On the road that leads to rationality as we understand it today, we have to point to the crusades as an obliged starting point of any serious inquiry. Basically two factors are unleashed through the crusades: the plundering of Muslim libraries and later the trade between the Middle-East and Europe passing through the Italian city states.
Plundering and trade are different only in the manner but identical in the end, the consequence from both was that very backward Europe acquired the knowledge written down in books stored in Islamic University libraries. Arab universities had stored in their libraries translations of the Greek classics that were unknown about in Europe. Under the keywords "Medieval university" Wikipedia states "The development of the medieval university coincided with the widespread reintroduction of Aristotle from Byzantine and Jewish scholars".
But Arab universities had far more to offer than the Greek classics, Islam had indeed encouraged the search for knowledge in its universities.
Let's not forget that universities were something unheard of in Europe at that time, they started to be erected gradually after the return of the crusaders.
At its conception on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea which was the meeting-point of Greek, Persian, and Indian civilizations, "Much of the genius of the early Muslim intellectuals was grounded in their eagerness to understand and integrate the research already carried out in these disparate societies. Islamic leaders sponsored a vast project of translation, whereby key works by Greek philosophers were rendered in Arabic and so made available to Islamic scientists, thinkers, and engineers in the Arab world and Persia (present-day Iran). Thus supplied with certain philosophical foundations, these individuals were able to improve upon the earlier work and to develop original lines of inquiry. ...Islamic professors at European universities introduced their students to the astrolabe and the quadrant, instruments which Islamic astronomers had used to make their remarkable measurements..."(1)
The knowledge acquired by Middle-age Europe went far further than exposed in this citation. Let's cite among others geography, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, pharmacology, architecture, linguistics and astronomy. Algebra and the Arabic numerals were introduced to the world by Muslim scholars. The astrolabe, the quadrant, and other navigation devices and maps were developed by Muslim scholars and later played an important role in Europe's age of exploration. Trade documents and other techniques of money management gave Europe the instruments to develop trade.
But one of the most important, if not the most important, aspect of this knowledge transmission to Europe was the emphasis on knowledge, the obligation for all Muslims to learn that adopted by Europe will be leading directly to the emergence of the Renaissance."The learned ones are the heirs of the prophets. They leave knowledge as their inheritance; he who inherits it inherits a great fortune... Knowledge is maintained only through teaching."(2)
This message will resonate far and loud in Europe where let's remember only the members of the clergy could read and write. Plunder has certainly been a decisive factor in Europe gaining some knowledge about Islam's material and intellectual richness but the story does not stop there. Mechanisms of trade had to be adopted to establish a regular flow, from the middle-East to Europe, of goods that were highly demanded by the aristocracy and later the new rich merchants. Those mechanisms were the result of the maturation, the rationalization, along a long road of practice at the hands of the Arab merchants in their commercial endeavours between themselves and with the far East. (India, South-East Asia and China) Usage of those instruments has imposed huge changes in the attitudes, behaviors and worldviews of the merchants, the bankers and all those who came into contact with them.
The Greek classics + the knowledge acquired from Muslim universities' + the practice of the rationality of the logical of capital through trade activities, all those will be superposed to the internal development of markets and the medieval cities that has been intensively studied by Henri Pirenne, Fernand Braudel and others. It is not as if knowledge and rationality were introduced in a vacuum, they came and reinforced the development of medieval cities and markets that were already in the making. It is this superposition that is important because it will act as a multiplier.
Universities and the emergence of scientific inquiry will be reinforced by the sanctioning by capital of those who do not play according to its rules in bringing about changes in all aspects of European societies. The integration of the principle of stationary perspective, along the 14th century, will command the visual arts as far as the end of the 19th century. Gradually, scientific studies will displace the traditional power of the church and opportunistic capital investors, confronted with mercantilist necessities, will integrate new technical ways of production helping them to displace imports and more traditional production methods. Change will be gradual with periods of acceleration corresponding to the "great discoveries" and later the "industrial revolution" that brings about the greatest discovery of all, mass production of socks.Mass production unleashes the speeding of change: population increases, urbanization empties the countryside, salarization forces the acceptance of merchandization and the speed of changes accelerates.
(1) Islam in Iran. Hank Sims Humboldt State University.
(2) In traditional sayings of Muhammed Hadith, from the Jami of Muhammed Ismael Bukhari. (Cited from Wikipedia)
2004-12-01
2004-11-28
About technique
Saying that technical mastery confers automatically artistic qualities to a work would be like saying that physical beauty in a person is what makes a person beautiful.
We all know that a beautiful person has a lot more to offer than her/his physical beauty. But let us not fall in the absurd, it is also clear that the absence of technical mastery will never allow a work to become a work of art on the merit of its content only. We all know that an interesting person does not necessarily render a person beautiful but we all also know that an interesting person that is physically beautiful is undoubtedly a beautiful person.
In other words, an artist has to possess some mastery in his technique in order to express himself with ease. Yes that is the point of a mastered technique, the one who masters a technique can express her or himself with ease.
How could one without technical mastery be able indeed to express her or himself unhindered?
We all know that a beautiful person has a lot more to offer than her/his physical beauty. But let us not fall in the absurd, it is also clear that the absence of technical mastery will never allow a work to become a work of art on the merit of its content only. We all know that an interesting person does not necessarily render a person beautiful but we all also know that an interesting person that is physically beautiful is undoubtedly a beautiful person.
In other words, an artist has to possess some mastery in his technique in order to express himself with ease. Yes that is the point of a mastered technique, the one who masters a technique can express her or himself with ease.
How could one without technical mastery be able indeed to express her or himself unhindered?
2004-11-23
Reality = our perception of reality.
If reality is fundamentally inaccessible to us, it turns out then that our relation to reality is limited to our sole perception of what it is all about. Perception of reality is then the central question. Knowing that we are no more than a micro particle of dust of reality we can't but deduce that observing reality implies first and foremost observing oneself. What appears thus in our conscience is that our observation is not neutral. We are the observers but we are also the observed. Here we conclude that our observation of ourself is conditioned in 3 distinctive ways and such a conditioned observation of ourself in turn conditions our perception of reality:
- OUR HISTORY:
# Our culture: from where we come we inherited a way of thinking, a way of seeing things. In other words, our inherited culture determines our observation and our actions. But this is too general an approach to be helpful. We have to distinguish between:
* culture as everyday ways of doing in our direct environment. Our ways of doing, at a given moment in a particular environment, are strongly ingrained in each of us but we nevertheless can relatively easily apprehend those ways through an intellectual effort at understanding.
* culture as civilizational build-up located very deep in the formation of our societies' given ways and truths. Culture as civilizational buildup is an assembling, an addition of our ways of doing at any given moment, in different environments within a larger collectivity sharing some basic ways of life
# Our social reality: where we come from is placing us in a given economic and social environment that determines our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing things, in other words where we come from determines our observation and our actions. We have to distinguish between:
* social reality as civilizational build-up giving our society's "level of development" that imposes the general life conditions and systems of beliefs of all their members. (animism, religions, capitalism)
* social reality as everyday ways of doing that impose our position on the social stratification ladder and the general life conditions that come with this particular position.
- OUR PERSONALITY: our biological origin and our history are giving us personality traits that will be reinforced or weakened at the contact of our daily experiences.
- OUR KNOWLEDGE: our history and our personality will in some way combine and give us a set of instruments for developing our knowledge. Our use of those instruments is largely related to the quality of our daily experiences.
What starts to form in our mind at this stage is the idea that our perception is unique to ourself and that there are thus as many different kinds of perceptions as there are individuals. But this is no proof of any fundamental relativism about reality or the perception of reality. What is relative is only the influences of our histories on the formation of our perception. So we conclude that the better, the richer our knowledge, the less important the influences of our histories appear to be.
Now we know for a sure fact that knowledge has been the preserve of the men of power for most of our human history. In the absence of any knowledge, the influences of our individual histories were determinant in our actions and perceptions and thus the arose an absolute need for a cement to bind us all together into collectivities. This total absence of knowledge could only be compensated by total control by the men of power for imposing the cementing of all.
During our modern age, power has been detached from knowledge or to be more accurate, the men of knowledge got total freedom to dwell in their researches and became autonomous while the men of power transformed into managers of large state systems. As a direct consequence of their autonomization, the men of knowledge lost the support of the men of power in the diffusion of their newly acquired knowledge among the members of society. In other words, knowledge was not imposed any further and thus became more and more unevenly distributed. In this process, the men of knowledge were left to compete for followers with all kinds of charlatans. The lesson here is that knowledge, without the respect it gains from power, can't impose itself upon societies. It should thus not be a surprise at all that, along the modern times, the creators of visual signs detached themselves from knowledge and immersed themselves into an ever wider variety of subjective renderings, all more out of touch with knowledge, with reality than the last.
In sum, it seems to me that, in the absence of an imposed truth, I mean of an imposed perception of reality given as truth, the acquisition of knowledge is the only driver of a possible convergence of human perceptions. The drama is that visual artists seem to be "unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works"(1) and are thus accepting to be pulled far away from the most advanced knowledge of the day, I mean from science and philosophy. This is what is rendering the signs that they produce absolutely in-operational, in other words, their visual signs are not making sense for their societies any further and yes, this is the unmistakable sign of the end of art, at this point art is effectively dead.
Our modern societies are nevertheless not in less of a need for art than their predecessors. On the contrary, the speed of societal change is such that most of us are at a loss to find any sense in our lives. Art is thus a specie that should be in large demand, but the greatest misery of our times is that nobody seems to know anymore what art is all about. And thus follows that nobody understands the need for art as answer to the questions of our societies for sense.
Plunged in such a reality the artist who is conscientious of what is going on finds that his primary role can only be to help clarifying the function of art in our societies. This effort at making sense and at trying to give back its ancestral sense to art passes before his artistic production. There is an urgency out there. But men, what a task! For indeed, can the word of an artist have some weight on a society?
(1) "The Face of Nature Changes as Art and Science Evolve". By CARL ZIMMER. November 23, 2004 in the NYTimes.
- OUR HISTORY:
# Our culture: from where we come we inherited a way of thinking, a way of seeing things. In other words, our inherited culture determines our observation and our actions. But this is too general an approach to be helpful. We have to distinguish between:
* culture as everyday ways of doing in our direct environment. Our ways of doing, at a given moment in a particular environment, are strongly ingrained in each of us but we nevertheless can relatively easily apprehend those ways through an intellectual effort at understanding.
* culture as civilizational build-up located very deep in the formation of our societies' given ways and truths. Culture as civilizational buildup is an assembling, an addition of our ways of doing at any given moment, in different environments within a larger collectivity sharing some basic ways of life
# Our social reality: where we come from is placing us in a given economic and social environment that determines our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing things, in other words where we come from determines our observation and our actions. We have to distinguish between:
* social reality as civilizational build-up giving our society's "level of development" that imposes the general life conditions and systems of beliefs of all their members. (animism, religions, capitalism)
* social reality as everyday ways of doing that impose our position on the social stratification ladder and the general life conditions that come with this particular position.
- OUR PERSONALITY: our biological origin and our history are giving us personality traits that will be reinforced or weakened at the contact of our daily experiences.
- OUR KNOWLEDGE: our history and our personality will in some way combine and give us a set of instruments for developing our knowledge. Our use of those instruments is largely related to the quality of our daily experiences.
What starts to form in our mind at this stage is the idea that our perception is unique to ourself and that there are thus as many different kinds of perceptions as there are individuals. But this is no proof of any fundamental relativism about reality or the perception of reality. What is relative is only the influences of our histories on the formation of our perception. So we conclude that the better, the richer our knowledge, the less important the influences of our histories appear to be.
