what to do next, and the fluency of these judgements will affect the fluency of painting. Everyone easily judges the pleasure attributed to the object, which is George Santayana s (1896) classic definition of beauty. One could redefine beauty or use some other, more intellectual, principle to guide painting, but this may be clumsier, less immediately accessible, in the creative process. To address this question it seems very desirable to experience the creation of art, not just looking at the finished product. The class was about an hour long, 4:55-6:10 PM. The students are mostly senior undergraduates majoring in psychology, with little or no background in art. Here we present 12 photos, a sketch, and a video of the event (pp. 1-5) and 125 mostly-student sketches of the dancing (pp. 8-18). The dancing sketches are charcoal on paper, inches. The artists, Terry, Claudia, and Madeleine, urged the students to look at the dancer, not the paper. Though sympathetic, I complained, noting that this is easy for them, with their skilled hands that can draw a curve at will, whereas our unskilled hands demand a lot more instruction to render that curve. Jody Sperling says, The dance was improvised. In the 1st dance, with the Loie cape, accompanied by Mikel Rouse s Quorum Part 1, I worked to create sustained activities so that a single image could endure for a few moments. In the 2nd dance, without the cape, accompanied by Quorum Part 2, I worked on defining space around the kinesphere. And in the 3rd dance, again with the cape, accompanied by Rouse s America s Secrets, I worked mostly on musical phrasing. The cape is inspired by the work of Loie Fuller ( ), an American in Paris, who created a unique art form by crafting mesmerizing, multi-media spectacles out of fabric, motion and light. Page 6 of 18

7 References Alan Saunders interviews Arthur C. Danto, What is art? on ABC Radio, Australia on 4 March Click the button that says SHOW TRANSCRIPT. Danto, A. C. (2002). The abuse of beauty. Daedalus, 131(4), Questia, HighBeam Santayana, G. (1896). The sense of beauty; being the outlines of aesthetic theory. New York, C. Scribner s sons. Acknowledgements Thanks to Terry Rosenberg for inviting us to his studio. Thanks to Edgar Castillo, Karl Peterson, and Mike Berlin for access to the NYU Photography and Imaging Lab to photograph the sketches. Thanks to Bill Cheng for the loan of his digital camera, used to photograph the sketchers. Thanks to Toni Saarela and Claudia Alvarez for their photos. Thanks to Doug Fox for his Fluid Motion sketches. Thanks to Diana Balmori and Margaret Morton for technical advice. Thanks to Lara Benusis for advice on selecting a dancer. Weschler, L. (1982). Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. A life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 61, 160. Credits Experiments in Beauty. NYU, Undergraduate Psychology, Fall 2009, V FA09 Terry Rosenberg paints dancers dancing. He s painted many famous companies, including American Ballet Theatre and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Jody Sperling is a dancer, choreographer, and dance scholar. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Time Lapse Dance. The painters Madeleine Hatz and Claudia Alvarez and the scientist Toni Saarela participated in the sketching and the subsequent discussion with the class. Pages 1-4, a graphite-on-paper sketch of Claudia Alvarez and Terry Rosenberg by Denis Pelli and 12 photos of the dancer and sketchers by Denis Pelli, Toni Saarela, and Claudia Alvarez. Page 5, video of the dancer by Claudia Alvarez. Pages 8-18, 125 charcoal sketches of the dancer by nearly everyone present. The 19 students are Brittan Badenhop, Melanie Ceder, Bill Cheng, Cynthia Hetlinger, Diane Kim, Sarah Krishnan, Elizabeth LaRosa, Jennifer Lee, Megan Mullan, Malia Norman, Alisen Pappalardo, Angel Patel, Emily Reynolds, Jeffrey Rosenberg, Mohsin Saber, Megan Smith, Aretha Soderstrom, Stefani Tellefsen, and Melissa Zhang. Page 7 of 18

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