Why Does Art Involve Experience? – A Look into the World of Art

In this article, we will look at why art involves experience. This experience does not stand for the training or experience an artist acquires throughout their career, but rather the experience of making art from the artist’s perspective and the experience that motivated the artist to make an artwork in the first place. Instead of considering art from the typical audience perspective, we will look at the concepts and values Process Art expresses in trying to answer the question, “Why does art involve experience?”

Why Does Art Involve Experience?

The philosophy of art is a fascinating field and also where this article’s question finds its origin. People have pondered the importance, value, and catalysts behind artmaking for decades, but most people perceive and understand art for what it offers the viewer.

The importance of art as an experience the artist goes through is often overlooked by the art market.

Therefore, Process art is not commonly seen on display as a reflection and documentation of the experience the artist has in the act of making. In this article, we will look at Process art, the preverbal function of art, and the maker’s experience of the art they are creating.

Communicating Mystery

Even the first art humans created aimed to communicate complex experiences words could not capture. The Khoisan art found in South African caves that are up to 28 000 years old reflects the deep mysteries of mind, myth, and culture. These people used certain caves as holy gathering spaces to conduct ceremonies.

The cave wall was believed to be the veil between the spirit world and the human world.

After altering their mental states by doing trance dances and using psycho-active substances, the shamans would cocreate with the natural forms of the rocks and paint visions onto the cave walls. If they saw deer in the forms of the rocks, they would highlight these images by painting them in natural color pigments.

How Does Art Involve Experience?: Art and the Preverbal Brain

Artists use mediums that activate the senses to communicate. In the experience of making art, artists often go through a process that could be called “channeling”. It might sound strange and magic-like, but what this simply means is that the artist is translating an experience of their bodies onto a canvas or piece of clay. For some truly magical and mysterious reason, that piece of clay or canvas then holds a resonance of the experience the artist went through and thus has the power to evoke a similar emotion or any other emotion in the viewer of the art piece.

What makes art such a powerful tool to communicate the experience of the artist, is that it defies the limitations of language.

The body always experiences first, and then the mind connects it to concepts, language, and mental understanding. However, we know our language is limited and that it is a broken tool when it comes to accurately express the mysterious complexities of being. Concepts also come with their own layered personal understanding.