Scientific studies regularly appear whose conclusions are validating the hypotheses that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but instead is an objective reality that is inscribed in the biology of life.
Here are links to the two last stories that capted my attention:
- Visual art: I just read an article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian titled "The ecstasy of art" in which he states: "A scientific study claims to have shown that beautiful paintings produce the same brain activity we feel when we see someone we love: biologically, great art is pure joy. It's nice to have scientific confirmation of something I already knew."
- music: Can Brain Scans Predict Music Sales?.
"Berns reexamined the functional magnetic resonance imaging scans his group had collected from 27 adolescents in 2007, looking for regions of the brain where neural activity during a 15-second clip of a song correlated with the subject's likeability ratings. Two regions stood out: the orbitofrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. "That was a good check that we were on the right track, because we knew from a ton of other studies that those regions are heavily linked to reward and anticipation," Berns says. "
This is a follow-up on my last post here on Crucial Talk and completes the transcription of my posts on the thread "Can anyone actually define what a "True Artist" is?" on the LinkedIn forum
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I suppose the initial question better be reframed as "what is a true visual artist". Music relates to something else than the visual but it is nevertheless also an art. Is it not?
Historically visual art has always been about giving a visual representation of reality for all to share for the very simple reason that an image has always been worth ten thousand words. So if history is of any guidance visual art is about generating visual signs containing the present state of knowledge about reality. And as Titus says it so well the visual form of representation is not necessarily related to what the eyes can see (realism) because what the eyes see contains very limited knowledge indeed. Music is about something very different...
Having said so we better remain humble. Reality (the whole of reality) is physically unattainable to humanity. At best we make approximations about its nature based on the body of observations available to the men of knowledge of the day (shaman under animism, clergy under religion, new rich merchants in early modernity, scientists in high modernity and everyone's opinion today in late modernity).
In short the true artist is the one who illustrates the state of knowledge about reality in his day.
But since today everyone is democratically invited to compete on the level playing field of the market for ideas are artists supposed to illustrate the popular trends shaped by marketing? No! This is the job of publicists who create visuals of commodities. But then... where is today's knowledge about reality to be found by artists? I dare suggest that since the men of knowledge have been erased of the societal equation by market economics and political democracy the only choice for the real artist is to generate his own knowledge learning from science, philosophy and history.
Today's true artists can only give visual signs of the state of their own knowledge and in doing so they are acting like the prospective shaman of late modernity.
"Simply because 'real' is in Realism doesn't mean a thing towards what is real or not, in art or anything." This is so right Jordan.
Realism is a way of painting that erupted out of the values of the new rich merchants (individualism, private property,...) who wanted to supplant the values of the church (late Middle-Ages, Renaissance). And so Europe got then stuck with realism and its 3 obliged subjects of painting for the next 4 or 5 hundred years: landscapes around the mansion, portraits of the people in the mansion and stills of what lays on the tables in the mansion.
Under the growing influence of entrepreneurship, rationalism, science, and technology those 3 obliged subjects of realism start to be contested by a rare few artists in the 2nd part of the 19th century (remember the "societally scandalous" potato eaters; Van Gogh's personal favorite work painted in 1885 while in Nuenen) and at the turn of the 20th century the avant-garde finally flushes realism in the toilet of history. What follows is a search by the minority of "thinking artists" (the avant-garde) for a deeper reality than what the eyes can see.
We should have the humility to recognize that this search has been largely unsuccessful till today ending with this absurd notion of "whatever is art" that is being justified with platitudes about truthfulness, honesty, creativity and other nothingnesses.
Do you really believe that "whatever is art" and its justifying platitudes have any chance to survive any longer now that most of the money that buys art originates in Asia? I already hear those angry platitudinarian voices accusing me of mixing up the art market with what real art is all about. But suffice to say that history teaches us that our understanding of reality, our culture, our values and our art are not static. They are following in the path generated by wealth adapting to its civilizational and cultural code. (from the Italian City States during the Renaissance to Bruges then Antwerp, then Amsterdam then London then New York and now emerging in Beijing...)
I suggest that instead of labouring incessantly in the fast fading Western code those who aspire being able to surf on the waves of the changing societal trends better start to inquire what the future civilizational and cultural dominating code is all about. Everyone is free for sure to believe in whatever she or he wants. Everyone is also free to behave and do whatever she or he wishes including her or his labouring in art. BUT freedom comes with responsibilities that have consequences. Chief among such consequences for the aspiring artist is the falling out of history which is the ultimate judgement on him not being a true artist...
9 months ago I concluded a long post in this thread with the words: "So, in my eyes, the true artist is someone who:
- masters the technique in which he expresses himself in order to avoid getting burdened by technical aspects in the rendering of what he wishes to express (it's a question of pragmatism in order to avoid technical limitations)
- on substance: masters a vast knowledge base in which he can fish the necessary elements to make his narrative a valid one that can resist the passing of time (The work of a true artist remains of interest to people long after his death. To make that possible the true artist must be able to surf on the waves of societal evolution for he is acting like a man of knowledge (shaman) of post-modernity.)
- on form: possesses a strong passion for gaining knowledge about our global reality. (Absolute beauty is the outcome of 3 billion years of evolution of the principle of life on earth and if humanity is to survive the follies of modernity our future worldview will necessarily have to reflect that objective beauty.)
- possesses the energy and the guts to go his way out of the security procured by the flock... The true artist is no sheep indeed."
Jack writes "I've shared throughout this discussion that any and all points of reference, are just that, including my own. Difference is James, it is not done through belittling, reactionary, nor confrontational discourse, but rather through accepting the infinite possibilities, that any and all are as relevant as any other. Period.
"Wow!
This assumption that any thought is no more than a statement and "as relevant as any other" terminates the very possibility of an intelligent conversation. White can now be described as what is black and black can be described as what is white in total impunity on the level playing field of the market for ideas. And those who have something substantial to say are thus relegated to compete with a bunch of charlatans for the attention of eyeballs.
Rare are those still able to sift the shaft from the grains in the communication noise and in consequence societies fragment to the point of atomization.This kind of relativism to the extreme is why late modernity concludes in such a terrible mess and in total confusion about anything relating to life and to humanity including art.
And Ron can bravely conclude "Wow, 227 comments. I have observed that almost no one agrees with each other. Thats the beauty of it. Its like everybody has their own pov, just like everybody has their own artisitc style."
Man was Duchamp right to distance himself from the art world for fear, as he said, "of appearing dumb as a painter" !!!
A good quote Ron.
Art "is a means of union among men, joining them together".
In my book "Artsense" I posit that "joining men together" is an absolute necessity for the survival of humanity. The individual can't survive out of his societal grouping. It is indeed the societal grouping that allows the individuals to survive and to reproduce.
Having said that we observe that societal groupings also use strategies to guarantee their own survival and reproduction through the enhancement of their societal cohesion. I posit that art is one of those societal strategies and each different art form is then specialized in a particular function. This seems to be a universal principle that all societies at any given time in history have been applying. The only known exception is high and late modernity that have apparently done away with the principle (roughly after 1900 in industrialized societies).
* societies use visual art to share the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share in order for their citizens to be joined together in a common understanding of reality. The most prominent human sensor is indeed vision... so it is only natural that vision should serve to share a given knowledge. (one image is worth ten thousand words).
* societies use music to shape the feeling of the individuals in order for such a feeling to spread throughout society. The idea here is that the sharing of the same rhythms and harmonics in a society generates a given mood that is shared by all the individuals. Micro or sectorial groupings have their own particular rhythms and harmonics. That's what happens when music is played in various gatherings (scout camps, parties,...). This is also being observed in churches and armies and more recently in shopping centres.
I posit that the derogation to this principle by high and late modernity generated the societal fragmentation towards atomization that is being observed nowadays in Western societies. Atomization is what you described earlier with this sentence: "Wow, 227 comments. I have observed that almost no one agrees with each other. Thats the beauty of it. Its like everybody has their own pov, just like everybody has their own artistic style."
Atomization is leading to cacophony (exactly what we observe in this thread is it not?) and later to the death of the society in which it happens.
