Art and Culture: Who We Are

© 2001 Kris Murray

Many books and articles on art begin with the question- What is Art? That's not a
bad place to begin, but the answer that is usually given can be as confusing as
the question itself. For example, Susanne Langer, in her essay, "The Cultural
Importance of Art," gives the following definition of art- "Art is the practice of
creating perceptible forms expressive of human feelings." Langer goes on to
explain that she is talking about the feelings which we all share as a culture, not
just those of one person. Therefore, it might be a good idea to take a look at the
term culture. After all, art is a large part of culture. Or is it that culture is a large
part of art?

Culture
Culture has several meanings, such as that stuff that grows in the bottom of a
petri dish in biology class. It can also refer to a large group of people (sometimes
entire nations, even several nations) who share backgrounds, ideas and ways
of doing things; for example, the Anglo culture, or the Hopi culture, or the gamer
culture, or the culture created by everyone who watches Jersey Shore. The
examples are as many as there are people.

But, another sense of the word culture is the one we use when we talk about
those ideas and ways of doing things that are shared by those groups of
people. To make these last two uses of the word culture a little clearer, let's use
this class as an example. As a group, we make up a subculture which we could
call the Sauk Valley educational culture. We all share certain things- we all live in
the Sauk Valley Community College district, we all come together at Sauk to
learn, we all know where at least one of the WalMarts is and probably where
Applebee’s is. These are all things we have in common and can use to, among
other things, make conversation- they make up our culture. But more
importantly, they are also all things thought of and/or made by humans. In other
words, the Rock River is also something which we all know about, but because it
is part of nature, the river itself is not a cultural thing the way WalMart is. But what
we do with the river is part of our culture because human thought went into

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deciding what to do. Any activities we engage in on the river are cultural
because they were created or invented by a person or a group of people. So
the word culture can also be used to talk about the things humans do, build,
talk about, think, or feel. So, people belong to cultures-- that is, groups of
people-- which can be named: Americans, Midwesterners, Millennials, Baby
Boomers. But the thoughts, feelings, activities, objects, etc. that make these
various groups different from each other make up that part of our lives which we
also call culture. And it is this use of the word culture which we will be talking
about the most in this course. We will be concentrating on this aspect of culture
because it is through culture that we create our lives. That is, by being born into
a certain culture, we automatically know certain things but not others, have
certain experiences but not others, and have certain objects, technology, and
stuff available to us but not others. But, most importantly, we also have choices
about what kinds of cultural objects, experiences, and thoughts we will make a
part of our lives. For example, as Americans, we have TV in common, especially
in terms of how we get some of our information about the world. But that
information may be slightly different depending upon whether you are an MTV
kind of person or whether you prefer Public Television. That is, someone who gets
their ideas about life from watching "American Idol" or "MST 3000" is going to
think the world works differently than someone who watches "Masterpiece
Theatre" or the Discovery Channel, because we do get our ideas about what
life is like from the cultural experience of TV. But we also get ideas from the
cultural expressions called politics, religion, education, next door neighbor, and,
of course, school. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out-

Undirected by cultural patterns- organized systems of significant

symbols [like politics, religion, education, or TV] - man's behavior would
be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and
exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the
accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of
human existence but.......an essential condition for it. (46)

In other words, culture is all of the man-made ideas and things in our "world"
which help us to understand ourselves and what is going on. It also helps us to
organize our social groups and give us a sense of belonging to a community.
But- and here's the point- we also have the power to shape our culture. After all,
we invented it, so we should have the ability to make it into whatever we want it

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to be. Therefore, it also makes sense for us to know something about how culture
works. That is where Art comes in. As Geertz explains it-

In order to make up our minds we must know how we feel about things;
and to know how we feel about things we need the public images of
sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide. (82)

The Laocoon (fifth century BCE)

The Cultural Activity Called ART

First, let's make clear what kinds of activities fall under the cultural category of
Art. Painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, theatre, and dance are
the main historic art forms. All of these art forms have been around since the
beginning of humankind and it has always been clear that art is very important
to people. Before we had towns and cities, before we had economics or
politics, even before we had agriculture, we had art. Art is the most obvious
connection we have with our ancestors, with the first truly human inhabitants of
this planet. When, as little kids, we drew on the walls of our room, we were
expressing the same urge as the people who painted scenes on cave walls
(except they didn't get yelled at by Mom). And when, as kids, we built our tree
forts, clubhouses, and so on, we were expressing the same urge to make
something as the early Greek architects. So art is one of our earliest expressions
of culture. It helped early humans to organize their lives, to understand the world

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around them, and to communicate those understandings. And that is what art
does for us. It helps us to understand how we feel about things and helps us to
organize our world. And this brings us back to Langer's definition of art- “the
practice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human feelings.” But, some
of the words she uses need their own definitions.

Perceptible - If something is perceptible, then we can know it either through our

senses or our imagination. e.g. (this is the Latin abbreviation for "for example")
we can perceive this article because we feel it (if you have printed it out) and
see it, but we can also perceive what we are going to have for lunch or dinner
because we can imagine ourselves eating it.

