How Art Matters

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How Art Matters

Quality of Life and Artistic Practice

This paper is written from the perspective of a practising artist who is trying to understand how her work affects its audience.[1] Although it addresses the implications of certain philosophic ideas on her form of arts practice, and certain strands of research in neuroscience, it is intended to be neither a philosophical or scientific treatise nor an overview of the impact of the arts on its audiences. Rather, it uses these disciplines to enhance understanding of one way in which art can contribute to the quality of life of its audiences in the context of Western arts culture.[2]  

For many years research into quality of life made use of objective measures (for example, determining and measuring well-being/happiness/psychological indicators and variables through psychometric tests). In contrast, in this paper Quality of Life is addressed from the perspective of individuals’ lived experience, that is, their way of being in and with the world. It is suggested that the quality of lived experience is the foundation upon which many of the social and personal benefits claimed for engagement in the arts are built, and that it is through that lived experience that engagement in the arts enhances life satisfaction and well-being.[3] The manner in which this might be achieved is the focus of this paper.

Once the basic needs of nutrition, shelter, and personal safety have been met, indeed sometimes even when they haven’t (Frankl 2004), an engagement in art, whether as creator or as an audience member, has the potential to enhance quality of life in a number of ways.[4] This can occur at an individual, a social, and even an environmental level through an enhanced quality in our perception of and interactions with the different environments with which we engage (Berleant 2000:93–94). Although art is not the only activity that can enhance quality of life at an individual or social level, because engagement with art simultaneously addresses several facets of our lifeworld it has a special role to play both in our relationship to our environment and in the enhancement of well-being and life satisfaction. It draws our attention to and intensifies the experiential, or embodied, dimension of our understanding of the world that we inhabit, and also affects the biological, the cognitive, psychological, and social facets of our being (Thompson 2008; Thrift 2007; Gallese 2009). As such, it is particularly well placed to facilitate an interweaving of all these dimensions of experience.As Arnold Berleant argues,  It is this notion that lies at the heart of my practice as an artist.[6] (See Video 1: Digital imagery for global drift (2006: Sarah Rubidge, Hellen Sky, Seo HyoJong and Kim Seunghye).[7])

Much of the work explicitly addresses the hidden sites of the lived experience of the audience in an attempt to bring closer to the surface insights generated by embodied cognition. Rooted in a choreographic sensibility built up over thirty years as a dance practitioner, the work features images of human movement. These are generally transformed, often radically, through the use of digital technologies (as in Video 2: Sensuous geographies (2003: Sarah Rubidge and Alistair MacDonald) [8])

to reveal the hidden movement, the sensed flow of motion, that streams through our bodies and permeates our being at every moment of our lives (see Video 3: Digital Imagery, "Time and Tide" (2006: Sarah Rubidge and Jane Rees) [9]).

The works frequently favour highly diffuse imagery, which does not have an overt representational content, and always feature motion in some form or another. The qualitative dimensions of the imagery are intended to facilitate the adoption of a sensate, embodied response to the work, and thus address directly the viewer’s state(s) of being in the world. It is the pursuit of these states of being, with their capacity to transform more prosaic states, that drives me as a researcher and an artist.

This work is situated within a mode of artistic practice that includes work by painters such as William Turner (see his "Sun Setting over a Lake" and "Snowstorm - Steam-boat off a Harbour's Mouth"), 

Mark Rothko (e.g.  No. 14 [ Horizontals, White over Darks ] and  No. 14 , 1960), James Turrell (e.g. Frontal Passage , 1994), and Olafur Eliasson ( The Weather Report , 2003).[10]  

All these works are resonant with ambiguity (of form and meaning), colour, and often a liminal, if illusory, sense of motion. They implicitly ask the viewer to abandon the desire to apply a cognitively-driven approach to the work, which entails interpreting its ‘meaning’ (an approach that favours a linguistic approach to understanding the work), and in its place adopt an experiential, embodied stance in order to access the sensation generated by the imagery, colour, and textures of the work.

The notion of ‘sensation’ formulated by Gilles Deleuze (1981) is intrinsic to this form of artistic practice, and has been a significant influence in my artistic research. However, whilst this kind of work seems to target a Deleuzean form of ‘sensation’, many other forms of artistic practice also impact upon this most liminal of bodystates, and it is this that underpins our experiences and thus quality of life. It has also been of interest to note that recent research by neuroscientists into the subliminal experiential level that underpins embodied cognition indicates that my artistic choices, albeit unwittingly, could indeed generate the kinds of responses in the neurophysiological systems that are central to the enhancement of lived experience. Indeed, as my artistic journey has progressed I have become increasingly intrigued as to the way that the work of neuroscientists adds another dimension to our understanding of the way we respond to art, both during the process of making art and as audience members. It has become clear that, although the experiments undertaken by the neuroscientists do not explain what art can do at a socio-cultural level, they can reveal some of the ways in which art matters to us as human beings at the deepest of biological levels, and thus how art comes to matter to our way of being in and with the world. This paper therefore addresses  How Art Matters  to Quality of Life.

It became clear very quickly that the way in which art affects quality of life is an extremely complex issue, and equally clear that this paper would only be able to touch lightly on many of the lines of enquiry to which my research has given rise. However, because like many artists I believe that engagement with art enhances life satisfaction and well-being, I will attempt to unpack some of the insights that this research has generated in the hopes that they might prove to be of relevance to studies of the relationship between the arts, well-being, and life satisfaction.

