Welcome everyone to the official weblog of Integral Institute's
Integral Art Center. I’m Matt Rentschler, poet, art philosopher, and a
director at the center. I’ll be managing this blog and its content,
providing you with regular updates on art center happenings, as well as
Integral commentaries on the arts and the aesthetics of living.
I’ve used Integral Art as both an artist and as someone writing about
the arts, so allow me to briefly outline why AQAL is relevant to
artists and viewers, and how Integral Art might address some of the
major challenges facing aesthetics, today. In that vein, I should note
that the phrase “Integral Art” is really just a shorthand for “Integral
Aesthetics,” or an AQAL approach to artistry, art interpretation, and
the art world, in general.
With Integral Art, artists can better integrate the Muse with their
daily
lives and
avoid going completely crazy in the process. Even if craziness
contributes to the greatness of art (as
Deida would argue), a little
craziness goes a long way, and too many artists have famously lost all
touch with balance. If we don't have some kind of support
system in place, this creative Force
can mop the floor with us. AQAL not only helps you anticipate the
Muse and give it shape but
also helps clean up what is often a messy creative aftermath. For
instance, the quadrants can contextualize the creative process for any
artist: I can keep track of the original intention
motivating my artwork; the labor or physical actions required by me in
order to carry that out; who my audience is and what kind of market exists for this kind of product/message; and what technoeconomic
means are available for me to produce and distribute the artwork.
Not only that, but quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types become a common language
for artists across different artforms. When an illustrator
describes a state-experience to me, or a creative block, or a business
problem, I can relate and speak to all of those issues. Obviously, there are
important details unique to their artform that need to be acknowledged,
but there are remarkable similarities, too.
With
Integral Art, and especially an Integral Methodological Pluralism, art
scholars can actually make room for and respect the work of others,
instead of distorting or ignoring it. It will always be necessary to
specialize in a given methodology, but not to absolutize it. For
example, the current hot topic in the field is Darwinian aesthetics, or
evolutionary psychology as it's applied to the arts. So you have books
with titles like
Survival of the Prettiest,
Homo Aestheticus,
and
Madame Bovary's Ovaries (my personal favorite). These approaches
certainly have truths that ought to be included in any Integral picture
of the arts, but, being primarily Upper-Right approaches, theirs is
only 1/4th of the story.
As a scholar, AQAL has helped me situate, and therefore accept, the
partial truths of virtually every major approach and school in
aesthetics. In fact, my next paper has an appendix that lists
these numerous approaches, basically to
say “Integral Art makes room for all of these.” (This was inspired by
Sean Esbjorn-Hargens' similar catalog of approaches to Ecology.) From a
practical standpoint, I use AQAL as a methodology because it works: it
allows me to simultrack these different approaches, the phenomena they
enact, and the explanatory frameworks that result, all in a way that’s
incredibly coherent.
With Integral Art, critics can effectively include depth-discernment in art interpretation. As the blogosphere asserts itself,
everyone has literally become a critic. So the challenge to
criticism, and art journalism, is introducing some notion of compassionate ranking in order to determine what are more true and less partial interpretations. To borrow Ken's idea of each perspective getting a vote in Integral Politics, one could say that, in Integral Art, each perspective gets
a point. If you give a Red response where you only take one
perspective (namely, your own), you get one point. But if you give an Orange response, you get 3 points, because you transcend and include the
perspectives of those previous altitudes. And so on. The same holds
true for the quadrants. What does the artist think about the artwork? What does
the artwork actually say? And what do we or other people think about
the artwork? If you can take
each of those into consideration, while acknowledging and holding the
space for an entire spectrum of aesthetic responses, you’re racking up
the perspective points.
Finally, with Integral Art, any layperson or casual art lover can
recognize that aesthetic judgment (which unfolds as one's very own
aesthetic intelligence) is an intrinsic aspect of the self, and that
everything from sports to clothing to cuisine to furniture can serve as avenues for genuine aesthetic
insights. The point is, you don't have to be a
capital-A artist
in order to find Beauty or the Sublime or Kalos (which, more often than
not, finds you). Beauty awaits in every sunset, every city square,
every beloved. There is such a thing as the everyday lyricism or
luminosity of our lives, and that to live your life as art is to
live it truthfully and with integrity, where your walk matches your talk
in an integral union. What would your actions look like if they were a work of art to
the world? How would you engage other people? What creative novelty
will you add in this moment’s interpretive freedom, as Eros steamrolls
those choices into the habits and grooves of greater tomorrows?
There are still so many topics and areas to acquaint ourselves with,
and we at the Integral Art Center will do it one post, threaded
discussion, and file at a time. We’d love for you to join this Integral
conversation centered around one of life’s Great Questions: Of what is,
what is beautiful?
The world awaits our deepening, widening, truly integral answers….