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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What now in painting? Part 1: The meaning of what to represent.

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.

___________

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

My last 4 paintings

I write much about the meaning and societal sense of visual arts but how does my painting relate to my writings? Take a peak at my last 4 paintings they foreshadow the content of my next post.

Acrylic on canvas. Size: 24" x 30" (61 x 76.5 cm)

Acrylic on canvas. Size: 20" x 24" (50.5 x 61 cm)

Acrylic on paper glued on hard wooden panel. Size: 17" x 22" (43 x 56 cm)

Acrylic on canvas. Size: 36" x 24" (92 x 61 cm)

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

On ART in the future.

This article is a follow-up of:
- What is modernism after all?
- Scientific visualization. Is it art?
- About the ways of seeing reality.
- Soulless science and rationalism
- Etymology to the rescue of sense in art.



In the air of our times something is brewing that we still can't see nor comprehend very well but that is bound to change drastically the way we understand what is reality. Four factors, it seems to me, are the ingredients of that brew:



1. The mis-understanding in Late modernity that "art is whatever".

If we agree with Marcel Duchamp that "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious, it had all been at the service of the mind but this characteristic was lost little by little during the last century" then we have to answer the question "how did art come to forget about its function?". Answering that question imposes us to resolve the problem of the mysterious disjunction between power and knowledge that happened sometime during modernity:

- when the worldviews of the men of knowledge stopped to be imposed on everyone by the men of power. That is when visual artists were freed of their ancestral obligation to illustrate subjects that had always been imposed on them. In this freeing the artists got to illustrate whatever they wanted...
- when freed from an imposed worldview everyone started to consider that their own views were reflecting the "truth" about "reality" better than the ones of the others.

This was indeed the fertile ground out of which societal confusion would grow and develop unhindered into the aberration of late modernity that is characterized by a complete societal imbalance, extreme individualism tilting toward the atomization of our late modern societies. Such an imbalance is deadly. We are indeed acting as if we were atoms of a "material entity" that were going it their own way. But this is pure delusion for the atoms are nothing on their own. The nature of their being is no more than to be a particle of the "material entity" they are a part of. That is what gives sense to their own existence. Going it their own way the atoms would only succeed to destroy the "material entity" they are a part of which would be synonymous with their collective suicide.

The history of visual arts after the second world war follows that path toward atomization and it is in this particular context that the art market imposed its rules of value. Those are rules of financial value that imposed themselves over an atomized visual art landscape wherein the idea that "whatever is art" finally led to that other idea that "art is dead" for the only reason of the loss of any societal functionality. In Danto's words "Art today is produced in an art world unstructured by any master narrative at all, though of course there remains in artistic consciousness the knowledge of the narratives that no longer apply". From the recognition of the disappearance of any societal functionality at all Danto then concludes: "I myself argue here and in a number of places, that the end of art has come, meaning that the narrative generated by the concept has come to its internally projected end". (note 1)

At that point "whatever is art" became the norm in the game of visual art creation... but it seems to me that the theoretical foundations bringing about "whatever is art" are ultimately very thin and fragile.

Through the whole timespan of human history visual arts have always been a function of society.
I mean that our visual sense is the most powerful sensor that we humans have at our disposal and societies needing some gluing of the individuals that compose them, through the sharing of a common worldview, in order to possibly achieve their reproduction, well because those reasons, the men of knowledge who produced or held the keys of the common worldview of a given society used images to convey the content of their worldview for easy sharing by all the other members of their society. This process has been going on since the beginning of the history of mankind till sometime around 1900 in the Western world and I posit that the necessity of this process has not vanished, that on the contrary, it has never been more urgently needed than in late modern societies.

The question that arises then is "what is the worldview" that should be illustrated by visual artists today? Furthermore where are the men of knowledge of our times? In short the answer is that, if there are still some real men of knowledge, societal atomization has put them on a level playing field with all kinds of charlatans and their worldview is being overshadowed by the noise and furry of the cacophony resulting from the public debate.

In this particular societal context visual artists are like being blinded. I posit that the only and exclusive answer to this blinding is knowledge about the workings of our societies and the road to the future they are on presently.