To survive and reproduce Western societies will necessarily have to succeed, soon, in "joining their citizens together" again. Otherwise we might assist at the collapse of those societies. It is in light of that possibility that I suggested that "...freedom comes with responsibilities that have consequences. Chief among such consequences for the aspiring artist is the falling out of history which is the ultimate judgement on him not being a true artist... ". What I mean by that is that the "true artist" is the one who produces visual signs illustrating the knowledge necessary for modern societies to survive and reproduce. That also implies that it is the future that will show who was a "true artist" today. The only thing we can say for sure today is that we are all "aspiring artists".
"Technology simply supports culture. Art drives it." This is a great quote Jordan.
Ron I would only suggest a slight change: "Art to me is a language, and whoever uses that language to bring people together is an ASPIRING TRUE ARTIST. " There is indeed always this question of what the artist says with the language. That's why I believe only the future will say who is a true artist today... and I believe that history concurs with what I suggest here. Think about it. While Van Gogh had absolutely no recognition during his lifetime others were filling the galleries, the private collections and museums. But ultimately those who were considered true artists while alive got flushed in the future and Van Gogh consecrated. Were they all "true artists" or was Van Gogh the one?
First I have to correct the content of my last post. I think I answered too quickly. Often it's best to sleep on an idea before writing about it.
I agreed basically with Ron's new definition "Art to me is a language, and whoever uses that language to bring people together is a TRUE ARTIST". BUT THIS IS WRONG. What Ron says is that those who speak the language are artists. And in his last post he goes so far as to say "my wife, who is an amature artist paints a picture of the SACRED HEART OF CHRIST for Mothers Day because my Mom is a devout Catholic. Mom loves the pic, hugs my wife and they are spiritually joined. Is she a true artist, because she brought people together with a piece of art, in that case I say yes."
Language is the technique the artist is using, for example, painting, music, dance or whatever else. But the fact to use the language of painting does in no way infer that the one speaking that language has something valid to say about today's understanding of reality. Religious art had its time. For good or for bad that time has passed. The same goes for modernity. The 3 obliged subjects of realism have indeed no bearing on today's understanding of reality, I mean the understanding by those who think (scientists, philosophers, thinkers). In "What is art?" Tolstoy showed he was well aware of this: "Another problem with a great deal of art is that it reproduces past models, and so it is not properly rooted in a contemporary and sincere expression of the most enlightened cultural ideals of the artist's time and place. "
In conclusion a language is a tool of communication. Oil painting or digital software are such tools.
* The fluency in a language helps to better communicate. (mastery in technique allows for such fluency, also in painting).
* But the more important question is what you try to communicate. Content is what counts. To quote Tolstoy it has to be "rooted in a contemporary and sincere expression of the most enlightened cultural ideals of the artist's time and place".
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Titus. Things change or to put it otherwise human perception of what reality is all about is continually changing. Being unattainable to humanity it is only natural that human perceptions change according to the evolution of science, philosophy and culture.
My mentioning of Van Gogh was limited to showing that the true quality of an art production is sifted through the filter of time (that's why I think we only can speak of aspiring true artist in the present). I could have used other examples for sure.
* Constant and the group Cobra who initiated a turning point in the European elites' consciousness after the 2nd ww that opened the path to the build-up of a postmodern model of political institution. But how many people know about that fundamentally world changing story?
* Hundertwasser and his "5 skins" theory that drives the European ecological wave. But again who knows about all that?
* The example of Van Gogh has this advantage that he is known the world over. Reproductions of his works hang everywhere. And the fact is that he is the symbol of the turning point from the realism of early modernity and its 3 obliged subjects. I'm not only speaking about form. In term of content the potato eaters act like a knock in the face of the 3 obliged subjects of early modern realism. But even that seems to be flying too high for most to see.
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Lis you write "As for the historical, the word 'artist' is not used anywhere in the bible. Instead there are 'skilled craftsmen'."
In a post 9 months ago I tried to show where the word artist comes from. Its use is very recent indeed and understanding how the word comes about should precede anything else if we want to be serious in trying to answer the question "what is a true artist?".
Alexander. I don't think that I "over typify the specific roles which conducted the emancipation of certain cultural expression".
Fact is that the artist has satisfied a similar societal function anywhere and throughout the whole history of mankind. That is: to give visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share. (only the 20th century in industrialized countries derogates to this principle which explains the present state of confusion)
Now the term artist dates from the Renaissance (individualism, private property and thus logically "attribution of authorship" as you write). Once this is recognized the use of the term artist to qualify the image makers throughout the whole of history is naturally detached from the meaning given to it during the Renaissance. I explained this in a post in this thread some 9 months ago...
In Christian times the artist was in charge of producing visual signs of the creed (worldview of the men of knowledge of that time) and for sure this supposed he mastered the creed as well as his painting technique, or as you write: "...the whole process of painting a sacred image required a strenuous training not only in matters of craftsmanship but also of spiritual vocation".
I wholeheartedly agree with you that "True artist is not a state of social recognition". You write about his work "as something capable of transcending". Yes but let's define this:
* content: visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly who are the men of knowledge today. That's why I posit that the artist has to accumulate a valid body of knowledge (science, philosophy) in order to be able to illustrate reality through the lens of nowadays' knowledge (art academies don't help doing that).
- form: in Ron's quote of Tolstoy, art "is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings". Tolstoy meant that the visual sign must be seductive and attractive... but this remains very vague indeed. The content does not by itself "infect the viewer" in Tolstoy's words. I personally posit that "beauty" is what allows the form of a work to touch its audience. Beauty is not "in the eye of the beholder" as most people think. Beauty is something objective inscribed in our DNA as the memory of the near infinity of successful evolutionary steps that led us to being here today. But we are not really conscientious that this is in us so we need to learn to decode it in our inner self... in order to be able to project it toward the viewer and thus subconsciously touch him. (Ron ironizes that I'm often too wordy but in all honesty I'm summarizing here in a few words only an idea of beauty that takes 50 pages to explain in depth).
Concerning this notion of beauty. I just read an article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian titled "The ecstasy of art" in which he states: "A scientific study claims to have shown that beautiful paintings produce the same brain activity we feel when we see someone we love: biologically, great art is pure joy. It's nice to have scientific confirmation of something I already knew."
We are adults is it not? So why all the fuss. The discussion about religion was limited to its relation to art. Thanks Vera, Titus and James for calling attention to a slippage...
I was saying that art has always had a "societal function anywhere and throughout the whole history of mankind. That is: to give visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share.
What does that mean?
The long history shows us 3 different worldview areas:
1. over tens of thousand and perhaps as much as hundreds of thousands of years humans were glued in tribal societies through the sharing of animism. The shaman was the man of knowledge of the tribe and also the originator of the visual signs illustrating animism. Those signs were than further reproduced by the tribe members on functional creations: pan and pots, textiles,... (Lascaux Ron...)
2. over a maximum of a few thousand years humans were glued in kingdoms and/or empires through the sharing of:
* a religious worldview in the Middle-East and then Europe
* a philosophic worldview in Eastern Asia
The priests and monks were the men of knowledge of Christianity. They sometime also acted as image creators but laymen were most generally trained "not only in matters of craftsmanship but also of spiritual vocation" as Alexander wrote.
In China for nearly 3000 years the mandarins (intellectuals) were educated in philosophy (Yi-Ching, Tao), state management (Confucius), music, poetry, calligraphy and painting.The artists were mandarinsand Xieyi painting aims to capture the Xi or energetic body underlying the Tao of the represented object which is also sometimes called "writing down the meaning of reality".
3. over a few hundred years in Europe and its geographic expansions the humans who count, those who drove society forward, were glued in kingdoms and/or republics through the sharing of the early modern credo of the new rich merchants (individualism, private property) that were illustrated in the 3 obliged subjects of pictorial representation (approx. 1500 to 1900)
4. influenced by rationalism, early science and tech., after 1900, the avant-garde rejects the idea to represent what the eye can see. The idea was that reality was far more vast than the first degree image that projects on the retina. But they failed miserably... That's why we are still stuck today with the question of what to represent.
5. In the 21st century societies around the world are bound to share a new meaning of reality. This is a necessity for the survival for humanity...
I hope this post helps to replace religion in its limited historical context. Did you notice how the timespan of each successive worldview reduces from hundreds of thousand years to thousands of years, to hundreds of years and then to extinction after 1900?
