The source of aesthetic experiences

I have a childhood memory I like to recall from time to time, and it goes something like this:

I am walking along the sidewalk in the small back yard of my home in Ohio. I am looking up at the sky. It is late summer, and still quite warm. The sky is blue, but dotted with small cumulus clouds floating in the warmth and stillness, none of them threatening to turn into storms. Night is approaching, dinner is over, and I am enjoying the evening air as a closing ritual of the day before the indoor rituals of the night. I am alone.

I hear the periodic, ghostly "coo-a-ooo, ooo-ooo" of an unseen mourning dove, presumably roosting in a leafy tree or grasping one of the phone lines that string through the neighborhood. At the time, I do not think about the source of that sound, preferring to preserve its disembodied and inhuman quality to enhance the moment.

The small backyard is surrounded by a simple fence of widely spaced wire, designed to keep out only the stray dogs that might wander through the neighborhood. It would not to stop a person from entering, and would only tempt a clever cat, so its intention is mostly symbolic, to denote a private space. Flowers and bushes grow along the fence to enhance the sense of a border. And it works. I know it is my space inside this rough frame.

These sights, sounds and feelings create a feeling of comfort, but also awe and joy, which reminds me of a song we sing at school--"God Bless America." The song (clichéd as it may be) has a beautiful melody containing a risky range of notes, especially for a child of 5; and the song lyrics, with their reference to mountains and prairies and oceans, make me think of a place I belong to that is much bigger than this small yard. I begin to sing the song, almost involuntarily, quietly, barely voicing the words so that they are only for me to hear.

I also find myself spinning slowly, making the clouds rotate above me, and causing the cooing sounds to rotate as well, enhancing the tonal change of the dove’s song due to the subtle Doppler effect. It is a childish dance to the rhythm of the music in my head and in my voice, but the effect is sensually stunning. I am transformed for these brief moments.

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Such simple moments can hold lasting power—a power that creates feelings of connection to the world and meaning about our place in the world. Some moments are equally momentous due to their power to question our place and current sense of meaning. Both types of moments are aesthetic in the same way that a work of fine art can be aesthetic. Consider some of the qualities exhibited in the experience I described:

• It has immediate qualities, not simply reflections. It is physical, as well as emotional and thoughtful. It includes the affective qualities of the experience.
• It is a time of engagement with the natural and man-made elements around me—the sky, the clouds, the sound of the dove, the fence. I am submissive to these elements, but also actively engaged with them. I walk, I focus on the ones that add to the experience, and I spin to change them. I am not passive.
• I am captivated, compelled to develop the experience further. It is not momentary; it builds. I am compelled to see it build, and I contribute to its building through my actions.
• I anticipate a rewarding outcome, even if only a feeling. I believe the feeling will be a take-away that enhances. I chose my actions based on the anticipated results.
• I add a man-made element--the song, that for me at that moment matches the feeling evoked by the other elements.

The experience has a coherence and completeness. It is marked off in time as special and notable. You could say it had a beginning, middle, and end, even if I was not conscious of these. In fact, I have no idea how long the experience lasted. It might have been less than a minute or two, or it could have been 30 minutes. The time is somewhat irrelevant, although some period of time was required for development of the experience. It was more than a momentary sensation.

I propose these are all aesthetic qualities: immediacy, engagement, captivation or compellingness, anticipation, contribution, coherence, completeness (see Dewey, 1934), and that they are the qualities of an experience, not a thing. These qualities can be felt in simple everyday situations, but they are also the source of the ubiquitous desire we have for the fine arts—like music, literature, films, and painting. The fine arts are, in a way, just a way of refining or distilling these qualities of everyday experience for our enjoyment and edification. It would be wrong to say that the fine arts are a short cut or a simulation, because they create experiences of their own. They also aid us in creating our everyday aesthetic experiences by offering approaches for achieving them.

These qualities are easy to assign to a film or novel, and any narrative for that matter, although some might question the presence of the quality of contribution. However, many narrative theorists have noted that each viewer or reader brings their own experiences to the narrative, even if they do not contribute words or images, and that good authors leave space for this contribution. We each bring an interpretation to the work, and we imagine the spaces between the scenes. We imagine the faces described, the settings, and the emotions felt. We each bring these uniquely, which partially explains the diversity of reactions people have to the same narrative.

But what about a painting? Imagine the experience of seeing a painting by Mark Rothko for the first time:

                                                                               Photo by Monika Kostera

You walk into the gallery and are confronted by the work hanging across the room, imposing in its size and the boldness of its large fields of colors. Perhaps it is a bit shocking compared to the more figurative and less abstract work you are accustomed to seeing. You wonder what is the source of your reaction, either positive or negative, and you want to wander closer.

Standing nearer, you notice that an important contributor to its power is the small band of orange placed curiously along the bottom edge, barely fitting within the frame, beneath the deep field of black, and far below the hovering violet at the top. The simplicity of the composition is what is shocking, as well as the power this simplicity carries. If this is meant to suggest a landscape, it is one from an alien world, with phosphorescent skies and flaming lands at the shores of a black tar sea. But you suspect that no landscape is intended, and that this impression is just you imposing your normative judgments on the work. But that is part of the experience, that the work inspires you to impose some expectation of an everyday scene, and that some of the impact is your realization that the work desires to thwart your expectations.

As you move even closer, letting the painting fill your field of vision, you know for a fact that this is not a landscape, and that the paint has a presence of its own—it is not representative of anything other than paint. The edges between the colors are the kind of edges created by camelhair brushes being roughly pushed into the canvas, rather than by nature. The effect is one of conscious sloppiness, not natural order. The extremely narrow, but extremely loud orange base asserts a power that is magnified by the neutral blackness above it, and balanced by the cooler violet floating high above—in the “sky” of the painting. You know this paint was placed where it is for a reason by human hands. And you feel that the reason is not reason, and certainly not representation, but sensibility and emotion. As you step back once again and walk away, the experience of seeing the painting sticks with you. You might feel the work was excessively childish, not worthy of your engagement, or that it represents an infrequently felt spiritual aspect of perception. More likely, your feelings lie somewhere in between, but the experience has engaged the potential of these extremes nonetheless.

When you fully appreciate a work like the one described, it involves immediacy, engagement, captivation, compellingness, anticipation, coherence, and completeness. The frame outlines the world of the encounter, but it does not contain it. And the contribution is your perception at work.

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I haven’t offered this comparison of an everyday experience to a recognized work of fine art to suggest that they are equal. One does not substitute for the other, and one does not naturally precede or follow the other. They stand on their own. Most importantly, one is not greater than the other.

The fine arts and the arts of everyday life co-exist comfortably. But I suspect we do not do enough to recognize the aesthetic value of everyday experience. We often forget the power each of us can bring to bear in creating an aesthetic life. Some make this happen in much more complex ways than the simple childhood experience shared above. They may create it through experiences like climbing a mountain, traveling to a distant place, or perfecting skills in a martial art, or through more formal experiences like engaging in a sport or participating in a social event—such as a wedding, or within professional practice, or in the learning that leads us to that practice. But more frequently, aesthetic experiences arise in everyday contexts like preparing and eating meals and creating a home. Aesthetic experiences come in many shapes and in many contexts.