Helena Sederholm
When scientists start to deal with art some are enthusiastic about it but others will become wary. Neuroscientists have tried to measure the responses art pictures trigger using brain imaging experiments. In that way they’ve tried to locate areas of the brain linked to the aesthetic experience and creativity. The discipline is called neuroaesthetics.
Many art researchers have took a critical attitude to the results of neuroaesthetic research. According to neuroaestheticians humans have a capacity to ascribe beauty to certain forms, colours, movements, and to their exaggerations and combinations. Without a doubt there are lights and sparkles in the brain when looking at pictures but does it mean that we are really experiencing art then.
During the Holidays I read Strange Tools – Art and Human Nature (2015), an interesting book by philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë. He summarizes very clearly what art theorists and even some art educators have tried to explain: aesthetic experience is not necessarily an art experience.
Art researchers maintain neuroaestheticians have not understood that ‘art’ is not visible in pictures but always presupposes related knowledge, cultural sophistication, and understanding contexts. Visual art is not only visual, i. e. what is in sight. In fact, art outlines what is not seen, and tells something not easily comprehensible. Also Noë states that art gives us an opportunity to become conscious of the nature of our thinking (how we assimilate, make sense of and evaluate the facts). This should be essential in art education as well.
Art outlines what is not seen, and tells something not easily comprehensible.
Art is not explicable in fixed data points in the brain. All in all, aesthetic or artistic experience is not only response to a visual stimulus but an activity with the world, as John Dewey has pointed out.
Very probably both neuroaestheticians and art theorists trace the truth. Does it mean that researchers in different disciplines are settling upon alternate thruths about art?
With this question hovering in the background we are doing a research project with neuroscientists in the Department of Art. We are studying bodily feelings envoked by various type of pics. At first glance this seems to be in conflict with Noë’s remark that “physical feeling and emotional response are art’s preconditions, its raw materials, rather than something at which art aims”.
To me it seems that our mutual research project also has larger meanings than actual results. At the moment we have interesting transdisciplinary discussions where different points of view encounter, collide and dance – yes, perhaps really dance, since according to Noë “[p]hilosophy is the choreography of ideas and concepts and beliefs. […] Choreography, in turn, is the philosophy of dancing.”
When art and science as well as their premises and research traditions conveniently merge, and when advocates of different fields learn to understand nature of another field, those apparently alternate truths research bring forth may not seem such unconditional. Then we can talk about the same issue without confusing terms and notions, and our understanding develops. Instead of being only responses to forms, colours and movements, as its own truth, art can be seen as an initiator of discussion, that strange tool which makes us reorganise our thoughts – perhaps in science as well.
Text seminar on Strange Tools – Art and Human Nature for doctoral students on Wednesdays 1.3.–29.3. 2017. Teachers: University lecturer Taneli Tuovinen, Professor (emerita) Riitta Hari & Professor Helena Sederholm.
Helena Sederholm