ONE DEVELOPMENT IN AESTHETIC AWARENESS

By Paul Henrickson,
©2002

Over the course of several decades and I varying geographical

locations where unbeckoned illumination took place, it
gradually occurred to me that my educational environment was
faulty and that I had been, perhaps unintentionally, misled.

Three decades had passed before the first breakthrough

occurred. I was in Minneapolis. Minnesota, U.S.A., wandering
through the rooms of
The Minneapolis Art Institute which were hosting an
impressive exhibition of six contemporary Italian artists. I no
longer remember their names, besides, their names ceased to
become significant at all once I had taken a quick glance at the
walls where large two-meter canvases were hanging.

There was one painting in particular which commanded my

attention because of its energetic, nearly violent existence.
The color range was relatively narrow beings madder up of
ochres, siennas, and whites, but the way the artist had
attached the paint to the surface, the record of his physical
process of laying the pigment on in massive impasto levels and
the varying rhythms by which this was accomplished was most
striking.

I tried, out of a sense of decorum, a talent I have finally shed,

to pay courtesy visits to the other contributors to the
exhibition. This sounds like a horrible put down of the other
works but I do not mean it that way for there was not one
incompetent work on exhibit, but this one, this particular one
kept drawing me into its environment, and if I tried to leave, it
would pull me back to draw more of my bewilderment out of
me. Finally, I grew frustrated at being unable to make
decisions on my own and subject to the pull of an inanimate
object and tried to take matters into my own hands. After all,
the responsibility, we have been told, of one having been born
in Boston, Massachusetts , demands intelligently responsible
behavior. After all, this is where the Lowells speak only to the
Cabots, the Cabots only to the Lodges and the Lodges only to
God, personal behavior is defined by nothing if not self-
control.

The fact that my self was not in control of my behavior

testified to the pull of aesthetic influence and that was an
important discovery. After having been compelled a dozen
times to return to gaze upon this work which had captured my
fancy, forced my admiration and demanded my adoration it
suddenly revealed itself for what it was. It was not the
powerful orchestration of non-objective forms it had, at first
appeared to be, but the near faithful reproduction of a dirty
public john. What had at first been attractive, appealing and
treasured because of its exciting variations and subtle
intonations had suddenly turned
malevolent, disgusting and threatening and I thought I heard
the devil laugh as he saw I had been deprived of my innocence.

This was my first really memorable experience with what it

meant to be aesthetically moved from at first one extreme to
its opposite. The experience needed explanation. Words I had
gown accustomed to and thought I understood suddenly had
no meaning for me. My trust in my teachers was destroyed.
Either I had been lied to and I had been a fool to believe my
mentors or they, themselves, hadn’t known what they had
been talking about, or, what they had been talking about had
not been my experience. This is the area that appropriate
language must bridge if it is to function as an intermediary
between experience and communication.

The important lesson for me from this experience was that, at

the very least, my understanding of the meaning of the word
“aesthetic” was broadened. No longer was it possible for me
to use the word “aesthetic” and mean something attractive,
desirable and pleasant. I must now be willing to include the
ugly, the smelly, the dirty, crude and vulgar…in short, the
expressive.

There are new responsibilities attending this new awareness,

responsibilities I’d not been aware of before O moved to
southwest Virginia and was teaching a group of young women
at Radford University about certain periods in the history of
art. In this particular case I was using as a base line the
ubiquitous image of the virgin and child and attempting to
point out certain critical differences between the examples we
had before us.

Because I was so intent upon not focusing on the religious

aspects of the works, but rather their formal qualities, the
message I intended was not the message received. When one
of these works I described as not really being “up to par” that
it was “not really a good virgin and child the reaction was
quite strong from these self-approving “well-bred ladies from
Virginia” but a strong reaction NOT for religious reasons but
for reasons that among the Southern Baptist motherhood is
sacred. They couldn’t have cared less about its being a good
painting.

What that experience eventually meant to me was that one’s

private, sensual vision will be sacrificed if there develops a
contest between what one thinks one sees and what one
perceives the peer vision to be.

I later put this new understanding to the test when I chose the
names of ten well-known and respected artists and asked the
class to rank them. For an experienced observer this exercise
might have been near futile and senseless, but in order to
demonstrate a point for the class I did it. Rembrandt was one
of those names and his name appeared unanimously at the top
of all the lists as being the very best artist of them all. Then I
showed them slides of little-known drawings by each of these
artists and asked them to rank order them. Rembrandt’s work
was ranked at the very bottom of this list. From this, and other
observations, I concluded that for the sake of social solidarity
most will sacrifice their own personal observations and deny
their sensual (aesthetic) experiences. The job of the teacher
is very much more difficult than what one might suppose.

I have now adopted the view that our society approves a form
of suicide when it comes to an understanding of what a social
unit is. I have also adopted the view that it is the thinker’s
responsibility to redefine the individual’s proper function
within a society.