Honestly I believe it is a very bad idea to continue to mix the 2 subjects in one thread.
Why do I say that?
Harold Garde wrote something very interesting about Ron's initial question but it did not get any traction everybody being busy making an omelette with a publishing idea.
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So what did Harold write?
"The 'trueness' of the artist is when the overriding goal is to achieve satisfaction for oneself in meeting ever demanding challenges."
This idea about art "to achieve satisfaction for oneself" is a new one that appeared in the US after the 2nd world war.
Having been spared the trauma of life through barbarity and not being excessively burdened by a past of theories and concepts American painters and artists are focusing on their individual feelings. This is best expressed by Jackson Pollock in "Three statements": "The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather then to illustrate them". Pollock and his colleagues limit their action to the satisfaction of their personal ego, the expression of their feelings, and do not show the least interest for the impact of their works on societal functioning.
Coming out of the barbarity that had afflicted all nations of Europe artists and intellectuals proclaim their rejection of societal life as it had always been conceived of. The members of Cobra are the most explicit. Constant speaks about the release of knowledge, as an outcome of the discovery of his desires through experimentation, hoping that this newly released knowledge will generate a radically new societal experience. Art is thus conceived of as the description of a reality in the process of becoming and not any longer as an existing system that would be absolute and unchanging. The artist thus mutates into a modern shaman who brings a vision of the rejected barbarity in the hope of gaining better days for all tomorrow.
In short the war had considerably enriched the US economically while Europe ended largely indebted towards the US and with an infrastructure in taters. In the post war America ran at full speed into "marketization for consumerism" while Europe had to spend its time reordering its political houses. In short demand for visual signs for wall decoration were fast booming in the US while Europe debated about ideas. This had a radically opposed impact on the intellectual and creative approach towards visual signs in Europe and the US. The American mass market needed politically sterile visual signs in order to reach the largest spread in demand while in Europe visual signs were largely expressing a political answer against war barbarity and the hope of better days to come.
Shed in such a light we understand a lot better the differences between abstract expressionism and Cobra and its followers and we also gain a better understanding as to why abstract expressionism gained wide market recognition while Cobra and other European artists remained in the shadows of the market.
But how has the input of both sides be judged in terms of the "long history" of visual art?
I venture to suggest that from a long haul historical viewpoint:
* Cobra and the other European thinking artists will be seen as the true initiators of the unification of Europe as an antidote against barbarity. As such Cobra could well appear as an early gravedigger of modernity opening the way for later first steps into early post modernity.
* The market success of abstract expressionism will be seen as the seeding ground of "whatever is art" and the free fall into the visual absurdities characterizing the end of modern art.
So much for this American idea that art is limited to expressing one's feelings.
@ Titus
post modernism has been put in all kind of unsavoury sauces. What I mean by the term is "what comes after modernity".
I'm sorry Eileen but because nobody seems to follow manifesto I have no other choice but to post this nuts&bolts thing here.
I initially wrote that content from LinkedIn could be screenshotted but there is an even better way by directly converting the web page to PDF. See http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/
A PDF is an image so it can be tweaked in the GIMP (why pay for Photoshop?)
- Publisher
A publisher will take the bait if he sees a market. At this stage there is only hope. No hard certainties and thus no publisher biting. I honestly hope someone can prove me wrong on this one but until then...
With the advent of "On-Demand publishing" the works that sell receive proposals by publishers... Hey their business model is also changing.
So "On-Demand publishing" is the way to go.
- Colour or B&W
From the little test I did I'm guessing that we already reach over 200 pages... So I checked the "On-Demand publishing" cost for 250 pages:
- B&W: $ 9.5
- Colour: $54.50
As of today's content a book along Titus' outline would already reach around 500 pages. While the idea is interesting I believe it is unrealistic. I think that we should give each participant 1 (one) page for image and text. Jack tells us that there are 40 participants who gave their approval for publication. That gives 40 pages.
So if we limit the content of the thread to 250 pages the book would total some 300 pages.
What is the target of publishing a book?
- the content of the thread comes first
- while we are at it we can add some exposure for all the participants but this should not render the principal impossible...
@ Eileen
Thanks for yr comments.
But did you think about the implications of what I write concerning the question of this thread?
What the avant-garde started changed the societal role of the artist in society.
- Before he was in charge of the form of a visual about content he had no control over (a religious story or a modern story).
- After he must deliver the content and the execution of the form. He is still free to illustrate the content defined by past men of knowledge (priests or merchants) but in this case the content of his work is going to be out of what shapes our present time...
So after 1900 defining the content of a work becomes the artist's determinant input.
- when the artist proposes his own vision of "what is reality" he makes art.
- when the artist limits himself to expressing his feelings he merely produces an interior decoration commodity. The same goes for the illustration of past worldviews.
@ Eileen
You write: "If you take a post modern artist who brings new life and their personal take or vision AND their personal aesthetic to a "past" content (for lack of a better phrase) you can have something quite remarkable."
I beg to disagree with that idea.
The following are the facts:
1. the totality of reality is unattainable to us human particles
2. humans are constantly assailed by a bunch of existential questions
3. the sharing with others of answers to those existential questions brings quietness, piece of mind and psychological comfort to the individual
4. the sharing throughout society of a given set of answers solidifies societal cohesion
5. seen that reality is unattainable no set of answers to our existential questions can possibly be the truth
6. for all those reasons societies throughout history have recoursed to their men of knowledge to devise "valid" sets of answers (answers that correspond to the level of knowledge or consciousness or sensibility of the time)
* over tens of thousands of years tribal societies have been sharing an animistic worldview
* over a few thousands of years at best kingdoms and empires have been sharing religions in the West or philosophies in the East
* over five centuries Europeans nations and their geographic extensions have been driven by the values of modernity: individualism and private property. But modernity failed to deliver a set of answers to the existential questions and in consequence late modern societies are fragmenting and the individuals are left aching... and yearning to integrate a spiritual community for sharing answers with its members.
BUT while this yearning is understandable spiritual communities are giving answers that correspond to the knowledge and sensibilities of a past area. Putting such past answers in a contemporary form is "passeism" and not true art.
Art is about the Artist's vision of reality as of today. Not as a belief in a past vision but as emergence in her or his mind out of contemporary knowledge and sensibilities. In consequence of that particular way of looking at things artists are surfing on the waves of today's reality far ahead of the other members of society...
Jack gave a quote that says it best: ""Artists", Einstein said, "are the true visionaries of the world we perceive and the one that is coming...""
I suppose everyone agrees that, from childhood on, each individual human is assailed by existential questions (what, how, why).
Any answers to those questions are no more than stories because the fact is that reality is unattainable to us human dust.
So if reality is unattainable how can we possibly posit that there is a truth out there accessible to us?
What artists have done since time immemorial is to illustrate the story (worldview) of the men of knowledge of their day. But on the level playing field of the Western market for ideas men of knowledge are left to compete with all kinds of charlatans and as a result their knowledge fails to reach the individuals.
As a consequence:
* the individuals are at a loss and yearn for the warmth of a sharing community
* and societies are fragmenting
In such an environment a true artist proposes a new look at reality based on contemporary knowledge and sensibilities. This is his societal contribution.
@Titus"
seeing reality AS IS" is also not the truth about it my friend... it is the result of having gained bits of knowledge here and there along a lifetime and I agree that such knowledge certainly allows for a more valid outlook.
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Posting to this thread on LinkedIn fully confirmed two things that matter to me intellectually:
- Marcel Duchamp's idea of the necessity to distancing oneself from the art world for fear, as he said, of "appearing dumb as a painter" !!!
- my idea that "since high modernity everyone is invited to compete on the level playing field of the market for ideas. But then... where is today's knowledge about reality to be found by artists? I dare suggest that since the men of knowledge have been erased of the societal equation by market economics and political democracy the only choice for the real artist is to generate his own knowledge learning from science, philosophy and history."
In this discussion on LinkedIn mostly everyone appears so sure to detain the truthful answer to the initial question. But that truthfulness is utterly shredded into pieces in a maelstrom of words that illustrates the sheer ignorance of the participants... which vindicates Duchamp's "idea of the necessity to distancing oneself from the art world for fear, as he said, of "appearing dumb as a painter" !!! "
But amidst the sheer ignorance of most participants some rare pearls of wisdom are shining their light on a radical change that is slowly emerging in visual arts. Those rare pearls of wisdom are why anyone interested to understand what is art should go read the entirety of the thread "Can anyone actually define what a "True Artist" is?" on the LinkedIn forum
(This is a re-publish of the content of my postings in a discussion started by Ron Croci on Linkedin under the same title as here above.)
