Rationality versus religion, a non-sense debate.

To make any sense about religion and rationality, it seems to me that, we have first to situate them in a societal evolutionary perspective and I'm afraid that the question has to be viewed from within the more globally encompassing framework of what is humanity and how it does operate. What I mean to say is that the reproduction and then the evolution of humanity (as an ensemble) necessitates a balancing mechanism in order to keep in check its polarities: societies and individuals.

Individuals tend to push the envelope of individualism which leads to change while societies tend to preserve, at any cost, the existing against such change.

With the start of civilization physical force appeared insufficient to keep in check populations scattered over always enlarging territories. When the men of power awakened to this reality they understood that the only way out for guaranteeing the reproduction of their power over their subjects was to find some psychic glue, in the form of the sharing by all of a common worldview, and impose it on their subjects.

In the Middle-East the men of power recoursed to religion as the shared worldview. But the religions of the word got their biggest boost from the Roman Emperor Constantine's decision to impose Christianity as the official religion of the empire. This is what made Christianity to become the shared worldview of all in Europe and of all in Europe's outposts around the world.
Force here is to observe that in other geographic areas the men of power did not recourse to religion but used the existing animist philosophies of life: Hinduism, Taoism, ... to unite their subjects.

What is slowly starting to sink in our consciousness is that:
1. individuals can't survive without belonging to societies
2. societies can't survive without the sharing by the individuals of a common worldview.

Animism, religions, philosophies and rationality are "worldviews".

In Western late-modernity religion can only be considered as a reliquary of history while science and rationality are the "worldview" of the men of knowledge of modernity. What I mean to say here is that to each particular period of history in each particular area of the world corresponds a given reality and a given "worldview" and it just makes no sense to try to re-apply today the worldview of past conditions.

On the doorstep of post-modernity we vaguely sense that the worldview of modernity, rationality, will necessarily be overtaken by a more globally encompassing knowledge system... The philosophy of rationality was derived out of the application of the logic of capital along several centuries. It laid the groundwork for the blooming of science that radically swept away past conceptions about reality but, in the end of the day, we are forced to observe that science left us in a societal quandary.

Tt appears clearer every passing day that the belief in science as the ultimate discoverer of reality was no more than adolescent certitude. The overwhelming immensity of our universe starts only to sink in our consciousness but it already let's us perceive the impossibility for science to ever come to the end of its quest for understanding. This means that we are bound, in essence, to remain in the dark about the nature of the whole in which we are such tiny particles... But this does in no way diminish the fundamental jump in the quality of our observations and deductions that science helped us to reach along these last centuries. This only brings us back to our senses from our adolescent dreams.

At this point two factors impose themselves to our attention:

1. Science is not a complete system of understanding, in other words, it can't offer us all the answers and, it is by now proven scientifically that, it never will. From this we know that science could never bring us a satisfactory story about reality for all to share.

2. For reasons that are still not well understood science, as the worldview of modernity, has been left to fight for credibility on the societal "level playing field" with all kinds of charlatans. The men of power under modernity did not further impose any worldview on their subjects. In other words the separation of power and knowledge under modernity left both isolated in their specialization and each went it alone along their own way.
Even if we make abstraction of this separation of power and knowledge, we have to recognize that the body of knowledge accumulated by science is nothing but a very complex system that can only be approached through many, many, years of studies without ever a chance of an end in sight. Such a system does not exactly qualify to be reduced into a simple story that could be given to all for sharing.

For reasons that I wrote about, in my book Artsense and in articles in Crucial Talk, I believe that our future shall witness a radical departure from the present and that post-modern societies will be given to share a new worldview answering the conditions of those particular times.

Under the aegis of "necessity" the knowledge level playing field, where the complex system embodied by science is left to compete for attention with all kinds of simple "foundational" stories, has a high probability to be superseded in a foreseeable future by a re-convergence of power and knowledge. My writing and my painting are entirely focused on the new knowledge that, I think, is bound to spread in the future. The power aspect is not a concern of mine but I nevertheless think that power shall eventually be involved, at a certain stage, in the spreading of that knowledge...

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

Sick art gives visual signs of a sick society

in The Guardian by Jess Smee

In his latest Berlin performance Christoph Schlingensief underlined his reputation as the enfant terrible of the German art world - and now the storm of controversy is about to hit London.

Images from the blood and vomit splattered stage production Kaprow City will form part of his new art installation. The piece, Last Hour, will be shown in a warehouse gallery in east London next Tuesday, he told the Guardian.

