Answers for contemporary visual arts (Part 2: animism)

1. In animist times.

Animism is a worldview that was generally shared in early tribal societies and that is still prevalent nowadays for a significant portion of the world population. Those societies are assemblings of small quantities of people, small groups of a few hundred families at most that we came to describe as tribal societies. Anthropologists describe such societies as having no state, no authority, no religion and so on.
But does it make sense trying to understand the tribal world through our modern lenses? Reality for tribesmen is simply "other" than our modern reality and saying that they don't have the institutional or cultural attributes of our modern world in no way helps us understanding how those societies were functioning.

The term "Animism", derived from the Latin word "anima" meaning breath or soul, was coined by British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his "Religion in Primitive Culture" (1871) . He defined Animism as "the doctrine of Spiritual Beings" : "Animism, in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, . . . resulting in some kind of active worship".

Animists identify with an "Absolute truth" that they call "the One" which they conceive of as the energy, the force, the power, the mind, the divine being (later concept) that tribal groups worshiped as the ENERGY that nourishes the movement of change within the whole of reality.
One of the best descriptions of this idea is expressed by HOBHOUSE, L. T., in "Morals in Evolution", published in New York in 1907 : "I would describe (primitive man's) mental attitude as a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks upon his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two distinct entities of body and soul."
This citation leaves an after taste of irony in our minds, to us late-moderns, HOBHOUSE's judgment appears indeed as the negative judgment of a pesky narrow-minded Euro-centric and in the end it's the primitive man whose description he intended to be degrading that appears to be resonating better in our modern ears.

Individuals sharing an animist worldview thought and continue to think that many powers are in charge of the management of "the one" and so the decisions of some of those powers might be contrary to their own personal interests. Early humans were pragmatists and believed that they could use, or to be more accurate, that they could manipulate moments, instants, of reality in such a way that the powers to be might be incited to take decisions more favorable for their interests. In consequence they desperately searched for information to ward off any negativities and manipulate the present in order for the powers to be to do their bidding at favors the moment after. Manipulation was meant indeed to bring changes in some constitutive elements of the present that would induce a more favorable outcome in the future.
Manipulation was also meant, in a more direct sense, as tricking or as cheating the powers to be into other decisions than the ones they would have otherwise taken. There is a Chinese popular story that illustrates admirably this kind of direct manipulation of the powers to be. During one of my first Chinese new-year celebrations in Beijing with my wife's family I was offered "guang tong sticky candy" that I liked for its resemblance with a candy that was customarily offered during my childhood in Flanders. I inquired why one could not find this kind of candy out of the spring festival period and my wife's grand-mother told me a story that remains as vivid in my mind today as when I heard it for the first time some fifteen years ago. "Guang Tong" is the Chinese "stove god". His mission is to observe the family's behavior along the year and coming "Spring Festival" he goes reporting to the "heavenly emperor" about the family's conduct. "We Chinese" she told me "make an offering of sticky candy to 'Guang Tong' before his departure for heaven in the hope that his teeth will be glued in the candy when he meets the /heavenly emperor'..."

Pragmatic and lucid the tribesmen did not fail to recognize that they were largely ignorant so they naturally favored the emergence of specialists, who would be devoting all their time inquiring about the workings of reality and would then help them in case of necessity.
They thus vested permanently recognized power exclusively on the shaman, their "man of knowledge", who was kind of the tribe's reader and interpreter of reality, its diviner who predicted the future course of events, its medicine men who helped the sick and hurt to recover and more generally its master of ceremonies and feasts.
The shaman or whatever the tribal "men of knowledge" are called, from place to place, garner their knowledge through initiation by their "benefactor", elder shaman, into the body of observations of the natural cycles as transmitted by the line of their predecessors that they then confirm through their personal observation of those same cycles. The observation of the natural cycles and elements is what grounded their knowledge, it should thus not come as a surprise that tribal knowledge was and remains fairly identical all over the world: the presence of men or women of knowledge, visions, trances, dances, sacred items, sacred spaces for worship and the trial at connecting with the spirits of ancestors, the spirits of animals and plants those are indeed general characteristics of animistic societies. Animals, plants, stars were "deified" but not much thought was expressed about a "creator god" only about the "spirits" inhabiting the gods within those animals, plants and stars that can help or hurt and that sometimes were called "gods", "demons" or even simply a "lie".

There is no trial, in animism, at establishing abstract models out-of the exercise of the mind, no stories that personify the energy or the power of the one or of the spirits.
In an animist worldview humans are conceived of as atoms of a larger body that remains mostly inaccessible through human sensors. Wikipedia gives this excellent summary: "This can be stated simply as everything is alive, everything is conscious or everything has a soul". So the mind in an animist environment focuses on what the sensors (senses) give to perceive in the hope to SEE the living ONE and the spirits operating its parts. And what does the mind see ?

The night follows the day; winter comes after summer, spring and autumn being no more than their gradual passage from the one to the other, as daybreak or dawn signals the passage from night to day and dusk from day to night.
Those natural rhythms are the foundational signs upon which animist "men of knowledge" built their understanding of reality. They understood, and still understand where they survive, that there is simply no escape from those rhythms and that humans have to move and act in humility and acceptance of the "whole one" or reality. For them plants, animals and trees have been considered sacred because they were thought to be home to spirits that were taking part in regulating the works of the one. This formed the base of an attitude of deep respect for nature that can be found in all tribal societies.

From such simple and basic facts of reality the shaman, animist "men of knowledge", conceived fairly identical worldviews the whole world over.
Described with modern concepts the animist worldview is seen as "pantheist" : a mountain is god, a rock, an animal, a planet, and even a cockroach can be a god or a spirit, you can be god so you can also be a spirit. From all this is thus also derived that animism is "polytheist" : there are thousands of gods thus the concept of 333 million deities. But pantheism and polytheism are later concepts that have been derived as opposites of the recognized and accepted concepts of religious and modern times; as such they generate negative images in our minds and are blinding us from the substance of animist daily life practice.

The observation of those natural rhythms led early Chinese to derive the abstractions of full line and broken line ( _______ , ___ ___ ) as the visual signs of the polarities of the cycles that they observed and conceived of as natural rhythms or repeating time units: day/night, summer/winter that were easily associated with warm/cold and so on. Those signs illustrating the polarities within single-units, or ensembles, were then further refined into ever more complex systems of understanding of the forces at play inside the cycles of change. Such signs can be seen on recently excavated carved stones finding their origin some BC 6000 years or 8000 years ago according to the dating results obtained with "carbon 14" techniques. What is even more remarkable, I think, is that those visual signs are the foundation, the roots, upon which the Chinese built their written language that survives to this day. It's as if their early understandings about reality had been inscribed once and for all in their written language.

Abstract signs are found in all animist societies. They decorate textiles, daily use objects, totems and other. Those "visual signs" are the "writing-down", at the attention of all the members of the group, of the meaning of what is going on in the reality encompassing it. Visual signs don't need many words they are accessible to all so they diffuse uniformly through the whole of the body-social and bind it, glue it, together. The creation of visual signs is thus conceived of as a technique for gluing the individual social atoms and solidifying the body collective, the group, the tribe.

