Interview With a Practitioner: March 26, 2013
Instructions: Speak with a teaching or other arts/creative professional about their ideas regarding aesthetic experience in their work and within contemporary culture in general. Compose a "sketch" of this conversation that presents salient points and quotes from the interview along with your reflections upon thediscussion.
I conducted my interview with Amy Bogard, a friend, coworker, fellow artist, and former music student of mine. Her personal work ranges from drawing and oil painting to puppetry and sculpture. Personally, I am endlessly fascinated by her dedication to her sketchbooks I have seen over the years. Starting January 1 of this year, she committed to do a Daily Drawing, once a day, every day – allowing her the time to meditate and notice the beauty around her. The interview was conducted in the cozy and familiar home of her family, with sweet golden dogs at our feet and the sound of a Debussy violin sonata being practiced upstairs wafting gently down upon us. From my interview with Amy, I gleaned three interesting things regarding aesthetics: first, that the notion of aesthetics implies a state of mindfulness; second, that it is a strongly social construct; and third, that it can arise from a collective of the mundane or even the disturbing.
Amy defines aesthetics as “the study of beauty as we sense it in nature, in art, and in design. So it’s definitely a sensory-based thing. Like an impression that’s made on us physically… and I think we’re moved by beauty. And we’re also moved – we’re repulsed - by things that aren’t beautiful…” After she defined her idea of aesthetic, I immediately told her about the article by Irvin that we read about the aesthetics in the everyday, knowing that we could connect this with her sketchbook practice. We agreed that “there’s ritual in the way you pour your cup of coffee. And it varies with different days, but I agree there’s beauty in those daily rituals” (“And noticing what you notice?” I ask) “Paying attention to what you pay attention to,” she replies. She then had this to say, regarding aesthetics in the everyday and her sketchbooks: “Taking the time to just meditate on what you find beautiful, or what you find notable even, which then becomes beautiful because you noted it, and there’s something to a mindfulness when it comes to aesthetics. Like you can go a million miles a day and not notice whether anything is beautiful. If you take the time to notice this blade of grass is coming up, or this dog is very sweet, or that’s a beautifully designed whatever at the mall, like if you take a moment to note it, it brings in aesthetics. And nobody really does it these days. You sort of discover the aesthetic beauty of things when you are mindful, but also something that is aesthetically pleasing can stop you in your tracks and make you mindful.”
The conversation took an interesting turn when she brought up the artist Marina Abromovic, whose performances Amy had just been watching videos of. Amy noted, “Surely a lot of what we find aesthetically beautiful today would have been found completely atrocious back in the day, and how does that change? Like this whole Marina Abromovic stuff – it’s very strange! But I find it completely compelling, you know? I watch her videos and I’m like, she is in it 100%. That makes it beautiful.” When she said “found completely atrocious back in the day,” I immediately recalled a chapter of Jonah Lehrer’s book Proust Was a Neuroscientist in which he tells the story of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Its dissonance and randomness appalled the upper class Parisian audience and they literally turned violent and rioted during the show. Modern neuroscience has theories as to why this happened, having to do with the brain’s tendency to pick up on patterns and pleasing phrases in music. Today, “Rite of Spring” is one of the most highly regarded pieces of classical music, because we grew accustomed to it. In summary, I agree with Amy that the societal norms of the specific time have a lot of influence on aesthetics and what is considered beautiful.
Finally, Amy brought up the artist Wendy Ewald about whom she had recently heard on NPR. She told me about a project of Ewald’s in which Polaroid cameras were distributed to the children in an art class and how the results of which constructed a sort of portrait of the community. We talked about how individually, the images probably were not too spectacular or powerful, but when put all together, “Suddenly you have something that’s really powerful and potentially really beautiful aesthetically because it’s in a collective sense, even though it might have been ugly to start with. The idea of a collective group of imagery, or music, or sound or whatever, that when you pile things upon things they sometimes become unexpectedly beautiful.” Just then her son Jack, previously practicing violin upstairs, came down. Overhearing this, he pulled up a video of Steve Reich, a musician who composes pieces that do just that – pile the same phrase upon itself numerous times, but slightly altering the tempo each time. As Jack explained, “It’s like when you’re sitting at a stop light and the turn signal of the guy in front of you matches up perfectly with yours, but then gets off. It’s the music version of that.” Listening to some of Steve Reich’s pieces, an audio metaphor of our current conversation unfolded. Mundane phrases, layered and layer atop one another, repeated endlessly, created a dissonant cacophony that was, at points, really discomforting and unbearable. Yet, there was beauty to be found in it. It proved hard to put our fingers on, but Amy reflected, “Everything that you think is supposed to be aesthetically musical, like a certain sense of order, is being thrown out the window. And yet, there’s something about it.”
