Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body”

I just finally read this big, long book.  Mark Johnson’s ‘theory of embodied meaning’ confirmed my experience of art and argued against unhelpful dichotomies between body and mind, feeling and thought, emotion and reason.  Without calling it that, I already ascribed to the embodied theory of meaning, which is why I am so attracted to dance.  Mark Johnson’s arguments in support of this theory come from philosophy, developmental psychology and neuroscience.

A watershed point in my own history with embodied meaning in art was experiencing the Clyfford Still room at the Albright Knox in Buffalo.  These paintings have their own room because that was one of the stipulations of the artist; that they would never be shown alongside the work of other artists, and never be bought or sold.  I had developed a relationship with other abstract impressionist painting there over the course of my childhood through trips with the Brownies, school or family, but maybe because they have their own room I had missed the Still paintings until one day when I was there alone, and about seventeen.  (Perhaps, in the Alva Noe sense, I only noticed this room at this stage in my development because it was then that I was able to see it)

The paintings are massive with jagged shapes streaking through them from top to bottom or corner.  They felt so craggy, so much like my teen-angstful inner landscape.  I was impressed that Still resisted the interpretation of his work, and felt that I understood his intention.  I felt I used these paintings well by sitting in front of them and noticing them, and noticing myself and the flow of my thoughts with them.  I returned there often and sat with them.  I thought about that they were important to me at a gut level, and would not have been so if they had a determinate, defined meaning, such as “this painting is about the loss of my mother because of war”.

Previously, I described this experience in terms of feelings, delimiting it to the subjective and taking away some of its power and importance to me.  Reflecting on the experience in light of Johnson’s theories, however, I would describe it as an experience of embodied knowledge.  The paintings are ripe with meaning.  They have massive weight, which feels like the importance of a thing.  They reference minerals, the slow passage of time, which, for a teenager, is also about deferral of gratification.   They are about conflict, and tension, and permanance, and glacial flow.

This way of talking about an art experience may be very elementary for visual artists or philosophers, and might come as no surprise to dance insiders, but it is new, and freeing for me.  I came to these painting with little specialized knowledge of painting and its history.  All I had was a history of contact with abstract paintings and the knowledge that the artist resisted interpretation and commercialization.  I was relatively unschooled, and yet I found I could access knowledge in these paintings.  This is very encouraging to me, positioned as I am in the small, specialized world of post-postmodern dance.

My deep discouragement with this moment in dance is that it seems to have gone in the direction of only speaking to one’s peers, and also maybe your mom, who comes to shows out of love.  On the other hand, there are the forms of dance that convey determinate meaning through movement, and come across as trite or impotent.  But reading about the embodied theory of meaning reminded me of dance’s best capability, which is to speak to the knowledge of the gut, which does not need an MFA to know things.