The great atomization.

I wish to remember you that the articles in this blog are forming the content of a book that I plan to terminate by year's end. If you are interested by the subjects I write about and you would like to read a first draft of the book, I would be delighted to give you the web address where you can download a PDF version. In exchange, I only ask those interested to read this first draft to give me their comments, suggestions or other help in the finishing touches on the text.
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Consumerism and the expansion of merchandization towards absolutely everything that relates to humans has reduced the individuals in the advanced countries to salary dependents, modern salarized slaves of large capital accumulation.
Pushed by so perceived godly edicts of expansion, the market embarked on the road to democratization as a strategy of inclusion of all individuals into its system. Once in the system, the competition for salaries makes it indispensable for humans to develop knowledge and skills adapted to the new needs of the economy. Knowledge helps each individual to thrive or to survive in the market but as an irony it is also transfering the biggest power of all, understanding, in the hands of the mass of individuals. Entering the realm of knowledge and understanding, everyone starts to develop his own ideas about everything, ideologies and common beliefs are on the wane. This "I know best" approach is like the devil's imprint into our minds and material possessions that were earlier so despised by religions and wisdoms are now what counts most.

But by far the worse that happened for humanity in this process has been the loss by the salarized individuals of the vital feeling of responsibility for their own lives, the lives of the members of their family and their brethren that was driving them to be concerned with their society and thus "to be" creative. Under stress of indebtedness salarized individuals are totally absorbed by their income generation and fast lose all sense of responsibility towards the collective. This, it seems to me, constitutes the central most important development that arose in "modern" societies. (see earlier development of the concept of modernity as the result of industrialisation)

Concerned as we are by our ideas and beliefs, totally absorbed by our individuality we are losing sight of all the parapets along the bridges, into the unknown, that drive us all towards our changing commons. Or we don't see the roads leading to the change of our societies or we don't care a damn anymore about our societies, in any case the result is identical, our societies are freezing and individuals feel incresingly lost.

The risk now for individuals is to fall from the bridges into the unknow and end up without any lights, punished for our sin, into a non stop roaming into an eternal night. This is the fall into hell.
Blind, directionless, unable to focus their "inner urge", individuals roam and roam as drunks unable to follow the "white fertilizing ray" that leads the evolution of their societies. The same seems bound to be happening to our commons that happened in the surrealist movement, a drive towards irrationality. But what happens to our commons has far bigger implications, is indeed far more dangerous than the irrationality that discredited the surrealist movement.

The immemorial binding of the individuals with their commons is fast disappearing in the most advanced capitalist-rational societies, the ones that reached modernity. What had been the natural driving force of evolution, the imprinted natural code driving us and all the rest to strive incessantly for more complexity, this is gradually being rendered inoperative. The conflictual mechanism between individual and collective, this natural mechanism of human change is fast dissolving before our eyes in the US, the EU and Japan.
We humans are well engaged on the road of "losing our way"!

The great atomization is one of the stories of the 21st century. First and foremost concerned by this story are artists, thinkers and scientists who are at the forefront in building the future general worldview of our societies. They are sprinting through the gates, towards the unknown world of knowledge and understanding, opened initially by market-rationalism.

At the reception side, new tools are giving us unrestrained access to knowledge. Open access Journals are winning over the world scientific community. They reduce drastically the costs of publication which allows for free distribution. Furthermore, new search tools let us envision a fast coming time when we will be able to search all the articles published by all the journals from around the world. For more information, see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
On the other side, new tools are also giving us unrestrained collaboration access in generating knowledge. Wikis and RSS are allowing community efforts at producing knowledge databases (encyclopedias) but more importantly they are allowing collaboration in research and production of new knowledge. See what wikis are all about in the Wikipedia Encyclopedia. See also the power of BLOGLINES' combination of RSS syndication and LINKBLOGS.

Now, think for a moment about the possibilities that will arise soon from the combination of, on one side, the power of unrestrained access and, on the other side, the power of collaborative generation of knowledge. Humanity is fast going to undergo one of the most important shocks of all its history, the shock of unrestrained knowledge.

Paradoxically artists and thinkers receive a blank check. Freedom is total, no guidance has been put in place and all the traditional ideologies, wisdoms and religions, that gave guidance to humanity, have been marginalized by the genie that came out of the sacred bottle of their "forbiddens". The traditional authorities, populated by members of the older generation, are at a loss, they don't understand the new and are left to abandon all decision making. They react when it is too late and when there is a reaction, we are taken aback by the utter stupidity of their decisions. Without any knowledge or conscience about it, we have gone back to the territory of nature where brutal competition for survival reigns. We have lost, without any knowledge or conscience about it, our societal capacity at autoregulation that our forebears took so much pain and so many centuries to develop. The only hope remaining for humanity resides, it seems to me, in the Chinese millenar wisdom accumulation but will the Chinese resist under the assault of modernity, that's the billion dollar question of the hour.

Artists and thinkers conceive of a myriad of micro changes but what results is absolute macro-irrationality. Without guidance, artists, thinkers and scientists are left on their own and the consequences of their works for society at large will only be felt when this contact happens. The most striking example of that has been the atom bomb. But one could multiply the examples of such irrational outcomes, in sciences, in arts or in thinking and it's the combination of all those irrationalities coming together that leads to macro-irrationality.
Somehow, surprisingly, this irrationality seems to take everyone by surprise. Fact is we all finally land in the most extreme confusion.

Time has come for artists, scientists and thinkers' to give sense to their productions and to re-establish some order in human thinking.
We need to construct a kind of "unified theory" of human relativity.

From a generally accepted observation iwe understand that when it's quest is let absolutely free, knowledge fragments.
What I mean is that the totality that is our universe is so large that there is absolutely no way to come up with a single explanation covering everything that could be acceptable for everyone. Statistically it is an impossibility! So we are bound under total individual freedom to roam AD vitam on the road of our personal dreams.
It's kind of a supreme irony that in the end the market's radical push for freedom of understanding, of knowledge leads to exactly the opposite of what it was looking for: the end of history or the acceptance of one unique truth, the market as the exclusive human way.
The atomization of knowledge is the absolute opposite from one unique truth.

Ideology is the outcome, in terms of ideas, of a society that is force-fed a message, a vision by institutions that are imposed upon all by an authority that uses this ideology as a kind of social super glue meant for nothing else than to guarantee the preservation of its authority. The market is the social super glue binding all individuals into acceptance of the logic of capital and rationalism that is given as its absolute ideology. The only problem with the market is it's instrumental nature that appears fundamentally indifferent to individual values, idees or knowledge. It is as if rationalism was an ideology of market instrumentality exclusively but once out of the market it appears without much of an effect upon individual behaviour.

Over the long haul the combination of knowledge democratization, that leads to growing individualism, and market indifference invariably results in the destruction of all traditional ideologies but also it seems in the destruction of the ideology of rationality. In the end, societies are left in an ideological void and individuals are feeling at a complete loss.

