What is modernism after all?

When placed in a societal perspective (economic, social and cultural history) it seems to me that the seeds of modernism were planted with the plunder of Middle-Eastern luxuries during the crusades and the flow of trade that ensued along the following centuries.What I mean to say more exactly is that Modernism is one episode within the historical era of Modernity that starts with the long distance trade that was unleashed by the crusades. Viewed through the lens of the very long history Homo-sapiens' evolved indeed societally from:

1. bands to tribes. Homo-sapiens' first true model of society were tribal non-power societies.  This was when the genie Homo distinguished itself from the other animal species by evolving societally, through the usage of knowledge, from bands of individuals coerced under the authority of an alpha-male into tribes whose members were considered to be equal and so decided on all matters pertaining to their group at the unanimity. Tribal societies shared the vision of reality of their shaman and this glued the minds of tribesmen inside a commonly shared worldview. And the substance of this worldview was shared by tribes all around the world while variations in the form of its substance adapted it to local contextual settings. Anthropologists refer to this worldview as animism or shamanism. Tribal (wo)men of knowledge were those who initiated the practice of image making. It was their instrument per excellence to instill their vision of reality in the minds of their fellow tribesmen. Later that practice of image making was referred to as being art sometimes during the Renaissance in Western Europe. And once the nations of the rest of the world joined Modernity they also  inherited this appellation.
   
2. tribes to power societies: demographic growth eventually destabilized the golden rule about the size of tribal societies and after thousands of years of trials and errors larger groups settled for institutions of power in order to reproduce their societies over the generations:

• the first stage of power societies was the era of empire and kingdoms that started approximately around 5000 Years Ago and came to an end first in Western Europe sometimes in the 13-14th centuries. The rest of the world later followed in the footsteps of Western Europe. The worldview shared by all during the era of kingdoms and empires was religion that glued the minds of the individual atoms and the art of that era is religious art illustrating the creed... China was an exception to that principle.  First the worldview of its empire was not religious but philosophical. Secondly its men of knowledge were the mandarins or scholars who were especially educated to serve the institutions of the empire and art was one among their practices. And so Chinese art was a representation of the tenets of their traditional philosophy and not an illustration of any creed.
• the second stage of power societies was initiated in Western Europe between the 13th and 14th centuries as a result of the long distance merchants' adoption of "the reason at work within capital". This is what unleashed the societal era called Modernity... Modernity divides in 3 phases:  -- Early-Modernity 13-14th centuries to the 19th century,  -- High-Modernity 19th and 20th centuries,  -- Late-Modernity started after the 2nd World war sometimes in the seventies/eighties and is the world's present condition.

What is called Modernism is the revolution in the visual art world that was initiated largely by the Parisian avant-garde sometimes during the 2nd part of the 19th century. The dominance of Modernism waded after the 2nd World-war. 

________

By the 14th and 15th centuries art was starting to transition in Western-Europe from being exclusively at the service of religion to becoming the illustrator and propagator of the visual signs of modernity. Religious stories had been the only accepted subjects to be represented in art for over a millennium following the imposition by the emperor Constantine of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire.

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

In the 14th to the 15th century art, which had been a practice describing religious stories at the attention of the followers of the church, start to be used to ensure the "sanctification" of the bourgeoisie's new values of individualism and private property. And gradually their commissions of works to be suspended on the walls of their mansions (financed with the proceeds of their plunders in far lands) overtook the purchases by the church and after a few centuries they eclipsed the traditional religious visual signs. This period is called the Renaissance for it was kind of a revolution to satisfy the emerging needs of the new rich, the enterprising aristocracy and merchants, through the recourse to Greek pre-Christian knowledge that had been lost in Europe during the Middle-ages but that long distance merchants rediscovered in the rich Muslim university libraries of the Middle-East. The new visual signs in demand now were -- portraits of the new rich and the members of their families, -- landscapes around their manors, -- and stills. Such subjects will dominate the visual art scene for the next four-five centuries.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Hunters in the Snow 1565; 

Oil on panel, 117 x 162 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna

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

Vincent van Gogh,  Wheatfield with Cypresses

, July 1890 (Auvers-sur-Oise), June 1889 original; Oil on canvas, 51.5 x 65 cm

By the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century science is blooming. At the contact of their friends mathematicians and physicists Picasso and a few other painters want to change the subject of representation by re-coursing to mathematical theories but in the end the only thing they succeed doing is what fast will appear as a trick (triangles and other abstract forms to represent more than one side of a same subject in one painting). Such tricks change the form of faces, landscapes, and stills but are still representations of the same first degree image  that projects on the retina. Duchamp understood this. He called cubism a trick and futurism an expressionism of movement.

Duchamp. Transition of Virgin into a Bride/Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée. 1912. 

Canvas 59 x 53.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.

At the contact with psychoanalysis the early surrealists, at least the thinkers of the movement, (Breton, Masson, Miro, Kandinsky...) experiment with automatism but while they escape the first degree image that projects on the retina they fail to theorize a new vision of reality. With Dali and Magritte the movement errs in commercialism and rapidly loses the steam of its original promises.



The second world war represents a radical turning point.

Coming out of the barbarity that had afflicted all nations of Europe artists and intellectuals proclaim their rejection of societal life as it had always been conceived of before. The members of Cobra are the most explicit. Constant, for example, speaks about the release of knowledge, as an outcome of the discovery of his desires through experimentation, hoping that this newly released knowledge will generate a radically new societal experience. Art started now to be conceived of as the description of a reality in the process of becoming and not any longer as an existing system that would be absolute and unchanging. This is when the artist projected the hope to mutate into a modern shaman who brings a vision of the rejected barbarity in the hope of gaining better days for all tomorrow.

Cobra Modification, 1949 

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

But real shaman are not stuck into rejecting the past. They offer a new vision that can be shared by all... As we see from "Cobra Modification" the past, the barbarity, is still the exclusive subject. We'll have to wait for artists in late Late-Modernity to dare starting to represent the first signs of a new vision of life in the process of becoming.

Having been spared the trauma of life through barbarity and not being excessively burdened by a past of theories and concepts American painters and artists are focusing on their individual feelings. This is best expressed by Jackson Pollock in "Three statements": "The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather then to illustrate them". Pollock and his colleagues limit their actions to the satisfaction of their personal ego, the expression of their feelings, and do not show the least interest for what their minds are thinking about nor for the impact of their works on societal functioning. With hindsight we come to better understand how they were the perfect match for ideologues and merchants.

 The ideologues of the US state department understood that by pushing the works of the New York Art School in the face of the whole world they would be able to contrast their freedom to paint "whatever" with the ideological rigidity of socialist realism. But the propaganda budgets of various branches of the US government also targeted the establishment of New York as the capital of the art market. European merchants were subsidized to transfer their galleries to New York while European painters who refused to move to New York were shunned by the market.

The failure by the painters of the Modernist avant-garde, to attain their objectives of representing reality at a deeper level than the first degree image that project on the retina, was not lost on the merchants. They sized on that failure to eliminate, from the commercial circuit, all works that focus on ideation and political messages. In that process form was favored over substance. And so we come to understand why the members of the New York Art School were not only pushed in the face of the world for reasons of propaganda but also for commercial reasons. Merchants want indeed to minimize the loss of eyeballs and buyers in order to maximize their returns. And to ensure maximum returns they eliminated everything that fostered ideation, debate, and rejection.

Pollock. Number 8, 1949 (detail) 1949; 

Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York.

This radical differentiation in creative attitudes on the two sides of the pond is largely due to daily life exposure or no daily life exposure to war barbarity. But the societal disparities between the two sides appear as radically important on creative attitudes as the exposure or not to daily barbarity. In short the war had considerably enriched the US economically while Europe ended largely indebted towards the US and with an infrastructure in taters. In the post war America ran at full speed into "marketization for consumerism" while Europe had to spend its time reordering its political houses. In short demand for visual signs for wall decoration were fast booming in the US while Europe continued to debate about ideas. This had a radically opposite impact on the intellectual and creative approach towards visual signs in Europe and the US. The American mass market needed politically sterile visual signs in order to reach the largest spread in demand while in Europe visual signs were largely expressing a political answer against war barbarity and the hope of better days to come.

Shed in such a light we understand a lot better the differences between abstract expressionism and Cobra and its followers and we also gain a better understanding as to why abstract expressionism gained wide market recognition while Cobra and other European artists remained in the shadows of the market.


But how will the input of both sides be judged in terms of the "long history" of visual art?

I venture to suggest that from a long haul historical standpoint:

• Cobra and the other European thinking artists will be seen as the true initiators of the unification of Europe as an antidote against barbarity. As such Cobra could well appear as an early gravedigger of modernity opening the way for later first steps into  what comes after modernity.

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

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

Richard Serra. One Ton Prop (House of Cards). 1969 (refabricated 1986). 