Tribes had no equivalent of kings, emperors nor prime ministers, their small groups had simply no need for those kinds of power symbols and institutions. Any individual tribesman was known by the others and all families had a very strong consciousness of their survival being in the hands of the group. There was thus no functional need for a permanent military or political power structure. When a situation of conflict arose with another tribe the strongest man of the tribe, kind of naturally, was endorsed with leading the defense of the group and when the conflict subsided he returned to his normal activities within the group. The same process of recoursing to the most able must have been at work as well in other situations than military conflict.
The notable exception to such a temporary exercise of a power-function remains with the "man of knowledge" who was given by the tribe his entire time, freed from all domestic chores, to read reality and to give to all an understandable visual representation of it. It appears to me that the shaman or "man of knowledge" is the first personification in history of a societal function that has been "remunerated" by the collectivity or to say this otherwise, for the first time in history, has society taken in charge to supply for the material needs of a specialized function that was considered to being exercised in the benefit of all.

The organization of tribal small groups was quite straightforward. They were basically an assembling of individuals glued together by a shared worldview. The shaman was in charge of telling to his fellow tribesmen a credible and simple story that would unify their vision of the world and of the reality around them. Story telling was thus an important component of living in a tribe. Stories were what constituted the shared knowledge of all the tribesmen and their content would then be visually illustrated in drawings and paintings that were directly accessible to all even to small children.

Those visual signs, that can be seen in what European thinkers by the end of the nineteenth century, came to call "primitive art" are humanity's first systematization of ideas about the rhythm of time, about space and the cosmic circus. Those ideas were recorded in abstract symbols and signs that amount to a symbolic writing about our distant ancestors' understanding of reality, how they perceived the main phenomena and properties of a complex world. For us moderns those signs are an enigma. Though the visual signs are visible the meaning of the stories behind those signs remains largely hidden to us.

Three themes reappear, from place to place around the world, showing what our ancestors were concerned about, showing how they perceived reality or themselves within the one:
- fertility (reproduction of the family, the group, the specie): The pronounced female forms of the "Venus of Willendorf" established it as an animist icon of fertility. It has been dated BC 22 - 24,000.
- wild animals and the ritual of hunting (the satisfaction of the individuals' "objective needs" and more particularly feeding):
- the eternal questions of the workings of the universe.

The earliest of those animist visual signs come from the Paleolitic, or Old Stone Age period, about BC 40,000. But the level of refinement of those signs suggests a much earlier beginning, about which we unfortunately have practically no knowledge. Most material predating 40,000 years ago reflect utilitarian concerns but an article from the Encyclopedia of Columbia University indicates that "there is now scattered African archaeological evidence from before that time (in one case as early as 90,000 years ago) of the production by H. sapiens of beads and other decorative work, perhaps indicating a gradual development of the aesthetic concerns and other symbolic thinking characteristic of later human societies".

Early hominids (from 2 million to 30,000 years ago) and modern homo sapiens, until 10,000 years ago approximately, lived exclusively as hunters and gatherers taking their food directly from the environment rather than producing it by tilting the land. Our knowledge of the life of our ancestors is very limited and we can only conclude that their worldview was animistic at least in the last phase of their history from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. We also know that the economic revolution that took place with the emergence of agriculture did not displace animism. The worldview continued to prosper, unabashed, fashioning the attitudes of small tribal agricultural societies around the world for thousands more years.
Only the political revolution that ensued after the unification of tribes into kingdoms/empires eventually created the conditions for displacing animism in favor of religions but we'll see in the next post that this political unification did not engender a unified response around the world.

Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Answers for contemporary visual arts (Part 1)

I'm sick and tired to read and listen to all the non-sense that is ascribed nowadays to painting and more generally to visual arts. I have enough of all this stupidity and I feel the urge to say out loud and clear that we have to make sense a-new of the act of painting and image making. The art of image making has nothing in common with advertisement nor with fashion nor with design nor with "whatever visual" nor anything related to money making.
The free-market ideology would like us to believe that the most representative artists nowadays are the ones whose works are sold to the highest bidders at art auctions but those artists are not necessarily the ones that history will remember for the very simple reason that they are not representative of the worldview of tomorrow that is starting to shape under our eyes today...
The real innovative artists today are the ones who grasp what is going on in terms of the changes occuring in humanity's worldview and are thus led to see the new worldview that is emerging. Those are the real visionaries whose images will help humanity crossing the bridge towards the future and their works will be remembered on that very particular merit.

Visual arts have to be brought back to their original functionality and if we can't do this lucidly and in all consciousness then, I'm afraid, we'll eventually have to accept societal necessity and its forcing this upon us in one or another reactionary fashion... Is it not Mr. Kimball ?

In summary my position is that "... art is an instrument of unification of human soieties behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry."

What remains largely unanswered in my writings is how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry in late modern times.

In "SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS" I wrote:
"a society is unified and stable when a large majority of its citizens make theirs a given worldview.
Humans are social animals who, historically, assembled into larger and more complex groupings. In other words our collective organization underwent successive changes leading to vaster assemblings of local groupings. The unification into larger groupings and their preservation necessitated the sharing of a similar understanding of reality by all the members of the group = view of the world = vision of reality = worldview.
The assembling of those groups was always very fragile so, to assure its survival, the collectivity was in need of a binding glue that took the form of belief systems accepted by all individuals.
This gradual and evolutionary process follows the road of humanity: the conflictual interaction between the two societal polarities constituted by the individualities and the collectivity. The interaction between those polarities is indeed what generated the energy that drove and continues to drive societal change. On one side the collectivity imposes conformity to a worldview and on the other side some individuals want to follow their own ideas and do not tire until reaching acceptance by the collectivity by which time their so called deviance transforms into innovation and they are applauded by all.
Over time the belief systems or worldviews of dispersed groups were translated into coherent sets of axioms gaining their societies, that had been unified through force, a unified interpretation of the principle of reality. Such unquestioned axioms formed the roots, the foundations, of all civilizations. "

Human societies developed along lines of always deeper interdependence between the concepts of "the road of humanity", "power", "knowledge" and "worldviews".

If we agree with Duchamp's quote that "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century" then we have to answer the question "how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry". Answering that question imposes us to resolve the problem of the mysterious disjunction between power and knowledge that happened sometime during the emergence of modernity:
- when the worldviews of the men of knowledge stopped to be imposed on everyone by the men of power
- when freed from an imposed worldview everyone started to consider that their own views were reflecting the "truth" about "reality".
This is indeed the fertile ground out of which societal confusion would grow and develop unhindered into the aberration of late societal modernity that is characterized by a complete imbalance with extreme individualism tilting towards the atomization of our modern societies. Such an imbalance is deadly.
We are acting as if we were the atoms of a "material entity" that decided to going it their own way. But this is only an ideological illusion, for, the atoms are nothing on their own. The nature of their being is to being a particle of the "material entity". That is exactly what gives sense to their own existence. Going it their own way the atoms would only succeed to destroy the "material entity" which would be synonymous with their collective suicide.
That's exactly where we are: societal atomization and on the verge of a collective suicide.

