What now in painting? Part 2: The visual form of meaning.

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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Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

The plight of the visual artist in late-modernity.

Seen from a historical perspective the form taken by visual art appears to have greatly evolved over time while its function has nevertheless remained constant, indeed, along 99.99% of its timespan visual art has been the visual representation of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day, by the artist, at the attention of his fellow citizens.

From early on humans understood that they could not survive by themselves alone in the wild but that they needed to be part of a societal grouping to assure their reproduction and that of their children. Societies were thus a fact of life for humanity since way back in time as it is also for most other animals. But once in existence societies behave like ensembles on their own and devise strategies to preserve their own reproduction. It's inside those societal strategies of reproduction that visual art finds its roots.

Through adaptation and evolution the eye evolved as the most important human sensor. Since millions of years each individual has been bestowed with vision to protect himself from the dangers lurking in his immediate environment and this, in turn, has shaped the foundations upon which humanity has developed its understanding of reality.

Under animism, along far more than one hundred thousand years, primitive arts have represented the worldview of the shaman. The role of the shaman (the man of knowledge within the tribe) was the formation of knowledge about what reality is all about, that means about all aspects touching the existence of his tribe. He then used visual illustrations, symbols, and signs to transmit the essence of his acquired knowledge to his fellow tribesmen. The sharing of those visual signs and their content was unifying the tribe behind a common set of beliefs and the tribesmen reinforced that belief through the use of those visual signs as decoration of their daily use utensils. Both the visual creations by the shaman and the functional creations by the tribesmen constitute what is commonly called "primitive arts" or "arts premiers" (following their decision to open a museum especially reserved for "animist arts" and in order to avoid being criticized for Eurocentrism, the French lately termed those arts "first arts" or the ones that came first on the human societal evolutionary ladder).

It always struck me that there seems to be such a strong resemblance in the content of animist works. African, American Indian, Indian India, Chinese or anywhere around the world animist works may vary in their form, the materials they are realized in but the story they represent for the observer to see are invariably identical: the interconnectedness of all living and inanimate elements present in the environment forming like so many yarns woven together in the gigantic tapestry of the one thing all fell they were part of, I mean, the ultimate reality; the Whole, the One.

Under religion, during a few thousand years, the creed has been the exclusive object to be represented visually. With the unification of tribes as a consequence of the larger population densities unleashed by agriculture the unity of content found in animism vanishes and is replaced gradually by parochial foundational stories used by the local men of power to strengthen their control over their subjects.
This is the time when the illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge started to specialize and gradually the making of visual signs established itself as an autonomous societal function. But this autonomization has been a very slow process that was only completed, in Europe, during the late Middle-Ages.
The separation of functions between knowledge production and its diffusion through visual signs was initially realized amongst the monks. Some specialized in learning and developing the creed while others specialized in spreading the foundational story through speech and visual signs. Seen that the only literate beings were the monks and priests visual signs took preeminence in the diffusion of the creed among the populations of Europe. When cities started to develop at the interstices of freedom on the periphery of the manors, commoners gradually took over this image making function from the monks which thus established the craft as one among the many others.
What is remarkable in this process is the extremely low social esteem that was recognized to the image making craftsmen. This stands in sharp contrast to the role of the artist under early modernity. The entreprizing aristocrats and new rich merchants accumulated their wealth against the will of the church which was forbidding banking activities and greatly discouraging the accumulation of material possessions. This acted like a powerfully incentive on the new rich to start spreading their own worldview. Image crafters were then hired to represent the virtues of individualism that ultimately procured the wealth of private property (portraits of those living in the mansions, landscapes around the mansion and stills of what lay on the tables in the mansions). One can easily imagine that the inquisition did not see with a benevolent eye its image making crafters passing at the service of the infidel, the enemy, and its punishment through fire acted as a severely inflating factor on the remuneration of those image crafters who dared brave the inquisition by jumping over board in the camp of the new rich. This incentive of very high remunerations fast changed the perception of the social status of the image crafters. Wealth for themselves procured them also gradually a high prestige and their craft soon was to be called art and themselves artists. This is indeed the origin of the words art and artist as we understand them under modernity.

