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NORDIC LIGHT & COLOUR
45
Susanne Langer calls them logical expressive – or articulated
– symbols (Langer 1953: 31)
Wittgenstein (1993:19) says that feelings follow experience
of a piece of music, just as they follow courses in life; a piece
of music consists of a sequence of tones. It has a structural
resemblance to courses in life – a rhythm, pauses and breaks,
pitches, etc. – and thus they can be used as examples. The
auditory structure in music is not a course of life, but felt life
abstracted in a logical expressive symbol. The same is true for
all sensory experiences.
The expressive symbols are what we may call the artistic or
aesthetic dimension in pictures, in utility goods, in architecture;
they can make us feel something
in
something or see some-
thing
as
something. Susanne Langer (1957: 73) describes them
as
objectification of feelings
. As logical expressive symbols,
colour and light expressions in art and design can serve as
ex-
amples
of direct experiences that may promote new perceptual
approaches the world.
The logical expressive symbols occur in the borderland be-
tween direct and indirect experience. What we are used to call-
ing “expression” in an articulated object or space is perceived
as a direct experience, but without being separated from its
symbol. Encountering articulated patterns in a piece of art or a
designed product we experience recognition. Susanne Langer
says that “in one way, all good art is abstract, and in another
way it is concrete” (Langer 1957: 69). The aesthetic dimensions
in art and design are, depending on aspect, both direct and
indirect experiences.
Conclusion
In a sense colour and light are “always something else”. They
have many aspects and their relations to different levels of
experience must always be considered. Our visual experience
is not without structure or laws and there are certainly many
concepts describing it. One could even say that there are too
many – and disparate – concepts to be useful in communica-
tion. What is emphasized here, however, is the need for a
coherent and well defined overall structure of content. Without
a comprehensive structure of content it is not possible to see
how different kinds of colour and light experiences – and colour
and light concepts – are related to each other, or in what re-
spect they refer to different aspects of reality.