Art: Oceania
Funeral Urns aborigines (hollow log tombs)
The art of Oceania includes productions, old and contemporary peoples of Melanesia, of Micronesia, of Polynesia, as well as those of traditional peoples of Australia and New Zealand and other islands of the Pacific. However, it does not classify in this category performances of artists from Australia and New Zealand of Western origin.
His story begins when the first wave of migrants who came of South-Eastern Asia, settled in Australia and New Guinea, there are probably about 50 000 years. The oldest works of art that have found them are figures of stone mortars and pestles adorned with zoomorphic motifs mixed with anthropomorphic figures.
Around 1500 BC the civilization appears Lapita (the name of an archaeological site in New Caledonia). This is an original civilization, including its decoration pottery, which seems to have appeared on the Bismarck Islands, north-eastern New Guinea. It is associated with people Austronesian who would win the Oceania distant from the Near Oceania, causing the Oceanic language group. Hundreds of Lapita archaeological sites were found in an area ranging from New Guinea to Samoa (Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Wallis and Futuna).
In each island, this culture has adapted to its particular environment and has undergone its own evolution, but it has not lost its unity. All Pacific island has retained a certain cultural homogeneity
Philosophy of Art
The classical theories: the aesthetic
The philosophy of art means both the nearly constant interest to philosophers of art since antiquity and discipline more or less designed to be autonomous from the late eighteenth century For the historian of philosophy Michel Blay, he must distinguish between two approaches to the philosophy of art. On the one hand it covers the whole body of philosophical texts, from ancient Greece, addressing the question of aesthetics (from Plato to Kant, in short) and secondly it is the discipline born with Schelling early nineteenth century.
The contribution of antiquity revolves around the concept of "mimesis," with Plato in Sophist, and especially with Aristotle in his Poetics. The mimesis is in his art represent the reality of art would be representation of reality and the Beautiful. However, it is with the shelving of the concept of mimesis as "the first theory of art as a work of genius emerges in Kant." In addition to distinguishing the different arts, Kant moves the principle of intimate artistic character to the pole for receiving, assimilating the aesthetic idea as an expression of understanding and imagination.
In his course on Philosophy of Art (1802-1803), Schelling rejects the name of aesthetics and announced that only philosophy is able to develop a "true science of art." Another big name on the philosophy of art is that of Hegel, who in his Aesthetic (1828-1829) shows that the purpose of this discipline is the Fair and Art, understood as distinct from religion and philosophy. The modern period is dominated by two major currents The first, represented by Adorno raises the question of the autonomy of art, particularly vis-à-vis the social. Theodor W. Adorno, heir to the thought of Karl Marx, concludes that without the social art can not exist. The second trend is that of analytic aesthetics. It poses the problem of defining art. The uses of the word are analyzed by Ludwig Wittgenstein while functioning as a practice is considered by Nelson Goodman.
The eighteenth century saw the emergence of an awareness of art, like the previous century had shown the subject's consciousness. Born of modern philosophy, aesthetics is a philosophical discipline that despite his attempts did not emancipated science of art. Only by simplifying we agree that aesthetics (philosophy of meaning and art) is a reflection on the art, for the purpose of this discussion is not given d advance. Indeed it is the artistic practices themselves that have become reflexive and nowadays it is hardly possible to separate the work of art discourse that founds "aesthetic" and "artistic" are two adjectives almost interchangeable.
But behind Alexander Baumgarten, the author whose aesthetic owes its name, was considered "art aesthetics" According to his idea of beauty provided an opportunity for knowledge to achieve noticeable for its perfect accomplishment: an art of beauty was the equivalent of the theory built on causation. A mediation effected by this third term, "beauty", introduced between art and aesthetics.
Just like the modern look has worked to discover a primitive art, aesthetics precursors found in ancient authors. For example the dialogue Plato Hippias Major is traditionally the subtitle of the beauty and became a canonical text of aesthetics. So it is hardly surprising to find that he anticipates some issues still being debated today. The outcomes of European civilization can not be subjected to such a reading and thus be reconstructed as, for example, a Chinese or Indian aesthetic.
So we conceived of art as a regulated activity, the need for a system to judge its results are made to feel. It is only in retrospect that the various arts of poetry written since antiquity have become representative of a normative aesthetics. The Quarrel of Ancients and the Moderns shows that in fact the conventional norms or rules were well received. The first draft of aesthetics was an attempt to naturalize the art and the temptation is still alive.
The Wanderer above a sea of clouds (1818) Caspar David Friedrich
At Immanuel Kant that one must compromise solution which, in one form or another, is underway. According to his original idea, "Genius is the innate disposition of the spirit by which nature gives the rule to art." If beauty, or rather the idea of beauty, timeless and universally valid, binding art discourse is concerned, innovation (artistic or aesthetic) is problematic. Accept the emergence of geniuses, defined by their "natural talent", paving the way for change, art is an activity subject to certain rules, but these may change. The aesthetic was reduced by Baumgarten in the perception grows on trial charged.
