I'm leaving this night for Beijing and will interrupt my daily clippings on "In the air of our times" and my irregular posts on CRUCIAL TALK. I'll be back by July 15th when I'll restart my daily selections and ruminations.
In the meantime, I plan to post photos of my daily trips in Beijing and eventually some commentaries on my FLICKR site:
RSS
URL
I'll try to relay my postings on FLICKR to CRUCIAL TALK... hoping that it works.
Best,
Laodan
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
2005-06-15
2005-06-12
Answers for contemporary visual arts.
Part 4: The economic road to religion.
In a nutshell:
THE GRADUAL EMERGENCE OF AGRICULTURE.
We only have a vague understanding of the shift from "animist knowledge-power" to the later "military-political-religious power" and I posit that what happened during this foundational moment in the emergence of civilizations is what drives our societies till this very day.
From that time dates the shift in the function of art from "a societal tool for sharing the worldview of the men of knowledge under anismism" towards "a societal tool for imposing the worldview of the men of power under military-political-religious power".
It is my understanding that to comprehend what's going on in the art-world today, we have to understand this shift from animism to centralized power. The reason for this is quite simple I should say. We are indeed assisting nowadays at the disintegration of the model of society based on centralized power that governed societies for the last 5,000 years... but we experience difficulties trying to discover where all that is leading us and this is causing much confusion in late-modern societies and particularly all around the art-world. This temporary hole in societal consciousness is unfortunately shamelessly exploited by market vultures who, under the spell of the logic of capital, are totally blinded from any artistic or societal concerns.
What we know for a sure fact is that everywhere on earth two determining factors were at work for thousands of years whose interactions eventually unleashed the unifying of tribes under a central military-political leadership:
- .. the gradual emergence of agriculture allowing for larger concentrations of populations.
-.. the evolution of animist thoughts towards:
* or the creation of gods
* or secular philosophical systems.
Those two factors followed their specific ways in different geographic and climatic conditions and it follows thus that their interactions led to many variations on the themes of:
-.. tribal unification by force under centralized power
-.. adoption of religious / philosophical worldviews.
-.. adoption of societal cohesion building tools: language, laws, education, art,...
From that time dates the shift in the function of art from "a societal tool for sharing the worldview of the men of knowledge under anismism" towards "a societal tool for imposing the worldview of the men of power under military-political-religious power".
It is my understanding that to comprehend what's going on in the art-world today, we have to understand this shift from animism to centralized power. The reason for this is quite simple I should say. We are indeed assisting nowadays at the disintegration of the model of society based on centralized power that governed societies for the last 5,000 years... but we experience difficulties trying to discover where all that is leading us and this is causing much confusion in late-modern societies and particularly all around the art-world. This temporary hole in societal consciousness is unfortunately shamelessly exploited by market vultures who, under the spell of the logic of capital, are totally blinded from any artistic or societal concerns.
What we know for a sure fact is that everywhere on earth two determining factors were at work for thousands of years whose interactions eventually unleashed the unifying of tribes under a central military-political leadership:
- .. the gradual emergence of agriculture allowing for larger concentrations of populations.
-.. the evolution of animist thoughts towards:
* or the creation of gods
* or secular philosophical systems.
Those two factors followed their specific ways in different geographic and climatic conditions and it follows thus that their interactions led to many variations on the themes of:
-.. tribal unification by force under centralized power
-.. adoption of religious / philosophical worldviews.
-.. adoption of societal cohesion building tools: language, laws, education, art,...
THE GRADUAL EMERGENCE OF AGRICULTURE.
The first signs of agricultural activities date some 10-11,000 years ago which is long after the appearance of anatomically modern humans and the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals have generated very few answers that resist scrutiny.
In "The origins of agriculture - a biological perspective and a new hypothesis", published in Australian Biologist 6: 96 - 105, June 1993, Greg Wadley & Angus Martin write: "Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls' hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws ... the data do not accord well with any one of these models. '
Recent discoveries of potentially psychoactive substances in certain agricultural products - cereals and milk - suggest an additional perspective on the adoption of agriculture and the behavioural changes ('civilisation') that followed it."
At this stage of our understanding of history, we have to accept the fact that there is no generally accepted explanation for the origin of agriculture.
Our general belief in the idea of progress ingrained deeply in all of us the belief that agriculture placed humans squarely on the road of progress but some inescapable facts suggest that humans were far worse off after they took up full-scale agriculture than when they were foraging:
life expectancy: In "The worst mistake in the history of the human race"Jared Diamond writes that "Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron- deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post- agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infections... affecting their ability to survive."
average height: paleopathologists have learned from skeletons that agriculture is directly linked to changes in human height. In "The worst mistake in the history of the human race" Jared Diamond writes that "Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors". I always had wondered how it was possible that the many mommies found in the desert of Xinjiang in the Western part of China were of people of 6 and often over 7 feet tall. (180, 210 cm) I guess that Diamond gave me the answer.
Jared Diamond gives "three sets of reasons lo explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health:
First, hunter- gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants - wheat, rice, and corn - provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.)
Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.
Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities".
So why in the world would humanity so uniformly around all the world have adopted a system that made it so much worse off than before?
Notwithstanding the limitations of the science of history we dispose nonetheless of some certainties:
1. Archaeological records indicates that plant and animal domestication arose independently in at least 7 to 9 separate locales: excavated millingstones indicate the use of small seeds and the find of cereal grains reported in archaeological diggings indicate the initial appearance of low level food production in the period going roughly from 10000 to 5000 years ago.
2. Detailed studies of Greenland ice cores & deep-sea mud cores suggest that climate change occurred regularly during the evolution of the human species from 2 million years ago to approximately 12,000 years ago and climatic fluctuations could be extremely abrupt on very short time scales. As R. Alley, P. Mayewski and B. Stauffer state in an article titled "Twin Ice Cores From Greenland Reveal History of Climate Change" Vol. 9, No. 2, October 1996, pp. 12-13. © 1996 American Geophysical Union: "Locked within two cores of ancient ice is evidence of unprecedented swings in Earth's climate throughout the ages. These icy archives tell us that large, rapid, global change is more the norm for the Earth's climate than is stasis." they then go on to conclude that "In short, the ice cores tell a clear story: humans came of age agriculturally and industrially during the most stable climatic regime recorded in the cores " See the graph here under from "The Science of Abrupt Climate Change" by Dr Jeffrey M. Masters.
Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson from Ohio State University and his research team have undertaken similar studies of ice cores from ice fields and glaciers in Peru, Bolivia, Antarctica, Greenland, Kurgyzstan, China, Africa and the Russian Arctic during the last quarter-century. Their studies found a similar cooling period, at the Younger Dryas, as seen on the graph here above from Greenland ice cores followed by a global warming. "These glaciers are very much like the canaries once used in coal mines. They're an indicator of massive changes taking place . . .in the tropics" says Thompson.
The global warming that started some 11-10,000 years ago was accompanied by monumental changes in the fauna and flora that led to an increase in the size of grains and also the concentration in certain areas of wild cereals in profusion. The argument then goes that pressed by other factors (population growth, drug addiction,...) humans took the presence of large quantities of cereals around them as an opportunity to source food.
The process took thousands of years to go from initial low level food harvesting to the appearance of full blown agriculture with settlement-subsistence systems centered around farming. Initially patches of land endowed with profusion of wild cereals were protected and harvested. Gradually seeds were sown and later land was cleared and tilt to increase the quantity and reliability of supply. It has to be noted that farming fully substituted hunting and plucking only in the last centuries... In "The transition to agriculture in Northwestern China" Bettinger, Barton, Elston, Madson, Brantingham, Oviatt, Wang and Choi argue that "... the interval between the initial appearance of (low level) food production and the appearance of full blown agriculture, as denoted by settlement-subsistence systems centered around food production, is perhaps 5500 years in Mesoamerica, 4000 years in eastern North America, and (arguably) 3000 years in the Near East".
Along the same line of massive global change or to be more accurate as a consequence of global warming some botanists suggest that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide acted as fertilizer on the fauna.
In an article titled "Origins of Agriculture" Robert C. Balling writes that
"Rowan Sage of the University of Toronto's Department of Botany presented an opinion article in which he developed the idea that low atmospheric CO2 levels during the late Pleistocene era (the last great glacial advance, which ended about 12,000 years ago) did not allow agriculture to develop. Toward the end of that glacial era, CO2 levels had fallen below 200 ppm. As the earth began to pull out of the Ice Age, CO2 concentrations increased from roughly 200 ppm 15,000 years ago to more than 250 ppm 12,000 years ago.
