About Laodan (2)

While in Belgium I followed the modernist movance and experienced the style of most of its schools, in China I earned an eyesight on the deafening technical skills of Chinese academic painters. I have to recognize that initially I had difficulties with traditional Chinese painting: Gongbi and Xieji. You need indeed first to have been exposed to Chinese traditional philosophy to grasp what is going on in those paintings. Its practitioners are indeed literati artists who execute expressionistic and gestural strokes to render their vision of the essence of their subject.

I was interested in philosophy, I devoured the classics and started to be attracted by Xieji painting. Basically, in this approach the artist is a thinker who is up to date about Chinese philosophy. Understanding that reality is a process of change at work in all our universe, the artist makes the Tao, the way of life or the spirit of all things and living beings his subject of painting. His conscience and acceptance of how the process of change affects all things and beings let's him ultimately discover the Tao of the object of his painting. Xieyi painting aims to capture the Xi or energetic body underlying the Tao of the represented object. Gu Kaizhi an artist of the Jin Dynasty (c. 345-406) wrote that Xieji is "making the form show the spirit". It is often presented as the aphorism "painting in poetry and poetry in painting". Xieji is also often translated as "writing one's soul" but my preferred translation is "writing the meaning down".

"Writing the meaning down" reflects indeed perfectly this idea of capturing the energetic body of the Tao of the represented object. Think about a mountain, the meaning of the mountain is to be found in the energetic body of its own Tao or spirit. What does that mean, well it means that the artist has to discover, in the first degree image of the mountain that appears on his retina, the way the mountain was formed, how the energy of Gaia molded its shape and being and where this movement is ultimately leading the mountain. In other words the painter, observing as a philosopher, tries to capture the past changes that shaped his subject in its present form and the present and future changes that are already affecting the present form of his subject.

A Xieyi painting is finished in one setting capturing the spirit or the essence of the subject with masterful brush strokes and a good sense of balance in the composition. One can thus understand that a Xieji painting does not start with the act of painting, it starts with observation and painting can only start when the artist has interiorized the spirit of his subject. Some painters could observe a mountain for years before starting to paint. Wow so much for merchandization.

In Xieji painting:
- ... The artist first observes his subject until he captures the essence of it's being, its spirit, in other words its Tao.
- ... Then the artist produces trial after trial of representations of the spirit of his subject.
- ... He will finally stop painting at the trial he feels gives the exact representation of how he sees the spirit of his subject. Each trial is made of simple and bold strokes and terminated within a few minutes. Only the last trial is kept, it is the art work, all other trials are destroyed.

My personal approach towards painting and more generally towards visual arts is somehow the result of the many influences that I underwent along my life. But more particularly, it is the result of the gigantic shock between:
- ... my understanding and practice of European modernism.
-... my discovery of Chinese philosophy and of Chinese visual arts.

It took me all the years between 1986 and 2000 to digest that cultural shock. It's difficult to lay out in a few words the impact of such a worldchanging event. I had already experienced 2 earlier cultural shocks through immigration and than through education but nothing compares with the immersion of a young European in the daily Chinese realities for a period of over 15 years.

Along that uneven road, I have experienced the need to go back to my received ideas they were indeed not satisfying me any longer.

Two fields absorbed my interest and all my time:
- ... the formation of capitalism because modernity is ultimately nothing more than one stage of cultural development along the history of capitalism.
- ... the build-up of culture and the formation of civilizations and more particularly the history of the Chinese civilization and the content and formation of its value system.

After fifteen years of extensive reading and daily immersion in Chinese waters, my ideas were starting to come together and, I felt the time had come for me to try my hands at painting again. I terminated some 10 gouaches in 2001 and then worked on 26 tapestry/rug designs.

By that time Xiaohong and I decided to experience life in the US. The chaos wrought on China by industrialization and the opening of the country to greed had exacted a toll on China's social landscape and also on our energy. We were tired and needed a change of air. Having lived some 35 years in Europe then in China the next 15 years the US seemed a natural choice.

The prospect to complete a journey experiencing the life conditions and ways of doing and thinking in the 3 most active areas on earth at the dawn of the 21st century was a very exciting one indeed.

The quietude and vast open spaces in Wisconsin, where we sat foot, were definitely reinvigorating. A broadband connection kept us in touch with what was going on in Europe and China and then... I came in contact with blogging. I started to post in march of 2003 and gradually an idea built in my mind, why not use those posts as material to write a book. A book had started to gestate that now is not far from to be born.

I spent all of 2004 writing and painting. The act of writing brings about much thinking and my painting underwent the influence of that thinking. The solitude that is imposed on you by the act of writing plunges you on the margins of society where the noise coming out of the world disintegrates and so you are left open, if you are free inside yourself, to always dig deeper inside your thoughts. That's a short but good summary, I think, of the dynamic I went through these last 15 months: solitude, quietude, thinking, writing and painting.

At the end of this peregrination my vision about painting and the visual arts has morphed into some kind of a composite (1): nor modern in the sense of whatever Western modern school nor Chinese Xieyi or Gongbi. Somehow I guess that I took something out of all those approaches, the elements that I felt would allow me to express the Tao of our days.

________________

(1) "Composite materials are combinations of materials from different classes that have properties different from or better than either of their parents", in History of Science and Technology, edited by Bryan Bunch and Alexander Hellemans. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

About Laodan (1)

Some of you questionned me about my identity. I guess the time has come to say some words about myself.

My personal experience in painting dates from my childhood.
Being a unique child painting has always been something of a refuge that was compensating in some way for the need of socialization. The result of Flemish immigration in Walloonia was indeed, for a Flemish child, to drastically limit socialization with Walloon kids and it ensued thus that I socialized mostly with trees, dirt and with paint, with the paint material on the canvas instead of with other children.

I had the exceptional chance to have the great WATKINE (1) as master in my teens. He taught me the love of nature and also the freedom to play with colors. By the time I attended university in Brussels, as young provincial, I was attracted by SOMVILLE (2) and attended some of his classes at the Boitsfort Academy of Arts, I did not expect that 12 years later I would befriend one of his colleagues TIMPER.
The decade between SOMVILLE and TIMPER (3), both culturally Latins, has been the most influential in my life. It has been a kind of jumping out or perhaps of dropout of society's conventions, seeing with Castaneda's (4) Don Juan and learning with Krishnamurti (5) to appreciate the higher plane of harmony's perpetual change.

JIPI (6), the Flemish shaman, showed me how to let lines and colors go where they want free of interference from one self's will. It also was a time of group painting with PIERROT, STEURS and others culminating with free expression at the "BRASSERIE" (7) that in the end pitifully fell in Walloon pessimism. This is when I quit the maelstrom and tried to immerse myself in Belgian society's decision making. But this proved to be too much non-sense for me and I left a few years later to land in China in 1986 where I stayed 16 years digesting the philosophical pleasures of insipidity, learning the taste of water and its natural movement down the slopes.

During those years, oh irony, Xiaohong (8) taught me the roots of European classicism and helped me to appreciate technical rigor which I discovered "en masse" at the hands of Chinese painters.
Today I appreciate a work well done technically but I believe that technique and art remain two different things. You need indeed to master the technique in which you express yourself but this technique does not transform automatically what you express into art.
Without technique what you express seems inachieved and without intellectual content it is as if what you express were shallow.