Going from one historical reality to the next always has generated frictions and conflicts.
Nowadays, the transition times have shorten radically and the shock of the future is becoming always heavier to assume, ALVIN TOFFLER only scratched its surface. The shock is quite more severe than anyting that had been envisaged but we have absolutely not been prepared for atomization and the individual responsibility that goes with it.
In visual arts this shock materialized in the 'everything is possible' and led to complete loss of sense. It is marketing that nowadays gives its imprimatur to what had to be considered as art. Instantly, garbage becomes art if marketing so decides. In this process, art and thought have been totally debased and rendered obsolete.

But there is still hope, for, let's remember that every time that an extreme is reached it is superseded by its opposite. Today, the opposite of "non-sense" is "no non-sense" but there is no guaranteed road, nor path to "no non-sense". That's what renders the artists and thinkers' road so much more arduous.
It seems as if Kandinsky's "black hand" was suddenly disappearing and everyone was given free of charge access to the "white fertilizing ray". But the conflictual relation, between the black hand and the white fertilizing ray, is what generates workable change. Workable because it is accepted by society at large and also stimulating for the individuals who were carrying the ideas leading to that change. The black hand and the white fertilizing ray are synonymous with YIN and YANG. If one of those terms disappeared, the other would automatically be rendered irrelevent. The mechanism of change would be dissolved and we humans would re-enter darkness.

For our societies, this would be synomymous with a deep freezing and the true meaning of such a deep freezing would be the falling out of history.

Culture is the representation of the ways of behaving and of doing by societies at a given time. For example, present day culture is our present day way of life: consumerism, mass market, merchandization of all that touches human life and dependence on salary and debt. This implies that culture is kind of a historic snaphot of the way of a society at a given time. And we have seen earlier that the way of a society at a given time is what results from the confrontation of individuals' complexifying thinking with the commons. But what happens when individuals' complexifying thinking is let loose, free of any confrontation with the commons that disappear? The conclusion is unmistakenly the deep freezing of their societies and their fall out of history, in other words the dieing of their civilization.

Civilization is the build-up of cultural snapshots through history, it is the addition of the successive cultural moments of a society. In that sense, the civilization of a given society can encompass a very large variety of cultural values and behaviors. It can even encompass what appears as opposite values: one extreme pole on the ladder of behavioral possibilities at a given time and the other extreme pole at an other given time.

Civilization dies when culture production stops!

It seems to me that in the Western civilization we are engaged in a very fast lane towards the crosspoint between "individuals complexifying thinking let loose" and disintegrating commons.

Individual responsibility teaches us that we are in dire need of a redefinition of the human commons on the scale of our entire earth. We need to construct a kind of "unified theory" of human relativity that could give sense to our lives and show us the direction towards tranquility.

The task is urgent, the end of our human history lurks... Words of an artist.

On the road to post-modernism

I wish to remember you that the articles in this blog are forming the content of a book that I plan to terminate by year's end. If you are interested by the subjects I write about and you would like to read a first draft of the book, I would be delighted to give you the web address where you can download a PDF version. In exchange, I only ask those interested to read this first draft to give me their comments, suggestions or other help in the finishing touches on the text.
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All citations below are extracts from Herschel B. Chipp's book "Theories of modern art." published by the University of California Press.
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Cubism and futurism were engaged on the road of an oppressive unique form, surrealism was fast slipping into the irrational and impressionism was still stuck in a color rendering technique of despised realistic subjects. That's how the European avant-garde painters were thinking the act of painting before the second world war started.
The furry and total barbarianism of the second world war destroyed all remaining cultural certainties and resulted in Sartre's theory of existentialism. Avant-garde thinkers and artists could not conceive any further of a valid sense of life coming out of a society that, in their eyes, had gone so far out of the boundaries of human property. The "well thinking" air of the time was now to reject all inheritences from that society and to create a different world, free from the old, a world based on the individuals' liberated selves.

The Dutch painter Constant happens to give us the most elaborate theory of this individualist, existential approach of the artistic creation process.
"Our needs impel us to discover our desires. This results in experiment, or the release of knowledge. Experiment is not only an instrument of knowledge, it is the very condition of knowledge in a period when our needs no longer correspond to the cultural conditions which should provide an outlet for them.
But what has been the basis of experiment until now? Since our desires are for the most part unknown to us, experiment must always take the present state of knowledge as its point of departure. All that we already know is the raw material from which we draw hitherto unacknowledged possibilities. And once the new uses of this experience are found, a still broader range will be opened to us, which will enable us to advance to still unimagined discoveries."
It seems to me that a historical turning point has been reached here in how the artistic process is been conceived by the artist. What Constant describes is an artistic act of creation of a new reality. He equates the artist with the creator, the one who shapes new realities in the Western religious image of god the creator.
"Today's individualist culture has replaced creation with artistic production, which has produced nothing but signs of tragic impotence and cries of despair from the individual, enslaved by aesthetic prohibitions."
The limits to the act of creation are thus set without any ambiguity. The culprit is the art market that needs artistic marketable productions. That means artistic productions that are respectuff of society's existing, accepted aesthetic and moral conceptions. In this mould, the artist is rendered impotent, enslaved by the aesthetic prohibitions...
To counter the limitations of the market, the artist has to risk his security and take the road to the unknown, in other words, the artist has to reclaim his freedom to create.
"If society turns against us and against our works, reproaching us for being 'incomprehensible', we reply:
1) That humanity in 1949 is incapable of understanding anything but the necessary struggle for freedom.
2) That we do not want to be 'understood' either, but to be freed, and that we are condemned to experiment by the same causes that drive the world into war.
3) That we could not be creators in a passive world, and that today's strife sustains our inventiveness.
4) Finally, that humanity, once it has become creative, will have no choice but to discard aesthetic and ethical conceptions whose only goal has been the restraint of creation -those conceptions responsible for man's present lack of understanding for experiment."
It seems to me that a second historical trurning point has been reached here. The artist is now given a social responsibility towards society at large. "... we could not be creators in a passive world, and that today's strife sustains our inventiveness."
Paradise is promized at the end of this fight by the artist. "... humanity, once it has become creative, will have no choice but to discard aesthetic and ethical conceptions whose only goal has been the restraint of creation". The paradise is thus equated with the act of creation itself.
Constant is not a religious believer but in his materialism he borrows from the Christian religion its categories.
- Hell: the market for artistic productions that leads to artistic despair, a sense of impotence and enslavement in prohibitions.
- Paradise: the territory of the godly creativity that is equated with life and the creation, life being thus presented as beauty itself.
- Firmly anchored in Western tradition, Constant ends in the good versus evil scheme. Paradise symbolises the rewarding with what is good and hell punishes with what is evil. In this scheme, one is naturally driven to fight for good, against evil. The fight against evil is against society's prohibitions and thus the fight for good is a revolution against society at large, for the recognition of individual desires, the acceptance of free experimentation leading to the creation of new knowledge.
Art is this model becomes a revolutionary way of thinking.

