AESTHETICS AND VISUAL CULTURE

Aesthetics and Visual Culture



Aesthetics and Visual Culture

Introduction

Visual arts describe those skills that are visible to the human eye, including drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic art, decoration, and later photography and film. The visual arts are the expression of human creativity, visualization of the way we see life and the world around us. Standing midway between what is perceived and what is believed, they stem from a need to make sense of human existence and explain it, both internally and externally. Changes in the aesthetic style of images do more than simply chart the history of art and visual culture; they can also indicate the development of different kinds of world views (Currie 1991, 23).

One of the earliest forms of communication, the visual arts forms a language through which humans speak about the world. This language is tempered by the society from which it springs, conditioned by its beliefs, its rituals, and its social codes. Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica (1937), for example, can be fully understood only when related to the environment of the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). It seems clear that some form of aesthetic appreciation is a universal experience of human nature. Indeed, whereas tastes and preferences might be influenced by factors such as culture or prior subjective experiences an aesthetic response mechanism appears to be hardwired in the human brain (Currie 1991, 23).

It is believed that the history of the visual arts begins with sculpture, the creation of a three-dimensional form. One of the earliest examples was the Lion-Human of Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany (c. 30,000 BCE), a fantastic form carved from mammoth ivory. Half human and half beast, it marks the meeting of external reality with inmost reality, and it is at this juncture that visual art occurs.

The decorative arts and aesthetics have always served both an ornamental and a functional purpose. Originating with the daubing of the body, it was an impulse that led to the fashioning of jewellery, pottery, glassware, textiles, and furniture. Some of the most important elements of the visual arts and aesthetics are drawing, the creation of an image, and painting, the application of colour to a surface. At Chauvet, in southwestern France, there are caves full of early drawings and paintings of animals (dating from 25,000 to 17,000 BCE). A visual expression of the world in which early humans lived, these pictures depict the beasts that were hunted and worshipped. Located far away from the living area, in the darkest part of the caves, these paintings evidently had a ritual and meaningful purpose. It is clear that both images and pictures were once things of power and that art itself played an important role in the everyday struggle of living; only today has it been relegated to a purely aesthetic role (Koed 2005, 147).

Beginning with the cave, architecture dates back to prehistoric times. As skills developed and resources increased, architecture became a statement about religion, power, and spectacle. The giant pyramids of Giza ...