________________________

(1) Watkyne: Jacques Vandewattyne: Walloon folk-art painter, author of the folk-art manifesto and activist advocating a philosophy of "simple living" .

(2) Roger Somville, Belgian contemporary painter, realist activist wanting to counter the influence of abstract art. He intended to put man at the center of his art. He struggled against the growing tendency of modern painting's loss of sense and its dehumanization.

(3) Paul Timper, Walloon contemporary painter and potter.

(4) Castaneda's works contain descriptions of paranormal experiences, several psychological techniques, Toltec magic rituals, shamanism and experiences with psychoactive drugs (e.g. Peyote). Although they started out with the premise of anthropology, his works became a mixture of story, religion, and philosophy.

(5) Krishnamurti is regarded as one of the greatest religious teachers of all time. He did not expound any specific philosophy or religion, but spoke of the everyday matters that concern all human beings. He belonged to no religion, sect or country, nor did he subscribe to any school of political or ideological thought. Instead, he stated that these are the very factors that divide us from one another and bring about personal and social conflict and ultimately war.

(6) Jipi, Jean-Paul Dhaenens, by the end of the sixties he was professor of painting at the Academy of Ghent but he then left everything to live the life of a shaman.

(7) "la Brasserie": a cultural and artistic center founded in Ellezelles/Belgium in 1980 that attracted many of those creatives personages who were living along the language border from France to well over Brussels.

(8) Xiaohong Huo: Piano professor at "China National University of Nationalities" in Beijing till 1989 when we married.

From Crucial talk to ARTSENSE.

I started the first chapter of ARTSENSE with the question about the artist's need for financial compensation of the time he inputs into his work. Having been a first eye witness, during the seventies and beginning of the eighties, of the extreme misery where an artist can eventually find himself in our merchandization societies I decided not to let myself become the prey of the good will of the market.

My personal approach has then been to make myself financially self-sufficient before to restart painting in 2000. Since my return to painting I guess I spent well over 10,000 hours painting and writing without ever having been subjected to the agonies of having to sell something for covering the expenses of my family. This has assuredly given me peace of mind and total freedom to dwell where and when I wanted as well in painting as in writing.

The market has never been one of my considerations and now that I arrive at the end of this book I can say that nothing has changed. Writing has been a great experience enabling me to clarify my ideas and to discover where those ideas could be leading to.
I'm satisfied that my conclusions are keeping strong and I have the feeling that the long haul historical vision expressed along ARTSENSE has the potential to help anyone in clarifying what visual arts are all about, in any case, it sheds light in my own head and as such the writing experience is positive enough.

I started, in March of 2003, to publish the first draft of my ideas in this blog that now totals some 140 posts. Later I reworked my posts into ARTSENSE. It makes no doubt that I hope to make this book available for all those who could be interested by its content.

I have no clue as to how my PDF version will be received by publishers but somehow I don't care, for, if there is no paper version I'm sure of one thing and that is that this book will always make it in the form of an e-book.
Time will tell this story later.
Now if someone among you who read this post knows how publishing works, I would appreciate to read any advice about how to do with my manuscript in order for it to be published. Thanks in advance.

Conclusions (4)

The age of CoGaH arises: Cosmos, Gaia, Humanity.

Postmodernism is the process of societal globalization whereby the rationality of the logic of capital is being extended as a common way of thinking to the whole world. This may seem very abstract put like that in words but the process is absolutely worldchanging in terms of the daily ways of live of everybody on earth.

Generally speaking this process takes quite different forms in the different geographic areas. It is indeed a big unification of the life conditions around the world. This is also the master subject of the work of Thomas P.M. Barnett who describes the interactions between the "Core" and the "Gap".

Basically the life conditions of the populations of the world are unifying and rebalancing around "a middle-class way of life" (what Barnett describes as a geographic distribution in the Core):

• The populations in Western advanced countries are bound to suffer a decrease in their income and of most of their social rights that had been established as privileges of living in the then industrially dominating West.

  Globalization of capital is driving whole sectors of economic activity out of those countries for the simple reason that the cost structure of their wages is no longer competitive. The transfer of the textile industry to countries of the South is a perfect illustration of that mechanism.

  The result in the countries of the West is invariably a stagnation of real incomes that will be followed by a fall in real incomes. The myth that technology would replace lost jobs with new ones that give highly paid wages is indeed only half true. All lost jobs are never fully compensated by new highly paid technology jobs. The fastest growing employment sector is indeed the service sector where wages are minimum wages that are less well paid then the lost jobs and furthermore technology jobs lowly paid in the South will be competiting with highly paid technology jobs in the north.
  

  This painful trend towards lower income averages is paralleled by a cultural disintegration. In other words "the conflictual change fostering relationship", between the individual and his society that I illustrated in chapter 2.5 of ARTSENSE, is breaking down with the individuals running in all directions as if they had lost their compass.

  The visual artists had been pulled into confusion some decades earlier already and are now on the verge of taking the first step out of confusion towards sense.

• The populations of East-Asia and South America are registering increases in their incomes that gradually will allow their countries to integrate into the hard core of the "middle-class way of life".

  Investments in work intensive productions of goods go to countries disposing of reasonable political stability, good education systems and most important of all where wages are low. At the dawn of the 21^st century the best example of such a country is unmistakenly China which indeed captures the highest input of Foreign Direct Investment.

  This economic growth is followed by an increasing social well-being but this is also accompanied by a very severe social and cultural shock. Traditional culture is being battered under the opening of Pandora's box of greed (1) which allows in the last instance for the flow of commodities. The younger generations are growing up in an "air of the time" that is encouraging individualism and materialism while their parents can't let go the values of their traditional cultures. The cultural shock is furthermore reinforced under the weight of creeping social inequality.

  In such conditions the million dollar question is whether those countries will succeed keeping their societies together. The experience of Europe's industrialization has been a story of political balancing of the interests of the different classes/interests and their representation into the political decision making process in order to avoid social explosions leading to revolutions as the one of October 1917. Even the US did not escape severe social upheavals even if it's society was unburdened by strong traditions.

  In such a fast changing environment the artists are somehow plunged back into the debate that was raging at the dawn of the 20^th century in Western Europe about the necessity to abandon their pictorial traditions. But this is not all of their story they are also under the impact of what Western artists have been doing this last century and this starkly influences their experiences. In one decade they leapfrogged 150 years of pictorial research and all styles practiced in the West are today practiced in China without the Chinese artists having had the need to experience the agonies endured by Western artists in the course of the process of research driving to these styles.

  Their absorption of modernity is thus only very superficial which I believe is not a bad thing in itself for it will not deepen so far their difficulties at going back to the traditional societal functionality of art which is basically identical in China and the West. My bet is thus that we will soon see Chinese, Indian, South American and other nations' artists jump into postmodernity roughly at the same time as Western artists.

• Africa and South-West Asia are experiencing the weakening and often the disintegration of their traditional societal systems and their populations are thus largely living in extreme poverty while having access, at least sometimes, to the window on the rest of the world that is television.

  Such a situation can only lead to a severe shock and simultaneously it also speeds up the flame of the desire to share into the goodies noticed in the window on the world. But those goodies are not coming basically because their societal systems are dysfunctional and unstable.