... A rise in atmospheric CO2 levels would have increased productivity of many plants by up to 50 percent, as hundreds of studies show. Further, the water efficiency of domesticated plants increased, so they developed a competitive advantage over many weeds".
-
"the remarkable synchrony of agricultural development around the world. Wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas were all domesticated in the Middle East by 10,000 years ago. In eastern Asia, rice and millets were domesticated 9,000 years ago. A thousand years earlier beans and chili peppers were "farmed" in Mesoamerica. Sugarcane in Southeast Asia, potatoes in the Andes, squash and sunflower in eastern North America, millet and sorghum in central Africa, and sesame and eggplant in India were all independently domesticated at about this same time".
"Compared with the length of time of human existence, the period of initial plant domestication all around the world took place in the blink of an eye".
"The conditions during the Pleistocene simply did not allow plant domestication and the successful establishment of agriculture—low carbon dioxide levels certainly could have played a major role".
3. Greg Wadley & Angus Martin, from the Department of Zoology of the University of Melbourne, write in "The origins of agriculture – a biological perspective and a new hypothesis" (published in Australian Biologist 6: 96 – 105, June 1993) that "The ingestion of cereals and milk, in normal modern dietary amounts by normal humans, activates reward centres in the brain. Foods that were common in the diet before agriculture (fruits and so on) do not have this pharmacological property. The effects of exorphins are qualitatively the same as those produced by other opioid and / or dopaminergic drugs, that is, reward, motivation, reduction of anxiety, a sense of wellbeing, and perhaps even addiction. Though the effects of a typical meal are quantitatively less than those of doses of those drugs, most modern humans experience them several times a day, every day of their adult lives".
Their argument goes as follows:
Studies by "Zioudrou (1979) and Brantl (1979) found opioid activity in wheat, maize and barley (exorphins), and bovine and human milk (casomorphin), as well as stimulatory activity in these proteins, and in oats, rye and soy".
"... researchers have measured the potency of exorphins, showing them to be comparable to morphine and enkephalin (Heubner et al. 1984), determined their amino acid sequences (Fukudome &Yoshikawa 1992), and shown that they are absorbed from the intestine (Svedburg et al.1985) and can produce effects such as analgesia and reduction of anxiety which are usually associated with poppy-derived opioids (Greksch et al.1981, Panksepp et al.1984). Mycroft et al. estimated that 150 mg of the MIF-1 analogue could be produced by normal daily intake of cereals and milk, noting that such quantities are orally active, and half this amount 'has induced mood alterations in clinically depressed subjects' (Mycroft et al. 1982:895)".
"cereals and dairy foods are not natural human foods, but rather are preferred because they contain exorphins. This chemical reward was the incentive for the adoption of cereal agriculture in the Neolithic. Regular self-administration of these substances facilitated the behavioural changes that led to the subsequent appearance of civilisation".
4. For over a million years human ancestors have derived their subsistence from hunting animals and gathering fruits, roots, leaves and seeds. The same division of labor is invariably observed around the world: men go hunting, women gather they take care of the food, the medicine, the roof, the dress and the children.
Agriculture was thus typically an extension of women's gathering of seeds.
It should thus not come as a surprise that women took central stage in the socio-economic structures that emerged with the adoption of agriculture. This economic process has to be seen expanding gradually over thousands of years giving way to enlarged socio-political groupings that gradually abandon their nomadic migrating ways.
In summary:
With retreating glaciers by the end of the ice age some 12,000 years ago the world got warmer and wetter than before. Greater rainfall and a higher concentration of CO2 in the air nourished grasses like wild wheat and barley that in some areas thus spread like wild fires. This attracted large concentrations of grazing animals followed by hunter-gatherers who gradually abandoned their nomadic ways and settled down in villages. The individuals continued to share an animist worldview while women were asserting their centrality through an increased recourse to cereals. All early agriculturalist societies seem indeed to have been matriarchal...
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
2005-05-16
Answers for contemporary visual arts (Part 3: religion)
Animism, that lasted for tens of thousands of years as humanity's exclusive worldview, privileged knowledge over power thus concentrating societal cohesion building in the hands of the men of knowledge. This stands in sharp contrast with the later religious worldview that privileged power and the use of physical force to assure societal cohesion.
How did such a tectonic shift in humanity's worldview take place ?
First and foremost we have to recognize that there is no simple answer to that question:
- This shift has taken place unevenly geographically over time.
- This shift did even not occur everywhere. Some forty percent of the world population are still sharing a largely animist worldview to this very day.
The traditional, eurocentric view of history, held that civilization started in the middle-east somewhere at the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers on the territory of modern day Irak some 7000 years ago (BC 5000) and gradually spread out to the East (India and China) and the West (Europe). This view is still largely unquestioned nowadays in the Western world but in academic circles specialized in the study of history some voices have started to reject this theory as being no more than an ideological expression of nineteenth century beliefs in Europe's and more particularly British centrality in the world.
How indeed to account for the American civilizations ? (Olmecs, Toltecs, ...).
But the last and most serious blow to this eurocentric view comes from China. China only started to study and seriously finance its archaeological studies in 1996-1997 and within the short time span since then major discoveries have already been made that permitted to date the existence some 8000 years ago of the written Chinese language which is 1000 years before the early start of Sumer !
We only have a vague understanding of this shift from animist knowledge to military-political power and I should say that this foundational moment in the emergence of civilizations is largely ignored by historical research.
What we know for a sure fact is that everywhere two determining factors were at work for thousands of years whose interactions eventually unleashed the unifying of tribes under a central military-political leadership:
-.. the evolution of animist thoughts towards:
* or the creation of gods
* or secular philosophical systems.
- .. the gradual emergence of agriculture allowing for larger concentrations of populations.
Those two factors followed their specific ways in different geographic and climatic conditions and it follows thus that their interactions led to many variations on the themes of:
-.. tribal unification by force under centralized power
-.. adoption of religious / philosophical worldviews.
-.. adoption of societal cohesion building tools: language, laws, education, art
In my next posts I'll try to put some meat on this bony sketch.
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
How did such a tectonic shift in humanity's worldview take place ?
First and foremost we have to recognize that there is no simple answer to that question:
- This shift has taken place unevenly geographically over time.
- This shift did even not occur everywhere. Some forty percent of the world population are still sharing a largely animist worldview to this very day.
The traditional, eurocentric view of history, held that civilization started in the middle-east somewhere at the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers on the territory of modern day Irak some 7000 years ago (BC 5000) and gradually spread out to the East (India and China) and the West (Europe). This view is still largely unquestioned nowadays in the Western world but in academic circles specialized in the study of history some voices have started to reject this theory as being no more than an ideological expression of nineteenth century beliefs in Europe's and more particularly British centrality in the world.
How indeed to account for the American civilizations ? (Olmecs, Toltecs, ...).
But the last and most serious blow to this eurocentric view comes from China. China only started to study and seriously finance its archaeological studies in 1996-1997 and within the short time span since then major discoveries have already been made that permitted to date the existence some 8000 years ago of the written Chinese language which is 1000 years before the early start of Sumer !
We only have a vague understanding of this shift from animist knowledge to military-political power and I should say that this foundational moment in the emergence of civilizations is largely ignored by historical research.
What we know for a sure fact is that everywhere two determining factors were at work for thousands of years whose interactions eventually unleashed the unifying of tribes under a central military-political leadership:
-.. the evolution of animist thoughts towards:
* or the creation of gods
* or secular philosophical systems.
- .. the gradual emergence of agriculture allowing for larger concentrations of populations.
Those two factors followed their specific ways in different geographic and climatic conditions and it follows thus that their interactions led to many variations on the themes of:
-.. tribal unification by force under centralized power
-.. adoption of religious / philosophical worldviews.
-.. adoption of societal cohesion building tools: language, laws, education, art
In my next posts I'll try to put some meat on this bony sketch.
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
2005-05-15
Answers for contemporary visual arts (Part 2: animism)
1. In animist times.
Animism is a worldview that was generally shared in early tribal societies and that is still prevalent nowadays for a significant portion of the world population. Those societies are assemblings of small quantities of people, small groups of a few hundred families at most that we came to describe as tribal societies. Anthropologists describe such societies as having no state, no authority, no religion and so on.
But does it make sense trying to understand the tribal world through our modern lenses? Reality for tribesmen is simply "other" than our modern reality and saying that they don't have the institutional or cultural attributes of our modern world in no way helps us understanding how those societies were functioning.
The term "Animism", derived from the Latin word "anima" meaning breath or soul, was coined by British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his "Religion in Primitive Culture" (1871) . He defined Animism as "the doctrine of Spiritual Beings" : "Animism, in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, . . . resulting in some kind of active worship".