Engaging with Art

In this paper the arts are taken to include not only painting, sculpture, literature, dance, theatre, poetry, and music, but also films, digitally generated art and music, and installation art. Further, although the paradigm of art in Western society tends to be professional manifestations of what are sometimes called the ‘high’ arts, references to art here implicitly include within their remit popular theatre, dance and music, amateur painting and music-making, social dancing, carnival, community arts, traditional indigenous dance/music/song/rock paintings/sculpture/mask-making, and so on.[11]  

That engagement in art has a beneficial effect on quality of life was first recognised by Aristotle and Plato over two millennia ago (Aristotle  Poetics ), as was its potential to have a harmful effect on quality of life (Plato  Republic ). In more contemporary times the first belief has been adopted as an integral part of therapeutic work by psychologists, health professionals, educationalists, and social workers (Starikoff 2004).

Engagement in the arts can take many forms. It can range from engaging as a creator of art (who may or may not be a professional artist), a performer of music, dances, or plays (created by oneself or by another), or an audience member who enjoys the fruits of the work of the artist and performers. For many decades, in self-styled ‘developed’ societies, the nature of the engagement of the artist and the audience has often been seen not only as distinguishable, but also as crucially different. Whilst the artist’s role has been characterised as being an active engagement with the artistic materials to produce images of feeling, idea, or concept, the audience’s has been seen as a mere ‘consumer’ of the artwork through a passive reception of the imagery that embodies the artist’s ideas. However, as Roland Barthes (1977) and Wolfgang Iser (1978) point out, audience members are by no means passive recipients of an artist’s/writer’s ideas. Rather, they engage actively with those ideas at both a conscious and a non-conscious level and by virtue of their personal and socio-cultural histories generate individual meanings from the works of art that create for it a unique content (which may not map precisely onto the artist’s understanding of the work’s content). Further, because artists undertake a dual role of artist and audience as they create their work they too are subject to the generation of individually conceived meanings. These, however, may not be the only meaning/s the artwork has to offer.[12] It is at this juncture that the active component of an audience member’s encounter with an artwork lies, both in its negotiation of meanings and its potential to enhance quality of life by extending the range of understanding available to audience members.[13]

With regards to this, Huta and Ryan (2009) suggest that an individual, whether participant or recipient, can achieve an enhanced quality of life in terms of both well-being and of life-satisfaction through pursuing two apparently different motivations for engaging in leisure activities.[14] One is the familiar hedonic mode, wherein an individual seeks pleasure (physical, emotional, or cognitive), comfort, relaxation, and/or entertainment. This mode tends to focus on the outcome of the activity, the pleasure that was achieved. The second motivation is closer to Aristotle’s position on the eudaemonic life. This Huta and Ryan identify as the eudaemonic motivation, in which individuals actively seek to better their quality of life by pursuing activities that give meaning or purpose to their lives, enhance social relations and/or personal growth, or are of benefit to others (the ‘good’, or virtuous, life). This can entail seeking excellence in a skill, making the best of ones’ abilities, seeking to gain new insights from engaging in the activity, and using the activity to enhance one’s relations with others. Thus in a eudaemonic mindset the concern tends to be with the qualities attendant on engaging with the activity itself, and its long-term benefits, not merely the immediate results of engagement.[15]

However, making a rigid distinction between two such modes of engagement in art could be deceptive, for they form part of a much larger system of response through which both hedonic and eudaemonic results can be achieved. Further, different forms of art initiate different responses. Whilst some art might alleviate psycho-physiological imbalances, art that challenges expectations can initiate temporary psycho-physiological imbalances. The latter requires the viewer to strive to understand and/or adapt to ideas presented through the work. Through ‘making sense’ of such an artwork both experiential and cognitive understandings of life can be augmented.[16]

Conversely, although individuals might engage with an artwork with a hedonic motivation, the experiential outcomes may also be associated with those designated as belonging to the eudaemonic side of the continuum. Thus, even whilst immersed in the sheer pleasure of an activity participants might also be gaining physical and cognitive skills, and with them confidence and enhanced self-esteem. They may also unwittingly be developing and refining social or psychological skills, or garnering insights to any number of other seemingly tangential facets of the activity. As such they are placing themselves in a better position to live a productive, meaningful life.

Nevertheless, it is the immediacy of the effects of the encounter with an artwork or art activity, which constitutes the heart of the aesthetic moment, that lays the foundation for art’s enhancement of qualities of life, inasmuch as the effect of immediate somato-sensory response during the encounter affects an individual’s sense of being at the deepest of levels (Damasio 2000). This unavoidably has an impact on the way in which individuals respond to others and to their environment in their everyday life. This notwithstanding, the somato-sensory response is then processed and modulated by subsequent cognitive activity that operates both above and below the level of reflective consciousness. It is in the interplay between the two modes of consciousness that the breadth, and depth, of art’s value to quality of life lies in the short term. Nor does the process end there, for still later (particularly in works that do not make their meaning/s immediately apparent) a considered reflection on the work and its potential meanings can further extend understanding. This activity of the cognitive systems can reveal more intricate dimensions and meanings than an affective somato-sensory response alone. The dialogue between the somato-sensory and the cognitive is essential in the processing of the experience of art.

The works of impressionist artists such as Monet (see Figure 1),

expressionists such as Edvard Munch (see Figure 2),

and abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko ( No.14 , 1960) and Jackson Pollock ( Untitled , 1952) [17]  indicate that artists intuitively recognised the embodied response as the route to understanding in the arts long before the notion of embodied cognition made an appearance in discourses on consciousness and knowledge. Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century a significant proportion of art has been designed to extend the pre-reflective response initiated in the first encounter with the work by emphasising and even deliberately trying to refine perceptual and physiological processes that operate below the level of reflective consciousness. These works, many of which lean towards the nonrepresentational end of the artistic continuum, seem to operate primarily at a deeper, embodied, mode of consciousness than those in a more representational style.

