Re: Word culture
worthenh who-is-at garnet.berkeley.edu
Wed, 1 Nov 1995 08:33:01 -0800
It is a mistake to think that non-verbal arts (painting, drama, music --
architecture, gardening, etc) exist somehow in a extra-verbal universe.
Go to a music lesson, listen to the teacher and student talking about
how a note sounds; to an orchestra rehearsal, where the conductor is
telling musicians what effect to work for; to an exhibition, where
observers and interpreting and historicizing the objects they look at;
to a play, where audience members are asking, "So, what do you think?" during
intermission. To see how much reflective talk goes into the design of
a single expressive gesture, read Stanislavski's "An Actor Prepares"....
Perhaps what is provocative about the way each of these arts floats
its artifacts on a sea of verbal commentary is related to the fact that
they are arts intended for a collective audience; the artists cannily,
intentionally construct the interpretable gesture/phrase/image; they
hypothesize a fresh consensus of interpretation -- then they project it
to the audience, to see what happens. It seems to me that this is
also what takes place when the "object" of interpretation is represented
in mathmatical symbols...Ellice's description of her graduate student;s
silences (the student who came from a Quaker family) is part of the
stream of interpretation that that student's actions has probably
generated since she first started practicing it.
In other words, non-verbal arts do not substitute for langauge; they
are more like nodes to which we reply in language. Helena