This ruling does not, however, based on concepts defined. The "Beautiful" is no universal concept. This means that the bottom is the brilliant work that gives new insight into the "Fair". The beautiful work is not reducible to a concept, but is an aesthetic idea, which suggests, but is inexponible transcends understanding. Kant interprets the aesthetic feeling as the result of a report inconceptualisable between our faculties, intuition, imagination and reason. This means that the "Beautiful" is rooted in the profound unity of the human person, that experience did not. Moreover, and criticized Hegel, Kant gives a primacy of "Beau" natural artistic beauty. Or rather, the human spirit is in nature.
Kantian approach can derive a large part of artistic views and practices further. Note particularly the idiosyncratic part of those that society accepts as great artists, transgression designed as aesthetic act or manifest and other programs through which the modern art movements assert
This approach by introducing a third term, beauty, engineering, culture or another, between what we call "art" and what is called "aesthetic" comes to no more than postpone the problem because every time comes the question what is beauty, engineering or culture? How does consensus on the validity of the answer? What art offers works in aesthetics or aesthetics circumscribe the field of art, there is a circularity that is difficult to avoid without recourse to historical and social dimensions of these phenomena.
Modern theories of art
Not that the distinction is clear, it can be argued that theories of art to address this issue more generally as aesthetics. For example, a sociological theory of art has been proposed by Pierre Bourdieu a semiotic theory by Goodman etc.. The same author has sometimes both approaches such as Hegel believes that the aesthetic in a special course while his philosophy says that art is a form in loss
The incompleteness of Theodor W. Adorno is published under the title Aesthetic Theory. One point of distinction is useful to note that aesthetics can be normative, that theory can not be. The enigma of art, which is his own, has become as its object of study in modern times:
"All works of art, and art in general are enigmas. The fact that the works say something and at the same time hiding, place the enigmatic character in the aspect of language. (...) The typical example of this is that, before all the other arts, music which is both mystery and something very obvious. There is not resolved, it is only to decipher its structure. But the enigmatic character is not the last word works on the contrary, any authentic work also proposes the solution of his riddle. "
The only point on which theories of art is agree that this is a human and a social practice. Two main alternatives are possible depending on whether the practice provides an autonomous or subordinate role. Consider bundling is a reductionist approach, it usually offers a view of art as communication - representation or expression. In autonomy, which is compared to that of games, art offers itself as "autotelic activity, that is to say, no other aim than itself, which summarizes the famous formula" l 'art for art ". Artists and those who revolve around the art have good reasons to defend such ideas and theoretical strategies often use one of two opposing options: return to a specific ontology - the art is linked to the specific aspect of being - or, paradoxically, be nominalist insisting that there are works of art but not "art" The reductionism, mainly from other media, it is generally held by exaggeration that comes with these views of bounds.
One form of interaction and exchange
Calligraphy animated
Today, art establishes a relationship that can encompass in a single interaction, in one exchange, a work, its creator and the receiver, the receiver of this work (viewer, listener, etc..) . The various forms that can take this mediation embody certain relations between man and nature, that is to say, between a human mind and its environment. A thought both conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, a free spirit and creative communicates with the world outside. Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics, attempted to define the transcendence of this relationship by asking a priori that: "The artistic beauty is higher than the beautiful in nature [since] emerges from the illusory and deceptive forms of this world imperfect and unstable the truth contained in appearance to give it a higher reality created by the mind itself. "
Seeking the truth behind the appearance. Could it be more exciting purpose? Art becomes an extension of the action. This philosophy of action, developed especially by Hannah Arendt emerges when the act becomes the art experience of a particular relationship. So art does not seek does not imitate or reproduce, but to translate a meta-sensible reality. It may then dawn the spiritual in the field of common experience.
The dynamic shape as the sensible
fireworks in Hamburg
In art, at least, the form is not a principle foreign content, and who would be printed out, but the law of development, become transparent. It is not thought by the viewer, which would mean it is about the concept, and therefore foreign to the collection itself, it does not give to see.
Paul Valéry wrote that "the architecture is beautiful plant. The law of growth must feel. Similarly, the law of forbearance openings. - A window should not be a hole as a crankshaft in a board, but being as the result of domestic laws, such as lining and shaped orifices. "
Before being transcribed into notation, the melody is the same as its deployment, operation of certain unsuspected possibilities of this material. The color does not fill the space Impressionist, but is vibration. Poetry is not to impose on the language a predetermined meaning, or produce rhyme ends. Rather, it leaves the floor to the words themselves, as if it was the speech of anyone. These reveal a movement inherent in a significant dimension of the world. The art gives to see how sensitive engendered: the painter's gaze asks light, shadows, color "How they do it to there suddenly something and that thing? "(The eye and mind, Merleau-Ponty).