Described by its creator as a shrine, the installation features the twisted metalwork of a crashed car and three films, including footage of a long tunnel and paparazzi-style stills of "Diana" taken from the contentious Berlin show.

URL:bad boy of German art heads for London

How to say?
Late modern Western societies are utterly sick so I guess that it is only normal that some are giving out sick visual signs of this societal sickness...

I perfectly well know about the existence of our societal sicknesses but I believe that our present societal reality is only one particularly bad moment in a, all together, long chain of societal changes. So while seeing, daily, the effects of the cancer that is eating our societal constructs I remain nevertheless optimistic that the direction where societal change leads us will in the end appear to be immensely positive for Gaia our mother and for humanity.
For sure this road of societal change is long and... we are all impatient. Our own life encompasses only a small fraction of the timespan of the societal changes leading us from late modernity to post-modernity. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the possibilities that arise, from the interactions between science and technology + the spread of new worldviews as result of economic globalization, are worldchanging and, mustI say, in the better sense of the term... The conscience of those possibilities is what drives my optimism and I know about the risks of collapse along the road but, I have the weakness to think that, our lives are too short to spend in misery vomiting as a consequence of our ruminating about a catastrophe that eventually never will happen

So my own visual approach is to give visual signs of what I perceive are some future trends in our way of understanding reality. I believe, indeed, that our worldviews, in the footsteps of societal changes, are bound to undergo a paradigmic shift.
I prefer to spend my life thinking about those possibilities than to crawl daily in my vomit and this does in no way reduce my conscience of our present societal sicknesses and the real risk of societal collapse along the road.

I guess, in the end, it is a question of personal choice for the artist to determine his own vision of what is going on in the world around him. But there is one thing I'm sure about. Down the road future generations will have no patience for visual signs of present-day vomiting. In the same fashion as most humans today revere VanGogh or other modern works, future generations could eventually recognize themselves in those visual signs that succeeded to capture today the trends along which their own understanding of reality will operate.... Now the question remains that I have no way to ascertain that my own understanding of the presently forming trends about our future understanding of reality will prove to be valid in the future.

In the meantime vomit seems to pay immediately... Charles Saatchi, for one, is paying for it while the search for understanding the paradigmic shift in our understanding of reality that is in the making does not attract much of a following. And so one is given to ask oneself who is the smart one in the end. I don't have a good answer to that question. Money-wise vomitting seems more successfull immediately... but no thank you, this is not for me, I hate vomitting.

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

Scientific visualization. Is it art?

URL: 2006 Visualization Challenge Winners
URL: Slide Show


Cockroach Portrait. David Yager. University of Maryland


A Da Vinci Blackboard Lesson in Multi-Conceptual Anatomy. Caryn Babaian.
Bucks County Community College, Newtown, Pennsylvania


Body Code. Drew Berry(1), Jeremy Pickett-Heaps(2) and François Tétaz.
(1) The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne, Australia. (2) University of Melbourne




Is this art?

No those are not artworks in the conventional sense they are only visualizations of scientific "knowings". (A knowing is a parcel of knowledge that is added to all other knowings. All the knowings interact together and replaced in a holistic vision they form the knowledge base that offers the worldview to be shared by all the citizens, the glue to keep societies from falling apart).

So what's the difference between such a visualization and an artwork?
That question begs that we make a detour through history.
__________




In short history teaches us that: from the earliest times humans practiced a division of labor between the production of knowledge (complete worldview systems) and the production of art (the illustration of those worldviews at the attention of all).

- under animistic hegemony the shaman is the man of knowledge and his knowledge is passed in simplified visual form to his fellow tribesmen who uniting behind this worldview are like glued together in their tribe. (in this specific case the shaman combines the roles of man of knowledge and image maker)

- under religious hegemony the monks and priests are the holders of the creed, the religious worldview, and image maker craftsmen are in charge of the illustration of the creed.
The only knowledgeable people who could read and write from the onset of Christianity (4th century AD) when this particular creed is being imposed as the exclusive religion of the Roman empire by emperor Constantine till as late as the Renaissance (16th century) are the priests and monks who communicate in Latin. The other members of society (including kings and emperors) were most generally illiterate and images were thus the only practical way to share the religious creed among all.

