The Artist As Design Scientist, from Expanded Cinema

In our text, it is Youngblood’s contention that popular entertainment is just a rehashing of ideas that are known, and always one of three basic takes on the human condition: idealization, frustration, and demoralization. In his view, the true artist is seeking to explore new experiences, such as “synaesthetic research of expanded cinema” (p. 67-8). He alludes to in a previous chapter and offers his opinion that truly significant films, like “Beauty and the Beast” by poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, are the ones that transcend their genres because of the style and design.

The author then draws a comparison between Art and Science, stating that they both are searching for the “unity in hidden likenesses” and that both seek to reveal potential in the relationship between man and the universe. He doesn’t spend much time making a case for this comparison, though it provides the title for the chapter. In my view, the scientist is most comfortable adhering to boundaries while categorizing and quantifying, while the artist is generally much more capable of crossing boundaries: between mental and physical, Self and Other, cerebral and emotional, and that of the temporal and the timeless.

The aptly named Youngblood goes on to describe the role of an artist as that of establishing imagery and symbols, and by doing so creating a structure of thought so that new modes of reality and consciousness can come into human awareness. The artist creates new language that relates more directly to experience by separating an image from its official symbolic meaning. This new language, according to the author, makes it possible to arrive at a new understanding of old facts, and addresses the ineffable “domain between the conscious and subconscious.”

In his view, the parameters of genre, plot, story, and drama restrict the choices available to filmmakers. He said this is illustrated by cybernetics, which shows that the “structure of a system is the index of the performance which may be expected from it.” This reminded me of an article we read last semester about the paradigm of the database versus the narrative in digital culture. The author states that an Auteur such as Antonioni has, through his art (design science) articulated for his generation that which went unspoken.

In what I think is the most interesting passage in the chapter, Youngblood quotes Rudolph Arnheim in Art and Visual Perception, who is quoted as saying that perception is to sensing as understanding is to reasoning, and that “eyesight is insight”. The author also says that by viewing a film, we are allowed to see through the eyes of the artist, that is, to see intuitively. He makes two statements here that I found myself agreeing with and which could easily discussed at greater length: “our psychological balance are the result of our relation to images” and that “the more ‘beautiful’ the image the more beautiful our consciousness.” However, in the next paragraph he ends the chapter by quoting John Cage for a somewhat different view of Beauty, which is that “Where beauty ends is where the artist begins.” This is a polemic directed at one of the traditional concerns of artists, a definitive statement with all the shadings, nuance, and logic of Christian fundamentalism.