2. Scientific imaging is confronting us with an exponential rise in realist images of things our eyes can't see directly.

The complexification of the content of available knowings often gives to an image a higher communicational trust or skill than a thousand words. Scientific literature thus logically embraced the trend with no restraint. Such images accessed through the lens of a telescope give us views on the macro realm, accessed through different kind of lenses they also give us views from the micro realm or simply of abstract thinking or of complex processes. All this has been rendered possible by our use of electronic microscopes and telescopes or databases and mind mapping software or new digital captioning technologies that appeared along the last two decades.

Technology liberated us from the limitation of our visual sensors (after all they were only tools given to us for assuring our individual survival) and multiplied the scope and breadth of our observation field. We are no longer bound exclusively by what our eyes see and their transmission of signals to the brain for it to process orders for the defense of the body. The brain is now, directly or indirectly, creating images for the eyes to see allowing them to discover dimensions of reality that were inaccessible to them before.

With the detachment of only a very short period of time since such images became accessible to the public we nevertheless already had the chance to become aware of the fact that such images are ushering us into a whole new visual dimension that somehow reflects the futility of traditional first degree images, realist photos or paintings of landscapes, portraits and stills.

The newly gained profound depth of comprehension about reality, that we gain from such images, instills in our minds the idea of a very strong positivity emanating from such postmodern realism. Unmistakably this is bound soon to shame all those who theorize, practice and finance the "whatever is art?". We'll then witness, within a relatively short timespan, the fall of "whatever is art" into the dustbin of history in the form of a "liquefaction" of modern art assets that had been thought of so highly by the bureaucrats of the art market.

But far more important than this loss will be the fact that the postmodern realism that I here describe shall be instrumental in devising for us a whole new paradigm about "what is reality".

Here follow some examples of such postmodern realist images.


Composite Crab. Credit: NASA - X-ray: CXC, J.Hester (ASU) et al.; - Optical:ESA, J.Hester and A.Loll (ASU); - Infrared: JPL-Caltech, R.Gehrz (U. Minn


Pinwheel galaxy. Nasa / ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.


Botanical Visualization of Huge Hierarchies. Author(s): Ernst Kleiberg, Huub van de Wetering, Jarke J. van Wijk. Institution: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science - Eindhoven University of Technology


Copyright © 2000 - 2006 AguaSonic Acoustics. All Rights Reserved.


Copyright © 2000 - 2006 AguaSonic Acoustics. All Rights Reserved.


Cystine a amino acids (very small biomolecules with an average molecular weight of about 135 daltons. © 1995-2006 by Michael W. Davidson and The Florida State University All Rights Reserved.


Taurine a amino acids (very small biomolecules with an average molecular weight of about 135 daltons. © 1995-2006 by Michael W. Davidson and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved


The least we can say after viewing such scientific visualizations is that the images they stumble upon are very seductive from an artistic point of view. And what amazes me the most is that those images are often far superior, in artistic terms, than much of the art produced by contemporary artists. Just for the sake of the experience compare the painting here under by Willem De Koning that sold recently for $63.5 million to the images here above. Everyone, not just the art specialist, shall be able to form valid conclusions. I hate the idea of appearing here to downplay a fellow artist, this is not my intention, but I guess that Willem De Koning would have been the first to poke fun at those who throw such amounts of money after that particular work of his and he would also have been one of the first to recognize the importance of scientific visualizations for the visual arts.



Willem De Kooning Revocable Trust/Artists Rights Society, New York. David Geffen sold Willem De Kooning's "Police Gazette" for $63.5 million to Mr. Cohen, the founder and manager of SAC Capital Advisors in Stamford, Conn.



3. The objectification of beauty.

Beauty is most often presented, by the art market bureaucracy, as being contained in the eye of the beholder meaning that it is thus purely a subjective matter.

A few days ago the National Geographic published an article by John Roach titled "Your DNA Is a Song" that should awaken us to the real possibility that beauty, musical or visual, is simply the memorization somewhere inside our DNA of the musical sounds and visual patterns that the principle of life successfully retained along the whole time span of evolution. This comes, kind of, substantiating what I'm writing about in my book Artsense.

