What I’d like to discuss is the mechanism by which art connects us. I’m not interested in defining art, but we need an understanding of it to proceed. So, let’s just say art is a tailored, created, or curated experience. You know art when you see it or make it. Rather than define it, we’ll consider that the art I am talking about to be the collection of person-created things you consider to be art. Your favourite books, movies, games, paintings, mixed media experiences, are all art, as well as the creations you bring forth.
Of what
does an experience, like a work of art, consist? Consider watching the sunset
at the beach. You point towards the specific qualia, especially the colors,
that compose it: the red, blue, and purple hues of the clouds, the waning
orange of the sun itself, both of these reflected on the rolling waves. But it’s
not as if you experienced just these qualia; their structured combination,
along with whatever your internal state was at the time, produced its own unique quale.
No two sunsets are exactly alike so it’s the ultimate quale that defines the
experience.
That ultimate
quale what I will call the Essence of an experience.
Essence can
itself be decomposed. We can direct our attention to a specific aspect of an
experience (the waves, the sun, or the sky), so that our experience is of just
that part, and even these simpler items have an Essence that arises from the
structure of their qualia. The frothiness of the waves, the brightness and size
of the sun, and the number and shape of clouds in the sky, each contributes to
the Essence of which it is part. In this way, each Essence can be decomposed
into sub-Essences (not necessarily in a unique way). We may find at some level
that we can’t really decompose the Essence into more than a single quale, but
we can still call this an Essence (composed of one quale).
An Essence
is specifically dependent on the structure of the sub-Essences that compose it.
If the sun were higher above the horizon, the mood would be a little less
relaxed, a little more upbeat. If the sky were cloudier, it would be more
melancholy. If we imagine rearranging the colours in the description above, the
experience would be different altogether (a blue sun and purple sea would be
terribly eerie, although perhaps still beautiful). It’s evident that Structure
(the arrangement of items in relation to each other) is essential to Essence.
The
argument of this section is: to make art is to try and create an experience,
experiences are defined by their Essence, an Essence is defined by the
Structure of its sub-Essences. Therefore, making art amounts to placing
Essences in Structures, thereby creating new Essences, which are may again be
placed into Structures. The power of art lies in how the Structure of the
audience’s life combines with the Structure of the work to produce a novel subjective
experience.
Let’s
return to the example of the sunset as an example of why and how one would be
driven to make art.
If you
described the sunset as I did above to your friend, they would get an idea of
what you saw but, if you had seen a truly beautiful sunset, you would not be
able to impart to them the depth of your experience with just that generic
description. If you adamantly want to reveal to others exactly what you felt,
you need to find a way to more accurately represent the Essence of what you
saw. You may have taken a photo, but this would not capture the humidity of the
day, or the lingering joy of seeing your dog Bud bound merrily along sandy
dunes just moments before. You could have taken a video instead, and captured a
little more, but the physical sensations are still missing. If your friend was
there with you, you could ask them to simply recall the memory, but even then,
they would still miss the impact of your own internal state (your emotions,
memories, associations, ect.) on the experience. You could describe these
to your friend (“I was sad because I dropped my egg sandwich in the sand, but
then I was happy because the vast ocean reminded me how insignificant my
worries are”) and that would get you somewhat closer—they’ve probably had
similar feelings at times, so they recall the associated qualia with some
degree of accuracy.
You’ve made
yourself understood, right? They know what you experienced.
No. There is
yet more to the Structure of your life that scaffolds the Essence of
that experience: you really really love egg sandwiches because your first
romantic interest made them for you when you lived together before things
turned bad. Losing the sandwich felt like being abandoned again. And you feel
kind of pathetic for still having feelings. And you got Bud to help you get
over the breakup. And you’re also a bit in love with your friend so you took
the fallen egg sandwich as a sign to finally let slip the past and confess your
feelings but you chickened out at the last moment, and …
We could go
on. Even if the list were exhaustive, simply describing every aspect of
the experience would not be enough to evoke the immensely complex and
interwoven feelings that came together in that moment. Even given undivided
attention, you would not be able to impart the entirety of your experience to
your friend.
It's
maddening to consider the infinite gap between each other. That lonely wound crying
to be sewn shut. That pain is one thing that might drive us to evoke in others
as close an approximation as possible of the experience we had, that is, an
approximation of the Essence of our experience.
And thus
art.
There is
really nothing other than art that could solve this problem. As a thought
experiment, imagine an alien appeared with a device that let your friend
experience your exact qualia. You would experience the situation exactly
as they did. This would still not be enough because you’d only be shown
the experience from the point of view of your friend. The sentence “You would
experience the situation exactly as they did” cannot be true because, almost by
definition, you cannot have someone else’s subjective experience.
Put another way, you cannot simultaneously experience something as both
yourself and as someone else.
If even
this technology, or magic if we had chosen a different metaphor, cannot solve
it, what hope does art have? Words, paintings, abstraction, and symbols are so
rudimentary, so physical and bounded. Can the distance even be closed?
Oh, my
friend. We will never know each other.
Do not
despair. There is yet hope. Not to for you to meet your friends where they are,
or for them to meet you where you are, but for your worlds to intersect in some
way. In capturing the Essence of the sunset, you inject yourself into something
your beloved friend can experience. You make art. Your friend reacts to what
can only be you and your relationship to that beautiful moment. The Structures
you chose in creating the Essence, and the Structure of Essence in their own
life, are what determines their response. By virtue of its utter reliance on
both your subjective experience and theirs, their response closes the gap.
Cronenberg
said, “We
know what the ultimate is … it’s to recreate reality but in our own image. All
art is that, in a way.” Putting it
that way is almost selfish but it’s true. We must imbue art with our very most
personal subjective experience if it is to connect us. That is because the connection
art allows does not exist in a mutual understanding, in a decoding of its Structure,
or even in understanding of what is being represented. Rather it
exists in the reality created by the intertwining of the subjective worlds of
artist and audience.