Nothing is being meant to last eternally and so the high remuneration that went with the exercise of the artist's craft, in early modernity, would soon be memory. From the wealth and prestige of Rubens history surfs indeed very fast towards the misery of Van Gogh.

The combination of the logic of capital and philosophic rationalism extending in applied science eventually ensued in industrialization and democratization. This process that expands approximately along two centuries resulted in the separation of the men of power from the men of knowledge which, by the way, procured to the visual artist the freedom to represent whatever he wants. The new men of knowledge, the scientists, were left to compete on the "level playing field" of the free market with anyone presenting a foundational story about reality.

In this process visual artists have gained total freedom over the content of their works but the substance of that content had vanished and thus their market was gone, they had lost the societal function that had been theirs until then. But, for sure, nothing changes overnight. All movement forward continues for a while even after the energy prompting its movement has been cut. Inertia sets in and inertia conquered modernity or to be more precise the mature stage of modernity what some also call "high modernity".

High modernity can be summed up as a short period of search, by "thinker-artists", for a new narrative about what is reality. The whole enterprise was centered on content, on meaning, and form was only of marginal concern for the artists themselves. But force is to recognize that the content of most of the works from that period does not carry forward much helpful meaning and that it is their form that is being remembered in late modernity. As a direct consequence of this paradox, visual arts lost:

- any trace of a narrative: the naive belief in an "end of history" did not leave any space for another historical narrative and whatever the artist does is considered sufficient to be called art.

- any trace of a public: from the onset of a high modernity Paul Klee already noted that "the people are not with us" (Uns tragt kein Volk)

Having lost any notion of a narrative (a story about what reality is all about), having lost their public, the question that begs for an answer now in late modernity is "for who do visual artists continue to create?".

Answering this question comes down to isolate the different market segments where the creator, the artist, can try to place his wares and this should also shed some light on the content of his works.

