title: Neglected Knowing: Some Characteristics of Positive Aesthetic Experience in Painting
Creators: name: Tarlton, John
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2007
Subjects: subject: human aesthetic experience
subject: positive aesthetic experience
subject: painting
subject: art form
subject: personal experiencing
subject: aesthetic response
subject: artist s eye
subject: modernist
subject: postmodernist thought
subject: concept of the sublime
subject: dominance of the experiential
subject: curriculum implications
subject: experiential knowing

description: This dissertation explores the human aesthetic experience. It does so through phenomenological investigations of two artist-educators, one full time artist and one art theorist-educator. This investigation is motivated by a curiosity to identify and explain the characteristics of ‘positive’ aesthetic experiences engendered by and used in paintings as an artistic art form. An eclectic blending of qualitative and phenomenological methods is used to address the guiding research question: What are the bases for the perception and description of the phenomena of aesthetic experience in painting? The findings suggest that understanding aesthetic experience requires reconciliation between intrinsic/essentialist and subjective/contextualist positions. Only by acknowledging both of these positions’ contributions and reconciling their paradigmatic differences can a comprehensive account of the aesthetic experience be advanced. Despite certain characteristic similarities, it is suggested that heightened pleasurable response to a painting remains fundamentally a subjective concern for the viewer and that the attainment of pleasurable response may incorporate any and all such relational or essentialist manifestations which the viewer believes or deems necessary. Here, divergent importations, analytically elusive and non-conforming natures inherent in personal experiencing, rather than theoretical cannon, drives heightened aesthetic response. By implication, it is suggested that the quality of the desired experience should also drive the nature of pedagogical and curriculum implementation. Nine major characteristics and five sub-characteristics (subsumed within the first characteristic) of positive aesthetic experience in painting are identified through this investigation. These characteristics relate to: (i) immediacy and totality of experience, (ii) associative aspects being embedded in form, (iii) metaphorical response replacing measurement, (iv) awarenesses of technical virtuosity, novelty and the idea of identifying with the ‘artist’s eye’, (v) personal remembrances associated with the experience, (vi) the acknowledgement of a sense of mystery, (vii) presumed transformative characteristics are present and relate to the subject self image, the view that paintings transcend their physical objective status and the idea of an on-going power of experience, (viii) aesthetic experience stems from a perceptual sensitising of ordinary experience, and that (ix) both mind and body are one within the experience. The five subsumed characteristics within the characteristic of immediacy and totality of experience concern notions of: (a) regard for pre-knowledge and a presumption of (b) effortless cognition. In addition, there is the (c) belief in a nonsequencing or ordering of the experience which can be (d) entered into from any number of divergent points of interest. Finally, an acknowledgement of the (e) concept of the sublime is suggested that conflates both modernist and postmodernist thought. These characteristics, drawn from phenomenological reflections of the research participants, are set before informing concepts relating to aesthetics, the explicated characteristics of aesthetic experience as proposed by a selection of prominent scholars in the field and the influences of two generalised opposing epistemologies; those being intrinsic/essentialist and subjective/contextualist in nature. The key theoretical contributions arising from this investigation are nine fold. These contributions concern: (i) a further explication of characteristics of positive aesthetic experience in painting, (ii) a conciliatory positioning of epistemologies, (iii) the contribution of immediacy, (iv) qualities and meanings, (iv) self-justifying experience with underlying contextual importations, (vi) the relevance of modernist paintings in a postmodernist climate, (vii) intensified experience, (viii) a conciliatory sublime, and (ix) dominance of the experiential. The key pedagogical and curriculum implications concern aspects of experiential knowing, corresponding strategies for experiential knowing, the questioning of contemporary curriculum: a critique and drawbacks within the implications.