What do you think of this idea that affect informs art? Or rather is it believed that art informs affect? Or both?
In this, affect/passion is defined as states of intensity which provoke something following it. Art refers to a variety of mediums, but is the mode through which such intensities are legitimized (or perhaps the other way around, that art legitimizes affect)…
For example:
Hamlet, he is impassioned by the idea of being haunted, thus it inspires action. He is exhilarated by being harrowed by an apparition. Hamlet creates a play to further confirm his suspicions, and at the arrival of the players he firstly asks for a dramatized speech. He has a desire to create situations that raise emotional temperature, as if it were his filial duty in the household. How is it that the will to passion exists so potently beside his meditative excess? Perhaps this is needed for the modernized form of tragedy (example, Nietzchean tragedy). In this art is the form of the play, but also is the pursuit of the subject of Hamlet, and the art form of tragedy is created by him and his actions alone.
This can also be seen in The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, where art itself informs affective life. The novel did not merely represent melancholy, but reportedly generated forms of romantic self-consciousness and emotional identification within its readers, who began to model their emotional lives after Werther himself, but why? Which comes first? Where does it end? Is the audience to take their life as Werther does, is that the final culmination? Is this a desire lying outside of art or simply realized through art?
Why is value for affective life so emphasized? The movement of affect taking place at any cost? This is not if it is fictive or real in any sort, if for the audience or for Hamlet the measure for passion lay outside of this, the revenge plot would be a farce, it would merely be a presentation of self-affirmation (in Goethe, it is the inverse) is art the legitimizing factor? I am not sure if I was able to word this coherently, but this is of utmost interest for me.
This is from R.G. Collingwood’s “The Principles of Art”:
It means that the picture, when seen by some one else or
by the painter himself subsequently, produces in him (we need not ask how) sensuous-emotional or psychical experiences which, when raised from impressions to ideas by the activity of the spectator’s consciousness, are transmuted into a total imaginative experience identical with that of the painter. This experience of the spectator’s does not repeat the comparatively poor experience of a person who merely looks at the subject; it repeats the richer and more highly organized experience of a person who has not only looked at it but has painted it as well.
So, according to Collingwood, it’s experience of any kind, not just emotion, that informs art.
Partly because of theories on empathy among intellectuals and early psychologists around 1840-70. For example, Theodor Lipps, whose ideas later influenced art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin.
The assumption is, roughly, that the passion that an artist puts in the work of art is somehow a part of the work and evokes the same passion in the observer.
Under such an assumption, passion becomes very significant, more significant than skills or ideas even.
I recall someone saying that art is expressions of one’s wishes. Then it is understandable that artists would inject all his/her passions into what is being created.
After all, it is the artists wishes coming true and being manifested in their creations, or what they are expressing into in the form of art.
Hamlet says (from memory): “I have of late lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seemeth to me a sterile promontory…”
This seems the opposite of passion – as does his famous “to be or not to be” speech. The Dane is melancholy. In the graveyard he puns about death, instead of feeling strong emotions about it.
Instead of trying to raise the emotional temperature, he is trying to suppress it (because otherwise he couldn’t handle it?).
Of course passion is important in many artworks. But not in all. Think of modern, minimalist paintings. Theodore Roethke, with his one-color canvases. Geometric patterns, that seem more intellectual than passionate abound in modern painting.
I haven’t (to my discredit) read The Sorrows of Young Werther so I can’t comment.
When affect informs art, the emotion originates in the artist. Their emotions inform the artwork.
When art informs affect, this is the emotion that the receiver (observer, reader, listener…) of the artwork experiences by experiencing the art.
I don’t think it is an either/or relationship, but that art exists in the connection between the emotion of the artist and the emotions of the receiver of the art.
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.
Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.
Agree. And the artist may have no idea what the audience will gain from the work. I also don’t believe that the artist always fully understand what they have created and their account of their work can be inadequate, mistaken or deceptive.
As a consumer of art I tend towards formalism - for instance in novels I am not overly interested in plot or emotionality, I am much more interested in reading something new about character and celebrating the use of language.
I’ll have to think about that I’m trying to think of an insight I have gleaned and how it came about. Difficult to do. I think I normally gain an insight when something doesn’t work or goes wrong. Not sure if I learn anything when it goes right. But on the subject of learning- I can’t say I have ever learned anything from art of any kind except indirectly. Thoughts?
The arts that really work for me involve words—fiction and poetry. Of course, not all fiction is art. I read a lot for entertainment. For writing that is art and that I find myself responding to, I learn things about myself.
Of course, sometimes I learn things about the world too, but that’s incidental. Example—I read “Infinite Jest” last year and it went into extensive detail about the workings of Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. I found that very informative as well as moving. I’m currently reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” and I’m leaning a lot about V-2 rockets.
I suppose it is that contradiction is precisely what interests me..