1. The market for interior decoration expanded from being exclusively reserved to luxuries for the rich to a mass market for the middle-class that was then satisfied by the proliferation of cheap prints and cheap originals. The profit imperative of the corporation being what it is the bulk of the prints on the market are mass copies of works that fell out of intellectual protection. Some artists experiment with limited edition copies of their works but, all in all, the marketing imperative most often leaves them in the quandary of having to decide being an artist or being a marketeer. Lately the production of cheap originals (copies or works in the style of...) has been delocalized to China and other countries of the South. You can buy an excellent copy of the Mona Lisa in Beijing for 50 US dollars frame included. Only the frame costs more that that in the West. Furthermore the level of technical skills of painters in the South is rarely seen nowadays in the West. Copies and works "in the style of..." relate to subjects of the past: portraits of those living in the mansions, landscapes around the mansion and stills of what lay on the tables in the mansions. This does not fit the content of contemporary art works. In sum the process of delocalization has left many Western painters discovering the hardship of having to sell their own wares at a Chinese price.
2. The memory of our culture and the cultural importance recognized by history to artworks is being cultivated in Western education systems and speculators equipped with PR and advertisement exploit the memory of that cultural importance to make fast bucks by speculating on the value of works that they buy initially for a cheap price. Charles Saatchi is a perfect example of this new group of art buyers. What counts here is the generation of hefty returns. Art is of no importance. Charles Saatchi candidly describes the criteria that motivates his purchases as a certain quality to generate scandal, to shock the observer and he lately declared that English art schools have lost their prime strength and fallen behind their successes of the eighties and nineties when he bought and rendered famous just graduated art students whose crap contained the genius to repulse the observer, and provoke his angry reaction, which in finale is what made the crap to the news bulletins. So if artists want to be selected by Saatchi or his peers the lesson is absolutely clear. They need to provide substance for the news hour. Scandal leading to shock and provocation or whatever else will catch the eye or the ear of the TV news channels will do. Charles Saatchi's company will then amplify the noise which will lead to a surge in value of the works he presents to the public and when the value is ripe to his taste he pockets the fantastic returns on his initial small investment. Saatchi justifies his move by saying that the high returns he pockets will allow him to buy so many more works from beginners. I have nothing against speculators but I have something against stupidity. Scandal never will qualify as art, at least not as visual art, but perhaps could it be conceived as the art of marketing. Why can't the speculators reintroduce art and its meaning in the art market? The answer here seems to be double headed. For one it comes from the artistic illiteracy of the speculators. But again I have nothing against speculators per se. They are indeed not responsible for their own illiteracy. Western societies, as a whole, have indeed become artistically illiterate. The first to blame are the media companies that want to give their poorly educated viewers what they most want, scandal and sensation and the second to blame are the bureaucrats of the artistic institutions. They are the ones who make all the noise about art and they just don't get it. Their talk is most generally total emptiness. Only the noise of words rattling onto one another. But where is the meaning in all their speeches and writings? In the end we have nevertheless to acknowledge that no-one is really responsible, for, it all boils down to the logic of capital that drives us all. In the face of their competitors the medias have to generate returns and the artistic institutions and their bureaucrats have to please donators for the sake of their donations.
3. Galleries live from sales of art works. Not surprisingly most owners focus their attention on what sells and force is to observe that what sells is conventional, in other words, what sells is what is already recognized. Those trying to promote artistic substance are a small minority. In the present overwhelming confusion, about what art is all about, it goes without surprise that this small minority is preponderantly poor in capital and in consequence its marketing reach is rather limited.
4. The art bureaucracy consists of speakers and writers making noise about the works of artists. It starts with art critics and commentators in the media and finds its true meaning in the functions serving, the modern form of public art temples, the museums. Money is the language of power and speculators and merchants target those modern art temples with the entirety of their power. Having their artistic possessions find a place in those temples consecrate their value in the eyes of all... The artists who might want to target that segment of the market better be advised first to try to be enlisted by a powerful speculator. Their direct encounter with this bureaucracy could at best only result in the sharing of some charitable proceeds in the form of meager grants or other.
5. Are there still some art connoisseurs out there? Yes they did not disappear all together. One still can find some specimen here and there but most generally they are not that wealthy, albeit, they are well educated or cultured. Those rare specimen of art connoisseurs are the best that can befall an artist. They know what they speak about and for artists they act as stimulating intellectual muses.
6. The last segment of the artist's market is himself. He will not generate any income by pleasing himself but it nevertheless remains, and by far, the most rewarding experience for the artist to try to understand the reality in which he struggles and ultimately see his understanding becoming the generator of the content of his works. We artists gained our freedom from the men of power and the men of knowledge but in this process we lost a given content and now our only escape from absurdity is through the generation of our own knowledge base. In our present societal predicament targeting one's own productions for him(her)self has the best chance to lead to a dialog between the reason of the brain and the execution of the hand. This is also the only way for the artist to regain a clear understanding of the societal meaning and function of art.

Modernity has triumphed:

- economically: the logic of capital substantiates all our social interactions.

- educationally: economic functionality obliging; science and its applications are transmitted, to one degree or another, to all of us through our education systems.

- philosophically: we all have fallen, to one degree or another, under the charm of rationality but to our surprise we also discovered that the growth of knowledge, predicated by rationality, is also expanding our field of ignorance.

But modernity never morphed into a worldview accessible to all nor did it ever give a foundational story of itself for all to share. Max Weber noted that "scientific rationality offered us artificial abstractions unable to teach us anything about the meaning of the world". Here we are thus left spectators of the utter limitation of modernity wondering "What now?".