Animists identify with an "Absolute truth" that they call "the One" which they conceive of as the energy, the force, the power, the mind, the divine being (later concept) that tribal groups worshiped as the ENERGY that nourishes the movement of change within the whole of reality.
One of the best descriptions of this idea is expressed by HOBHOUSE, L. T., in "Morals in Evolution", published in New York in 1907 : "I would describe (primitive man's) mental attitude as a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks upon his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two distinct entities of body and soul."
This citation leaves an after taste of irony in our minds, to us late-moderns, HOBHOUSE's judgment appears indeed as the negative judgment of a pesky narrow-minded Euro-centric and in the end it's the primitive man whose description he intended to be degrading that appears to be resonating better in our modern ears.
Individuals sharing an animist worldview thought and continue to think that many powers are in charge of the management of "the one" and so the decisions of some of those powers might be contrary to their own personal interests. Early humans were pragmatists and believed that they could use, or to be more accurate, that they could manipulate moments, instants, of reality in such a way that the powers to be might be incited to take decisions more favorable for their interests. In consequence they desperately searched for information to ward off any negativities and manipulate the present in order for the powers to be to do their bidding at favors the moment after. Manipulation was meant indeed to bring changes in some constitutive elements of the present that would induce a more favorable outcome in the future.
Manipulation was also meant, in a more direct sense, as tricking or as cheating the powers to be into other decisions than the ones they would have otherwise taken. There is a Chinese popular story that illustrates admirably this kind of direct manipulation of the powers to be. During one of my first Chinese new-year celebrations in Beijing with my wife's family I was offered "guang tong sticky candy" that I liked for its resemblance with a candy that was customarily offered during my childhood in Flanders. I inquired why one could not find this kind of candy out of the spring festival period and my wife's grand-mother told me a story that remains as vivid in my mind today as when I heard it for the first time some fifteen years ago. "Guang Tong" is the Chinese "stove god". His mission is to observe the family's behavior along the year and coming "Spring Festival" he goes reporting to the "heavenly emperor" about the family's conduct. "We Chinese" she told me "make an offering of sticky candy to 'Guang Tong' before his departure for heaven in the hope that his teeth will be glued in the candy when he meets the /heavenly emperor'..."
Pragmatic and lucid the tribesmen did not fail to recognize that they were largely ignorant so they naturally favored the emergence of specialists, who would be devoting all their time inquiring about the workings of reality and would then help them in case of necessity.
They thus vested permanently recognized power exclusively on the shaman, their "man of knowledge", who was kind of the tribe's reader and interpreter of reality, its diviner who predicted the future course of events, its medicine men who helped the sick and hurt to recover and more generally its master of ceremonies and feasts.
The shaman or whatever the tribal "men of knowledge" are called, from place to place, garner their knowledge through initiation by their "benefactor", elder shaman, into the body of observations of the natural cycles as transmitted by the line of their predecessors that they then confirm through their personal observation of those same cycles. The observation of the natural cycles and elements is what grounded their knowledge, it should thus not come as a surprise that tribal knowledge was and remains fairly identical all over the world: the presence of men or women of knowledge, visions, trances, dances, sacred items, sacred spaces for worship and the trial at connecting with the spirits of ancestors, the spirits of animals and plants those are indeed general characteristics of animistic societies. Animals, plants, stars were "deified" but not much thought was expressed about a "creator god" only about the "spirits" inhabiting the gods within those animals, plants and stars that can help or hurt and that sometimes were called "gods", "demons" or even simply a "lie".
There is no trial, in animism, at establishing abstract models out-of the exercise of the mind, no stories that personify the energy or the power of the one or of the spirits.
In an animist worldview humans are conceived of as atoms of a larger body that remains mostly inaccessible through human sensors. Wikipedia gives this excellent summary: "This can be stated simply as everything is alive, everything is conscious or everything has a soul". So the mind in an animist environment focuses on what the sensors (senses) give to perceive in the hope to SEE the living ONE and the spirits operating its parts. And what does the mind see ?
The night follows the day; winter comes after summer, spring and autumn being no more than their gradual passage from the one to the other, as daybreak or dawn signals the passage from night to day and dusk from day to night.
Those natural rhythms are the foundational signs upon which animist "men of knowledge" built their understanding of reality. They understood, and still understand where they survive, that there is simply no escape from those rhythms and that humans have to move and act in humility and acceptance of the "whole one" or reality. For them plants, animals and trees have been considered sacred because they were thought to be home to spirits that were taking part in regulating the works of the one. This formed the base of an attitude of deep respect for nature that can be found in all tribal societies.
From such simple and basic facts of reality the shaman, animist "men of knowledge", conceived fairly identical worldviews the whole world over.
Described with modern concepts the animist worldview is seen as "pantheist" : a mountain is god, a rock, an animal, a planet, and even a cockroach can be a god or a spirit, you can be god so you can also be a spirit. From all this is thus also derived that animism is "polytheist" : there are thousands of gods thus the concept of 333 million deities. But pantheism and polytheism are later concepts that have been derived as opposites of the recognized and accepted concepts of religious and modern times; as such they generate negative images in our minds and are blinding us from the substance of animist daily life practice.
The observation of those natural rhythms led early Chinese to derive the abstractions of full line and broken line ( _______ , ___ ___ ) as the visual signs of the polarities of the cycles that they observed and conceived of as natural rhythms or repeating time units: day/night, summer/winter that were easily associated with warm/cold and so on. Those signs illustrating the polarities within single-units, or ensembles, were then further refined into ever more complex systems of understanding of the forces at play inside the cycles of change. Such signs can be seen on recently excavated carved stones finding their origin some BC 6000 years or 8000 years ago according to the dating results obtained with "carbon 14" techniques. What is even more remarkable, I think, is that those visual signs are the foundation, the roots, upon which the Chinese built their written language that survives to this day. It's as if their early understandings about reality had been inscribed once and for all in their written language.
Abstract signs are found in all animist societies. They decorate textiles, daily use objects, totems and other. Those "visual signs" are the "writing-down", at the attention of all the members of the group, of the meaning of what is going on in the reality encompassing it. Visual signs don't need many words they are accessible to all so they diffuse uniformly through the whole of the body-social and bind it, glue it, together. The creation of visual signs is thus conceived of as a technique for gluing the individual social atoms and solidifying the body collective, the group, the tribe.
Tribes had no equivalent of kings, emperors nor prime ministers, their small groups had simply no need for those kinds of power symbols and institutions. Any individual tribesman was known by the others and all families had a very strong consciousness of their survival being in the hands of the group. There was thus no functional need for a permanent military or political power structure. When a situation of conflict arose with another tribe the strongest man of the tribe, kind of naturally, was endorsed with leading the defense of the group and when the conflict subsided he returned to his normal activities within the group. The same process of recoursing to the most able must have been at work as well in other situations than military conflict.
The notable exception to such a temporary exercise of a power-function remains with the "man of knowledge" who was given by the tribe his entire time, freed from all domestic chores, to read reality and to give to all an understandable visual representation of it. It appears to me that the shaman or "man of knowledge" is the first personification in history of a societal function that has been "remunerated" by the collectivity or to say this otherwise, for the first time in history, has society taken in charge to supply for the material needs of a specialized function that was considered to being exercised in the benefit of all.
The organization of tribal small groups was quite straightforward. They were basically an assembling of individuals glued together by a shared worldview. The shaman was in charge of telling to his fellow tribesmen a credible and simple story that would unify their vision of the world and of the reality around them. Story telling was thus an important component of living in a tribe. Stories were what constituted the shared knowledge of all the tribesmen and their content would then be visually illustrated in drawings and paintings that were directly accessible to all even to small children.
Those visual signs, that can be seen in what European thinkers by the end of the nineteenth century, came to call "primitive art" are humanity's first systematization of ideas about the rhythm of time, about space and the cosmic circus. Those ideas were recorded in abstract symbols and signs that amount to a symbolic writing about our distant ancestors' understanding of reality, how they perceived the main phenomena and properties of a complex world. For us moderns those signs are an enigma. Though the visual signs are visible the meaning of the stories behind those signs remains largely hidden to us.
Three themes reappear, from place to place around the world, showing what our ancestors were concerned about, showing how they perceived reality or themselves within the one:
- fertility (reproduction of the family, the group, the specie): The pronounced female forms of the "Venus of Willendorf" established it as an animist icon of fertility. It has been dated BC 22 - 24,000.
- wild animals and the ritual of hunting (the satisfaction of the individuals' "objective needs" and more particularly feeding):
- the eternal questions of the workings of the universe.
