The Visual Arts and the Art of the Unseen

Leonardo, Vol. 12, pp. 231-235. Pergamon Press Ltd. 1979. Printed in Great Britain THE VISUAL ARTS AND THE ART OF THE UNSEEN* Arnold Berleant** I. After a century of innovation and revolt, it might seem that visual artists would have exhausted the possibilities of the perceptual world. In a series of movements protesting the complacent attitude of 19th-century Western ‘academic’ art, painters, led by Cezanne, Manet, Gauguin and van Gogh, fought the battle of Impressionism , Fauvism, Cubism and succeedingschools until, by the last third of the 20th century, a kind of art has arisen in which a visible object is neither needed nor wanted. The traditional expectations of visual art have been discarded so that one cannot be sure what one will find upon entering a gallery in New York, Paris and Tokyo, for example; there may be no art objects on view. One is expected instead to consider an idea, a proposal, a process, an event or to step out into the midst of the tumult of the street for an aesthetic engagement [l, 21. Such expectations cause a perceptive critic like the late Harold Rosenberg to lament that ‘The post-art artist carries the definition of art to the point where nothing is left of art but the fiction of the artist’ [3]. To say that this presents a problem for aestheticians is an understatement. Most theoreticians of visual art continue to bring to their judgments predilections and concepts seldom more recent than the 18th century, and these, unfortunately, cast the art object and the appreciative experience into patterns that are ill-equipped to illuminate and comprehend the arts of the unseen [4]. It is not enough merely to ridicule and dismiss these disconcertingdevelopments . I should like, instead, to attempt to discern their origins, to appreciate their impulses and to placethem in a context that can accommodate this artistic development. To do this will require a shift from the history of art objectsto a history of awareness, for, as will emergefrom my discussion, the underlying continuity in the arts is the development of perception in which ideas and not objectsplay an essential part. Three stages appear in this view, although they overlap and merge with one another. The first consists in extending the range of types of art objects, the second in intensifying appreciative aesthetic experiencesand the third in enlarging the arts to include an experience of the total environment chosen by an artist. What I should like to do here is to sketch this *Based on a version of this article presented at the InternationalSymposium on Postindustrial Culture: Technology and the Public Sphere, organized by the Center for Twentieth CenturyStudiesat theUniversityof Wisconsin-Milwaukeefrom 16 to 19 November 1977. **Aesthetician,Dept of Philosoph, C.W. Post Center, Long Island University,Greenvale,NY 11548, U S A . history, from necessity working rather selectively, and then to evaluate briefly the present situation of the unseen in art. n. Visual artists are congenital iconoclasts, sometimes in their programs, typically in the execution of their works. It is in the last century that this has been made most apparent, particularly by the irresistible tendency to extend the notion of what an art object is. Such an extension has occurred ina variety of ways, someof which result from the choice of materials, others from techniques , still others from a changed content in response to the surrounding culture. An important extension of the traditional art object derivesfrom the availability of new industrial techniques, materials and products. In part, acrylic paints are being used instead of oils, steel and aluminum instead of stone and bronze, plastics instead of wood and clay, colored electric light instead of pigments. So, too, with techniques . The spray gun, the acetylene torch and electrical and electronicsystemscan be found in studios. Instead of using materials that are rare, precious and exotic, some artists make collagesof newspaperand cloth, assemblages of everyday objects and exhibit Found objects. Instead of etnploying skills that require long periods of training, some artists have turned to simple tools and techniques that many members of an industrial society possess, and have utilized industrial craftsmen to execute their conceptions . Artworks involving random or chance effects replacethe highlydiscriminating...