Imagining Bodies: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Imagination

THREE. Aesthetic Imagining

A e s t h e t i c I m a g i n i n g 5 1 51 THREE Aesthetic Imagining F illed with wonder before the waves of the seashore, I decide to take out my pad and charcoal to draw. I trace with my hand the sweeping curves and the movements of the waves to express their impact on my body and my imagination. When I am done, I place the sketchbook before me, and I trace the curves on the page with my eyes instead of my hand. The finished sketch becomes the object of my attention, providing a communion at a distance between the waves and myself. In addition to being a unique visible object, a work of art can have a powerful effect on perception itself. The perspective drawings of the Renaissance, for instance, allowed for the birth of a new experience of space; the vanishing line, a single dot at the center of the landscape, exposed the canvas to the third dimension and changed forever the way that space is experienced. More recently , the Impressionists used their technique to present the world as a two-dimensional spectacle of color and light, and Andy Warhol’s use of computer graphics have made the visible world plastic and dispensable. The artistic battle is more than a struggle to represent objects, it is a fight to reinvent the very way that we perceive the world. 5 2 A e s t h e t i c I m a g i n i n g Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy gives special attention to the phenomenon of the work of art. Much of his research after the publication of Phenomenology of Perception concerns the aesthetic experience and the activity of artistic production. The arts that interested him the most included painting and literature, especially the artworks of Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee, and the literature of Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. He admired the sculptures of Marcel Duchamp and Auguste Rodin, and he even wrote an essay on the new art form of cinema. Merleau-Ponty was also aware of many of the most popular art critics of his time: André Malraux, Erwin Panofsky and Sigmund Freud to name a few. But he does not simply express the ideas of others. What is unique about his essays on art and literature is the appreciation that he shows for the expressive body and the role that it plays in every form of art. Be it a painting or a sculpture, a novel or a film, what is common in every artwork is the way that it uses the imagining body to extend the experience of perception to a heightened sense of beauty and creativity. The art world during the 1940s and 1950s, when Merleau-Ponty was writing many of his essays on aesthetics, was in a state of transition. The popularity of classical realism started to wane as the Impressionists began to experiment with painting. Photography and cinema were beginning to assert themselves as legitimate art forms that surpassed their original mimetic function. The art of mime was undergoing a radical transformation that gave to the body a new expressive power. Each of these developments created a tension between those who believed that art was meant to hold up a mirror to nature, and those who claimed for art the role of emotional expression. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, the arts in France had been mostly representational in nature.Artworks had traditionally remained a part of the general landscape, a fresco decorating the wall of a place of worship, or a statue commemorating the victory of a great general as part of a public square. For this reason, A e s t h e t i c I m a g i n i n g 5 3 art has traditionally been treated as mimetic.1 Even today sketches and photographs are often used primarily as an aid to memory, painted landscapes are frequently used to adorn the walls of commercial buildings, and the digitized reproductions of classic masterpieces now litter the expansive regions of virtual reality. Pictorial art gained support from several technical innovations during the early ages of modern science. Merleau-Ponty mentions the story of how Brunelleschi, the great master of the duomo in Florence, built a device to show how a scene of the...