The earliest of those animist visual signs come from the Paleolitic, or Old Stone Age period, about BC 40,000. But the level of refinement of those signs suggests a much earlier beginning, about which we unfortunately have practically no knowledge. Most material predating 40,000 years ago reflect utilitarian concerns but an article from the Encyclopedia of Columbia University indicates that "there is now scattered African archaeological evidence from before that time (in one case as early as 90,000 years ago) of the production by H. sapiens of beads and other decorative work, perhaps indicating a gradual development of the aesthetic concerns and other symbolic thinking characteristic of later human societies".
Early hominids (from 2 million to 30,000 years ago) and modern homo sapiens, until 10,000 years ago approximately, lived exclusively as hunters and gatherers taking their food directly from the environment rather than producing it by tilting the land. Our knowledge of the life of our ancestors is very limited and we can only conclude that their worldview was animistic at least in the last phase of their history from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. We also know that the economic revolution that took place with the emergence of agriculture did not displace animism. The worldview continued to prosper, unabashed, fashioning the attitudes of small tribal agricultural societies around the world for thousands more years.
Only the political revolution that ensued after the unification of tribes into kingdoms/empires eventually created the conditions for displacing animism in favor of religions but we'll see in the next post that this political unification did not engender a unified response around the world.
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
Animism is a worldview that was generally shared in early tribal societies and that is still prevalent nowadays for a significant portion of the world population. Those societies are assemblings of small quantities of people, small groups of a few hundred families at most that we came to describe as tribal societies. Anthropologists describe such societies as having no state, no authority, no religion and so on.
But does it make sense trying to understand the tribal world through our modern lenses? Reality for tribesmen is simply "other" than our modern reality and saying that they don't have the institutional or cultural attributes of our modern world in no way helps us understanding how those societies were functioning.
The term "Animism", derived from the Latin word "anima" meaning breath or soul, was coined by British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his "Religion in Primitive Culture" (1871) . He defined Animism as "the doctrine of Spiritual Beings" : "Animism, in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, . . . resulting in some kind of active worship".
Animists identify with an "Absolute truth" that they call "the One" which they conceive of as the energy, the force, the power, the mind, the divine being (later concept) that tribal groups worshiped as the ENERGY that nourishes the movement of change within the whole of reality.
One of the best descriptions of this idea is expressed by HOBHOUSE, L. T., in "Morals in Evolution", published in New York in 1907 : "I would describe (primitive man's) mental attitude as a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks upon his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two distinct entities of body and soul."
This citation leaves an after taste of irony in our minds, to us late-moderns, HOBHOUSE's judgment appears indeed as the negative judgment of a pesky narrow-minded Euro-centric and in the end it's the primitive man whose description he intended to be degrading that appears to be resonating better in our modern ears.
Individuals sharing an animist worldview thought and continue to think that many powers are in charge of the management of "the one" and so the decisions of some of those powers might be contrary to their own personal interests. Early humans were pragmatists and believed that they could use, or to be more accurate, that they could manipulate moments, instants, of reality in such a way that the powers to be might be incited to take decisions more favorable for their interests. In consequence they desperately searched for information to ward off any negativities and manipulate the present in order for the powers to be to do their bidding at favors the moment after. Manipulation was meant indeed to bring changes in some constitutive elements of the present that would induce a more favorable outcome in the future.
Manipulation was also meant, in a more direct sense, as tricking or as cheating the powers to be into other decisions than the ones they would have otherwise taken. There is a Chinese popular story that illustrates admirably this kind of direct manipulation of the powers to be. During one of my first Chinese new-year celebrations in Beijing with my wife's family I was offered "guang tong sticky candy" that I liked for its resemblance with a candy that was customarily offered during my childhood in Flanders. I inquired why one could not find this kind of candy out of the spring festival period and my wife's grand-mother told me a story that remains as vivid in my mind today as when I heard it for the first time some fifteen years ago. "Guang Tong" is the Chinese "stove god". His mission is to observe the family's behavior along the year and coming "Spring Festival" he goes reporting to the "heavenly emperor" about the family's conduct. "We Chinese" she told me "make an offering of sticky candy to 'Guang Tong' before his departure for heaven in the hope that his teeth will be glued in the candy when he meets the /heavenly emperor'..."
Pragmatic and lucid the tribesmen did not fail to recognize that they were largely ignorant so they naturally favored the emergence of specialists, who would be devoting all their time inquiring about the workings of reality and would then help them in case of necessity.
They thus vested permanently recognized power exclusively on the shaman, their "man of knowledge", who was kind of the tribe's reader and interpreter of reality, its diviner who predicted the future course of events, its medicine men who helped the sick and hurt to recover and more generally its master of ceremonies and feasts.
The shaman or whatever the tribal "men of knowledge" are called, from place to place, garner their knowledge through initiation by their "benefactor", elder shaman, into the body of observations of the natural cycles as transmitted by the line of their predecessors that they then confirm through their personal observation of those same cycles. The observation of the natural cycles and elements is what grounded their knowledge, it should thus not come as a surprise that tribal knowledge was and remains fairly identical all over the world: the presence of men or women of knowledge, visions, trances, dances, sacred items, sacred spaces for worship and the trial at connecting with the spirits of ancestors, the spirits of animals and plants those are indeed general characteristics of animistic societies. Animals, plants, stars were "deified" but not much thought was expressed about a "creator god" only about the "spirits" inhabiting the gods within those animals, plants and stars that can help or hurt and that sometimes were called "gods", "demons" or even simply a "lie".
There is no trial, in animism, at establishing abstract models out-of the exercise of the mind, no stories that personify the energy or the power of the one or of the spirits.
In an animist worldview humans are conceived of as atoms of a larger body that remains mostly inaccessible through human sensors. Wikipedia gives this excellent summary: "This can be stated simply as everything is alive, everything is conscious or everything has a soul". So the mind in an animist environment focuses on what the sensors (senses) give to perceive in the hope to SEE the living ONE and the spirits operating its parts. And what does the mind see ?
The night follows the day; winter comes after summer, spring and autumn being no more than their gradual passage from the one to the other, as daybreak or dawn signals the passage from night to day and dusk from day to night.
Those natural rhythms are the foundational signs upon which animist "men of knowledge" built their understanding of reality. They understood, and still understand where they survive, that there is simply no escape from those rhythms and that humans have to move and act in humility and acceptance of the "whole one" or reality. For them plants, animals and trees have been considered sacred because they were thought to be home to spirits that were taking part in regulating the works of the one. This formed the base of an attitude of deep respect for nature that can be found in all tribal societies.
From such simple and basic facts of reality the shaman, animist "men of knowledge", conceived fairly identical worldviews the whole world over.
Described with modern concepts the animist worldview is seen as "pantheist" : a mountain is god, a rock, an animal, a planet, and even a cockroach can be a god or a spirit, you can be god so you can also be a spirit. From all this is thus also derived that animism is "polytheist" : there are thousands of gods thus the concept of 333 million deities. But pantheism and polytheism are later concepts that have been derived as opposites of the recognized and accepted concepts of religious and modern times; as such they generate negative images in our minds and are blinding us from the substance of animist daily life practice.
The observation of those natural rhythms led early Chinese to derive the abstractions of full line and broken line ( _______ , ___ ___ ) as the visual signs of the polarities of the cycles that they observed and conceived of as natural rhythms or repeating time units: day/night, summer/winter that were easily associated with warm/cold and so on. Those signs illustrating the polarities within single-units, or ensembles, were then further refined into ever more complex systems of understanding of the forces at play inside the cycles of change. Such signs can be seen on recently excavated carved stones finding their origin some BC 6000 years or 8000 years ago according to the dating results obtained with "carbon 14" techniques. What is even more remarkable, I think, is that those visual signs are the foundation, the roots, upon which the Chinese built their written language that survives to this day. It's as if their early understandings about reality had been inscribed once and for all in their written language.
Abstract signs are found in all animist societies. They decorate textiles, daily use objects, totems and other. Those "visual signs" are the "writing-down", at the attention of all the members of the group, of the meaning of what is going on in the reality encompassing it. Visual signs don't need many words they are accessible to all so they diffuse uniformly through the whole of the body-social and bind it, glue it, together. The creation of visual signs is thus conceived of as a technique for gluing the individual social atoms and solidifying the body collective, the group, the tribe.