Now we know for a sure fact that knowledge has been the preserve of the men of power for most of our human history. In the absence of any knowledge, the influences of our individual histories were determinant in our actions and perceptions and thus the arose an absolute need for a cement to bind us all together into collectivities. This total absence of knowledge could only be compensated by total control by the men of power for imposing the cementing of all.
During our modern age, power has been detached from knowledge or to be more accurate, the men of knowledge got total freedom to dwell in their researches and became autonomous while the men of power transformed into managers of large state systems. As a direct consequence of their autonomization, the men of knowledge lost the support of the men of power in the diffusion of their newly acquired knowledge among the members of society. In other words, knowledge was not imposed any further and thus became more and more unevenly distributed. In this process, the men of knowledge were left to compete for followers with all kinds of charlatans. The lesson here is that knowledge, without the respect it gains from power, can't impose itself upon societies. It should thus not be a surprise at all that, along the modern times, the creators of visual signs detached themselves from knowledge and immersed themselves into an ever wider variety of subjective renderings, all more out of touch with knowledge, with reality than the last.
In sum, it seems to me that, in the absence of an imposed truth, I mean of an imposed perception of reality given as truth, the acquisition of knowledge is the only driver of a possible convergence of human perceptions. The drama is that visual artists seem to be "unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works"(1) and are thus accepting to be pulled far away from the most advanced knowledge of the day, I mean from science and philosophy. This is what is rendering the signs that they produce absolutely in-operational, in other words, their visual signs are not making sense for their societies any further and yes, this is the unmistakable sign of the end of art, at this point art is effectively dead.
Our modern societies are nevertheless not in less of a need for art than their predecessors. On the contrary, the speed of societal change is such that most of us are at a loss to find any sense in our lives. Art is thus a specie that should be in large demand, but the greatest misery of our times is that nobody seems to know anymore what art is all about. And thus follows that nobody understands the need for art as answer to the questions of our societies for sense.
Plunged in such a reality the artist who is conscientious of what is going on finds that his primary role can only be to help clarifying the function of art in our societies. This effort at making sense and at trying to give back its ancestral sense to art passes before his artistic production. There is an urgency out there. But men, what a task! For indeed, can the word of an artist have some weight on a society?
(1) "The Face of Nature Changes as Art and Science Evolve". By CARL ZIMMER. November 23, 2004 in the NYTimes.
2004-11-22
On scientism, the leviathan dream.
I wrote earlier that "Art and thinking are not neutral. Artists and thinkers are engaged in shaping a more trueful perception of the world".
In my understanding the world means reality, we live in reality is it not?
But what is reality, what is our world?
It is the web of interactions between all particles and parts of our universe from its micro to its macro dimensions. Its whole and its parts are indeed only temporal dimensions or aspects of a same reality, its own reality. But we should always remain aware of this fundamental fact that what we call our universe is only a concept covering the understanding of our reality at this stage of our human history.
Each epoch has its own concept and understanding and those constitute the cement that binds all the individuals into a collective social being, into a society. Faced with the disappearance of its cement, a society fast disintegrates. Contrarily to what some may think, our modern society has not succeeded to escape or to isolate itself from this immemorial fact of human life.
- Our present day vision of reality is indeed relative, it is no more than one vision among an infinity of possible visions. Our vision of the universe is indeed very limited and perhaps only one of the many facets of a more encompassing entity. Quantum mechanic physicists already imply that our universe is only one of many universes and they use a ready concept for this newer reality, the multiverse. Uni is one, multi is more than one so for the sake of pragmatism, let us conclude that our environment is the verse and that our reality is the web of interactions between all particles and parts of our verse, from its micro to its macro dimensions and at the moment we speak about it.
- Our present day vision of reality, or the importance of it, has been assaulted by the logic of capital that succeeded to establish itself as the ultimate truth of modernity. Everything has been subordinated to its rationality and in the process everything has been merchandised. Visions and knowledge have been relativized, cornered into a marginal societal role and "whatever" has been given prominence because it could make money. But all that resulted is atomized societies on the fast lane of the road towards their disintegration.
We, humans, are only very small actors on the surface of our earth and seen from the macro dimension of our verse we appear as nothing more than a micro particle of dust on the earthly waves that are blown by the versal winds. From this understanding, it appears to me that the only wise attitude, as a human, is humility and acceptance of our insignificance. But we should also be conscientious of our belonging to the verse, we are part of it. All religions and traditional philosophies came to the same conclusions, speaking of the One and saying that we are part of the One and absolute.
I conclude from all this that reality or what we like to call the truth (the One in religions) is absolutely inaccessible to us humans and scientific discoveries change nothing to our predicament. We remain dust even if sometimes we have dreams of being leviathan. The best we can ever hope for is that our perceptions of reality remain in line with the truth or to say it otherwise with what reality is all about. Letting ourselves dwell outside of this line is akin to permissiveness that would ultimately be sanctioned with our falling into the absurd. For what would we find, out of the line of what reality is all about? We would find the illusion of a fake detachment. Detachment is the attitude that we arrive at after having molded ourselves into humility and reached complete acceptance of our insignificance in the verse. Fake detachment is a particular form of detachment, it's the illusion of our absolute detachment from the verse which leads to a kind of euphoric empowerment of the self. But this empowerment is short lived for one can only go so far as the reflection in the mirror of his own image that projects a naked self, down the road of the verse at which point the mirage of empowerment dissolves and one falls into disarray. The possibility of an absolute detachment from the verse is a myth that has been popularized at the margins of rationality by blind-folded believers in the salvation of humankind through science and technology presented as an ultimate rationality that would liberate humans from the chains of nature.
For the best part of the twentieth century, we have indeed been taught that by freeing humankind from all its irrational religious beliefs science was leading us straight into a paradise of materiality where everything can be fixed by mechanic application of scientific solutions. This has been the credo of capitalism as well as of communism. But it did not lead further than merely being a belief, a different version of ideology. Mechanic scientism has indeed always proved to be short thinking, short of the real complexity of reality.
It was in this kind of environment that thinkers and artists were plunged in the twentieth century so it should come as no surprise that the outcome has been very much confusion.
In my understanding the world means reality, we live in reality is it not?
But what is reality, what is our world?
It is the web of interactions between all particles and parts of our universe from its micro to its macro dimensions. Its whole and its parts are indeed only temporal dimensions or aspects of a same reality, its own reality. But we should always remain aware of this fundamental fact that what we call our universe is only a concept covering the understanding of our reality at this stage of our human history.
Each epoch has its own concept and understanding and those constitute the cement that binds all the individuals into a collective social being, into a society. Faced with the disappearance of its cement, a society fast disintegrates. Contrarily to what some may think, our modern society has not succeeded to escape or to isolate itself from this immemorial fact of human life.
- Our present day vision of reality is indeed relative, it is no more than one vision among an infinity of possible visions. Our vision of the universe is indeed very limited and perhaps only one of the many facets of a more encompassing entity. Quantum mechanic physicists already imply that our universe is only one of many universes and they use a ready concept for this newer reality, the multiverse. Uni is one, multi is more than one so for the sake of pragmatism, let us conclude that our environment is the verse and that our reality is the web of interactions between all particles and parts of our verse, from its micro to its macro dimensions and at the moment we speak about it.
- Our present day vision of reality, or the importance of it, has been assaulted by the logic of capital that succeeded to establish itself as the ultimate truth of modernity. Everything has been subordinated to its rationality and in the process everything has been merchandised. Visions and knowledge have been relativized, cornered into a marginal societal role and "whatever" has been given prominence because it could make money. But all that resulted is atomized societies on the fast lane of the road towards their disintegration.
We, humans, are only very small actors on the surface of our earth and seen from the macro dimension of our verse we appear as nothing more than a micro particle of dust on the earthly waves that are blown by the versal winds. From this understanding, it appears to me that the only wise attitude, as a human, is humility and acceptance of our insignificance. But we should also be conscientious of our belonging to the verse, we are part of it. All religions and traditional philosophies came to the same conclusions, speaking of the One and saying that we are part of the One and absolute.
I conclude from all this that reality or what we like to call the truth (the One in religions) is absolutely inaccessible to us humans and scientific discoveries change nothing to our predicament. We remain dust even if sometimes we have dreams of being leviathan. The best we can ever hope for is that our perceptions of reality remain in line with the truth or to say it otherwise with what reality is all about. Letting ourselves dwell outside of this line is akin to permissiveness that would ultimately be sanctioned with our falling into the absurd. For what would we find, out of the line of what reality is all about? We would find the illusion of a fake detachment. Detachment is the attitude that we arrive at after having molded ourselves into humility and reached complete acceptance of our insignificance in the verse. Fake detachment is a particular form of detachment, it's the illusion of our absolute detachment from the verse which leads to a kind of euphoric empowerment of the self. But this empowerment is short lived for one can only go so far as the reflection in the mirror of his own image that projects a naked self, down the road of the verse at which point the mirage of empowerment dissolves and one falls into disarray. The possibility of an absolute detachment from the verse is a myth that has been popularized at the margins of rationality by blind-folded believers in the salvation of humankind through science and technology presented as an ultimate rationality that would liberate humans from the chains of nature.
For the best part of the twentieth century, we have indeed been taught that by freeing humankind from all its irrational religious beliefs science was leading us straight into a paradise of materiality where everything can be fixed by mechanic application of scientific solutions. This has been the credo of capitalism as well as of communism. But it did not lead further than merely being a belief, a different version of ideology. Mechanic scientism has indeed always proved to be short thinking, short of the real complexity of reality.
It was in this kind of environment that thinkers and artists were plunged in the twentieth century so it should come as no surprise that the outcome has been very much confusion.
2004-11-18
Where does the surf land us?
If visual arts have been, for a time during the Renaissance, in the vanguard of change in Europe, in the present times they are somehow out of the picture, marginalized in our societies by the confusion that they themselves help to entertain. Science and technology are indeed the leading shapers of new perceptions of reality. So I believe that the only way out of confusion is for the visual arts to follow in the footsteps of scientific discoveries and produce the visual signs of the new perception of reality that is shaping and emerging out of those discoveries.
- The failure of visual artists to grasp this opportunity is irritating and leading some scientists at trying their own hands at visual arts.(1) One could summarize those artists visions as stationary points of perspective plunging out of the realm of what the eye can see. With the help of microscopes and telescopes they are plunging either towards the micro/nano-scale or towards the macro-scale of the universe. Their photos are showing a visual reality seen from another environment than the environment where our human eyes can operate. The results are often stunning graphically and can't but foreshadow a new perception of reality, a new Zeitgeist, a new worldview that will spread in the conscience of humanity along this 21st century.
- The stationary point of perspective had been abandoned by the "avant-garde" as early as 1900 but science pulls us again inexorably towards visual representations drawn to points perspective. Science gives us today the means of 6 simultaneous points of perspective(2) that unveil a wholly new way of thinking and seeing reality.
- Another approach, more poetic perhaps, is the discovery out of automatism. The surrealists influenced by the early psychoanalysts Freud and Jung tried their hands at automatism, automatic writing and automatic painting but did not explore very far along that path.
In his treatise "On painting"(3), Leonardo often mentions the "admirable inventions" in the clouds, in streams, in dirt, in the irregularities and the shadows on a wall,... but he correlates the ability of the artist to seize the opportunities of those "admirable inventions" with his knowledge base. In other words, what one can see in those "admirable inventions" depends upon what one knows, thus implying that one can't see what one does not know. Furthermore, the possibility to use in a visual creation what one sees depends ultimately upon one's ability to complete the parts "ignored" in the images growing out of the "admirable inventions". Here Leonardo implies the knowledge of the parts that are not given by the "admirable inventions" but also the knowledge of the visual representation technique that is used by the artist.