Conceptual Frames: Philosophy and Neuroscience

As my enquiry into the effect such works might have on quality of life has progressed it has become increasingly evident that the strand of artistic work that I favour, with its emphasis on somatic responses, embodies many ideas developed first in phenomenology and later in ‘process’ philosophy and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. These philosophies favour the embodied response as a means of understanding the more subtle facets of the world we inhabit. Unsurprisingly, they have come to constitute the conceptual context in which my intuitive artistic decisions have been made.

It has also become clear that many of the concepts that these philosophers explored are being echoed in neuroscience, for experiments with new technologies such as fMRI scanners are beginning to provide evidence to support some of the philosophical concepts that have previously not been open to forms of empirical enquiry. These experiments reveal potential sources of the tacit rationales that lie at the core of pre-reflective decisions made during artistic practice and in audience responses to the work. Further, a growing number of neuroscientists are now arguing that experiential or embodied knowledge not only affords a crucial mode of knowing, one vital to our engagement with the world, but also that it is an underlying matrix upon which more abstract (cognitive) modes of understanding are built (Varela and Thompson 1991; Damasio 2000; Edelman 2000). These arguments are beginning to afford the arts scientific support for the instinctive belief that the arts have benefits that go beyond the intangibility of the aesthetic moment.

Philosophy

An interplay between philosophy and neuroscience has become increasingly evident during the last two decades. Indeed, as a choreographic artist whose work is predicated on the intuitive belief that body and mind are one it has been interesting to follow the role that the concept of the embodied mind has come to play. Many of the insights emerging from current philosophical enquiries into embodied cognition extend those offered by phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger (1927) and Maurice Merleau Ponty (1962), and by Henri Bergson (1899, 1907) and Alfred Whitehead (1929). Evan Thompson (2008), for example, argues that the mind is constituted from active dynamic sensorimotor relations between neural activity, the body and the world/environment. This position is supported by other contemporary philosophers, including Susan Hurley and Alva Nöe (2003), Mark Johnson (1987/2007), Dorothée Legrand (2006), and Shaun Gallagher (2005) and Berleant (2000). The work of these philosophers is supplemented by philosophical ideas developed by Deleuze concerning sensation and affect (Deleuze 1981).

It is, perhaps, not coincidental that much of Deleuze’s work has particular significance for many nonfigurative contemporary artists who are attempting to understand the nature of their practice and their artistic intuitions. Deleuze (1981) argues that art is primarily the domain of percept, affect, and sensation. However, the Deleuzean notion of sensation refers not to raw sense data or recognisable physical sensations but to the “being of the sensible,” which is characterised by a flow of intensities that lies beneath physical sensation, and (in scientific terms) is generated by autonomous responses.[18] I would argue that the “being of the sensible” permeates much of the artistic work discussed earlier, and underlies our responses to many other forms of art.

Affect  and  sensation  are ambiguous concepts. Brian Massumi describes  affect  as the “intensity that characterises a work of art … a non-conscious, never to be conscious remainder … [one] embodied in purely autonomic reactions” (Massumi 1996:221). Being formed in the autonomic systems  affect  is neither a concrete nor a subjective state. It is a precognitive state that grounds but does not constitute personalised subjective responses. The notion of affect has affinities with the equally nuanced concepts of  prehension (Whitehead) and protention (Husserl).[19] Prehension , protention , and affect alike are permeated with the sediments of past experience and implicit sociocultural traditions and, like sensation, do not precede perception or representation but are coextensive with it (Smith 2003). It is of interest that neuroscientists such as Damasio (2000) are beginning to explore the neurological sources of these liminal states.

The notion of  affect  in particular can illuminate understanding of the nature of many of our responses to those kinds of art in which the embodied response is central to the moment of aesthetic experience, and our understanding of artistic intuition.Related to but more subtle than commonsense understandings of emotion, [20]  which are generated by an attitude to a specific object or person,  affect  is, rather, “a pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another” (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 1980:xvi), that is, those barely felt sensations of well-being or dis-ease that we experience from time to time without quite knowing why. This is also a characteristic feature of our engagement with the arts, whether Rembrandt or Rothko, Scarlatti or Sinatra, ballet or ballroom dancing. Another crucial feature of  affect  is that, like all other human sensation, it cannot be divorced from our relationship to our environment, whether that be the material environment, works of art, or our social and inner worlds, for  affect  is the “property of an active outcome of an encounter … tak[ing] the form of an increase or decrease in the ability of the body and mind alike to act” (Thrift 2007:178). Thus, although sited well below the level of cognition and intention, affect has the power to increase an individual’s potential for action in the world.

These notions of sensation, prehension, and affect resonate with the experience of working intuitively as an artist, and with the sense of transcendence that many audience members seek when engaging with works of art. As with intuition and transcendence, we are ‘out of mind’ when we are in the state characterised as  affect , although clearly not ‘without mind’, for, as artists show, we are still able to act in and upon the world, albeit sometimes without conscious intention. However, the significance of  affect  to well-being and quality of life lies not solely in the experience itself, for this has a temporal dimension inasmuch as  affect  lingers as a ‘non-conscious’ remainder, a trace that affects an individual’s lifeworld beyond the immediacy of the ‘transcendent’ moment.