Tribes had no equivalent of kings, emperors nor prime ministers, their small groups had simply no need for those kinds of power symbols and institutions. Any individual tribesman was known by the others and all families had a very strong consciousness of their survival being in the hands of the group. There was thus no functional need for a permanent military or political power structure. When a situation of conflict arose with another tribe the strongest man of the tribe, kind of naturally, was endorsed with leading the defense of the group and when the conflict subsided he returned to his normal activities within the group. The same process of recoursing to the most able must have been at work as well in other situations than military conflict.
The notable exception to such a temporary exercise of a power-function remains with the "man of knowledge" who was given by the tribe his entire time, freed from all domestic chores, to read reality and to give to all an understandable visual representation of it. It appears to me that the shaman or "man of knowledge" is the first personification in history of a societal function that has been "remunerated" by the collectivity or to say this otherwise, for the first time in history, has society taken in charge to supply for the material needs of a specialized function that was considered to being exercised in the benefit of all.
The organization of tribal small groups was quite straightforward. They were basically an assembling of individuals glued together by a shared worldview. The shaman was in charge of telling to his fellow tribesmen a credible and simple story that would unify their vision of the world and of the reality around them. Story telling was thus an important component of living in a tribe. Stories were what constituted the shared knowledge of all the tribesmen and their content would then be visually illustrated in drawings and paintings that were directly accessible to all even to small children.
Those visual signs, that can be seen in what European thinkers by the end of the nineteenth century, came to call "primitive art" are humanity's first systematization of ideas about the rhythm of time, about space and the cosmic circus. Those ideas were recorded in abstract symbols and signs that amount to a symbolic writing about our distant ancestors' understanding of reality, how they perceived the main phenomena and properties of a complex world. For us moderns those signs are an enigma. Though the visual signs are visible the meaning of the stories behind those signs remains largely hidden to us.
Three themes reappear, from place to place around the world, showing what our ancestors were concerned about, showing how they perceived reality or themselves within the one:
- fertility (reproduction of the family, the group, the specie): The pronounced female forms of the "Venus of Willendorf" established it as an animist icon of fertility. It has been dated BC 22 - 24,000.
- wild animals and the ritual of hunting (the satisfaction of the individuals' "objective needs" and more particularly feeding):
- the eternal questions of the workings of the universe.
The earliest of those animist visual signs come from the Paleolitic, or Old Stone Age period, about BC 40,000. But the level of refinement of those signs suggests a much earlier beginning, about which we unfortunately have practically no knowledge. Most material predating 40,000 years ago reflect utilitarian concerns but an article from the Encyclopedia of Columbia University indicates that "there is now scattered African archaeological evidence from before that time (in one case as early as 90,000 years ago) of the production by H. sapiens of beads and other decorative work, perhaps indicating a gradual development of the aesthetic concerns and other symbolic thinking characteristic of later human societies".
Early hominids (from 2 million to 30,000 years ago) and modern homo sapiens, until 10,000 years ago approximately, lived exclusively as hunters and gatherers taking their food directly from the environment rather than producing it by tilting the land. Our knowledge of the life of our ancestors is very limited and we can only conclude that their worldview was animistic at least in the last phase of their history from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. We also know that the economic revolution that took place with the emergence of agriculture did not displace animism. The worldview continued to prosper, unabashed, fashioning the attitudes of small tribal agricultural societies around the world for thousands more years.
Only the political revolution that ensued after the unification of tribes into kingdoms/empires eventually created the conditions for displacing animism in favor of religions but we'll see in the next post that this political unification did not engender a unified response around the world.
2005-05-07
Answers for contemporary visual arts (Part 1)
I'm sick and tired to read and listen to all the non-sense that is ascribed nowadays to painting and more generally to visual arts. I have enough of all this stupidity and I feel the urge to say out loud and clear that we have to make sense a-new of the act of painting and image making. The art of image making has nothing in common with advertisement nor with fashion nor with design nor with "whatever visual" nor anything related to money making.
The free-market ideology would like us to believe that the most representative artists nowadays are the ones whose works are sold to the highest bidders at art auctions but those artists are not necessarily the ones that history will remember for the very simple reason that they are not representative of the worldview of tomorrow that is starting to shape under our eyes today...
The real innovative artists today are the ones who grasp what is going on in terms of the changes occuring in humanity's worldview and are thus led to see the new worldview that is emerging. Those are the real visionaries whose images will help humanity crossing the bridge towards the future and their works will be remembered on that very particular merit.
Visual arts have to be brought back to their original functionality and if we can't do this lucidly and in all consciousness then, I'm afraid, we'll eventually have to accept societal necessity and its forcing this upon us in one or another reactionary fashion... Is it not Mr. Kimball ?
In summary my position is that "... art is an instrument of unification of human soieties behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry."
What remains largely unanswered in my writings is how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry in late modern times.
In "SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS" I wrote:
"a society is unified and stable when a large majority of its citizens make theirs a given worldview.
Humans are social animals who, historically, assembled into larger and more complex groupings. In other words our collective organization underwent successive changes leading to vaster assemblings of local groupings. The unification into larger groupings and their preservation necessitated the sharing of a similar understanding of reality by all the members of the group = view of the world = vision of reality = worldview.
The assembling of those groups was always very fragile so, to assure its survival, the collectivity was in need of a binding glue that took the form of belief systems accepted by all individuals.
This gradual and evolutionary process follows the road of humanity: the conflictual interaction between the two societal polarities constituted by the individualities and the collectivity. The interaction between those polarities is indeed what generated the energy that drove and continues to drive societal change. On one side the collectivity imposes conformity to a worldview and on the other side some individuals want to follow their own ideas and do not tire until reaching acceptance by the collectivity by which time their so called deviance transforms into innovation and they are applauded by all.
Over time the belief systems or worldviews of dispersed groups were translated into coherent sets of axioms gaining their societies, that had been unified through force, a unified interpretation of the principle of reality. Such unquestioned axioms formed the roots, the foundations, of all civilizations. "
Human societies developed along lines of always deeper interdependence between the concepts of "the road of humanity", "power", "knowledge" and "worldviews".
If we agree with Duchamp's quote that "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century" then we have to answer the question "how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry". Answering that question imposes us to resolve the problem of the mysterious disjunction between power and knowledge that happened sometime during the emergence of modernity:
- when the worldviews of the men of knowledge stopped to be imposed on everyone by the men of power
- when freed from an imposed worldview everyone started to consider that their own views were reflecting the "truth" about "reality".
This is indeed the fertile ground out of which societal confusion would grow and develop unhindered into the aberration of late societal modernity that is characterized by a complete imbalance with extreme individualism tilting towards the atomization of our modern societies. Such an imbalance is deadly.
We are acting as if we were the atoms of a "material entity" that decided to going it their own way. But this is only an ideological illusion, for, the atoms are nothing on their own. The nature of their being is to being a particle of the "material entity". That is exactly what gives sense to their own existence. Going it their own way the atoms would only succeed to destroy the "material entity" which would be synonymous with their collective suicide.
That's exactly where we are: societal atomization and on the verge of a collective suicide.
The very long haul history, I mean the passages from one societal form to another, is founded in the changes occurring in the realities covered by the 4 concepts of "the road of humanity", "power", "knowledge" and "worldviews" and also their interactions.
In the present state of knowledge that is accessible to us, we distinguish 4 evolutionary stages of societal development:
- animism (small groups)
- religious times (starting with tribal unification under a centralized political power)
- modern times (following the crusades, looting and trade brought riches to some and that accumulated capital imposed on its holders a logic of pragmatism that gradually developed into an ideology of individualism and an ideology of rationality that displaced religious beliefs)
- postmodern times (a postmodern worldview that shapes out of the interaction between a globalizing world, an ideology of all-rationality culminating in science and technology and a rebalancing of the axioms of civilizations)
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
The free-market ideology would like us to believe that the most representative artists nowadays are the ones whose works are sold to the highest bidders at art auctions but those artists are not necessarily the ones that history will remember for the very simple reason that they are not representative of the worldview of tomorrow that is starting to shape under our eyes today...
The real innovative artists today are the ones who grasp what is going on in terms of the changes occuring in humanity's worldview and are thus led to see the new worldview that is emerging. Those are the real visionaries whose images will help humanity crossing the bridge towards the future and their works will be remembered on that very particular merit.
Visual arts have to be brought back to their original functionality and if we can't do this lucidly and in all consciousness then, I'm afraid, we'll eventually have to accept societal necessity and its forcing this upon us in one or another reactionary fashion... Is it not Mr. Kimball ?
In summary my position is that "... art is an instrument of unification of human soieties behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry."
What remains largely unanswered in my writings is how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry in late modern times.
In "SOCIETIES STABILIZE AROUND WORLDVIEWS" I wrote:
"a society is unified and stable when a large majority of its citizens make theirs a given worldview.