  Those areas are remnants of Western European colonialism. Their borders have nothing to do with their historical experience they were simply imposed on them by European whitemen who thought they knew better. But it seems that they knew nothing or was it only the desire to divide that motivated their early nation building? The borders set up by whitemen are generally regrouping people who have separate histories, often conflictual histories. Look at Irak for that matter: Shia, Sunni, Kurds and others been lumped together it seems for the only purpose that this assembling would oblige the locals to recourse to British power for assuring order. But order finally reigned in the country only when it was under the dictatorship of an autocrat basing his power on the tribe of his origin, not the best of structures to foster social and political stability and the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment.

  Those artificial nations could eventually be stuck in a permanent impasse not able to assure the necessary consensus between their disparate populations for setting up the conditions that would allow them to start their industrialization. The Gap looks more and more insurmountable indeed.

Sorting out the contradictions of the gap will be a long and messy undertaking but the core of modernity will not stay still and wait it will gradually expand geographically on its margins while simultaneously advancing on the road of postmodernity.

A unifying worldview, in the end, is what will eventually overcome the gap of the South and allow for its transformation into a middle class societal model that will allow for a truly unified world.

It's kind of an intellectual adventure to wish for a description of what comes after a mature postmodern world or in other words what life could be like in CoGaH. The thing is too far down the road and eventually humanity will perhaps succeed, well before reaching that point, to provoke its own evolutionary demise.

But this dream about what comes after postmodernity, if it was at all possible, could nevertheless project some very useful light on humanity's road through postmodernity and as such it would indeed be very enlightening in guiding and orienting our present-day endeavors.

(1) In chapter 2.3. "The opening of the gates" in ARTSENSE.

Conclusions (3)

Postmodernism is starting to shape in front of our eyes as a global "open society" that will unleash the resuscitation of visual arts and will lead humanity into the age of CoGaH: Cosmos, Gaia, Humanity.

Scientific knowings and their imagings will be confronted with the holistic approach of philosophy. The risks related to our passing the threshold of singularity are simply not acceptable any longer and from all the corners of our earth voices are growing louder asking for accountability. We are accountable to the future generations and indeed obligated to leave them a livable environment.

• The knowings and imagings of science are concentrated on the understanding of the particular, the specific. Science, left on itself, is thus incapable at understanding the global picture which is indeed what philosophy is all about. Our hope is thus that science and philosophy will confront each other for their eventual combination could indeed result in a jump of understanding that would eventually reduce the gap between humanity and wisdom.

• From this confrontation real knowledge emerges gradually that imposes itself on all cultures and individuals. This process will be long and chaotic but it is inevitable that the incremental gain in knowledge will somehow bring about the unification of mankind.

• The reinforcement of knowledge unifies the worldviews which in turn allows for the establishing of a hegemonic world culture based on the comprehension and the respect of the real complexity of the principle of change that, in final instance, is our inescapable reality.

Under the weight of the absolute reign of the rationality imposed by the logic of capital borders have been opened for capital to go invest where it pleases and goods to be sold where there is demand for. The old 19^th century theory of free markets and open borders has today gained acceptance around the world and this new reality has been coined globalization. But capital and goods are an affair between humans and when humans come together they socialize and culture starts to form.

• To work as smoothly as possible globalization will have to integrate the principle of the diversity of cultures which in turn will impose the recognition of the principle of philosophic variety.

• For reason of its working functionality at the contact of scientific knowings, while other systems flounder under their contradictions with scientific knowings, Chinese traditional philosophy (1) gains wide acceptance worldwide and gradually becomes hegemonic.

Postmodernism shapes a global "open society" model that establishes the recognition by all of some basic rules. The question here is not a question of voluntarist legal decision making but of the emergence of a changing "air of the time" that necessitates changes in the rules of the societal game.

• From the confrontation and combination of Chinese philosophy with scientific knowings and imaging emerges a universal knowledge. By universal knowledge I mean a knowledge that is scientifically valid and also philosophically consistent.

• The universal knowledge founds "harmony in change" as the general principle of life and societies take to establish systems functioning in self-sustainability on Gaia.

• Humanity in its entirety participates in the building of a global systemic societal "machinery". Basically the models of relationship between individuals and societies are converging establishing individual rights for individuals and social obligations by the individuals towards their society. Morality and righteousness are established once again as the code of conduct that each individual strives to attain.

The visual arts will re-established their historical functionality in society and artists will thus rediscover the sense of the act of creation and create sense in their works out the principles of life and reality.

• Under the impact of the recognition by all of the new and truly global worldview the art market will unmistakably mature and discard greed as the sole principle of artistic recognition. The quality of the visual signs of an artist at representing the shaping worldview of his time will be re-established as the central most important factor in artistic recognition.

• The artists will focus on the creation of visual signs about the knowledge of the day that is bound tomorrow to reflect the worldview of all.

• As a tool easing the comprehension by the individuals of what reality is all about, visual art finds universal recognition and praise. In a sense art recuperates its traditional popular nature.

Humanity explores the cosmos and enters an age of great discoveries without precedent. The truly enormous investments required by that task are bringing nations together. NASA, ESA, Russia, China, India, Brazil and other national space agencies are pulling their scientific and financial resources in a common pot in order to undertake the exploration of far space

(1) What I call the traditional Chinese philosophy is the resulting belief system that emerged out of the interaction over time between Yi-Ching + philosophic Taoism + Confucianism + Buddhism + ...

Conclusions (2)

Modernism is ending with the death of the societal functionality of the visual arts as it had been practiced along 99.8% of the timespan of humanity's cultural history.

• Under the weight of the absolute reign of the rationality imposed by the logic of capital, by the end of the 20^th century, visual arts were completely knocked down in merchandization and as a result a globalizing human culture and the individuals of the world have been thrown into a time of great confusion a time of fragmentation of the traditional worldviews.

• But with the advent of the demultiplication of scientific knowings and their imagings the idea that an artistic awakening could nevertheless be possible is re-energizing the artistic avant-garde that sees hope a-new through our return to art's historical functionality.

  In other words artists are discovering that there is a vibrant life in the creation of the visual signs of the future worldview that is starting to shape in the present.

• But where is the knowledge founding our future worldview? Through all the history of visual arts artists had illustrated the knowledge of the "men of knowledge" of their day at the attention of all the members of their societies.

  But who are the men of knowledge today? Are they the ones who devised the nuclear bomb and who presently are perhaps developing a future biologic, genetic or nanotechnologic time bomb that could eventually annihilate the entire human race? We can't blame scientists for the myopia of the scientific approach but we can imagine how that myopia could be corrected through the lenses of the holistic approach of philosophy. We have nevertheless to conclude that this approach is rarely practiced nowadays.

• In the absence of a recognized and respected group of men of knowledge artists thinkers and scientists have no alternative, if they want to give sense to their works, but to become their own men of knowledge. Specialized knowings have to be put in a holistic context to correct the myopia that they engender.

Conclusions (1)

Since March 2003, I posted 140 times giving a first draft of what is becoming a book titled ARTSENSE. I plan 2 more series of posts before concluding the artsense serie:
- first my conclusions about the content of those 140 posts.
- the second serie shall be about my personal way of painting.
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The following is a trial at projecting out of the heavy trends discovered in the present what the future has in store. The conclusions expressed are thus intended to be prospective.

