Art as expression

Expression in the creation of art

The creation of a work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of elements in the medium (tones in music, words in literature, paints on canvas, and so on). The elements existed beforehand but not in the same combination; creation is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials. Pre-existence of materials holds true of creation quite apart from art: in the creation of a scientific theory or the creation of a disturbance. It applies even to creation in most theologies, except some versions of Christian theology, in which creation is ex nihilo—that is, without pre-existing matter.

That creation occurs in various art mediums is an obvious truth. But once this is granted, nothing has yet been said about expression, and the expressionist would say that the foregoing statement about creation is too mild to cover what needs to be said about the process of artistic creation. The creative process, the expressionist wants to say, is (or is also) an expressive process, and for expression something more is necessary than that the artist be creating something. Great care must be taken at this stage: some say that the creation of art is (or involves) self-expression; others say that it is the expression of feeling, though not necessarily of one’s own feeling (or perhaps that and something more, such as the feeling of one’s culture or of one’s nation or of all humanity); others say that it is not necessarily limited to feelings but that ideas or thoughts can be expressed, as they clearly are in essays. But the distinctively expressionist view of artistic creation is the product of the Romantic movement, according to which the expression of feelings constitutes the creation of art, just as philosophy and other disciplines are the expression of ideas. It is, at any rate, the theory of art as the expression of feelings (which here shall be taken to include emotions and attitudes) that has been historically significant and developed: art as specially connected with the life of feeling.

When people are said to be expressing feelings, what specifically are they doing? In a perfectly ordinary sense, expressing is “letting go” or “letting off steam”: individuals may express their anger by throwing things or by cursing or by striking the persons who have angered them. But, as many writers have pointed out, this kind of “expressing” has little to do with art; as the American philosopher John Dewey said, it is more of a “spilling over” or a “spewing forth” than expression. In art at least, expression requires a medium, a medium that is recalcitrant and that artists must bend to their will. In throwing things to express anger, there is no medium—or, if one’s body is called the medium, then it is something one does not have to study to use for that purpose. It is still necessary to distinguish a “natural release” from an expression. If poetry were literally “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as William Wordsworth said, it would consist largely of things like tears and incoherent babblings. If artistic creation can plausibly be said to be a process of expression, something different from and more specific than natural release or discharge must be meant.

One view of emotional expression in art is that it is preceded by a perturbation or excitement from a vague cause about which the artist is uncertain and therefore anxious. The artist then proceeds to express feelings and ideas in words or paint or stone or the like, clarifying them and achieving a release of tension. The point of this theory seems to be that artists, having been perturbed at the inarticulateness of their “ideas,” now feel relieved because they have “expressed what they wanted to express.” This phenomenon, indeed a familiar one (for everyone has felt relieved when a job is done), must still be examined for its relevance. Is it the emotion being expressed that counts or the relief at having expressed it? If the concern here is with art as therapy or doing art to provide revelations for a psychiatrist, then the latter is what counts, but the critic or consumer of the art is surely not concerned with such details of the artist’s biography. This is an objection to all accounts of expression as process: how is any light at all cast upon the work of art by saying that the artist went through any expressive process or through any process whatever in the genesis of it? If the artist was relieved at the end of it, so much the better, but this fact is as aesthetically irrelevant as it would be if the artist had committed suicide at the end of it or taken to drink or composed another work immediately thereafter.

Another problem should be noted: assuming that artists do relieve their oppressed states of mind through creating, what connection has this with the exact words or score or brushstrokes that they put on paper or canvas? Feelings are one thing, words and visual shapes and tones are quite another; it is these latter that constitute the art medium, and in them that works of art are created. There is doubtless a causal connection between the feelings of the artist and the words the artist writes in a poem, but the expression theory of creation talks only about the artist’s feelings, while creation occurs within the art mediums themselves, and to speak only of the former is not to tell anything about the work of art—anything, that is, that would be of interest other than to the artist’s psychiatrist or biographer. Through what paroxysms of emotion the artist passed does not matter anymore, insofar as one’s insight into the work is concerned, than knowing that a given engineer had had a quarrel with a friend the night before beginning construction on a certain bridge. To speak of anything revelatory of works of art, it is necessary to stop talking about the artist’s emotions and talk about the genesis of words, tones, and so on—items in the specific art mediums.

