Phenomenology

Wolfgang Lettl, Der Aufschrei, Oil on Canvas, 82x120cm, 1989

                              

This week we learned about phenomenology. When learning I came to realize that we as humans do not just experience things through gaze. People experience things through their bodies, not just their eyes. I have always believed that you learn things by seeing and doing. People are creatures of habit. I see my dad bite his cheek when he’s focused, and I do it too from watching him do it. My mom showed me how to parallel park, I saw it, now I can do it. With art, I find I learn most from seeing. You could describe to me how to paint but seeing it and recreating the movements would be more efficient. Then I learned that seeing is not only how we learn. We experience through our bodies as well. Phenomenology to me is the idea that people are a study of lived experience. Individuals experience reality through perception, emotions, and human consciousness. There is intentionality in everything, and you cannot separate something from its context. This idea is related to how you cannot remove bias, only manage it inside your head. Opinions and biases are always there, you feel a certain way about something, and you are aware of it. However, you cannot erase it completely. 

 

Another point I found fascinating is relationships. Humans are bodies that need to react to other physical beings. Everything in this universe is connected, and you understand it through relationships. This also plays into the idea that mind and body cannot be separated. Our body is tied directly to our perception.

 

“Merleau-Ponty, I will argue, provides a crucial way of thinking about how we make meaning from the world, from other subjects, and for ourselves as embodied subjects; in this sense, he provides a model of understanding the process through which we determine meaning and identity; his model indicates precisely that these determinations are never fixed but, rather, always fluid.” – Amelia Jones 

 

As Amelia explains Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, she describes how he believes we experience from other subjects. He says that determinations are never fixed, meaning certain or singular, but they are fluid, meaning connecting and changing. 

 

We then looked at how this relates to art. The way we understand and perceive are it linked to our own identity. Every person has their own experiences. Your experiences influence your perceptions. One person can look at an artwork and see one possible meaning, this could be entirely different meaning from the person standing next to them. This is why I believe art is always subjective. It can always have multiple meanings even if the artists had specific intentions creating the art. 

 

“Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the chiasmus in particular can be viewed as at least a partial solution in that it argues for a reciprocal interrelation between the viewing subject and the object she views, and between the viewer and the subject who is identified with the object as its maker. Merleau-Ponty’s work, because of its theorization of the human experience of the world in terms of embodied, and thus specifically identified, subjects, is also of great use to the understanding of how our experience of visual images and objects informs who we are (not to mention, of how we engage these works and give them particular meanings and values.)” – Amelia Jones

 

Some art historians argue that art is not subjective, it is black or white. They would most likely believe that art is what it is, and what the artist intended it to be. However, other art historians would believe art is fluid. I believe the context is dependent on who is viewing it. 

 

The art I chose for this week sums up how I feel about learning phenomenology. 

Amelia Jones, "Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology in Art History," in Art and Thought, 2003