CALL (“ ΚΑLΕSΜΑ ”)

FOR THE FOUNDATION OF AN AESTHETIC SCIENCE
FOR THE VISUAL ARTS

Everyone who wants and believes to be able to contribute to the foundation of an Aesthetic Science for the Visual Arts is invited to cooperate in the attempt to form a broad interdisciplinary work group with the aim for Aesthetics to become a branch of science and Visual Arts to obtain a Scientific Theory and Criteria.

Michalis Papadakis

sculptor
e-mail: info@kalesma.net

Michalis Papadakis, sculptor 24/2/2016

TWO BASIC PRECONDITIONS ON A SCIENCE OF AESTHETICS IN VISUAL ARTS

1. The Object of the Science of Aesthetics

The Object of our subjective scientific analysis is Visual Arts, through the number of their Objects (Works) diachronically.

Every visual Work of Art has the following properties, which characterize it:

a) It is a material body, a result of strenuous effort of the historical Subject.

b) It occupies discrete space in the environment created by the historical Subject for his/her self.

c) Its usefulness for the historical Subject that creates it lies EXCLUSIVELY in the form of the representations of the Artwork itself.

These three basic properties of the Work of Art incarnate at the same time the basic elements of the general image of the historical stages of the development of human activity since its birth.

More analytically, these properties are:

a) The fact that the Work of Art is a result of strenuous activity that uses tools, creates or fits tools for its purposes, uses and elaborates raw material, in order for this specific Οbject to be produced.

b) The fact that the Work of Art is decorative for the environment that each respective historical Subject creates for his/her self, with a particular significance and marking in the framework of applied Aesthetics.

c) The fact that the Work of Art is a composition of values of shapes, color qualities and plastic forms in a delimited whole-space, which aims at giving a representation of a much wider and with vague boundaries Environment-Whole (Cosmos), together with the approach to its causes.

In the representation (Form) of the Work of Art intuitively another representation becomes visual, which is composed by the causative (value) relation of shapes, colors and plastic forms: the representation of the motion of the Noesis that functions with images, which are elaborated into an Aesthetic Representation (Content) and through which notions and meanings are captured and elaborated.

In the third stage, where the Work of Art emerges as a discrete Object, it incorporates the first two properties, and in this way it becomes for the Noesis Image-Object of its substantive act, i.e. the mental procedure, so that the Noesis is pushed to give specific attention to Aesthetics and its cultivation and, by extension, of Knowledge.

2. The Scientific Methodology of the Science of Aesthetics

The scientific methodology of the Science of Aesthetics is that of the Science of Logic, with the difference that the forms of motion of the content of Logic find their representation in the forms of the representation of its Object, the Work of Art, where also the criteria of the truth of its scientific consideration are deduced from.

In this way Logic, through the Work of Art, gains external forms (representations) of its own movement as well, which contain its origin and the certainties of its existence.

In the Work of Art, Logic gains the representation of its origin from the Whole of human activity (not Νoesis alone), which is, at the same time, its own criterion as well.

The identity of mental and manual work in the Work of Art has always annulled the historical separation of those two forms of human work and has always requested their universal identity.

Hence, in our subjective theorization we have to look for and set the kind of Object (Art object and terms of its production), its relation to other Objects (objects in general and terms of their production), in order to approach the Essence of its Nature, which is Aesthetics, as a core element of Knowledge.

The Work of Art is not “philosophy through other means”, as it is usually said. On the contrary, the Aesthetic Representation, which is cultivated in the Work of Art as a product of the elaboration of the aesthetic perception, is the core, around which Philosophy elaborates and judges its Theory of Knowledge.