Feeling - Langer means those sensations, sensibilities, or emotions that ideas and
activities bring out in us, like when we read a sad story or see a dog run over by
a car. Both situations will make us "feel" something, even though the story is not
real. It still has the power to make us feel emotions and learn something about
what it means to be sad.

Creating - Making, constructing. Obviously, this can apply to many, many

activities- from cooking to landscaping to painting to composing music. Form -
An apparition given to our senses or imagination which has a unity, a self-
sufficiency, and an individual reality; e.g. a shape in the fog may be unclear,
but it still exists as a form, as a shape in the fog.

Expression - There are two kinds of expression. One is self-expression which gives
vent to our feelings. It is a symptom of what we feel, a spontaneous reaction to
an actual situation. The other is conceptual expression, that is, the presentation
of an idea through a symbol system such as language or painting or music. For
example, written words are symbols for spoken language, so this whole text is a
conceptual expression of the idea of art, created through the symbol system of
written language.

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Look at this detail from Edvard Munch's The Scream. It is a conceptual expression of the
idea of feeling great emotion created through the symbol system of the visual arts.

Symbol Systems
So what are these symbol system things? Well, again we need to turn to Clifford
Geertz for a definition.

A symbol is- any object [like writing or painting], act [like dancing],
event [like a rock concert], quality [like loud!], or relation [like getting
involved with a soap opera] which serves as a vehicle for a
conception- the conception is the symbol's meaning. Symbols are
tangible [able to be perceived] formulations of notions, abstractions
from experiences fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of
ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings or beliefs. (91) (Material in
brackets is mine.)

A symbol system, then, is a group of symbols which make up cultural acts, and
cultural acts are the things like religion or sports or TV or hanging out that we
participate in without even really thinking about how they affect us. That is,
symbols and cultural acts, or patterns, are the ways we exchange information
with each other about "how life goes." But we aren’t always aware of the fact
that who we are, both as individuals and as a culture (group), is determined by
our culture (man-made things, ideas, events, and so on. You know- symbol

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systems). And since art is a symbol system just like any other, it is also able to tell
us things about ourselves that we wouldn't otherwise know.

Language as a Symbol System

In speaking of language as a symbol system, Langer points out that- "Acting as
symbols, language will formulate new ideas as well as communicate old ones.
Symbolic expression, therefore, extends our knowledge beyond the scope of our
actual experience" (77). Using anger as an example, Langer tells us that to feel
anger is a symptom of how a situation affects us, but to talk about that anger is
to express the anger in a symbolic way in order to share it with someone. The
things we can say are the things we can think. Without words, sense experience
is only a flow of impressions. Words help us to organize and make sense out of
what goes on around us. "Words make sense experience objective- make it into
facts and things" (78). In other words, if we didn’t have the word anger, we
wouldn’t know what we were feeling, and we wouldn’t know what to do about
it. But to know what to do about it is also made clear through language.
Someone who grew up listening to and watching Mom or Dad scream at the
top of their lungs whenever they were angry would naturally think that that was
the normal way to express anger. But if that same person also listened to,
watched, or read about other ways of expressing anger, they would learn that
we have choices about how to express anger. For example, in Shakespeare,
anger is usually expressed through strong but elegant words which almost turn
anger into an art form itself. The English take great pride in expressing anger
through beautiful speeches that make the person to whom the anger is directed
feel worse than if they had simply been yelled at.

But we can also share the feeling by painting a picture or writing a poem about
anger. These symbol systems tell us something about anger which merely talking
about it cannot. Again, as Langer points out-

But- there is an important part of reality that is quite inaccessible to the formative
influence of language; i.e., “inner experience." .....Feelings and emotions only
seem irrational because language does not help to make them conceivable.
The natural form of language does not reflect the natural form of feeling.
Language only names very general kinds of inner experience. [But] human
feeling is a fabric, not a vague mass. It has an intricate dynamic pattern with

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 possible combinations and new emergent phenomena. This dynamic pattern
finds its formal expression in the arts...... The primary function of art is to objectify
feeling so that we can contemplate and understand it. (80)

Imagination
One final word on the arts and culture--imagination. For Langer, imagination is
the oldest typically human mental trait- older even than what we call logical
reasoning. As the common source for dreams and social acts of all kinds,
imagination is still a very important part of how our minds work. Would we ever
come up with new ideas if we didn't have imagination? But here is the really
neat thing. Although imagination is what we need to create the arts, the arts
also create the imagination, by giving us new things to think. For example, an
artist creates a painting of a flower or an historical event. This act transforms
those scenes into "a piece of imagination," which then adds to our enjoyment of
the real things. This also happens when we read good literature. We imagine the
scene and the characters as we read, but, by creating new images for us to
think about, the literature also makes us see things in the world around us in
different ways. It even helps us to see things we might never have noticed
before.

Detail from The Fall of Icarus by Pietr Breughel.

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 Works Cited

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books,

1973.

Langer, Susanne. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite,

and Art. Cambridge: HUP, 1957.

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