Search

In Principles of Art Collingwood defines art as an activity through which we express our emotions by creating a totality of experience based on the imagination. With this definition, the creation of the artist is explained as an experience of cognitive activity. In the first part of his work, Collingwood emphasizes the idea of cognitive activity so strong that his thinking arrives to the point at which the artist can create an art work without producing an external object. Hence, the necessity of the aesthetic spectator for aesthetic activity is denied. These assertions of Collingwood bring about a contradiction with regard to ontological status of the art work: art work can be totally mental and private, but it also an expression. As far as it is expression, it is necessarily sharable and communicable; thus, publicly accessible. Commentators like Aaron Ridley, Gary Kemp try to solve this contradiction by discussing the material and objective qualities. In contrast with this, in this article it will be argued that the contradiction can be reevaluated by focusing on the relation between artist and spectator and bringing art's role of self-awareness forward. Art proper is an activity through which artist both becomes more and more conscious of his or her social selfhood and artistic practice and helps the spectators to face with her or his self. So, the first parts of the work in which the object and the spectator are held to be unnecessary for artist cognitive activity can be interpreted as the initial steps of artist's process of self-consciousness. In a contradictory way, the last parts of the work in which expression, engagement with the sensual matter and the necessity of the spectator are emphasized can be analyzed as the level that the artist and the spectator become aware of themselves and of the immanency of the other in becoming an individual. In order to make this analysis, in this paper Collingwood's conception of aesthetic experience will be examined in detail, its intersubjectivity will be manifested and the path through which the spectator as the simple witness turns to be a necessary collaborator will be traced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]