I will not not be playing here the role of a diviner but I believe that future heavy trends can indeed be uncovered from present day heavy trends and, as such, I have the weakness to believe that predictions make sense and can indeed be very useful.
Furthermore, I follow this idea of Illya Prygogyne about the future: "I believe that what we do today depends on our image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today. We build our equations by our actions. These equations, and the future they represent, are not written in nature. In other words, time becomes construction. Of course, we have some conditions that determine limits of the future but within these limits are many, many possibilities.

Therefore, since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future -utopian visions- play a very important role in present conduct. (1)

In other words our ideas about what the future has in store could look like or be acting as rails along which our present endeavors unfold. What we do today is related to our dreams of what the future should be like. The future is an outcome between multiple possibles and how we dream about it makes us then derive strategies for the present in order to make our dream come true.

What follows is given in this sense of my dream about the future. But don't be mistaken it's not because I'm following a dream vision that my conclusions are unrealistic, they are indeed rooted in present day heavy trends and somehow constitute the last steps along the ladder of this book's presentation of past and present trends.

(1) Beyond Being and Becoming: Interview of Illia prygogine by Marilyn Berlin Snell in the magazine NPQ.

The exponential rise in scientific imaging. (6) CONCLUSIONS

It makes no doubt at all that the sheer size of the present demultiplication of visual images about things that are so largely unknown by the citizens of the world will have an incalculable impact upon the perception of reality and its understanding by future generations:

- scientific imaging is bound to modify our perception of what reality is all about. Those images will be giving to all a visual understanding of aspects of reality that earlier were only accessible to highly educated and specialized people. Something as an innate basic understanding of the complexity of reality will be made possible from the systemic nature of our cosmos to the systemic nature of the microscopic. This basic innate understanding will extend to the patterns present in the real world from the infinitely small to the infinitely large..

- scientific imaging will enlarge the scope of the visual forms and colors that are accepted by humans. Forms that were unknown earlier will gradually be “normalized” in the psyche of all on earth. This abundance and richness of forms and colors is bound to to have an immense effect on future visual representations in the arts and in design.

- scientific imaging will enhance the sense that some “hard-wiring” must be at work deep inside the “mechanics” of change that, in the end, is resulting in the coating of reality under a surface layer made of patterns that are somehow giving us the rhythm and harmony of the lines forms colors and sounds found in our reality.
We experience physically any disharmony in sound in the form of an unease in our ears that can reach the level of a shrillness that we feel could tear our tympanum but we have no such physical experience at the contact of lines forms and colors. It seems that for physical reasons our ears can only accept a narrow harmonic of sounds while our eyes can accommodate any visual shapes and shades.
Here lies perhaps the reason why music in the modern age could continue to fulfill its societal function without falling into excesses leading to death while, not being constrained by limits, the visual arts fell in such excesses that led them to die.
If visuals can't be troubling physically for our eyes the same can't be said for our brains. Visuals can indeed be very troubling for our tastes for our ideas of what beauty is all about. In other words the acceptability of visuals is not a physical question it is a cultural question.
The reason why the visual arts could be pulled so far into excesses becomes now understandable they were on a path of fashion making by marketeers who succeeded in imposing their excesses as the cultural norm of the day. Only greed no pain no cultural gain but in the end the death of the visual arts plunging everybody in a deep confusion.

Jettisoning visual arts out of sense has thus been the fact of a parasitic group of usurpators of the role traditionally devolved to the men of knowledge: the managers marketeers the bureaucrats curators and the groupthink critics. This state of affairs is societally intolerable.
If culture is really the shaper of what is visually acceptable, as I posit, then we have to conclude that those who detain the scientific knowings and those who detain the knowledge derived from the confrontation of scientific knowings with philosophy have a historic obligation towards all of humanity.

The new men of knowledge have to stand up and reclaim their rightful position in society. They have to re-establish themselves as the rightful guides of the producers of visual arts. I know damn well that money has an overwhelming power over ideas in the short term but one should remain conscientious of what is at play here. Knowledge and visual arts are bound in their societal role of shapers of the worldviews of their societies. Nor the power of money nor the ideological power of traditions can resist this natural rule of societal evolution.

Over time the proliferation of images out of the treasure trove of scientific imaging will have a lasting impact on our perception of reality and thus also on the shaping of the future visual arts. The acceptance of scientific imagings will transform the knowledge behind it into a hegemonic culture and its values will be taken over as the common sense values of all.
Thus a consensus culture will develop in which everybody will come to identify the knowledge of the men of knowledge with his own system of belief. The present-time culture sucker power-art triumvirat will not make his mea-culpa but we can bet on it that it will run to make his the new worldview of the time.

The cultural reassessment of the visual arts, that is starting to be engendered today under the pressure of the exponential rise in scientific imaging, is pulling humanity to awaken at the dawn of what will be seen a few centuries from now as the greatest of renaissances, as the unification of humanity under the banner of "the citizenry of the earth".
In the past tribes have been unified under the banner of Nations and then States now we see the day pointing when Nations and States shall be unified at the level of the earth.
How should we coin this new reality of a conscient citizenry of the world, the cells of Gaia?

The exponential rise in scientific imaging. (5)

Science gives us to see further than the first degree image that projects on the retina and "... when it comes to seeing more, science holds a marvelous tool chest of techniques".

Science has indeed drastically demultiplied the potential of first degree images that our retina can absorb. Basically science is making accessible images that our eyes can't perceive by themselves and it thus is enlarging our vision of reality in three directions:

• towards the microscopic,

• towards the macroscopic

• towards the abstraction emerging out of mathematical formulas.

The visual imaging derived from scientific approaches is now transforming what was our visual normality until very recently I mean this first degree image of reality projecting on our retina. It will gradually expand humanity's visual horizons towards the micro and macro infinites while giving us the tools that will allow us to dwell into the patterns of the real resulting from the non-ending changes that constitute the deep reality of our universe.

One thing is for sure we will more and more be inundated under visual signs and images that are not resulting directly from the projection of an "existing" on our retina. I mean the proportion of images that are derived from environments not directly accessible to the human eye but made accessible through the intervention of some technological captioning devices is become absolutely dominant and this will not go without dramatic consequences for the individuals and the societies.
My next post shall be about those consequences.

The exponential rise in scientific imaging. (4) FRACTALS

On December 30, 2004, I indicated the 3 paths followed by the imaging revolution:
- towards the microscopic
- towards the macroscopic
- towards mathematical abstractions
Today I'll concentrate on the path toward the mathematical formulas.
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"Mandelbrot became convinced that a common theme of self-similar structures ran through all of the real-world problems. In 1975 Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures, and published his ideas in "Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension" (translated into English as Fractals: form, chance and dimension in 1977).
He emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models of many natural phenomena, including the shape of coastlines and river basins; the structure of plants, blood vessels and lungs; the clustering of galaxies; Brownian motion; and stock market prices. Far from being unnatural, Mandelbrot held the view that fractals were, in many ways, more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry.
As he says in the Introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature:
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
Mandelbrot's informal and passionate style of writing and his emphasis on visual and geometric intuition (supported by the inclusion of numerous illustrations) made The Fractal Geometry of Nature accessible to non-specialists. It sparked a widespread popular interest in fractals as well as contributing to new fields of science such as chaos theory."(1)

Artists sized with enthusiasm on Mendelbrot's approach and they are churning images out of their programs at the speed of breads baked in industrial baking factories. The profusion of fractal images available on the net is simply astounding.