Humans are social animals who, historically, assembled into larger and more complex groupings. In other words our collective organization underwent successive changes leading to vaster assemblings of local groupings. The unification into larger groupings and their preservation necessitated the sharing of a similar understanding of reality by all the members of the group = view of the world = vision of reality = worldview.
The assembling of those groups was always very fragile so, to assure its survival, the collectivity was in need of a binding glue that took the form of belief systems accepted by all individuals.
This gradual and evolutionary process follows the road of humanity: the conflictual interaction between the two societal polarities constituted by the individualities and the collectivity. The interaction between those polarities is indeed what generated the energy that drove and continues to drive societal change. On one side the collectivity imposes conformity to a worldview and on the other side some individuals want to follow their own ideas and do not tire until reaching acceptance by the collectivity by which time their so called deviance transforms into innovation and they are applauded by all.
Over time the belief systems or worldviews of dispersed groups were translated into coherent sets of axioms gaining their societies, that had been unified through force, a unified interpretation of the principle of reality. Such unquestioned axioms formed the roots, the foundations, of all civilizations. "
Human societies developed along lines of always deeper interdependence between the concepts of "the road of humanity", "power", "knowledge" and "worldviews".
If we agree with Duchamp's quote that "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century" then we have to answer the question "how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry". Answering that question imposes us to resolve the problem of the mysterious disjunction between power and knowledge that happened sometime during the emergence of modernity:
- when the worldviews of the men of knowledge stopped to be imposed on everyone by the men of power
- when freed from an imposed worldview everyone started to consider that their own views were reflecting the "truth" about "reality".
This is indeed the fertile ground out of which societal confusion would grow and develop unhindered into the aberration of late societal modernity that is characterized by a complete imbalance with extreme individualism tilting towards the atomization of our modern societies. Such an imbalance is deadly.
We are acting as if we were the atoms of a "material entity" that decided to going it their own way. But this is only an ideological illusion, for, the atoms are nothing on their own. The nature of their being is to being a particle of the "material entity". That is exactly what gives sense to their own existence. Going it their own way the atoms would only succeed to destroy the "material entity" which would be synonymous with their collective suicide.
That's exactly where we are: societal atomization and on the verge of a collective suicide.
The very long haul history, I mean the passages from one societal form to another, is founded in the changes occurring in the realities covered by the 4 concepts of "the road of humanity", "power", "knowledge" and "worldviews" and also their interactions.
In the present state of knowledge that is accessible to us, we distinguish 4 evolutionary stages of societal development:
- animism (small groups)
- religious times (starting with tribal unification under a centralized political power)
- modern times (following the crusades, looting and trade brought riches to some and that accumulated capital imposed on its holders a logic of pragmatism that gradually developed into an ideology of individualism and an ideology of rationality that displaced religious beliefs)
- postmodern times (a postmodern worldview that shapes out of the interaction between a globalizing world, an ideology of all-rationality culminating in science and technology and a rebalancing of the axioms of civilizations)
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
2005-04-24
Unanswered questions about contemporary visual arts
Those of you who read my posts regularly know my views by now on visual arts. In summary my thesis goes as follows:
"From animist times, through religious times, to modern times art has served as an instrument of unification of human societies behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry. This functionality of art that goes back tens of thousands of years has been interrupted sometime along the twentieth century. The notion that art serves a societal functionality has indeed been totally lost on late moderns."
Duchamp said no less in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in "Eleven Europeans in America" that had been published in "Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art" (new York), XIII No 4-5, 1946: "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century".
This loss is what explains the total confusion where visual art landed by the end of the twentieth century. It was as if "whatever" had been made possible, had been made the norm, in art creation. Suffice indeed for the artist nowadays to say that something is art for that thing to be considered as art and art critics and collectors seem to be of no help at correcting this aberration, they are simply lost in entropy.
In such an environment painting is not sufficient any longer I feel that our present predicament is asking for words to shine the light of sense again on the act of painting.
In the same interview mentionned above Duchamp approached this in the following words : "... art should turn to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression.
I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre-stupid as a painter' ."
I'm also sick to read and listen all the non-sense that is ascribed to the activity of painting. I have enough of all this stupidity and feel the urge to say out loud and clear that we have to make sense a-new of the act of painting. Visual arts have to be brought back to their original functionality and if we can't do this lucidly and in all consciousness then we'll eventually have to accept societal necessity forcing this upon us in one or another reactionary fashion...
________________________
Those of you who are interested to follow this discussion but who did not read regularly my posts can find a good summary of my thoughts by reading the following posts:
- About the systemic map of my inquiry into "what is visual art?"
- About the road of humanity
- About the axioms of civilizations
- About worldviews
- About the road of humanity
- About the axioms of civilizations
- About worldviews
About MODERNITY:
- Early modernity
- Modernity
- Late modernity
About POSTMODERNISM:
- Postmodernism, preliminaries
- The context of the new Postmodern societal worldview in the forming
- The road towards a postmodern societal worldview
- The shaping of a postmodern societal worldview
__________________________
So my position is that "... art has served as an instrument of unification of human societies behind the worldviews at the hands of the men of knowledge and the men of power of the time through its imaging of those worldviews at the attention of all the citizenry.."
What remains largely unanswered in my writings is how art came to forget about its function at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge and the men of power at the attention of all the citizenry.
How come that such a truly central question could have been so generally ignored ?
Those are the questions that I propose trying to peel in my next series of posts.
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
Keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society
2005-04-18
Digital variations of acrylics (2)
I terminated all the digital variations of the presently available 25 acrylics of my ARTSENSE collection. Here are some of those works. Click the images to enlarge.
keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art
keywords: art, modern art, art theory, visual art
2005-04-14
Digital variations of acrylics
A few days more and I'll have completed 300 variations. (12 x 25 acrylics)
Check out some of my last works and click forward or backward in the slide-show. To enter the slide-show click on one of the following images.
keywoeds: art, modern art, art theory, visual art
Check out some of my last works and click forward or backward in the slide-show. To enter the slide-show click on one of the following images.
keywoeds: art, modern art, art theory, visual art
2005-04-08
About art and reality.
Reality is all about our perception of ourselves within the "workings" of the whole of our universe and painting is all about giving visual signs of the worldview that the men of knowledge are deriving from how they see and understand reality. There are definitely an infinity of angles from where we can look at the unfolding of that reality story and the capturing by our eyes of the first degree image that impacts on our neurons is but one capturing of reality among an infinity of possibilities. Visual sight is no more than the activity of one physical-biological sensor, among many other possibles, that evolved from our general condition as humans. That "first degree image" capturing device is basically needed by our brains' as data-input about our close environment so that our brains should be able to devise orders at the attention of our bodies for them to be able to act in the interest of their own preservation. The first degree image perceived by our eyes is thus a functionality of human survival that we inherited along the road of our biological evolution. We should always remember that our noses were far more dominant in earlier times as a functionality of our survival than our eyes. In nature functionalities of survival can take many many different forms that are always adapted to guaranteeing the best chance of survival of the species.
Knowledge is something fundamentally different. It is what allows us to approach reality from a more thoroughly encompassing observation integrating all the different angles possible including the first degree image that our eyes are capturing about it. Knowledge projects us further than the first degree visual capturing of our close environment. It is a trial at rendering comprehensible to us the working of that environment and thus it enlightens our eyes' first degree images of reality with sense.
At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century cubism was a first essay at giving a visual representation of reality through the prism of knowledge. As such Cubism was the first artistic approach trying to bring us visual signs of reality that were not based any longer on the classical model of copying the image projecting on our retinas (this is valid in "whiteland" but not in China where Shieyi painting since thousands of years is practiced as an exercise at "reading the meaning" of reality). Cubism nevertheless very fast appeared to be no more than a graphical trick that made sense for sure in Picasso and Braque's visual researches but that was losing all meaning at the hands of further artists. Cubism was not rendering something else than the first degree image projecting on the retina. It only succeeded to give a different visual rendering from that first degree image that, as Marcel Duchamp puts it, was derived from a very "amateurish" reading "of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry".
The twentieth century has been for the visual arts, in Europe and to a lesser degree in the US, a time of searching for visual representations that should project our understanding of reality further than the first degree image captured by our eyes.
Picasso and Braque were influenced much by mathematics and the notion, somehow new in their time, of the 4th dimension but in the end they did not succeed to render something else than the first degree image.
The surrealists ventured in the path of the unconscientious that was a favorite theme of Freud and Jung and at long last they discovered visual paths rendering something else than this first degree image that they so much hated.
