WHAT IS ART? - No. 1 – Antony Gormley and art as quintessentially spiritual experience.

Art - as quintessentially spiritual experience

I am presenting a range of artists who mean a lot to me.  I'm doing this in the context of a working definition of art - and the view that both the making of art, by the artist, and aesthetic experience, by the viewer are essentially one and the same as mystical or spiritual experience.

What of the definition of art?  Here is the one I work with;

Art is culturally, and personally, significant meaning, skilfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.
(RP’s working definition  – after a definition by Richard Anderson quoted in Freeland (2001 p. 77))

All art is about movement of the human spirit.  Human spirit as heart-mind – ‘xin’ in Chinese.

The idea of ‘heart-mind’ for the singleness of the interiority of inner experience, as opposed to heart and mind as two mythical inner organs, which is the bifurcation of the human spirit that the Age of Reason has left us with, removes any need to argue for or against ‘conceptual art’.  Hoorayyyyy!

I can now love both art that is labelled ‘conceptual’ and that which isn’t, and with luck I get some sensuality, cultural references, significant personal meaning-making and skilfull encoding!

There are a range of reasons for suggesting that both the making of art and aesthetic experience are essentially one and the same as mystical experience. Here are three;

1) Art that really works for you takes you out of yourself – it creates a unitive experience.

2) The making of art mostly involves engagement that is beyond language and the conceptual.

3) The conceptual is stimulated by the experience but can never adequately render or re-present the creative or aesthetic experience.

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One artist that gives me ‘the full set’ – sensuality, cultural references, significant personal meaning-making and skilfull encoding and the qualities of the spiritual or mystical etc. -  is Antony Gormley.

The Asian Field (photo above) is, quite appropriately, much larger than the ‘Field’ I saw in the Tullie gallery in Carlisle.  The impact of setting eyes on all of the figures staring up at me was a force-field of heart-mind.  Reflection afterwards is endless.

His genius has developed art that is;

Transcendent

Universalist

Community generated and community-generating.

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Source and article on Asian Field HERE

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