For a time, artist's and thinkers will be pulled in the marxist path but at the crumbling of it's collective paradigm another path is already open that leads to nature and green leaves in a cup of tea.
But the idea of a mission, of a moral fight for good is intact.
This time around art is dressed in the clothes of the absolute truth about reality. The straight line is seen as a sign of evil, of rationality at work. Good is in the irrationality at work in the natural processes: decay and putrefaction transforming matter into food for organic life, death transforming life in material ready for decay and putrefaction... Life as an elliptic line.

Hundertwasser feels that he has been bestowed with a moral mandate to help humanity harmonize with nature.
The artist searches for beauty in the lines and colors found in nature and his visual art production is not limited to his canvas, it now extends to his clothes, his house, his garden.
Art now becomes a way of life and the way of life is the creation of an alternative to society at large. Beauty is researched as an instrument to attract the interest of the other individuals.

As we saw, European contemporary art is driven by the working of the artist's brain, as such it is a painting of ideas. In contrast, American contemporary painting is centered on the artist's individual feelings that are not burdened by a past of theories and concepts.
Impressionism, pointillism, cubism, futurism were in fact limited to the change of pattern, or form, of a non changed content, our visual reality. But the recourse to automaticism that is theorized by the surrealists changed all that and with Cobra (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam), European painters are entering firmly in a new area of creation, the creation of new knowledge.

That is what seems to me differentiates American and European artists is their more individual or more collective concerns. Jackson Pollock says it best "The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather to illustrate them". Contrast that with Constant who could also have started writing "The method of painting is the natural growth out of need" but who then continues "our needs impel us to discover our desires, this results in experiment, or the release of knowledge."
Pollock wants to express his feelings and Constant wants to create knowledge about himself. Feelings are interior and expressing them leads to a visual image that has no pretension other than the act to express them. Releasing knowledge through experience is a strong pretension for an artist, he is certainly taking great risks and exposing himself to judgements.
So here we are.
Pollock limits his pretensions to his own personal satisfaction, the expression of his feelings, he has no thoughts for the impact of his work on the collectif. Constant does not speak about his feelings, he speaks about discovering his desires through experimentation which leads to the release of knowledge. One can assume that he will discover satisfaction by doing so but differing with Pollock he does not limit himself to the gain of this satisfaction. Constant wants indeed that this process, of knowledge creation, would lead him to a new life, to a new society.

At this point, one may want to ask what has been the impact of Cobra or for that matter of Abstract Expressionism on the art scene of the second part of the twentieth century. It makes no doubt that the artists under the banner of those two movements have found an important place in the art market, but what about their influence on society at large and what about their input in the history of art? Cobra is representative of a primitive, naive form of painting that goes at the heart of the artistic experience while abstract expressionism appears more finished, more mature in execution but also artistically formal or a-content. The big question is about their input in the history of painting. In other words, did those schools bring something worth remembering in artistic terms and will they be remembered over the long haul?

Judgements are always difficult but one has to recognize that something has gone wrong.
That those paintings represent an area in our history that is for sure. But is it possible to imagine that those styles will have further traction? There is not much of a chance for that, their style and/or their content do not carry sufficient substance to catch the attention of future realities. There is indeed far too much confusion in the works of those schools and far too much absence of meaning for people living through different historical realities to continue to be attracted.

The green leaves in Hundertwasser's cup of tea seems to me having far more chances to remain a strong message, in term of content, as well as in term of form, for future generations. For one, Hundertwasser's content, his message is there to stay as a valuable contribution towards problems that will continue to amplify in the future. Hundertwasser's form is based on the search for beauty in the colors and in the technical detail of the decorating elements of his works.

Contemporary artists often forget that visual arts basically have a decorative function, they are interior decoration elements. Paintings are indeed rectangular surfaces that are suspended on walls, first and foremost for the pleasure of the eyes.

On their road to post-modernity, European and American artistic approaches have largely forgotten some basic facts of life.
1. A visual art work is for interior decoration. it should thus be pleasing for the eyes.
2. A visual art work is about content: how society is driven to perceive reality at the moment of creation of that specific work. The question is thus not the image in the eyes of the majority of the population but the visual image that is fashionned out of the theories by the leading human driving forces of the time: the clergy in the times of the gods, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in the early stages of modernity (industrialisation), the scientist and the thinker in the early stages of post-modernity.

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The perils of practicing subversive art in Buffalo, NY.

Good article by Dan Oppenheimer, Valley Advocate. Posted July 1, 2004 on Alternet. Where is the US going to land?

Art in the Age of Terror

Complexity versus consumerism

Consumerism, the reign of merchandise over the whole world leads to ever more simplicity. Art in this model is pulled to its lowest common denominator, acceptance by the biggest percentage of all individuals in the market.
But artists do not feel at ease in this model, they feel losing their freedom of investigation.
Here is an article exploring this dilemna through the prism of the politics of art and culture. Its conclusion: the state has not to direct but it should make available spaces of freedom for creators.
The case for complexity

Where to find 90 percent of government research papers.

About Open Access and US government research publications.
"Joab Jackson, Science.gov 2.0 plumbs depths of federal data, Government Computer News, June 29, 2004. Excerpt: "The 2-year-old Science.gov portal now can reach 47 million agency pages as well as databases. ... The portal has pointers to an estimated 90 percent of government research, but some areas remain untouched. An agency interested in joining the alliance has to pay $7,500 per year and ensure that its own content is ready for searching."
science.gov

The road to capital of big money.

Where does big money go? It seems the road of capital changes...
China overtakes US as investment target

Evolution and design

Read this, it's abible with a ton of links to a wealth of info.
"Evolution is a pretty amazing process. The combination of internal change (mutation) and environmental pressure (fitness) can have pretty dramatic results, given enough time. And when you do it in a computer, "enough time" can be surprisingly brief."
Evolution in Action

Big gamble in the Middle East.

A report in the latest issue of the New Yorker shows that Israel is actively involved in supporting the Iraqi Kurds, who are fast sowing the seeds of their independence...
What's going on?
A MUST READ
As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds.
Israel and Iran chart collision course

Irak: The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war.