The very long haul history, I mean the passages from one societal form to another, is founded in the changes occurring in the realities covered by the 4 concepts of "the road of humanity", "power", "knowledge" and "worldviews" and also their interactions.
In the present state of knowledge that is accessible to us, we distinguish 4 evolutionary stages of societal development:
- animism (small groups)
- religious times (starting with tribal unification under a centralized political power)
- modern times (following the crusades, looting and trade brought riches to some and that accumulated capital imposed on its holders a logic of pragmatism that gradually developed into an ideology of individualism and an ideology of rationality that displaced religious beliefs)
- postmodern times (a postmodern worldview that shapes out of the interaction between a globalizing world, an ideology of all-rationality culminating in science and technology and a rebalancing of the axioms of civilizations)


Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Unanswered questions about contemporary visual arts

Those of you who read my posts regularly know my views by now on visual arts. In summary my thesis goes as follows:
"From animist times, through religious times, to modern times art has served as an instrument of unification of human societies behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry. This functionality of art that goes back tens of thousands of years has been interrupted sometime along the twentieth century. The notion that art serves a societal functionality has indeed been totally lost on late moderns."

Duchamp said no less in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in "Eleven Europeans in America" that had been published in "Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art" (new York), XIII No 4-5, 1946: "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century".

This loss is what explains the total confusion where visual art landed by the end of the twentieth century. It was as if "whatever" had been made possible, had been made the norm, in art creation. Suffice indeed for the artist nowadays to say that something is art for that thing to be considered as art and art critics and collectors seem to be of no help at correcting this aberration, they are simply lost in entropy.

In such an environment painting is not sufficient any longer I feel that our present predicament is asking for words to shine the light of sense again on the act of painting.
In the same interview mentionned above Duchamp approached this in the following words : "... art should turn to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression.
I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre-stupid as a painter' ."

I'm also sick to read and listen all the non-sense that is ascribed to the activity of painting. I have enough of all this stupidity and feel the urge to say out loud and clear that we have to make sense a-new of the act of painting. Visual arts have to be brought back to their original functionality and if we can't do this lucidly and in all consciousness then we'll eventually have to accept societal necessity forcing this upon us in one or another reactionary fashion...

________________________

Those of you who are interested to follow this discussion but who did not read regularly my posts can find a good summary of my thoughts by reading the following posts:

- About the systemic map of my inquiry into "what is visual art?"
- About the road of humanity
- About the axioms of civilizations
- About worldviews

About MODERNITY:
- Early modernity
- Modernity
- Late modernity

About POSTMODERNISM:
- Postmodernism, preliminaries
- The context of the new Postmodern societal worldview in the forming
- The road towards a postmodern societal worldview
- The shaping of a postmodern societal worldview

__________________________

So my position is that "... art has served as an instrument of unification of human societies behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry.."

What remains largely unanswered in my writings is how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry.

How come that such a truly central question could have been so generally ignored ?

Those are the questions that I propose trying to peel in my next series of posts.


Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society

Digital variations of acrylics (2)

I terminated all the digital variations of the presently available 25 acrylics of my ARTSENSE collection. Here are some of those works. Click the images to enlarge.

















keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art

Digital variations of acrylics

A few days more and I'll have completed 300 variations. (12 x 25 acrylics)
Check out some of my last works and click forward or backward in the slide-show. To enter the slide-show click on one of the following images.

















keywoeds: art, modern art, art theory, visual art

About art and reality.

Reality is all about our perception of ourselves within the "workings" of the whole of our universe and painting is all about giving visual signs of the worldview that the men of knowledge are deriving from how they see and understand reality. There are definitely an infinity of angles from where we can look at the unfolding of that reality story and the capturing by our eyes of the first degree image that impacts on our neurons is but one capturing of reality among an infinity of possibilities. Visual sight is no more than the activity of one physical-biological sensor, among many other possibles, that evolved from our general condition as humans. That "first degree image" capturing device is basically needed by our brains' as data-input about our close environment so that our brains should be able to devise orders at the attention of our bodies for them to be able to act in the interest of their own preservation. The first degree image perceived by our eyes is thus a functionality of human survival that we inherited along the road of our biological evolution. We should always remember that our noses were far more dominant in earlier times as a functionality of our survival than our eyes. In nature functionalities of survival can take many many different forms that are always adapted to guaranteeing the best chance of survival of the species.

Knowledge is something fundamentally different. It is what allows us to approach reality from a more thoroughly encompassing observation integrating all the different angles possible including the first degree image that our eyes are capturing about it. Knowledge projects us further than the first degree visual capturing of our close environment. It is a trial at rendering comprehensible to us the working of that environment and thus it enlightens our eyes' first degree images of reality with sense.

At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century cubism was a first essay at giving a visual representation of reality through the prism of knowledge. As such Cubism was the first artistic approach trying to bring us visual signs of reality that were not based any longer on the classical model of copying the image projecting on our retinas (this is valid in "whiteland" but not in China where Shieyi painting since thousands of years is practiced as an exercise at "reading the meaning" of reality). Cubism nevertheless very fast appeared to be no more than a graphical trick that made sense for sure in Picasso and Braque's visual researches but that was losing all meaning at the hands of further artists. Cubism was not rendering something else than the first degree image projecting on the retina. It only succeeded to give a different visual rendering from that first degree image that, as Marcel Duchamp puts it, was derived from a very "amateurish" reading "of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry".

The twentieth century has been for the visual arts, in Europe and to a lesser degree in the US, a time of searching for visual representations that should project our understanding of reality further than the first degree image captured by our eyes.

Picasso and Braque were influenced much by mathematics and the notion, somehow new in their time, of the 4th dimension but in the end they did not succeed to render something else than the first degree image.

The surrealists ventured in the path of the unconscientious that was a favorite theme of Freud and Jung and at long last they discovered visual paths rendering something else than this first degree image that they so much hated.

After the 2nd world war the members of Cobra, rejecting as pure absurdity the logic of a societal system that had unleashed all those primitive and montruous horrors of warfare, were searching for a better collective tomorrow in Marxism then in Existentialism and later in Situationism. It makes no doubt in my mind that the spirit of the works of Cobra artists have had a determining influence on the Zeitgeist in Western Europe that in finale rendered possible the unimaginable, the build-up of the EU.
The spirit of their works, exclusively turned against an abomination, was rendering a visual expression of ugliness as being something to be rejected. Thus their works being about something very negative did never really succeed to attract a large following.

