Susanne Langer distinguishes propositional and presentational language� This can be helpful in addressing the fact that propositional language, the verbal means of expression that makes use of everyday language, might be insufficient in order to convey artistic experiences� As theatre director Eugenio Barba puts it,
“if you were able to say this in words, then it would be a sort of poetry”� He points out the fact that artists, in this case actors, engage in a wholly different thinking strategy, one that is experiential and bodily:
We are facing a completely different way of thinking through sounds, through prox-emics, distance, through rhythm, through dialogue, through physical reactions� […]
The actor is like an angel who has three languages, he has the words, the verbal, but he has also the sound, the music, the sonority, the vocal, and then he has the somatic, or the extraordinary gamut, the range, which goes from immobility to almost the flight moment-you jump, so how to coordinate […] these three languages?
Langer too maintains that there is more to experience that propositional language cannot reach, and that the language of art, presentational language, stretches its epistemological reach by means of metaphor (1953)�
This concept is not new and has been exploited before by Dewey, who makes a fundamental distinction between two kinds of cognition: “thinking directly in terms of colors, tones, images, is a different operation technically from thinking in words� But only superstition will hold that, because the meaning of paint-ings and symphonies cannot be translated into words, or that of poetry into prose, therefore thought is monopolized by the latter� If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not ex-ist” (2005, p� 77)� Dewey introduces here concepts that can lead us to the un-derstanding of the arts as language: cognition can be embodied and aesthetic, and language can be expressed by artistic means, as an alternative to verbal expression�
As Feinstein maintains, Langer’s classes of symbolisation, presentational ver-sus propositional language, conceptualise the end products of the transforma-tive process: “The symbol-making function is the capability to decide that one thing shall stand for another, a decision which presupposes a transformation”
(1982, p� 45)� This interpretation of Langer’s categories is central to our theme of creativity and learning� The shifting of meanings or images into one another, which the symbolisation process implies, is the result of active choices� Poets not only craft the symbol out of knowledge, technique and experience - for in-stance a rose can symbolise love in Western poetry - but their artistic abilities are activated voluntarily as a part of an artistic project in a context and within
relationships� For both artist and audience the dialogue with the symbol implies a cognitive transformation, for instance from the tangible object of the rose, me-diated through propositional language (a rose is a rose), to the abstract concept of love, expressed in presentational language (a rose is symbol for love)� Once the semantic transformation has taken the shape of an artwork, a virtual reality is established� Its qualities “cannot be rendered discursively because it concerns ex-periences that are not formally amendable to the discursive projection” (Langer 1953, p� 241)�
Gestalt psychology explains the struggle to express the artistically inexplica-ble as the misunderstood separation between perception and thinking� Arnheim (1997) moves this discussion towards the qualities of artistic experiences and how the artwork simultaneously engages both senses and cognition� Artistic experi-ences on the one hand bring knowledge and understanding� On the other, they engage a different dimension, autonomous and specific, the aesthetic dimension, which can be confusing if met with logical-verbal tools� A different kind of com-munication is established within the arts, therefore artistic experiences are often non-utterable: “the elusive quality of [artistic] experiences is hard to capture with our language, which commonly describes objects by their tangible, material di-mensions” (Arnheim 1997, p� 108)� Like Barba, dancer and choreographer Palle Granhøj maintains that what counts for him is the “doing”, the artistic language he is proficient in, and then others “should interpret it”� However, he also reports a strong need for artists to verbalise their work, which is even stronger in the case of collaborating artists� To Signe Klejs and Niels Rønsholdt, for instance, dialogue is fundamental, but always supplemented by showing each other pro-totypes of their ideas or solutions� Granhøj seems to have found a specific solu-tion to the challenge of verbalisasolu-tion� He tells us about his encounter with Odin Teatret’s work demonstrations and how Barba’s approach to verbal explanations inspired him to try the same: “[Barba] gave me great courage in doing the work demonstrations because he applied it well in his symposium, where he used my method and he had three or four others of his own [group] and so he created a superstructure for it… that was brilliant, I felt comfortable in having to explain what I was doing, because I did not know yet what it was… I can only say what I do, and then others can interpret it […] I’m doing it only to make the prod-uct”� Granhøj’s feeling of confidence in engaging in verbal explanations is due, in our opinion, to the communication form of work demonstrations, where actors present their reflections or meta-reflections on stage in a performed form and make use of both presentational and propositional symbolic forms� These work demonstrations embrace artistic symbolisation under its own terms, without constricting it to a propositional dimension�
When artists struggle with definitions and interpretations they can find them-selves in the middle of a linguistic dilemma: on the one side, verbal language and on the other side their own artistic “language”, which is their “mother tongue”�
Gestalt approaches to the arts believe that the latter is a language that is autono-mous and does not necessarily have the function of mirroring something else�
According to Arnheim, images –but we can also take sounds and movements as examples– are not simple analogies, mechanical replicas or faithful reports of the world, but rather self-directed systems� Perceiving the arts and thinking within the arts is not a mere completion by realistic criteria, just as decoding the artistic experience is not simply a pre-established fill-in-the-blanks, but a complex completion of what is apparent and what is missing by means of per-ception, cognition and imagination� Arnheim’s interpretation of the languages of art emphasises its embodied cognition and autonomy: “perceptual and pictorial shapes are not only translations of thought products but the very flesh and blood of thinking itself” (Arnheim 1997, p� 134)�
In our dialogues with the artists this is very clear: artistic creation is articu-lated as independent, self-sufficient language� Filmmaker Annette K� Olesen says: “when I sit in a cutting room there may be an insane difference whether you cut [or not], which can sound completely insane if you cut four seconds before or four seconds after, so timing, rhythm, breath, also as a musician [is important] and it’s almost like building sentences: where is the comma, where is the sentence, where is the dash?” But also musicians from The Mira Quartet use language as a metaphor for their artistic communication: “It is actually a bit like talking, with the bow� It may well be the case that people suddenly want to talk like this [she demonstrates by changing her voice so that it sounds like a duck quacking] so one strokes differently than if talking quietly […] thus, it can be the same way one nuances a speech or a conversation”� Music is to them means of communication with the outside but also an internal jargon through which art-ists in a group communicate with each other� In this latter case, musicians make sure that a different level of communication is established, the non-verbal, by means of which “one does not need to agree on everything”�
According to Gardner art is an act of communication “of subjective knowl-edge” (1994, p� 30), which is intentional, deliberate, purposeful and in-context�
This act is often based on experimentation and communicative try-outs, “an at-tempt to communicate” (1994, p� 30), and has an effect on someone else� The aes-thetic object “tends to be nontranslatable [sic]� […] A work of art is not readily rendered in another symbol system” (Gardner 1994, p� 31), therefore the transla-tion into other languages (for instance the non-verbal ones) might be experi-enced as effortful and not really getting to the point�
While accounting for the hard work that artists encounter when they attempt a propositional explication of their artistic creation, we met the concept of art as language, recurring both in theoretical contributions and in the conversations with our artists� In the following section, we are going to extend our considera-tions about it and propose our interpretive modelling