Has everyone been duped by the Irakis? They learned from Mao Tze Tung the art of deception. Lose the battle, let the ennemy enter and when he is in, attack him...
Former Saddam Hussein generals turned members of the elite of the Iraqi resistance movement have abandoned their clandestine positions for a while to explain their version of events and talk about their plans to Alix de la Grange.
"Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell. This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom."
The liberation of Baghdad is not far away

The Emergence of The Global Mind

Take half an hour of your time to read this and navigate the future of intelligence.
This article is written by Nova Spivack in his blog "Minding the planet". Before clicking the link, see Nova's conclusion about his article.
"The ideas in this essay are not unique to me - they are memes that are spreading on their own through the global mind. Many others such as the people involved with the Principia Cybernetica Project or my friend Howard Bloom have thought far more extensively than I have about these subjects. In writing this article I am merely providing a service to the global mind - that of aggregating, annotating and communicating these memes onward in a process that I cannot begin to comprehend. All I know is that the global mind is thinking about its own evolution and realizing that it is intelligent - and that I am just an infinitesimal part of that process. Yet, like you who are reading this, I somehow sense that what is taking place is incredibly important and will change our world and our species profoundly."
MINDING THE PLANET: THE EMERGENCE OF THE GLOBAL MIND
If you experience difficulties to reach the article, click on Nova's blog and then find your way to the article in his archives.
MINDING THE PLANET

Evolution of visual arts in late modern age. (2)

Cubism started as an inquiry into the meaning of life.
"Habits of perception and assumptions about the nature of things that had been stable since the 17th century were falling away. ... In science, mathematics and philosophy, the laws of a clockwork universe established by Sir Isaac Newton in the Baroque age were giving way before the first world war to extraordinary notions - that time and space are one, that light waves curve, that no two observers ever see exactly the same thing. ... Mathematicians, philosophers and physicists at the beginning of the 20th century were recognising that many absolute truths were convenient caricatures of a universe that might be far stranger, far further from common sense than anyone thought. Western painting had its own scientific assumptions, established in the Renaissance. Picasso and Braque unmasked these as conventions. The concepts of absolute gravity and time that gave way to relative ones in the early 20th century had been established by Newton in the 1600s. The doctrine of single-point perspective, whose inadequacies Braque and Picasso exposed, had been asserted by Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi two centuries before.
The perspective system invented in Florence in the 15th century was a shorthand for the way things looked, a brilliantly usable fiction of the appearance of the world. Our sense impressions are complicated, chaotic data that the brain has to make sense of. Seeing in pictures appears to be necessary in our lives. Alberti and Brunelleschi showed how those pictures can be made consistent and logical by fixing a distant point towards which objects recede - what's further away looks smaller than what's near. The inventors did not make their intellectual revolution against this centuries-old system in a cool, considered mood, but with turbulence and fury. There was a violence in their assault on perspective".

For Picasso, (at least in his major works) color remains a dominant factor so he continues in the path of the innovators of the precedent generation. But he leaps over realism and the rules of drawing associated to it, as such he follows in the footsteps of Gauguin but he will eventually go well further. He is indeed making intellectual efforts at understand reality and in his quest he will be immensely influenced by his friend the mathematician Maurice Princet and the French thinker Henri Poincaré.
Picasso was a curious man. He quested science about the 4th dimension but simultaneously he was attracted by primitive arts. This shows clearly in 'Les demoiselles d'Avignon' where his lines are strongly influenced by primitivism. As the pictures attest, his evolution is towards more abstraction with few curves and mostly straight lines and angles. If his journey started as an inquiry into sense, into understanding the new paradigms of the scientists of his time, form finally prevails over content. And if Picasso rejected realism, he only succeded to create one non realist form of painting about reality.
Not far from a century later, Picasso's lines have clearly been interiorized by our Western society at large and his influence is apparent in contemporary architecture and design for exemple.

By the turn of the 20th century, the speed of changes was accelerating under the impact of trains, cars, electricity,... and futurists painters had in mind to express that speed visually.
"Our growing need of truth is no longer satisfied with Form and Color as they have been understood hitherto. The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself (made eternal). Indeed all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. ... Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.
All is conventional in art. Nothing is absolute in painting. What was truth for the painters of yesterday is but falsehood today."

Formalist was how Cubism was perceived in many circles. Kandinsky has one of the most elaborate and compelling critiques. He saw Cubism as being stuck in one form and this form then displacing content at the margins of the artwork. Breton's critique was along the same lines.
At the outcome of the 1st world war, the changes in the scientific paradigm and the changes, induced by the introduction of new techniques on people's daily lifes, are central determinants to the artists' quest for changes in art.
As reaction to the limitations of Cubism through its formalism, artists' will now place content at the forefront of their preoccupations. To summarize the situation, I would say that artists are concerned primordially by:
- the rejection of realism, as a way to copy reality as it is perceived.
the rejection of reality itself.
- the urge to strip art of all routines and former accepted ways.
The surrealist movement will focus on those topics and attract to its debates all thinking artists. It is thus evident that it will be fragmented, not that it will create chapels in competition with one another, but rather sub-groups acting as if specializing in particular aspects. As such it would be better to speak about a mouvance than about a mouvement. Andre Breton is clearly the intellectual light of the mouvance, giving it its central tenets: content, interiority and automatism.

It is difficult to miss Andre Breton's central role in theorizing the rejection of realism and reality in the 20th century. Nothing better than a dialog with the artists themselves could give us access to the substance of what drove their thinking and their art. (Citations from Herschel B Chipp. Theories of modern art. University of California Press)

LAODAN: Mr. Breton, until you, I mean you and your close associates, the princip of the immediately visible reality had been the accepted subject of all artists. For sure, one can always find a quote by someone further down in the past that goes against this, but essentially it is a fact that your theorizing will unleash the greatest flourishing of trials at novelty in artistic creation in our world's history. Could you define for us the steps that your thinking followed?

BRETON: Well thank you for your comments on my contribution to modern art.
" .. let's not forget that in this epoch, it is reality itself that is in question.
... The plastic work of art in order to respond to the undisputed necessity of thoroughly revising all real values, will either refer to a purely interior model or cease to exist.
It remains to us to determine what is meant by the term 'interior model', and at this point it becomes a question of tackling the great problem raised in recent years by the attitude of those few men who have truly rediscovered a reason to paint, ..., I mean a truly insolent grace, which has enabled the mind, on finding itself withdrawn from all ideals, to begin to occupy itself with its own life, in which the attained and the desired no longer mutually exclude one another and thereupon to attempt to submit to a permanent and most rigorous censorship whatever has constrained it heretofore. After their appearance, the idea of what is forbidden and what is allowed adopted its present elasticity, to such a point that the words family, fatherland, society, for instance, seem to us now to be so many macabre jests. ... We have desperately to pursue in their footsteps, animated by the feverish desire for conquest, total conquest, that will never leave us; so that our eyes, our precious eyes, have to reflect that which, while not existing, is yet as intense as that which does exist, and which has once more to consist of visual images, fully compensating us for what we have left behind."

LAODAN: French intellectuals have the art to complicate things sometimes. For the sake of clarity and also because those words are the starting point of your thinking, I propose to summarize your words in a more understandable form.
Reality itself is in question. To survive, plastic arts have to refer to an 'interior model'. That means finding the freedom to look freely at what moves us deeply and this out of all ideologies. Having said that, we still don't know what we'll find.

BRETON: "Shall we ever know what awaits us at the end of this agonizing journey? All that matters is that the exploration be continued, and that the objective rallying signs tale place without any possibility of equivocation and follow one another uninterrupedly"

LAODAN: What we search for is unknown but what matters is that we persevere in our search. The act of painting is the result of a kind of psychiatric analysis that is conducted one painting after another without the artist really understanding his results.

