I don’t think you really get what I mean; which I have to expect, since what I mean goes completely against what we all grew up thinking, and it took me quite some time to figure this out myself.
We grew up thinking like this: an artist paints a picture. The picture represents something out there in the physical world. It symbolizes. We experience the picture, and thus, vicariously, the thing the picture symbolizes.
From that, you get the primitivist critique of art: how it alienates, removes us from direct experience, and all the other things you mentioned and alluded to.
But that comes from the logic (Greek logos, meaning “word”) of literacy, the fundamental dualism between the “thing” and what it “represents,” predicated in the relationship of letter to phoneme. We extend it everywhere. We extend it to ourselves, even, dividing the bodily “thing” from the spiritual meaning it “represents”. Tim Ingold calls this the “building perspective.” We build a thing. First, you have the blueprints, then you build the house, and you call the house “complete” when you finish the plans set out in the blueprint. We see this idea in ourselves, too, between a genotypic blueprint and a phenotypic completion.
But let’s peel that back for a moment, and remember that before we invented the alphabet, we had orality. In orality, communication occurs. It puts your mind into a viewpoint of processes, events and relationships, rather than things with static attributes. This much, I presume, just reviews what we all already know. So let me push this a little further, analogous to how the civilized concept of art and story you’ve critiqued follows from the “building perspective.”
The oral perspective gives rise to what Ingold calls the “dwelling perspective.” You can never call the house complete. For the barest moment, perhaps, the house matches the blueprint, but before that it existed as trees over there and this patch of ground, and immediately thereafter, wind, rain, and its occupants–humans, yes, but also those mice in the basement, the songbird that builds its nest in the eaves, and the bat that gets loose in the attic–begin to change it. When can we call it “complete,” then? The house, just like all those who dwell in it, engage in a constant, ongoing process of dwelling, of active participation. The dwelling perspective doesn’t focus on static things and their attributes because such things do not exist; if they appear to exist, they simply delude us, just as the printed letter on the page deludes us into thinking it endures. But in fact, all writing eventually fades away. Letters aspire to “build,” but really, they always “dwell.”
Cultures that live with such a perspective still make art, yes. But painters do not paint to create a painting; they paint to paint. They aim to perform, rather than to create. Notice that very often, the art produced gets thrown away or hidden almost immediately. Even among civilized cultures, you have Buddhist sand paintings. Ingold goes into some detail about Australian aboriginal painters, and how their painting over emphasizes going over and retracing the paths of the ancestors; art means the performance of painting. The painting and the act of painting have the same relationship as a track does to walking. A track does not signify, symbolize, or represent walking; it leaves evidence of walking because it emerged from the same act. The Australian aborigines tend to view the landscape itself as just such a painting, emerged from the ancestors’ journeys. Which we certainly cannot deny: the landscape as it exists today comes from millions of years of tracks and signs, layed down thick, layer upon layer. Tectonic plate people push up mountains; worm people grind them down into rolling hills as they make soil; tree people and plant people and animal people make forests. You could hardly ask for a more direct expounding of Gaia Theory.
So, to get back to the original point of direct vs. removed experience, stories in the dwelling perspective do not “represent” or “symbolize.” You cannot live vicariously through them. Rather, they come from skilled perception. They trace over the same patterns of relationship, and they direct your attention and perception to those areas that novices overlook, which the skilled, through years of accumulating skill, have noticed. Hearing a Coyote tale does not allow you to vicariously live out an encounter with Coyote; it offers an encounter with Coyote all its own. We can see Coyote; we can hear Coyote; we can smell Coyote; we can taste Coyote; we can feel Coyote. But we neglect other senses; emotions, imagination, and story operate as much as senses for us as our ears, eyes, nose, tongue or fingers, because these things do not reside inside of a human skull. Sight comes from your active engagement with the world; hearing comes from your active engagement with the world. So, too, story, emotion and imagination all come from your active engagement with the world.
Tim Ingold offers a lot more on this perspective, and I can’t say I’ve entirely mastered it yet. But to hear much the same straight from a native source, I’ve often cited Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat’s “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred” before, and it certainly applies here.