Unfortunately, by the end of the second part of the 20th century, the visual arts have been sequestrated by an "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" that imposed its inexorable dictorship upon anything touching the visual arts. Interest obliging; making a buck out of art works took precedence over any artistic consideration. Soon under the "diktats" of the artistic authorities "whatever" was imposed as being art. That's how the visual arts entered a time of pure absurdity, non-sense imposed as art by the authorities, the merchants, the curators and the critics. The installation, in Central Park of the Gates of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, validates my point. Verify for yourself the grand-standing of the artistic authorities towards that event:
- The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates

In their own defense, the art dictators claimed that Duchamp was the one who had initiated this drive towards "whatever" with his "ready-mades". But the intention of Duchamp through his "ready-mades" was no other than to turn into derision those "well-thinking" autorities who did not have the slightest idea about the artistic substance that artists were so desperately running after. The initial switch of the sense of art in the "ready mades", that had been operated by Duchamp, was no more that a good joke on the "smooth talkers" of his time but it ended up in the end by turning miserably against Duchamp himself. Here is what Duchamp had to say later on about his earlier endeavors. I quote from a transcript by Herschel B. Chipp in "Theories of Modern Art" of Duchamp's interview with James Johnson Sweeney in "Eleven Europeans in America" that had been published in "Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art" (new York), XIII No 4-5, 1946: "Futurism was an impressionism of the mechanial world. It was strictly a continuation of the impressionist movement. I was not interested in that. I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting. ... I was interested in ideas -not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. ... In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century. ... Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. ... It was a way to get out of a state of mind -to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from cliches -to get free. ... Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. ... There was no thought of anything beyond the physical side of painting. No notion of freedom was thaught. No philosophical outlook was introduced. ... I thought of art on a broader scale. There were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry. But most views of it were amateurish. ... I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter. ... This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter." It is a mistery to me why Duchamp remains known for his "ready-mades" while his thoughts about art are so foundational but nevertheless ignored. Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs ? Our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" should be brought to account for their inadmissible lightness.

It is nevertheless a fact that, even after "whatever" had been imposed as subject of art, the societal functionality of visual arts has never been in any way put into question. We just don't know any more what this functionality is all about and so we don't speak or write about it but this does in no way mean that visual arts have no societal functionality. As Duchamp was saying "This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century". The absence of debate about the societal functionality of the visual arts does not suppress this functionality it mainly obscures it by fostering ignorance.

Duchamp was right in this idea that "art is at the service of the mind". He just did not conduct the thinking to its logical conclusion. What is the mind indeed used for ? What is the outcome of knowledge ? What is the relationship between society and knowledge ? How does and can visual art serve knowledge ? So what is the societal functionality of visual arts? Today as well as 500 years ago or 2000 years ago or 50,000 years ago for that matter visual arts were meant to create visual signs of the worldview that is derived out of the knowledge at the hands of the men of knowledge of the day. The only reason, why those signs took such precedence, is that human societies garanteed their stability through the smooth spreading among all members of society of the worldview of the day. The functionality of visual arts is thus directly related to the preservation and the enhancement of societal stability. Bingo !

Visual signs are easier to comprehend than spoken or written words and they are a lot more easy to comprehend than the theories that they represent. I wrote many times already about how this worked in animist times, in religious times and also in early modern times. But what about nowadays? I firmly believe that the societal confusion that we experience nowadays is related to the confusion that we experience in the visual arts and not the other way around. In other words, I believe that the knowledge that gradually emerges out of the ideas of today's men of knowings, the scientists, is not translated into a worldview. If there is no longer any worldview that could be permeating society at large there can be no longer any question of the visual arts relaying the worldview of the men of knowledge towards all members of society.

The artists have thus no alternative but to abandon the traditional dumbness that is associated with illustrating the ideas of others. We are confronted today with this paradox that we do not know where are today's men of knowledge. Surely enough there are some scientists and thinkers who are trying to connect "knowings" horizontally but this does not preclude the existence of a workable knowledge giving birth to a worldview that would be acceptable to all.

In conclusion the only conceivable way out of this conundrum is for the artist to become his own man of knowledge. I follow Duchamp one hundred percent when he says that "this is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter". Yes why should painters continue to accept all that non-sense coming out of the big mouthes of our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" ? What is it that forbids artists to start accumulating scientific knowings and to confront those with the wisdom of philosophy in order to create knowledge ?

Yes I know that this proposition of mine is no easy feat. But what is the alternative if we want to surpass this characterization of being " 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter" and being absolutely unable to fullfill the societal role that is ours ? The societal confusion that we are plunged into nowadays creates much despair. More and more individuals feel at a loss and try by all means to find answers to the inescapable questions relating to REALITY that could be sensical to them.

Religion brought such sensical answers for over one thousand years in Europe and did so too in the territories that inherited the European Christian worldview. Later portraits and landscapes suceeded to give a basic representation of the ideas of individualism and private property or ownership that formed the backbone of the worldview adhered to along the timespan of modern times.

Without visual signs of a unified worldview mirroring today's trends and knowings our late modern societies are fragmenting and imploding into atomization. Individuals have come to believe that they know better. But the fact remains that individuals are no more than particles of their societies and that the creative tension between individuality and collectivity is what in the end generates the possibility of a smooth sailing into the future.

Could there be a worldview emanating directly out of scientific endeavors and the accumulation of scientific knowings nowadays ? Yes and no. Science is indeed characterized by ultra specialization. The scientific outlook is like channelled through narrow vertical pipes leading in the direction of the microscopic or the macroscopic towards the observation of very narrow areas of reality. Views out of such vertical pipes are thus necessarily fragmentory and the scientific approach ends up being burdened by an infinity of fragmentory observations that are not connected horizontally between themselves.

My understanding is thus that the scientific model is generating an infinity of "KNOWINGS", vertical micro-observations, but those knowings do not in any way qualify as "KNOWLEDGE" about reality. Knowings are undoubtedly necessary quantities in developping a coherent knowledge base but it is the horizontal linking between developped knowings that in the end is generating knowledge.

The fact is that science is accumulating astronomical quantities of knowings and that nobody is capable any longer to connect all those knowings together. It is physically unfeasible for us humans:
- first to accumulate all the available knowings at any given time and if it were feasible it would nevertheless remain an unattainable task to track their appearance over time.
- second to link all the existing and potential knowings between themselves in order to generate knowledge.

The acceptance of our physical limitations brings us to the recognition of our void of wholeness that, in the end, is what generates our perpetual quest for "wholesensicalness". From the deepest of our origins till today we searched to master this "wholesensicalness" and even if we did not succeed to master it, we tried to approximate it as good as we could with the tools at our disposal at the time and one of the determining tools for ordering and making sense out of the knowings of the time has always been philosophy.

Philosophy is our vision of the whole of our reality, of the whole of our universe, it is what gives sense to the fragments of reality that we observe with our eyes or that we discover through our scientific explorations. In this sense it is imperative that we all go back to the foundational building blocks of our civilizations for those building blocks are acting upon our civilizations in a way very similar to the way axioms are acting on mathematics. As in mathematics, the central question in our civilizations relates to the validity of our founding axioms or building blocks.
_____________________________
art modern art art theory visual art

Digital variations versus fractals

I terminated my first 168 digital variations.

Enter the slide-show

As I wrote in an earlier post those digital works are procuring me much satisfaction. In 2003 I created 60 fractals (post-psychedelic collection) but I had not found the experience as much enriching as this time around. There is for sure a fundamental difference between fractals and the variations that I'm realizing now:

- fractals: images resulting from the application of a mathematical formula in a fractal imaging software that are then finished in the Gimp or photoshop.

- variations: I manipulate a digital photo of a painting in "The Gimp" (free imaging software similar to photoshop).