BRETON: "In the depth of our minds harbor strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of successfully contending with them, then it is all in our interest to canalyse them first in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of the reason. ... I believe in the future transmution of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak.
... Rene Crevel expressed himself in very much the same way in 'L'esprit contre la raison': 'The poet does not put the wild animals to sleep in order to play the tamer, but, the cages wide open, the keys thrown to the winds, he journeys forth, a traveler who thinks not of himself, but of the voyage, of dream-beaches, forests of hands, soul-endowed animals, all undeniable surreality".

LAODAN: The subconscient is participating in the build-up of our being. Our interest is thus to canalyse our subconscient in order to understand it later on, eventually through reason. Breton believes that subconscient (dream) and conscient (real) will fuse into a superior perception that will see the absolute reality.
There are two steps in this scheme:
- canalysing the subconscient in order to understand it. The tool to canalyse it is given by a psychiatric method, through automatic action: automatic speaking, writing, painting,... Breton recognizes the intellectual contribution of Freud in making this possible.
- reaching the absolute reality through understanding the workings of our subconscient. Breton thought that this would be made possible by suppressing the distinction between subjective and objective.

BRETON: "Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which I had practiced occasionally upon the sick during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject's critical faculty has no control -the subject himself throwing reticence to the winds- and which so much as possible represents 'spoken thought'. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of either tongue or pen.
... I began to cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a praiseworthy contempt for whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement brought about the rest.
... To you who may be writing them, these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you are yourself naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are distinguished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar quality of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than the others.
The word surrealism having thereupon become descriptive of the generalizable undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves, I thought it indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and for all:
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation in the absence of all control exerciced by the reason and outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations".

LAODAN: Automatic speach is what the psychiatrist asks from his patients in order to understand what's going on deep inside the subconscient of those patients. You propose automatic writing or painting in order to access the subconscient. The result you conclude is not less objectionable than conscient writing or painting.
It is evident that automatic painting (or for that matter whatever other action) gives a real painting. This auto-psychiatric analysis is conducted one painting after another but the artist never really understands what he reaches as result. I guess that here lies the principal handicap of your approach. The artist canalyses his subconscient but does not understand it. Let's remember that your final stated goal is to understand the workings of one's subconscient in order to see the absolute reality. The artist being unable to understand his automatic production is incapable of seeing the absolute reality and thus automaticism fails as a systematic approach.
This does not mean that automaticism is dead. It will indeed be used, as a method, by various artists who will then try to canalize it towards their own visions.

BRETON: "The abandonment to verbal or graphic impulses and the resort to paranoiac-critical activity are not the only ones, and one may say that, during the last four years of surrealist activity, the many others that have made their appearance allow us to affirm that the automatism from which we started and to which we have unceasingly returned does in fact constitute the CROSSROADS where these various paths meet".

LAODAN: Yes there is indeed something as a crosspoint where most artists pass who engage in non-figurative, non-realist work. This point where the roads cross is some form or another of automaticism. But whe should be clear, the great majority of artists do not stop at this crossroad, they only pass through to go their own destinations. It seems to me that stopping at this crosspoint only leaves you stuck in irrationality and to be honest I do not see the interest to be stuck in irrationality.

MASSON: I totally subscribe to your view. "For us, young surrealists of 1924, the great prostitute was reason.
... Whatever it may have been, a few of us were in fear of the “other fault': of making of the appeal to the unconscious something as limited as the discredited rationalism, but all to no good. Towards 1930, five years after the foundation of surrealism, a formidable disaster appeared in its midst: the demagogy of the irrational. ... The conquest of the irrational for the irrational is a poor conquest, and the imagination is indeed sad which only associates those elements worn by dismal reason...
Thus in its turn, surrealism shut itself into a duality incomparably more dangerous than Cubism:
(a) by liberating the psychic menagerie, or, at any rate, making a pretence of this liberation in order to use it as a theme;
(b) by expressing itself by the methods left over by the academics of the preceding century.
Should one conform to this new academism? Of course not".

LAODAN: Let's be clear, when we condemn irrationality it does not mean that we automatically subscribe to its opposite, rationality. I hope, Mr. Masson, that we agree on this point. What we look for is indeed trying to make sense out of the fog that surrounds us. Thinkers, and artists are first and foremost thinkers, are concerned by finding sense in oneselves and in our environment that goes as far as the limits of our cosmos. Finding sense has nothing to do with irrationality that's a sure fact, but rationality can also be a trap in the fact that it most often refers to a generally accepted vision. A visual picture is what it is, a picture representing our understanding and our understanding depends largely upon our knowledge. I'am suggesting here that artists and thinkers liberate knowledge through images that touch the viewer.

MASSON: "... it is vital for the imaginative artist, who is only able to compose his work with elements which are already existing within reality, to keep his eyes open on the exterior world and not to see things in their perceived generality, but in their revealed individuality. There is a whole world in a drop of water trembling on the edge of a leaf, but it is only there when the artist and the poet have the gift of seeing it in its immediacy. However, to avoid making any mistakes, this revelation or inspired knowledge, and this contact with nature are only profound is so far as they have been prepared by the thought and by the intense consideration of the artist. This is the only way in which sensitive revelation can enrich knowledge. The tendancy to allow oneself to be swamped by things, the ego being no more than a vase which they fill, really only represents a very low degree of knowledge. In the same way a casual appeal to subterranean powers, the superficial identification with the cosmos, false 'primitivism' are only aspects of an easy pantheism.
Let us repeat the major conditions which the conpemporary work of the imagination must fulfill in order to last. We have seen that automatism (the investigation of the powers of the subconcious), dreams, and the associations of images only provide the materials. In the same way Nature and the elements provide the subjects. The real power of an imaginative work will derive from the three following conditions: (1) the intensity of the preliminary thought; (2) the freshness of the vision on the exterior world; (3) the necessity of knowing the pictorial means most suitable for the art of this time. It is also important not to forget that the saying of Delacroix “une oeuvre figurative doit etre surtout une fete pour les yeus” remains true".

LAODAN: I think that we speak about the same thing, the primordiality of the content of an art work above its form. In a sense, we both agree with Kandinsky when he says: “As a matter of principle it has no significance at all whether a real or abstract form is used by the artist”. We also agree that knowledge, of ourselves and of our environment or to say it otherwise of nature, is the base from which the content of an art work is derived. Without knowledge there can only be accumulation of elements leading to the representation of superficial subjects. And for the subjects to reach their viewers with a maximum intensity, their form has to be contemporary. Here again we rejoin Kandinsky and his theory of the evolution of form.
We spoke much about theory here but what about the practicallity in the act of painting. We agreed with Andre Breton that most artists, working out of realistic copy, in some way or another passed through the crosspoint of automatism on their way towards their own vision. Could someone describe his own painting road and own automatism plays in the final vision of the composition?