The term "artist" in visual art has been in use for only a relatively short time. Before the Renaissance the "picture makers" were considered being craftsmen of very low social standing put in charge of illustrating the story of the Christian creed.
But remember that was the story of Europe... Out of Europe the situation was different.
- Primitive societies, otherwise called tribal societies, had no notion of there being artists or any other specialists, for, tribesmen had no notion of individualism. They considered themselves as atoms receiving from their group the substance of their ideas and beliefs. What we today call "primitive arts" was in fact no more than what anyone in a tribe did on a daily base to assure the subsistence of the group. Tribesmen shared a common worldview and they thus all naturally illustrated the elements of their worldview in their functional productions: ceramic pots and pans, jewelry, textiles, totems, drawings in the sand, or dirt, or on rocks, and so on.
- in traditional China (before the 20th century) there was no idea of there being artists. The study program of the "mandarins" (intellectuals) comprised the Confucian books + music and the use of the brush (writing characters and painting). There were 2 forms of painting: Gongbi and Xieyi. Gongbi illustrates peoples' daily lives in minutia detail and acts thus like a repository of the history of the nation while Xieji is the spontaneous illustration of the Tao of things and acts thus like a Chinese visual philosophic narrative. It goes without saying that the mandarins were adept at Xieyi while Gongbi was more the specialty of craftsmen (mandarin or not).
In light of this; a valid answer to the question starting this discussion "Can anyone actually define what a "True Artist" is?" has to focus on the transformation during the European Renaissance of the traditional "picture makers" into "artists".
We have indeed to understand why traditional "picture makers" of very low social standing who were in charge of illustrating the story of the Christian creed suddenly were transformed into "artists" earning lots of money, for, it is the relatively important amounts of money they now earned which bestowed on the artists this "je ne sais quoi" of mythical proportions that rendered them so special in the eyes of all the other citizens of early modern societies.
The plundering of Middle-Eastern "richesses" during the crusades resulted in luxuries finding their way to a very "crude" Europe. Once familiarized with carpets, tapestries, mirrors, fine ceramics, silk textiles and other niceties the aristocracy and early merchants wanted more of those and thus developed a long distance trade in Luxuries between the Middle East and Europe. Such long distance trade resulted in the rise of "new rich" merchants who spent their newly acquired fortunes building mansions and doing all they could to differentiate themselves from the other citizens.
Till then "image makers" had been living in poverty, as second class citizens, illustrating the creed of the church. The visual rendering of the creed were imposed upon the populations as being sacred. It was and remains indeed a sacrilege to desecrate a religious artwork. A sacrilege is the act of taking anything sacred for secular use. So the illustration of the creed (what we call religious art today) was thus infused with the authority of the church that manifested itself, lets never forget this, through the authority of its physical power to burn and kill whoever did not follow or obey its intellectual power and its foundational story. Such a totalitarian reality has been impressed in the brains of Europeans for centuries (4th to 19th century). It's in this particular context that art has acquired for Westerners its character of sacred absolutism. The visual illustration of the worldview of the moment (Christianity) gained the respect of all for fear to be burned alive!
Let's imagine, for a second, what a prestige the "new rich" were thinking they would acquire from owning such visual illustrations to decorate the walls of their mansions.
The visual illustrations that would enter the palaces, the mansions and villas would undoubtedly be dressed in power clothes. But to motivate the "image makers" to realize illustrations destined to adorn their walls the "new rich" would have to vanquish the fear in the heads of those "image makers" of retribution by the church and the price for vanquishing that fear has been very high financial retributions. And so was born the "artist" a guy realizing "visual illustrations" that had gained a character of sacred absolutism gained through the physical power of the church to burn those who committed a sacrilege.
Once "image makers" were financially convinced to work for the "new rich" they were asked to realize illustrations of the newly emerging values of those same "new rich: individualism and private property; thus the appearance of 3 new subjects to be illustrated:
- portraits of those living in the mansions,
- landscapes around the mansions
- stills on the tables in the mansions.
Those 3 new subjects became thus the exclusive affair of all visual illustrations for the next 4 to 5 centuries.
The emergence in the end of the 18th and in the 19th century of:
- rationality with the philosophers,
- science with the early entrepreneurs that started mass productions,
- new technologies such as trains and long distance communication that bruised the picture of reality in the minds of those using them,
- social scientists who started questioning the hegemony of the bourgeoisie,
all that led painters to start questioning the 3 imposed subjects to be illustrated.
The high point of this questioning came around 1900 (high modernity) at the hands of the "avant-garde". The artists' thinking about art was that their productions had to illustrate "reality" but they felt that the 3 imposed subjects had nothing to do with the "truth about reality" that they suspected existed out there and Duchamp was without any doubt the most active searcher of that "truth about reality". He terminated his cubist search declaring that it was no more than a painting trick. He left futurism saying that it was no more than an impressionism of movement. Finally when his "toilet ready-made" provocation had been recuperated by critics and collectors alike he felt that art made no longer any sense for him and immersed himself in table play. Note that in the fifties he was claiming that he was tired of being called an artist, for, he felt that it meant "being dumb as a painter".
We have to recognize today, in late modernity, that the questioning of the avant-garde did not find any valid answers. And in our age of "financialization and speculation" on absolutely everything the nature of art has been lost to almost everyone.
Art today is being presented as:
- whatever the "artist" says is art.
- Pollock pretended that it was the expression of his feelings and that it had no meaning out of the splashing of his feelings (colors) on the canvas.
- Fang Lijun likes to compare his artwork to excretion. "Artwork is actually the urination of the sick [artist]. As long as he gets enough water, he will urinate at times. That's how the artworks come out," Fang writes. And his paintings sell for million of US dollars... to the new Chinese dollar millionaires.
- some believe that art is expression of beauty and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What a bullshit is that?
- others believe that art is in the content (the narrative) of what appears on the canvas.
I personally observe that what we call art today (from primitive to religious to modern) has been practiced along tens of thousands of years all around the world:
- for tens of thousands of years in tribal societies art was the illustration of the tribal worldview also called animism.
- for a short few thousands of years in religious societies art was the illustration of the worldview of the church.
- in early modernity (roughly 1400-1500 to 1900) art was the illustration of the worldview of capital holders and thus the 3 imposed subjects.
- in high modernity (roughly 1900 to WW2) art was a search for the "truth about reality" but that search for a modern worldview ended in tears.
- in late modernity, roughly 1950 to 2000, art has become a product of speculation and artists are, or lost in their subjectivity, or cynically cashing in on whatever sells.
- today I sense that something is slowly emerging that could very well be the answer to the search of the avant-garde. And I believe that in the production of what is emerging lays the answer to the initial question of this discussion.
What is emerging?
* the search for absolutely objective beauty in the rendering form of an artwork. (Man, that needs technique)
* the search for the big trends that will shape the future worldview of humanity. (in this sense the artist needs to acquire a solid body of knowledge about reality.
So, in my eyes, the true artist is someone who:
* masters the technique in which he expresses himself in order to avoid getting burdened by technical aspects in the rendering of what he wishes to express (it's a question of pragmatism in order to avoid technical limitations),
* masters a vast knowledge base in which he can fish the necessary elements to make his narrative a valid one that can resist the passing of time (The work of a true artist remains of interest to people long after his death. To make that possible the true artist must be able to surf on the waves of societal evolution for he is acting like a man of knowledge (shaman) of post-modernity.)
* possesses a strong passion for gaining knowledge about our global reality. (Absolute beauty is the outcome of 3 billion years of evolution of the principle of life on earth and if humanity is to survive the follies of modernity our future worldview will necessarily have to reflect that objective beauty.)
* possesses the energy and the guts to go his way out of the security procured by the flock... The true artist is no sheep indeed. Sorry for having taken so much space. I'm definitely not a Twitter type guy.
Nova Spivek had an interesting post on Twine:(a smarter way to keep up with what you’re into) that I could not resist commenting on.