- under the hegemony of modernity the ideology of rationality triumphed that emerged out of the repeated application of the logic of capital. The new rich who plundered their fortunes in far lands were gradually forcing the shift from the religious creed to individualism and private property. (see "What is modernism after all?")
Economically a mature modernity transformed, from an exchange of luxurious goods as in early
modernity, into the exchange of mass productions.
Under the impact of the scientific revolution and philosophic rationalism Europe entered gradually in a phase of fast maturing modernity, I mean that culturally the ideas of rationality, of freedom, and democracy were spreading as a wildfire. With historical hindsight it is as if culture had been put in the service of the economy preparing the minds of the individuals for the coming choice-economy, the mass-market.

Politics and visual arts were slower at adapting to the changes of modernity then philosophy, science and culture. Society as a whole needed to reach a threshold in acceptance of the new ideas of rationality, science, freedom and democracy before politics and visual arts could enter the dance of a maturing modernity.

The passage from early modernity to mature modernity must be seen as the real turning point from a religious worldview to a modern worldview. After a period of social fights for the recognition of the rights of all citizens, in the evening of the nineteenth century, politics integrated finally the new ideals of freedom and democracy but in doing so it abandoned its traditional role that had been, since the beginning of civilization, to force in the mind of all citizens the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. In this abandonment by the men of power artists were set free of their traditional societal mission at illustrating the worldview of the men of knowledge. But all this happened without one word being uttered. The artists had gained the freedom to paint what they please but, oh irony, they are still totally un-conscientious about the changes that occurred, in their societal function, at the turn of the twentieth century.

Those systemic changes put the visual arts out of a societal role.
But is this the real story?
Is this not more like the fog of a complete societal confusion that leaves us all completely blind and thus unable to understand the yearning for sense by most of the citizens in our present-day late-modern societies?

One century passed since those systemic changes apparently left the visual arts out of a societal role. That is a very short time span on the ladder of societal evolution and force is to observe that the spirit of modernity was easily absorbed by Western citizens during the last 100 years of mass market consumerism. Advertisement took over from visual arts pulling the individuals on a roller-coaster of material possessions leaving most of us drowning under mountains of "stuff". But three factors interacting among themselves are preparing our awakening.

Science and technology + economic and cultural globalization + environmental degradation and resource depletion are pulling us into a societal maelstrom on a global scale without any precedent in past history. The societal "malaise", that is already strongly felt nowadays by many of us yearning for sense in churches, mosques, temples, or wherever else, is bound to increase dramatically in the coming years and could very well ultimately put us all in the bounds of a societal collapse.

This yearning for sense is a yearning to share the worldview of the men of knowledge of late modernity, early post-modernity. There is only one problem. Where are the men of knowledge of our days? Are they the scientists? No they are holders of knowings but not really of knowledge. Are they the priest, the monks, the imams? No their worldviews derives from a state of knowledge arrived at in earlier times and so they are not suitable to answer the realities of our present times. So who are the men of knowledge of our times? I confess that I don't know. I sure know some wise individuals but they all are pedalling in one way streets or walking in the wilderness.
__________



This leads us back to our initial question "what's the difference between a scientific visualization and an artwork?

Scientific visualizations are not works of art in the sense that they do not illustrate the knowledge of our times but rudimentary fragments only of that knowledge. Those fragments surely help us better understanding that the "first degree image that projects on our retina" is at best only a very weak image that has not the slightest chance to help us coming to grips with our present reality. In that sense scientific visualizations are kind of precursors or awakeners to the visual arts to come.

What is modernism after all?

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

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

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

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

________

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vincent van Gogh,  Wheatfield with Cypresses

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

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

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

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

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



The second world war represents a radical turning point.

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

Cobra Modification, 1949 

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

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

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

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

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

Pollock. Number 8, 1949 (detail) 1949; 

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rejection of formalism. Postmodernism.

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

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

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

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



What comes after Modernity and post-Modernity

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

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

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

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

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

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

laodan. Transformation. Acrylic 17" x 22".

Note dated July 2016.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note Dated December 2018

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

Soulless science and rationalism

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


What's going on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the ways of seeing reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Whatever" has no place here any longer.

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

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

This religious story of science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Etymology to the rescue of sense in art.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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



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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

Actualization on 2021-05-21

 

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

 

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

Crucial Talk: Table of content

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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







What is ARTSENSE about?

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

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

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

Where to find ARTSENSE?

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

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

Societal atomization

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

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

URL: The twisted religion of Blair and Bush


Technorati tags: modernity, religion, atomization, worldviews,

The road of humanity, worldviews and visual arts

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


1. The road of humanity.
























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


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


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

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



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

About non-determination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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