Notwithstanding the popularity of fractals and other pixel manipulation programs, artists digital works are still not generally recognized as being art works by the managers and the bureaucracy of the arts. It makes no doubt in my mind that digital techniques are nothing more than the brush and pencil of the Middle-Age painter so I do not see how digital techniques could be held at the margins of art for much longer.

some examples of images from the macrocosm

Frax Flame 2. Linda Bucklin

Post Contemporary Art. J. C. Macpherson

Andreas Lober. GALLERY 1

Mystic fish 08. Laodan

(1) About Mandelbrot in Wikipedia.

The exponential rise in scientific imaging. (3) MACRO

On December 30, 2004, I indicated the 3 paths followed by the imaging revolution:
- towards the microscopic
- towards the macroscopic
- towards mathematical abstractions
Today I'll concentrate on the path toward the macroscopic.
______________________________________________________________________________

The launching in 1957 of Sputnik1 by the Soviet Union, as a technical achievement, caught the world's attention and engendered a sprint to space by all the nation-states that had the financial means to enter such an adventure. By the year 2000 4 nations were carrying the bulk of space investments, in order of importance: NASA, ESA, Russia and China.

The exploration of the cosmos and the observation of our planet from space that began some fifty years ago is leading humanity to a new understanding of its place in the evolution of the life cycle and as such is furthering its comprehension of reality. We are coming to realize that the Earth -and all life on it- is part of a much larger cosmic environment and that life on earth is subject to changes and fluctuations that may occur far far away. Space science has discovered that the essential ingredients of life, as well as places that are potentially suitable for its development, are very widely distributed throughout the cosmos.

Space imaging is thus going to directly impact upon humanity's conscience of the interconnectedness and interdependence of life on Earth with the Universe.

some examples of images from the macrocosm

Saturn's rings NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens

Helix Nebula. ESA, NASA

Saturn's rings. NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens

Tarantula Nebula. ESA

The exponential rise in scientific imaging. (2) MICRO

On December 30, 2004, I indicated the 3 paths followed by the imaging revolution:
- towards the microscopic
- towards the macroscopic
- towards mathematical abstractions
Today I'll concentrate on the path toward the microscopic.
______________________________________________________________________________

To observe the very small scientists basically use lenses, light and cameras. From those 3 elements they derive multiple techniques. For example: Scanning Electron Microscopy, Translational Microscopy, Magnifying Microscopy, Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy, etc. A good introduction to all those techniques is available on the site "Molecular Expressions" a treatise on optical microscopy. Olympus America Inc published another very useful pdf document "Basics and Beyond" by Mortimer Abramowitz Fellow, New York Microscopical Society.

In the “Eye of the Beholder, wonders under the lens of the optical microscope” by Emily Harrison, an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN of December 2004, we read: “There is infinite beauty in the world, if only we find the means to see it. And when it comes to seeing more, science holds a marvelous tool chest of techniques. With materials that may be as fundamental as light and lens, the art of scientific observation expands the visible world far beyond the depths and distances our unaided eyes can access. While optical telescopes extend our view deep into space, to distances billions of light-years away from the eye’s everyday demesne, optical microscopes turn our vision inward, taking it to deep inner space. They resolve slivers of the world as small as a wavelength of light, 1,000 times as small as anything we notice in the macroscopic world.”1

Describing their philosophy, the members of the “Eye of Science” state: “Our commitment is to the evidence of scientific investigation but also to the use of color as a creative and harmonious tool to achieve beauty. In the combination of the aesthetics and the science we hope to inspire the public. Day by day, in a world beyond human vision, we explore fascinating forms and structures.” 2

some examples of images from the microcosm

Dust, by Tina Carvalho in MicroAngela

Fossil Antarctic radiolarian. Dee Breger

Bubbles. Loes Modderman

Heineken Lager Beer. Molecular Expressions

(1) American scientific Magazine. January 2005. In the Eye of the Beholder by Emily Harrison.
(2) In "Eye of Science"

The exponential rise in scientific imaging. (1)

The 20th century visual art world has been characterized by trials and essays at surpassing the limitations artists felt landscapes and portraits, those first degree images that project on the retina, were imposing on their creations.
Different schools of thought and style succeeded one another presenting an evolving landscape of the visual arts and eventually the adventure concluded with the death of painting around the 1980th when the art world lost complete conscience of its historical functionality at diffusing the visual signs of the worldview of the day.
Coinciding with the death of painting an imaging revolution was slowly put in motion in the world of science:

- in the underground of university laboratories scientists coupling lenses light and cameras were trying to render in visual images the infinitely small in biology chemistry physics in order to advance their knowledge. The visuals of the infinitely small were so surprising that they appealed to the artistic sensitivity of scientists and artists alike.

- space endeavors, pursued in the footsteps of earlier observations by astronomers, returned to earth a myriad of photographic images from the macrocosm going back in earlier times. The farther the distances the longer those images take to reach earth and it ensues thus that the farther the images have to travel the older will be the reality they represent.

- visual representations are behind our thinking mechanism, deriving the idea that natural phenomena were ordered according to recurring patterns, scientists developed mathematical formulas to give visual representations of such patterns. The visuals resulting from those formulas were so appealing that a scientific tool was born for artists to play with.

What is art. A summary.

Since the beginning of mankind, as far as our eyes can see, that means as far as human history goes, art has been at the service of society. Art and most importantly visual arts acted as diffusers, as spreaders of the worldview of society's "men of power and men od knowledge" towards the members of society at large.
One could somehow think of visual arts as acting in a way very similar as optical devices that distribute the light of a lamp or baffles that distribute sound waves evenly in a room.

• in animist times, shamans, sorcerers or whatever they are called were the ones who shaped the worldview of the members of the group. Their vision of reality was that the sun was at the heart of life, a male (yang) power of creation to be revered. Animals and plants used as forage in everyday life were respected for their power of maintenance of human life. Art served to illustrate those ideas. We moderns have come to call this form of art "primitive arts".... it flourished for tens of thousands of years but has completely vanished lately at the contact of greed that has been unleashed on the remaining animist societies by marketization.

• in religious times, I mean the historical phase of human development that comes after animism, humans revere gods (in the 3 religions of the word a unique god). The men of knowledge, in those societies governed by religions, are the priest, the monks or whatever they are called. They study the religious creed in their teens to diffuse it to all in their adult life. Art in that period illustrates the stories of the creed and gives images of the gods and their inner circle. Religious art flourished for hundreds and in some religions for thousands of years. It is still practiced nowadays but its influence over societies has been largely marginalized by the new ideology of capital, I mean the rationality vehiculated by the logic of capital.
  

• starting with early capitalism in Europe around the 16th century, power in society shifted from the clergy to the new rich merchants and the entrepreneurial aristocrats. Richness in terms of gold and silver possessions are now what procures power. The search for more gold and silver gradually shapes a new worldview made of the ideas of material possessions, private property, individualism and ever increasing rationality... By the end of the 15th century, art starts to represent landscapes and portraits and by the 16th and 17th century, those subjects represent the majority of all art productions. This goes on and on and is still appreciated today by many people but something fundamentally new happened in between that relegated landscapes and portraits as art forms of a past worldview.