From southwest Virginia of the 20th century, which could never

forget the colonial 18th century, where upper-class residences
were still being constructed of brick, were white shuttered and
where the walls of rooms where one received guests were
painted a discrete pale green and trimmed in white, I left, like
Gauguin, to luxuriate for four years in a tropical island
paradise in the Pacific where, on some of the islands, the
women are bare-breasted until they spot a white man when
they then quickly grasp a square piece of white cloth they
carry for the purpose and deftly suspend it by two of its
corners from their compressed arm pits. I have wondered
whether they fully realize the effect such a muscular response
has on the position the breasts hold on the rib cage. Some men
might consider these actions an example of mixed signals. It is
also here that the men of status display their proofs of
importance by having their bodies covered with tattoos from
neck to wrists to ankles with only their groins covered in a
bright red cloth with along tail and where the language,
literally, does not distinguish between “love”, “like” “want”
and “desire” for such refined degree s of erotic attraction
seem unimportant, or are non-existent. Here, in Micronesia,
one does not commit a form of suicide by not acknowledging
the sensual.

This fact was on one occasion in full blossom and fully

confirmed by one dear friend whom I asked to tell me how
many children he had. “L have ten” he replied and then added
“by my wife”.

I persisted: “and how many altogether?” He thought about it

for awhile and then gave another number. I then asked him if
he remembered so and so or so and so and he hadn’t. So the
final number we came up with between what he could
remember and what others had told me, was thirty.

“Gaius” I told him, “This has got to stop.”

“Yes,” he replied.

Gaius: thinking about taking it easy

After these four years when I returned to the civilization as it

was practiced in the state of Iowa and turned my attention to
the discovery of the source of creative activity I learned that
there were some who had accepted the Aldous Huxley notion
that the “Brave New World” he had foreseen 1958 was to
come about methodically and that one of that state’s
influential educators who, reapplying the statistical results
obtained by others, was advocating the use of drugs to control
hyperactive, divergent, and independent loners among both
the pupil and teacher populations.

By way of contrast to that I had learned from my studies that

about 4% of the more and 4% of the less creative among the
population were exhibiting important differences among which
was that the least creative of the student population
consistently received one grade-point higher in their course
work than did the creative students and I wondered why until,
using other psychological measures, I learned that those who
got the higher grades and were the less creative also told
more manipulative and misleading lies than the other group.
This confirmed for me what I had already started to learn
which was that society, probably any society, functions like
most organisms in survival mode and that it reacts defensively
when challenged.

In other words, the less creative and the less honest among
the students recognized what their mothers may have always
told them was true, that if you want to get ahead you must do
what superiors tell you to do and tell them what they want to
hear. This advice, however, as caringly meant as it may have
been, stands in direct opposition to what the individual may
feel the need to respond to in his own evaluations of reality
and the requirements of his own evolving moral structure. It is
precisely this process the creative artist goes through when
he, responding to his own collection of sense data, decides
what his next move will be.

The implications for mental health in this structure must have

been obvious to R.D.Laing when he did a study of adolescent
girls in England and found that there seemed to be a
relationship between the modes of verbal sexual instruction as
controlled by their mothers, subsequent adaptation to social
constructs , and the information that the girls were receiving
from their own bodies. The euphemistic phrasing used by the
mothers was found to be the source for misinterpretation and
a consequent borderline psychosis. So there may be a virtue in
calling a spade a spade.

This brings me to the point where my comments may seem to

border on sophistry, when I might test the readers flexibility in
thinking about the contemporary art scene. Even among an
audience of sophisticates I have tried frequently to get them
to accept, understand and use the concepts that what they
had thought was “abstract” was really “real” and what they
had called “realistic” was really “abstract”. Very few can
stand with those ideas foremost in their minds for any period
of time. But I am going to give it another try.

With the examples included here, one a 19th century painting

atttributed to Albert Bierstadt and a 20th century painting by
Hans Hoffmann. I would wager that 90-odd % of contemporary
commentators would agree that the Bierstadt painting was a
realistic work and that the same percentage would agree that
the Hoffman was abstract. I shall attempt to point out that
their conclusions are inconsistent with the facts.

In both these instances, the Bierstadt and the Hoffman, the

artist had been working with “real” materials, the paint, the
brushes, the canvas the solvents were all “real”. To this
extent, at least, the two artists’ approaches to panting do not
differ. Both artists manipulated the medium to bring about
certain visual results. These results differ significantly, but the
kinetic behaviors do not. These still involve muscular
coordination, an understanding of the appropriate mixes of
paint and thinner, but the mental governance differs and this
is related to the eidetic ideal in the mind of the individual.

Bierstadt, whether or not he completed this landscape while

still confronted with the original in the objective world, was
obviously concerned with how that world appeared and he
adjusted his behaviors to achieve, as closely as possible, a
visual resemblance to that world.

However, it is only appropriate to point out that the realty of

that painting does not offer the viewer a replicable scale,
temperature of air or odor of pine. To that extent, then, this
landscape is a fraudulent work. On the other hand, Hoffman
offers us colors, shapes arrangements which do not mislead
the viewer who may, however, due to the still prevalent
expectations of his social environment expects art to represent
the outside world, discount Hoffman’s achievement to the
extent that his work falls short of that expectation. This
prejudice has interfered seriously with our comprehension, in
spite of efforts of artists like Pollack, de Kooning and Kline.