- Globalisation is one of the facets of our future that will become determinant in the shaping of our daily lives. Art will not escape this fact. How will this turn out is not of our knowing but some trends will emerge that seem unavoidable. I personally think that the traditional Chinese Xieyi approach has the most promizing future, it is bound to revolutionalize visual signs and could thus be one of the prime shapers of the signs of our future worldview that is in the initial stages of development nowadays.
But if science is the leading shaper of reality at the dawn of this 21stcentury, we should nevertheless remain conscient of its limitations and avoid to be enslaved as propagandists of what is most often no more than mechanic scientism. Science is an accumulation of knowings about micro realities and the sheer size of accumulation of such knowings about micro realities is having the effect of acting as a blinding agent upon knowledge. The elimination of this blinding effect is thus an imperative for the artist and this can only be done by integrating scientific knowings into the globalizing mold of philosophy.
(1)Dee Breger
Ken Musgrave
Loes Modderman
Microangela
Molecular expressions
Martha Demenezes
Philip Galanter
Cell Imaging
(2)Book On Perspective Six points allows you to draw the total up, down, and all around scene. It gives students and artists a whole new way of thinking.
(3) Leonardo. On painting. Yale University Press. 2001.
(4) Xieyi painting. Meaning: "writing down the meaning"
- The failure of visual artists to grasp this opportunity is irritating and leading some scientists at trying their own hands at visual arts.(1) One could summarize those artists visions as stationary points of perspective plunging out of the realm of what the eye can see. With the help of microscopes and telescopes they are plunging either towards the micro/nano-scale or towards the macro-scale of the universe. Their photos are showing a visual reality seen from another environment than the environment where our human eyes can operate. The results are often stunning graphically and can't but foreshadow a new perception of reality, a new Zeitgeist, a new worldview that will spread in the conscience of humanity along this 21st century.
- The stationary point of perspective had been abandoned by the "avant-garde" as early as 1900 but science pulls us again inexorably towards visual representations drawn to points perspective. Science gives us today the means of 6 simultaneous points of perspective(2) that unveil a wholly new way of thinking and seeing reality.
- Another approach, more poetic perhaps, is the discovery out of automatism. The surrealists influenced by the early psychoanalysts Freud and Jung tried their hands at automatism, automatic writing and automatic painting but did not explore very far along that path.
In his treatise "On painting"(3), Leonardo often mentions the "admirable inventions" in the clouds, in streams, in dirt, in the irregularities and the shadows on a wall,... but he correlates the ability of the artist to seize the opportunities of those "admirable inventions" with his knowledge base. In other words, what one can see in those "admirable inventions" depends upon what one knows, thus implying that one can't see what one does not know. Furthermore, the possibility to use in a visual creation what one sees depends ultimately upon one's ability to complete the parts "ignored" in the images growing out of the "admirable inventions". Here Leonardo implies the knowledge of the parts that are not given by the "admirable inventions" but also the knowledge of the visual representation technique that is used by the artist.
- Globalisation is one of the facets of our future that will become determinant in the shaping of our daily lives. Art will not escape this fact. How will this turn out is not of our knowing but some trends will emerge that seem unavoidable. I personally think that the traditional Chinese Xieyi approach has the most promizing future, it is bound to revolutionalize visual signs and could thus be one of the prime shapers of the signs of our future worldview that is in the initial stages of development nowadays.
________________
But if science is the leading shaper of reality at the dawn of this 21stcentury, we should nevertheless remain conscient of its limitations and avoid to be enslaved as propagandists of what is most often no more than mechanic scientism. Science is an accumulation of knowings about micro realities and the sheer size of accumulation of such knowings about micro realities is having the effect of acting as a blinding agent upon knowledge. The elimination of this blinding effect is thus an imperative for the artist and this can only be done by integrating scientific knowings into the globalizing mold of philosophy.
________________
(1)Dee Breger
Ken Musgrave
Loes Modderman
Microangela
Molecular expressions
Martha Demenezes
Philip Galanter
Cell Imaging
(2)Book On Perspective Six points allows you to draw the total up, down, and all around scene. It gives students and artists a whole new way of thinking.
(3) Leonardo. On painting. Yale University Press. 2001.
(4) Xieyi painting. Meaning: "writing down the meaning"
2004-11-17
In the air of our times
I have a daily selection of articles about the air of our times and visual arts at In the air of our times; feel free to syndicate the link.
I try daily in that blog to find links to articles relating to Modern and contemporary art. Reality is all about our visual perception and this blog is all about the shaping of the visual arts through our perception of reality.
We breathe the air of our times in a very selective fashion. This blog is such a selection focused on the shaping of contemporary visual arts.
The air of our times is our present day reality and knowledge is our breathing technique that acts as a catalist on our visions on the future.
I try daily in that blog to find links to articles relating to Modern and contemporary art. Reality is all about our visual perception and this blog is all about the shaping of the visual arts through our perception of reality.
We breathe the air of our times in a very selective fashion. This blog is such a selection focused on the shaping of contemporary visual arts.
The air of our times is our present day reality and knowledge is our breathing technique that acts as a catalist on our visions on the future.
2004-11-16
What : image technicians or artists?
Back to history for a while and the emergence of art as some extraordinary feat.
The German art historian Hans Belting published a very interesting book, tracing the history of religious images in the Christian West from late Roman times until about A.D. 1400.
The subtitle of his book says it all: "A history of the Image before the Era of Art" (1) .
Earlier religious image-icons were not conceived of as being art works, they were mere functional tools, communicational tools in the relationship between the clergy and its flock. Let's remember that in all of Europe, for a thousand years after the fall of the roman empire, no lay-person, from emperors down to slaves could read nor write. The only way for the church to sell its story about reality was to recourse to simple images, kind of illustrations on a similar plane as what we find nowadays in children books. The relationship to those images was basically functional, tools for dumb sheep to understand the description of reality as given by the men of knowledge of the day, the clergy. This is the same kind of relationship that children entertain with their image books that they consider as objects of veneration possessing a kind of tangible presence of something as a holy, supernatural reality that is given to them in edutainment form by adults searching to transfer their educated perception of reality into those young brains.
The creators of religious images were considered image technicians, crafters who were only recognized a very low social status. Technically, their images were not conceived, in term of space and time, as focusing from one point. They were illustrations of multiple stories that were considered having occurred not necessarily at the same times.
The concept of art as we know it emerged in the European Zeitgeist only after European thinkers had made theirs the tenets of Greeck classics following the import of copies of their works through the christian crusaders' contact with the Islamic universities that were rich in translations of those works. The fifteenth century witnessed a revolution in thought and science that was led by Copernicus. This is the period of early modern times that sees not only a scientific but a cultural and artistic renaissance emerging, financed by largely increased economic richness, from long distance looting and trade, at the hands of the clergy, the aristocracy and the first merchants.
"Giotto was the first artist of record to understand intuitively the benefits of painting a scene as if it were viewed from a stationary point of view that was organized along a horizontal and vertical axis. ... From Giotto until the modern area, this convention became the standard with each painting representing only one frozen instant viewed as if it were on a lighted, three dimensional stage". (2)
For the next 500 years the stationary perspective model of looking at things will be the imposed form for all visual art works.
Historical progression is like a quantum wave made of energetic and magnetic swirls that are pulling societies forward. Much of my thoughts on this point are borrowed from Dr. Chaim H. Tejman's "Grand Unified Theory: Wave Theory".(3)
"Wave formations are composed of both a pushing energetic loop (swirl) and a pulling magnetic loop (swirl). These swirls are in a constant state of both competition and superposition in vast and minute formations alike".
HUMAN SOCIETY
Historical facts do by no means confirm the primary role of one of the following four factors in the formation of societal change: arts, culture, technology or the economy. On the contrary, history does indicate that at times one of those factors is preponderantly influential but that at other times this same factor is totally absent of the equation. But historians have too often presented a one-sided absolutist vision of change and universities are thus filled with history chair-holders behaving more as faithful clergymen spreading their gospel and arguing between themselves than as scientists.
For example, I do not buy the argument of Leonard Shlain "the radical innovations of art embody the preverbial stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization". Further, on his website, he states that "Leonard Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world"(4). I do not deny some of Shlain's well chosen and convincing examples of an artist's vision that preceded the scientific world's acceptance of a phenomena but I don't see how a system of thought could be formed out of such examples.
The wave model seems better at representing how societies change over time. In this model, it's the interaction between arts, culture, technology and the economy that gives the movement of change and each of those factors have their moment of dominance within their global interaction.
In religious times, the artist was an image technician receiving only very low social esteem, he could absolutely not have been the visionary who pre-verbially sets the stage "of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization" as Shlain describes. This is purely not fact in religious times. In animist times, the shaman or the "men of knowledge" were giving to their tribes a story describing their understanding of reality and how their tribesmen should then behave in consequence. The shaman were also the ones who would then carve or paint those stories for their tribesmen to grasp and remember. Thus the artist was not the visionary, the shaman was.
The determining factor in the shaping of the early modern times has been the crusades that resulted in the encountering by the Western European aristocracy of a far higher civilization than their own. This simple fact then led to plunder, looting and later to the gradual development of long distance trade between the advanced Arab Muslims and the primitive Western European Christian, obliged trade passing through the Italian city-States which explains their early economic and cultural dominance. Looting of material luxuries naturally included books, and so did the Arab translations of the Greek classics and the latest scientific productions of the Muslim universities find their ways to Rome, Paris and other centers of religious power.
It's important at this point not to forget that the members of the clergy were the only Europeans who could read... so the passing of the newly acquired knowledge had to happen at the hands of this same clergy! Now let's also remember that art purchases were also the exclusive privilege of the clergy... so we start to understand how the knowledge about the Greek canons, ratios landed with the image technicians. This knowledge could not land to the scientists, there were no scientists in those times so image technicians were logically the first in applying the techniques learned in the newly acquired books. At this point of our reasoning, permit me a digression, monks and pastors being the only literates it should not come as a surprise that the first generation of Western scientists were coming from their ranks. The new understanding about reality that they gained from those books has without any doubt been very disturbing and destabilizing in their intellectual environment that, let's not forget this, was exclusively confined to the religious documents of the church.
(1). A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
(2). Leonard Shlain. Arts and physics. Simon and Schusters.
(3). Dr. Chaim H. Tejman's. Grand Unified Theory: Wave Theory.
(4). Leonard Shlain. Arts and physics. Simon and Schusters.
Historical facts do by no means confirm the primary role of one of the following four factors in the formation of societal change: arts, culture, technology or the economy. On the contrary, history does indicate that at times one of those factors is preponderantly influential but that at other times this same factor is totally absent of the equation. But historians have too often presented a one-sided absolutist vision of change and universities are thus filled with history chair-holders behaving more as faithful clergymen spreading their gospel and arguing between themselves than as scientists.
For example, I do not buy the argument of Leonard Shlain "the radical innovations of art embody the preverbial stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization". Further, on his website, he states that "Leonard Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world"(4). I do not deny some of Shlain's well chosen and convincing examples of an artist's vision that preceded the scientific world's acceptance of a phenomena but I don't see how a system of thought could be formed out of such examples.
The wave model seems better at representing how societies change over time. In this model, it's the interaction between arts, culture, technology and the economy that gives the movement of change and each of those factors have their moment of dominance within their global interaction.
In religious times, the artist was an image technician receiving only very low social esteem, he could absolutely not have been the visionary who pre-verbially sets the stage "of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization" as Shlain describes. This is purely not fact in religious times. In animist times, the shaman or the "men of knowledge" were giving to their tribes a story describing their understanding of reality and how their tribesmen should then behave in consequence. The shaman were also the ones who would then carve or paint those stories for their tribesmen to grasp and remember. Thus the artist was not the visionary, the shaman was.