• After mid-nineteenth century:
• under the impact on one side of new technologies and more particularly new techniques of transportation introducing the notion of speed,
• under the impact on another side of social changes relativizing the certainties of early capitalist forms, some artists are driven into changing their style of representation of portraits and landscapes. Van Gogh, Gauguin are the best known precursors of this stylistic change. The impressionist movance, later the expressionists, the cubists, the futurists and other schools continue to depict portraits and landscapes, or to say this otherwise, they continue to depict "reality" or at least what is considered as being reality in their days, this first degree image that project on the retina.
  

• sometime after the 1st world war, here and there artists begin to question the wisdom of that reality, they think, they write about the need to reject that vision for something new. (Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Miro, Masson, Chagall,...) This debate and trials at painting something different will go on from the 1930th without interruption until today.

• the approaches in creation after the 2nd world war can best be described as a search for individuality. Everyone tries something different, originality takes central stage and very fast "what has not been done before" becomes the sacred grail of artists. BUT in this process total confusion becomes pervasive. Everything has been called art, has it not, from a slashed canvas to a toilet seat.
  

• starting around the year 2000 (very arbitrary dating) some artists begin to express the need for a return to SENSE in visual arts. Debates are going on but no firm conclusions have been accepted yet. Those artists are laboring toward early postmodernism.
  

On Postmodernism, Summary.

1. Seen from a historical perspective, modernism appears as a blimp on the time span of human culture and postmodernism remains till largely absent from the history of human culture. Dates are given as indications of each period's time relativity.

- animism: (BC 50,000-0, ...) : primitive arts.
- religion: (Europe: AD 400-1700) : religious art
- modernism: (1500-2020/2050)
........ * early modernism: (1500-1900) : landscapes, portraits
.........* modernism: (1900-1980) : rejection of the first degree image that projects on the retina
.........* late modernism: (1980-2020/2050) : total confusion
- Postmodernism: (2000-... )
.........* early postmodernism: (2000-2050/2100) : trials at making visual sense
.........* postmodernism: (2050/2100-.... ) : the visual signs of a new worldview

2. Visual arts have been imposed by the men of power as illustrators of the worldview of the men of knowledge along all of humanity's cultural history, albeit for the last 100 years.
By the end of early modernity, the men of knowledge were losing the help of the men of power in imposing their knowledge upon all and they had more and more to compete with all kinds of charlatans to find the attention of all members of their societies.
Entering in the modern age, under the influence of new technologies that were introducing the notion of speed and under the influence of new scientific ideas, visual artists rejected the idea of reality as being this traditional first degree image projected on the retina. They were on a mission to find the visual signs of a changing worldview but newer changes were always emerging that annihilated the results that they had aleady attained. The intensification of changes in the second part of the century, kind of, broke the artists' compass. Losing the traditional socialization function given by the tandem men of power-men of knowledge, artists were plunged in a foggy thunderstrom. Groggy at the loss of their traditional function of illustrators of the worldview of the men of knowledge they fell under the influence of men of greed and marketization finally landed the visual arts in confusion land.


3. On Postmodernism.
Groggy and frustrated by the superficiality of arts at the hands of the managers and institutional bureaucrats of the art world, visual artists feel a deep need for rediscovering the sense of art in their works and they tumble upon this discovery that the world has changed a lot.
They discover that nowadays artists have not only to master a technique of representation as was the case during the past tens of thousands of years, they now also have to come up with their own content! They need to master their technique in order not to be burdened by technical matters but it is content that finally finds central stage in artistic creation and "beauty" or "ugliness" relates more and more to the content of a work.

- A new understanding is starting to shape in the visual arts that without technique an artwork seems inachieved and without intellectual content it is as if it were shallow.

- A new human age is shaping from the maturation of 2 trends that grew out of modernity:
......* science and technology
......* globalization

Science and technology are developments emerging out of rationality and rationality is the philosophical worldview that has been imposed on all by the logic of capital.
By the end of the 20th century, science entered a new stage of its development. All phenomena were reduced successfully into combinations of digits and this led to the revolutionizing of all spheres of knowledge: information, biology, physics, chemistry and the expansion of scope from nanosciences to macrosciences...
From the intereaction between those sciences and its integration in system theory, is emerging a radically new understanding that is invalidating most of our past accepted truths.

Science and technology are central in the invalidation of past truths but they are unable by themselves to forge a new worldview. This can only result from the interaction between science and philosophy. In this age of building the global village it appears more evident every day that the belief system of the 15% of the world population who live in the affluence of the rich countries of the North/West shall not be the only philosophical guide of humanity and that other traditional systems of belief shall eventually supplant the western system.

Reality will not be conceived of any further as the straight line trajectory starting with god's creation that ends in a paradise of all goodness. Reality will be seen more as a process of multiple complex systems interacting between themselves and integrating in larger complex systems with change seen as reality's temporal trajectory. In summary, humanity went from an animist worldview towards a religious worldview then towards the rationality of the logic of capital and it now for the first time in human history is taking the road towards a truly global worldview:
- integrating all of humanity on mother earth.
- integrating a systemic model of understanding derived from the confrontation between science and philosophy.

The sheer size of the sea of changes in our newly shaping worldview is difficult to grasp. I think that, in the future, it shall be seen as the most profound cultural leap in all of humanity's history. It should thus not come as a surprise that our societies will be more and more in a dire need of cohesion building instruments and the creation of the visual signs of the emerging worldview shall I believe re-establish itself as a leading instrument of cohesion building.

Painters at your brushes, the world awaits your visual signs of the new worldview in the shaping but please remember that your content is a direct reflection of the quality of your knowledge base.

On Postmodernism (5)

Looking at present day visual arts productions, I can't miss to see an extreme variety of styles and there are definitely some works of extremely good quality out there. This does not mean that the art market has already discovered those present day pearls and their creators. Art merchants and critics have still to stick their heads out of the confusion that reigned master in the late 20th century. But let me be unambiguous. What I discern is a profusion of approaches as we never have seen in all of our history. "We're living in an extremely fruitful and exciting time for those captivated by contemporary art" says Dan Cameron, senior curator at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art. "I've been in the trenches for 20 years, and there's more good art being produced in more places than I can remember at any one time. We're in a sort of Golden Age."
Is this for real? "In other words, is the new painting more about nostalgia - a throwback to a time of greater stability - or is it vital and original, shaking up one's assumptions and forcing the viewer to feel and think about the present?"
All I write here is about that question and my answer is unequivocal. We are entering a period of extreme depth of content and of technical excellence.
Is this going to last?
I have no clue about that, too many factors are presently at work: climate, globalization, social dislocations, scientific leap, cultural homogenization and political and cultural craziness, much will depend on the ability of the "world societal system" to stabilize and to integrate with the system of Gaia.