Following this idea that visualizations shed more light, and faster, in the brain of the observer than a thousand words biologists started to convert DNA and its components, amino acids and proteins, into musical compositions (see notes 2, 3, 4)

"By listening to the songs, scientists and students alike can hear the structure of a protein. And when the songs of the same protein from different species are played together, their similarities and differences are apparent to the ear. " 'It's an illustration transferred into a medium people will find more accessible than just [text] sequences. If you look at protein sequences, if you just read those as they are written down, recorded in a database, it's hard to get a sense for the pattern.' " (see note 5)

Here are a few exemples of such sound conversions:
- the amino acid scale by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University
- Drosophila Protein by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University
- Heat Shock Protein by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University
- Collagen PBD by John Dunn

One of the most prolific in the field, and an artist on his own, Nobuo Munakata shows that musical sounds can in turn be converted into visualizations and thus help the brain to form an easier interpretation of something that initially seemed quite abstract in words and letters.
Three Faces of Genome Guardian: P53 Tumor-Suppressor Protein (3D, 17.1MB) by Nobuo Munakata.

Those conversions from biological code to sound and then to image are as valid a representation as the language of mathematics or physics or chemistry or biology. They indicate the background noise of phenomena, and also their own conversations. As such those musical and visual conversions are an integral part of our tool-set for describing reality and they suggest that our universal background is interwoven by an infinity of particles and ensembles that are interacting upon themselves like a giant interactive multimedia orchestra that is projecting the sounds and lines and forms and colors in the memory of all its actors.

In substance, I posit that, if we are all attracted by musical beauty it is because it reproduces the harmonics and rhythms of successful evolution and the same goes for visual beauty. By that I mean that visual signs are equally under the determinant influence of all forms and lines and colors that have been successfully retained along the whole evolutionary timespan of the principle of life. All of us humans are thus somehow un-conscientiously under the influence of some kind of automatic pilot inducing us to appreciate the successful evolutionary forms, colors, lines, harmonics, rhythms... and this pilot is our DNA and its genetic code that stores the memory of the entire evolution of life on earth.

We are also, let's not forget that point, induced to abhor all unsuccessful forms, colors, lines, harmonics and rhythms. Such unsuccessful sounds are quite easily recognizable, for, our ears do not seem to tolerate them, as if it were a question of hearing-physicality, while in the visual realm acceptable signs seem more dependent on our cultural build-up that spans tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years back which should explain why our eyes are able to look at whatever. It is indeed our value system that makes us eventually reject an image or a visual sign and not our physicality.

What I write here is not something so radically new. It is only the transcription of an eternal artistic truth into a present day form that grows out of our contemporary knowledge-base. Kandinsky is assuredly one of the thinker-artists who best described this idea of objective beauty. "Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. ... There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, at first closely pursued but later lost to sight, a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age. An example of this today is our sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form." (see note 6)

Kandinsky's idea of internal truths is founded upon a firm conviction that something objective is hidden deep inside all of us. But he very well knew that in his age those internal truths remained hidden and that "this all-important spark of inner life today is at present only a spark."

Whatever the advances of science one hundred years after Kandinsky wrote "The art of spiritual harmony" we still, today, have not grasped the profundity of his intuition.

Notwithstanding our general ignorance it is nowadays a well accepted fact that life is governed by forms, colors, lines, rhythms and harmonics that are not directly accessible to human sensors. We know they are there but that is about all we know.



4. Globalization and the great melting-pot.

"Whatever is art" shall not vanish from our sight like erased by a single swoop of my words nor shall scientific imaging be integrated into the consciousness of all by any more swoop of my words nor shall the objectification of beauty materialize in knowledge made of stone.
Those three seem to be, no more than a sign of the times under late modernity in the Western world which including Japan and some other isolated countries (the North) represent barely 15% of the world population and this figure is bound to decline further in the foreseeable future.