Nova Spivek diagnoses:
- Loneliness, social isolation, and social fragmentation are huge and growing problems
- Our present communities are not working and most are breaking down or stagnating.
in a comment on Nova's post Scott Newell observes that "Community is at the heart of civilization. Without a strong sense of it, civilization begin it's inevitable decline".
I personally believe that all living species are governed by a set of immutable rules:
- without a community the individual can't reproduce and his species dies out.
- without a dose of individualism the community is bound to stagnate and then to collapse.
The balance of the tension between those two polarities within all living species seems to act as the ticking clock on their evolutionary roads.
From humanity's long haul history we observe that societal forms go hand in hand with the sharing by the individual atoms of a common view about reality (worldview).
- animism within tribes over tens of thousands of years.
- religion and/or philosophies within kingdoms and empires over a few thousand years.
- modernity within nation states over a few hundred years.
Do you observe, as I do, how one zero is taken away from the length of any successive societal epoch?
Animism, religions and traditional philosophies balanced the tension between the two polarities (societies / individuals). Modernity, in stark contrast, favors the individual over the community. This was true in the time of the merchants and "discoverers" fighting the edicts and interdictions of Christianity and this is true today in the fight of Western modernity against the edicts and interdictions of Islam or in the fight of Chinese modernity against the edicts and interdictions of Tibetan Buddhism.
Force is to observe that anywhere the idolatry of individualism has rooted this has led to the demise of the religions / philosophies that were shared by the individuals. Individualism is a powerful force indeed. In testament to this force that was perceived as destructive religions and traditional philosophies anywhere on earth devised the same kind of answers:
- material possessions don't bestow happiness nor contentment
- happiness and contentment result from the sharing of the accepted worldview among all the individuals of any given time.
Modernity departed from this idea to balance the tension between individuals (atoms) and community (grouping) and favored individual enterprise over societal cohesion. More precisely it subordinated social cohesion to the individual enterprise of its triumphing entrepreneurs who in the process of their accumulation of capital gained the levers of powers within their societies.
Practiced extremely successfully over less than two centuries, during high modernity, this process unfolds today in late modernity when we observe two concomitant forces at work:
- ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: Financialization, Outsourcing, Institutional lag, Eradication of all particularisms and traditions (languages, belief systems,..., etc.)
- SIDE-EFFECTS OF MODERNITY, a converging set of Crises:
+ Environmental Chaos: Climate Change, loss of bio-diversity, poisoning of land, water and air, etc.
+ Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Minerals. Copper. Food, etc.
+ Societal Atomization: Loneliness, social isolation, and social fragmentation acting as the symptoms of a grave societal malady. Cause: the loss of a commonly shared worldview is thinning the societal glue to the point of societal atomization.
Nova's "Question: Can We Design The Next-Evolution of Community?" has to be understood and answered in this particular context.
My personal take is that "The Next-Evolution of Community" is out of our hands. It will result as a new realignment or balance of the near infinite load of factors interacting in the "whole earth ensemble" or "whole earth system": climate, resources, species, humanity, etc. This in no way implies any determinism. We are faced with many possible outcomes.
Our dreams and visions of a better tomorrow will eventually bring us to act as a nano-push on the unfolding balance between those many possibles.
"I believe that what we do today depends on our image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today. We build our equations by our actions. These equations, and the future they represent, are not written in nature. In other words, time becomes construction. Of course, we have some conditions that determine limits of the future but within these limits are many, many possibilities.
Therefore, since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future--utopian visions--play a very important role in present conduct." (quote of Ilya Prigogine from an interview by NPq of Fall 2004 titled "Beyond Being and Becoming")
As the posts on this site attest my paintings reflect on my dreams and my visions of the future understanding of what is reality.
Nothing is clearly delineated in my works. I can't paint the body of an elephant on the legs of a giraffe as Daly did. Nor can I paint an open window of my room in the sky as Magritte did. Nor can I attach a toilet seat on the wall as Duchamp had the audacity to do. Nor can I monkey VanGogh, Picasso or anyone else in impressionism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism or any other "ismic" fashion. The reason is not that I can't technically execute such works. No the reason is simply that I find that those ways of painting are not longer making any sense in our age, My dreams and visions of the future have no clearly delineated contours nor explanations nor imagery of reality.
In other words I don't know the text nor the imagery nor the sound of our coming worldview. It's more as if I had flashes of intuition or a vague sense of the patterns, rhythms and colors of a more evolved understanding of reality. Ilya Prigogine very presciently told "since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future--utopian visions--play a very important role in present conduct". I consider my painting as an utopian vision. A vision of the beautiful patterns unfolding along the changing nature of a global system called reality.
As I many times have written we'll never be able to acquire a photographic like image of the global reality in which we are such tiny particles. At best we'll have the chance to express a glimmer of its patterns or a little piece of the infinitely vast puzzle of its always changing nature. That's what I'm interested in. I don't know how to express in words the last thought that came to my mind. It's something aking to the sub-title of this blog "Without technique what we express seems unfinished and without intellectual content it is as if what we express were shallow." I no longer suffer unfinished creations, it's as if they were dirty to my eyes, and I no longer suffer shallowness it's as if it was a waste of my time. I'm interested to understand myself and how I fit in the whole in which I feel such a tiny speck of dust and that's what I try to illustrate.
Summary of Part 1:
= Art as an illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day:
........... but who are the men of knowledge in late modernity?
........... artists have to build up their own knowledge base
= Knowledge as the outcome of:
........... an accumulation of knowings by scientists.
........... a philosophic vision of the human atom as particle of an unattainable whole.
........... our human ideals and visions of a better tomorrow.
= The outcome of knowledge:
........... the future is not a given. It is probabilistic. It is the materialization of one possible among many possibilities.
........... human ideals about the future are one among an ensemble of determining factors and the stronger those ideals the stronger they'll impact the setting of the future.
........... human ideals are visions of a better tomorrow they convey an image of beauty.
Abstract of part 2
It is in the nature of art to express beauty in the formal rendering of a work. Non-beauty, ugliness, inharmony are the results of the artist's envy, greed and most importantly his will. The artist can overcome those by letting the content of his creations flow out of the material of his support and what he'll discover there unmistakably will reflect upon the conditions of his time.
Part 2. The visual form of meaning.
2.1. Beauty is the reflection of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life.
In "The meaning of what to represent" I try to convey this idea that the meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality. I would now like to posit that reality is beautiful for the simple reason that it materialized into existence. Many more other possibles have failed indeed to materialize along this immemorial road of evolutionary changes that constitute our human reality. The failure of all those other possibles to be retained by the principle of life, or its synonym evolution, in our minds evokes something visually akin to non-beauty or ugliness.
The principle of life stores in its DNA (its program) the entirety of its evolutionary road and passes this information down to the next generations. In opposition to the ugliness that casts the rejected possibilities of change the successfully retained ones appear fantastically beautiful for no other reason that they appear to be the direct causes of our being here today. We are here today as the result of a chain of cascading successes, as the result of so many successful links in a chain of evolutionary changes that started sometime 4000 million years ago. Each of those links of changes were like emerging miracles and the miracles multiplied and multiplied in an endless chain. This whole process built of additional successes suggest a certain magical beauty of life being at the pinnacle of its glory. And this beauty is reflected in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth.
This begs the question of the nature of beauty. If beauty is the characteristic of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life than beauty is something objective and is in no way connected to human subjectivity. What we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something (lines, forms, colors, rythms, harmonics and sounds) evolution did not retain. Being thus encoded in the DNA of life beauty remains indeed largely inaccessible to the individuals who carry it. At best the individuals experience an unconscientious feel that something is ugly or beautiful without being able to express anything more than platitudes about the reason for their feeling. Some artists were lucky enough to touch that beauty at the top of their talent and their creations were applauded by all who unconscientiously came under the spell of those artists' reflection of the miraculous beauty laying at the hart of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life.