Lead, four plates, each 48 x 48 x 1" (122 x 122 x 2.5 cm). Gift of the Grinstein Family. © 2006 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Rejection of formalism. Postmodernism.

European intellectuals and artists rebelled against the focus of the art-world on form and soon the Post-Modernist school re-introduced substance. In their minds substance equaled ideation. But what is ideation? In "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" Jean-Francois Lyotard posited that 'grand narratives' or worldviews had been ousted by rationalism and science and so ideation had to focus on limited phenomena just like science does. In other words Lyotard and his Parisian colleagues suspected meaning to be a trap that they thought they could escape by deconstruction and concentration on the fragmented pieces. In essence the artist was tasked to imitate science and its stated mission to comprehend the whole by addition of the comprehension of the parts.  

This very fact did not escape the powers that be. They had indeed been in a fight, over the best part of the last hundred years, against social movements that grand political narratives had glued into cohesive opposition groups. One such group, the Communist party in 1917, succeeded to take over Russia, then another group nearly took the control of Germany, and such groups have been since threatening the whole of Western Europe. To the agents of power theories about the rejection of grand narratives were like a gift from the sky. They controlled the institutions of higher education, they had vast state budgets, and rushed their most famous institutions into hiring the best known Postmodern French star theorists. The rest is history.

In the name of artistic substantiation Postmodern thought leaders imposed an arbitrary limit to ideation that has the ideological stench of propaganda and censorship. The rejection of the notion of worldviews and their societal functions by the theorists of postmodernism was tantamount to hoodwinking citizens to believe in grand illusions of freedom which would necessarily engage serious consequences for the future working of societies in the form of societal atomization followed by the collapse of societies. More generally Postmodern thought leaders gave everyone to see that they had no idea of what societal evolution is all about: gluing the mind of individual particles into sharing a common worldview so that their societies have a sufficient cohesiveness to possibly reproduce over the generations.

The reason at work within capital and the ‘knowings’ leading to rationality and science were full of the energy of life that frenetically pushes for ever more complexity and as such rationality and science were fostering an age of incredibly rapid societal evolution. In contrast, it seems to me, Postmodernism goes against the grain of societal evolution and it is harmful to the physical and moral well-being of the individuals. But perhaps this is again all at the image of the loneliness of Western individuals in their atomized societies in waiting to collapse...



What comes after Modernity and post-Modernity

To give a feel of how the works of modernity and post-modernity differentiate from what is to come, here are some examples of early After-modernity babble. No doubt this is early post modern learning, for, what comes after modernity will take many decades if not centuries to mature. We have indeed to acknowledge that what comes after modernity can only grow into fertile ground, if I may say so, and this ground is unfortunately represented by the completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world which inevitably ensures -- the maximization of all the side-effects of Modernity, and their convergence which sets in motion a raft of feedbacks among themselves...

See the contrast of these early works of After-modernity with the sad, mostly negative outlook in Constant's works. The latter is the phase of rejection (late evening) that allows for the dawn to set on the experimentation of better days to come. These new works dare starting to represent the first signs of a new vision of life in the process of becoming and what is striking is that these works denote a positiveness that suggest the break-down of many of the present-day existing obstacles to individual fulfillment. In this sense it is a new societal setting, a new worldview, that these works try to prefigure or imagine.

There is also visibly a reference to knowledge that could be available to all. Today the knowledge accumulated along the generations has to be learned and memorized by each individual. There is no reason to believe that the large mass of knowledge accumulated earlier should indefinitely need to be memorized by all.

One possibility is that extensions from the brain to computers will give us access to stored memory. In such a vision directly accessible accumulated knowledge is one of the most striking aspects of After-Modernity... Another possibility is that technology disappears in the maelstrom of side-effects of Modernity that unleash societal collapse and mass extinction of life. I'm personally more inclined to think that collapse and extinction are what comes our way... And if humanity survives the Anthropocene it will unmistakably have to compose with nature. Small groups of people will not have the time to inquire into abstractions. They'll have to toil to survive. To decrease their suffering while increasing their happiness they will have to delegate the task of knowledge formation to a specialized man of knowledge... And so we discover how a cycle of societal evolution closes while a new cycle eventually emerges...

In such a contextual setting the role of the real artist is thus to imagine how humanity might then conceive of reality in the future. Here are very early visual signs of such possibly better days to come when the organic reality of life necessarily re-imposes itself and men of knowledge start to search for patterns in the fabric of reality in order to gain knowledge about the working of the new realities confronting humanity...

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

laodan. Transformation. Acrylic 17" x 22".

Note dated July 2016.

This post was written in May 2007. Nearly a decade later, while still agreeing with what I wrote there, I have to expand on the notion of "better days to come" and "Those works denote a positiveness suggesting the break-down of many of the present-day existing obstacles to individual fulfillment".

My view today is that our societies are definitely on an accelerated path to collapse. This will assuredly not be a picnic. But while collapse evokes hard times ahead it also evokes the liberation from a maddening worldview and the chance to recover one's sanity.

Modernity has been overly successful and this is what in the end is killing it. The side-effects of Modernity have no other explanation for them possibly affecting societies and individuals than the fact that the individuals have been dumbed down by an overly wild individualism and extreme consumerism that act like a lobotomization that reduces our minds into infantilism. In the future historians will be asking why Moderns did lose the usage of their minds. Why did they follow, like sheep, the abstract idea contained in the reason at work within capital? Why did they continue destroying life on earth while collapse was already well advanced?

To future minds our behavior today as a species will indeed appear baffling to say the least.

When you understand where humanity stands today you can only dread what is coming our way but at the same time you also feel a tickling of encouragement because it promises the ending of what can only be called an era of sheer insanity. It is in that sense that the expression "better days to come" has to be understood ...as being a promise of positivity, of pragmatism, that is contained as a tickling of encouragement in our minds.

My work "Transformation" here above reflects such a promise of leaving chaos and entering an emergent new era of order in which man starts a new cycle of knowledge formation...

Note Dated December 2018

To better visualize, in one glance, what Modernism is all about I invite you to visit my "Visual Encyclopedia of art". Scroll up from section 07 to 15 to visualize the unfolding of Modernism and, in sections 16 to 24, you can visualize how a new avant-garde is starting to venture in the representation of the artistic path out of Modernity towards what comes after Modernity.

Soulless science and rationalism

Alan Finder had an interesting piece this morning in the NYT: "Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus": Peter J. Gomes has been at Harvard University for 37 years, and says he remembers when religious people on campus felt under siege. To be seen as religious often meant being dismissed as not very bright, he said.
No longer. At Harvard these days, said Professor Gomes, the university preacher, 'There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years'. "


What's going on?

Science and rationalism have never offered a simple and all encompassing worldview answering the many foundational questions that each of us hears popping in his mind at one or another moment in his life. Where does the universe come from? How do I fit in the wholeness of the universe? What is life? Is there life after death? And so on.

It is not as if it were impossible to find credible answers to those questions from a rationalist or scientific standpoint but fact is that only those who accumulated a vast body of scientific knowings can possibly find such credible answers out of rationalism. That means that the vast majority of students and should I say the vast majority of citizens do not have the means to find such answers through rationalism.

But living without shared certainty in your head about those foundational questions can be distressful, for, you will never find peace of mind and you will also never fully sense the warmth and security offered by a participation in a group or society.

Individuals, at the image of atoms, are components of the grouping they belong to. Atoms of iron unrelated to other atoms of iron are nothing. It's the iron indeed that confers them an existence. The same goes for human individuals. We can't possibly exist by or on ourselves. It's the grouping we belong to that confers the viability of our individual existence. And the belonging to a grouping is, first and foremost, a question of psychic bonding with the other members. This is realized through the sharing of a common worldview that acts as a gluing of the individuals into the group.

The sharing of such a worldview is also what ultimately assures the reproduction of the group and its development.

It is as if life, or humanity for that matter, were only springing into existence when their polarities are interacting: on one side the group, the society and on the other the individuals. The contradictions between those poles appear as generating the energy that drives their unity to change, to evolve, down the line of time.
Take out the sharing of a common worldview (belief system) by the individuals or give them latitude to believe in whatever they want and the contradictions between them and the group they belong to fade away thus reducing or eliminating the production of energy that is necessary to power the evolution of the unity they belong to. That's when the grouping starts to disintegrate. The same mechanism would equally be at work if society were covering the whole space of life. This would indeed suffocate the individuals to their death.

The Wolfram Demonstrations Project gives an excellent visualization of the "Yin Yang" that perfectly illustrates my comments: "variations of the classic Chinese symbol that animate the motto of Niels Bohr: Contraria non contradictoria sed complementa sunt. (Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.)"

In fact Yin-Yang are no opposites as suggested on Wolfram.com they are indeed acting more like the polarities of any unity.

Let's say for the sake of convenience that white represents society and black represents the individuals. What we see, from Wolfram's visualization, is that when black covers the full space of the unity represented by the circle then there remains no white which would mean the total disappearance of society...