Hamlet’s melancholic paralysis does not eliminate his attraction toward affective intensity, but instead seems to produce it indirectly. He often appears emotionally withdrawn, yet repeatedly constructs situations of emotional extremity, as I stated before. Otherwise, I define this “passion” as any strong permeating emotion, so this could simply be of his intense sadness. Why is it that in this dejection he desires still to uphold theatrics? It is almost as if affect becomes bearable only once mediated through performance, or at least this is a belief that is constantly affirmed as for this relationship for the two to be observed.
Lightly, I believe you mean Mark Rothko, though the poet is amazing as well : )
In reference to this, then how is it that the artist is able to get this point of simplicity across? I am not sure that minimalist or geometric art is necessarily devoid of affect simply because it appears intellectually restrained or informed by more empirical desires. In many modern works, affect is displaced from dramatic emotional expression into tension, sterility, repetition, sublimity, alienation, stillness, or just abstraction itself. The emotional is not absent.
Even monochromatic or geometric paintings often attempt to produce a particular psychological state within the viewer. In this sense, affect need not manifest as visible passion or excess. Suppression, emptiness, detachment, and emotional reduction may themselves become affective conditions. One could even argue that modernism frequently aestheticizes emotional absence itself, but the fact this is able to occur suggests to us in the artistic tradition, there is an innate connection between the two concepts of passion and art.
I actually think this discussion between you two proves my point exactly, because nobody could say that art transmits stable knowledge the way other fields may. Rather, art seems to reorganize the subject affectively, such that recognition itself becomes possible only through aesthetic mediation. The insight is not detached from affect, but constituted through it. One does not first understand and then feel; rather, the emotional experience generated by the artwork becomes the very condition through which understanding emerges?
So perhaps the question is not whether affect informs art or art informs affect, but whether modern subjectivity itself has become aestheticized — whether we increasingly encounter and understand our own emotional lives through aesthetic forms prior to any stable notion of authenticity?
But, aside from that and more importantly, my question is not of if the artist is aware of what is imparted on the consumer…I do not necessarily disagree that artists may not fully understand what they have created, nor that audiences may derive meanings unintended by the creator. However, I think this somewhat sidesteps the question I am trying to ask. My interest is less in intentionality or interpretation than in how aesthetic form itself produces affective experience.
Even formalism, to me, does not fully escape affect. The appreciation of language, structure, rhythm, characterization, or formal innovation is not purely ; it still produces forms of psychological fascination. One may say they are “not interested in emotionality,” yet the experience of being moved by form itself may already constitute a kind of affect.
In this sense, I am not arguing that all art is passionate obviously, but rather that art seems capable of reorganizing perception and emotional orientation even when operating through restraint, or formal control. The distinction between formal and affective experience may therefore not be as stable as it first appears. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the original question itself — whether affect informs art, art informs affect, or whether the two become inseparable from one another altogether? Or do you truly disbelieve such?
I don’t think it is unusual (even among psychologists) to hold that affect and emotion are primary motivational factors shaping perception, cognition, and behaviour rather than merely secondary responses to rational assessment and I take this to apply across most areas of human endeavour. Art is the most obvious case, since aesthetics is often simplified to being about the production of emotional response.
What pleases us, and the things we privilege almost always has an affective component. Even when we justify our preferences in terms of reason, consistency, or even morality, those justifications are grounded in prior felt dispositions, feelings of attraction or repulsion, that structure what becomes meaningful or important to us.
Art can do all those things and more, it’s like an emotional, intellectual, introspective tapestry. Here is a painting I saw in a gallery yesterday (I was not able to ask the artist if it was ok to reproduce it here. So I ask people not to reproduce it further)
My favorite book is “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad. For me, it’s the story of a Englishman with a moral center working in a world, colonial Africa, where English civilization has been corrupted brutally. I’ve found that’s a subject that is very important to me. I think that’s because it’s something I’ve struggled with myself.
Another thought, or rethought. I mentioned learning about Alcoholics Anonymous in “Infinite Jest.” I learned some facts, but I also learned about what it means to the people who participate. It changed the way I think about drug and alcohol addiction and all the people who struggle, heroically or futilly, to get the very minimum requirements for stability and peace in their lives. I guess you could get that across in non-fiction, but it would be a very different experience.
Rothko … Roethke. OK. I blew it. Especially since Roethke’s poetry is often passionate.
“Affect” and “passion” are not synonyms. All passion is affective, but not all affect is passionate. That was my point about Hamlet (and Rothko). Indeed, Jane Austen makes fun of Marianne Dashwood for thinking romantic passion is the essence of affect. Austen (evidently) disagrees, however much we readers might dislike seeing beautiful, romantic Marianne toddling off to the altar with stick-in-the-mud Colonel Brandon. Satire, paintings like Rothko’s, and other art affects the emotions of the consumer, but not necessarily their passions. Perhaps the affect is more contemplative or rational.