With modernity painters gained the total freedom to represent whatever they want but never were they been offered the intellectual tools to come up with images corresponding to the reality of their times. What ensued was "whatever is art". Marcel Duchamp had it all seen come down on the art world and ridiculed the process by exhibiting a toilet seat that critics baptized "readymade". Profoundly distraught by this recuperation Duchamp quit painting for chess.

With late modernity we witness an initial sketching of the road of humanity towards its future in the form of an interaction on a worldscale of 3 determinant factors that will gradually displace modernity:

- a process of scientific revolutionizing that is churning out ever faster new "knowings" or bits of knowledge about the working of reality.

- the impact of the side-effects of modernity on life on earth will definitely mould our ways of doing and thinking in the future.

- globalization is expanding the frontiers of modernity to the whole world and as such we are assisting at a kind of radicalization of modernity. But ultimately this will project on the whole world the civilizational, cultural, societal and other values of 85% of the world population that was until now only experiencing the destructive impact on their traditional structures of a dominating European or Western modernity.

We have entered an age characterized by a total absence of certainty that will transform into a maelstrom of destruction of our past givens and creation of new forms. This process that could well take decades if not centuries to complete will end with the sharing, by all, of a new paradigmatic vision of reality; a common worldview.

It is the understanding of this process that today offers a chance to the artist to engage into a dialog between the reason of his brain and the execution of his hand. Starting from the self the artist then regains the pleasure of understanding how his creations can fit and play within the context of his society.

That's where the artistic adventure finds a new start, a societal meaning, letting us quit late modernity and entering the unknown of what comes after...

Here are some sketchy trails into that unknown:

1. On the front of ideas the dualistic certainties founding our views of things (beginning versus end, good versus bad, white versus black and so forth) will be displaced by more interactive, polar, circular or cyclical visions of change coming to us from the civilizations of China, India, Africa and south America as well as from advanced science and a rediscovery of animism.
2. On the front of our environment the fact that reality is made-up of systemic complexity, or complexity within ever farther-apart ensembles interacting upon one another, will gradually be firmly inserted into our minds, albeit, under the impact of necessity.
3. On the front of our macro universe will gradually emerge the certainty of our ultimate incapacity to apprehend the whole. Understanding the working of the parts will never indicate us if the whole, we are such a tiny particle of, is a pink elephant nor, if it really is a pink elephant, how many family members it lives with.
4. On the front of visual representations our confrontation with Chinese philosophy and Xieyi painting (writing down the meaning) will help us reassess the link between knowledge and the act of painting and ultimately its societal function. Xieyi painting was never a specialization as such. It was a practice by the men of knowledge on a par with music, philosophy, history, strategy and other.

A vision is slowly sinking into my mind; under the urgent necessity of clarifying his own role the artist is slowly weaving the dress he'll be wearing as a kind of shaman for postmodern times.

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Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

What is modernism after all?

When placed in a societal perspective (economic, social and cultural history) it seems to me that the seeds of modernism started to sprout with the plunder of Middle-Eastern luxuries during the crusades and the flow of trade that ensued along the following centuries.
By the 15th, 16th centuries, art was transitioning in Europe from being exclusively at the service of religion to becoming the illustrator and propagator of the visual signs of modernity. For over a millenium after Constantine imposed Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire, religious stories were the only accepted subjects to be represented in art.



Jan van Eyck Madonna of Canon van der Paele,1436 oil on panel, Musee Communal at Bruges.


From the 15th to the 16th century art goes from an artistic practice describing religious stories at the attention of the followers of the church to the "sanctification" of the bourgeoisie's new values of individualism and private property. Their purchases of works to be suspended on the walls of their mansions (built with the proceeds of their plunders in far lands) gradually overtook the purchases by the church and thus eclipsed the traditional religious visual signs illustrated in painting and the other visual arts. This period is called the Renaissance for it was kind of a revolution to satisfying the emerging needs of the new rich, the enterprising aristocracy and merchants through the recoursce to Greeck pre-christian knowledge that had been lost in Europe during the Middle-ages but had been rediscovered in the rich Muslim university libraries of the Middle-East. The new visual signs in demand were portraits of the new rich and the members of their families, landscapes around their manors and stills. Such subjects will dominate the visual art scene for the next four centuries.



Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Hunters in the Snow 1565; Oil on panel, 117 x 162 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna


Only in the second half of the nineteenth century do things start to change.

A technological explosion (trains, long distance communications,...) that goes in parallel with the emergence of philosophical rationalism somehow engender changing perceptions about what reality is all about. Van Gogh, Gauguin, the impressionists, the pointillists, the fauvists, the expressionists and others are challenging the "way to paint" but force is to observe that they continue to represent the first degree images that project on their retinas and what they see are faces and landscapes.



Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies, July 1890 (Auvers-sur-Oise), oil on canvas, 50.5 x 100.5 cm, Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam


By the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century science is blooming. At the contact of their friends mathematicians Picasso and a few other painters want to change the subject of representation by trecourscing to mathematical therory but in the end the only thing they succeed doing is what fast will appear as a trick (triangles and other abstract forms to represent more than one side of a same subject in one painting). They do not succeed to quit representing the same first degree image that projects directly on the retina. The same can be said of the works of Duchamp and the futurists.



Duchamp. Transition of Virgin into a Bride/Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée. 1912. Canvas 59 x 53.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.


At the contact with Psychoanalysis the early surrealists, at least the thinkers of the movement, (Breton, Masson, Miro, Kandinsky...) experiment with automatism but while they escape the first degree image they fail to theorize a new approach of reality.


The second world war represents a radical turning point.

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.



Cobra Modification, 1949 (Constant with Jorn, Appel and Corneille, on original by Richard Mortensen)


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.



Pollock. Number 8, 1949 (detail) 1949; Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York.


This radical differentiation in creative attitudes on the two sides of the pond is largely due to daily life exposure or no daily life exposure to war barbarity. But the societal disparities between the two sides appear as radically important on creative attitudes as the exposure or not to daily barbarity. 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 will 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 standpoint:

- 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.



Constant. Untitled (Copenhagen), 1949. oil on canvas. 55 x 60 cm.


- The market success of abstract expressionism will be seen as the seeding gound of "whatever is art" and the free fall into the visual absurdities characterizing the end of modern art.


Richard Serra. One Ton Prop (House of Cards). 1969 (refabricated 1986). Lead, four plates, each 48 x 48 x 1" (122 x 122 x 2.5 cm). Gift of the Grinstein Family. © 2006 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


To have a feel of how the works of modernity differentiate from what is to come, here are some exemples of early post modern babble. No doubt this is early post modern learning,for, post modernism will take many decades if not centuries to mature. We have indeed to aknowledge that Post-modernity can only grow into fertile ground and this ground is represented by the completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world. This will undoubtedly take a long time.
See the contrast of these early post modern works with the sad, mostly negative outlook in Constant's works. The latter is the phase of rejection (late evening) that allows for the dawn to set on the experimentation of better days to come. Those works denote a positiveness suggesting the break-down of many of the present-day existing obstacles to individual fulfillment. There is also visibly a reference to knowledge that could be available to all. Today the knowledge accumulated along the generations has to be learned and memorized by each individual. There is no reason to believe that the large mass of knowledge accumulated earlier should indefinitely need to be memorized. Extensions of the brain to computers are already in preparation... Shared and directly accessible accumulated knowledge is indeed one of the most striking aspects that I envision for Post modernity. Imagine how humanity might then conceive of reality. Here are early visual signs of such possibly better days to come.



Werner Horvath: "Hundertwasser's Dream". Oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm.



laodan. Transformation. Acrylic 17" x 22".


If you are interested by this approach you could always read my book artsense where I dwell in detail over this subject.