The determining factor in the shaping of the early modern times has been the crusades that resulted in the encountering by the Western European aristocracy of a far higher civilization than their own. This simple fact then led to plunder, looting and later to the gradual development of long distance trade between the advanced Arab Muslims and the primitive Western European Christian, obliged trade passing through the Italian city-States which explains their early economic and cultural dominance. Looting of material luxuries naturally included books, and so did the Arab translations of the Greek classics and the latest scientific productions of the Muslim universities find their ways to Rome, Paris and other centers of religious power.
It's important at this point not to forget that the members of the clergy were the only Europeans who could read... so the passing of the newly acquired knowledge had to happen at the hands of this same clergy! Now let's also remember that art purchases were also the exclusive privilege of the clergy... so we start to understand how the knowledge about the Greek canons, ratios landed with the image technicians. This knowledge could not land to the scientists, there were no scientists in those times so image technicians were logically the first in applying the techniques learned in the newly acquired books. At this point of our reasoning, permit me a digression, monks and pastors being the only literates it should not come as a surprise that the first generation of Western scientists were coming from their ranks. The new understanding about reality that they gained from those books has without any doubt been very disturbing and destabilizing in their intellectual environment that, let's not forget this, was exclusively confined to the religious documents of the church.
(1). A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
(2). Leonard Shlain. Arts and physics. Simon and Schusters.
(3). Dr. Chaim H. Tejman's. Grand Unified Theory: Wave Theory.
(4). Leonard Shlain. Arts and physics. Simon and Schusters.
Form versus content
Art creation is a kind of marginal activity that in essence is elitist. Artists are seeing themselves as different from the mass of toiling-men this comes as a result of their free dwelling in areas never visited by toiling-men. But this does not in any way imply that toiling-men have no possible reach at art. They have homes and they decorate their walls. But what they put on their walls has a function that is limited to decoration, the content of what hangs on their walls is thus automatically mainstream, something that society at large has interiorized, has accepted as "normal beauty".
Van Gogh who could not sell one painting during his life is thus some 120 years after his death the darling of the masses and his works are accepted as one of the favourite mainstream "wall hangings" worldwide. Imposed worldviews have faded but society is still searching for conformity. New visions are not readily accepted, they need to undergo a process of socialized acceptance.
From this I derive that visual arts encompass works that have to satisfy two separate functions:
- on one side we have art works for the enjoyment of the brain and for diffusing the worldview of the power and knowledge elites.
- on the other side, we have decoration works for interior design and decoration at the attention of the mass market.
In short a distinction has to be made between art and design. They cover two very different social functions:
- In the 21st century, art is an individual undertaking that is unique, that brings some new understanding of ourselves and of our universe, in other words art gives the early signs of how a society is shaping its coming vision of reality. For one, content is paramount in an art work. In that sense, we can affirm that art is a risky undertaking focused on coming realities (remember our state of fast changing realities). For two, buyers of art works are few, they are a cultural elite with some money and viewed from the standpoint of demand the offer of art has to remain very limited to have some prospect of financial return in the future.
- Design is kind of a vulgarization of the spirit of art works at the attention of larger segments of consumers. We could also say that design is the merchandisation process of the substance of art works that will introduce the spirit of the works of art into the interiors of larger segments of the population. But more generally, design attaches no importance to the content of a work, form is indeed paramount in decoration and thus works of art from earlier times that were created foremost for their content, after having gone through a process of socialized acceptance, can become mainstream just for the form of their content. A good example of this process of acceptance of the form of content is given by Van Gogh's body of works that while being absolutely unknown, I mean not understood, by most people, is accepted as a mainstream form and prints of his works are then what help diffuse this form of content in unlimited numbers around the world.
Because nowadays' confusion between art and design, this idea that form is paramount in design succeeded to impose itself to many artists. But this is essentially a dead end road where the proeminence given to form is bound to irremediably destroy the primacy of content that is the essence of art.
This opposition between the primacy of content versus the primacy of form has outlined the debating ground about the nature of art during the last fifty years. Seen from the lenses of universities and through the words of those who monopolize the speaking arenas of our mediatized societies, the debate basically opposed conceptualism versus minimalism or versions of both.
Conceptualism gave priority to the ideas, the concepts expressed in a work while de-emphesizing the materiality of this work. Conceptualists came then to consider that non-merchandable media would extinguish once and for all this firery desire of material possession of a work and thus the concept would be garanteed survival.
Minimalism defined art as being "out of content", residing in the rendering of minimal forms, shapes, colors and textures.
It seems to me that both those approaches are focusing on very narrow segments of one and the same thing, as if they were targeting a beam of light at a particular aspect of a same observed. Not knowing that those contradictory views are derived from images of distinct areas of an identical observed, they happen to present their particular approaches and theories as contradictory views. But in reality both views make no sense, they both fail to realize the globality of what they observe. What they observe is the recurring polarity at work in visual arts: form and content and excluding one of the poles just destroys the whole. What they do is just the same as trying to isolate the negative and the positive poles in electricity, the result is simply meaningless for it lands in nothingness.
Both conceptualism and minimalism are already present in animist arts, in what white men termed "primitive arts".
Totems, as visual signs of their understanding of reality, spoke loud in those times to the people about the respect that they needed absolutely to express for the animals that ultimately would feed them. I guess that Joseph Kosuth the pope of conceptualism was somehow recognizing being in the dark about the reasons for the respect of those "primitives" for art when he claimed that the only role for an artist "was to investigate the nature of art itself... Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is".(1)
With "Art after Philosophy" Kosuth posists that an artwork can consist of any object whatsoever that is enfranchised as art. "Whatever" had found its justification in philosophical terms for as Danto writes, "... now that at least the glimpse of self-consciousness had been attained, that history was finished. It had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And artists, liberated from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all. That is the mark of contemporary art, and small wonder, in contrast with modernism, there is no such thing as a contemporary style".
Here is the point where conceptualism, disguised under the clothes of intellectualism, becomes meaningless. The initial questions were right but the final answer erred.
(1) Arthur C. Danto. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Published in 1997 by Princeton University Press.
Van Gogh who could not sell one painting during his life is thus some 120 years after his death the darling of the masses and his works are accepted as one of the favourite mainstream "wall hangings" worldwide. Imposed worldviews have faded but society is still searching for conformity. New visions are not readily accepted, they need to undergo a process of socialized acceptance.
From this I derive that visual arts encompass works that have to satisfy two separate functions:
- on one side we have art works for the enjoyment of the brain and for diffusing the worldview of the power and knowledge elites.
- on the other side, we have decoration works for interior design and decoration at the attention of the mass market.
In short a distinction has to be made between art and design. They cover two very different social functions:
- In the 21st century, art is an individual undertaking that is unique, that brings some new understanding of ourselves and of our universe, in other words art gives the early signs of how a society is shaping its coming vision of reality. For one, content is paramount in an art work. In that sense, we can affirm that art is a risky undertaking focused on coming realities (remember our state of fast changing realities). For two, buyers of art works are few, they are a cultural elite with some money and viewed from the standpoint of demand the offer of art has to remain very limited to have some prospect of financial return in the future.
- Design is kind of a vulgarization of the spirit of art works at the attention of larger segments of consumers. We could also say that design is the merchandisation process of the substance of art works that will introduce the spirit of the works of art into the interiors of larger segments of the population. But more generally, design attaches no importance to the content of a work, form is indeed paramount in decoration and thus works of art from earlier times that were created foremost for their content, after having gone through a process of socialized acceptance, can become mainstream just for the form of their content. A good example of this process of acceptance of the form of content is given by Van Gogh's body of works that while being absolutely unknown, I mean not understood, by most people, is accepted as a mainstream form and prints of his works are then what help diffuse this form of content in unlimited numbers around the world.
Because nowadays' confusion between art and design, this idea that form is paramount in design succeeded to impose itself to many artists. But this is essentially a dead end road where the proeminence given to form is bound to irremediably destroy the primacy of content that is the essence of art.
This opposition between the primacy of content versus the primacy of form has outlined the debating ground about the nature of art during the last fifty years. Seen from the lenses of universities and through the words of those who monopolize the speaking arenas of our mediatized societies, the debate basically opposed conceptualism versus minimalism or versions of both.
Conceptualism gave priority to the ideas, the concepts expressed in a work while de-emphesizing the materiality of this work. Conceptualists came then to consider that non-merchandable media would extinguish once and for all this firery desire of material possession of a work and thus the concept would be garanteed survival.
Minimalism defined art as being "out of content", residing in the rendering of minimal forms, shapes, colors and textures.
It seems to me that both those approaches are focusing on very narrow segments of one and the same thing, as if they were targeting a beam of light at a particular aspect of a same observed. Not knowing that those contradictory views are derived from images of distinct areas of an identical observed, they happen to present their particular approaches and theories as contradictory views. But in reality both views make no sense, they both fail to realize the globality of what they observe. What they observe is the recurring polarity at work in visual arts: form and content and excluding one of the poles just destroys the whole. What they do is just the same as trying to isolate the negative and the positive poles in electricity, the result is simply meaningless for it lands in nothingness.
Both conceptualism and minimalism are already present in animist arts, in what white men termed "primitive arts".
Totems, as visual signs of their understanding of reality, spoke loud in those times to the people about the respect that they needed absolutely to express for the animals that ultimately would feed them. I guess that Joseph Kosuth the pope of conceptualism was somehow recognizing being in the dark about the reasons for the respect of those "primitives" for art when he claimed that the only role for an artist "was to investigate the nature of art itself... Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is".(1)
With "Art after Philosophy" Kosuth posists that an artwork can consist of any object whatsoever that is enfranchised as art. "Whatever" had found its justification in philosophical terms for as Danto writes, "... now that at least the glimpse of self-consciousness had been attained, that history was finished. It had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And artists, liberated from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all. That is the mark of contemporary art, and small wonder, in contrast with modernism, there is no such thing as a contemporary style".
Here is the point where conceptualism, disguised under the clothes of intellectualism, becomes meaningless. The initial questions were right but the final answer erred.
(1) Arthur C. Danto. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Published in 1997 by Princeton University Press.
2004-11-14
Solid knowledge about reality
Artists are within the best placed to experience this interaction between philosophy and science for the good reason that they are somewhat protected from the dramatic effects of the tornado. I mean that the physical marginality, the isolation that is necessary for the creative act is like shielding them from the trepidation, the non-ending demands on the individuals who are plunged in salarization. In modern and post modern times, it is as if artists were forgotten by society and as a result they can indulge in their inner self and are let free to think and act if they so desire, out of the conventional lines generally admitted by our societies. But we should not jump into premature conclusions, this particular position of the artist does not, by itself, supply the artist with his daily dose of thinking, it only helps create a favourable environment for ideas to sprout. We should indeed remember that sprouting is the act of seeds and those emerge out of maturation with the blooming of an individual specie, plant or human. So someone's possibility to think and to act is ultimately and decisively dependent on the maturation of his knowledge and of his general culture.
I think that in late modern and early post-modern societies, knowledge and culture are acting as the necessary breeding ground for creativity to blossom. I think also that knowledge and culture are somewhat akin to the parapets on the bridge to the promised land of consciousness that is given to our attention by the reflection of the image of the global village in the cosmic mirror. And I bet that recognized artists in the 21st century will be the ones who accumulate a valid base of knowledge, knowledge of their own culture and history, of the cultures and histories of the other people of this earth, knowledge of the scientific understandings of our times as focusing on the micro levels of reality and knowledge of the different philosophic approaches of the people of this earth as focusing on the macro levels of reality.
Knowledge acts as a springboard for creativity, it projects a little further into reality and could redefine the artists and other free thinkers of the 21st century as the potential wise men who first could experience a global consciousness as a result of their integration of philosophical inquiries with scientific methodologies and data.