These observations should exalt the statement by the 18th

century hostess, Mme.de Stael-Holstein to the effect that
those who demand that painting have a subject matter were
missing the point. Her observation is enhanced when we
remember that for the most part her contemporary art world
may still have been dominated by the work of Fragonard,
Boucher and Watteau. She did not, at least, have the works of
Pollack, de Kooning and Kline to instruct her. Our ability, at the
elementary level of observation, to understand what we see,
has been warped by the pressures of various peer-groups to
have all see the way the majority have agreed everything
should be seen and that, consequently, we too, like Laing’s
adolescent girls continue to deny our perceptions.

Jean-Anroine Watteau: painting

Jean-Honore Fragonard: painting
Francois Boucher: painting

Although I am loath to give the man credit, Breshnjev was

correct when he explained to the American painter Jaime
Wyeth that one should not underestimate the power of an
image.
We might ask ourselves, just what it is that these artists, all of
them are doing. To begin with Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau
are telling us stories about people. Kline, de Kooning and
Pollack are not doing that, except by implication, and a lot of
observer possible reconstruction as to the genesis of such
images. What both groups of artists have done, however, is to
manipulate the materials and the main differences in the way
they have done that is that Kline, de Kooning and Pollack have
done so without misleading (or fooling) the observer’s eye into
accepting a false reality. The reality of the pigment is there to
be measured and assessed. The visual events which take place
on the canva have been attested to by our neural constructs.
Our eyes, our own eyes verify the events on canvas which is a
response we cannot attribute to the works by the three 18th
century Frenchmen.

Now, the difference between those three artists and some

other contemporary artistss is the degree of success they have
achieved in teaching the observer something new about the
neurology of vision and the psychology of perception. It is in
this respect that the work of Kline, de Kooning and Pollack is
far superior to the work of the 18th century painters and it was
that socialite woman Mme de Stael-Holstein who gave us the
clue when she pointed out the naivety of the belief that the
value of painting was in what the subject illustrated.
Vigee Lebrun: Mme deStael
Friederich Tiehl: Mme deStael

This power can be illustrated by yet another expression of peer

pressure when an organization as influential as Daimler-
Chrysler features the works of the American Andy Warhol and
furthers his undeserved reputation as a genius with the
undisguised self-aggrandizing motivation o profit, monetary
and reputational with little regard for the effect upon a
thoughtless population in so far as their aesthetic perceptions
may be enhanced…or discounted. When I was eight years old,
or seven I would cut out the images of Cadillacs, Buicks, and
Pontiacs from sales brochures and drive them at exorbitant
speeds with great motor sounds coming from my childish
mouth. I knew what the reality was and that I was allowed to
do what I was doing without a driver’s license.

However, the Warhol-Daimler-Chrysler association isn’t as

honest in its imaginative relationship as is the child with his
paper cutouts.
To sum up, if that is possible, disengaging the artistic process
from its historic attachment to “another reality” be it political,
religious, or product centered, is essential to an understanding
of an aesthetic response.

The tendency to measure artistic excellence by technical good

behavior misses the point and would encouraging preferring
the “divine” Raphael to Michelangelo, Jacques Louis David to
Rembrandt and, in sculpture, Houdin to Rodin.

Language appropriately used to clarify perceptions can affect

an important change in our cultural development.

“Using the material of language, people make new –symbolic—

models of reality (scientific theories in particular) such as
never existed as neural models given us by nature. Language
is, as it were, an extension of the human brain. Moreover it is a
unitary common extension of the brains of all members of
society. It is a collective model of reality that all members of
society labor to improve, and one that preserves the
experience of previous generations.”
---C.Joslyn, V. Turchin, F. Heylighten;
“Social Evolution” in/at:
http://pespmc.vub.ac.be/SOCEVOL.html
Albert Bierstadt: landscape

Hans Hoffman: untitled painting

Jackson Pollack: painting

Willem de Kooning: painting

Franz Kline: painting
Raphael Santi: Madonna and Child

Michelangelo Buonarrotti: Sistine Chapel

Jacques Louis David: painting
Rembrandt van Rijn: painting

Jaime Wyeth: Wolf fish

Jean-Antoine Houdin: portrait sculpture
August Rodin: portrait sculpture

To sum up this essay I decided to show two of my own works

which, actually, are results of putting these observations into
practice.

Paul Henrickson: Rape of Europa (Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New
Mexico)

Paul Henrickson.assemblage,2002, Gozo, Malta

Titian: painting: Rape of Europa

Were I in a position to hand out assignments to the

intellectually curious I would suggest their making an in-depth
analysis of the two rapes, the Titian and the Henrickson.

The Henrickson one which is now in the collection of the Fine

Arts Museum at Santa Fe, New Mexico was produced as a
result of a conversation the artist had had with another artist,
Kenneth Burge, on the merits of the Titian in maintaining a
sense of the intact, un-violated canvas, while others , such as
Caravaggio, for example showed no interest whatever in that
quality. Henrickson, evidently, decided to take quite the
opposite approach to that of Titian.