In fractals you are using a mathematical formula that you create or one that you borrow from someone else. The software calculates the parameters in the formula and the result is an image that can then be manipulated further through incremental changes applied to the formula. This process of incremental changes is automated in most of the available software so the art in creating fractals is to stop the process of change on the image that gives you the most satisfaction. In other words, this is where subjectivity finally has the last say... What I describe here is how a visual artist as myself interacts with fractals. Some people find their pleasure not so much in the process that I describe here but in the creation of the mathematical formula itself. But however you approach fractals the resulting images will always appear as if they had been machine made. You will not find in a fractal the imperfections that are related to hand work. The best analogy I guess would be to say that the lines and forms in fractals are like industrial lines and forms.

I do not mean here to reject fractals my intention is just trying to let you feel how I myself see the difference between fractals and digital variations.

In my digital variations, because I start from a photo of an existing painting, I never can reach the perfection of a machined straight line nor the perfection of a machined curve nor the perfection of a color transition. The imperfections that are resulting from a hand work are resulting from the communication between the eyes that see, the brain that decides and the hands that execute. The eyes do not necessarily register the exactitude of what they look at, the brain decides according to the preferences that we accumulated as a result of our past experiences and the hands can only do what they have been trained to do... What I want to show here is that a hand work done by a person contains the character of that person, his mood, likes and dislikes and other preferences. Digital variations of the photo of a painting are not taking away the character of the hand work nor of the craft of the creator of the painting they are just amplifying or reducing this or that imprint of the character.

The difference between fractals and digital variations is thus analogous to the difference between industrial products and arts and crafts wares. From my own experience I conclude that fractals are like hamburgers from MacDonalds while digital variations are like fine Chinese or French cuisine. That must be the reason why I find so much pleasure in my digital variations...
art
modern art
art theory
visual art

About modern art: the artist's choice. But is it really so?

I just read the following in ART FOR A CHANGE:
"Hirst was interviewed at the Gagosian Gallery, a New York venue currently showing his latest works. The Elusive Truth is a display of 29 photorealist oil paintings by Hirst... except that he didn't paint a single one of them. The artworks were actually painted by an assembly line of assistants. Hirst only stepped in to add a few final brush strokes, a detail here and there, and to add the all important signature of the master. He admits that he can't paint, saying that "You'd get an inferior painting if it's done by the artist." The paintings, which have sold from $200,000 to $2 million each, are based on cheerless photos of drug addicts, suicide bombers, and hospital scenes. Prints of works in the Gagosian exhibit go for $20,000. One can only wonder what the assistants were paid."
To read this article click here:
URL: Has Damien Hirst Jumped the Shark?

The provocateur's new paintings still can't get much beyond his need to shock, by Mark Stevens
URL: This Is Your Brain on Pause by Michael Kimmelman

What to say?
As I mentionned yesterday art and marketing are two different things but it seems that marketing irremediably dominates the art sphere in our societies is it not?

The artist and all honest thinkers, for that matter, are thus confronted with a choice of life:
- or trying to make money and thus find a way to enter the marketing chain by catching the attention of the media through any means. (remember Banksi and the focus on his recent New York prank by the art-word machine ?)
- or, knowing that this will not bring you any money, think about the old question "what is reality?" and try to convey in visual signs the emerging ideas that are shaping a postmodern worldview that for the first time in human history will be a truly global worldview.

The entire collection of posts on "Crucial Talk" is devoted to art with no concern for marketing.

It makes no doubt that reading the words of Mark Vallen cited here above inspires a disturbing feel of disgust for the state of the arts in our societies. But is this state of affair of the arts not representative of a more general state of affair of the human condition? After reading Vallen's post "Of Cheese & Pickled Sharks" I read in The Guardian about "a report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure... In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself".
Yes here we are: humanity as a hazard to the principle of life !

Soo...
Different people react in different ways. Some fall for suicide, some fall for terror, some fall for material possessions...
My personal way to survive in this maelstrom is to search for the beauty of ideas best matching reality, not the image that projects on our retina but, the understanding of the workings of the whole and of our place as particles in this whole.
My paintings are thus not "realist" in the classical sense they are visual signs of, our understanding about reality, our latest ideas about what reality is all about. Reality is not attainable to us small particles of the whole, at best, we can approximate reality through words, ideas and visual signs. As Lao Tze wrote "the tao that we speak about is not the real tao".
Producing visual signs, of the ideas of the men of knowledge of the day about reality, this has been the societal function of visual arts throughout the whole length of our human history. My personal works are just that and nothing more than that.
I know that our societies are going through a period of very thick fog in terms of consciousness and that the ensueing confusion is favoring an all out merchandization of life. The next step, I guess, they'll ask us to pay for the right to breathe air...
So what can we do? We best we can ever hope of achieving is to take back the control over our personal consciousness, over our personal freedom to examine the validity of all available ideas about reality, with the hope to harness our free will.
Check the meaning of those words in some of my last works.

About blogging

SARAH BOXER had a good piece in the NYT CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK this March 29th "On the Internet, 2nd (and 3rd and . . . ) Opinions". Reading this piece I was thinking about my own blogging experience.

On one side I find myself fishing daily since a few years in a large list of art blogs for material of interest I mean that I scan the net for original thinking about this old question "What is art?". But I have to confess that most of the time I feel as if navigating a dry desert. Not much flowering thought but a confusion of dried grasses. As Sarah Boxer puts it "The traditional objects of culture - books, movies, art - are becoming ever more distant. In their place are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists." The reason behind the existence of most internet sites and blogs, "Their main purpose, it seems, is to get noticed and linked to by more popular blogs". So then what's the reason behind all the hype? "..., many lists on the Web have distance built into them. Respondents comment less on objects of culture than on themselves, their taste and their memory. The narcissistic lure can be irresistible." I guess that's it, it's all about that big ego. But then what's the point to persevere? Well not everyone is so obsessed with his ego and if patient, among the profusion of dried grasses that is so confusing, one can occasionally discover a sprouting green leave.
I "reblog" daily what I find of interest and Bloglines' reblog function works just fine to share my selection of material with others but with time I came to discover that it does not serve me well personally.
I have presently some 1110 reblogs on my blog In the air of our times. The only problem is that BloglinesReblog has no search function and I can't thus find an article that I reblogged when I need it nor can the visitors of the site. To circumvent this problem I subscribed to CiteULike where I post the reblogged articles that I would like to be able to find at a later date. Ideally a reblog site should be able to combine the functionality of reblogging + the search functionality within the library of reblogged articles. All this to show that Sarah Boxer's conclusions are somewhat exagerated. One does not throw the water in the bath and the baby that sits in it... The web is not a perfect instrument for sure. Its ease of use, cheap cost and endless possibilities, is a powerfull magnet for egos but then what? This is not the only story of the web it only is a dominant trait that one can learn to circumvent.