Other artists tried to theorize about the artistic necessity of beauty. Kandinsky came the closest to this realization of an artistic necessity in "Concerning the spiritual in art". (1) He called this artistic necessity of beauty "the inner need for inner meaning" and defined it as "the inevitable desire for outward expression of the objective element... If the artist be priest of beauty, nevertheless this beauty is to be sought only according to the principle of the inner need, and can be measured only according to the size of that need. That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul". Kandinsky seemed clearly aware of the existence of something objective out there that defines beauty. But, not understanding the nature of that objective element, he equated his intuition with an act of the soul and his following step was thus to posit that art has to reflect the spirituality of the soul. I bet, had Kandinsky known that the entirety of our evolutionary road is stored in our DNA, he would have equated "the inner need, which springs from the soul" with the inner need we feel to respect life as the beauty resulting from a chain of cascading evolutionary successes.
So if "The meaning of what to represent" lays in the knowledge of the men of knowledge of the day about the meaning of life then we have to conclude that artists, in late modernity, have to give visual signs of such knowledge while reflecting that meaning in the miraculous beauty laying at the hart of the chain of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life. So it seems that for the first time in the history of visual art form and content are meant to join in the same object. This should be great news for all of us and for art lovers in particular.
2.2. Greed envy and will are the shapers of ugliness in human creations.
Will is shaped by desire and desire emerges out of envy and greed. All acts forged out of will reflect an innate rigidity in their form. They are set in the concrete of envy and greed and the lust they profile through the eventual satisfaction of the desires they evoke initially. And thus is eradicated any possibility of spontaneity and naturalness.
When will is absent we discover harmony. Harmony is something objective, it is what all great religions and philosophies strived to illustrate. Harmony can't be deranged. Whatever happens in the cosmos, in our human societies or in our personal lives, harmony is always resulting. It's kind of being the prevailing state of life around our universe. Disharmony in the whole is simply an impossibility, it is a creation of our egos that are driven by greed, want for possessions and glory that trick us to try imposing our will over the harmony reflected by the principle of life. Will is the shaper of disharmony.
As human creations paintings, and other fine art works, are subjective renderings and in consequence they are not automatically harmonious. Our driven egos are more often than not playing tricks on us resulting in subjective preferences that are blinding us. In a painting, of whatever style and by extension in whatever art form, some objective rules apply that are acting as the parapet protecting us from falling in the precipice of confusion that lays under the bridge leading towards harmony and beauty. THE HARMONIZATION OF THE CREATOR's SUBJECTIVITY, freed of his greed and glory driven ego, WITH THE OBJECTIVE RULES OF BEAUTY, the principle of life that is at work throughout our universe, THIS IS WHAT ART IS ALL ABOUT. In paintings, or for that matter in all fine art works, content and technique are blend into form. What I mean to say is that whatever technique is being used to express whatever content, the form of the resulting work must be harmonious or in other words that it must blend with the objective rules of beauty derived from the prevailing harmony that flows throughout our entire universe. Harmony is the general state of our universe, and the memory of its historical forms is stored in the DNA of life, that's how we call it the prevailing harmony. It is not something static, all the contrary, it is permanent change. It is an infinite chain of transformations.
These last centuries, western artists and thinkers concentrated on the idea of an absolute truth and they lost themselves in this Sisyphean act for a snapshot FOR truth leading more often than not in the deep valley of absolute certainty where they drowned under the passions arising with these very certainties.
We should now make the jump to a superior level of understanding and discover how to fabricate snapshots OF truth un-encumbered by greed, envy, and the ideologies founded on such. I firmly believe that to keep in tune WITH THE OBJECTIVE RULES OF BEAUTY, the principles of life at work throughout our universe, we have to concentrate on the sequences between the snapshots while freeing our SUBJECTIVITY from our greed and glory driven ego that tricks us into the desire or the preference of some outcomes. By design outcomes emerge as the conclusion of a process and are not destined to endure. We should thus not bow in contemplation of them. What really matters is the process leading to a successful outcome, for, whence such an outcome emerges it is bound to weaken in importance in light of the non-ending search for more complexity by the principle of life. Successful outcomes are indeed like the links in the long haul chain of the complexification of the principle of life. This chain is like the metastasize of the principle of life throughout the body of reality and once a link is welded, as the successful outcome at a particular moment in time, a process of change sets in that'll conclude with the welding of the next link.
For the observer, the sequencing of changes is what ultimately is making sense of each particular moment. The same goes for the art observer. It is indeed the sequencing of changes between colors, between sounds or between ideas and words that ultimately makes sense of those same colors, sounds, ideas and words in the whole of a work of art. In the understanding of this simple truth (universal principle) lays a unique chance to leave the heights of our past searches for certainties. By their very nature, changes don't let us the time to focus on certainties, indeed, the best we can do is to try to surf on the waves of changes, to try to be IN the reality of the situation or to say this otherwise, to try to be in the reality of each moment.
2.3. A way of enhancing and arousing the mind to various inventions. (2)
"I shall not refrain from including among these precepts a new aid to contemplation, which, although seemingly trivial and almost ridiculous, is none the less of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, if you look at any wall soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations. ... But although these stains may supply inventions they do not teach you how to finish any detail. Therefore painter, you should know that you can't be good if you are not a master universal enough to imitate with your art every kind of natural form, which you will not know how to do unless you observe them and retain them in your mind."
Leonardo tells us here that painters should use some form of automatism to discern the content of their works into the stain or the material of their support. Such an automatism implies spontaneity. It excludes will and eliminates any formal rigidity emanating from desire. And Leonardo then to insist. "Therefore, O painter, take care that lust for gain does not override in your mind the glory of art." Leonardo implies here that what is not resulting from your will is conducive "to bring honor upon yourself through your art".
Under the influence of the popes of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung the idea of automatism was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century by the early surrealists. But as noted by Andre Masson "The tendency to allow oneself to be swamped by things, the ego being no more than the vase which they fill, really only represents a very low degree of knowledge. ... There is a whole world in a drop of water trembling on the edge of a leaf, but it is only there when the artist and the poet have the gift of seeing it in its immediacy. However to avoid making any mistakes, this revelation or inspired knowledge, and this contact with nature are only profound in so far as they have been prepared by the thought and by the intense consideration of the artist. This is the only way in which sensitive revelation can enrich knowledge." (3) Surrealism would then flow further into the irrational, the bizarre, and lose its creative power at discovering something useful to say about reality. That's when surrealism was done with.
Automatism as a practice to discover reality "in a stain on a canvas" has not lost its power at generating flowing lines and colors that starkly contrast the rigidity of a work labored under the duress of will. But as has been evidenced with Surrealism its power at "arousing the mind" is conditional to the painter possessing:
- a body of knowledge "universal enough to imitate with your art every kind of natural form" (2)
- a technique that does not hamper your representation for "although these stains may supply inventions they do not teach you how to finish any detail". (2)
Automatism by itself does not supply any meaning or any content. At best it helps painters who have a valid body of knowledge about reality to transfer on the canvas, in highly creative ways, elements of that knowledge while attaining a high degree, of naturalness, of fluidity and dynamism in their works. But as evidenced with Surrealism automatism becomes incomparably dangerous at the hands of people who do not master the knowledge of their day. Kandinsky was indeed cleverly prescient when he wrote "... the freedom of today has at once its dangers and its possibilities. We may be present at the conception of a new great epoch, or we may see the opportunity squandered in aimless extravagance." (1)
It was extravagance that won. It imposed its seal on all artworks that would be suceessfull on the market these last fifty years. This does by no means imply that art is dead. It just means that art, during an instant of inattention, has been debased to "whatever" the market deemed to carry success for itself. This meant art creations that would generate fiancial surplusses on the merit of marketing techniques alone. In this process the artistic had to be expunged of art works, for, it was distracting people's attention from what the marketing techniques intended it to focus on. So extravagance and whatever dominated the art scene for a while but art is back now and the conception of a new great epoch is at last free to emerge!
2.4. The "periodic characteristics" of a work of art.
The artist is a citizen as any other. He lives in a given historical, political and cultural context that are impacting on his attitudes, his behavior with other people, and his work. From animism to religion and then to modernity we observe constants, in each of those periods, in term of content of an art work and in term of the form in which artists render the meaning of their work. Ours is a period of change from modernity to what comes later in post modernity. In contrast to the two earlier transitions (animism to religion and religion to modernity) the passage from modernity to post modernity will be extremely fast and will take place on a global scale. The outcome of this transition is uncertain. It could conclude with the elimination of the human species from the surface of the earth but it could also promise us better tomorrows. What is for sure is that this transition will last at most a couple of centuries and it will be devastating for the human population and its societal forms of organization.
