THE TASK

OF ART

As our consumer and media culture contains increasing manipulation of the human mind, in the form of thematized environments, commercial conditioning and benumbing entertainment, art has the mission to defend the autonomy of individual experience and provide the existential ground for the human condition. One of the tasks of art is to safeguard the authenticity of the human experience.

The settings of our lives are irresistibly turning into a mass produced and universally marketed kitsch. In my view, it would be ungrounded idealism to believe that the course of our culture could be altered within the visible future. But it is exactly because of this pessimistic view of the future that the ethical task of artists and architects, the defense of the authenticity of life and experience, is so important.

In a world where everything is becoming similar and, eventually, insignificant and of no consequence, art has to maintain differences of meaning, and in particular, the criteria of experiential quality.'My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it'15, writes Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and continues (in another chapter), 'In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communicating between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.'16

In my view, the task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up our experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, hault time, and defend the slowness of experience.

Architecture must defend us against excessive noise and communication. Architecture must maintain and defend silence.

Art is generally viewed as a means of reflecting reality through the artistic artefact. The art of our time thought provokingly often reflects experiences of alienation and anguish, violence and inhumanity. In my view, mere reflection and representation of prevailing reality is not a sufficient mission of art. Art should not increase, or reinforce human misery, but alleviate it.

The duty of art is to survey ideals and modes of perception and experience, and thus, open up and widen the boundaries of the world.

'Art is realistic when it attempts to express an ethical ideal', 17 Tarkovsky writes, giving the notion of realism a surprising new meaning. Along his work of art, an authentic artist always creates his ideal reader, listener and viewer. In the postscript to his novel The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco18 divides writers in two categories. The first writer writes what he expects his readers to want to read, whereas the second creates his ideal reader as he writes. In Eco's view the first writer is capable of writing mere kiosk literature, whereas the second may write literature that touches human soul for century to come.I believe that also authentic architecture can only be born through a similar process of idealization.The role of ideals and idealization is equally important in architecture. An authentic architect thinks of an ideal society or dweller as he designs. Only a construction that constructs something ideal can turn into meaningful architecture. Without any deliberate futurism, great architecture is always a harbinger of a more humane future.'Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function', Calvino states. 'The grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes' into a manyfold and multifaceted vision of the world.19Confidence in the future of architecture can, in my view, be based on the very same knowledge; existential meanings of inhabiting space can be wrought by the art of architecture alone. Architecture continues to have a great human task in mediating between the world and ourselves and in providing a horizon of understanding the human existential condition.The disappearance of beauty in our contemporary world is alarming. Can this mean anything else but the disappearance of human value, self-identity and hope. Beauty is not an added aesthetic value; longing for beauty reflects the belief and confidence in future, and it represents the realm of ideals in the human mindscape. 'Beauty is not the opposite of the ugly, but of the false',20 as Erich Fromm wrote. A culture that has lost its graving for beauty is already on its way towards decay.

Knowledge

through

Art

The prevailing view in our culture makes a fundamental distinction between the worlds of science and art; science is understood to represent the realm of rational and objective knowledge, whereas art stands for the world of subjective sensations. The first is understood to possess an operational value, whereas the world of art is seen as a form of exclusive cultural entertainment.In an interview in 1990 concerning complexities and mysteries of new physics, Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 for his discovery of the relationship between electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, was asked: 'Whom would you ask about the complexity of life: Shakespeare or Einstein?' The physicist answered quickly: 'Oh, for the complexity of life, there's no question - Shakespeare.' And the interviewer continued: 'And you would go to Einstein for simplicity?'. `Yes, for a sense of why things are the way they are - not why people are the way they are, because that's at the end of such a long chain of inference... .'21Art articulates our existentially essential experiences, but also modes of thinking, that is, reactions to the world and processing of information take place directly as an embodied and sensory activity without being turned into concepts, or even entering our sphere of consciousness.

Embodied

Consciousness

Our consciousness is an embodied consciousness, the world is structured around a sensory and corporeal center. 'I am my body'22, Gabriel Marcel claims, 'I am the space, where I am',23 establishes the poet Noel Arnaud. Finally, 'I am my world'24, writes Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The senses are not merely passive receptors of stimuli, and the body is not a mere point of viewing the world through a central perspective. Our entire being in the world is a sensuous and bodily mode of being. The body is not the stage of cognitive thinking, but the senses and our bodily being as such structure, produce and tore silent knowledge.The senses are not merely passive receptors of stimuli, and the body is not a mere point of viewing the world through a central perspective. Our entire being in the world is a sensuous and bodily mode of being. The body is not the stage of cognitive thinking, but the senses and our bodily being as such structure, produce and tore silent knowledge.

In fact, the knowledge of the traditional societies is stored directly in the senses and muscles; it is not a knowledge molded into words and concepts. Learning a skill is not founded on verbal teaching but rather on the transference of skill form the muscles of the master directly to the muscles of the apprentice through sensory perception and mimesis.

The same principle of embodying - or introjecting, to use a notion of psychoanalysis - knowledge and skill continues to be the core of artistic learning. The foremost skill of the architect is, likewise, turning the multi-dimensional essence of the design task into an embodied image; the entire personality and body of the architect becomes the site of the problem.

Architectural problems are far too complex and existential to be dealt with in a solely conceptualized and rational manner.

Sensory Thought

The artforms of sculpture, painting, music, cinema and architecture are all areas and modes of thinking. They represent modes of sensory and embodied thinking characteristic to the particular artistic medium. Architecture is also a mode of existential and metaphysical philosophy though the means of space, matter, gravity, scale and light.