On the other side I use Crucial Talk as an outlay for my personal thinking about art and whatever Sarah Boxer may peruse about I'm just not sure that there is still an interest out there for original thinking.
As I understand it art nowadays is the prey of merchants and their bureaucratic art-word machine that controls the level of noise about art in our societies. That noise is all a gimnick to catch the attention of buyers and other art lovers. It imposes the content emerging out of the public debate and it keeps the lid over the pot of creativity of our societies in order to keep a firm grip over all substantial financial transactions. But this comes at a high cost. The price of this power to direct and determine the marketability of works of art is paid in superficiality and formalism that are as the marks of the trade in the contemporary public debate about art. In this game substance comes to be seen as a threat against the control of market-freaks. They encourage form which eventually becomes pervasive and what finance can pay takes then an air of normality.
That is our artistic reality in the present but those who control the production of our present have nevertheless no control over what will be the perception of our societies in the future. Van Gogh's experience in the 19th century is by no means exceptional. Painters living today and who will be remembered a century from now are not necessarily known today in the art market...
I know that the air of greed that we breathe presently is conducive to following the road of marketing instead of the road of art. Marketing leads to money and art leads to knowledge about what is reality. Money can buy stuff is it not and appease somewhat the urge of greed so it is generally privileged. Knowledge can only satisfy those who wish to understand reality but how could this be comprehended by those who run after money?

Digital variations

I embarked on a long journey in January of 2004.

Those of you who read regularly my posts in Crucial Talk are witnessing my passing through the different stages of that "ARTSENSE" journey. Basically this ARTSENSE journey consists of the following:

1. ARTSENSE acrylics series.
First 25 are terminated. My program is to complete a series of 42. At 9 hours a day and 6 days on average per painting, this means that I still need 17 more weeks to complete that acrylics series...

2. ARTSENSE books.
Out of necessary re-re-readings, this book is terminated and is 305 pages long. Instead of adding always new chapters to that already long work I decided to continue my theoretical explorations further in a second book. I basically terminated two third of that second work that I titled "PAINTING" and that is already over 100 pages long. You could follow the first draft of that work in my PAINTING Posts... I have to confess that I finally tired of painting and of writing that's how a few days ago I landed, absolutely unconsciently (no it's not a joke), in the 3rd leg of that long journey that now became so much longer longer...

3. Digital variations on my ARTSENSE acrylic paintings.
A few days ago I was playing with the GIMP (open source imaging software similar to photoshop at the only difference that the GIMP is absolutely free of charge and also of superior quality in my view).
I was playing with the photos of my ARTSENSE acrylics and fast discovered things that pleased me so much that I got stuck behind the computer for a few days, ...in the end I got a series of digital variations of my first painting, this digital processing was absolutely amazing and also so much relaxing. That's how, step by step, I came to this idea to realize 12 variations of each of my ARTSENSE paintings...
The fastest mathematical processors among you already calculated that this job is 42 paintings times 12 variations long, meaning that I embarked in an adventure of 504 digital works...
I plan to give those digital variations in the form of Limited Edition prints (8 x 1`2" and 01/25).
I terminated the first 60 digital variations. Those of you who are interested to see what's the outcome can go to:
Laodan Acrylics digital variations
Click on "digital variations" down the page and you'll enter the slide show... to progress click the arrows....


Your comments are more than welcome I'm indeed curious to know about the reactions towards my work coming out of that world that I sometimes feel is so far from me, I mean human society....

Painting (13)

About Postmodernism.

Postmodernism is an old concept used to indicate what follows the modern age but it has been associated with so many different ideas that the concept ended up being foggy and perceived as some kind of metaphysical rareness. I'm using the concept "postmodern" in its narrow sense of "what follows the modern age". Another denomination shall eventually impose itself out of the practice of what comes after modernism but only the future will tell.

1. Preliminaries. ......................... ................ ...................(post Painting 10)

2. The context of the new societal paradigm in the forming (post Painting 11)

3. On the road toward a postmodern societal paradigm.. (post Painting 12)

4. The postmodern societal paradigm.

I described earlier how science and technology have been derived as functionalities of the rationality that has been creeping out of the logic of capital and how they spread to all corners of the world. They were pulled by the globalization that capital searched for itself and have been presented as being and containing all the truth there is about reality. We all know, by now, that science is not the truth, or does not project all the truth, it is only functionally superior to all other approaches in the eyes of the logic of capital and as such it has been privileged to the point of being the exclusive approach that was accepted in all industrial societies. In consequence, most of us have come to believe that there is no other way out of the scientific approach to understand reality.
But if science were really the only way to understand reality how do we begin to explain that after less than 200 years of application, by less than 10% of the world population, it landed the whole world in such a mess?

The problems that science helped to create and its impossibility to come up with satisfying answers has fortunately led some scientists to recognize the limitations of the traditional scientific approach.

-............So what is the problem with the scientific approach?
Answer: the vertical approach, the tunnel.
The scientific tunnel starts with the perception by the scientific traveler and ends upon what his perception is looking for. The scientist isolates the phenomenon he is studying and rushes toward it with a microscope or a telescope. He zooms and instantly reaches the zone of his interest. But by doing so he eliminates all the interconnections his subject is entertaining with all the other components present in the ensemble wherein his subject belongs and furthermore eliminating the interconnections between this ensemble and all other ensembles being part of the whole of the universe. In other words the scientific approach is like boring a vertical tunnel through the environment of the observed hoping that by focusing on the observed; light will be shed on its reality.
The only problem is that the observed exists only as a component of the whole and the light that is shed by the scientific approach can thus only be a mirage of its reality.
To put this in other words here is how the late Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for his work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems, is putting it in a conversation with Marilyn Berlin Snell Senior Editor at NPQ: "Let's consider, for a moment, a cup of hot coffee. Is this coffee aging? Will it cool down until it reaches equilibrium at room temperature? In order to determine whether the coffee is aging I cannot consider the water molecules taken separately. If I do that I will not see the aging process. But if I consider the relationship between molecules I can then see quite clearly that the coffee is aging. We must view the encounters, the collisions and correlations between molecules, in order to see the flow of time."

-...........What are the solutions scientists came up with?
Answer: the horizontal approach or the horizontal linkage between multi-vertical-tunneling.
Becoming conscientious about the limitations of the tunneling model scientists began to refer to multi-tunneling (vertical tunneling toward multiple observed) and later to multi-disciplinary vertical tunneling (the tunneling by different sciences toward the same observed).

.............*............In a first move the practitioners of one scientific branch decided to link horizontally the multiple objects of their vertical-multi-tunneling focusings. By combining the results observed at multiple points of observation they gained more complexity inside their field of specialty and they reached predictive validity in modeling narrow segments of reality. The calculating power of computers expanded the reach of multi-tunneling to relatively simple mechanisms: metal forming, chemical reactions, etc. But the multi-tunneling approach is basically limited to narrow fields in closed ensembles.

.............*............In a second move multi-disciplinary observations, from various vertical tunnels of a unique observed, are reconciled into a synthesis. The next logical step was then to combine the multi-disciplinary approach with multi-tunneling. The result is without any doubt much more complexity but this did not help gaining much more real practical understanding. The multi-disciplinary approach certainly sheds more light on the working of wider fields closed ensembles but their shedding light on more complexity does not necessarily procure much more understanding about what is going on at the point of focus. This approach has been initiated by the Santa Fe Institute of the sciences of complexity since the beginning of the 1980th but in the words of one of its pioneers, Stephen Wolfram, it did not help to advance as much the level of understanding reality as was initially expected.

