tailieunhanh - The Aesthetics of Mixing the Senses

The picture of Nilotic visual aesthetics painted here is an analyst’s abstraction. It is founded on the current state of anthropological knowledge concerning the group of peoples which provide the ethnographic focus, peoples who are related linguistically, historically, geographically, and culturally. Further research may reveal significant differences between and amongst the aesthetics of these four peoples. It might, however, also reveal significant similarities between these four peoples and other Nilotic-speaking peoples. The analysis presented here is ahistorical. This is for the sake of convenience only. A full understanding of an aesthetic system must include the historical dimension. I hope. | The Aesthetics of Mixing the Senses Cross-Modal Aesthetics David Howes Concordia University The term aesthetics comes from the Greek aesthesis meaning sense perception. The modern Western understanding of aesthetics was forged in the mid-eighteenth century. It was elaborated on the basis of a taxonomy of the five arts architecture sculpture painting music and poetry . The scope and criteria of the various arts were delimited in terms of the dualism of vision epitomized by painting and hearing epitomized by either music or poetry . The dark or lower senses of smell taste and touch were deemed too base to hold any significance for the fine arts. Theatre and dance were also excluded on account of their hybrid character since they played to more than one sense at once Rée 2000 . At the close of the eighteenth century in his monumental Critique of Judgment 1790 Immanuel Kant sought to transcend the dualism of vision and hearing and replace it with a fundamental division between the arts of space . painting and the arts of time . music accessible to outer intuition and inner intuition respectively. It could be said that Kant rarefied aesthetics by divorcing it from perception and substituting intuition. After Kant aesthetic judgment would be properly neutral passionless and disinterested see Turner 1994 Eagleton 1990 . This definition of aesthetics guaranteed the autonomy of the enclave now known as art but at the expense of sensory plenitude. In its modern incarnation or rather disincarnation aesthetics has to do with the appreciation of the formal relations intrinsic to a work of art irrespective of that work s content. Thus in one characterization of the proper object of aesthetics Robert Redfield offered the following analogy Art . is like a window with a garden behind it. One may focus on either the garden or the window. The common viewer of a Constable landscape or a statue by St. Gaudens focuses on the garden. Not many people . are capable of adjusting their