But will artists size upon this opportunity? This is absolutely not a given fact, it requires indeed much humility, time and perseverance to reflect upon oneself and to study the mysteries of the sky, the earth and the self. Notwithstanding those uncertainties, let's remember that art is something as the production of an expression or if you prefer an impression of the inner feelings and ideas of the artist. So we understand that an artist's productions are intimately related to his knowledge. The better his knowledge base, the better we can expect his production to be. Not advertisement of an ideology but expression of an idea, of a feeling through the use of a technique. In other words, content, the artist's personalized content will find central stage in artistic creation and beauty or ugliness will more and more relate to the content of a work.
It makes indeed no sense anymore in the twenty-first century to continue to photo-paint landscapes, people or whatever when everyone is given to simply use a camera, shoot a perfectly realist image and manipulate its pixels through a photo imaging software. In other words, landscapes and portraits are artistic subjects of a past period in our human history and they somehow transmuted into artistic commodities offered to the masses on the market for interior design and decoration.
It makes also no sense anymore to continue to illustrate the ideological trappings of religious or political half baked truths as it makes no more sense to plunge ourselves into the different distortions of reality as described by the twentieth century observers of the technological alterings of our visions of reality. Cubism, futurism, formalism and other approaches were forms with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. They are the soul of the historic intersection between early-modernity and modernity: relegation to the dustbin of history of the early-modern and search for sense out of the forming of a new scientific and technological worldview in the making. Force is to observe that those approaches did not succeed to abandon the early-modern artistic subjects of the landscape and the portrait, they only adapted the form of their visual representation.
In modernity two antagonistic forces are at play: the art market and the sense of art. The art market trivialises the sense of art by mediatizing the artists and artists searching for sense in art lose themselves in the ideologies of their days. Both those two forces led to total confusion in the understanding of what art is all about. And in late modernity, it seemed as if art had become "whatever is new", original, in the sense of "never done before".
It seems to me that we are today inside the time-span representing the intersection between late-modernity and early post-modernity. "Whatever has not been done before" is in competition with "the search for a radically new sense of reality".
Artists and free thinkers of the 21st century have to place the bar somewhat higher than the futile "Whatever has not been done before". Let's remember that, as I wrote earlier, those of us who are watching the image of the global village in the cosmic mirror are plunged into a whole new world vision that gives us in some way the means to cross the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across the bridge from the present. We artists have to cross this bridge but we should permanently remember that the parapets on the bridge are what is protecting us from falling into the absurd and we should remember that those parapets are made of solid knowledge...
I think that in late modern and early post-modern societies, knowledge and culture are acting as the necessary breeding ground for creativity to blossom. I think also that knowledge and culture are somewhat akin to the parapets on the bridge to the promised land of consciousness that is given to our attention by the reflection of the image of the global village in the cosmic mirror. And I bet that recognized artists in the 21st century will be the ones who accumulate a valid base of knowledge, knowledge of their own culture and history, of the cultures and histories of the other people of this earth, knowledge of the scientific understandings of our times as focusing on the micro levels of reality and knowledge of the different philosophic approaches of the people of this earth as focusing on the macro levels of reality.
Knowledge acts as a springboard for creativity, it projects a little further into reality and could redefine the artists and other free thinkers of the 21st century as the potential wise men who first could experience a global consciousness as a result of their integration of philosophical inquiries with scientific methodologies and data.
But will artists size upon this opportunity? This is absolutely not a given fact, it requires indeed much humility, time and perseverance to reflect upon oneself and to study the mysteries of the sky, the earth and the self. Notwithstanding those uncertainties, let's remember that art is something as the production of an expression or if you prefer an impression of the inner feelings and ideas of the artist. So we understand that an artist's productions are intimately related to his knowledge. The better his knowledge base, the better we can expect his production to be. Not advertisement of an ideology but expression of an idea, of a feeling through the use of a technique. In other words, content, the artist's personalized content will find central stage in artistic creation and beauty or ugliness will more and more relate to the content of a work.
It makes indeed no sense anymore in the twenty-first century to continue to photo-paint landscapes, people or whatever when everyone is given to simply use a camera, shoot a perfectly realist image and manipulate its pixels through a photo imaging software. In other words, landscapes and portraits are artistic subjects of a past period in our human history and they somehow transmuted into artistic commodities offered to the masses on the market for interior design and decoration.
It makes also no sense anymore to continue to illustrate the ideological trappings of religious or political half baked truths as it makes no more sense to plunge ourselves into the different distortions of reality as described by the twentieth century observers of the technological alterings of our visions of reality. Cubism, futurism, formalism and other approaches were forms with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. They are the soul of the historic intersection between early-modernity and modernity: relegation to the dustbin of history of the early-modern and search for sense out of the forming of a new scientific and technological worldview in the making. Force is to observe that those approaches did not succeed to abandon the early-modern artistic subjects of the landscape and the portrait, they only adapted the form of their visual representation.
In modernity two antagonistic forces are at play: the art market and the sense of art. The art market trivialises the sense of art by mediatizing the artists and artists searching for sense in art lose themselves in the ideologies of their days. Both those two forces led to total confusion in the understanding of what art is all about. And in late modernity, it seemed as if art had become "whatever is new", original, in the sense of "never done before".
It seems to me that we are today inside the time-span representing the intersection between late-modernity and early post-modernity. "Whatever has not been done before" is in competition with "the search for a radically new sense of reality".
Artists and free thinkers of the 21st century have to place the bar somewhat higher than the futile "Whatever has not been done before". Let's remember that, as I wrote earlier, those of us who are watching the image of the global village in the cosmic mirror are plunged into a whole new world vision that gives us in some way the means to cross the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across the bridge from the present. We artists have to cross this bridge but we should permanently remember that the parapets on the bridge are what is protecting us from falling into the absurd and we should remember that those parapets are made of solid knowledge...
2004-11-04
The promised land of consciousness
As the technological roads taken in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century spread to all corners, people and societies slowly adapted to those new ways. This allowed for digested changes that time passing appeared natural in peoples eyes even if from a historic perspective those changes appear more like a formidable thunderstorm. Starting after the 2nd world war, technological changes followed an increasingly fast pace and by the start of the 21st century many technological changes have no time any more to make it through all the segments of society before being overtaken by always newer technological approaches. This is a time of non digested changes pulling a riot of social, cultural and economic disruptions that are obscuring our understanding of what we are going through and where we are being led to. In a sense I have this intuition that we have entered the territory of folly. A new concept has appeared recently covering what I'm speaking about: singularity(1). From a historical perspective the present times look like the earlier thunderstorm degenerating into some kind of non ending tornado.
Digested technological changes fundamentally altered our vision of the world but left us perfectly conscient and in control. That was early modernity.
In later modernity, non digested technological changes are breaking down all our points of reference and are thus plunging us into a mental state of profound anesthesia. Deeply unsatisfied we follow the movement of economic and social entropy that plunges the majority of us into political apathy.
Earth distances have vanished and looking in the windows of our computers, TV's and phones we can see how the other people of the world are living (global village). Many of us have not only seen the other through the window of TV and computer, we have actually plunged physically into the other's daily reality and this changed radically our vision. But this is not all, images from the space station help us now to discover ourselves and our earth from a distance (mirror). Soon the most privileged will be offered trips in space for a surf around the earth, sure enough their experience shall have profound transformational effects on their vision of themselves, of mankind and more generally of reality.
Those of us who are already watching the "image of the global village in the mirror" are plunged into a whole new world vision that gives us in some way the means to cross the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across the bridge to the future.
I guess, as for today, only a tiny minority of scientists, thinkers and artists have made the effort to acquire not only a large trempoline of knowledge (curiosity) but who, furthermore, are free enough (unafraid) to imagine and dream what lies ahead of our present day land of folly. And I bet that this vision, of what lies ahead of our present day land of folly, best represents the content of the art works that will really have a lasting effect on the build-up of the coming worldview of humanity. In that sense, I think that the artists who will succeed finding their way today, I mean in visual terms, into this future land of consciousness will be the ones whose visual signs will be remembered for giving the masses (oh whow that is such a maoist term) the visual keys to the door leading into this radically new and global worldview that humanity is in the early stage of the forming process.
But I must point here on the fact that this future land of consciousness can only be attained through knowledge, there is simply no escape to this basic fact. Today is no time for artistic confusion, nor for accepting any further the mercantile confusion coming out of the art market. Crossing the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across the span of the bridge leading to the future can only be done with solid building materials and the only available material to build the bridge and its parapets is knowledge... It would be suicide believing that one can leapfrog the construction of the bridge and its parapets, by trying to fly to the other side of the precipice, it could only result in total intellectual and artistic bankruptcy. I see absolutely no incentive whatsoever in taking that road.
(1)Broderick argues that this century, society can expect a singularity a Spike in the upward soaring graph of historical change, a wall or horizon of prediction beyond which we cannot reliably see. I'm firmly convinced that we already passed that point, at least in societal terms.
Digested technological changes fundamentally altered our vision of the world but left us perfectly conscient and in control. That was early modernity.
In later modernity, non digested technological changes are breaking down all our points of reference and are thus plunging us into a mental state of profound anesthesia. Deeply unsatisfied we follow the movement of economic and social entropy that plunges the majority of us into political apathy.
Earth distances have vanished and looking in the windows of our computers, TV's and phones we can see how the other people of the world are living (global village). Many of us have not only seen the other through the window of TV and computer, we have actually plunged physically into the other's daily reality and this changed radically our vision. But this is not all, images from the space station help us now to discover ourselves and our earth from a distance (mirror). Soon the most privileged will be offered trips in space for a surf around the earth, sure enough their experience shall have profound transformational effects on their vision of themselves, of mankind and more generally of reality.
Those of us who are already watching the "image of the global village in the mirror" are plunged into a whole new world vision that gives us in some way the means to cross the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across the bridge to the future.
I guess, as for today, only a tiny minority of scientists, thinkers and artists have made the effort to acquire not only a large trempoline of knowledge (curiosity) but who, furthermore, are free enough (unafraid) to imagine and dream what lies ahead of our present day land of folly. And I bet that this vision, of what lies ahead of our present day land of folly, best represents the content of the art works that will really have a lasting effect on the build-up of the coming worldview of humanity. In that sense, I think that the artists who will succeed finding their way today, I mean in visual terms, into this future land of consciousness will be the ones whose visual signs will be remembered for giving the masses (oh whow that is such a maoist term) the visual keys to the door leading into this radically new and global worldview that humanity is in the early stage of the forming process.
But I must point here on the fact that this future land of consciousness can only be attained through knowledge, there is simply no escape to this basic fact. Today is no time for artistic confusion, nor for accepting any further the mercantile confusion coming out of the art market. Crossing the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across the span of the bridge leading to the future can only be done with solid building materials and the only available material to build the bridge and its parapets is knowledge... It would be suicide believing that one can leapfrog the construction of the bridge and its parapets, by trying to fly to the other side of the precipice, it could only result in total intellectual and artistic bankruptcy. I see absolutely no incentive whatsoever in taking that road.
(1)Broderick argues that this century, society can expect a singularity a Spike in the upward soaring graph of historical change, a wall or horizon of prediction beyond which we cannot reliably see. I'm firmly convinced that we already passed that point, at least in societal terms.