MIRO: "What really counts is to strip the soul naked. Painting or poetry is made as we make love; a total embrace, prudence thrown to the wind, nothing held back.
For me painting is never form for form's sake.
... At the time I was painting 'The farm', my first year in Paris, I had Gargallo's studio. Masson was in the studio next door. Masson was always a great reader and full of ideas. Among his friends were practically all the young poets of the day. Through Masson I met them. Through them I heard poetry discussed. The poets Masson introduced me to interested me more than the painters I had met in Paris. I was carried away by the new ideas they brought...
As a result of this reading I began gradually to work away from the realism I had practiced up to the farm, until, in 1925, I was drawing almost entirely from hallucinations. ... Hunger was a great source of these hallucinations. ...
... Little by little I turned from dependance on hallucinations to forms suggested by physical elements, but still quite apart from realism.
... And in the various paintings I have done since my return from Palma to Barcelona there have always been these three stages
first, the suggestion, usually from the materials
second, the conscious organization of these forms
third, the compositional enrichment.
... The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have felt from the beginning".


Fortunes have been disbursed, for works of contemporary art in the 20th century, that appeared totally incomprehensible to their buyers. The critiques of Masson against the normalization of irrationality that took place in the name of surrealism were prescient but I doubt that Masson himself could have imagined the level of danger that was involved.
In this process, prostitute art marketeers succeeded in convincing some buyers that pieces of garbage were pieces of art. Art marketeers succeeded this extraordinary feet at giving to absolutely irrational and hermetic works the staus of art. They imposed their so called art specialist knowledge and in the process they gained the control over wide financial speculative movements. The acceptance by society at large during the second part of the 20th century and largely today of such art that is irrational and hermetic to normal comprehension led to the worse. That's how I can associate myself with Roger Kimball's fundamental rejection of art critics' productions in his piece "The rape of the masters" without nevertheless in any way following him in his ideological conclusions. I dwell in detail on this further down this book.

Evolution of visual arts in late modern age. (1)

Paris was the uncontested cultural capital of the Western world until after the 2nd world war. It is thus not surprising that the evolution of the art of painting took place in Paris or in relation to Paris.
Starting just before the first world war, a mostly Germanic and Northern trend will revitalize what had started in France with Gauguin and matisse that will unleash one of the most exciting approaches towards painting. Cubism and futurism were surely of their time, but as latin movements they concentrated much of their energy on form while germanic tastes more inclined towards content fomented a very vibrant search for the eclosion of its expression.
The theoretical content of this search to define expressionism is absolutely remarkable and stands firmly valid till today while as much can't be said about what has been written about impressionism, cubism, futurism, surrealism, dadaism and other schools of painting. To try to illustrate the content of their theories, I'll leave the principal protagonists use their own words in a discussion that I now shall moderate. (Citations from Herschel B Chipp. Theories of modern art. University of California Press)

LAODAN: How do expressionists explain their search for a different kind of painting?

NOLDE: " I was no longer satisfied with the way I drew and painted during the last few years, imitating nature and creating form all done preferably with the first stroke, the first brushfull of paint. I rubbed and scratched the paper until I tore holes in it, trying to reach something else, something more profound, to grasp the very essence in things. The techniques of impressionism suggested to me only a means, but no satisfactory end. Conscientious and exact imation of nature does not create a work of art. A wax figure confoundingly lifelike causes nothing but disgust. A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality."

KIRCHNER: "The ideas of our predecessors are no longer ours. We are less fond of works which for centuries have been identified with the names of the great masters. Artists wise in the ways of their times created sculptures and paintings for palaces and popes. ... It is a sign of our times that every piece of pottery or dress or jewelry, every tool for living has to start with a blueprint. Primitive people begin making things with their fingers, with material in their hands. Their work expresses the pleasure of making. What we enjoy, probably, is the intense and often grotesque expression of energy, of life.
... There is enough art around that is over bred, pale and decadent. This may be why young artists have taken their cue from the aborigines.
... Glory be to our strong, healthy German art. And this painter much preferred the holy German madonnas, invested with the souls of Grunewald and others, over the latin, superficially presentable paintings of rafael, which fit so well into the milieu of doges and popes".

LAODAN: Whow Mr. Kirchner those are strong words, but do cubists not also refer to the aborigines for their inspiration? What distinguishes you germanics from Picasso, Braque and others?

KANDINSKY: "The irresistible urge of today to reveal the purely compositional -to unveil the future laws of our great epoch- is the power which forces artists to strive toward one goal in different ways.
... The searching to express the compositional in a formula is the cause for the rise of so-called Cubism. This "mathematical" construction is a form which must sometimes lead -and with consistent use does lead- to the nth degree of destruction of the material cohesion of the parts of the things (for instance, Picasso).
The final goal also in this direction is to create a picture which is brought to life -becomes a being- through its own schematically constructed organs. If this course can in general be reproached, it is for no other reason than the use of the number here is too limited.
... Why should one diminish artistic expression by exclusive use of triangles and similar geometrical forms and bodies?"

LAODAN: This makes sense to my 21st century ears Mr Kandinsky. To summarize, you are saying that Cubism by focusing on an exclusive artistic form is limiting the freedom of artistic expression and avoiding all preoccupations for the content of the art work. How are you understanding this problem of the artist's freedom in terms of the form of artistic expression?

KANDINSKY: "The form is the outer expression of the inner content.
Therefore, one should not make a deity of form. And one should fight for the form only insofar as it can serve as a means of expression of the inner resonnance. Therefore, one should not seek salvation in one form.
... Since the form is only an expression of the content and the content is different with different artists, it is then clear that there can be many different forms at the same time which are equally good. Necessity creates the form. ... Thus, the spirit of the individual artist is mirrored in the form. The form bears the stamp of his personality.
... Full freedom shall prevail: one shall consider valid every form, deem correct (= artistic) every form which represent an inner content. ... The form (material substance) in general is not the most important, but rather the content (spirit).
... This is the way the form has to be appreciated and understood. One must approach (artist) a work in such a way that the form has an effect on the soul. And through the form, the content (spirit, inner resonnance). Otherwise one elevates the relative to the absolute.
In practical life one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to go to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg. In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing. Sometimes even the engineer does not want to go any further, and all the passengers get off in Regensburg. How many, who sought god, finally remained standing before a carved figure! How many, who sought art, became caught on a form which an artist had used for his own purposes, be it Giotto, Raphael, Durer or Van Gogh!
... The most important thing in the question of form is whether or not the form has grown out of the inner necessity. That is, one may not make a uniform out of a form. Works of art are not soldiers. With a given artist, a given form can be the best at one time and the worst at another. In the first case, it has grown in the soil of inner necessity; in the second, in the soil of outer necessity, out of ambition and greed."

