We Teach Art, but Can Art Teaches Us? John Dewey on the Significance of Art

oleh: D. Rio Adiwijaya

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: Graduate School of Indonesia Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta 2019-12-01

Deskripsi

Those who pursue a teaching career in art and design are most likely aware of one of its pressing dilemmas. On the one hand, as a subject situated in the postindustrial higher education setting where the progressive accumulation of knowledge – mostly in propositional form and explaining how things work in physical or social reality – constitutes its main purpose, art are unavoidably driven to adopt the same objective. On the other hand, most artistic activities are not aimed to produce and derived from replicable research propositions but conducted to generate novel artifacts, performances, narratives or experiences in order to enhance artistic universe. Regarding their being as artifactual, non-propositional and idiosyncratic, artworks are unfortunately regarded as mere products of subjective emotions, where it’s appropriate roles are nothing more than spectacles, entertainments or ornaments, which at the same time testify its marginal relationship with knowledge. However, this predicament is not as self-evident as it looks since it is in fact resulted from a particular philosophical outlook, namely, an outlook that bifurcates mind and body, rational and emotional, subject and object, and so forth that comes down to us from the Platonic and Cartesian tradition. It is precisely the thought of John Dewey that profitably conceives art prior to Platonic/Cartesian bifurcation which will be discussed in this paper. Art, for Dewey, is not a product of a mere subjectivity, but instead emerges from “experience,” understood as primary, pre-linguistic (hence pre-dualism) and embodied human-environment “transactions.” Located in such a primary domain, art regains its utmost significance.