Science has unmistakably helped us gaining some functional knowledge that led to immediate commercial applications that in turn eased on us the weight of necessity. Without that kind of functionality financing would have been rare indeed. But one is left to wonder if modern science is not foremost driven by the desire for marketable knowledge which would be far from the image of science that is projected in the public's concienceness. Big bucks in the expectation of big returns. The saddest for the lucid observer is that no one seems really bothered by the general weakness of scientific understanding. Often very crude measures are sufficient to turn out doing the trick of profit. So why bother? Well we better bother for the good reason that we did so many things that turned out to be doing the trick of profit but in the end appeared to carry a price that we would never have accepted had we just known about the size of the cost initially. Climate change is one of such costs that we learned about long after the industry started to propose us individual cars and we could multiply this kind of examples ad infinite. But in the eyes of our children and grand-children this could well spell so much trouble that our attitude could be seen as having been totally unacceptable. We'll long be gone and we'll not have to endure their wrath; is it not?
What I want to indicate here is that the scientific community as a whole can't be trusted to generate societally sustainable knowledge. It is so fundamentally skewed by its dependence on the financing by capital holders that it's freedom is limited to the only production of knowings that will generate returns for those same capital holders. Such knowings have nevertheless the weakness to be out of knowledge of the impact that their application will impose on societies, individuals, nature and other species.

Deborah Tannen has a good piece in the LA Times that addresses this problem from a different angle: "The Feminine Technique, Men attack problems, maybe women understand that there's a better way". Her article addresses a substantive differentiation of attitudes, between men and women, and further between Westerners and Chinese in trying to apprehend reality.
" The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas is deeply rooted in Western civilization. It can be found in the militaristic roots of the Christian church and in our educational system, tracing back to all-male medieval universities where students learned by oral disputation.
... contrast this with Chinese science and philosophy, which eschewed disputation and aimed to "enlighten an inquirer," not to "overwhelm an opponent." As Chinese anthropologist Linda Young showed, Chinese philosophy sees the universe in a precarious balance that must be maintained, leading to methods of investigation that focus more on integrating ideas and exploring relations among them rather than on opposing ideas and fighting over them. "

This short citation paints a realistic description of how far pole apart are the methods used in trying to apprehend reality in the West and in China.

The West is stuck in its civilizational roots based on the struggle for survival among opposites (see Painting 4: The axioms of civilization) and the individual atoms perceive themselves on the side of the 'good', the 'right' so that the opposing party can only be perceived as on the side of the 'bad', the 'wrong'.
"The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas" is thus what is framing the intellectual debate and "overwhelming an opponent" is what each party in a debate is concerned about.
In real life this cultural characteristic, inherited from as far as the roots of Western civilization, combines with the dependence of the scientist on the financing by capital holders. The result is sheer incapacity at listening to a fundamental critique or proposition at repositioning the scientific investigation. Science is presented as the optimal truth as something sacred that can't be criticized and daring to pass over that interdiction is then presented as a sacrilege and the one who commits this sacrilege is accused of committing a profanation. In this process science has been transformed in a new religion for short sighted individuals.
Fortunately some scientists eventually are enlightened and are then calling for a shift in the scientific paradigm. Those are our contemporary men of knowledge who are showing us the path toward the future. They are the revolutionaries indicating the path, to humanity, toward a new and superior paradigm of what reality is all about. Let's listen once more to Prigogine: "The very aim of science is to show how we are related to the universe. We can no longer have a 'unified' picture that shows nature as an automaton but which shows us as free and ethically responsible. The theory of instability does not encourage alienation. On the contrary it is an idea that makes us feel that we are living in a universe that is not so different from ourselves. ... The classical view was that we could reduce the history of the universe, and thereby science, to a geometry. Because of instability this is no longer possible. I very much like the fact that instability opens up a horizon of possibilities, since our actions at a given time depend on the way in which we view the future. If we looked on the horizon and saw only death, pollution and decay, I think it would erase any argument for reasoned, ethical action today."

The roots of the Chinese civilization are based on a similar approach to what Prigogine expresses in his late years: a holistic vision of reality constituted by the principle of change with no beginning and no end but with an arrow indicating a movement forward.
In each state of disequilibrium a point of bifurcation is eventually reached where an infinity of possible roads forward appear. At this point we have the choice or the chance to favor this or that outcome by our actions; if we are conscientious that means. In this view the universe is "in a precarious balance that must be maintained, leading to methods of investigation that focus more on integrating ideas and exploring relations". For thousands of years the Chinese have learned that they are no more than a particle of dust on the waves of changes. They learned to surf and they thus do not resist the waves but try to understand where are the obstacles in order to avoid being killed. Here is where the Chinese gained their pragmatism. They understood that there is no way to oppose the working of the whole but they also understood the possibility of an homeopathic dose of will gaining themselves a more favorable outcome.

Late modernism witnesses an expansion without precedent of the reach of capital its ideology and the scientific method while simultaneously the level of confusion in all spheres of human life has never been more intense. In this very complex environment two worldchanging trends are on the road of their convergence:

-............Some enlightened scientists are acting as our societies' new men of knowledge. As says Prigogine "In a sense there is a hierarchy: The fundamental aspect is instability or chaos, which then forces us to incorporate the probabilistic aspect into our concepts; then the probabilistic aspect forces us to include the arrow of time in our formulations. Chaos, then, and not immutable, deterministic laws is really the basic law of the universe. Chaos is at the origin of the variety of physical experience. Today we have moved from determinism to determinations; from stability to instability and probability."

-............In "On the road toward a postmodern societal paradigm = The result of a global rebalancing act" I described the shaping of a process leading toward Chinese economic dominance that in turn is leading to their future cultural hegemony.

The point of convergence of those two trends will affirm, around the world, a new paradigm or to say this in a better understandable form: a new worldview about reality is shaping through the encounter of modern science and Chinese traditions that will bring the whole of humanity together behind a common understanding of reality.
That new worldview is what postmodernism is all about.
We should remember that the concept has been coined by us in late modernity to indicate something that comes after modernity but the concept has unfortunately covered many various explanations all more meaningless than the others. As such the concept postmodernism should not carry over much significance for the men and women who will be witnessing that convergence and who will surely find a more appropriate coinage to describe that worldchanging event.

"With every new intellectual program always come new fears and expectations. But consider the unity between knowledge and culture that has emerged within the paradigm of chaos: At this moment, when as a human civilization we are beginning to sense our connection with the environment--we are understanding the importance of preserving biological diversity, etc.--and with the universe as a whole, we are also coming over to a theoretical view of the universe that connects us in fundamental ways to nature. At the moment we see bifurcation points in human history--consider the coup attempt in the former Soviet Union, which had many possible outcomes--we discover new bifurcations in physics. In this way, we are building a kind of unified cultural identity for the 21st century. Finally, we can move beyond the classical conflict between being and becoming. Being is no longer the primordial element, just as becoming is no longer an illusion, the product of ignorance. Not at all. Today, we see that becoming, which is the expression of instability in the universe, is the primordial element. Yet, in order to express this, we also need elements that are permanent. We cannot have becoming without being, just as we cannot have light without darkness or music without silence." It seems to me that this is the point where Prigogine's thinking fuses with Chinese traditional philosophy in recognizing the impossibility, inside one unit, of the existence of one polarity without the existence of the other. Visual artists understand instinctively that white, or all colors coming together, this extreme possibility is indeed to materialize only if it is balanced by a total absence of colors, or black, at the other pole of the unit colors. Positing otherwise would be rejecting the possibility of the range of colors' shadings between white (all) and black (none).