LAODAN: So by using a kind of mathematical formula to compose the form of their works the cubists are dressing those in the uniform of their school which eliminates their freedom of choice and thus eliminates their capacity to impact, their own inner content, on their viewers' soul. This is an incredible weakness indeed and I'am wondering if this weakness to reach the soul of their viewers has not been what ultimately drew cubist painters away from content to concentrate about exclusively on the form of their work.
I also appreciate the distinction that you make between a visual form grown out of inner necessity and another out of outer necessity. There is indeed great confusion in our societies due to the presence of so many quasi counterfeits by painters who have no urge for expressing their inner content that in any case is often absent. I agree with you that what gives value to a work is its content and the form should be considered the artist's freedom.

KANDINSKY: About the cubist I have to say that "The fearfull clinging to one form leads finally and inevitably into a dead end. The open feeling leads toward freedom. The former is to restrict oneself to the material substance. The latter is to follow the spirit: the spirit creates one form and goes on to others." About the outer urge, "the farther into the past we look, the fewer deceptions and sham works we find. They have mystheriously disappeared. Only the genuine artistic beings remain, that is, those which possess a soul (content) in their bodies (form).
Further, ..., if we draw the conclusion from the independent effect of the inner resonnance, we see that this inner resonnance will gain in intensity if the outer, practical-purposeful import which suppresses it is removed. Here lies the one explanation for the marked effect of a child's drawing upon the impartial, the untraditional observer. The practical-purposeful element is foreign to the child since he looks at each thing with unaccustomed eyes and still possesses the unclouded ability to register the thing as such. Thus the inner resonance of the object reveals itself of its own accord and without exception in every child's drawing."

LAODAN: You spoke about the need for total freedom by the artist about the form in which he wishes to present his content. Generally speaking if we consider that form is like a straight line, one end of the line should be realism and the other should be its opposite non-realism, I guess we could also call it abstraction. Practically, all the forms possible are located along this straigh line representing form. My question is how do you see the difference between all the possible forms along this line?

KANDINSKY: As you just showed through the image of the line form there are two poles.
"Those two poles open two roads which lead finally to one goal. Between these two poles lie many combinations of different harmonies of the abstract with the real.
Both of these elements were always present in art, where they were to be designated as the 'purely artistic' and the 'objective'. The first expressed itself in the second, whereby the second served the first. It was a varied balancing which apparently sought to achieve the acme of the ideal in absolute equilibrium.
And it seems today that one no longer finds a goal in this ideal, ... Art has apparently put an end to the pleasant supplementing of the abstract with the objective -and conversely.
On the one hand, the diverting support in the objective is taken away from the abstract, and the observer feels himself floating in the air. One says: art is losing its footing. On the other hand, the diverting idealization in the abstract (the 'artistic' element) is taken away from the objective, and the observer feels nailed to the floor. One says: art is losing its ideal. These reproaches grow from inadequately developed feeling. The practice of giving the most attention to form, and the behavior of the observer which springs from that -that is, the clinging to the usual form of equilibrium- are the blinding forces which leave no clear path to free feeling.
... The 'artistic' brought to the minimum, must be recognized here as the most strongly working abstract.
... The 'objective' brought to the minimum, must be recognized in the abstraction as the most strongly working reality.
Here we have touched one of the most essential laws: the external magnifying of a means of expression leads in certain circumstances, to the diminishing of the internal power of the same." And the opposite is also true, the external reduction of a means of expression leads in certain circumstances, to the increase of the internal power of the same.
"Thus we finally see: if in the great realism, reality appears strikingly large and the abstract strikingly small and if in the great abstraction this relation seems to be reversed, in the last analysis (= aim) the two poles equal each other. Between these two antipodes the sign of equality can be placed:
Realism = Abstraction
Abstraction = Realism
The greatest external difference turns into the greatest internal equality.
... "As a matter of principle it has no significance at all whether a real or abstract form is used by the artist. Since both forms are internally equal the choice muist be left to the artist, who must know best himself by which means he can materialize most clearly the content of his art. Abstractly put: in principle, there is no question of form."

LAODAN: You say that “form is the outer expression of the inner content” and you also say that “one must approach (artist) a work in such a way that the form has an effect on the soul. And through the form, the content (spirit, inner resonnance). Otherwise one elevates the relative to the absolute”.
We know for a fact that within a society ideas, values and beliefs are permanently changing. Seen through the window on our present, it is absolutely clear that science and technology are presently the leading force driving change. This change should thus reflect in the content of art works. And because form is the exterior aspect of content, art forms should be changing at the rhythm of content changes. How do you understand this dynamic of change?

KANDINSKY: As joy, as happiness, as fullfillment.
"The joy of life is the irresistible, constant victory of the new value. This victory proceeds slowly. The new value conquers the people quite gradually. And when it becomes undoubtable in many eyes, this value, which was absolutely necessary today, will be turned into a wall -a wall which is erected against tomorrow.
The changing of the new value (of the fruit of freedom) into a petrified form (a wall against freedom) is the work of the black hand.
The whole evolution, that is to say, the inner development and the outer culture, is then a shifting of the barriers. The barriers are constantly created from new values which have overthrown the old barriers.
Thus one sees that basically the new value is not the most important, but rather the spirit which has revealed itself in this value. And further, the freedom necessary for the revelations.
Thus one sees that the absolute is not to be sought in the form (materialism). The form is always bound to its time, is relative, since it is nothing more than the means necessary today in which today's revelation manifests itself, resounds.
The resonnance is then the soul of the form which can only become alive through the resonnance and which works from within to without."

LAODAN: So the resonnance, of the artist's inner content with his time is what will generate the form of his art work. In other words the art form is somehow generated automatically when the artist's ideas are in sink with his time. I guess that by artist you mean thinker, the act of thinking is indeed what generates the inner content. And further, I guess that for a thinking to be in resonnance with its time this thinking needs to be based on solid knowledge available at that time. Whatever irrationality could indeed not be accepted at any time and thus follows the reason why mastery of the knowledge of the time is a necessity in order for the thinker to be in sink with his own time. I feel Mr. Kandinsky that you just defined the relationship between form and content in a very enlightened way offering a very dynamic perspective on change in the history of the arts.
I'am interested to know if the mechanism you just enunciated for change in the arts could be extended to society at large, in other words, do you have a similarly interesting perspective on societal change.

KANDINSKY: "The evolution, the movement forward and upward, is only possible if the path is clear, that is if no barriers stand in the way. That is the external condition.
The force which moves the human spirit forward and upward on the clear path is the abstract spirit, one which must naturally ring out and be able to be heard; a summoning must be possible. That is the internal condition.
To destroy both of these conditions is the means of the black hand against evolution. The tools for it are: fear of the clear path; feer of freedom (which is philistinism); and deafness to the spirit (which is dull materialism).
Therefore, people regard each new value with hostility; indeed, they seek to fight it with ridicule and slander. The human being who carries the value is pictured as ridiculous and dishonest. The new value is laughed at and abused. That is the misery of life."

