Autumnal 4352291 [Alcohol ink and acrylic on canvas]. © K. VanderHaak & K. McVey (2019). Collaborative artwork: Expressive meaning-making.
Patricia L. Maarhuis, A. G. Rud, and the international array of contributors to Imagining Dewey convey the soul of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (LW10); indeed, his entire philosophy. For Dewey, “soul” denotes “the qualities of psycho-physical activities as far as they are organized into unity” (LW1, p. 223). Dewey here is thinking in terms of Aristotelian hexis; that is, a relatively stable coordination of embodied psycho-physical functions yielding individual wellbeing, wisdom, and unique activity (i.e., energia). To say someone has a great soul
expresses the conviction that the man or woman in question has in marked degree qualities of sensitive, rich and coordinated participation in all the situations of life. Thus works of art, music, poetry, painting, architecture, have soul, while others are dead, mechanical. (LW1, p. 223)
Imagining Dewey as itself a work of art expresses the soulfulness, the unity, of Art as Experience.
Strangely, many seem to conceive unity as a closed totality. Dewey did not, nor do Maarhuis, Rud, and their contributors. Dewey reminds us, “There is an old formula for beauty in nature and art: Unity in variety” (LW10, p. 166). Dewey is profoundly pluralistic:
There is unity only when the resistances create a suspense that is resolved through cooperative interaction of the opposed energies. The “one” of the formula is the realization through interacting parts of their respective energies. The “many” is the manifestation of the defined individualizations due to opposed forces that finally sustain a balance…. [T]he unity in variety that characterizes a work of art is dynamic. (LW10, p. 166)
As collaborators, we feel that we share a “hive mind” (coalescence of thoughts, experiences, and knowledge). Because of this, we have a unique model of thought and communication. We begin with an idea or observation, and discuss its different emotions, associations, or meaning. We proceed by aligning our thoughts with a singular, concise sentence of creative intent. This acts as a “single source of truth” to foster structure and intentionality. We look at the idea together and decide which tones or hues evoke the essence of the creative intent. We actively reject literal representation during this phase. It’s about going deeper than what’s at the surface.
Friction is welcome, necessary, and healthy when creating. To encourage this broader field of view, we work on opposite sides of the canvas so that we always examine our work from different angles. This provides optics of where visual weight, texture, or color needs to be added in order to create a balanced composition. Throughout the process, we continually align our collective impressions of how well the artwork fits the overarching creative intent.
Often, we have a very similar mental picture of what we want to create. Of course, no two people always have the same vision, but we have a deep mutual respect for each other’s perspective and designs. Humor and sharing personal philosophies or memories are always central. Our collaboration evolves into storytelling, which becomes the foundation for meaning within each piece. (Kayla McVey & Katelyn VanderHaak, personal communication, 10/8/2019)
The balance in any person or work of art that remains creative is dynamic and ever changing; it is adaptive to constantly changing conditions. Imagining Dewey is a dynamic and agile text that achieves unity in the creative tensions among its contributors.
Every chapter is visually illustrated and often cross-reference to other modes of artistic expression, thereby combining statable meanings with expressive meanings that transact with each other in reciprocally transformative ways. The editors have arranged the text such that this Foreword, their Introduction, and the individual essays may be read in any order the reader might decide. It has many of the characteristics of a hypertext only it is in print. Indeed, many of the essays have links. Since most of the essays include links to audio and visual arts (including some original work) the book even contains aspects of hypermedia. Some may think such radical decentering is more post-structural than pragmatic. However, from the beginning pragmatism was far too historical and anti-dualistic to be contained within narrow structuralist confines.
Decohere 0982812 [Alcohol ink and acrylic on canvas]. © K. McVey & K. VanderHaak. (2019). Collaborative artwork. Expressive meaning-making.
While pragmatism differs from some forms of post-structuralism when the latter attempt to completely ignore context, there are still some surprising similarities. Although Derrida (1976) retains a two-term Saussurean semiotics to his detriment, he is fully aware Peirce’s three-term semiotics of representamen, object, and interpretant (which may be a feeling, action, or thought, and only sometimes is an interpreter) does not have a “transcendental signified” and accords well with “the destruction of onto theology and the metaphysics of presence” (p. 50). Whether or not Derrida is correct about Peirce, it is easy to see Dewey rejects the metaphysics of presence (see Garrison, 1999).
It is impossible to complete the quest for certainty: “Under all the captions that are called immediate knowledge, or self-sufficient certitude of belief, whether logical, esthetic or epistemological, there is something selected for a purpose, and hence not simple, not self-evident and not intrinsically eulogizable” (LW1, p. 35). There are no cosmic purposes fulfilling themselves in history or in a human life; there are only human purposes and the only aim is continued growth; the meaning of life is to make more meaning. There are no fixed and final cosmic or mundane structural centers. Rejecting Kant’s version of foundationalism, his “Copernican revolution,” Dewey offers a revolution of his own:
The new centre [sic] is indefinite interactions taking place within a course of nature which is not fixed and complete, but which is capable of direction to new and different results through the mediation of intentional operations. Neither self nor world, neither soul nor nature (in the sense of something isolated and finished in its isolation) is the centre [sic], any more than either earth or sun is the absolute centre [sic] of a single universal and necessary frame of reference. There is a moving whole of interacting parts; a centre [sic] emerges wherever there is effort to change them in a particular direction. (LW 4, p. 232)
Here Dewey is explicitly rejecting the spectator view in favor of a participant stance. Centers emerge whenever souls strive to reconstruct the course of events for their purposes, perhaps in community with others.