After the 2nd world war the members of Cobra, rejecting as pure absurdity the logic of a societal system that had unleashed all those primitive and montruous horrors of warfare, were searching for a better collective tomorrow in Marxism then in Existentialism and later in Situationism. It makes no doubt in my mind that the spirit of the works of Cobra artists have had a determining influence on the Zeitgeist in Western Europe that in finale rendered possible the unimaginable, the build-up of the EU.
The spirit of their works, exclusively turned against an abomination, was rendering a visual expression of ugliness as being something to be rejected. Thus their works being about something very negative did never really succeed to attract a large following.
Unfortunately, by the end of the second part of the 20th century, the visual arts have been sequestrated by an "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" that imposed its inexorable dictorship upon anything touching the visual arts. Interest obliging; making a buck out of art works took precedence over any artistic consideration. Soon under the "diktats" of the artistic authorities "whatever" was imposed as being art. That's how the visual arts entered a time of pure absurdity, non-sense imposed as art by the authorities, the merchants, the curators and the critics. The installation, in Central Park of the Gates of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, validates my point. Verify for yourself the grand-standing of the artistic authorities towards that event:
- The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates
In their own defense, the art dictators claimed that Duchamp was the one who had initiated this drive towards "whatever" with his "ready-mades". But the intention of Duchamp through his "ready-mades" was no other than to turn into derision those "well-thinking" autorities who did not have the slightest idea about the artistic substance that artists were so desperately running after. The initial switch of the sense of art in the "ready mades", that had been operated by Duchamp, was no more that a good joke on the "smooth talkers" of his time but it ended up in the end by turning miserably against Duchamp himself. Here is what Duchamp had to say later on about his earlier endeavors. I quote from a transcript by Herschel B. Chipp in "Theories of Modern Art" of Duchamp's interview with James Johnson Sweeney in "Eleven Europeans in America" that had been published in "Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art" (new York), XIII No 4-5, 1946: "Futurism was an impressionism of the mechanial world. It was strictly a continuation of the impressionist movement. I was not interested in that. I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting. ... I was interested in ideas -not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. ... In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century. ... Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. ... It was a way to get out of a state of mind -to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from cliches -to get free. ... Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. ... There was no thought of anything beyond the physical side of painting. No notion of freedom was thaught. No philosophical outlook was introduced. ... I thought of art on a broader scale. There were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry. But most views of it were amateurish. ... I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter. ... This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter." It is a mistery to me why Duchamp remains known for his "ready-mades" while his thoughts about art are so foundational but nevertheless ignored. Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs ? Our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" should be brought to account for their inadmissible lightness.
It is nevertheless a fact that, even after "whatever" had been imposed as subject of art, the societal functionality of visual arts has never been in any way put into question. We just don't know any more what this functionality is all about and so we don't speak or write about it but this does in no way mean that visual arts have no societal functionality. As Duchamp was saying "This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century". The absence of debate about the societal functionality of the visual arts does not suppress this functionality it mainly obscures it by fostering ignorance.
Duchamp was right in this idea that "art is at the service of the mind". He just did not conduct the thinking to its logical conclusion. What is the mind indeed used for ? What is the outcome of knowledge ? What is the relationship between society and knowledge ? How does and can visual art serve knowledge ? So what is the societal functionality of visual arts? Today as well as 500 years ago or 2000 years ago or 50,000 years ago for that matter visual arts were meant to create visual signs of the worldview that is derived out of the knowledge at the hands of the men of knowledge of the day. The only reason, why those signs took such precedence, is that human societies garanteed their stability through the smooth spreading among all members of society of the worldview of the day. The functionality of visual arts is thus directly related to the preservation and the enhancement of societal stability. Bingo !
Visual signs are easier to comprehend than spoken or written words and they are a lot more easy to comprehend than the theories that they represent. I wrote many times already about how this worked in animist times, in religious times and also in early modern times. But what about nowadays? I firmly believe that the societal confusion that we experience nowadays is related to the confusion that we experience in the visual arts and not the other way around. In other words, I believe that the knowledge that gradually emerges out of the ideas of today's men of knowings, the scientists, is not translated into a worldview. If there is no longer any worldview that could be permeating society at large there can be no longer any question of the visual arts relaying the worldview of the men of knowledge towards all members of society.
The artists have thus no alternative but to abandon the traditional dumbness that is associated with illustrating the ideas of others. We are confronted today with this paradox that we do not know where are today's men of knowledge. Surely enough there are some scientists and thinkers who are trying to connect "knowings" horizontally but this does not preclude the existence of a workable knowledge giving birth to a worldview that would be acceptable to all.
In conclusion the only conceivable way out of this conundrum is for the artist to become his own man of knowledge. I follow Duchamp one hundred percent when he says that "this is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter". Yes why should painters continue to accept all that non-sense coming out of the big mouthes of our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" ? What is it that forbids artists to start accumulating scientific knowings and to confront those with the wisdom of philosophy in order to create knowledge ?
Yes I know that this proposition of mine is no easy feat. But what is the alternative if we want to surpass this characterization of being " 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter" and being absolutely unable to fullfill the societal role that is ours ? The societal confusion that we are plunged into nowadays creates much despair. More and more individuals feel at a loss and try by all means to find answers to the inescapable questions relating to REALITY that could be sensical to them.
Religion brought such sensical answers for over one thousand years in Europe and did so too in the territories that inherited the European Christian worldview. Later portraits and landscapes suceeded to give a basic representation of the ideas of individualism and private property or ownership that formed the backbone of the worldview adhered to along the timespan of modern times.
Without visual signs of a unified worldview mirroring today's trends and knowings our late modern societies are fragmenting and imploding into atomization. Individuals have come to believe that they know better. But the fact remains that individuals are no more than particles of their societies and that the creative tension between individuality and collectivity is what in the end generates the possibility of a smooth sailing into the future.
Could there be a worldview emanating directly out of scientific endeavors and the accumulation of scientific knowings nowadays ? Yes and no. Science is indeed characterized by ultra specialization. The scientific outlook is like channelled through narrow vertical pipes leading in the direction of the microscopic or the macroscopic towards the observation of very narrow areas of reality. Views out of such vertical pipes are thus necessarily fragmentory and the scientific approach ends up being burdened by an infinity of fragmentory observations that are not connected horizontally between themselves.
My understanding is thus that the scientific model is generating an infinity of "KNOWINGS", vertical micro-observations, but those knowings do not in any way qualify as "KNOWLEDGE" about reality. Knowings are undoubtedly necessary quantities in developping a coherent knowledge base but it is the horizontal linking between developped knowings that in the end is generating knowledge.
The fact is that science is accumulating astronomical quantities of knowings and that nobody is capable any longer to connect all those knowings together. It is physically unfeasible for us humans:
- first to accumulate all the available knowings at any given time and if it were feasible it would nevertheless remain an unattainable task to track their appearance over time.
- second to link all the existing and potential knowings between themselves in order to generate knowledge.
The acceptance of our physical limitations brings us to the recognition of our void of wholeness that, in the end, is what generates our perpetual quest for "wholesensicalness". From the deepest of our origins till today we searched to master this "wholesensicalness" and even if we did not succeed to master it, we tried to approximate it as good as we could with the tools at our disposal at the time and one of the determining tools for ordering and making sense out of the knowings of the time has always been philosophy.
Philosophy is our vision of the whole of our reality, of the whole of our universe, it is what gives sense to the fragments of reality that we observe with our eyes or that we discover through our scientific explorations. In this sense it is imperative that we all go back to the foundational building blocks of our civilizations for those building blocks are acting upon our civilizations in a way very similar to the way axioms are acting on mathematics. As in mathematics, the central question in our civilizations relates to the validity of our founding axioms or building blocks.
_____________________________
art modern art art theory visual art
Knowledge is something fundamentally different. It is what allows us to approach reality from a more thoroughly encompassing observation integrating all the different angles possible including the first degree image that our eyes are capturing about it. Knowledge projects us further than the first degree visual capturing of our close environment. It is a trial at rendering comprehensible to us the working of that environment and thus it enlightens our eyes' first degree images of reality with sense.
At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century cubism was a first essay at giving a visual representation of reality through the prism of knowledge. As such Cubism was the first artistic approach trying to bring us visual signs of reality that were not based any longer on the classical model of copying the image projecting on our retinas (this is valid in "whiteland" but not in China where Shieyi painting since thousands of years is practiced as an exercise at "reading the meaning" of reality). Cubism nevertheless very fast appeared to be no more than a graphical trick that made sense for sure in Picasso and Braque's visual researches but that was losing all meaning at the hands of further artists. Cubism was not rendering something else than the first degree image projecting on the retina. It only succeeded to give a different visual rendering from that first degree image that, as Marcel Duchamp puts it, was derived from a very "amateurish" reading "of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry".