For the Chinese the Tao of life is to avoid all excesses and harmony is to be found in the middle-ground where the 2 polarities find their maximum breathing space. The dynamic visualized by Wolfram's demonstration shows the range of movements that changing conditions possibly can follow within any given unity along the span of time. In some periods the white of society can be dominant but if society were to represent the whole of humanity then there would be absence of black meaning no individuals any longer... and by definition that would also represent the death of society. In other periods the black of individuals can be dominant but if it were to represent the whole of humanity then there would be absence of white meaning no society any longer... and by definition that would represent the death of the individuals. What this shows us is that all white or all black are an existential impossibility.

The ill-feeling experienced by many individuals in late modernity could thus be understood as a natural mechanism, biological perhaps?, of rejection of the atomization of their societies that on Wolfram's visualization corresponds to an ever increasing blackening of the circle...

Late modernity concludes with such a societal atomization and the fact is that societies really appear starting to disintegrate. On one side the individuals follow their own belief system that is formed as their life goes by but on the other side they also feel more and more ill at-ease and experience a growing yearning for sharing a common worldview with others. This is what Alan Finder's article is all about and, by the way, it is also what many Chinese are experiencing nowadays after the chaos unleashed on them by the excessively rapid entry of their country into modernity...

Understanding the societal need for a strong worldview to be shared by the individuals is one thing. But we better be aware that past worldviews, if they possibly could satisfy the individuals, never will they satisfy their societies. Today's conditions on the ground, in terms of established knowings, are different from the time when those past worldviews emerged. And so societies that would be driven by hegemonic past-worldviews are bound to lose out to those that succeed to devise worldviews out of present realities. Their citizens will indeed find it difficult to admit, adjust, and surf on the waves of their time while the citizens of societies that will succeed to adopt a worldview adapted to the present times will assuredly be better equipped to let the waves of our present reality carry them forward.

About the ways of seeing reality.

I first published this article on my Saatchi blog and on The way things are on 2006-07-05. What follows is a doctored version of that article.

I just had an interesting read in The Guardian, an article by Jonathan Jones titled "Ways of seeing" (lost the link). It concerns the passage from a religious imagery to the modern imagery and how science and art inter-played in this process of change. This article gives us also food for thought about the state of our present-day imagery.

In modernity there was first a recognition of the "truthiness" of the image projected on the retina which after transfer to the brain induces conclusions in the mind. This "way of seeing" was limited to seeing this first degree image that was projected on the retina and absolutely nothing else. Such first degree images have been the only accepted images from the Renaissance till near the end of the 19th century.

During the period of religious hegemony the dominant idea had been that god was the ultimate creator of everything and reality was thus conceived of as being shaped through god's will. Humans had thus to show their respect for god in all their undertakings and avoid any personal enquiry about reality.

Modernity revisits this postulate. An initial accumulation of richness and luxuries undertaken through plunder and violence since the crusades imposes the logic of capital on its holders. This complex economic-like process spreads over a few centuries and will gradually impose its own cultural set of values in the form of the idea of private property and the idea of the primacy of the individual over the collective.

Individualism unleashes the rejection of the religious edicts in favor of the logic of capital that is thought to be more reasonable than blind belief. This process of rationalization also establishes the primacy of vision, of what the eyes are given to see, over belief. Vision takes thus precedence and in such a mindset "in Renaissance Italy, there was no separation between art and science. Artists were at the forefront of scientific research - Leonardo da Vinci championed experiment a century before Galileo, and even anticipated, without a telescope, his observation that light reflected off the Earth illuminates the moon" (from Jonathan Jones' article).

So came about the reign of the image projected on the retina which after transfer to the brain induces conclusions in the mind and so thus has been opened the road toward philosophic rationalism that would appear a few centuries later.

Under the hegemony of individualism and private property the next centuries will champion visual signs representing portraits of the family members of the new rich, landscapes surrounding their mansions as well as stills of what lay on their tables. All signs that were like a glorification of their newly found values.

Some 6-7 centuries after private property and individualism popped into Western Europe's consciousness, around 1900 to be precise, the thinker-artists of modernity rejected such first degree images (Kandinsky, Miro, Masson, Breton,...). But force is to a-knowledge that they did not succeed in forcing their way into a new visual paradigm... they have indeed been stuck in tricks, in formalism and without any doubt they did not reach the new content they were searching for.

Only recently is a new visual paradigm emerging, not at the hands of artists but, out of scientific endeavor. First there were those images from the macrocosm (telescope) and from the microcosm (microscope) or from scanning what is there (body, materials,...) then came images as illustrations of abstract reasoning or of patterns detected from long series at the hands of computers (Internet network visualizations, cellular automata's, etc).

This kind of visualization comes to the eye not as a first degree image of what is there that projects on the retina but as an illustration of something that is not directly accessible to the eyes, something that appears as a dimension of the mind.

Visualization is now acting as the illustration of processes initiated by the mind.

Those images are being used to gain a better grasp on the existing level of scientific abstract reasoning and also to help scientists project their abstract reasoning a step further. This is most visible in the neurosciences where scientists are observing how the brain reacts to this or that stimulus through scan "imaging". The image of the scan gives them the location where an action takes place in the brain and from there they can zoom into the molecular structure in order to understand the biochemical processes at work at the micro-level.

The lessons from what is going on in the scientific world have vast implications for visual artists. Unfortunately the art academies are still rooted in past realities and are thus not preparing the brains of future artists for this new age. As Marcel Duchamp famously said this leads to "being dumb as a painter". What Duchamp meant was that artists need more than just the knowledge of brushes and pigments. They first and foremost need a deep knowledge in science for being able to put their feet on reel visual steps towards a representation of the worldview of our times.

But scientific knowledge is not enough. Science is one of the drivers towards post-modernity, that's a fact, but it is not the only one. A cultural mutation is also been generated out of economic globalization that will have an impact as important on the fashioning of our understanding of reality as science itself.

Modernity has been conceived inside the mold of the Christian worldview.

Globalization unleashes the economic renaissance of China, India, South America and Africa that in turn will unleash a new kind of cultural mold on the world. The "ways of seeing" of 85% of the world population are inevitably bound to have a dramatic impact on the future understanding of reality by those privileged 15% of the world population that have been living in advanced industrialized societies. This seems an absolute evidence but it is nevertheless so badly understood.

I believe that, in the same fashion as the real artists of the Italian Renaissance were also the scientists of their time, today the real artists have to absorb the content of science and of the Asian worldviews in order to keep themselves afloat in the maelstrom leading to the real future. Those who succeed to do just that could well appear, in the future, not just as artists but as the men of knowledge of postmodernity.

"Whatever" has no place here any longer.

Now is the time of the brain. The brain giving to see to the eyes. At the image of the "primitive accumulation" of financial capital the present revolutionary process starts with the "primitive accumulation" of knowings in science and worldviews.

Necessity shall act as a catalyst on the emergence of that process.
The side-effects of modernity are indeed so severe already that we can say without a shred of a doubt that the survival of life on earth, in the not so distant future, will depend on our capacity at realizing a fast and dramatic "primitive accumulation", of knowings in science and in the worldviews of the different cultures of the South, out of which a postmodern worldview would then emerge that rejects the diktats of the logic of capital and its mechanist rationalism.

This religious story of science.

Since long I sense that the more knowings (parcels of knowledge) I accumulate the more evident it becomes how little I really know about the whole of reality. What I mean to show is that a large accumulation of knowings does not necessarily preclude knowledge. Here follows an awakening call from particle physicists and cosmologists that seems to say just that.
"Twenty years ago most physicists would have said, on the basis of 450 years of science, that they believed that there's only one allowed law of nature that works, that ultimately we might discover fundamental symmetries and mathematical principles that cause the nature to be the way it is, because it's always worked that way. So that is the way science has worked. But now because of this energy of empty space -- which is so inexplicable that if it really is an energy of empty space, the value of that number is so ridiculous that it's driven people to think that maybe, maybe it's an accident of our environment, that physics is an environmental science -- that certain fundamental constants in nature may just be accidents, and there may be many different universes, in which the laws of physics are different, and the reasons those constants have the values they have might be -- in our universe -- might be because we're there to observe them. " (Lawrence Krauss in THE
ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO in Edge Magazine 7.6.06)

We have been dream-talking in "Western Late Modernity" about a science that would explain everything and make us at the image of the gods in religious foundational stories. But such a faith in science is no more than a naive religious-type belief in a very poor story. I have this feeling that what humanity is most urgently in need of presently is not to be found in the stars nor in sub-atomic particles but in its own substance, the balancing act between its polarities, individual and society. If societies collapse science shall murmur bye bye to the individuals... and this poor religious-like story of science shall then simply vanish with the individuals who created it in the first place.

