Subscribe to Posts‘THE EUCHARIST INCLUDES THE RELATIONS OF MEANING WHICH THE ELEMENTS GENERATE IN THE MINDS OF THOSE WHO EAT THEM’
Fuller, Beyond the Crisis in Art, Writers and Readers, 1980.
p. 221 “I have to take you into the relations existing between ideology and perception, because it is here that I find my own critical criteria.
The consciousness of men and women, of which their ‘ways of seeing’ form a part, is self-evidently subejct to continuous change and development…..Since it would be absurd to assume that modifications in ways of seeing were solely the product of the inexorably slow biological evolution of the human perceptual apparatus, I conclude that the dominant mode of peception–the way in which objects are seen–at a given historical moment, and also those modes which oppose themselves to that which is dominant, are themselves determined by historical forces.
Let me give a single example. In the seventeenth century, soon after the discovery of the microscope, scientists began to study human spermatazoa beneath the lens. Within each individual sperm, they reported seeing a homunculus, that is a diminutive but fully formed little man, within whom, they claimed, was another homunculus, and so on, ad infinitum…..It is not, and I would stress this, a question of saying that their ideology pervaded and distorted what they thought about what they saw. The distinction between perception and cognition had vanished….their perception itself was forced to conform to an elaborate degree with their pre-existing framework of prejudices. If this is sometimes (and perhaps more often than is usually admitted) true of scientists, actively trying to identify the attributes of objects, we may readily understand how much more true it is of perception exercised within the territory of aesthetics; here, we find that what people see is very often simply swarming with homunculi, as the art columns of our Sunday newspapers demonstrate week after week.”
OBSERVATION: Bias, and subjectivity actively form personal opinion. The statement ‘anything can be art’, is an interesting entry point for examining what art is. Is everything art? Can anything be art? Perhaps anything and everything can be art, though we might observe that not everything is art. Every standard, definition, context, and connotation of the word (art) must be held under severe scrutiny in order to fully comprehend a genuine meaning. The base of knowledge and experience brought to the aesthetic encounter determines the level, or levels of cognitive and perceptual contact activated by such an encounter. What one sees, and what one perceives in an aesthetic encounter result from accumulated life experience, sensory capability, and the ability for every person to participate fully in such an experience.