For this reason the recent advocation of the adoption of the affective turn (Guattari 1992; Thrift 2007) is not entirely without difficulties when considered in the context of human society and culture. Crucially, because  affect  is felt but not consciously ‘known’, it contains a political dimension, inasmuch as modes of understanding that lie beneath the level of our reflective consciousness are more difficult for the individual either to recognise or to control.[21] Nevertheless, because traces of  affect  linger within our lived experience they continue to have an effect on the way in which we perceive and respond to the world around us. As such, any artwork, whether figurative or non-figurative, is replete with a ‘politics of affect’ (Thrift 2007), and it is there that the source of art’s power lies, as well as its dangers—dangers because, although biologically grounded,  affect  is not entirely individualized, as it results from interactions in and with a pre-established sociocultural environment.

Indeed, affective responses develop in, and are in part formed by, socio-cultural environments and the worldviews that emerge from them. As Nikos Salingaros has pointed out in his paper for this panel, external control of the affective dimensions of our lifeworlds can be located in the built environment, in the design of urban and social spaces and of artefacts that are used habitually within a society. They are also found in the new ‘worlds’ brought forth by works of art, and in the corporeal regimes, developed within a society, which give rise to particular modes of embodied consciousness.[22] These all constitute a politics of control to which human beings are subject. The effects of these controls, although not conscious, impact upon the very heart of our political sensibilities, for as Lee Spinks (2001:23) notes, “political attitudes and statements are conditioned by intense autonomic bodily reactions that do not simply reproduce the trace of political intention” but  embody  it. It has been argued therefore that political attitudes and beliefs can be generated by engagement with both material and kinetic environments, and thus by works of art, in ways of which we are not consciously aware, affecting not only our way of being in and with the world, but also the way we engage with others, and with our material and immaterial environments. This places the artist in a position of some responsibility.

Neuroscience

It was noted earlier that the philosophical concepts discussed above found their echo in the work of contemporary neuroscientists. As suggested, scientific support for the theoretical insights offered by phenomenologists Whitehead and Deleuze has become possible with the advent of fMRI scanners, which measure the activity of the brain without invasive intervention. In spite of its limitations, this technology allows neuroscientists to investigate the neurological and physiological underpinnings of human responses to the environment in considerably more detail and with considerably more accuracy than was previously possible. Additionally, neuroscientific research into the precognitive moment (in philosophical terms  affect , prehension , protention ) has proven to be a rich source for current developments in understanding the nature of the effect of the arts on both audiences and artists.

At the same time, both philosophy and artistic practice is being used by neuroscientists to enhance their understanding of the brain, as well as the implications of their scientific research beyond the laboratory (Gallese 2003; Zeki 1999; Freedberg and Gallese 2007; Lavazza 2009). Although still in an early stage, the work being undertaken in neuroaesthetics is revealing that the intuitive manipulations of perception and sensation that are the grist of the artist’s mill have a foundation in some of the deepest levels of biological activity, and are illuminated through a study of phenomenology. For example, some neuroscientists use phenomenology extensively in their work (Varela, Thompson, and Roesch 1991) and some go so far as to suggest that artists are unwittingly engaging in a form of neuroscientific research (Ramachandran and Hirstien 1999; Zeki and Lamb 1994; Livingstone 2002).[23]  

Interestingly, experiments into the effects of the arts on audience members are beginning to reveal that, in terms of neurological systems, the arts do indeed have a profound effect on our bodystate, and thus on our lived experience. The applications of research into Mirror Neuron Systems (Gallese et al.1996), [24] and research on the neural processes activated when listening to music (Koelsch et al. 2002, 2005, 2010), or viewing paintings (Freedberg and Gallese 2007; Zeki 1994, 2010) and dance movement (Calvo-Merino et al. 2006, 2007, 2008) all reveal that engaging with art affects us at the most fundamental levels of our neurobiological systems. However, they reveal additionally that, as Berleant (2000) and others have argued, art affects us not only at a prerational (or ‘emotional’) level, but also at other levels of consciousness.

It has, for example, been shown by neuroscientists that, as well as music’s well established ability to activate areas of the brain associated with emotional responses (Peretz 1998, 2002; Gaser and Schlaug 2003; Koelsch 2002, 2005), the cognitive systems are also active (Sloboda 2004, Krumhansl 2002), as is an enhancement of the area of the brain which communicates between the brain’s hemispheres (Ball 2010). It has also been found that, whilst representational paintings (for instance, see Figure 3) elicit ‘pleasurable’ responses more easily than those generated by abstract art (Di Dio and Gallese 2009),

abstract paintings (where the image is unclear, requiring active image-construction by the viewer, as in Figure 4) not only increase activation in the areas of the brain that integrates sensory information from different sensory modalities (Cupchik et al. 2009) but also involve parts of the brain that are involved in cognitive processing (Vartanian & Goel 2004).

This suggests that nonfigurative art of the kind discussed in this paper, and indeed music (Ball 2010) and dance, may invoke intricate, cross-modal responses, and perhaps bring more intense activity of preconscious cognitive systems to bear on embodied responses than those employed when responding to more overtly representational art, in order to adapt our responses to the semi-choate affective qualities that the works offer.

There is, however, no opposition between the two strands of art practice, for the representational still has a crucial role to play in the experience of art. Any painting or sculpture that depicts a human being implicitly presents possible actions, intentions, emotions, and sensations through the positioning and apparent distribution of weight in the depicted body (see Figure 5, Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa).

This, they suggest, initiates an embodied simulation of the perceived potential action and, through this, access to the meaning of the work. Freedberg and Gallese (2007) therefore argue that for many works of art “a crucial element of aesthetic response consists of the activation of embodied mechanisms encompassing the simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensation” (Freedberg and Gallese 2007:197).Significantly, in the context of my work and that of others working with non-figurative imagery, Freedberg and Gallese additionally suggest that the embodied simulation mechanisms are just as active when viewing paintings by artists such as Jackson Pollock, [25]  for, they surmise, our autonomic systems respond to the visible traces of the artist’s gestures left in the lines, curves, and textures from which the work is formed. For this reason, in nonfigurative works “the relationship between embodied empathetic feelings in the observer [derived from embodied simulation] and the quality of the work forms a substantial part of the experience of the artwork” (Freedberg and Gallese 2007:199).