As a companion book, Imagining Dewey offers the energetic, restless reader the opportunity to reconstruct Art as Experience for themselves. Within the moving whole of their conjoined interacting parts a center may emerge for any reader that wishes to change their movement in any direction, perhaps by simply reversing the order in which they read the text, or any other scheme that may suit their purposes. There is nothing about this text that the editors present as “self-evident” or “intrinsically eulogizable.”
Dewey is known as the philosopher of reconstruction and from Hegelian absolutism to experimental naturalism, Dewey reconstructed himself in thought, feeling, and action across a lifetime. Everyone should read Dewey in the same spirit. In his essay, “Construction and Criticism,” Dewey remarks:
I have used the word construction rather than creation because it seems less pretentious. But what I mean by it is the creative mind, the mind that is genuinely productive in its operations. We are given to associating creative mind with persons regarded as rare and unique, like geniuses. But every individual is in his own way unique. (LW 5, p. 127)
I wish Dewey had been more pretentious because we should read him as offering a philosophy of constant creation and re-creation. Imagining Dewey urges each reader to re-create Dewey for themselves, and thereby re-create themselves, and perhaps their students should the reader elect to teach the text. Should a critical-creative reading result in the reader rejecting Dewey, then Imagining Dewey will still have served them well.
Among many other things, Imagining Dewey is also pedagogical text. It is designed to be used as a pedagogical companion to Art as Experience, although it would serve the autodidact well. Every contribution concludes with probing and reflective questions, possible themes, additional resources, recommended reading and viewing, possible activities, and such. Creative teachers will have no trouble riffing from these to create their own curriculum.
After we decide on our creative intent for a specific piece, we do a miniature rendition on yupo paper with the alcohol ink process done first. The sharper line and shape work are plotted out and added over top of the ink. The acrylic paint mixing is done next to finalize the color palette. Once we are satisfied with the smaller rendition we redo the process on canvas. The acrylic paint is added last and, once that is dry, the line work is retraced over top to make sure the lines are crisp.
(Katelyn VanderHaak & Kayla McVey, artists, personal communication, 10/8/2019)
Process of collaborative artwork: Statable & expressive meaning-making [Photo]. © K. McVey & K. VanderHaak (2019).
Reading Imagining Dewey reminded me of the value of Louise M. Rosenblatt’s Deweyan inspired The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978/1994); wherein we may readily comprehend “the Poem” in terms of classical Greek poiesis as taught in Plato’s Symposium to the young Socrates by the prophetess Diotima,
there is more than one kind of poetry in the true sense of the word—that is to say, calling something into existence that was not there before, so that every kind of artistic creation poiesis poetry, and every artist is a poet. (205b)
In Rosenblatt’s reader response theory, the poem, the meaning, emerges in the transaction between the reader and the text. Again, we encounter a three-term relation:
The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it. Thus language involves what logicians call a triadic relation. There is the speaker, the thing said, and the one spoken to. The external object, the product of art, is the connecting link between artist and audience. (LW10, p. 111)
Dewey realizes that a work of art “is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced” (LW10: 113). Imagining Dewey invites readers, students and teachers alike, to create and re-create their own work of art. It is an immanently teachable text for teachers that are also learners and delight in the sagacity of their students.
Maarhuis and Rud’s text is loose textured, open ended, and proffers a vast assortment of possibilities. Of these, the highly subtle and nuanced emphasis on social justice will impress many. In the last paragraph of Art and Experience Dewey proclaims:
While perception of the union of the possible with the actual in a work of art is itself a great good, the good does not terminate with the immediate and particular occasion in which it is had. The union that is presented in perception persists in the remaking of impulsion and thought. The first intimations of wide and large redirections of desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative. (LW10, pp. 351–352)
Imagining Dewey provides its readers with intimations of wider and larger redirections of ideas, moods, and deeds; it provides a pedagogy and politics of possibility. Art as Experience concludes with these lines from the poetry of Robert Browning:
But Art, wherein man speaks in no wise to man,
Only to mankind—Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the deed shall breed the thought.
Maarhuis and Rud’s decentered text obliquely does the deed leaving it for the readers to breed their own thoughts.
References
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. (Original work published 1967)
Dewey, J. (1969–1991). Standard references are to the critical edition The collected works of John Dewey 1882–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston and published by Southern Illinois University Press. Citations are given in the text using EW (Early Works), MW (Middle Works), and LW (Later Works) and the volume and page number. Included here are the following works with their original publication dates:
Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and nature. (LW1).
Dewey, J. (1929). The quest for certainty. (LW 4).
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. (LW10).
Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, and the metaphysics of presence. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 35(2), 346–372.
Peirce, C. S. (1992). Some consequences of four incapacitates. In N. Houser & C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (Vol. 1, pp. 28–55). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1868)
Rosenblatt, L. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1978)