Art as Formative Technique: The Human Behaviour Between Art and Nature
From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis
Alessandro Cazzola, University of Bologna
This paper primarily reflects upon crafts and the philosophy of technics and refers to two of the most distinguished philosophers who have reflected on this theme, i.e. Luigi Pareyson and Dino Formaggio.
Their philosophy of technics chiefly involves reflections on the features of art and consider art’s scope; furthermore, their philosophy considers what foregrounds the emergence of art, and finally, they reflect if art involves a special relationship with crafts. However, if we confine ourselves only to artistic inquiry, we would not be able to answer these problems without ruling out another relevant feature of art, namely aesthetics as sentience and behavioural acting.
This feature introduces acts such as mimesis and creativity that concur to shape our relationship with the world, into an artistic sphere.
From the different relationship between artistic and aesthetic facets, the critical stance of this paper springs up. The role of technique allows for the analysis of these issues: Pareyson would make out savoir-faire as related to artistic doing, since form is, as we shall see, an organic composition where both parts and the whole comply with each other. An artwork which stems from the artistic doing is still a lively ensemble that reveals a peculiar method of shaping within itself.
However, Formaggio makes the technical side of human activities more significant without dismissing subjective facets of form-shaping in regard to the dynamic quality of creation. According to him, technique is not a demanding feature, but a lively activity whereby human beings confer new meanings on their relationship with the environment and the shape of community life.
Pareyson and Formaggio agree that the manysided arrangement of artworks encompasses the shaping method of form: this should be found within the process of artistic shaping by taking into account, in particular, skills and habits of know-how. This logic requires that the solutions suitable for expression should originate from an opposition between the material and the method of shaping. Artwork reveals itself as a singularity, which discloses its uniqueness in a peculiar configuration; in order to sketch out the relationship between the artworld and the shaping method involved in every human activity, Pareyson devises a common and elementary faculty of knowledge by focusing on aesthetics as art theory (Vercellone [2018]: 95–98), whereby the first source of knowledge ensues a kind of intuition which is a figurative way to express the definiteness of impressions (Pareyson [2009]: 98–109). Since intuition is not merely reproductive but a figuration, namely transfiguration of impressions, the purport of aesthetic intuition is rigorously separated from artistic making but stands, as it were, for its setting. If transfiguration means to form and to figurate, the aspect of the expression entailed in it qualifies asa spur of interpretation. Interpretation pours onto all activities in so far as it qualifies as an intertwinement between activity and receptivity (Modica [1980]: 101–105; Pineri [1994]: 549–551; Rosso [1980]: 63–67).
Formaggio primarily charges artistic technique with the eidetic nature of a phenomenological method which subordinates to itself the aesthetic facet of experience (Formaggio [1962b]: 245-246, 307–309). The eidetic method springs from the aesthetic facet so as to blend a pre-categorial sphere that figures out a relationship with materiality and constitutes the setting of phenomenological investigation on artistic experience. Intuition bornes out of a comprehensive framework including an encompassing concern with sensibility and the genetical look over the formation of artistic practices (Pareyson [1966]: 8–11; Pareyson [2009]: 348–356).
The relationship between tradition, within which artists are submerged, and the critical reshaping of it involved in every activity disclose an outstanding concern with aesthetic experience, which provides the comparison with the qualitative depth of the world and involves the relationship with morality, meant as the artists’s responsibility of acting within a community (Banfi [1988]: 145–149; Scaramuzza [1981]: 354-355). Whereas for Pareyson the artistic facet of the theory of moulding overwhelms the aesthetic quality of intuition as a general means of interpretation, Formaggio’s reflection revolves around a broad notion of artisticity which, though split ted into two different but complementary fields, entails an extended notion of body mimicking the shaping force of nature (Franzini [1995]: 111–113; Neri [1995]: 132–133).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-10702
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/10702
