Dewey for Artists

Mary Jane Jacob

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226580449, 9780226580302
• eBook ISBN: 9780226580586
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

John Dewey is known as a pragmatic philosopher and progressive architect of American educational reform, but some of his most important contributions came in his thinking about art.
          Dewey argued that there is strong social value to be found in art, and it is artists who often most challenge our preconceived notions. Dewey for Artists shows us how Dewey advocated for an "art of democracy." Identifying the audience as co-creator of a work of art by virtue of their experience, he made space for public participation. Moreover, he believed that societies only become—and remain—truly democratic if its citizens embrace democracy itself as a creative act, and in this he advocated for the social participation of artists.
          Throughout the book, Mary Jane Jacob draws on the experiences of contemporary artists who have modeled Dewey's principles within their practices. We see how their work springs from deeply held values. We see, too, how carefully considered curatorial practice can address the manifold ways in which aesthetic experience happens and, thus, enable viewers to find greater meaning and purpose. And it is this potential of art for self and social realization, Jacob helps us understand, that further ensures Dewey's legacy—and the culture we live in.

Part One

The Artist’s Process

1

Making

We are what we make. Dewey’s revolution was to value the making. With that in mind, he attempted to construct a philosophy of life for a rapidly growing America in the throes of industrial and ideological change at the turn of the twentieth century. “I think the whole problem of understanding should be approached not from the point of view of the eyes, but from the point of view of the hands,” he said.1

What is making? To Dewey, it was far more than bringing something into existence and giving it concrete form. We carry an interest through a process of inquiry. Care is invested, with the hope that something new can be achieved and the outcome will have been worth the effort. Making is vitalizing, Dewey observed, because it feels vitally important and can only be understood by carrying it out. The aliveness experienced by makers in the process derives from what they truly care about. Thus, the creative act is quite literally a life force.

Making is central to being an artist. During the process, the artist cares about bringing something to pass in an especially intense way, for a time, so focused that all else seems to fade from sight, so passionately possessed in the undertaking that the bounds of time and effort become irrelevant. During the making life feels uncharacteristically centered, and the calm that comes with clear intent sustains the uncertainty of creating something new. Projects (as many contemporary artists’ work have come to be called) also carry this singular sense of searching that is renewed time and again with each new undertaking. And this happens, too, when collaborations are acts of comaking among dedicated and invested persons. Each party, as its knowledge is valued, sometimes for the first time, unlocks its own questions.

For a curator, the enterprise of exhibitions has a similar sensation: all-consuming, requiring gestation as well as concerted development, so that ideas can arise then be honed as one lives the project. So today curators care not only for the work entrusted to them but also for the shape of the show or project they make, expanding what is at the root of being a curator—curare—to care. This is a bond artists and curators share. It lives in their coevolution of ideas and shared, laser-sharp view into all the details of the enterprise that make each aspect urgently important at the moment of making.

Caring for Culture

Making is more than the province of the artist or craftsman or curator. Any work undertaken with care and attention by a committed, invested maker, can become art. “When we say that tennis-playing, singing, acting, and a multitude of other activities are arts, we engage in an elliptical way of saying that there is art in the conduct of these activities.”2 John Dewey even looked to his making as a philosopher: “Knowledge and propositions which are the products of thinking, are works of art, as much so as statuary and symphonies.”3 Art emerges as a quality of doing, and since it adheres to the manner of doing, art is adverbial in nature.

In 1934, Dewey wrote: “The intelligent mechanic4 engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged. The difference between such a worker and the inept and careless bungler is as great in the shop as it is in the studio.”5 This creative potential inside everyone, not just those who identify as artists, was key to Dewey’s philosophy of life and education decades before Joseph Beuys pronounced “everyone is an artist.” When, later still, Robert Pirsig thought back to the work of a couple of guys who messed up his bike’s oil-delivery system in the 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he also uncannily built his case around the profession of mechanic: “they were uninvolved, had no identification with the job, were removed, and did not put care into what they did.”6 He further explained: a “person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.” And he cited, “The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care!”7 In the end, Pirsig determined the ill-suited mechanics were “spectators.”8

As early as 1891, Dewey affirmed that each of us “is not born as a mere spectator of the world; [we are] born into it.” We are each “an agent,” he said, and if that is taken away, “nothing remains.”9 To be a maker is to be a participant. It is not just to take hand to material. Making is more than the physical labor. It is careful observation, precise thinking, “looking for the underlying form,” Pirsig called it.10 Martin Puryear is a sculptor who applies consummate craft as he arrives at a form; he is a maker who has broken barriers between art and craft, as well as what it is to be an African-American artist in the modern tradition. Yet when he publically spoke with Theaster Gates, he arrived at a perplexing point as he tried to understand the younger artist’s expanded practice that spans from the studio to the boardroom to the street. Gates explained that the variety of things he creates is his work as an artist. This is not by fiat or conceptual ploy, but because of the care he puts into each aspect of his work. Seeing the threads that run through them and over time, he builds his life, with the parts reinforcing the whole. So working in multiple ways is about crafting the right project as he seeks to “resolve the right form for the right context.” Then, no matter the shape the undertaking takes, “I get the same euphoric, artful feeling as being in the studio,” he said.11

To Dewey, and later Pirsig, making goes to the core of our being: one must be a mechanic. To be a maker is to be fully engaged in what you are doing. Interests are at work, no matter how wide or idiosyncratically defined; they drive what you do, shape your intentions. While curiosity is an attribute, this word does not begin to capture the passion or urgency that comes from values that you hold dear at the very moment they are played out in the work and which cause what you do to be critically important to carry out and draw to conclusion. The maker, as a participant, values the doing as much or more than the thing done, and “does not shun moments of resistance and tension [but] rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total.”12

Care, though this word speaks of skill and craft, of knowing how to do things well, is always about giving your full attention to the making. To Dewey, the maker undertakes an inquiry. It need not be revolutionary, a “first,” but nonetheless it must be a discovery for you in the moment. No matter how many times you have been there, you do it anew. To do this, the maker has to be present in the moment, fully conscious. You live it. And this making is vital each and every time.

