American philosopher (1887-1965)
Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
But life is not the wax or wick of the candle, it is the burning. It is not the complex nitrates and the carbon compounds in which it sits but their combustion.
BAKER BROWNELL
The New Universe
For the world is but a woman with all her mystery and loveliness; and though we may attend her as if we were physician, scientist, business partner, love will go quicker to reality than these and find the inner being of the world.
BAKER BROWNELL
The New Universe
As an end and finality of life love has its deeper meaning, for it sinks below the surfaces of casual emotion, of feeling, of happiness, to profound realities. Beyond possession, and personality and play--not against them--love penetrates to realms that intuition finds ultimately real. It seeks identity with being; it wants divine approach.
BAKER BROWNELL
The New Universe
Its women are lovely and stubborn, its men angry and ingenious. Is there a land anywhere like southern Illinois?
BAKER BROWNELL
The Other Illinois
What life is cannot be photographed or weighed for it is not a substance but an action, and what it does is a better way to know life than to classify its materials. It will do with a marshmallow, for example, about what the campfire on a moonlit night will do.
BAKER BROWNELL
The New Universe
But Springlike preludes suggest a happy world where the young are philosophers and the old gracefully get out of their way.
BAKER BROWNELL
The Philosopher in Chaos
Modern music, headstrong, wayward, tragically confused as to what to say and how to say it, has mounted its horse, as the joke goes, and ridden off in all directions. If we require of an art that it be unified as a whole and expressed in a universal language known to all, if it must be a consistent symbolization of the era, then modern music is a disastrous failure. It has many voices, many symbolizations. It is known to one, unknown to another. But if an art may be as variable and polyvocal as the different individuals and emotional regions from which it comes in this heterogeneous modern world, then the diversity and contradiction of modern music may be acceptable.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
The dance is four-dimensional art in that it moves concretely in both space and time. For the onlooker, it is an art largely of visual space combined with time. But for the dancer, and this is more important, the dance is more a muscular than a visual space rhythm, a muscular time, a muscular movement and balance. Dancing is not animated sculpture, it is kinesthetic.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Dance ... is life, or becomes it, in a way that other arts cannot attain. It is not in stone, or words or tones, but in our muscles. It is a formulation of their movements.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action