Science is radically revolutionizing our understanding of reality and this causes an enormous stress on the individuals who feel at a loss faced with the disintegration of their traditional belief systems while not being able to understand the new scientific paradigm. Furthermore the equalization of life styles between the North and the South that has been initiated by globalization is fast destabilizing every society on earth. In the presently growing chaos wrought upon us, by the interactions between the productions of science and of globalization, what is most urgently needed is a worldview uniting the individuals around the idea of bringing about a livable, and possibly a better, future for their children. Such a worldview will not reject science. On the contrary it will integrate science into a more globally encompassing system of thought that shall be derived from the holistic vision projected by the diverse philosophies and religions of the people of the earth.

Change, and more particularly societal change, comes out of necessity. Whatever idealist intellectuals may think about societal change; will-power on its own has never shaped societal change. Leninism may have given the illusion for a short time to the contrary. But barely seventy years after having imposed their will-power on the Russian society necessity found its way around state force. What I want to say is that, while there is a credible argument to be made that late modern societies are in a dire need of some sort of glue (worldview) to bind their individual atoms in order to avoid collapsing into atomization, imposing a worldview that was shaped under past conditions has just no chance to work. Religions and philosophies that were shaped over past centuries, if not millenia, do not answer present necessities and recoursing to them to stabilize present societies would only end up in the collapse of those societies a little later at the image of what happened not long ago to Leninist controlled societies.

Necessity is out there banging on our doors. The present-day necessity is for answers to the deluge of problems that is flooding out of the side-effects of modernity: climate change, poisoning of water, air and foods, decreasing rates of Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH), deforestation, mass extinction of species and so on. The more time passes and the more those side-effects of modernity appear indeed to threaten the very foundation of life on earth.

Modernity was founded on the recognition and respect, over the centuries, of the logic of capital. In short, money invested in a venture becomes capital and people soon understood that they needed to follow the logic inherent to capital, for, not recognizing this logic was immediately sanctioned by a decrease of capital's monetary value that could possibly lead to the total extinction of that monetary value. Merchants and bankers were first to recognize and respect the logic of capital and found themselves antagonized by the clergy and the aristocracy who followed the edicts of the scriptures. The contradictions of the logic of capital and the edicts of the scriptures paved the way for the ideological contest between rationality and belief. Respecting the logic of capital was thought a rational behavior while belief in religious stories was gradually thought of as irrational. We all know the outcome. But force is to observe that in as short as a few centuries the logic of capital and rationality brought us on the brink of life extinction...

In our present-day peculiar societal reality the role of art is to give visual signs of the coming postmodern worldview for all to share.
Easy said is it not? But where to start?

Knowledge is the answer and this starts with the accumulation of knowings about science and philosophy and then the understanding of our present-day times and how we personally fit in the time. Only the works of those artists who make the effort to go through such a process of learning have a chance to remain of interest in the eyes of those who will be living a century from now. "Whatever", sharks or drippings, shall have vanished from their memory.

Etymology to the rescue of sense in art.

My friend Mark from New Delhi sent me the following comment about my post "About the ways of seeing reality":
The word 'idea' has its roots in the Ancient Greek word 'idien' which means 'to see'.
The root word for 'technology' is again an Ancient Greek word 'techne' which to the Greeks meant 'art'.



That's very interesting indeed. The etymology of the words I write about seems to reinforce my argument:
- to see = idea about reality
- art = the technique to put out the idea about reality for all to share.

The real question then centers on our way of seeing. And that is at heart what differentiates civilizations and the different epochs within civilizations.

Modernity has its "way of seeing" that is basically ideological: the reign of individualism and private property. This ideology develops as an outcome of a few centuries of plundering by the European aristocracies and merchant adventurers. From those accumulated "richnesses" develops a logic of rationality (the logic of capital) and the individuals who own those richnesses want to experience the prestige that comes with them. So we'll have portraits. landscapes and stills on the walls of their mansions and for a few centuries painting will be exclusively about that.

Coming out of the first world war "thinker-artists" reject that model but they don't succeed in finding a new "way of seeing" that could be validated by their societies and the story will end later in "whatever" being presented as being art. (a certain shark for exemple, is it not Mr. Saatchi?).

We sense today that a new "way of seeing" is there somewhere out of the door waiting to be shared by the whole world. I mean that the world, the whole world for once, is searching for sense out of the chaos wrought about by the fast changes induced by science, on one side, the impact of globalization on another side and finally the side-effects of modernity that day after day appear to become a greater threat to the survival of life on earth. All this is happening simultaneously on a worldwide scale and at an accelerating rhythm due to the multiplying interactions between those 3 factors!

What I refer to here is a new "way of seeing"and understanding reality that is shaping as a postmodern "way of seeing" but I sense that there are some conditions for this search for sense to find a successful outcome. Post-modernity emerges indeed out of the completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world! Let's remember that the process towards modernity implies economic change that brings social change that in turn brings cultural change. It's this complete process that guarantees the capitalistic strength for a nation to strive in modernity and it's only after the completion of the whole process in all nations that postmodernity could possibly strive.

But we artists can't wait for this outcome. It is our role, it seems to me, to materialize in visual signs what the etymology of the words "idea" and "art" could possibly represent in postmodernity:
- to see = idea about reality: science and the philosophies shared by the majority of the people on this earth (China, India,...) will somehow fuse to give us a paradigmic new vision about reality that redresses all the ill side-effects of modernity.
- art = the technique to put out the idea about reality for all to share.

To give visual signs that will make sense 50 or 100 years from now artists better dig into science and philosophies in order to represent substance in their works.

What is it with Postmodernism that irks in the "intellectual" narrative?

 

 

Visualizing something that our eyes can't see.... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With science the first action, in visualization, is no longer going from the eyes to the brain as earlier. Now the action comes first from an abstraction imagined by the mind, or by a piece of software. That abstraction first transits through a digital rendering and then it reaches the eyes. All this is done in order to make things better understandable... For sure visualization is always a question of service at the attention of the brain in the last instance. 

 

 

I guess that in the long future our eyes will learn to see with the brain and automatically detect patterns and meaning where we saw none earlier. This new visualization trend could be a sign that we are on the verge of a human mutation without precedent... at least if the human genie has not succeeded to extinguish the human race before that. 

 

 

But let's be clear this has already unlocked 2 sets of fundamental and, should I say, inescapable implications for the visual arts: 

 

1.  in light of this dramatic revolution in the act of seeing there is just no way any longer that representations of what our eyes see directly could still be accepted as art. (portraits, landscapes, stills,...) Such representations are indeed based on a mode of perception that reigned in the past and as such they are no longer artistically significant. At best such representations are crafts for interior decoration. 



2. in light, on the one hand, of the inversion of the action of visualization from the brain to the eyes that has been unlocked by science recently which, on another hand, also happens in a globalizing environment where the philosophies and ways of understanding reality by the majority of the people on this earth will displace whitemen's dualism... well, in light of all that, visual arts are definitely entering a time of mutation... 

 

All those signs are signals that indicate a coming mutation of the worldview shared by the whole of humanity that also implies a mutation of the content of the visual arts. 

 

 

Visual arts act like light-posts unveiling, for those who are curious and observing, a first draft of a sketch of what Postmodernity is all about. But please let's remember that Postmodernity comes after the societal completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world... anything less would be akin to a dumbing down of what Postmodernity is all about. But the fact is that the intellectual narrative about Postmodernity did just that. It dumbed down Postmodernity to a story of the evolution of modernity in the West. And that is what irks in the intellectual narrative. 

 

 

 

Actualization on 2021-05-21

 

In 2013 I decided to leave the concepts "postmodernism" and "Postmodernity" to the critical theorists. Since then I'm using the concept "After-Modernity". See my series titled "From Modernity to After-Modernity"...

 

The revolution I'm writing about here, in terms of the content of visual-arts, is the subject of my book Artsense that was published in 2003. In 2019 I expanded my thinking on the subject with the publication of the "Organic Art Manifesto"

Crucial Talk: Table of content

Browse the 164 most important posts in Crucial Talk's table of content.

The second stage of my ARTSENSE adventure, "The way things are", shall also be published on Laodan's blog and on my Saatchi blog.

My daily clippings of what I find of interest in the media and on the net are posted on my new blog with StumbleUpon.


Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, painting, fine art

Publication of Crucial talk's "adapted" content into a book: ARTSENSE.

I'm now, entering a new phase of my work, preparing for the writing of "The way things are" or "About the emergence of a postmodern realism".


I shall be publishing the first drafts in the form of posts on this blog and other web venues.


If interested to follow my postings please subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed of this blog.







What is ARTSENSE about?

ARTSENSE is an adventure of mine that started beginning of 2004. It includes a collection of some 50 acrylic paintings, 600 digital variations and 2 books!

ARTSENSE is also the title of the first of those 2 books that gives a summary of my ideas about reality about the societal functionality of visual arts throughout history and of my understanding of the changes that are setting our present-day globalizing world on the road of the future.