LAODAN: To put this in perspective in my own thinking, your internal condition corresponds to my idea of complexification of individual thinking that leads their individual carriers into restlessness. Joy being attained only when society at large will integrate their level of complexity.
I did not integrate the negative factor against complexification in my thinking but I think that your concept of external condition with its actice principle the black hand makes much sense.
Could you expand on those ideas?

KANDINSKY: "... the creative spirit (which one can designate as the abstract spirit) finds an avenue to the soul, later to other souls, and causes a yearning, an inner urge.
When the conditions necessary for the ripening of a precise form are fulfilled, the yearning, the inner urge acquires the power to create in the human spirit a new value which, conciously or unconsciously, begins to live in the human being. From this moment on, consciously or unconsciously, the human being seeks to find a material form for the new value which lives in him in spiritual form.
That is the searching of the spiritual value for materialization. Matter is here a storeroom and from it, the spirit chooses what is specifically necessary for it -just as a cook would.
This is the positive, the creative. This is the good. The white fertilizing ray.
This white ray leads to evolution, to elevation. Thus behind matter the creative spirit is concealed within matter. The veiling of the spirit in the material is often so dense that there are generally few people who can see through to the spirit. Thus especially today, many do not see the spirit in religion and in art. There are whole epochs which disavow spirit, since the eyes of people, generally at such times, cannot see the spirit. It was so in the nineteenth century and is, on the whole, still so today.
People are blinded.
A black hand is laid over their eyes. The black hand belongs to him who hates. He who hates endeavors, with all means, to hold back the evolution, the elevation.
That is the negative, the destructive. That is the evil. The black, death-bringing hand".

The enlightenment and the modern area.

From the 18th to 20th centuries, European minds are enlightened by rationalism that develops as an ideological1 extension of capitalism and industrialism. The function of visual arts is now the decoration of the mansions of the aristocracy and of the new rich. Portraits and landscapes are the subjects of most painters. The size of paintings is reduced to adapt to their new architectural destinations.

The enlightenment goes hand in hand with the generalization of the decorating function of visual arts in "white" land. The idea of beautifying living spaces has indeed been adopted by ever larger segments of the populations after adoption of rationalism and today the idea of interior decoration is absolutely generalized.

The development of capitalism in its phase of consumerism forces everyone in industrialized nations into dependance on the offer of goods and services and that leads to deepening individualism. In other words, the market imposes its offers to every single individual in the form of a creation of new needs adapted to the financial capabilities of all. From being reserved for the aristocracy and the new rich who were the only ones who could afford to pay for paintings, architectural constructions, rich furnishings and accessories; visual arts will gradually be offered in cheaper forms in the market. The conception of those cheaper forms has gradually given rise to specialized jobs: designers, marketers, researchers. As illustration of this idea, let's look at how the visual art-form painting will be "democratized".
- In a first phase lithographic limited editions prints serving the same function as paintings will expand the market base.
- Then, following the economic development of Western societies, higher incomes will also allow for an expansion of the customer base for paintings.
- The ultimate expansion of the consumer base for prints will be reached with the advent of offset printing presses that can churn out very large quantities of prints at very low unit cost. Paintings by famous artists are reproduced in unlimited quantities and the sheer size of this market is calling for specialized answers that will take the form of graphic design.
- Finally, paintings themselves will be chain produced for the same market expansion reason. And today, chain production in Western workshops of landscape paintings has been delocalized to cheap wage countries. In Beijing, you can now get a good copy of Picasso's “Boy with a pipe”, that sold in May 2004 for $ 110 million, for far less than $ 100!

It makes no doubt in my mind that, in this maelstrom of a few centuries of economic and technological changes, Western painter artists have been the group of individuals that most interiorized the impact of those changes. Through the effect of such a profound interiorization process they have been reduced to society's margins and have been recognized as special. Notwithstanding that their visions were not understood, they nevertheless were accepted. Van Gogh and others were surely not understood by many of their contemporaries but they have been accepted, their strangeness has been tolerated, only the market had no place for their productions during their lifetime because they themselves had no time or will for marketing or they had no clue how to do it. But again, in finale, the market gradually absorbs that strangeness that makes those works so unique in terms of content and so rare in terms of quantity. I spoke here about people who were searching to put some sense in their paintings who were trying to give a representation of the coming worldview of society at large, in other words about artists. It makes no doubt that they are very few at any given time who can represent in their present what comes next in the future.

Painters artists are now visionaries. They think about their role radically differently with the introduction of new techniques that plunge western societies into cultural shock. Painter artists have adapted their function in society to what they perceive as changed times. All that happens mostly unconsciently for sure.
Landscapes and portraits were the artists' subjects at the start of the modern age. Those were times when the rich wanted to accaparate for themselves the symbolic function that paintings had in churches and palaces. I mean that commoners starting to accumulate richnesses, as merchants, searched to gain “aristocratic airs”, a well known human attitude. The purchase of goods that were symbolic of the “being” of church and aristocracy were an easy short cut to those “aristocratic airs”.
The function of paintings remains decorative, rectangles for wall decoration but their traditional subjects appear gradually out of place in a world that starts to change fast after mid 19th century.

Van Gogh remains a realist in the lines of his subjects but he uses colors as if he wanted to show us the inner working of his landscapes or portrait subjects. Alcohol and drugs allow him to go see inside his subjects but eventually he will have difficulties to come back. The impressionists also remain realists, the changes they introduce are also about how to apply colors, for them it's not the inner working of what they paint that is of interest, it's how to reach a representative image of their subject through the application of pure colors. What they find out is that their images give good impressions of their subjects.

Gaughin as Van Gogh plays the colors. But at the difference of Van Gogh, Gaughin is not really a realist. He is not interested to reproduce an exact visual representation of his subject. He works mostly through memory and influenced by primitive art he renders quasi abstractions that give a feeling of the atmosphere of a landscape or the character of a person.

Van Gogh, Gauguin and the impressionists reflect on the changes in speed that modify visual experiences with the use of trains. Their visual renderings will be largely adapted by the next generation of painters who by adding their own visions will project painting further from photographic realism.
Seurat and other pointillists experience a specific brush touch but do not go further than impressionism.

Matisse integrates classic realism with the approaches of Van Gogh, Gauguin, the impressionists and abstraction that he shares with gauguin. “What I'am after, above all is expression. ...Expression to my way of thinking does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by objects or figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner all the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings. In a picture every part will be visible and will play the role conferred upon it, be it principal or secondary. All that is not usefull in the picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements”.

Matisse conceived of painting as “the art of arranging in a decorative manner all the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings” about the essential, superfluous details had thus to be eliminated.
The pictures of the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, the impressionists and Matisse are a good illustration about their respect of realism plus a tendancy to simplify and finally their play of “exagerated” colors.
Matisse's conception is announcing expressionism that would come shortly after.

Global Warming Facts and Our Future, by the National Academy of Sciences

One of the best presentations of the science surrounding global warming-induced climate change I've ever seen

Global Warming Facts and Our Future, by the National Academy of Sciences.