Looking at what's going on in the scientific world I see the same variety and richness as in the visual arts. I'm particularly trilled at the discoveries made in terms of the sciences of complexity for example. The sciences that study the emergence and transformations of life itself. The way I see it is in reality a convergence of modern scientific knowledge with the ancient Chinese philosophy of "transformation", of "change" that is bound to revolutionize our ways of thinking, our ways of understanding ourselves and our cosmos.
"Questioned on the future of time, the Belgian Nobel Prize of chemistry Ilya Prigogine tries to introduce the idea of uncertainty into the idea of time. This idea of uncertainty will perhaps be the marking fact of 21st century. Ilya Prigogine shows that the reversible laws of Newton relate to only one weak fraction of the world in which we live. (...) Do we measure enough the revolution which these discoveries introduce into the notion of time? Here comes the end of certainties: time does not have a future, but futures. Because nature is from now on unforeseeable: it is history".(1)

The future is the result of what we'll be making out of it. I mean that our inputs are making what we will harvest in the future. But what will be our inputs?
Surely not only the inputs of the western world only. 15-20% of the world population will not be at the steering wheel for eternity. The remaining 80-85% are knocking on the doors and making more and more vociferous noises. What I want to show is that the future can't be simply a projection of what is going on today in the West. It's a lot more complex than that and it definitely involves all the world, that means all the other cultures: Indu, Chinese, Arabic, ...

(1) "Jalons pour une ethique du futur. L'avenir du temps". Le Monde Diplomatique. Jerome BINDE. 03/ 2002. (translation, Laodan)

On Postmodernism (4)

Let's come back for a while to this idea of a final outcome that is perhaps the most dominating trait within the Western worldview. While being absolutely out of sink with what is going on around the world at the start of the 21st century it nevertheless is still predominant.
This should not come as a surprise. The media with a world reach are all without exception controlled by "white" capital. Scientific research with a world impact is invariably done in "white" universities and research centers. Art and design is exclusively produced by "white" hands at the attention of "white" patrons. Speaking about "white" I mean from Europe and from all the European extensions around the world, that includes all immigrations among those as well as any apings of those.

In their view, life is like a trip on a road leading to a final destination that is given by their unique god (be it a god of religion or a god of capital). A kind of day-dream of the reunion, in an environment made of the search for love, of all those who were on god's side during their life. The foundational building blocks of the West establish the thirst from god's believers for his love and the desire that it induces brings his believers to act as god's arm in his fight against evil. This in summary is what has been transmitted generation after generation for so many centuries by the religions of the book to their followers and it remains fully at work even for those who abandoned religious practice. What is at work under this view is a dualist approach of reality: good versus evil, black versus white. The individuals and groups then chose one side of the duality, the side given by the authorities of the church or the authorities of capital as the side of their god.
Being on the side of good, one feels vindicated to eliminate evil.
The histories of the religions of the book, and of the countries where they are practiced, are tragedies that unfold along the lines of the fight between good and evil and the thirst for the love of good that is said to be god.

Our present predicament with terrorism offers us an ideal perspective to observe this mechanic at work.
Listen to Georges Bush and Tony Blair, they have absolutely no doubt in their mind that they are on the side of good and the terrorists are evil. From this certainty they thus derive that they have the right, they even speak of the obligation to destroy them. No question is ever asked about the reasons why the terrorists are willing to give their lives and to take the lives of others. No effort at understanding is undertaken and things have deteriorated so far that many in the West are now viewing with suspicion someone who is trying to understand what's going on. But listen to what the terrorists are saying. The west is evil that's why they have to destroy it.
The same infernal logic is at work on both sides!

The combination of an expanding post-modernist shock with the infernal logic of dualism could be brewing some very nasty surprises for all of us but this is the story of our future. Our present is the theater where our future is taking root. Wherever our eyes focus, we see confusion:
- According to scientists, we live in the 6th historical period of mass extinction and they are warning that it is the worst that ever occurred.
- Terrorism is shaking societal systems over all the planet.
- Globalization exacerbates the inequalities between regions of the world reducing more and more people to live into abject poverty, sickness and despair. Globalization of capital also displaces the sources of work to the cheapest and most politically stable regions leaving the populations of the industrialized world under severe stress.
- Mass extinctions also apply to cultures. Traditions are under attack the world over and the number of languages in use is dropping fast.
Much confusion and insecurity indeed all over the world.

We are assisting at something immense, a worldwide tectonic societal shift that will leave the world radically changed in terms of culture and also in terms of power.

Observing from another perspective, from the internal dynamic within the industrialized world we see also much confusion.
- Technological change is so fast that it becomes difficult to follow those changes and the impact of those changes on human behavior are absolutely unpredictable. What's clear is that all those changes are having a huge impact upon our worldviews.
- Our certainties are waning, doubts are instilling in our minds and without receiving satisfying answers doubts reinforce and lead the individuals to search wherever they can to find answers they will be able to share with others.

Artists are always the first to feel changes.
In the second part of the 20th century they reached maximum confusion and left it to be seen in their works. But it seems to me that something is starting to heat up nowadays that eventually will one day be brewing into something that could act as an awakener on humanity.

On Post modernism (3)

Our world has entered a chaotic period of disorder resulting from the re-balancing of the economic forces around the world. But there is hope, for as science and the Chinese philosophy of change are showing, out of disorder comes order. The future truly global societal system will be integrating all the population of the world with their civilizational foundations and in the case of China those foundations are fundamentally intact.

Herein lies a radical departure between the present encounter of white men with their peers from afar and past encounters that white men called discoveries. In the present encounter, Chinese, Indian and other people have learned to play by the rules of the white men and they are beating them at their own game through the combined weight of their sheer numbers and the depth of their culture.
During the discoveries non-white men perished at the contact of white men... and the Arab men still have not recovered from their encounter with white men during the crusades. This time around, the "game" of white men is bound for a radical change and the beneficiaries of the encounter will not be the white men any longer but the ones they encounter and there is strong evidence that white men's societies will be shaken to their foundations as well materially as spiritually.

Post-modernism has to integrate this economic and cultural re-balancing act. But I believe that it would be unwise to project here on the paper the outcome of this act as it will occur along this century. We know that in the chaos, humanity will find many opportunities and possibilities and we also know that its future path is not to be determined by rational choices only, randomness, chance and unforseen events will also have their part. There is simply no way that a deterministic projection could be verified by future realities.

In Western societies the present stage of evolution, that one can call late-modernity or others call early post-modernity, is a historical process of merchandization. That seems to be a fact. After industrialization has been generalized, to continue to grow the market needed an internal expansion of demand and to make such an expansion of demand possible, the market was in need of a hegemonic ideology [in a Gramscian sense] in order for such an expansion of demand to become acceptable in the eyes of the populations.

For demand to expand, it was indeed necessary for all individuals to accept purchasing what they until then got free of charge from their daily ways of doing. Early industrialization had already taken from the families the free supply of vegetables from their gardens, eggs from their chickens, sweaters from their needles and so on. This later stage of market expansion was about commercializing absolutely everything: water, music, thinking and soon perhaps air to breathe. I'll come back on the ideology that permitted this jump in total consumerism in the next chapter, suffice here to remember that ideology has been actively pursued as a means to expand the market internally.

But this has not been the only strategy put at work under the logic of capital. Free trade was the other leg used to try to increase global demand and free trade has been over-successful those last 20 years in the sense that it unleashed an unforeseen dynamic of geographic re-balancing of economic power that, I think, is leading the whole world into chaos. Pain is felt in the South as well as in the North and gigantic restructuring efforts are already under way but one should be aware of the fact that the coming future restructurings will go far, far deeper. It will not be a question of political vision of how societies should evolve, it will be the world awakening to the principle of reality, awakening to changes that have already taken roots. I firmly believe indeed that changes are already taking place faster than our ideas can adapt to and the distance between the reality of changes and our capacity to perceive them is bound to continue to grow. This indicates the depth of the chaos that has been unleashed.