The relevance of embodied simulation therefore seems to have a reach beyond the literal ‘mirroring’ activity—observed by Gallese and his colleagues when they first identified Mirror Neuron Systems (Gallese et al. 1996)—to an altogether more subtle domain of human communication, that of the qualitative (or expressive) elements of gesture. It is equally interesting to observe that here we find twenty-first century science invoking one of Plato and Aristotle’s most influential insights concerning the arts, that of art as imitation, albeit now referencing a mode of imitation that extends beyond the representational.

Because embodied simulation emulates the neurophysiological behaviour associated with actions, it is of particular importance to developing an embodied understanding of art that has a kinetic dimension. It has been found, in experiments measuring the intensity of embodied simulation in the ‘receptive’ neuronal systems, that, during viewings of dance movement, the activity in these systems intensifies when subjects view movements with which they are familiar (e.g. Calvo-Merino et al. 2006). On reflection, much of my early work seems to have operated on this principle. The digital imagery in Passing Phases (1994–1999) is an example of this (Video 4: 1994-99, Sarah Rubidge, Garry Hill, Tim Diggins and Nye Parry).

In this work subtle emotional states are articulated simply through presenting (carefully choreographed and edited) gestures of isolated body parts such as the mouth, the hand, and the foot.[27] If Gallese is correct, the audience member experiences traces of the emotional states represented in the qualities of the gestures as they view the imagery. The audience’s response to this installation indicates that this is so. That this has been due to the character of the affective bodystates that embodied simulation generates in audience members is not, it appears, beyond the bounds of possibility.

Nevertheless, although enhancement of the intensity of immediate experience is central to the aesthetic response in works such as this, these responses also have implications beyond the immediacy of the experience, inasmuch as they can heighten sensitivity to others’ feelings and emotional states, and recognition of these states through subtle behavioural clues. This ultimately affects our way of being in the world, and our relations with others and the environment. Indeed, for many years Gallese and his colleagues have been exploring the hypothesis that embodied simulation might be a neurological foundation of intersubjectivity (Gallese 2001, 2003, 2009). They are gradually beginning to provide evidence that social cognition could have its sources in autonomic systems, such as the Mirror Neuron System, which enable us to respond appropriately to others in social interactions. We do this by attuning ourselves to our companion’s perceived emotional state through a process in which the “the phenomenal content of intentional relations [is] mediated by sensory-motor multimodally integrated neural circuits” (Gallese 2005:43). Through this we implicitly assess potential motor intentions of the observed other prior to action, and thus pre-reflectively prepare ourselves to respond to them in an appropriate manner. Gallese suggests that we also understand the emotional content of much representational art through the activation of these pre-reflective processes, a conclusion that is born out by the emotional insights to which many representational works of art give rise (as in Figure 6).

However, even though Gallese’s findings confirmed my intuitive notions concerning the way in which works such as  Passing Phases could transform the state of being of its audience members, from my perspective as a chorographic artist, it seemed possible that there might be even more subtle ways of harnessing this tendency to embodied simulation than using representational imagery. I began to develop kinetic imagery that had been abstracted from human movement to gauge whether it might have a similar effect on the autonomic systems as that generated by realistic depictions of human movement, but elicit a state that was less akin to an empathetic emotional response and more akin to affect. 

Works such as  "Hidden Histories" (see Video 5: Digital imagery from the installation "Hidden Histories," 2001, Sarah Rubidge and Jo Hyde and Video 6: The installation "Hidden Histories" in situ, 2001, Sarah Rubidge and Jo Hyde)

and  "Time & Tide" (see Video 7: Digital imagery "Time and Tide, 2001, Sarah Rubidge and Jane Rees and Video 8: Digital imagery "Time and Tide" in situ, 2001, Sarah Rubidge and Jane Rees)

were the first steps in this artistic enquiry. This was followed by the movement imagery developed for "Sensuous Geographies" (see Video 9: Sensuous Geographies, 2003. Sarah Rubidge and Alistair MacDonald).

This artistic enquiry perhaps reached its apotheosis in the nonfigurative, yet dance-like, movement that characterises both "Fugitive Moments" (Video 10 and Video 11 "Fugitive Moments,"  2006, Sarah Rubidge, Beau Lotto, and Erwan le Matelot)

and some of the digital imagery developed for "global drifts" (see Video 12 and Video 13, "global drifts", 2006, Sarah Rubidge, Hellen Sky, Seo HyoJong and Kim Seunghye)

and  "Eros Eris" (see Video 14, Excerpt from performance of "Eros Eris", 2007, Liz Lea and Sarah Rubidge).[32]

The aim of this imagery was specifically to invoke the “pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another” of which Massumi (1996) spoke when defining  affect , and thus allow audiences to reach towards the deeper levels of the experience of movement.