Crucial Talk is a tool that I used to bring online the first drafts of the material that I would later use in assembling ARTSENSE. I'm now, entering a new phase, preparing for the writing of a new work "The way things are" or "About the emergence of a postmodern new realism".

Where to find ARTSENSE?

Check here for the best pricing of Artsense
or go directly to Amazon

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

Societal atomization

Here is an article that comes somehow to the same conclusions that I express in this blog and also in my book Artsense (see top left and click on the coverpage).
Late modernity ends in atomization. The individuals believe that they have the truth about everything and real knowledge is thus relativized. In other words that better reflect my own presentation the views and visions of the men of knowledge being not any longer privileged by the men of power they don't any longer secure the diffusion of the ideas of the men of knowledge at the attention of all and the men of knowledge thus find themselves in competition with all sorts of charlatans...
I share this vision with the authors of the article that follows but we diverge on two fundamental points.
- One on the "human way". I do not consider indeed that religion is the only historical, nor valid, form of societal cohesion building (worldview). I also do not consider that the glueing of the individuals into a societal form has anything to do with believing in objective truths. It is all dependant on the knowledge available at any given time.
- Two on the evolution of human knowledge leading to the emergence of new worldviews. This aspect of societal reality is totally absent from the presentation of those authors and religion is thus the only belief system that they can imagine about... people are lost into atomization because religion has been relegated to the dustbin of history by liberalism and in consequence fundamentalism is rising as a militant reaction against liberalism. But what about the possibility that the relegation of religion to the dustbin of history could eventually be followed by the emergence of a new worldview? No sign of this possibility in this article...
Notwithstanding those short-comings I suggest you read the following article, for, it is one of the best presentations I have had the chance to read on:
- the linkage between religion and the formation and conservation of state power...
- the rejection of the existing religious worldview and the following relativization of knowledge that led Western societies to atomize.
Writing one is sometimes led to doubt but when discovering that others share some of your thoughts you are somehow encouraged... that's exactly what happened for me with this article.

in the IHT by Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst :
""" Confined to the personal sphere, religion is deprived of civic engagement that would mitigate fanaticism and foster moderation, and faith answers to no authority other than subjective inner conscience.
- The trouble is that once liberalism has surrendered any belief in objective truths, all personal subjective beliefs become true. Once all things are equally valid, the only way to attain supremacy is through war and power. Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all.
- By denying religion any public import, this hitherto shared realm became drained of any objective moral beliefs. Society was atomized and culture surrendered to relativism. """

URL: The twisted religion of Blair and Bush


Technorati tags: modernity, religion, atomization, worldviews,

The road of humanity, worldviews and visual arts

Before jumping to the description of civilizations and culture, I guess that a summary of the thoughts presented earlier would be usefull.


1. The road of humanity.
























This model is based on the "Wave theory" by Dr. Chaim H. Tejman


2. Worldviews.
We know from history that humanity went through 3 successive worldviews:
- animism: it lasted for tens of thousands and perhaps as long as hundred of thousands of years and ended with agriculture that developed as an indirect consequence of the last climate cahnge some 11,000 B.C.
- religions: were used and imposed as psychic glues to unify the individuals within the territory of the early kingdoms and empires starting approximately 3,000 B.C.
- modernity: is the system of thought based on individualism and private property that grew in Western European Christian lands as an direct consequence of the discovery of luxuries during the crusades and later discoveries.
- post-modernity: the sheer speed of scientific discoveries around the year 2000 and globalization that develops in parallel, plus the side-effects of modernity, those 3 factors are shaping a radically new approach towards reality from which a new post-modern worldview is emerging that will eventually be shared in the future by all on this earth.


3. Visual arts.
Worldviews glued the individuals within the boundaries of their societies. They were shaped in the minds of the "men of knowledge": shaman under animism, priests and monks under religions and aristocracy and new rich under early modernity. Visual sight having developed since tens of thousands of years, as humans' first and foremost sense, visual images were the best vehicle for transmitting the worldviews of the men of knowledge at the attention of their contemporaries. The production of such visual images is what has been referred to as art since the Renaissance (early modernity).
With a mature modernity the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day, the scientists, disconnected gradually from "the road of humanity". One of the direct consequences of this disconnect was for artists to be freed from the representation of imposed signs and they thus gained the freedom to represent what they want on their canvasses but by late modernity they had lost themselves in "whatever" is art...

In my next post about civilizations I'll try to sketch how the disconnect between knowledge and society at large occured.



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

About non-determination.

The future is not given.
The future is non-determined.

The future can't possibly result out of a straight line projection from a limited and subjective reading of the present... there are ups and downs, order is followed by chaos and out of chaos emerges a new form of order that we just should not have the pretension to define for the good reason that at the point of bifurcation or at the crosspoint leading out of chaos an infinity of possibilities arise... but only one will materialize into our future. What I mean to point here is that at the bifurcation point out of chaos the possibility that imposes itself as the future reality is not chosen by god playing dice. It is not as if the emerging reality were following a path of randomness. Our input, yes ours of we humans, can eventually (not necessarily) act as the drop of water that forces the balance in this or that direction.

We should be conscient about one fact: our input is the result of our dream about the future (ideals) what I mean is that the way we wish our future to be determines our present ideas and actions... if we don't have any ideal we simply are speechless and actless now.

At this point let's come back to the idea of art.
But first let's define what is art, for, without a commonly agreed upon definition if I speak about apples you could be thinking that I'm talking about pears. My understanding is that as far as we can look down our human history art has always been an instrument for letting the atoms (individuals) that form the corpus (society) share a common understanding about reality, about life, about what we are and about whatever bla bla bla. Societies need cohesion to survive and art acted as an instrument of communication to let the individuals share the wisdom of the men of knowledge. Images and visual signs are indeed understandable by all but we can't unfortunately say the same of the words expressed by the men of knowledge. (shaman under animism, priest under religions, philosophers under early modernity). What I mean to say is that artists were in reality no more than image technicians who were in charge of executing visual signs or illustrations about the wisdom, the worldview of the men of knowledge of their days.

But things changed with a maturing modernity. (approximative dating: 1900-1950) This is when the men of wisdom were indeed left to compete with all kinds of charlatans for the ears of their contemporaries... and artists thus were freed of the obligation to illustrate their wisdom. By the end of the twentieth century this experience had unfortunately landed everyone into the deepest of confusions.... here we are now reading that art is dead or that the only reality is the market.

Our present day predicament is that the freeing of the artists of their past obligation to illustrate the wisdom of the men of knowleldge of their day has plunged them into an unknown territory where the question becomes: what do I now have to represent, what do I now have to illustrate.... animism and religions are worldviews of the past and the visual signs that illustrate them are thus of no help, any longer, in our days. Early modern signs representing individualism, private property and so on, I mean portraits and landscapes have also lost the power to say anything about our times. We are thus left to search for meaning and sense about what we are living through societally and this is something radical, for, visual artists have not been prepared for something like that. Remember the remark of Duchamp who was saying that he was "tired of being called dumb as an artist"... he was targeting what I try to speak about here, I mean the need for the "late moderm" or "early postmodern" artist to accumulate knowledge about what is going on in order for him to have the material to work with in his visual signs.

The problem is that there are so many knowings today, I mean scientific knowings, but where is the knowledge of our times?

Ok, I give it to you... the knowledge of our times is not available yet, it is bound to emerge later out of the confrontation of science and culture. You understand science for sure, but culture? By that word I mean the encounter of all the cultures of this world leading to a whole new cultural paradigm. I believe indeed that our Western culture will have to give way to the wisdoms of the East and of the other people on this earth.

It is my firm belief that the role of the present day artist is to try to give visual signs of that coming worldview.

We artists have to reapropriate the societal functionality of visual arts so as to participate in our limited capacity in helping the presently forming society of the globalizing village to stabilize, to gain cohesion. This is the only way that I know about to help shape into reality my dream of a better tomorrow....

By the way this is also the best way to keep intellectual sanity in our very confused times.



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

Wordviews

Worldviews are transmitted from one generation to another over the long haul.

A worldview, as its name implies, is a view of the world a shared understanding of reality. When we speak about reality what we mean is nothing more than our perception, our understanding, our consciousness about our environment from infinitesimal to infinity and our place inside that environment.

Reality is inaccessible to us we are indeed only tiny specks of dust within its vastness so the best we can hope for is to gain a perception, an interpretation, a conscienceness that would be as near as possible from the real thing. Our understanding fluctuates along the lines of our knowledge base and force is to admit that knowledge evolves... prompting fluctuations in our interpretation, our consciousness, about what reality is all about. This in turn further up the societal level is gradually shaping our worldviews.

Knowledge is the fact of thinkers, and other adventurers on the slopes of reality, they constitute only a tiny minority within their societies while worldviews are the result of a shared knowledge by all members of a society.