I believe that this expanding post-modernist shock is bound to surpass in importance the European Renaissance in Western history.
It will lead, I sense, to the emergence of a truly modern worldview shared this time by the world in its entirety.

It seems evident that such a new worldview can only emerge from a long process of interactions between new scientific evidence and past wisdom from all over the world and that such a unifying worldview will not be an end in itself, it will indeed permanently evolve at the rhythm of our new discoveries. Let's be absolutely clear here, humanity never will reach the end of the process of scientific understanding, there is no way for us, cosmic dust, to encompass infinity or what appears at our level as such. In this sense our scientific discoveries are bound to be endless and thus also the evolution of the "coloring" of our worldview. Let me explain what I mean by the coloring of our worldview. Our worldview is a question of culture, of philosophy rather than a question of science. Our civilizational founding blocks have to be readjusted at the light of our scientific knowings and in this process, traditional wisdom will reemerge as enlightening, In contrast with science, wisdom in the traditional or philosophical sense is all encompassing and thus gives us appeasement that brings peace of mind and acceptance of what is. Science for its part is focused on the understanding of parts which is an endless affair as we have seen. Thus we are bound to face new scientific discoveries ad-perpetuum or at least until we disappear which inevitably will happen without this impeaching the world and the cosmos to further evolve without us. Science can't bring us an all encompassing view or understanding, it only helps us shape images of the parts of the all encompassing and as such it colors our world view.

On Postmodernism (2)

Post-modernism will see the center of capitalistic power shifting towards north-east Asia with China as its center. This process that is already at work should last some 50 more years at least and shall gradually pull in its track the emergence of Chinese culture on the world stage and in the process, I bet that Beijing shall impose itself as the world's premier cultural center.
But what does this imply in terms of content in the arts? Well, first and foremost we'll assist at the relegation to the dustbin of history of large swathes of so called "Western post-modern" visual productions. I don't think for an instant that this could be a loss since most of those productions are no more than garbage that only collectors' greed can establish as works of art.
I firmly believe that post-modernism will establish:

- the primacy of a new worldview resulting from the encounter of the knowings of modern science with traditional systems of wisdom as the Yi-Ching, philosophic Taoism, Buddhism... Spontaneous emergence, systemic self-organization, non determination of outcome will fuse with the teachings of the Tao to give us a worldview of life as surfing on the waves of changes toward our image of the future.

- personal visions of this worldview will take center stage instead of the visions of schools and that of their masters. Western individualism will mutate at the contact of Chinese individualism that exercises itself within the boundaries of "the way of things" and "the virtue of morality" that follows the way. Artists personal visions are thus not so much individualist endeavours but more like their visual particularization of the worldview at the attention of the individuals of the group they belong to.

- the primacy of the principle of rich intellectual content + technical skills that are so much absent of the Western visual art scene nowadays will come back with a vengeance.

What drives humanity over the long haul is not its economy, it is unmistakenly it's culture, it's ways of behaving, it's ways of interacting with the other species, the environment and it is evident that we are doing very poorly on that level. We have more goods than at any time in our history but the more our economies enrich, the more our cultures "empoor" and in this process humanity's chances of survival are thinning fast.
The coming cultural input of China could not be better timed.

I know that the conclusions that I express here are pole apart from the views and theories expressed by most recognized authorities on the arts in Western countries, from the left as well as from the right. But I have the weakness to think that both sides of the Western intelligentsia are wrong, I think that both behave as pure Westerncentrics.
They know that there is a world out there. They know that it is different from the Western world, another world that has another understanding of realities but that's about all they know. They generally know nothing about the ideas, the values and the ways of behaving inside that external world that, let's never forget, represents 80-85% of the world population. Could it be that 15-20% of the world population would have for ever in its hands the destiny of humanity?
Never, that's pure Westerncentric delusion.

One thing is for sure, our future can't be thought of as a simple projection into the future of trends observed today within the Western world. It is in that particular sense that I pretend that the present dominant description given of Post modernism shall be fast forgotten.

On Postmodernism (1)

Post-modernism, I think, is vastly different from what Western, right and left, thinkers are making about it. Let's start with modernism, it divides roughly in 3 distinct periods:

- early modernity: from the renaissance till 1900 rejecting religious art painters will satisfy the demands of early capitalism for portraits and landscapes.

- modernity: starting around 1900, it corresponds to the radical rejection of the visual representation model of the first degree image that falls on our retina. Influenced by new technologies, the introduction of speed in daily life and new scientific paradigms in the forming, painters and thinkers are searching for higher level visual representations, they intuitively sense that there are other dimensions to reality than this first degree vision transmitted by the retina to the brain.

- Late modernity: after decades of searches and experimentations in visual rendering and two world wars that crudely exposed men's absurdity visual arts were declared clinically dead around the seventies. "Whatever" could now be presented as art by audacious merchant-artists and critics, curators, collectors swallowed the sham. Some initiated the concept of post-modernism, an approach that tried to put the existing knowledge into perspective saying that it was only the particular form of thought of the hegemonic culture of the day. This rejection manifested itself in minimal, conceptual visual forms as if its creators were announcing the end of times. Post modernism is kind of the product of a "intellectuel de chambre" and in that sense it appears as totally marginal on the world stage of real life.

Western thinkers are indeed privileging the Western internal tendencies to the point of blacking out all that may be going on externally in the rest of the world. They act a little bit as if they were thinking that they are the center of the world forgetting that a nation of a billion and a half who think they are the center of the world since 3000 years already is finally shaping itself as the next center of economic and cultural power in the world.

It seems to me that what is going on outside of the West is indeed bound to have gradually a decisive impact on the West itself. The awakening I believe shall be rude because there is no doubt that the foundations of our Western civilization are already crumbling. We are nowadays economically so totally dependent on science that the conclusions arrived at by scientists will, there should be no doubt about it, shake our certainties. There is indeed a convergence in the building between science and the foundations of the Chinese civilization which I believe is bound to lead to the most fundamental revolution in Western thought since the early days of Western civilization itself. A very readable account of what is going on in the scientific community is given by Mitchell Waldrop in his books "Chaos" and "Complexity", by Fritjof Capra in "The Tao of Physics" (1975), "The Turning Point" (1982), "Uncommon Wisdom" (1988), and "The Web of Life" (1996), by Ilia Prigogine in "Order Out of Chaos", "Exploring Complexity", "The End of Certainty, Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature", "Is Future Given?" , Dr. Chaim H. Tejman, "Grand Unified Theory: Wave Theory" and the many others.

I believe that the recognition of the principle of spontaneous emergence, systemic auto-regulation/self-organization and the theories relating to the macro reality as quantum physics, string theory, wave theory,... are engendering a what will be a whole new form of consciousness in the West.
When one couples this new scientific paradigm with economic globalization and the shock of philosophic wisdoms that will ensue, one gets a glimpse of what post-modernism will be all about in the realm of culture and one starts to understand the real illusionary nature of late modernism.