The brew of those three ingredients, in the North, is a process that will be taking a long time before completion. It would be day-dreaming to believe that we'll be given to taste it soon and there is one more complication. Even if we succeeded societally, here or there to near completion of this postmodern brew, force is to recognize that its taste should not be mature, for, if modernity could mature and even reach its late stages within the confines of one, two or three regions, in contrast, postmodernity is a global affair that comes after the completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world. Post-modernity will definitely include much of the thinking and philosophical background of the Chinese, and the same I'm sure can be said of, the philosophical background of the Indians, the Africans, the Arabs, the South-Americans.

What I mean to say ultimately is that the Western intelligentsia's approach towards postmodernity is definitely totally out of touch with the reality of 85% of the world population and in the present times of capitalistic globalization it makes no doubt at all that such a Western-centric vision is doomed. See the visualization of the evolution of the distribution of economic power around the world given in this stunning eight images slide-show of Der Spiegel Online: "Postponed Power: The Rise of China and India"



World in 2005. Copyright Der Spiegel Online


World in 2050. Copyright Der Spiegel Online.

I'm not a divinator, I can't see into the future. But I believe that, out of the process of change that is taking place nowadays within the timescale of the "long history", we can determine the factors that will be most determinant in the shaping of the future of humanity. Some of those factors are already visible for those who care to accumulate the necessary knowledge and who furthermore care enough to look attentively at what's going on around us today and I firmly believe that the 4 factors that I introduced here above constitute the core of what lies ahead in the making of our future visual reality.

As a visual artist I feel that it is my duty to understand the following questions:

- What is art?
Answer: art is the illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day at the attention of their contemporaries. So who are the men of knowledge of our days? I dare to venture that we are like in a "hole" in late modernity not knowing clearly any longer who are the men of knowledge of the day. For sure we all know that the scientists are accumulating vast pools of "knowings" but we also have this confused feel that somehow they do not succeed to transform those "knowings" into workable knowledge that could transform into a worldview to be shared by all.

- What is the knowledge of our days?
"Men of knowledge" are no longer readily available in the North, as was the case since the start of humanity's history till somewhere around 1900. So the only valid answer at the disposal of visual artists is to accumulate by themselves the necessary "knowings" in order to weave a valid knowledge-base that they could then transform into visual signs or signals of the worldview of the future that is starting to form in our days.

Marcel Duchamp said no less when referring to painters as "being dumb as a painter"... The drama of our age in the visual art world is that schools and art academies only teach kids the use of a tool: a pencil, a brush, a computer program or else out of any understanding of what the use of such tools should be set to accomplish. But the problem runs deeper than the education system. It is indeed the whole bureaucracy of the art market that does not get it. The art market pretends it is content driven but very few critics, dealers and even less buyers are intellectually capable of understanding let alone putting a valid interpretation of the working of reality into their words to communicate them to the public and the public art institutions.

Artistic qualities are not being determined by the art market.

Only time shall determine what remains artistically valid half a century, a century or more, from now. But again time is only a convenient way to put things, for, it is the knowledge shared by the people of the future that will in fact determine if a work realized today has its place in front of their eyes. If we are really conscientious of that very fact then I believe there remains only one choice for all those who are active today in the art world and that is to accumulate the necessary knowings to grasp the wave of humanity's "globalizing worldview"... and then to surf on that wave as best as one can.



Notes:

1. Arthur Danto. "After the end of art". Princeton paperbacks. 1997.

2. Amino acids.
Amino acids have the following general chemical structure (C = carbon, H = hydrogen, O = oxygen, N = nitrogen). All amino acids have the same general structure, but each has a different R-group -- the chemical group represented by the designation "R".
The carbon atom to which the R group is connected is called the alpha carbon. See table of amino acid R-groups

3. Proteins.
Amino acids are connected to make proteins through a chemical reaction in which a molecule of water is removed, leaving two amino acids residues (i.e. what's left when the water is removed) connected by a peptide bond. Connecting multiple amino acids in this way produces a polypeptide. Proteins are polypeptides composed of 20 different amino acids.
The linear order of amino acids in a polypeptide is called its primary structure. The primary structure is represented in the protein databases by a string of single letters, like a long word or sentence. The order of letters is the order in which the amino acids were strung together when the polypeptide was synthesized.