In the contradictions that unfold between the minority that creates new knowledge and society at large that tries to protect itself from change lies the energetic substance that will bring societal change. This is what I call "the road of humanity". It is a process that can take centuries if not millenia to mature and it fluctuates and changes along the lines of the polarities of the ensemble "humanity". What do I mean? We are trying to understand how worldviews evolve and change. I posit that worldviews change as a result of the dynamics inside the ensemble "humanity" and what powers those dynamics are the polarities that are shaping the ensemble itself: societies versus individuals.

Individual innovating visions are not readily accepted they need to undergo a process of sociatal acceptance. Societies, in whatever form, try to protect what is established against change. Change is indeed considered as destabilizing and eventually dangerous that's why societies made the sharing by all of the worldview of the moment as the ultimate glue that would keep the societal building from falling apart.

Historic evolution is like a quantum wave made of energetic (societal) and magnetic (individuals) swirls that are pulling societies forward. In the following graph I borrow the substance of the "Wave theory" by Dr. Chaim H. Tejman to illustrate the mechanics of societal change.



























Historical facts do by no means confirm the primary role of one or another of those factors in the formation of societal change: arts, culture, knowledge and the economy. On the contrary history does indicate that at times one of those factors can be preponderantly influential while being totally absent of the equation at other times.

There is simply no beginning and no end in this swirling cycle of change there is only a beginning and an end for each specific moment in time corresponding to a snapshot of change. It should be noted here that historians, economists and other specialists have all too often fallen into a one-sided absolutist vision of change and universities are thus filled with chair-holders behaving more as faithfull clergymen spreading their gospel and arguing between themselves than as true scientists.

For what we know history witnessed 3 epochal worldviews: animism, religion and modernity.

A fourth is starting to shape nowadays that should bring us a radically transformed view of the world in the future. I argue in my book ARTSENSE that the interaction between science and technology on the one hand and on the other globalization that will spread the cultures worldviews and civilizational axioms of the future economically dominant countries through the windows of each and everyone; this interaction is starting to shape for all of us a radically new worldview that for the first time in history promizes to be a globally shared worldview over all the earth.

From what is going on today in the world we see that our model "the road of humanity" is kind of riding on 3 wheels only as if the tire of the wheel carrying arts was flat. In late modernity the wave of humanity has been interrupted, stucked as it is within the economic polarities of societies (knowledge versus economy) that are themselves nothing more than one of the polarities of the road of humanity (societies verus individuals). Societies are no ends in themselves they are only instruments in the hands of humanity on its evolutionary road.

The economy nowadays imposes on all individuals the illusion of their freedom through the offer of merchandises to be consumed. Knowledge is then generated quasi-exclusively to produce always more alienating merchandises. But in this process, force is to recognize that, knowledge has been reduced to "pre-knowledge" or one could also say that it has been reduced to scientific or rational "knowings" that are of interest to the economy for sure but offer very little substance to societies and individuals in their dance along the road of humanity.

Is this sounding paradoxical to you? I guess yes so let me try to shed some light on this phenomenon from another angle. The economy is being driven by the "logic of capital" and the logic of capital has muted ideologically into rationalism that has become the hegemonic model of thought imposed on all of us from kindergarten to university. Shocking isn't it? How could it be that we have been thaught to reason but ever been forbidden to question reason? Reason is no more than the transfer to the process of thinking of the rules that were imposed by the "logic of capital" on those who were holding capital; in contravention with the edicts of the church I have to add. So we start to understand that capital holders had a very strong incentive to finance the expansion of the "logic of capital" into an ideology for all to follow. The acceptence of the ideology of rationalism would indeed increase the "playing field" of the logic of capital making it possible to generate always more surplusses (benefits) . Globalization has to be understood in the same light, for, when national bases offered no more or only little potential to expand the "playing field" the continuing increase of surpluses could only come from outside the national boundaries where those surplusses had been generated hitherto.

The use of the ideology of rationalism was not limited to the expansion of the "playing field" of the "logic of capital" (demand) it also became instrumental in the development of always more merchandises (offer). The application of knowledge, derived from the use of rationalism, into solving technical problems of production allowed indeed for the "massification" of the market and later for the incessant offer of different merchandises. Knowledge to solve technical problems is technoscience which is a major misappropriation of knowledge that hitherto had always been conceived as the way we understand reality or to say this otherwise the way we understand our environment from infinitesimal to infinite and our place into that environment. How did we come to replace knowledge with technoscience? The interest of capital holders and researchers is to perfect and diffuse innovations that can occupy market shares and this explains the mutation of knowledge into technoscience. Technoscience is applied science which is built upon existing general knowledge but it fast appeared that our general knowledge base had also to be expanded to allow further developments in technoscience that's how financing was then diverted to "fundamental science" meant to expand our general knowledge base.

Being derived out of the reductionist ideology of rationalism fundamental science is just not capable of generating real knowledge that gives meaning to people's lives and then this blind following of rationalism that sings about better tomorrows extinguishes breathless... Scientific knowledge, applied or fundamental, is thus not real knowledge at best can we speak of "knowings"; a multitude of knowings or of little pieces that await to be inter-woven with a more globally encompassing philosophic vision into a new paradigm of reality.

The complete corruption of "the road of humanity" that started with "the logic of capital" destroyed art and knowledge that are absent now in the dance between individuals and societies and humanity fell sick, very sick as well as mother earth that sustains us all.

Hope is on the way, for, the speed and the sheer size of our accumulation of "knowings" are giving us to see signs of hope. Humanity seems indeed to dispose of the technical solutions or is very near of finding those technical solutions that could eliminate all the scourges that afflict us todat: poverty, environmental degradation, diminishing fossil fuels and other raw materials, etc.
But humanity just can't put its act together it seems, for, having the technical solutions to its problems is not enough it should implement the application of those technical solutions and initiate the process of change out of its problems and into a liveable post-modern world. Here is undoubtedly the weak link in this process of change, for, bringing all the people on earth to share a same understanding of the urgency of humanity's problems is still a far-away possibility it seems.

I nevertheless see encouraging signs. First on a macro-level force is to recognize that with globalization the worldview of the whiteman that has shaped the modern world until now will soon come under the assault of the worldviews of some of the countries that are emerging as the soon to be economic powers of the world. I'm speaking about China and India principally. The axiomatic foundations of their civilizations being so far apart from the Western axiomatic foundations changes in humanity's behaviors are necessarily on the horizon. I shall write more extensively about that point in my next post titled "civilizations". The second encouraging sign is the frenetic search for answers to fill the void of sense or of meaning about life that is so prevalently felt nowadays by most citizens in Western or better in advanced industrialized countries. Knowledge encompassing the present realities has still not matured and shall in all evidence not stabilize as a result only of internal elements of those countries, for, the energizing of the world now comes from other skies.

According to the traditional vue of the function of art in societies the artist role is to give visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge at the attention of his fellow citizens. The knowledge of our days having still not yet maturated the artists are left without a message to illustrate and not surprisingly most of them landed into confusion-land believing that "whatever" is now a good enough subject for their craft. But they are flat wrong the only thing they attain is total insignificance making Marcel Duchamp's words "being dumb as a painter" look premonitory. Considering that the only possible thing that truly can be considered as art are the visual works realized today that will make sense in the eyes of the people 50 or 100 years from now we can but conclude that "whatever" is not art for it will not reflect the worldview of those people no more than the works reflecting past worldviews as religious works, landscapes or portraits . The unmistaken conclusion we arrive at is thus that the only escape for artists today is to build up their knowledge base in terms of scientific knowings and in terms of other civilizations' foundational axioms, for, out of the interaction between those two will emerge the post-modern worldview of tomorrow.


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

Worldviews, civilizations and culture

I concluded my last post with the following words: "The European and by extension the Western civilization finds its roots in Christianity. In contrast the Chinese civilization seems to have been built directly out of its Animist societal experience". The ground where both civilizations sprouted and the roots they grew could thus not be further apart.

It is generally accepted that humans' present day form and fully grown brain potential were reached some 100,000 years ago. We have thus to assume that the earliest cultural development of humanity starts at least at that time. But recent scientific descoveries about animal societies conclude that animals have languages, societal organizations and their own cultures. Force is thus to assume that human culture goes back far earlier than the last 100,000 years.

The point here is not to engage in a scholastic debate about the time span covered by human culture. The point is simply to recognize that for well over 100,000 years humans were observing the earth and the sky and their cycles. Those observations then led them into thinking about their place in what they saw. The perception they so developed helped them to set up and adjust their early societal organization and thus emerged human culture.

I started this post writing about civilization and here I'm writing about culture and those who read me regularly know for a fact that I'm very often referrring to worldviews. But what are the differences between those concepts? Many writers use them as if they were interchangeable as if they were meaning the same thing but nothing could be further apart from the reality of their meaning. If we want to understand the evolution of human thinking, the evolution of human societal organizations, we better clarify the differences between those 3 concepts and how they relate to one another.

