“We do not have to travel to the ends of the earth nor return many millennia in time to find peoples for whom everything that intensifies the sense of immediate living is an object of intense admiration. Bodily scarification, waving feathers, gaudy robes, shining ornaments of gold and silver, of emerald and jade, formed the contents of the esthetic arts, and, presumably, without the vulgarity of class exhibitionism that attends their analogues today.”

John Dewey, from Art As Experience

 

I took these pictures from the kitchen of a two-room apartment built in Saint Petersburg, Russia during Soviet times. You reach this upper floor in an elevator with space only for three passengers packed tightly together. The lift is plain and sometimes needs cleaning and empties to hallways painted drably in colors more suited to barracks than to one’s home. In short, our motifs could not be located in more ordinary surroundings, devoid of upper-class ostentation. A housewife’s unconscious arrangement on a window ledge exists in a domestic realm not even remotely touching the world of fine art. Nonetheless the composition has a casualness and spontaneity — even an aliveness — that pleases me. I believe it creates the aesthetic experience our philosopher considers primordial in human beings, the product of intricate sensations we share with other animals on Earth.

Does the scene and its objects, “intensify the sense of immediate living?”

Did this for me, so might act upon the souls of others in the same way.

The feeling comes from what Dewey calls: the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic. Experience as Art. The movements of a professional athlete could give rise to this; the pattern of flames in a campfire might suffice, or a view through intricate curtains, or any of a thousand unpretentious recreations: tending a houseplant, working a puzzle, mending a garment, betting a horse-race — all have abilities to create pleasures which might not seem aesthetic at all to the participants, but nevertheless touch on the intrinsic meanings of life explored in regular works of art.