2004-11-02
21st century influences
In my last post, I concluded that art is the representation of the worldview of the day. This was true in earlier times but is not exactly true nowadays anymore. Today, changes are coming on us so fast that there is no clear worldview anymore that we have the time to describe. Our's is a fast evolving worldview under the impact of:
- scientific breakthroughs in all fields of knowledge. But the really important fact here is the interaction between those breakthroughs that lead to a radically new "worldview" about what is reality. In our Christian Western world, we come from a static view of reality in which all human actions were perceived to be oriented in the direction of an absolute good. A world of the straight line with an end in goodness has been our worldview for 2-3000 years of cultural build-up. This model is shaken up today and the tree of this cultural build-up has been uprooted, it lies there lifeless. From whatever field we look at, we observe converging signs sprouting a new understanding of reality. Complexity, evolutionary chains,... being as one moment in a chain of events, it seems as if our reality became more and more to be seen as a process of change with no particular directionality.
- the integration of the Western Christian based cultural build-up with all other cultural build-ups. Modernity, there is no doubt about that, is an outgrowth of the Western Christian cultural buil-up. Today, we assist at the integration of all the other cultural build-ups into modernity. It's "integration or disappearance" as the Chinese correctly understood.
Cultural dominance emerges out of economic dominance. In our modern area, economic dominance followed by cultural and artistic dominance goes from:
- the Italian city States from the early renaissance sprouting out of the European crusaders' contact with the far, far more advanced muslim lands,
- to Bruges (Flanders) establishing itself as the capital of the early wool industry,
- to Antwerp (Flanders) taking over from Bruges that lost its sea port due to silting,
- to Amsterdam taking over from Antwerp that had been burned down by the Spanish inquisition,
- to London taking over from Amsterdam that crumbled under its overdebtedness,
- to New-York taking over from London that had been bankrupted by its 2nd worldwar effort.
Here we are now at the dawn of the 21st century, a world under US economic dominance trying, unwillingly, to digest the US cultural hegemony. But this image is short-sighted, the US population that represents less than 5% of the world population has to contend with China, India, Brazil and other countries that are fast integrating into the worldview of the rationality of capital. Capital and its rationality, science, have indeed become universals that are unifying the populations of the whole world into a real "global village" in instant communication. This being so, we can already see that soon:
- Beijing shall overtake New-York that will crumble under its overdebtedness (result of an illusory imperial vision that the country has not the means to finance). China becomes the biggest economy in GDP terms well before 2050 and it has also the means to become a scientific and technological world leader for the only reason that it will soon churn out more worldclass scientists and engineers from its universities than all the indusrialized countries together. Then, we could see the Chinese cultural build-up become hegemonic. Their newly acquired economic dominance will reinforce their cultural build-up. Let's never forget that, contrarily to the Western Christian worldview, the Chinese worldview is not in contradiction with our " under science" evolving global worldview. The Chinese cultural worldview gives reality as a process of change with no particular directionality since thousands of years already and this vision has been interiorized in their daily approaches towards medical care, towards diplomacy,... and towards the arts!
In my introduction to this post I stated that "art is the representation of the worldview of the day. ... Our's is a fast evolving worldview". The 2 parameters of change that I cite (science and globalization) are indicating that worldviews are gradually unifying into one global worldview that will give reality as a process of change. Science and philosophy will finally merge and the traditional Western straight line vision with its outcome in absolute goodness will be eliminated from our coming human global culture.
Do you see the visual implications?
- scientific breakthroughs in all fields of knowledge. But the really important fact here is the interaction between those breakthroughs that lead to a radically new "worldview" about what is reality. In our Christian Western world, we come from a static view of reality in which all human actions were perceived to be oriented in the direction of an absolute good. A world of the straight line with an end in goodness has been our worldview for 2-3000 years of cultural build-up. This model is shaken up today and the tree of this cultural build-up has been uprooted, it lies there lifeless. From whatever field we look at, we observe converging signs sprouting a new understanding of reality. Complexity, evolutionary chains,... being as one moment in a chain of events, it seems as if our reality became more and more to be seen as a process of change with no particular directionality.
- the integration of the Western Christian based cultural build-up with all other cultural build-ups. Modernity, there is no doubt about that, is an outgrowth of the Western Christian cultural buil-up. Today, we assist at the integration of all the other cultural build-ups into modernity. It's "integration or disappearance" as the Chinese correctly understood.
Cultural dominance emerges out of economic dominance. In our modern area, economic dominance followed by cultural and artistic dominance goes from:
- the Italian city States from the early renaissance sprouting out of the European crusaders' contact with the far, far more advanced muslim lands,
- to Bruges (Flanders) establishing itself as the capital of the early wool industry,
- to Antwerp (Flanders) taking over from Bruges that lost its sea port due to silting,
- to Amsterdam taking over from Antwerp that had been burned down by the Spanish inquisition,
- to London taking over from Amsterdam that crumbled under its overdebtedness,
- to New-York taking over from London that had been bankrupted by its 2nd worldwar effort.
Here we are now at the dawn of the 21st century, a world under US economic dominance trying, unwillingly, to digest the US cultural hegemony. But this image is short-sighted, the US population that represents less than 5% of the world population has to contend with China, India, Brazil and other countries that are fast integrating into the worldview of the rationality of capital. Capital and its rationality, science, have indeed become universals that are unifying the populations of the whole world into a real "global village" in instant communication. This being so, we can already see that soon:
- Beijing shall overtake New-York that will crumble under its overdebtedness (result of an illusory imperial vision that the country has not the means to finance). China becomes the biggest economy in GDP terms well before 2050 and it has also the means to become a scientific and technological world leader for the only reason that it will soon churn out more worldclass scientists and engineers from its universities than all the indusrialized countries together. Then, we could see the Chinese cultural build-up become hegemonic. Their newly acquired economic dominance will reinforce their cultural build-up. Let's never forget that, contrarily to the Western Christian worldview, the Chinese worldview is not in contradiction with our " under science" evolving global worldview. The Chinese cultural worldview gives reality as a process of change with no particular directionality since thousands of years already and this vision has been interiorized in their daily approaches towards medical care, towards diplomacy,... and towards the arts!
In my introduction to this post I stated that "art is the representation of the worldview of the day. ... Our's is a fast evolving worldview". The 2 parameters of change that I cite (science and globalization) are indicating that worldviews are gradually unifying into one global worldview that will give reality as a process of change. Science and philosophy will finally merge and the traditional Western straight line vision with its outcome in absolute goodness will be eliminated from our coming human global culture.
Do you see the visual implications?
2004-10-31
After the pictures, the words.
In the last months, I gave copy of 49 of my works.
Those of you who followed my daily, or about daily, presentations know already that this year, I concentrated on the painting of a serie of acrylics of which I posted copy of the first 24. I'am still working on 8 more. I call this acrylic serie my ARTSENSE collection for it accompanies or should I say, it is accompanied by a book that I titled ARTSENSE. You can read the introduction and the table of content by clicking the copy of the black rectangle coverpage of ARTSENSE that is located in the upper left corner of your display.
The ARTSENSE collection of 32 paintings goes hand in hand with the book, indeed, they both relate to the same subject: my sense of what art will be all about in the 21st century. Whow this is a word that will draw much scepticism, I bet.
So what is art going to be all about in the 21st century?
As a simple answer to that question I would point:
FIRST, to the history of art that illustrates the perdurance of an identical meaning of art for individuals and societies alike along the tens of thousands of years going back to the origin of humanity. Art has indeed played as illustrator or as diffusor, at the attention of the individuals in any societies, of the worldview of those who detained the knowledge and power in those societies. This rule has been valid from animist societies to religious societies. In those times, artists were considered as technicians. Painters were considered as image making technicians obeying the orders of their commissioners.
That was bound to break down with the demise of the religious age at the contact of the first emerging abstract system of thinking that would give all those who learn to practice its rational inner working the power of self determination, the power of free examination . This is when artists started to paint for themselves, expressing their personal ideas and feelings about reality.
SECOND, the intellectual power of self determination allows who has this power to devise his own worldview. Artistic substance is about the peeling of reality and this requires the adequate knowledge. Sure enough, as in earlier times, the visual artist had to master a technique at rendering visual images. But the most striking difference with his peers in earlier times, is that the visual artists is not any further being told the substance of the image to be represented. In other words, the painter now has also to fill in the content of the image.
Sure enough, conceiving a whole new worldview is not the same as peeling an orange. Peeling reality is indeed far more complex and requires a very different set of knowledge than what was traditionally required from a painter. So we should thus not be surprised that painters experienced a rude awakening labouring after the watering down of imposed subjects. Their rejection of past ways of doing after the first world war did not automatically lead to the conception and the birth of artistic substance. Most of their pregnancies along the 20th century have only been nervous pregnancies that drove many of them into psychic breakdowns.
THIRD, after accepting this basic fact that art is the representation of the current worldview, the idea of peeling our present reality cries for the knives and brushes of present day knowledge. Do visual artists have such a kind of knowledge? It is a given fact that most don't and are thus left with only 2 alternatives: or give images of past worldviews, or try to impose bullshit as art. Both alternatives have nothing to do with art creation. Images of past worldviews are commodities for the interior decoration market and bullshit should be reserved for the nourishment of dirt.
So what? What is art to be in the 21st century?
I have an advice. Go check the images at the sites that I link to under the title SCIENTIFIC IMAGING in the column on the left. They are images by present day people of knowledge, I mean by scientists. Are those artistic works? Most are not really art works but they are far better at giving us a sense of what art will be in the 21st century than most visual creations given by artists. Sure enough, science is only one approach of knowledge, the other is philosophy and both sciences and philosophy will continue to interact upon each other to generate knowledge.
I gave a personal shot at trying to render artistic images of our times in my acrylics collection. It's a shot, how far was I from the objective, well all of you can decide about that.
Those of you who followed my daily, or about daily, presentations know already that this year, I concentrated on the painting of a serie of acrylics of which I posted copy of the first 24. I'am still working on 8 more. I call this acrylic serie my ARTSENSE collection for it accompanies or should I say, it is accompanied by a book that I titled ARTSENSE. You can read the introduction and the table of content by clicking the copy of the black rectangle coverpage of ARTSENSE that is located in the upper left corner of your display.
The ARTSENSE collection of 32 paintings goes hand in hand with the book, indeed, they both relate to the same subject: my sense of what art will be all about in the 21st century. Whow this is a word that will draw much scepticism, I bet.
So what is art going to be all about in the 21st century?
As a simple answer to that question I would point:
FIRST, to the history of art that illustrates the perdurance of an identical meaning of art for individuals and societies alike along the tens of thousands of years going back to the origin of humanity. Art has indeed played as illustrator or as diffusor, at the attention of the individuals in any societies, of the worldview of those who detained the knowledge and power in those societies. This rule has been valid from animist societies to religious societies. In those times, artists were considered as technicians. Painters were considered as image making technicians obeying the orders of their commissioners.
That was bound to break down with the demise of the religious age at the contact of the first emerging abstract system of thinking that would give all those who learn to practice its rational inner working the power of self determination, the power of free examination . This is when artists started to paint for themselves, expressing their personal ideas and feelings about reality.
SECOND, the intellectual power of self determination allows who has this power to devise his own worldview. Artistic substance is about the peeling of reality and this requires the adequate knowledge. Sure enough, as in earlier times, the visual artist had to master a technique at rendering visual images. But the most striking difference with his peers in earlier times, is that the visual artists is not any further being told the substance of the image to be represented. In other words, the painter now has also to fill in the content of the image.
Sure enough, conceiving a whole new worldview is not the same as peeling an orange. Peeling reality is indeed far more complex and requires a very different set of knowledge than what was traditionally required from a painter. So we should thus not be surprised that painters experienced a rude awakening labouring after the watering down of imposed subjects. Their rejection of past ways of doing after the first world war did not automatically lead to the conception and the birth of artistic substance. Most of their pregnancies along the 20th century have only been nervous pregnancies that drove many of them into psychic breakdowns.