I'll try to clarify this question in my next 3 post.


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

Western versus Chinese civilization

In Western eyes, the traditional model of societal development that has been teached for ages goes something like this. (The timeline goes from left towards right.)










We should be aware that this is somehow an Eurocentrist model and it should thus not be generalized to the rest of the world. But let's nevertheless see what its application returns from a comparison between the developments of Europe and China.











































From those images everyone will rapidly come to the same 3 conclusions:
- animism has decidedly been, at least in terms of its timespan, the overwhelming stage of the human theater of societal evolution and this stage of development was similar in Europe and in China.
- on the right side of the graph a stark differentiation appears between the European and Chinese societal developments.
- religion seems to have been a uniquely European reality.
Let's now zoom on the developments that are nearest to us.


Europe.


















China.




















For sure these visualizations are crude "impressionistic style" generalizations but they are nevertheless exact reflections of the reality of societal evolution and those images undoubtedly leave us with a very strong visual impression of the differences between the roads taken by Europe and China.

So let's examine what are the strongest differentiations.

1. In Europe the passage from Animism to Christianity seems to have been a rather gradual experience. But while Christianity borrowed some Animist traits it remains nevertheless that in the end it eradicated with a vengence the last vestiges of its competitor for the control of people's minds. Books were burnt, statues were destroyed, temples were demolished, public signs were eradicated and feasts and festivals were converted to the new creed. The natural consequence of such a barbarity has been the irremediable loss of the observations and knowledge that had been gathered by earlier generations along the preceding tens of thousands of years.
In contrast China kept that heritage intact.

2. European and by extension Western civilization finds thus its roots in Christianity. In contrast the Chinese civilization seems to have been built out of its Animist societal experience.


Graphs Copyright Laodan

Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society, culture, civilization, animism, religion, modernity

About worldviews and visual arts.

Abstract


1. All religions are worldviews but all worldviews are not religions.

2. A worldview is the general set of elements that characterizes one's understanding of reality or more generally one's view of the world. In other words a worldview gives its adherents a view about reality, the world, themselves... and, that we wish it or not, the fact is that we all adhere to one or another worldview be it conscientiously or unconscientiously.
Worldviews have always acted as the glue binding atoms (individuals) together in their corpus (society), as such we can affirm that, worldviews are a function of the evolution of humanity.

3. The principle of "humanity" is formed by the interactions between its opposites poles: its corpus (society) and its constitutive atoms (the individuals). That means that all changes in the human condition are powered by the energy emanating from those interactions and this implies that both poles are equally important. Any excess of preponderance of one or the other pole indicates a disruption in the organic mode of human evolution and the observation of any such disruption gives the diagnostic of a malady, of an illness, in the developmental process of the human specie in general.

4. Visual arts, and more particularly painting, were assigned the task to "illustrate", at the attention of all members of society, the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. The human evolutionary process selected vision as the primary tool of survival... and so humans came naturaly to use visual signs as their preferred tools for sharing, among themselves the worldview of the men of knowledge of their times.

5. The assembling of humans in groups was always very fragile and to assure its survival it was in need of a binding glue that took the form of belief systems accepted by all individuals. Over time those belief systems translated into coherent sets of axioms gaining their societies a unified interpretation of the principle of reality. Such unquestioned axioms form, the roots, the foundations of all civilizations.



Worldviews and visual arts.


The evolution from great apes to the human race is a scientific hypothesis that has received ample verification. This hard fact is confirmed by hard discoveries but what is more difficult to pinpoint is the process setting humans on the road of visual representations of their cultural values and ideas.

We now know that animals communicate between themselves, they have cultures that unify all the individuals in one group to behave according to the values of their culture. But what brought the human animal to draw, paint and sculpt? I think that the answer to that question has to be derived out of the act of representation itself.

Nature and the process of evolution do not generate unnecessary functions in a specie. Everything that is there is there for a good reason, it is there to answer an existing necessity. So the functionality of visual representations has to be seen as an evolutionary answer of the human specie to a necessity it was confronted with. We know for a sure fact that human societies were producing visual representations since early on. We know this for the archaeological discoveries of a few of those representations. What we also know is that the societies that produced those early representations had belief systems that have come to be known under the term "animism", a worldview, that had common traits anywhere and at any time around the world. The question that now arises is what did an animist worldview fulfill as function for the societies where it was in practice?

That worldview was one view of the world, one vision of reality, among many possible views. Nonetheless it had similar traits anywhere and at any time for it was based on the realities of human life: nourishing the body (reproducing the individual), sexual pleasure (reproducing the specie), harmonizing in one's environment (ecology) and respecting the power of the sun that creates the days and the seasons. The visual representations of those traits can be observed in the "art" productions of any animist society. (primitive art)

So what was the role of those representations? Again I come back to this idea that if something takes place in nature the reason why it takes place has to be found in the function that it exercises. The only plausible function that I can see is that the shaman who was the man of knowledge of his group, of his tribe, used visual signs to share his vision of reality with his fellow tribesmen. The survival of the individuals was dependent on the survival of the group and this could only be guaranteed through a unity of views shared by all members of the group. Disunity of views would have destabilized the group and impeached its fulfilling of the necessary tasks to assure the survival of its members.

Tribes were sometimes affiliated with other tribes in some sort of loose confederacy sharing some particular values that allowed for a smooth coexistence among them at least in times of plenty.

For reasons that still have not been fully understood, at a given time, one tribe could go on a rampage and by force of arms unify all the other tribes around it within what then came to be called later on as a nation. (a modern concept) For exemple Tsongstan Gambo unified militarily the Tibetan Tribes in the 8th century and introduced Buddhism as the unifying worldview of his newfound kingdom. Over the next centuries Buddhism will compete with "Bonism", local animist worldview, for acceptance by the "Tibetans". Buddhism will finally be imposed as the official religion in the 13th century by the conquering Mongols.

In the end of the 12th century Genghis Khan had been on a rampage finally unifying the various Mongolian clans in 1206. His rampage extended then to the adjacent lands and thus Tibet conquered by Khubilai Khan, Genghis' grandson, came under the umbrella of the Chinese empire that Khubilai had conquered and was leading as its emperor.

The unification of the Chinese tribes had taken place much earlier, sometime, BC 3000.

This process of unification can be seen at work in all parts of the world. Local tribes, clans, sharing a similar animist worldview were unified by the force of arms. Some will never be unified and continue to live to this day under an animist worldview except that our modern worldview is making us to steal from them their natural habitat.

The unification of local groupings into kingdoms and empires has generally coincided with the adoption of:
- a religion (gods)
- a central authority (politics and military)
- the idea of being the center of the world
- a written language

All those elements somehow combined to give the newly grouped nations a new worldview where religion generally took center stage. Competition was now between nations and turned out to take variable forms. If the general traits of animism were globally shared by local groups anywhere around the world things took a new turn with the birth of nations. These were times of differentiation and the observed differences helped to solidify the bonds between "nationals".

The process of change from animism to religions that I try to describe here is inscribed in the long haul history. The worldviews did not change overnight. It was more as a hundreds of years long competitive process where religions borrowed much of animist practices to gain acceptance. The same went for the structures of power. Nations that succeeded to survive over the long haul were affirming and deepening the content of their proper set of views about reality and thus differentiating even further with the other surviving nations. This describes basically the formation of civilizations.

A civilization is somehow like a house. Foundations are laid in the ground upon which the house is then being build and once the house is built the foundations become invisible like hidden in the ground. We live in houses and forget about their foundations and, when a house has structural problems, only building technicians remember about those foundations and go check what has gone wrong with them.

Societies are vastly more complex than houses but basically the analogy stands the test. Their foundations are unknown to most of the individuals who have no clue at all that what they think and how they think is founded in those unknowns. Only a few thinkers are conscientious about the civilizational foundations that formed the ideas and belief systems of our societies and how they continue to shape the formation of our ideas in the present.

If we can understand that foundations are hidden we do nonetheless not necessarily know what our civilizations are all about . Everyone can see a house but a civilization remains largely invisible, indeed, it's not a material construct. We all can observe some of the components of its branches in the form of our cultures but most of us fail to see the tree. For example we all can see that Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African or Muslim paintings do not belong to the sphere of the Western civilization and we all, kind of instinctively, know that the works of Leonardo, Rubens, Van Gogh and Picasso are part of the Western civilization. But what is a civilization, and what is the difference between culture and civilization, remain questions whose answers are largely unknown and ignored. We can abstractly understand the principle of our civilizations having foundations but we have difficulties to describe the house of our civilizations for the good reason that our civilizational house is never completely built. Generation after generation we build add-ons to it and what we are conscientious about as individuals, who are part of a generation, is the cultural add-on we are participating in and not the civilization as a whole. What we all, in various degrees, know something about are the ideas and values that shape our present day culture but how our culture participates in the building of our civilization remains largely a mystery.