Although the digital imagery in  Time & Tide ,  Fugitive Moments , and  Eros Eris  is primarily grounded in the activity of a dancing body, the kinetic rhythms are not (as they are in Naum Gabo’s work) merely “as important as space and structure and [pictorial] image” (Gabo 1950; cited in Zeki and Lamb 1994:625), they are the primary characteristic of the imagery. Being able to consciously recognise the material form from which the imagery has arisen is thus not a precondition of an appreciation of these works. Because the flow of motion in this increasingly abstract imagery is grounded in the characteristics of human movement, the bodystates that characterise ‘background emotions’ associated with those qualities of movement (I surmised) would be simulated in the viewer via embodied simulation.[34] Audience responses to these works indicate that audiences do seem to embody the motional qualities that they observe in the imagery, particularly if they have physical experience of the form of dance movement on which the imagery is based. This is, however, not yet scientifically verifiable.[35] Nevertheless, it seems as if I have been successfully operating within, and extending, the remit of both Gallese’s theories and one of the principles proposed by Aristotle in  Poetics (I) concerning the choreographic art, namely, that dancers imitate character, emotion, and action through means of rhythmical movement. Although nonfigurative, the images, by virtue of their rhythmical movement seem to ‘dance’, and through that to communicate a liminal sense of emotion, or affect. If this is the case then encounters with the work could have a beneficial effect on the audiences’ sense of well-being both during and after their immediate experience of the work.

The ‘Darker’ Side of Art and Quality of Life

I am aware that this paper has focused on artwork that enhances emotional homeostasis through the generation of positive background emotions (or affect). Any claim that all art enhances quality of life may not, therefore, be sustainable, for art has another side, one that exposes the uncomfortable, the disturbing, shows the darker side of human society and the human psyche. Indeed, many forms of art have been directed towards to generating far from positive physiological, psychological, or emotional states. This they achieve both through subject matter (for example, Francisco Goya’ etchings from the  "Disaster of War" Series, 1810–1820, Figure 7),

by departing radically from the artistic  status quo  (for example, Paul Cézanne’s  "Bridge and Pool" [1888–1890], Figure 8)

or by using both these strategies (Picasso’s Guernica  [1937]).[37]  Through such approaches these artists disrupt the ease of response that accompanies the encounter with familiar forms of artistic expression. The question therefore has to be asked, does this kind of art have a role to play in quality of life?

Counterintuitively an argument can be made that such arts could indeed play a role, for as Aristotle has suggested the enhancement of quality of life extends beyond attaining an easy emotional homeostasis. Thus, although works such as those created by contemporary artists throughout the twentieth century challenged the artistic status quo by exposing the less pleasant sides of the human condition and psyche, disturbed expectations of what art should do and be, and generated often disquieting affective and cognitive states (for example, Francis Bacon’s  Three Figures and Portrait , 1975, [38]  and Martha Graham’s  Lamentations , 1930, or  Night Journey , 1947 [39] ), it could be claimed that they play a role in enhancing quality of life by opening their audience’s minds and eyes to new ways of seeing, new ways of being, and alternative ways of understanding the world. Further, for the very reasons that they disturb the  status quo , such art works could also contribute to quality of life through requiring viewers to confront and exercise their innate ability to adapt to the unfamiliar, and to reflect upon the nature of their instinctive responses to the unexpected.

In common with Aristotle, many psychologists and psychoanalysts consider engagement with art that disturbs to have a positive role to play in the process of confronting and processing less pleasant sides of the human condition, a process many still consider may serve an important educative and therapeutic function. This process diminishes the effects of the negative responses of the primitive somato-sensory systems generated on a first encounter with unpleasant imagery, for through it the former are gradually modulated by the application of reflection and the cognitive systems. This eventually alleviates the immediate effects on emotional balance of negative somatic responses by allowing audience members to understand, although not always enjoy, realms of feeling that they would not actively seek out (Ball 2010). Further, they initiate the processes needed to adapt to unexpected environmental circumstances, which remains a vital aspect of our being in this world. Although there is as yet no scientific evidence that these outcomes can result from an encounter with less comfortable forms of art, even though the experience may not be conducive to a consistent state of emotional homeostasis it can be an integral part of gaining life satisfaction at a different level of consciousness for those who enjoy a cognitive and emotional challenge.[40]

Artists, Creative, Activity and Neuroscience

Although it was noted at the beginning of this paper that engagement with the arts takes many forms, from creator and/or performer to audience member, the major focus has been on the effect of the art experience on the latter. It is now time to turn attention to the creator and performer. It has long been argued that the pre-reflective experience felt by the audience is also felt by artists during the process of making their work (Berleant 2000). Indeed, anecdotal evidence from fellow artists indicates that artists can become so immersed in the process of creating or performing a work that they enter what some describe as a ‘mindless’, others a transcendent, state.[41] Here rather than actions being directed intentionally by the ‘mind’, intention becomes embodied as pre-reflective systems initiate deeply rooted potentialities of action which are no longer limited by the pragmatic constraints of conscious intention.

Although for obvious reasons little research has been undertaken by neuroscientists to explore the neurological responses of artists as they create their work, Charles Limb and Allen Braun (2008) recently conducted experiments with professional jazz musicians in order to ascertain the nature of this particular form of creative behaviour.[42] Their work throws some light on the experience of the creative process. Limb and Braun’s experiment entailed jazz pianists improvising around the chord structure of a given jazz composition on a specially designed piano keyboard whilst their brain activity was measured in an fMRI scanner.[43] The results of the experiments revealed a pattern “in which internally motivated, stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance” (Limb and Braun 2008:4). The deactivation of these processes indicates that these cognitive dissociations may be an intrinsic feature of the creative process. Limb and Braun also note that “deactivation of the lateral prefrontal regions represents the primary physiologic change responsible for altered states of consciousness such as hypnosis, meditation or even daydreaming” (2008:5). This upholds the sense of many artists that a significant proportion of their creative activity takes place in an altered state of consciousness in which intuition assumes a dominant role. 