I'm very well aware of the risks of collapse along this transition: societal, civilizational and even for the human species. But this is part of the evolutionary process that the principle of life is bound to undergo; whatever this may be. We should understand that the principle of life is not depending on the survival of humanity to thrive further. Who are we to even think about equating ourselves with the principle of life? Yes we are a living species but we are only one among many other and nothing indicates that our actions as a specie are conducive to the metastatic expansion of the principle of life throughout the whole. There are many reasons to believe that, on the contrary, with modernity our specie acts more like a poison that kills life.
Whatever the outcome of the evolutionary transition we are entering fact is that in the last decades we learned some important lessons about the workings of our societal organizations and about human culture, art, the biology of life and so on. This idea that the evolutionary process of change is inscribed in each particular form of life's DNA; this allows us to have a peak at the beauty contained in each link of the chain of life. And art being the inscription of the knowledge of the day in visual signs to be shared with all; it seems to me that late modern artists should be drawing and painting nothing else than signs of the process of change from which shall emerge the beauty contained in the next link on the long chain of humanity's societal evolution.
I think that there is no point in painting our societal demise other than eventually frightening the human atoms. That's what the members of Cobra did in Europe after experiencing the atrocities of the second world war. But they were also in search of a better tomorrow and their creations eventually participated in modulating the societal mood that led to the emergence of a process of change that could possibly conclude with a viable post modern societal organization.
The present transition is a global affair that will need the sharing of a common worldview by the individuals in order for humanity to have a chance to make it, without too much of a damage, to the next link on the societal evolutionary chain.
It seems to me that all the conditions are starting to fall into place for such a worldview to arise:
- the most advanced late modern science sheds light - on the inaccessibility of the whole through rationality, - on our interconnectedness as particles of the whole, - and on the sheer vanity at the core of modernity that is responsible for igniting a chain reaction of side-effects that have the potential to annihilate us as a species. It also helps us better understand that we have to dump our present ways of living for a more organic and sustainable approach.
- science is now awakening to a growing conscience that animism and the civilizations that were built as its add-ons (the East globally) got it right from the beginning.
- science and the philosophies of the East could thus possibly be finding common ground in devising the building blocks of a worldview that could be shared on a worldwide scale.
- people's conscience, of the dangers that are lurking for humanity as a whole, is deepening fast around the whole world foreshadowing an approaching twilight of conversion to an emerging worldwide worldview.
I try to render visual signs of this coming worldview.
2.5. The tools of the visual trade.
To the traditional techniques that had been in use over thousands of years, modernity successively adds oil painting, lithography, photography, motion pictures and lately imaging software and we can't but marvel at the power of seduction of the images produced with these techniques. It should thus not come as a surprise that along the last century the visual relay to societies at large of new ideas, new understandings and new ideologies largely borrowed from the images produced with those modern techniques.
This recourse to modern techniques of representation acted like a parking at the margins of high and late modernity of the traditional techniques of representation and this happened while visual arts entered in a general state of confusion. But we should not deduce from that simultaneity any causality out of the use of those modern techniques. The surge of images produced with those modern techniques follows indeed the failure by the modern thinking artists of the avant-garde, at the turn of and further along the 20th century, to define a valid replacement of the first degree images that our eyes give us to see... images that they so much hated.
Today in late modernity artists have first and foremost:
1. to find the answers to the questions that the avant-garde of high-modernity struggled with and that it never solved.
2. to understand that the techniques made available along the span of high and late-modernity have been conceived in the intellectual context of those periods and as such they are not at all neutral. Those techniques contain the intellectual answers of our period and drive the artists who use them on a given path that does not allow them much freedom in term of the expression of their own vision (as answers to the questions implied in 1). It is not as if the artist was not free. It is that by using these techniques the artist limits his freedom to a choice between different options that are contained in those techniques. Those techniques act indeed like multi-answer questions. In other words the choice of answers is limited.
3. to understand that the meaning expressed in the content of their works comes first and that they should thus employ the technique that gives them the maximum ease in representing their meaning.
Personally I feel more at ease on a canvas using my hands, brushes, or whatever allows me to discover the meaning that sits unplugged in my unconscious and I don't know how I ever could better reproduce that discovered meaning than by letting flow the brush along the lines of the various inventions that are already there on the canvas and that I just discovered. Once a work is terminated software imaging techniques become my means to explore further, deeper, the content rendered with my hands.
But I guess everyone grew his own set of habits and technical skills and no one technique is thus more recommendable than another. In the end the imaging technique that best renders the meaning of the creator of visual signs is the technique that he best masters.
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(1). Kandinsky in "Concerning the spiritual in art." Dover publications. 1977.
(2). Leonardo in "On painting". The Invention and composition of narratives. Yale Nota Bene Book. 2001
(3). Andre Masson. "Painting is a wager". Horizon (London). In Herschel B, Chipp. Theories of modern art". University of California Press. 1968.
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The central thesis that runs through my rumblings about visual arts is that they are no more than the visual representation by artists, of the worldview of the men of knowledge of their days, for all to share. Under Animism they represent the worldview of the shaman, under Religious times they represent the creed professed by the priests and under Modernity they represent as many signs of the value system of the triumphing aristocracy and new rich merchants.
In high modernity a collision occurs into visual artists' minds between the disappearance of the men of knowledge in the traditional sense and an emergent subjective necessity to represent reality differently. It appears evident for the avant-garde that continuing to represent worldviews of the past makes no sense any longer. But this results in doubt and uncertainty in artists' minds:
- about what to represent (content of the work).
- about the technique of representation to use.
Today in late modernity, after nearly a century of trials and errors by the avant-garde, it is fair to say that it did not succeed in attaining the target it had set for itself. I mean that the avant-garde did not succeed to devise a new vision about reality that integrates the knowledge of the day. On the contrary its trials and errors concluded on a landscape of confusion. And in the midst of this intellectual confusion art has first been presented as being whatever the artist wanted it to be but that, in turn, engendered more than confusion, for, it was a direct conduit leading to cynicism and art then became the vector of finance. But as we all know finance is no art nor does it have any knowledge about what art is all about.
After a century of avant-gardism we artists are faced with the same questions that arose with the emergence of the avant-garde:
- what to represent or what meaning to give to the content of the work of art.
- what form to best dress the substance of our content.
- what technique to best represent, in our time, our content and its form.
The level of confusion in artists' minds is assuredly deafening but this does not eliminate the necessity to find answers to those questions that were first expressed nearly a century ago.
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1. The meaning of what to represent.
In this blog and in my book Artsense I posit that since the cultural dawn of humanity visual arts had a societal functionality. That function was to create visual signs, for all to share, about the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. That functionality has been un-interrupted along tens of thousands of years and, the more archaeologists succeed in digging further down in history, the more it appears that it could well have been the case along hundreds of thousands of years. Or to put it otherwise this societal function of visual arts has been in practice over more than 99,9% of humanity's cultural span. High and Late modernity appear to have derogated to this societal functionality for less than 0.1% of humanity's cultural span. The least we can say is that what has been going on during the last 0.1% of the human time should by no means be considered as the norm of what is to come.
But who are the men of knowledge in late modernity to inspire the artists in their production of visual signs?
It was thought, for a time, during the swing of High modernity that science and rationality were the producers of the knowledge of modernity. This was effectively right but we start to discover that such knowledge was not really knowledge but an amalgamation of knowings that, in finale, are responsible, albeit indirectly, for the side-effects of modernity: 6th mass extinction of species, poisoning of our drinking water and our land bearing crops, climate change, over-population and rarity of raw materials, fossil energy, as well as those effects that are still unverified but that we somehow instinctively feel could well appear soon to be worse even than the ones we observe today: biological manipulations of plant, animal and human DNA, dispersion of nano-particles in the environment and so on
Furthermore the rise and expansion of modernity have been driven as a totalitarian push to convert to rationality. But that rationality now appears not to have been very reasonable after all. Its recipes are directly responsible for having caused:
- the poisoning of the oceans that ruptures the balance of the eco-systems sustaining marine life.
- the poisoning our arable land for the industrialization of our foods that is responsible in the last instance for the degrading quality of what we daily eat, drink, and for the disappearance of insects, bees, birds and so on.