A civilization is the building, over its original foundations, of snapshots of the cultural behaviors of the different human generations throughout its history. It is the addition of the successive cultural moments of societies sharing the same foundations. In that sense, the civilization of a given society can encompass a very large variety of cultural values and behaviors. It can even encompass what appears as opposite values: one extreme pole on the ladder of behavioral possibilities at a given time and the other extreme pole at another given time.

Culture is the result of the ways of behaving and of doing by societies and individuals at a given time. For example, present day culture is our present day way of life: the goods and services that feed our consumerism through mass marketization, the merchandization of all that touches human life and our dependence on salary and debt. This implies that culture is kind of a historic snapshot of the way of a society at a given time.

In the past, multiple generations were sharing roughly the same culture over the long haul. A good example of this state of affairs is found in Western Europe where culture, in the form of Christian ideas and values imposed by Rome, was transmitted largely unchallenged and thus unchanged, generation after generation, from the 4th-5th century till around the 15th century. A turning point is reached with the Renaissance (15th-16th centuries) that establishes ideas and values celebrating private ownership, individualism and the rationality emerging out of the logic of capital. Cultural change will then go accelerating in parallel with scientific, technological and economic changes and the founding values of the Renaissance will be spreading around the world giving hegemony to the rationality of the logic of capital.

Observing China's history one finds identical patterns of cultural change at work. The age of the hundred schools of thoughts (AD500-200) were succeeded by the re-unification of the warring kingdoms under an imperial dynasty and the imposition of Confucianism upon the Chinese society which itself imposed one particular version of Chinese culture on generation after generation of individuals from BC 200 to AD 1900. A turn is reached around 1900 after China's cultural certainties had been weakening for two centuries at the contact of more advanced Western rifles and canons. The idea that generally was adopted by all Chinese intellectuals at the time was to integrate Western scientific prowess with Chinese traditions. Another turn is reached with the import by the communists into the country of the concept of capital and the ensuing decision to industrialize the country (1960-1990) that will culminate with Deng Xiao ping's "reform and opening" policies.

It appears thus that cultural change is not following a regular clock-like mechanism. Seismic cultural ruptures seem indeed to have been followed by long periods of "relative cultural stability". Those seismic cultural ruptures correspond to a shift in the worldview of the individuals within a civilization. The term worldview was coined from the German word Weltanschaung (look onto the world) which denotes a comprehensive set of opinions about what reality is all about. Worldviews were only achieving wide and unquestioning support very slowly over time.

The foundations of our present day civilizations were established in pre-history times, by this I mean that, their emergence has not been acted in written accounts and in consequence we remain largely in the dark about their formation. But notwithstanding this gap we can clearly identify their founding axioms. I give a relatively detailed account of those axioms for the Western and Chinese civilizations in my post "THE AXIOMS OF CIVILIZATIONS = the founding building blocks upon which societies build their future".
It seems that civilizations start somehow with the political unification of local groups and with "the invention of the gods" or with the waning of animism. The transition from animism to the creation of the gods takes place historically at different times for each center of civilization. China and Sumer invent their first gods sometime 5-6,000 years ago or earlier. Other centers will follow up later on and some ethnic groups are still living in animist cultures today. What all this shows us is a deep differentiation between the people of this earth in their levels of societal development. This reality does not imply, in any way, a judgment about the people who live in different stages of societal development.

Animism corresponds to an early worldview giving humans to glorify the elements that visually appeared to them as commanding the phenomena that directly impacted on their survival: the sun, the moon, the animals and plants that nourished them and sex and their reproduction. Because they were not or did not cut themselves from their environment they could directly experience and hear the song of the earth, the song of life and feel being one with their environment. That this worldview was the result of conscientious thinking or not does not matter. What matters is the result or the consequence of this conscientious or unconscientious behavior: a deep respect for everything in nature, a limitation of the species' take from nature that was limited to the satisfaction of the primary needs of its members to reproduce their existence.

Visual arts were not perceived in the age of animism nor in the age of the gods in the same light as they are nowadays. They were indeed not considered as art, those productions had a direct functionality, they were illustrations of the ideas and values of the men of knowledge of their day: the shaman in animism and the priest under the gods. The artists were simply image makers, illustrators, publicists of the ideas of others.

The worldviews of the men of knowledge were imposed by the men of power and the artist's job was to illustrate those worldviews. The freedom of the artists was limited to form, content was imposed on him.

Things will start to change with the Renaissance. Towns and cities were developing at the non-controlled and wild intersections between manors generating demographic growth and the need for more craft productions and trade. On this particular West-European reality will be superposed the consequences of a brutal and primitive urge to impose the Christian creed upon the Middle East:

- . . advanced Arab sciences and the long lost Greek classics made their entry in the rooms of the literate, I mean the clergy, all others were indeed illiterate including the laymen painters. Clergymen being the buyers of images their reading the classics and the Arab university publications will unleash their demand for change in the rendering of the form of their new image orders.
- . . the aristocracy had a taste for the luxuries of more advanced lands and long distance trade took root to satisfy their needs and desires. Walls that had been left bare until then will now be decorated with mirrors, tapestries and paintings. Interior decoration was born to satisfy the desire of the aristocracy for luxuries and their ideas about life: individualism, private ownership,...


Here is the turning point between the age of the gods and the modern times. Increased trade combines with the newly discovered desire by the aristocracy and then the new rich for luxuries.
The values and ideas of the aristocracy and the new rich merchants have mutated. They now search to establish as rights what their newly found material wealth can buy and individual ownership becomes the center of their discourse. Owning a richly decorated mansion gives them the sense of being different from the masses and this newly found perception of a differentiation infuses their minds with the illusion of their particularism, of the importance of their individualities. The aristocracy and the new rich merchants are driving the new fashion of the day and individualism and private ownership will ultimately take center stage in the European social game.

At this turning point in history the Christian church that has been hegemonic for over 1000 years is still the dominating force and it will take another few centuries for its dominance to wane. The sacred images hanging on the walls of the churches continue to illustrate the Christian creed. In this environment of social and cultural change interior decoration luxuries will try to catch up with the sacred character of the images hanging on the walls of the churches. Paintings on the walls of the manors of the aristocracy and the new rich will posit the sacrality of their newly discovered values of individuality and private ownership. Their portraits and environing landscapes act as a stamp of sacrality adorning their walls. Here is the point when art in Western Europe takes its sacred character. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witness the assembling of large collections of paintings. Mansions, castles and palaces are filled with the sacred character of the visual representations of the shaping worldview. Those investments are not typically capitalistic they are more of the nature of procuring prestige. Only later will the acqired ustensils of prestige be exchanged on the market for money and then be converted into capital to finance the production of canons and socks.

In the meanwhile the flow of money increases and the surpluses are invested in trading ventures and later in production. In this process something goes largely unnoticed by all the participants. Everything seems to be normal but something absolutely stunning is nevertheless happening: the logic of their invested capital is starting to dictate the actions of capital owners. They are not acting out of their own will any longer, the generation of profits, of surpluses is now what dictates their conduct. One could argue that they freely accept and even search for the consequences of the logic of capital that in last instance is engulfing them into always more opportunities of luxuries. The rationality of the logic of capital is then presented as what is good, desirable and what should be encouraged by societies. And why not will you ask. Well I think that when one accepts to abdicate blindly his own right at free examination of what is to be done for the chimera of a quick buck guaranteed by a mechanical logic, well then one decides to abdicate not only the short term but also everything that comes in the future engendered by the rationality of that logic of the invested capital. I guess that I don't need to make a drawing about what kind of consequences one exposes oneself by following such a flawed logic. But what is more fundamental even is that by abdicating your free will to the rationality of the logic of capital you not only expose yourself to consequences, you expose the whole of your society.

Here we are today with poisoned waters, poisoned air, deforestation, climate change, the most brutal of species extinctions that ever happened, and the steadying possibility of our human extinction... and all this has been dictatorially imposed on all of us by a tiny minority of capital owners who are totally unconscientious about the consequences of their actions.

Till when will humanity as a whole continue to accept such a paltry state of affairs?


Modernism concludes nowadays not only with this real possibility of our own provoking human mass extinction but also with the real possibility of a new found control of our actions that could be leading to a radically better future for every citizen on this earth. What will make the balance tilt towards one side or the other? I think ourselves and nothing else. What do I mean by that? Well we sure have ended the 20th century in the most glaring confusion in art no doubt about that and more generally in our cultural behavior but this is not in any way implying that we can't reach out for sense anymore.

Whatever the outcome for humanity, it makes no doubt that we have entered an area of change unparalleled in human history. If we succeed to glide around the obstacles before us the future could be very interesting. Never has humanity seen such an extensive range of fundamental changes interacting upon one another. This is a systemic exception for sure or is it some form of conclusion

Other posts relating to the same subject can be found here.
If interested in a more thorough presentation of those ideas, read my book ARTSENSE that dwells along 310 pages on those ideas.


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