However, artistic intuition—although ‘out of mind’—is not completely ‘mindless’, for it is underpinned by extensive prior experience of the art form; nor is it the only mode of consciousness involved in the creative act. Rather, during the creative process, artists continually shift back and forth between intuitive behaviour and cognitive processing (‘making sense’ whilst ‘making sense of’), engaging in an intricate dialogue between the different levels of consciousness that are active during the aesthetic experience (Berleant 2000). Through this ongoing interaction between different levels of consciousness the quality of artists’ immediate intuitions are continually modulated. This impacts on the detail of the ongoing artistic activity, on the shifting understandings of what the work is  as  a work during its journey towards its final form, and ultimately on the form that the work eventually takes.

It is important to note that this process of developing intuitive responses applies also in the audience’s encounters with artworks. Indeed, as with the creative process, an interplay between intuition and cognitive responses takes place during the practice of viewing or hearing others’ artistic work. As a result, the ‘instinctive’ somato-sensory responses that are the first response to a work of art are gradually modulated and refined through a growing understanding of art gleaned both through repeated encounters with works of art and from learning  about  art. Audience members develop skills as an audience, just as artists develop artistic skills as the result of their repeated engagement with their practice. Over time, the modulations of the immediate experience that occur during this process are transformed into ‘intuitive’ responses. It is this transformation that makes engagement in art so valuable to the enhancement of our quality of life, as it offers a continual refinement of the ways in which we respond to the world around us, whilst at the same time it can challenge habitual responses built up over repeated exposure to works of art, and thus potentially enhance our ability to adapt to the unfamiliar. 

Conclusion

Although this paper was initiated by questions raised from the perspective of a particular form of contemporary arts practice, I have tried to show some of the deeper processes through which the arts can contribute to the well-being and life satisfaction of those who have the luxury of being able to indulge in activities that go beyond the fundamental needs of survival. The position I have taken is that the ‘subjective’ level of lived experience is the grounding of our quality of life, and that this lived experience is situated in an embodied response to the world. It is through intensifying this embodied response that art can contribute to the education of our sensibilities and thus to the enhancement of our quality of life and our interactions with the environment. These qualitative dimensions of experience impact on lived experience by providing us with pleasure, but also potentially a sense of purpose, self-esteem and agency, enhancement of social interaction, the ability to apply creative solutions to life situations, and even the capacity to counter some of the deleterious psychological effects of ill health or social deprivation, even if only temporarily. 

I have also argued that the very process of experiencing art, whether as an artist, participant, or audience member, has the capacity to enhance one’s qualities of life in significant and varied ways, inasmuch as the immediate experience of the aesthetic moment that is brought into play in the encounter with art generates lingering traces of  affect , which transforms our way of being in the world. However, whilst the transcendent, pre-reflective moment is crucial to the aesthetic experience, if that moment was all that experiencing art entailed, engagement in art, at any level, would remain purely subjective and private. It is, I suggest, far more than that. The immediate encounter with art leads not only to the aesthetic pleasure but also to the initiation of a cognitive turn and thus a relationship with what lies beyond the solipsism of somato-sensory responses. By virtue of the fact that a number of other systems (from the cognitive to the proto-social) are brought into play during the artistic experience, the effects of engagement with the arts therefore have the capacity to extend beyond the inner world of individuals to their interactions with others and with their environment.

Finally, although the examples given in this paper are specific to a stable Western society with a long history, and make explicit reference neither to the range of cultures that exist within that society nor to the range of popular and participatory arts that it embraces, these forms of artistic practice are considered equally powerful in communicating a way of being and enhancing quality of life. Further, even if the claims forwarded in this paper may not be applicable in their detail across all forms of art or all cultures, many of the principles that have been investigated here in relation to twenty-first century Western arts practices are potentially relevant to most other forms of artistic practice, whatever their origin, for they go far deeper than the surface characteristics of either art or society to the very deepest levels of human responses to sound, image, and movement. The applicability across cultures of the ideas discussed in this paper has yet to be investigated in any depth, however. Although philosophical discussions of the nature of audience responses to indigenous art forms have recently extended to a discussion of Australian aboriginal art (Manning 2007; Bolt 2004), this does not yet seem to have been extended to other indigenous art forms. Similarly, although neuroscientific experiments have been undertaken with popular forms of music (Ball 2010), few neuroscientists are extending their experiments either to the more contemporary forms of the arts, or to art forms from non-Western cultures. This is, I would suggest, an omission, for these forms have an equal capacity to impact the lived experience, and thus quality of life, of those who engage with them. 

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Footnotes

Note 1
As a choreographic installation artist I develop digital installations in collaboration with others that integrate real and virtual (or digitally augmented) environments. These works are all created with other artists, and thus strictly not  my  but  our  work. From my artistic perspective, most of the works are directed at eliciting embodied responses to the installation environments, and are permeated with an understanding derived from choreographic practice that space (real or virtual) is relational, and that it is constituted by and through a dynamic network of forces.

Note 3
Of course, many other activities, for example, sports, gardening, beekeeping, reading, learning, writing, are equally viable means of enhancing quality of life.

Note 4
Projects such as Hope North in Uganda (http://www.hopenorth.org/about.html) and the numerous arts projects undertaken in slums and shantytowns in Africa and South Asia are evidence of this.

Note 5
Berleant takes the position, as does this paper, that both active participant and the observer participate equally, although perhaps differently, in the experience of art.

Note 6
Due to the importance in this paper of my role as a practitioner-scholar I will be using the first person pronoun when discussing my work and my practice.

Note 10
For copyright reasons images of these works cannot be reproduced. See images of the works at: http://www.olafureliasson.net/works/the_weather_project_5.html (Eliasson’s The Weather Report ); http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=81089 (Turrell’s Frontal Passage ); http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A5047 & page_number=16 & template_id=1 & sort_order=1 (Rothko’s No. 14 [ Horizontals, White over Darks ]).