- the poisoning of the air we breathe that is responsible for the increase in cancers, juvenile diabetes and so on.
- the rupture of the equilibrium between the multitude of parameters at work on earth and in the atmosphere. But that equilibrium, let us never forget this, is the source of the sustenance of life on earth. The rupture of the earth climate equilibrium leads to destabilizing changes; the species' equilibrium leads to declining variety that in turn leads to declining possibilities for the principle of life; the rupture of the human population equilibrium leading to over exploitation of material and energetic resources and so on and so on.
Now that humanity is on the verge of self-annihilation sirens are being heard from all quarters and capital, in a hurry, is positioning its ideology of rationalism as the answer to the very real problems it initially created.
As economic globalization expands the problems mentioned above are bound to multiply exponentially. The freeing of the genie of greed under the global assault of the values of modernity is going to make sure of that. But how could we, the 15% or less of humanity who have been reaping all the sweats of modernity until now, reproach to the other 85% to desire to share at the same table of modernity; come what may.
Necessity begs for answers and solutions. History is full of examples and the necessity that we feel in late-modernity is no different. Answers and solutions at the global level are slow to come by and slower yet to implement. But coming they will, imposed on us through the power of nature. The gravity of our late-modern problems is going to make sure that “non-rational” holistic solutions shall be implemented, solutions that emphasize the organic or functional relation between parts and whole.
One of the segments, in this all-encompassing range of problems to solve, concerns the re-balancing of the dis-equilibrium of the polarities of humanity itself: individuals versus societies. The re-balancing of that particular dis-equilibrium could very well be the central most pressing task that awaits us if we seriously want to save ourselves and our children from self-annihilation. Individualism in late-modernity has grown to such a point that it forms the sole substance of the societal dance between polarities. One of the two polarities, the societal, has been shuffled to the margins meaning that no actioning restraint mechanism functions any longer against individual excesses. In those conditions societies are simply incapable to determine solutions and if one particular group of interest wanted to impose its own perceived solutions it would never find the power to implement their application other than recoursing to totalitarian political adventure. The logic of capital has succeeded to impose the individual as the sole acting substance of its rationality but this has been reached at the expense of the loss of societal knowledge about its reproduction. Societies want to preserve what is there in order to guarantee their reproduction but that was going against the search by the logic of capital for growth and as a consequence the societal polarity has been sacrificed and thrown into the dustbin of modernity.
Whatever we might think about the limitation by society of individual rights and freedoms fact is that necessity shall impose the return in force of the societal polarity. Societal cohesion shall indeed be required to speed up the execution and implementation of the answers and solutions to our present state of necessity. And societal cohesion means first and foremost the sharing of a common worldview by all... This is where we close the circle, coming back to my initial definition of visual arts as being the representation of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share.
By no means do I suggest that visual artists collaborate with authoritarian powers to be. The power elite has indeed no clue about any valid knowledge about our global reality. They know about force to coerce, capital to invest and science to generate new avenues where to invest. They will eventually try to re-impose a past religious worldview that does not qualify as a workable worldview in the present and even less, in times of necessity, as a worldview that all could share.
The intersection that we observe starting to operate - between globalization, climate change, species' extinction, over-population, rarefaction of material and energetic resources and the other side-effects of modernity - is making for a messy process. A process that asks from us to respond, on the fly, with valid answers to the multiple urgencies. It goes without saying that pragmatism is the only valid key to open the doors on a livable future for our children.
I don't suppose that visual artists will transform, as by magic, into men of knowledge. Nowhere is the visual art education system preparing artists to think or to search for knowledge. And seen that knowledge is dispersed and not residing in any particular group of individuals, my best guess is that here and there we'll see some knowledgeable individuals having some practice in a method of representation starting to offer their take on reality for others to share. Those who search for meaning and more particularly meaning through visual representation can already experience what I try to expose. There is without any possible doubt an increase in quality meaning in the visual arts nowadays. For sure only a trained eye will detect and recognize such rare creators among the multitude of would-be artists.
The creative process toward meaning is akin to a process of sifting the grain from the shaft. Once someone succeeds to sift an appreciable quantity of grains then those grains start fast to interbreed bringing about fast personal improvement for their discoverers and that in turn is fast emulated by many others to create a line of pure-breeds in quality meaning. This process is somehow akin to what was going on under animism when the shaman created knowledge for his tribe and also the visual representation of that knowledge for all to share.
But how to start sifting the grains from the shaft? How to recognize the grains of the plants of knowledge that could feed us in the future? We for sure know that knowledge is the only valid answer. But where to find the men of knowledge whose worldview we could make ours? Nowhere it seems. The only path to actionable knowledge, in our present day circumstances, lays inside ourselves. There is no school nor any “ism” that masters the kind of global knowledge about reality that we are in need today. Parcels can be found here and there but we have to make the effort to assemble all those parcels into a coherent whole.
Not knowing if the whole of our reality is a pink elephant, a family of pink elephants, or even a pack of families the fallacy of a compartmental approach based on the observation of a detail inside one compartment of the whole can only result in a fantasy. That's typically the story of the classical scientific approach and why our application of its fantasies concludes invariably into dramas. We'll never know if the whole of our reality is a pink elephant, a family of pink elephants, or a pack of families but this should not impeach us to devise a methodology reflective of the working of the whole and that's exactly what humanity has been trying to attain along the hundreds of thousands of years when humans observed the rhythms and patterns of the universe, Gaia and their local environments. Anywhere around the world under animism "primitive" humans understood that they were connected in a web of complexity to all other living species in the "whole" and from that understanding they derived a deep respect for the life of all living species. The theories of complexity and the studies about change from chaos to order, and vice versa, in advanced sciences come to recognize today the validity of the animistic approach towards reality. But their discourse is unfortunately only accessible to a very narrow minority.
Following this line of argument, we deduce that reality is composed of a series of concentric circles, starting with ourselves (the observer) at the innermost point and spreading outwards and inwards:
- Outwards towards the self, the family, the village market place, the homeland, humanity itself, Gaia, the Milky Way, right out to the limit of our island universe knowing that further lays an unattainable that could be vaster that all that is attainable to us, an unattainable our attainable is a part of: a universe composed of one elephant, a family or a pack of families?
- Inwards towards the parts of our body, the molecules, the atoms, the sub-atomic particles.
Those concentric circles are in constant flux like interwoven by incessant interactions between circles and between particles in and among the circles. Reality is thus complexity in motion and what appears clearly here is that we are no more than time limited particles within that complexity in motion. Time limited particles that are driven by the whole that is characterized by this complexity in motion. This does not mean that what comes is invariably determined and that we therefore should take a fatalist approach. It simply means that what comes in the future is resulting as the “materialization” of one possible among the many possibles manifesting themselves at any given time. This leads me to think with Ilya Prygogyne that “... what we do today depends on our image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today. We build our equations by our actions. These equations, and the future they represent, are not written in nature. In other words, time becomes construction. Of course, we have some conditions that determine limits of the future but within these limits are many, many possibilities.
Therefore, since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future--utopian visions--play a very important role in present conduct. I am more afraid of the lack of utopias.” (1) Anyone who is well versed in the Yi-Ching shall recognize in the words of Prygogyne the substance of what is at work in that very old work. Prygogyne is indeed one of those scientists who close the historical loop of knowledge by re-appropriating the foundational building blocks of animism; albeit in total unconsciousness of that very feat.
I summarized my understanding of reality in the following poem that I wrote in the fall of 2000 in Beijing. It became part of a gouache that I was working on around that time.
The contact between polarities generates a burst of energy fueling changes and transformations that are as the seconds on the ticking clock of evolution. From this we know that the life of all species and their members is given by the changes occurring in the following 3 dimensions:
1. The SKY or the influences of environments, from vicinity to infinity, on each species and its members.
2. The EARTH or the influences of the hardware and software assigned to the members of each living species. This is called the drama of reproduction of the species through sex and of reproduction of the individuals through satisfaction of their objective needs.
3. The SELF or the influences of the cultural and economic works of each species upon itself, upon its members, upon other species and upon the environment.
But how to put such a vision and the knowledge it is based upon into visual signs? This is the subject of the following parts of this text.
1. Beyond Being and Becoming by Illya Prygogyne In NPQ (New Perspectives Quarterly.
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