How perception is affected by the interconnectedness of aesthetics, mediums, and ideologies.
Written by Ramirez De Leon
“In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained — ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”
Note: This work is not a critique or analysis of politics. It is merely a look at different philosophical and artistic perspectives as they influence the perception of the self within culture. First, we take a look at the impact of mediums, next ideology and commodities, and finally habitus.
“What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed word. The printed words sets up a paradigm, a structure of awareness which affects everybody in very, very drastic ways, and it doesn’t very much matter what you print as long as you go on in that form of activity.”
As an artist, as someone who walks in the unknown uncertainty of creativity, I understand that the work we do as artists has an impact beyond immediate description.
A work’s “non-descriptiveness” allows it to be felt intensely regardless of language, culture, or identification. It is an affect that is grossly underrated and under-discussed. This subject matter is rarely discussed or expressed because people are trained to think in a gross materialistic way at a very young age. Materialistic indoctrination forces one to see artwork (or creative projects) as merely products. (or as means to an end).
“Creativity is uncertain. To be creative you must get into the indeterminacy of your own structure, your own knowledge, your own future , one of the large control systems that you have in your head and in your body says… that for survival of the individual and survival of the race, these are the railroad tracks you have to travel. That may or may not be true. And we know that it’s true within certain limits, but these limits probably can be enlarged. We also know that in the software of your own brain, the province of your own mind, this is not really that necessary. We have sufficient computing capacity within our own structures, our own brains, so that we can turn over to a very small part of that computing capacity for the necessary programs for survival…you can have alternative futures, you can have alternative programming you don’t have to keep going round and round survival tape loop…”
Oppression is not merely in the physical, economic, or material sense. Nor is it merely large entity versus the small entity. Oppression is often an ideologically materialistic , passive means of asserting dominance over the essence of creativity, true expression and new ideas. Oppression in its most basic form can be a concocted collection of institutionalized assumptions that repress possibilities of creative thinking.
Furthermore, we cannot underestimate the power of mediums themselves. To ignore the power of the medium or to maintain our ignorance to the medium is to refuse excellence in our art, thinking, and profession. This lack of awareness of the medium may be a direct hindrance to happiness and enjoyment in life.
For those not in a constant state of fight for survival, what must be obtained is the consciousness of the evolving medium that is the communication of our digital selves (avatars).
And so the title [The Medium is the Massage] is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral — it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were…
Mediums: the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses (or that force that acts on objects at a distance.) are indeed very powerful. Ultimately, our experience in the material sense is exactly that, a stimulating encounter with that information derived from the senses (engagement with the unseen and seen, where material objects have the leading role). This means that the objects we encounter in themselves are created works, and therefore can have just as much impact (or more) than those objects that we call and designate as “art”(those objects which we intend to be treated, viewed, and considered to be “works of art”).
We are not at odds with ideas solely, or primarily (as many might suggest). We are at odds with objects and their suggested implications. We are at odds with the roles that we have assumed and the mediums which carry the polarizing and sometimes offensive ideas.
The medium is allowed to carry a concept or an idea and present it to the eye or ear, and in many cases, when the viewer gives those ideas credence, the medium , as well as it’s objective is able to stealthy infiltrate the attitudes, moods and modes of the now subdued perceiver.
“It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”
II.) IDEOLOGY and COMMODITIES
“Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.”
- Slavoj Zizek , [Perverts Guide to Ideology, 2012]
If objects as mediums have a profound and sometimes subliminal impact on our perception, then we must also look at commodities of industry. Commodities help establish class and class systems.
Certain objects are often appreciated by those families of certain classes that train their young to appreciate those very objects as well as their cultural significance. These activities and objects, of course, are often guarded by characteristics of economic inaccessibility.
The nature of the fine arts, more specifically oil painting, collectively, helped reinforced a sense ownership, commodity fetishism, and high classism.
“From 1500 to 1900 the visual arts of Europe were dominated by the oil painting, the easel picture, this kind of painting had never been used anywhere else in the world before. The tradition of oil painting was made up of hundreds of thousands of unremarkable works hung all over the walls of galleries and private houses rather in the same way as the reserve collection is still hung in the National Gallery …European oil painting unlike the art of other civilizations and periods placed a unique emphasis on the tangibility. The texture, the weight. the graspability of what was depicted. What was real as what you could put your hands on…. the beginning of the tradition of oil painting, the emphasis on the real being solid was part of a scientific attitude but the emphasis on the real being solid became equally closely connected with a sense of ownership.”
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Imagine two individuals from very different classes. One is highly rich and the other very poor. It is easy to imagine that in some oil paintings of the 1600s, those wealthier individuals will likely have a different relationship and attitude towards those paintings (especially if they see themselves reflected in those very works).
Many argue for equal representation of minority groups in mass and popular media. If one sees themselves in the artwork around them, then their perception of the world will change.
It is my argument that not only “fine art” or oil paintings in todays era are a reflection and establishment of classes and class structures, but rather, almost any commodity, product, or medium can have a very similar affect. All of these subjects, and how we interact with them, are reflections of class structures and belief systems.
Objects, in a way, force individuals to consider their options and reality in a very specific and sometimes narrow way. It can greatly limit what one perceives to be possible for them within a society. These assumptions further perpetuated by objects and mediums can systematically eliminate the thought of new and positive possibilities that otherwise gain access to the mental faculties of the higher classes.
This can be simply understood as the impact of design on the psyche. Those who appreciate and know that design can affect our reality and our relationship with it know how important aesthetic and utility can be.
The late John Berger, art critic well known for his work entitled “Ways Of Seeing” explains that previously oil painting would show a class of individuals as they were, with their materials and land and lifestyle. These oil paintings reaffirmed their positions in their reality. And on the contrary, our modern era of publicity and advertisement displays a fantasy of who we are not, but wish to one day be. For the modern era, it is not simply about the product but the fantasy and attitude that the product will grant us.
“It was already Marx who long ago emphasized that a commodity is never just a simple object that we buy and consume. A commodity is an object full of theological, even metaphysical, niceties. Its presence always reflects an invisible transcendence. And the classical publicity for Coke quite openly refers to this absent, invisible, quality. Coke is the “real thing”.
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties….. as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.
— Karl Marx, Capital (1867)
In sociology, Habitus comprises socially ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is the way that individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar backgrounds (such as social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education and profession).
“Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing.
In one of his major works, Distinction, [Pierre] Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus.
Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.”
The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.
“The meaning of a painting no longer resides on it’s unique painted surface, which it is only possible to see in one place at one time. It’s meaning ,or a large part of it has become transmittable. It comes to you, this meaning, like the news of an event. It has become information of a sort.” — Justin Berger
In conclusion, I believe that once we acknowledge the affect commodities have on the world beyond their implied and immediately described purpose, if we acknowledge their assumed magical qualities, we will understand that mediums and commodities create a very particular context by which we view ourselves within the world.
These objects quite literally create the structural boundaries in which our imaginations dance. These objects influence the distance in which our imagination travels as well as the means of such travel. It is only until we discuss and acknowledge these invisible qualities that we may consider our own rational alternatives to these prescribed perspectives.
If we are to acknowledge at all the boundaries and limitations that are put on artists and subjects of class, if we have any desire to have a say in how our work as artists is perceived and activated, if we want to change any of these conditions in which we live, if we desire to acquire a taste beyond the commonly associated, false identities; we must begin to learn about these materials, their invisible qualities, and the descriptions that are indeed the basis of our culture.
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