Note 11
Although community arts practices are often argued for in relation to their socio-cultural benefits, they focus initially on the role first-person experience plays in enabling these benefits to occur (see: The Foundation for Community Dance (http://www.communitydance.org.uk); Rod Paton’s Lifemusic (http://www.lifemusic.org); Poyner and Simmonds 1997; and Wilder 2002 (http://www.ausdance.org.au/professional_practice/community/comarticle.html).

Note 12
Barthes and Iser make the point that because everything is open to interpretation there is no ‘real’ meaning to any expressive utterance, even if there might be an intention to convey a particular meaning.

Note 13
In participatory art forms the role of the audience member is extended still further, for they are able to affect the work materially, not merely conceptually, as they engage with it. Interactive art is one example of this.

Note 14
The activities can include any number of things, from running to reading, art to sports, mountain climbing to walking, woodwork to gardening.

Note 15
It is notable that the effects of activities initiated for eudaemonic purposes also seem to last longer that those initiated by a purely hedonic motivation (Steger et al. 2008).

Note 16
It is worthy of note that the term ‘sense’ is inherently ambiguous inasmuch as it can refer to understanding (making sense of …) and to experienced sensation or feeling (I sense that …).

Note 17
To view images of these works go to: http://sfmoma.stores.yahoo.net/maroino1419u2.html (Rothko’s No 14 , 1960. Click on web image to enlarge ); http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4675 & page_number=68 & template_id=1 & sort_order= (Pollock’s Untitled , 1962. Click on web image to enlarge ).

Note 18
This concept bears a remarkable similarity to Susanne Langer’s concept of ‘virtual powers’ (Langer 1977).

Note 20
In Damasio’s terms there are several levels of emotion, including background, primary, and secondary emotions. Affect lies closer to what Damasio (2000) refers to as background emotions, which are the deep autonomic responses that give rise to an unidentifiable sense of dis-ease, tension, dread, and so on.

Note 21
The terms affect and politics are used in this paper (broadly) in a Deleuzean sense (out of Spinoza), namely that affect is “the ability to affect and be affected … [and further that] a power to affect and be affected governs a transition” (Massumi and McKim 2009). In this philosophical framework affect is associated with networks of intensities or ‘forces’, transition and transformation, and, by extension, the power to affect, and potentially transform, the ‘way of being’ experienced by an individual immersed in an affective ‘field’. For this reason, it has the potential to assume a ‘political’ dimension. ‘Politics’ here is politics with a small ‘p’, and refers to the ‘politics’ of ‘being’ or ‘feeling’. Nevertheless, it can be related with Politics with a large ‘P’, inasmuch as all political agendas strive to establish conditions that align feelings, attitudes, and beliefs so that their ideological stance can flourish. An architect creating a building and an artist creating an artwork are similarly setting up the conditions through which certain forms of feeling can be initiated.

Note 22
These range from military training to gym routines, dance techniques to social dancing, as well as habitual systems of social behaviour.

Note 23
This might be more modestly expressed as ‘proto-neuroscientific’ research.

Note 24
Mirror Neuron Systems were identified by Vittorio Gallese and his colleagues in the mid-1990s (Gallese et al. 1996). In these systems a group of pre-motor neurons (which were given the name ‘mirror neurons’) discharge not only during execution of actions (active, or expressive, mode) but also during the observation of similar actions executed by another individual (receptive mode). However, Gallese (2009) now suggests that the metaphor of a mirror is misleading, as systems are more plastic than implied by the mirror analogy, for rather than being merely a direct neurological emulation the model of action, in the receptive mode the pattern of response is dependent on the personal history and situated nature of the subject. For this reason the term ‘embodied simulation’ is generally used instead of ‘Mirror Neuron System’ in this paper.

Note 25
To view an image of Pollock’s work go to:

Note 27
Short segments of video footage of one or two long gestures were extracted and subjected to temporal editing/choreographic techniques (e.g. repetition, retrograde, slowing down or speeding up the tempo. These generated different emotional qualities from the ‘same’ gestural fragment.

Note 32
Of course, any inferences with respect to the feeling of movement generated in all these works are culture-bound (here a particular somatically-based mode of dance practice). The works may thus affect those familiar with that form of dance practice more than those who are not.

Note 34
Interestingly, from the position of a very different discipline, movement analysts Rudolph Laban (1966) and Judith Kestenberg (1995) have proposed that emotional states can be identified through an analysis of the qualitative dimensions of movement, particularly the flow of movement within the body. Laban even goes so far as to suggest that emulating the qualities of movement associated with particular emotions could generate the feeling of that emotion.

Note 35
Nevertheless, written and spoken feedback from audience members to several works indicates that both those familiar with this kind of work and audience members who would not have considered themselves knowledgeable about ‘art’ found that the works had an effect on the way they ‘felt’, that is, their emotional bodystate.

Note 37
To view this image go to:

Note 38
To view image go to:

Note 39
To View these works go to:

Note 40
A balance between challenging and comfortable encounters with the environment makes it more possible that an individual’s development will not stagnate.

Note 41
This assertion is drawn from personal experience and personal communications with artist colleagues, including poets, dancers, composers, performers, and visual artists.

Note 42
Improvisation is real-time composition in which the musician/dancer is simultaneously a composer and a performer. Although often working operating within a predetermined sonic or motional frame, the compositional progression is unpremeditated.

Note 43
For this experiment a special keyboard was created that the improviser could use whilst lying in the fMRI scanner. The experiment was rigorously structured, and included experimental controls (playing and then improvising around a simple scale).