The twentieth century has been for the visual arts, in Europe and to a lesser degree in the US, a time of searching for visual representations that should project our understanding of reality further than the first degree image captured by our eyes.
Picasso and Braque were influenced much by mathematics and the notion, somehow new in their time, of the 4th dimension but in the end they did not succeed to render something else than the first degree image.
The surrealists ventured in the path of the unconscientious that was a favorite theme of Freud and Jung and at long last they discovered visual paths rendering something else than this first degree image that they so much hated.
After the 2nd world war the members of Cobra, rejecting as pure absurdity the logic of a societal system that had unleashed all those primitive and montruous horrors of warfare, were searching for a better collective tomorrow in Marxism then in Existentialism and later in Situationism. It makes no doubt in my mind that the spirit of the works of Cobra artists have had a determining influence on the Zeitgeist in Western Europe that in finale rendered possible the unimaginable, the build-up of the EU.
The spirit of their works, exclusively turned against an abomination, was rendering a visual expression of ugliness as being something to be rejected. Thus their works being about something very negative did never really succeed to attract a large following.
Unfortunately, by the end of the second part of the 20th century, the visual arts have been sequestrated by an "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" that imposed its inexorable dictorship upon anything touching the visual arts. Interest obliging; making a buck out of art works took precedence over any artistic consideration. Soon under the "diktats" of the artistic authorities "whatever" was imposed as being art. That's how the visual arts entered a time of pure absurdity, non-sense imposed as art by the authorities, the merchants, the curators and the critics. The installation, in Central Park of the Gates of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, validates my point. Verify for yourself the grand-standing of the artistic authorities towards that event:
- The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates - The gates
In their own defense, the art dictators claimed that Duchamp was the one who had initiated this drive towards "whatever" with his "ready-mades". But the intention of Duchamp through his "ready-mades" was no other than to turn into derision those "well-thinking" autorities who did not have the slightest idea about the artistic substance that artists were so desperately running after. The initial switch of the sense of art in the "ready mades", that had been operated by Duchamp, was no more that a good joke on the "smooth talkers" of his time but it ended up in the end by turning miserably against Duchamp himself. Here is what Duchamp had to say later on about his earlier endeavors. I quote from a transcript by Herschel B. Chipp in "Theories of Modern Art" of Duchamp's interview with James Johnson Sweeney in "Eleven Europeans in America" that had been published in "Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art" (new York), XIII No 4-5, 1946: "Futurism was an impressionism of the mechanial world. It was strictly a continuation of the impressionist movement. I was not interested in that. I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting. ... I was interested in ideas -not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. ... In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century. ... Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. ... It was a way to get out of a state of mind -to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from cliches -to get free. ... Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. ... There was no thought of anything beyond the physical side of painting. No notion of freedom was thaught. No philosophical outlook was introduced. ... I thought of art on a broader scale. There were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry. But most views of it were amateurish. ... I felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter. ... This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter." It is a mistery to me why Duchamp remains known for his "ready-mades" while his thoughts about art are so foundational but nevertheless ignored. Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs ? Our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" should be brought to account for their inadmissible lightness.
It is nevertheless a fact that, even after "whatever" had been imposed as subject of art, the societal functionality of visual arts has never been in any way put into question. We just don't know any more what this functionality is all about and so we don't speak or write about it but this does in no way mean that visual arts have no societal functionality. As Duchamp was saying "This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century". The absence of debate about the societal functionality of the visual arts does not suppress this functionality it mainly obscures it by fostering ignorance.
Duchamp was right in this idea that "art is at the service of the mind". He just did not conduct the thinking to its logical conclusion. What is the mind indeed used for ? What is the outcome of knowledge ? What is the relationship between society and knowledge ? How does and can visual art serve knowledge ? So what is the societal functionality of visual arts? Today as well as 500 years ago or 2000 years ago or 50,000 years ago for that matter visual arts were meant to create visual signs of the worldview that is derived out of the knowledge at the hands of the men of knowledge of the day. The only reason, why those signs took such precedence, is that human societies garanteed their stability through the smooth spreading among all members of society of the worldview of the day. The functionality of visual arts is thus directly related to the preservation and the enhancement of societal stability. Bingo !
Visual signs are easier to comprehend than spoken or written words and they are a lot more easy to comprehend than the theories that they represent. I wrote many times already about how this worked in animist times, in religious times and also in early modern times. But what about nowadays? I firmly believe that the societal confusion that we experience nowadays is related to the confusion that we experience in the visual arts and not the other way around. In other words, I believe that the knowledge that gradually emerges out of the ideas of today's men of knowings, the scientists, is not translated into a worldview. If there is no longer any worldview that could be permeating society at large there can be no longer any question of the visual arts relaying the worldview of the men of knowledge towards all members of society.
The artists have thus no alternative but to abandon the traditional dumbness that is associated with illustrating the ideas of others. We are confronted today with this paradox that we do not know where are today's men of knowledge. Surely enough there are some scientists and thinkers who are trying to connect "knowings" horizontally but this does not preclude the existence of a workable knowledge giving birth to a worldview that would be acceptable to all.
In conclusion the only conceivable way out of this conundrum is for the artist to become his own man of knowledge. I follow Duchamp one hundred percent when he says that "this is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression, rather than to an animal expression. I'm sick of the expression 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter". Yes why should painters continue to accept all that non-sense coming out of the big mouthes of our "all-knowing art bureaucratic word machine" ? What is it that forbids artists to start accumulating scientific knowings and to confront those with the wisdom of philosophy in order to create knowledge ?
Yes I know that this proposition of mine is no easy feat. But what is the alternative if we want to surpass this characterization of being " 'bete comme un peintre' -stupid as a painter" and being absolutely unable to fullfill the societal role that is ours ? The societal confusion that we are plunged into nowadays creates much despair. More and more individuals feel at a loss and try by all means to find answers to the inescapable questions relating to REALITY that could be sensical to them.
Religion brought such sensical answers for over one thousand years in Europe and did so too in the territories that inherited the European Christian worldview. Later portraits and landscapes suceeded to give a basic representation of the ideas of individualism and private property or ownership that formed the backbone of the worldview adhered to along the timespan of modern times.
Without visual signs of a unified worldview mirroring today's trends and knowings our late modern societies are fragmenting and imploding into atomization. Individuals have come to believe that they know better. But the fact remains that individuals are no more than particles of their societies and that the creative tension between individuality and collectivity is what in the end generates the possibility of a smooth sailing into the future.
Could there be a worldview emanating directly out of scientific endeavors and the accumulation of scientific knowings nowadays ? Yes and no. Science is indeed characterized by ultra specialization. The scientific outlook is like channelled through narrow vertical pipes leading in the direction of the microscopic or the macroscopic towards the observation of very narrow areas of reality. Views out of such vertical pipes are thus necessarily fragmentory and the scientific approach ends up being burdened by an infinity of fragmentory observations that are not connected horizontally between themselves.
My understanding is thus that the scientific model is generating an infinity of "KNOWINGS", vertical micro-observations, but those knowings do not in any way qualify as "KNOWLEDGE" about reality. Knowings are undoubtedly necessary quantities in developping a coherent knowledge base but it is the horizontal linking between developped knowings that in the end is generating knowledge.
The fact is that science is accumulating astronomical quantities of knowings and that nobody is capable any longer to connect all those knowings together. It is physically unfeasible for us humans:
- first to accumulate all the available knowings at any given time and if it were feasible it would nevertheless remain an unattainable task to track their appearance over time.
- second to link all the existing and potential knowings between themselves in order to generate knowledge.
The acceptance of our physical limitations brings us to the recognition of our void of wholeness that, in the end, is what generates our perpetual quest for "wholesensicalness". From the deepest of our origins till today we searched to master this "wholesensicalness" and even if we did not succeed to master it, we tried to approximate it as good as we could with the tools at our disposal at the time and one of the determining tools for ordering and making sense out of the knowings of the time has always been philosophy.
Philosophy is our vision of the whole of our reality, of the whole of our universe, it is what gives sense to the fragments of reality that we observe with our eyes or that we discover through our scientific explorations. In this sense it is imperative that we all go back to the foundational building blocks of our civilizations for those building blocks are acting upon our civilizations in a way very similar to the way axioms are acting on mathematics. As in mathematics, the central question in our civilizations relates to the validity of our founding axioms or building blocks.
_____________________________
art modern art art theory visual art
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