4. DNA.
DNA is a two-stranded molecule. Each strand is a polynucleotide composed of A (adenosine), T (thymidine), C (cytidine), and G (guanosine). Each strand has polarity and runs antiparallel in such a way that one strand runs 5' -> 3' while the other one runs 3' -> 5'.
One strand of DNA holds the information that codes various genes; this strand is often called the template strand or antisense strand (containing anticodons). The other, and complementary, strand is called the coding strand or sense strand (containing codons).
The Genetic Code is known as "universal", because it is used by all known organisms. So the genetic code is the code of the principle of life. The universality of the genetic code encompasses all animals (including humans), plants, fungi, archaea, bacteria, and viruses.

5. "A Protein Primer": a Musical Introduction to Protein Structure.
An accessible presentation by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University

6. Vassily Kandinsky. "Concerning the spiritual in art".
Dover publications.1977. (First published in London in 1914 under the title "The art of spiritual harmony")
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Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

Sick art gives visual signs of a sick society

in The Guardian by Jess Smee

In his latest Berlin performance Christoph Schlingensief underlined his reputation as the enfant terrible of the German art world - and now the storm of controversy is about to hit London.

Images from the blood and vomit splattered stage production Kaprow City will form part of his new art installation. The piece, Last Hour, will be shown in a warehouse gallery in east London next Tuesday, he told the Guardian.

Described by its creator as a shrine, the installation features the twisted metalwork of a crashed car and three films, including footage of a long tunnel and paparazzi-style stills of "Diana" taken from the contentious Berlin show.

URL:bad boy of German art heads for London

How to say?
Late modern Western societies are utterly sick so I guess that it is only normal that some are giving out sick visual signs of this societal sickness...

I perfectly well know about the existence of our societal sicknesses but I believe that our present societal reality is only one particularly bad moment in a, all together, long chain of societal changes. So while seeing, daily, the effects of the cancer that is eating our societal constructs I remain nevertheless optimistic that the direction where societal change leads us will in the end appear to be immensely positive for Gaia our mother and for humanity.
For sure this road of societal change is long and... we are all impatient. Our own life encompasses only a small fraction of the timespan of the societal changes leading us from late modernity to post-modernity. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the possibilities that arise, from the interactions between science and technology + the spread of new worldviews as result of economic globalization, are worldchanging and, mustI say, in the better sense of the term... The conscience of those possibilities is what drives my optimism and I know about the risks of collapse along the road but, I have the weakness to think that, our lives are too short to spend in misery vomiting as a consequence of our ruminating about a catastrophe that eventually never will happen

So my own visual approach is to give visual signs of what I perceive are some future trends in our way of understanding reality. I believe, indeed, that our worldviews, in the footsteps of societal changes, are bound to undergo a paradigmic shift.
I prefer to spend my life thinking about those possibilities than to crawl daily in my vomit and this does in no way reduce my conscience of our present societal sicknesses and the real risk of societal collapse along the road.

I guess, in the end, it is a question of personal choice for the artist to determine his own vision of what is going on in the world around him. But there is one thing I'm sure about. Down the road future generations will have no patience for visual signs of present-day vomiting. In the same fashion as most humans today revere VanGogh or other modern works, future generations could eventually recognize themselves in those visual signs that succeeded to capture today the trends along which their own understanding of reality will operate.... Now the question remains that I have no way to ascertain that my own understanding of the presently forming trends about our future understanding of reality will prove to be valid in the future.

In the meantime vomit seems to pay immediately... Charles Saatchi, for one, is paying for it while the search for understanding the paradigmic shift in our understanding of reality that is in the making does not attract much of a following. And so one is given to ask oneself who is the smart one in the end. I don't have a good answer to that question. Money-wise vomitting seems more successfull immediately... but no thank you, this is not for me, I hate vomitting.

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

Scientific visualization. Is it art?

URL: 2006 Visualization Challenge Winners
URL: Slide Show


Cockroach Portrait. David Yager. University of Maryland


A Da Vinci Blackboard Lesson in Multi-Conceptual Anatomy. Caryn Babaian.
Bucks County Community College, Newtown, Pennsylvania