Prigogine points to the polarities of the individual unit, being – becoming, and the dynamic that they engender and he then goes on opening the road to choice, determinations or probabilities at the bifurcation point inside a unit's state of instability.
The universe can thus not be considered any longer as being mechanically predetermined, the arrow of time does not point to an inevitable final outcome, there are an infinity of possible futures for the unit humanity and only our actions are what makes the difference.
Clearly our ideals about the future are thus what engenders our actions in the present and as such we discover that morality and virtue are the real shapers of our future. We are back in the realm of Chinese traditional philosophy: tao, the way and te, virtue.

Prigogine simultaneously rejects to the dustbin of history the founding axioms of our western civilization. "The view which we now have of the universe and our place in it seems to me to be absolutely anti-Kantian. In order to reconcile ethical behavior and the classical laws of physics, Kant had to introduce duality, which is a permanent fixture in the Western history of philosophy. Descartes introduced a division between intelligent thought, the brain, on one side and matter on the other. Kant introduced the difference between the noumenal world, which could be apprehended by intuition, and the phenomenological world, which could be apprehended through analysis. Physics would deal with phenomenology and ethics would be constructed in the noumenal world.
The main point of what I try to say in my work is that we no longer need this kind of dualism. Life is more deeply rooted in the laws of self-organization and coherent behavior than classical science led us to believe."

In summary:

-.............Postmodernism will bring about a vision based on the concepts of:

...............*............wholeness (vision of us, in the whole of our universe and
............................in the whole of .humanity, giving form to the idea of our
............................ responsibility towards the whole.)

...............*............inclusiveness (vision of us as being a part, being a particle,
.............................of the whole and of humanity. The repercussions here could
.............................be immense for how could we continue.to accept this
.............................disgrace of our humanity's inequality that so visually
.............................affects us all.)

...............*...........unity (the unity of the whole, the unity of all its ensembles
............................and the unity of allthe particles of those ensembles)

...............*...........change (reality is change on the pendulum of chaos to order
............................and vice-versa. Change occurs within all unities along the
............................infinite movement of the pendulum. .We better be
............................conscientious that change is not an abstract proposition it is
............................affecting our daily lives.)

-.............In postmodernism our perception of reality will focus on change as the essence of time and of life: as illustration of my vision here follows a poem that I integrated in a work titled philosophy that I painted in Beijing in the Fall of 2001:



The contact, between the polarities within any unit, generates a burst of energy fueling changes and transformations that are as the seconds on the ticking clock of evolution.

From this we know that the life of all species and their members is given by the changes occurring in the following 3 dimensions:

-............ The SKY or the influences of environments, from vicinity to infinity, on each specie and its members.

-.............The EARTH or the influences of the hardware and software assigned to the members of each living specie. This is called the drama of reproduction of the specie through sex and of reproduction of the individuals through the satisfaction of their objective needs.

-.............The SELF or the influences of the cultural and economic works of each specie upon itself, upon its members, upon other species and upon the environment.

Seeing that cultural and economic works are nothing more than the specific forms and answers of one particular specie to the influences of the earth and the sky, that is very wise indeed.
Seeing that individual works are nothing more than the specific forms and answers of one particular individual to the influences of the sky, the earth and the self that is pure wisdom.

What is visual art?

A short post to put my writings in this blog into perspective.
This post is a repeat of my post Painting (3) about the systemic map of my inquiry into "what is visual art?".

I approach this question from the historical perspective of the changes in human societies over the long haul. I can't indeed bring myself to be satisfied by abstract intellectual constructions about art that I feel are so much empty talk that time fast washes away. University libraries are replete with such art theories but these theories seem not having much enlightened humanity. I'm even tempted to assert that they are part of the problem with the contemporary confusion about art. Many times I have this troubling feel that thinking is, like, caged into specialist fields where chain reactions of words are imposing themselves upon the mind of their speakers without bringing any substance to the debate their voices are participating into. Much noise ensues not much sense. But it seems that this does not disturb our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine". If I write about art, instead of spending all my time painting it's not to add some more words to an already overflowing box, it is simply because I'm not satisfied with what I read and writing imposes the logical rigor that helps me to clarify my own ideas which is basically what I'm running after.



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About the systemic map of my inquiry into "what is visual art?".
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We are part of a continuum, part of the history of mankind, more particularly we are acting inside one moment of that history one among the global population in that specific time. It is not as if we were inventing the wheel we just flow a little further on what has been built before us.
The validation or invalidation of the sense of our actions, in painting or whatever else, is thus determined by the flowing or not of the content of our actions into the future.
For sure we are not divine and we don't know what the future has in store but we can maximize the chances the content of our actions being part of the flow towards the future by understanding the long haul historical process of what we are doing. That's what I'm trying to achieve through my writings about visual arts.


I distinguish 4 "scales" in the long haul rythm of the artistic pulse:

1. THE ROAD OF HUMANITY:
.....= the energetic contact between humanity's polarities:
..........--> societies
..........--> individuals

2. THE AXIOMS OF CIVILIZATIONS:
.....= the founding building blocks upon which societies build their future. At a certain juncture on the road of humanity societies adopt axiom like foundational ideas and values about what reality is all about upon which they later will build cultural add-ons. Those building blocks are somehow similar to the foundations of a house upon which is build the visible structure of that house that's why they are called "founding building blocks". Each civilization has its own founding building blocks and they are actively shaping the paths taken by their societies.

3. SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS:
.....= a society reaches stability when a large majority of its citizens make theirs a given worldview. This gradual and evolutionary process follows 2 tracks:
.........--> the road of humanity
.........--> the path given by the civilization's axioms

4. THE FUNCTION OF VISUAL ARTS:
.....= creating the visual signs of what is shaping into the worldview of the day in order to share that worldview with all members of society.
..........--> along 99.8% of the time span of the history of human culture the men of power imposed the worldview of the men of knowledge of their day upon all members of their societies and visual artists were nothing more than image technicians who created visual signs of those worldviews at the attention of all members of their societies.
..........--> somewhere along the road of Western societies towards democracy the men of knowledge went their separate roads from the men of power and in the 20th century the worldview of the individuals started to fragment. Not being imposed any longer a worldview to illustrate the image technicians (artists) were left on their own to define what their visual signs should illustrate. Never educated in anything else than the use of their brushes they were generally "bete comme un peintre, stupid as a painter " as says it so well Marcel Duchamp. There were indeed not many Leonardos. The fragmentation of the worldview of their societies did not help them and the "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" was surely of no help either.
..........--> In our times of great confusion, I think, it is our first duty to re-establish sense in the art of creating visual signs. The art is not a question of technique it is a question of content...

Interested, visit me at:

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