Our world is structured on the basis of mental maps and in the formation of these experiential schemes the structures of the environment play a central role. The existentially most important knowledge of our everyday life - even in the technological culture does not reside in detached theories and explanations, but it is a silent knowledge beyond the threshold of consciousness that is fused with the daily environment and behavioral situations. But the poet, too, speaks of encounters at the `threshold of being'25, as Gaston Bachelard writes.

Art surveys the biological and unconscious realms of our body and mind. Thus, art maintains vital connections with our biological and cultural past, to the soil of genetic and mythical silent knowledge. The essential time dimension of art points to the past rather than the future, art maintains roots and traditions rather than uproots and invents.

The Thinking Hand

Martin Heidegger connects the hand with our thinking capacity: '... the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp ... Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element osthinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element ... .26 Gaston Bachelard writes about the imagination of the hand: `Even the hand has its dreams and assumptions. It helps us understand the innermost essence of matter. That is why it also helps us imagine (forms of) matter'.27

All the senses 'think' and structure our relation with the world although we are not conscious of this perpetual activity. In my view, the sensory and embodied mode of thinking is essential in art and all creative work. The well-known description of Albert Einstein of the role of visual and muscular images in his thinking process is an authoritative example of this. `Words and language, as they are written and spoken, do not seem to have any role in my thinking mechanism.

Psychic entities, which seem to be the elements of thinking are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily repeated and recombined. The above elements are, in my case, visual in nature and, some of them, related with muscles. Ordinary words and other signs have to be laborously sought only in the second phase when the mentioned associative play has been sufficiently established and can be repeated if desired,'28 Einstein confesses (in his famous letter of Jacques Hadamar.)It is evident that an emotional and aesthetic factor is equally central in scientific creativity as it is in the making and experiencing of art. Henry Moore writes about a bodily identification and the simultaneous grasping of several points of view in the sculptor's work:'This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head - he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, and the space that the shape displaces in the air.'29Our educational philosophy should, finally, acknowledge the existence of sensory thinking and embodied intuition as counterparts and complimentaries of conceptual thought, in order to understand the multi-dimensional and layered essence of art and creativity, or, I would like to say, in order to understand ourselves as human beings.

The Gift

Imagination

The uniqueness of the human condition is this; we live in the manifold worlds of possibilities created and sustained by our experiences, recollections and dreams. The ability to imagine and day-dream must be considered the most human and essential of our capabilities. But the deluge of excessive, nonhierarchical and meaningless pictures in our culture of images -'the rainfall of images'30 in Italo Calvino's words - flattens our world of imagination. The image flood of television externalizes and passivates images when compared with the interior imagery evoked by reading a book.

There is a dramatic difference between a passive looking at pictures on one hand, and images created by our imagination on the other; the effortless images of entertainment imagine on our behalf. The image flow of consciousness industry detaches images from their historical, cultural and human context and thus 'liberates' the viewer from investing his/her emotions and ethical attitudes in what is experienced. Benumbed by mass communication, we are already prepared to watch the most outrageous cruelty without the least of emotional envolvement. The deluge of images that grows overwhelming for the senses and emotions, has suppressed empathy and imagination.In my view, the lack of horizon, ideals and also alternatives in today's political thought is a consequence of a withering of political imagination. As our imagination weakens, we are left at the mercy of an incomprehensible future. Ideals are projections of an optimistic imagination, and it seems, the loss of imagination is bound to ruin idealism. The pragmatism and lack of stimulating visions today are likely to be consequences of an empowerished imagination. A culture that has lost its imagination can only produce apocalyptic visions of threat as projections of the repressed unconscious. A world devoid of alternatives, due to the absence of imagination, is the world of Huxley's and Orwell's manipulated subjects.

The duty of education is to cultivate and support the human abilities of imagination and empathy, but the prevailing values of culture tend to discourage fantasy, suppress the senses, and petrify the boundary between the world and the self. Education in any creative field today has to begin with questioning of the absoluteness of the world and with the expansion of the boundaries of self. The main objective of artistic education today is not directly in the principles of artistic making, but in the personality of the student and his/her self-image in relation to the world and the traditions of the craft.

The idea of sensory training is nowadays connected solely with artistic education proper, but the refinement of sensory litteracy and sensory thinking has an irreplaceable value in other areas of human activity. I want to say more; education of the senses and the imagination is necessary for a full and dignified life.

Notes

15 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Vintage Books, New York 1993, p. 1.

16 Ibid., p. 45.

17 Ibid., p. 151.

18 Umberto Eco, Matka arklpäivän epätodellisuuteen (Semiologia guotidiana). WSOY, Helsinki 1985, p. 350.

19 Ibid., p. 112.

20 Erich Fromm, source unidentified, most likely Escape From Freedom.

21 Interview in Time Magazine, 1990. Source not identified in detail.

22 As quoted in 'Translator's Introduction', (Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, III., 1964, p. XII.

23 As quoted in Bachelard, ibid., p. 157.

24 Origin of the quote unidentified.

25 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, Boston, 1964, p. XII.

26 Martin Heidegger, 'What Calls for Thinking?'. Basic Writings. Harper & Row, New York, 1977, p. 357.

27 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay On the Imagination of Matter. The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas 1982, s. 107.

28 Jacques Hadamar, 'The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field', Education in Vision Series. Princeton, 1943.

29 Henry Moore, 'The Sculptor Speaks', Henry Moore On Sculpture (edited by Philip James). MacDonald, London 1966, p. 62-64.

30 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Vintage Books, New York, 1993, s. 57.

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