The idea that we can be moved by something uncomfortable just the same as we can by something beautiful is compelling. Class conversations of ours have discussed the abject, and how it’s important to address the abject in our classrooms, but I don’t think we went so far as to claim the abject can evoke similar responses as beauty can. In her definition of aesthetics, Amy mentioned that “we’re moved by beauty. And we’re also moved – we’re repulsed - by things that aren’t beautiful.” Intrigued, I asked her to expand upon this at the end of the interview. She explained, “Some situations are pleasing to the eye, like you can say ‘this is beautiful even though it’s difficult and gross’ and I actually like that line of creepy/beautiful. I love it, actually. When you speak of aesthetics you speak of beauty in some kind of positive response. And if it’s something gross, difficult, ugly, whatever, it can still be beautiful and that’s where aesthetics is powerful - when you walk that line.”
Amy defines aesthetics as “the study of beauty as we sense it in nature, in art, and in design. So it’s definitely a sensory-based thing. Like an impression that’s made on us physically… and I think we’re moved by beauty. And we’re also moved – we’re repulsed - by things that aren’t beautiful…” After she defined her idea of aesthetic, I immediately told her about the article by Irvin that we read about the aesthetics in the everyday, knowing that we could connect this with her sketchbook practice. We agreed that “there’s ritual in the way you pour your cup of coffee. And it varies with different days, but I agree there’s beauty in those daily rituals” (“And noticing what you notice?” I ask) “Paying attention to what you pay attention to,” she replies. She then had this to say, regarding aesthetics in the everyday and her sketchbooks: “Taking the time to just meditate on what you find beautiful, or what you find notable even, which then becomes beautiful because you noted it, and there’s something to a mindfulness when it comes to aesthetics. Like you can go a million miles a day and not notice whether anything is beautiful. If you take the time to notice this blade of grass is coming up, or this dog is very sweet, or that’s a beautifully designed whatever at the mall, like if you take a moment to note it, it brings in aesthetics. And nobody really does it these days. You sort of discover the aesthetic beauty of things when you are mindful, but also something that is aesthetically pleasing can stop you in your tracks and make you mindful.”
The conversation took an interesting turn when she brought up the artist Marina Abromovic, whose performances Amy had just been watching videos of. Amy noted, “Surely a lot of what we find aesthetically beautiful today would have been found completely atrocious back in the day, and how does that change? Like this whole Marina Abromovic stuff – it’s very strange! But I find it completely compelling, you know? I watch her videos and I’m like, she is in it 100%. That makes it beautiful.” When she said “found completely atrocious back in the day,” I immediately recalled a chapter of Jonah Lehrer’s book Proust Was a Neuroscientist in which he tells the story of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Its dissonance and randomness appalled the upper class Parisian audience and they literally turned violent and rioted during the show. Modern neuroscience has theories as to why this happened, having to do with the brain’s tendency to pick up on patterns and pleasing phrases in music. Today, “Rite of Spring” is one of the most highly regarded pieces of classical music, because we grew accustomed to it. In summary, I agree with Amy that the societal norms of the specific time have a lot of influence on aesthetics and what is considered beautiful.
Finally, Amy brought up the artist Wendy Ewald about whom she had recently heard on NPR. She told me about a project of Ewald’s in which Polaroid cameras were distributed to the children in an art class and how the results of which constructed a sort of portrait of the community. We talked about how individually, the images probably were not too spectacular or powerful, but when put all together, “Suddenly you have something that’s really powerful and potentially really beautiful aesthetically because it’s in a collective sense, even though it might have been ugly to start with. The idea of a collective group of imagery, or music, or sound or whatever, that when you pile things upon things they sometimes become unexpectedly beautiful.” Just then her son Jack, previously practicing violin upstairs, came down. Overhearing this, he pulled up a video of Steve Reich, a musician who composes pieces that do just that – pile the same phrase upon itself numerous times, but slightly altering the tempo each time. As Jack explained, “It’s like when you’re sitting at a stop light and the turn signal of the guy in front of you matches up perfectly with yours, but then gets off. It’s the music version of that.” Listening to some of Steve Reich’s pieces, an audio metaphor of our current conversation unfolded. Mundane phrases, layered and layer atop one another, repeated endlessly, created a dissonant cacophony that was, at points, really discomforting and unbearable. Yet, there was beauty to be found in it. It proved hard to put our fingers on, but Amy reflected, “Everything that you think is supposed to be aesthetically musical, like a certain sense of order, is being thrown out the window. And yet, there’s something about it.”
The idea that we can be moved by something uncomfortable just the same as we can by something beautiful is compelling. Class conversations of ours have discussed the abject, and how it’s important to address the abject in our classrooms, but I don’t think we went so far as to claim the abject can evoke similar responses as beauty can. In her definition of aesthetics, Amy mentioned that “we’re moved by beauty. And we’re also moved – we’re repulsed - by things that aren’t beautiful.” Intrigued, I asked her to expand upon this at the end of the interview. She explained, “Some situations are pleasing to the eye, like you can say ‘this is beautiful even though it’s difficult and gross’ and I actually like that line of creepy/beautiful. I love it, actually. When you speak of aesthetics you speak of beauty in some kind of positive response. And if it’s something gross, difficult, ugly, whatever, it can still be beautiful and that’s where aesthetics is powerful - when you walk that line.”