The expressionists have indeed brought out and emphasized one important distinction: between the processes involved in art and in craft. The activity of building a bridge from an architect’s blueprint or constructing a brick wall or putting together a table just like a thousand others the artisan has already made is a craft and not an art. The craftsperson knows at the beginning of the processes exactly what sort of end product is wanted: for example, a chair of specific dimensions made of particular materials. A good (efficient) craftsperson knows at the beginning how much material it will take to do the job, which tools, and so forth. But the creative artist cannot work in this manner: “Artists don’t know what they are going to express until they have expressed it” is a watchword of the expressionist. They cannot state in advance what a completed work of art will be like: the poet cannot say what words will constitute the completed poem or how many times the word the will occur in it or what the order of the words will be—that can be known only after the poem has been created, and until then the poet cannot say. Nor could the poet set about working with such a plan: “I shall compose a poem that contains the word the 563 times, the word rose 47 times,” and so on. What distinguishes art from craft is that the artist, unlike the craftsperson, “does not know the end in the beginning.”

The distinction seems valid enough, but whether it supports the expressionist’s view is more dubious, for it can be held regardless of the attitude assumed toward the theory of expression. The open-ended process described as art rather than craft characterizes all kinds of creation: of mathematical hypotheses and of scientific theory, as well as art. What distinguishes creation from all other things is that it results in a new combination of elements, and it is not known in advance what this combination will be. Thus, one may speak of creating a work of sculpture or creating a new theory, but rarely of creating a bridge (unless the builder was also the architect who designed it, and then it is to the genesis of the idea for the bridge, not to its execution, that the word creation applies). This, then, is a feature of creation; it is not clear that it is a feature of expression (whatever is being done in expressing that is not already being done in creating). Is it necessary to talk about expression, as opposed to creation, to bring out the distinction between art and craft?

There does not seem to be any true generalization about the creative processes of all artists nor even of great artists. Some follow their “intuitions,” letting their artistic work grow “as the spirit moves” and being comparatively passive in the process (that is, the conscious mind is passive, and the unconscious takes over). Others are consciously active, knowing very much what they want in advance and figuring out exactly how to do it (for example, the 19th-century American writer Edgar Allan Poe in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition”). Some artists go through extended agonies of creation (the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms, weeping and groaning to give birth to one of his symphonies), whereas for others it seems to be comparatively easy (Mozart, who could write an entire overture in one evening for the next day’s performance). Some artists create only while having physical contact with the medium (for example, composers who must compose at the piano, painters who must “play about” in the medium in order to get painterly ideas), and others prefer to create in their minds only (Mozart, it is said, visualized every note in his mind before he wrote the score). There appears to be no true generalization that can be made about the process of artistic creation—certainly not that it is always a process of expression. For the appreciation of the work of art, no such uniformity, of course, is necessary, greatly though it may be desired by theorists of artistic creation.

The main difficulties in the way of accepting conclusions about the creative process in art are (1) that artists differ so much from one another in their creative processes that no generalizations can be arrived at that are both true and interesting or of any significance and (2) that in psychology and neurology not enough is known about the creative process—it is surely the most staggeringly complex of all the mental processes in human beings, and even simpler human mental processes are shrouded in mystery. In every arena hypotheses are rife, none of them substantiated sufficiently to compel assent over other and conflicting hypotheses. Some have said—for example, Graham Wallas in his book The Art of Thought (1926)—that in the creation of every work of art there are four successive stages: preparation, incubation, inspiration, and elaboration; others have said that these stages are not successive at all but are going on throughout the entire creative process, while still others have produced a different list of stages. Some say that the artist begins with a state of mental confusion, with a few fragments of words or melody gradually becoming clear and the rest starting from there, working gradually toward clarity and articulation, whereas others hold that the artist begins with a problem, which is gradually worked out during the process of creation, but the artist’s vision of the whole guides the creative process from its inception. The first view would be a surprise to the dramatist who set out to write a drama in five acts about the life and assassination of Julius Caesar, and the second would be a surprise to artists like the 20th-century English artist Henry Moore, who said he sometimes began a drawing with no conscious aim but only the wish to use pencil on paper and make tones, lines, and shapes. Again, as to psychological theories about the unconscious motivations of artists during creation, an early Freudian view is that in creating the artist works out unconscious wish fulfillments; a later Freudian view is that the artist is engaged in working out defenses against the dictates of the superego. Views based on the ideas of the 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung reject both these alternatives, substituting an account of the unconscious symbol-making process.