THIRD, after accepting this basic fact that art is the representation of the current worldview, the idea of peeling our present reality cries for the knives and brushes of present day knowledge. Do visual artists have such a kind of knowledge? It is a given fact that most don't and are thus left with only 2 alternatives: or give images of past worldviews, or try to impose bullshit as art. Both alternatives have nothing to do with art creation. Images of past worldviews are commodities for the interior decoration market and bullshit should be reserved for the nourishment of dirt.
So what? What is art to be in the 21st century?
I have an advice. Go check the images at the sites that I link to under the title SCIENTIFIC IMAGING in the column on the left. They are images by present day people of knowledge, I mean by scientists. Are those artistic works? Most are not really art works but they are far better at giving us a sense of what art will be in the 21st century than most visual creations given by artists. Sure enough, science is only one approach of knowledge, the other is philosophy and both sciences and philosophy will continue to interact upon each other to generate knowledge.
I gave a personal shot at trying to render artistic images of our times in my acrylics collection. It's a shot, how far was I from the objective, well all of you can decide about that.
2004-10-28
Modern art 49: ARTSENSE 024
Acryl024. The dawn of order.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
Forms, shapes, color harmonics, textures, rythms, fluctuations, waves and patterns are discernable in the general confusion and will eventually go reinforcing themselves. But the road is still long to reach their complete being, many accidents are still possible that could derail the process in the making.
Irreversibility shows us going forward and uncertainty shows us at the mercy of influences that are out of our sight and out of our ability to forecast.
2004-10-27
Modern art 48: ARTSENSE 023
Acryl023. Order creeping out of chaos.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
In the eighties, scientists visualized reality as a process of unending change. This was without a doubt a radical departure from the traditional approach of causality that we inherited from the Greek scientists and philosophers. Remember Aristotle's “ultimate mover”, conceptualized as a logical stop to unending causalities. Well, the cyclical movement from chaos to order acted as a kind of stop to the traditional vision of a mover behind a cause.
It seems as if the need to stop unending causality disappeared simply as out of the absence of thought for what moved the cycle of chaos to order. What was indeed behind the chaos-order cycle? Was it its internal causalities, in that case the ultimate mover would remain solidly entranched in the observer's psyche? Or was it some kind of acceptance of the old Chinese philosophic concept of Tao that gradually found its road in physical and chemistry hypotheses?
Ilya Prigogine the 1977 Belgian Nobel prize laureate of Chemistry posited that irreversibility and uncertainty are two fundamental features of our universe. Irreversibility is the property of an event which makes reverting back to the state before the occurrence of the event impossible, irreversibility thus implies a movement that goes forward. Uncertainty implies that change is not given by a pre-existing mover but by the reality of the forces on the ground in the system and their environment at the crucial moment of change. Taken together, irreversibility and uncertainty lead to the concept of self-organization.
In Wikipedia self-organization is referred to as a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties.
Here we are thus with a definition of reality that corresponds to the vision of traditional Chinese philosophy.
2004-10-24
Modern art 47: ARTSENSE 022
Acryl022. Hommage to Vincent.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
Man, what a trip his life has been. The guy started to paint, aound his 32nd birthday, somehow as a reaction to what he saw in the art market where he was acting as an agent for a Hollandish art broker. Nothing has changed since the time he decided to leave the art business. The game is always the same. Some have available money that they hope to multiply. Imagine, only imagine for a moment how those guys are thinking. Buying cheap and then hoping to sell for a high multiplicator some time later.
Where is the artistic vision in that game? There is none, there is simply no way that speculators could envision future worldviews in present visual art works. First they have no clue about what art is all about. Art is something objective, it's the representation today of what our human worldview is shaping into. For sure this worldview will be visible, absolutely visible, only after all have interiorized that worldview... Secondly they have no clue about where our world is leading, but this is the absolute subject of art works so how could they possibly be able to detect art works?
Art is not only works of art.
Art is a question of life. It has nothing to do with the mastery of a technique. It has all to do with the ideas and the understanding of the waves of human reality. While Van Gogh who was in crisis tried to find peace in colors, others were consciently focusing on sales. Here is a world of difference: selling on the market now and putting out a vision of what is in the making now. Churning out a vision of what's in the making is depending on living through what's going on in the present. An art work is thus a result of the creator's daily life. If his life is focused on the market, he'll surely have no experience at all of the wave of life, instead he'll for sure know what sells. But let's be more to the point. Van Gogh was living very frugaly, with small money and was thus confronted with the real life conditions of his time. He knew something about misery, he had spent much time with subsistence farmers in Brabant and then with coal miners in Hainaut near Mons and later with artists in Paris. He surely had not the same analytic vision as Marx or Poincare and Curie but he surely had a feel of what daily life was all about. He also travelled long distances, when he could afford to pay, by train, otherwise by foot. Vincent's vision of late 19th century has to be found there. How many critics took the pain to understand what he went through during his life?
Van Gogh was like a sensor of life, totally immersed in his time. He had no grip on greed and prestige, this did not interest him and he thus was open.
His work was about the wave of life in his time. My hommage to Vincent.
2004-10-23
Modern art 46: ARTSENSE 021
Acryl021. Bestowed with grace.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
There are basically two ways to approach reality.
- One is for the observer to position himself at a great distance from what he observes. By so doing, he gains a broad and all encompassing vision of the observed that allows him to understand how the observed changes.
- The other is for the observer to position himself inside what he observes. By doing so, he can zoom on specific areas of the observed and gain some understanding about the inner working of the observed but he so misses to see how the observed itself changes....
Zooming in direction of the microscopic let's one discover the internal working of big ensembles. The first degree image registered on the eyes retina, gives us to see one or more interacting ensembles. After selection of one of those sub-ensembles, one can zoom into it and discover that its internal workings is constituted by smaller interacting ensembles and so on till our zooming instruments don't allow us to visualize deeper. Our instruments will eventually be upgraded and we'll get visuals of a few zooming multiplications but will we ever reach the starting point? Some scientists would like us to believe that we already have or that we'll eventually reach that point. But where is the proof?
Zooming out in the direction of the macroscopic let's one discover that our first degree retinal image is only a small component of larger ensembles. With each zoom-in multiplication we discover our relativity and also our incapacity at reaching the end of the observable. Some scientists would like us to believe that we will reach the ending point of all possible zoom-in and out. But where is the proof? Present day science goes so far as what present day zooming techniques allow us to see. We believe in our capacity at theorizing but we should by now have recognized that our theories have to be adapted each time we reach a higher level of zooming. The idea that we could reach the starting and ending point of the observable seems like an illusion of our self-importance or of our eternity. By comparison, philosophical wisdom along human history remains constant: humanity is seen as passing, humanity's vision is seen as limited and only meditation is seen as reaching out to the whole, to the one.
Words lead us into abstractions out of reach of visual images and thus are finally only very weak instruments at communication. Visual images, I believe, contain an easier access to the observers' inner potential vision.
In "Bestowed with grace", I give my vision about the pattern of life that I best see as grace in movement.
2004-10-22
Modern art 45: ARTSENSE 020
Acryl020. Creative chaos.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
Our reality is ultimately no more than a process of change along the dimension of passing time. Nothing can be called upon that would explain with some scientific validity the stopping of time, nor as starting point nor as ending point. The only limitation of time we can think of is the time of a given thing, a given process, our universe for example or our capitalist rationalism. But all those are no more than moments of wider cycles.
It is not very difficult to understand that our ideological model of capitalist rationalism only corresponds to a moment in the time of human ideological cycles. We know for a sure fact that it emerged out of European primitive violence. Most people have never given a thought to the possibility of its extinction but it makes no doubt at all that capitalist rationalism will eventually be overtaken by another hegemonic ideological form. The cycle of our universe is another matter that is far less known and also known by far less people. The big bang is its starting point and astro-physicists of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) reveal the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty of only 200 million years. The calculation of its ending point is out of our reach. Observations by WMAP indeed recognize our limitations. Real matter, hard visible material in the form of atoms that we know about only represents 4 % of all that is in our universe. Nobody has the slightest idea about the 23 % representing Dark matter nor about the 73 % representing Dark energy...
We humans came to believe in many lofty thoughts but one thing is for sure, reality can't be reduced to one moment on the continuum of time. A moment will irrevocably be overtaken by another moment and thus moments have to be considered as particules of time at our image of particules of matter.
For most Westerners, the moment in our history corresponding to the diffusion of capitalist rationalism in every corner of our societies (1950-1980), appears as being our normality, our reality. Eating cabbage or spagetti means indeed going to the store or the restaurant. Driving to a friend's home is done by car. Everything is paid for with money that we earn working for an office or a factory. This is our never questionned human reality in our advanced societies. "Cela va de soi". But this reality just can't continue much further. Economically advanced societies represent barely 15% of the world population and the other 85% is banging on the door... But to reach our level of development we the "developed" 15% have already very much initiated human extinction! Here we are thus confronted with two fundamental facts that are igniting a dynamic of chaos in the organization and the working of human societies around the world: 85% of the world population want to reach the development of the West.. Western development initiated the mechanism of human extinction.
"Creative chaos" is about our entering into a period of chaos that hopefully should lead to a fundamental rebalancing of the centers of power and the collective organization of humankind. The painting shows forces converging to crack the existing stability.
2004-10-20
Modern art 44: ARTSENSE 019
Acryl019. This bacteria has a gargantuan appetite.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
Nature.
Nature the beautifull dream of romantics is not really romantic. Survival and reproduction are its primary concerns. A little bear is so cute is it not, but his mother has to kill to let him survive and we humans are no better, even if we don't eat meat, we have to terminate the life of those plants that we want to nourish us.
Human societies developed worldviews, made rules, built systems and shaped cultures to soften the rule of nature in order to protect the individuals so as to favor societal development. But along the centuries our memories diluted and we developed many lofty thoughts far from reality (nature). From whatever perspective we look at ourselves, we cannot but recognize that our lofty thoughts do change nothing to this basic reality that we are still animals who convert to the rules of nature as soon as a cultural breakdown occurs. Contemporary examples abound.
It seems to me that an honest assessment of our human condition should thus be our first preoccupation. We are part of nature, we are one of its components. But the rationality of the logic of capital led us to believe that we are outside of nature, that nature is at our disposal. In other words, we live now in the illusion that our culture has syphooned us out of nature and that it then should have bestowed on us the shadow of the "ultimate mover", god in Aristotle's speak.
Our illusions about what we are all about, that is one of my most frightening thoughts. From those illusions we derive our barbarity. The more we advance on the road of our development, the more living species are eliminated from our earth, the more dammages we inflict to ourselves, the higher is becoming the probability that our actions are preparing our own extinction.
Are we really so short-sighted?
Time has come to rediscover ourselves. We are components of nature. Seen from far in the universe, we are no more than bacteries ported on the waves of life on earth.
Poets gave us images of ridicule behaviors. The frog that is sucking air till he gets the size of a bull for example. We are good at this kind of ridiculing those we think of as our inferiors but we don't see the straw in our own eyes.
Nature the beautifull dream of romantics is not really romantic. Survival and reproduction are its primary concerns. A little bear is so cute is it not, but his mother has to kill to let him survive and we humans are no better, even if we don't eat meat, we have to terminate the life of those plants that we want to nourish us.
Human societies developed worldviews, made rules, built systems and shaped cultures to soften the rule of nature in order to protect the individuals so as to favor societal development. But along the centuries our memories diluted and we developed many lofty thoughts far from reality (nature). From whatever perspective we look at ourselves, we cannot but recognize that our lofty thoughts do change nothing to this basic reality that we are still animals who convert to the rules of nature as soon as a cultural breakdown occurs. Contemporary examples abound.