There is no doubt that Dewey’s great respect for artists sprang from his sense that they assume this role out of necessity. To the philosopher, artists possess a keen ability to hear their inner voice and bring forth things into the world, while also continually challenging themselves to see in fresh ways, to locate resonant meanings, and to create change. To do so, artists occupy their own realm and control their means of production, even if they pay dearly for that freedom.

Dewey wanted this possibility for everyone. He thought if conditions were such that a worker could produce “articles of use that satisfy his urge for experience as he works,” then psychological wisdom would tell us that that worker would beneficially gain in consciousness. In turn, such work would contribute to consumers’ “heightened consciousness of sight and touch,” offering small moments of aesthetic experience to us all.13 But changing methods of mass production would require a “radical social alteration,”14 because care was not an economic priority to those in power.

Embodied Making

For the maker, each work encompasses more than the thing itself. Working with wood to fashion furniture, maker-author Peter Korn writes: “The maker of craft (or any maker) is generally a lone individual asking, in part, how life may be lived with meaning and fulfillment. His work is a process of remapping social narratives central to human identity, so the things he makes speak to those issues.”15 Katie Paterson is working with a whole forest of trees in Oslo to make Future Library. It will be pulped in one hundred years from planting in order to print the manuscripts of authors commissioned once a year until then. Of making, she said:

I treat my work like it was alive, a living being, sentient in some regard. Therefore, if alive, I must treat it with respect, care and compassion, for it to live and grow. This requires cultivation. I feel like I’m deceiving my work if it’s made carelessly, overlooked, rushed. With Future Library, it more literally does live and grow; it needs to be tended with compassion over the years to come. I need to sustain strong willpower to see many of my works through. I must not only have belief but also compassion for the work: I must feel for it. I must always have a belief from the outset, that the work deserves to be brought into being—and I distinguish this belief from a value judgment on the work.16

As a work is brought into being, it becomes alive. And it lives in the maker. Pirsig, channeling Dewey, spoke of the integration:

I’ve said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do. To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they’re doing, but more than this—there’s a kind of inner peace of mind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.17

Making as a conscious act also develops the consciousness of the maker. It is more than the workings of the brain or the muscle memory of the hand. It is an embodied process of inquiry. Dewey believed that the self can neither be separated into parts nor from its surroundings, and with this he urged an understanding of the totality and continuity of being. He called this concept mind-body. This feeling of unity within and beyond the self contributes to artful making: “Any practical activity will, provided that it is integrated and moves by its own urge to fulfillment, have esthetic quality.”18

Creating art, or any invested making, draws upon the whole-and-situated self, offering us an uncommon chance to feel a sense of wholeness within ourselves and connectedness to something beyond. We feel a sense of completeness—not just of having completed a task. Korn speaks from experience when he says: “Creative practice simply makes our lives richer in meaning and fulfillment than they might otherwise be. For some of us, creative practice may be among the few slender threads that bind our lives together at all.”19 Furthermore, making as a manifestation of mind-body is a process by which we can further develop our consciousness. What we make shapes the ethos of our life. Dewey surely had Aristotle’s Ethics in mind, seeking to bring into his own time the ancient wisdom that to live well is to practice the values at the essence of our being. Hence, having embodied these values, we act on them through what we make.

If the workings of mind and body are unified, so too must be thinking and action, according to Dewey. But to suggest that all makers are agents who think as well as act was problematic in his time. Class distinctions remained defined according to labor, with the intellectual elite distinguished from the less-esteemed handworker, and the artist ambiguously positioned between the two. Even today, art schools endeavor to demonstrate that artists are researchers; this is consummated in artists’ practice-based PhDs. But Dewey demanded no division between theory and practice.20 To him, the future depended on their union. So he wrote:

The question of the integration of mind-body in action is the most practical of all questions we can ask of our civilization. It is not just a speculative question, it is a demand; a demand that the labor of multitudes now too predominantly physical in character be inspirited by purpose and emotion and informed by knowledge and understanding. It is a demand that what now pass for highly intellectual and spiritual functions shall be integrated with the ultimate conditions and means of all achievement, namely the physical, and thereby accomplish something beyond themselves. Until this integration is effected in the only place where it can be carried out, in action itself, we shall continue to live in a society in which a soulless and heartless materialism is compensated for by soulful but futile and unnatural idealism and spiritualism. For materialism is not a theory, but a condition of action; that in which material and mechanical means are severed from the consequences which give them meaning and value. And spiritualistic idealism is not a theory but a state of action; that in which ends are privately enjoyed in isolation from means of execution and consequent public betterment.21

Making as an embodied practice fulfills something basic to being human. As an evolutionary-minded philosopher, informed by the rising field of anthropology, Dewey was led to conclude that humans make things purposefully, in spite of variations across cultures. Thus, putting care into what we make, Dewey reasoned, must serve a purpose in living life. The answer he found lay in the satisfyingly invigorating moments in wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One  The Artist’s Process
• Part Two  The Social Value of Art
• Notes
• Index