It seems to me that an honest assessment of our human condition should thus be our first preoccupation. We are part of nature, we are one of its components. But the rationality of the logic of capital led us to believe that we are outside of nature, that nature is at our disposal. In other words, we live now in the illusion that our culture has syphooned us out of nature and that it then should have bestowed on us the shadow of the "ultimate mover", god in Aristotle's speak.
Our illusions about what we are all about, that is one of my most frightening thoughts. From those illusions we derive our barbarity. The more we advance on the road of our development, the more living species are eliminated from our earth, the more dammages we inflict to ourselves, the higher is becoming the probability that our actions are preparing our own extinction.
Are we really so short-sighted?
Time has come to rediscover ourselves. We are components of nature. Seen from far in the universe, we are no more than bacteries ported on the waves of life on earth.
Poets gave us images of ridicule behaviors. The frog that is sucking air till he gets the size of a bull for example. We are good at this kind of ridiculing those we think of as our inferiors but we don't see the straw in our own eyes.
2004-10-19
Modern art 43: ARTSENCE 018
Acryl018. The lacemaker.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
Lacemakers nowadays live in China, India or other countries paying less than half a dollar an hour. For sure, some housewifes in the Western world still practice lacemaking, but it's not to put bread on the table.
I spent on average 50 hours on each of my acrylic ARTSENSE serie and I feel some kind of sympathy for modern lacemakers. My situation is different for sure, I'm not obliged to sell out to eat this evening. But if I was in that kind of a situation, I'm not sure that I would even reach the level of wages that are given to MacDonald clercks.
Art is a dead-end economic proposition in rational capitalist societies. It was already the case in Van Gogh's time and it seems not having gotten better since, it seems that it even got worse with the absorption of absolutely everyone in the sphere of influence of the logic of capital. Van Gogh could survive in his time in Provence, there was always a subsistance farmer to give him a piece of bread, some cheese, a glass of red wine and who let him sleep on the hay in the barn. There was always a country doctor to accept to help him out. All that is gone now. There are no subsistance farmers anymore in any part of the Western world, they have been taken over by industrial agribusiness concerns and doctors are speeding from one customer to another if it is not the customer who has to speed to go to the doctor's office.
Nowhere in the Western world can one find a remaining open soul ready to share with a stranger. Accumulation of material possessions freed the genie of fear, fear to lose... I experienced the last years of subsistance farming in Belgium in the fifties. Farmers walking behind the horses pulling their ploughs had all the time in the world. When someone appeared in sight, they stopped the horses and went for a talk. I rediscovered an identical relationship with Chinese farmers in the nineties, they have all the time in the world, they observe what's going on around them, they like to chat and to share what is on the table. They joke and laugh, they seem a lot more happy than the people who have to pay monthy installments for what they have already consumed.
Our societies experience extreme difficulties at recognizing artworks. They are in search of merchandises that generate immediate financial returns. Nowadays, the nearest to a visual art work is an interior design merchandise that is known, accepted and integrated in the collective psyche. A Van Gogh print for example. One hundred and twenty years after his death critics, gallerists, curators and other art specialists eventually came to recognize what the guy brought to the visual art scene of his time but let us never forget that during his life he never could sell one painting. So today Van Gogh's colors, lines and vision is accepted and prints of his works can be seen everywhere. His original oils are out of price, they are worth a lot more than their weight in gold... What an incredible misery!
I spent on average 50 hours on each of my acrylic ARTSENSE serie and I feel some kind of sympathy for modern lacemakers. My situation is different for sure, I'm not obliged to sell out to eat this evening. But if I was in that kind of a situation, I'm not sure that I would even reach the level of wages that are given to MacDonald clercks.
Art is a dead-end economic proposition in rational capitalist societies. It was already the case in Van Gogh's time and it seems not having gotten better since, it seems that it even got worse with the absorption of absolutely everyone in the sphere of influence of the logic of capital. Van Gogh could survive in his time in Provence, there was always a subsistance farmer to give him a piece of bread, some cheese, a glass of red wine and who let him sleep on the hay in the barn. There was always a country doctor to accept to help him out. All that is gone now. There are no subsistance farmers anymore in any part of the Western world, they have been taken over by industrial agribusiness concerns and doctors are speeding from one customer to another if it is not the customer who has to speed to go to the doctor's office.
Nowhere in the Western world can one find a remaining open soul ready to share with a stranger. Accumulation of material possessions freed the genie of fear, fear to lose... I experienced the last years of subsistance farming in Belgium in the fifties. Farmers walking behind the horses pulling their ploughs had all the time in the world. When someone appeared in sight, they stopped the horses and went for a talk. I rediscovered an identical relationship with Chinese farmers in the nineties, they have all the time in the world, they observe what's going on around them, they like to chat and to share what is on the table. They joke and laugh, they seem a lot more happy than the people who have to pay monthy installments for what they have already consumed.
Our societies experience extreme difficulties at recognizing artworks. They are in search of merchandises that generate immediate financial returns. Nowadays, the nearest to a visual art work is an interior design merchandise that is known, accepted and integrated in the collective psyche. A Van Gogh print for example. One hundred and twenty years after his death critics, gallerists, curators and other art specialists eventually came to recognize what the guy brought to the visual art scene of his time but let us never forget that during his life he never could sell one painting. So today Van Gogh's colors, lines and vision is accepted and prints of his works can be seen everywhere. His original oils are out of price, they are worth a lot more than their weight in gold... What an incredible misery!
2004-10-14
About art blogs
NEED YOUR COMMENTS, NEED YOUR COMMENTS, NEED YOUR COMMENTS
____________________________________________________________
I just posted on my other blog "In the air of our times" about what is an art blog.
I wrote the following:
"""Ok guys, reading all of you ART BLOGGERS, it appears as if art blogs were the only preserve of art commentators.
My take is on art creation.
I feel that ART BLOGS cover 3 different categories:
- ART CREATION by artists
- ART CRITIQUE by commentators,...
- ART MARKET by gallerists, merchants,...
Time has come to take back from the commentators the label ART BLOGS."""
In the same post "what is an art blog" (via Todd Gibson from "On the floor") I link to an article by Tyler Green about ART BLOGS. Green is a critic and his words are thus about the sole aspect of CRITIQUE. But he says something quite interesting:
"""I have some friends who write and read literary and book-world blogs. They've had a far greater impact on the book industry than art blogs have on the art industry. For starters, there are a lot more of them. I'm not really sure why there are so many more lit-bloggers than art bloggers—maybe art folks are too busy swilling white wine out of plastic cups."""
Thanks Tyler for this honest admission, your point is indeed crucial. Now a question. Are your friends who "write and read literary and book-world blogs" not CREATORS before being COMMENTATORS?
This distinction is essential I feel.
For, are we primarily interested to read comments about creations or are we primarily interested to read about the creator's take on his creations?
I place my bet on the creator.
For the first time in history, the artist has access to a technique that allows him to speak publicly about his work. For my part the choice, between the voice of the creator or the voice of the commentator, makes no doubt whatsoever. I chose the voices of Van Gogh, picasso, Breton, Hundertwasser and all those anonymous creators' voices that today chat, blog and write on the net. Who remembers about nineteen century critics?
Now don't misrepresent my outburst, a good critique, that means one that shines some knowledge over a creation or over a creator, is always welcome. But sadly to say, knowledge is so hard to come by...
If you know about a visual artist 's blog, please let me know, I 'll post a link. Thanks.
____________________________________________________________
I just posted on my other blog "In the air of our times" about what is an art blog.
I wrote the following:
"""Ok guys, reading all of you ART BLOGGERS, it appears as if art blogs were the only preserve of art commentators.
My take is on art creation.
I feel that ART BLOGS cover 3 different categories:
- ART CREATION by artists
- ART CRITIQUE by commentators,...
- ART MARKET by gallerists, merchants,...
Time has come to take back from the commentators the label ART BLOGS."""
In the same post "what is an art blog" (via Todd Gibson from "On the floor") I link to an article by Tyler Green about ART BLOGS. Green is a critic and his words are thus about the sole aspect of CRITIQUE. But he says something quite interesting:
"""I have some friends who write and read literary and book-world blogs. They've had a far greater impact on the book industry than art blogs have on the art industry. For starters, there are a lot more of them. I'm not really sure why there are so many more lit-bloggers than art bloggers—maybe art folks are too busy swilling white wine out of plastic cups."""
Thanks Tyler for this honest admission, your point is indeed crucial. Now a question. Are your friends who "write and read literary and book-world blogs" not CREATORS before being COMMENTATORS?
This distinction is essential I feel.
For, are we primarily interested to read comments about creations or are we primarily interested to read about the creator's take on his creations?
I place my bet on the creator.
For the first time in history, the artist has access to a technique that allows him to speak publicly about his work. For my part the choice, between the voice of the creator or the voice of the commentator, makes no doubt whatsoever. I chose the voices of Van Gogh, picasso, Breton, Hundertwasser and all those anonymous creators' voices that today chat, blog and write on the net. Who remembers about nineteen century critics?
Now don't misrepresent my outburst, a good critique, that means one that shines some knowledge over a creation or over a creator, is always welcome. But sadly to say, knowledge is so hard to come by...
If you know about a visual artist 's blog, please let me know, I 'll post a link. Thanks.
2004-10-12
Modern art 42: ARTSENSE 017
Acryl017. The pianist.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
My wife Xiaohong is a professional pianist. I often paint while she plays classical music. Listening her play is relaxing, it helps me to forget everything else.
In this composition I try to relate in visual terms my feeling of her at the piano.
2004-10-11
Modern art 41: ARTSENSE 016
Acryl015. Organic life in primitive soup.
DETAIL 1
DETAIL 2
DETAIL 3
DETAIL 4
The slide-show of all the acrylics of my ARTSENSE serie has been installed, if interested click
show
___________________________________
The theory of evolution is universally accepted in Europe and in China, the two places where I spent my initial 50 years. I had never seen someone seriously questionning this theory and I also had never read a study questionning the wisdom of this theory. So my surprise was not small when after living in the US, one of the first shocking things I discovered was that a significant portion of the population rejected this theory for creationism. I had never heard of creationism nor in Europe nor in China so my surprise was great indeed.
In other places along this book, I approach the differenciation between the Greek and Chinese civilizational building blocks and conclude that the Chinese were in no particular need for a logic of the gods. The axioms founding their civilization contain an ample body of logic explaining what reality is all about and how things change. Civilizations that find their foundational building blocks in the Middle-East don't have this luxury, they need to recourse to an outside mover in order to explain reality and change. For Aristotle holds it as an axiom that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes and effects. "That which is the logical starting point of infinite change must be an unchanging substance, causing change but not being subject to change". From this point in the reasonning there is no escape, the "unchanging substance", the "ultimate mover" will be called god.
This is for the conceptualization of Western civilizational building blocks but the "Great Enlightenment" or the rationality of capitalism, after shaking those civilizational building blocks to their roots, threw them overboard and replaced them.
For sure, the rationality of capitalism is only functional, it never defined how to handle the ontological question of Aristotle's "ultimate mover". This is without any doubt the most fundamental weakness of rationality but I believe that being only a functional system of thinking, it had never the conceptual tools to answer that question. Only recently, has science progressed to the point that an epistemological answer is becoming possible to this question of the "ultimate mover". And what is absolutely amazing, in my eyes, is that this becomes possible just at the moment when Western rationality rejoins the Chinese civilizational building blocks.
Science now conceives of reality as a process of transformations. The big bang is seen as the explosion of concentrated energy of a passed universe. This is then followed by a continued expansion of the resulting universe. Life emerges later in the form of unicellular organisms as the result of chemical reactions ignited by "accidental" energy that will expand their complexity by uniting into multi-cellular organisms. My piece "Organic life in primitive soup" is my vision of multi-cellular organisms in competitive growth and lurching towards more complexity.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)