Archive for the ‘ Art ’ Category

When the World Became a Surface

I know practically nothing about art – but was amazed recently, in my The Modern and the Postmodern course to discover that this process happened in Painting about the same time as it did in the Movies, Television and the Computer – where everything is shown on the magical screen. Which has the added advantage of sound.

No wonder we were so taken by it. It was a world better than the real world. We never noticed that it had no depth – who cared?

This transition from three-dimensional imagery, as in the Renaissance, to one-dimensional imagery was part of the transition from the Modern to the Post-modern world. We are determined now to make the world superficial – in every way that we can.

After all – it is much easier that way.

2013
05/01
CATEGORY
Art
Technology
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Profoundness and Parody

I am having an artistic day – quite by accident.

This morning I listened to a lecture on Modernism and Art for Art’s Sake. The lecturer was the president of Wesleyan University, who is a Francophile – something new to me. He is spending the week on Madame Bovary. And even induced me to buy it.

As he points out, Flaubert had a great deal of fun satirizing the Enlightenment and Romanticism. While throwing in enough sex to keep us all panting – and nearly got him thrown into jail. I doubt if there was a Spanish translation, but the new English one by Lydia Davis is now the standard one.

This is social satire, which the English, French, and Russians excelled at in the 19th Century. Americans (then and now) are far too serious – and wouldn’t recognize satire if it hit them in the head. Much like the Germans.

I sat down to a lunch of peanut butter and jam and opened Poetry Magazine. At the end there is a long section about Joan Mitchell, who made paintings about poetry.

There are color reproductions of her paintings (view the slide show in the Introduction). She was an Abstract Expressionist – an acquired taste that I never acquired. Possibly, in a museum with someone explaining it – as they often do – I would see the light.

Sometimes I am not sure if the text is meant to be profound – or a satire.

From page 536:

They are at once contemplative and exuberant, restless and calm, strong and fragile, defiant and tender.

Perhaps in a altered state of consciousness this makes sense. But I have to say this makes sense, as it lays there on the page:

the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to to

Nowhere in any of this is there any mention of money. She didn’t have to worry about it, since she inherited her wealth – along with nearly everything else.

Poetry Magazine has always been part of the Chicago scene. My family were country hicks from further south in Illinois – who regarded Chicago as Sin City itself. And were completely without culture.

2013
02/27
CATEGORY
Art
Poetry
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Software Makes People Obsolete

I got this idea from William Carlos Williams’ poem The Rose is Obsolete, which you can read here, and hear a mini-lecture it about here.  The parallel in painting is Nude Descending a Staircase, which caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1932. I thought it had been lost, but it is now on permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – in case you are ever out that way.

What were Williams, and all the many artists like him, saying? This explanation would take volumes, and I can only hint at it here. They were saying that the symbols of our society, such as the rose and the nude, are obsolete. And we have become obsolete too because our creations, our technologies, have swallowed us up, or absorbed us, and become more important than we are.

All we can do now is serve them – or, as artists, describe the strange world and the strange beings we have become.

Bruno Latour puts this a little differently – the border between humans and non-humans has been breached, and cannot be repaired. Humpty-Dumpty (the symbol for our rich, satisfied self) has fallen from his wall.

I continue to study software development – because I feel it is somehow related to human development. One thing software does is model the human condition. But this model is fast becoming more important than the thing being modeled – us!

The industrial era, which created the population boom of mass man, is drawing to a close. In the post-industrial world we will be serving a new master – the computer.

Society is reorganizing itself along inhuman lines (a process that began in the 20th Century) and getting rid of its surplus population.

It’s not going to be a pretty picture.

2012
10/01
CATEGORY
Art
Philosophy
Poetry
Technology
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The Renaissance and Humanism

I have been immensely impressed by Bruno Latour. I am a natural hero-worshiper - but I am now assessing him more carefully.

For him, modernity began with the Scientific Revolution. Which, as any historian of Science will admit – never happened. Latour describes what did happen better than anyone else I know. But he ignores what happened just before that.

What happened were three earth-shaking events – the Renaissance and Humanism that began in Italy. And the Reformation that began in Germany and Switzerland.

The Reformation produced religious wars, the worst that had ever been seen in Europe. And these produced (in a very strange way) Modernity, and Science – and eventually the Industrial Revolution, which was real.

Southern Europe (and Latin America) were not touched by the Reformation. And remained undeveloped – and poor. France remained a special case, but never became Protestant.

Latour (a Frenchman) never goes into these series of events – the Renaissance and Humanism, which were very human. And the religious wars and their impact (including technologies) – that made people less human. He fails to make this very important contrast.

He has a lot of company. We have forgotten our human past. And we have no intention of remembering it.

2012
08/20
CATEGORY
Art
Business
History
Literature
Philosophy
Science
The Self
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Computers do not Have Minds

This will no doubt surprise many people because they they have been led to believe that they do. They have been led to believe that computers have brains – much as people do. And some of the latest therapies, such as Neuro-Linquistic Programming (NLP), state this explicitly.

This is ridiculous, to put the matter bluntly. The computer uses entirely different mechanisms than a nervous system does. Some of the functioning of the two can be analogous, and such a comparison can even be useful at times. But they are two entirely different systems.

Much attention has been given recently to showing the computers can think – because they can analyze vast amounts of data – such as our search engines are doing every day – and which I use every day. But this is a different kind of thinking – and to equate this with human thinking is a bit of a stretch.

One is living, and one is not. But people have been carefully trained to overlook this – and concentrate instead on the non-living parts of their personalities.

I do this myself, and spend a lot of time learning programming again. But I am aware when I do this that I am not studying people. And I also spend a lot time time thinking about the Human-Computer Interface – and just finished a course on this.

Most people simply ignore the difference – which does much to explain our present problem:  we have no idea what we are or where we are.

They do not realize that humans have both brains and minds – and the relationship between the two is probably something we will never understand.

We do understand a lot – as the fantastic book The Master and his Emissary points out. But as Iain McGilchrist also emphasizes, this still leaves the important question unanswered. What is it that makes us human? All we can do is point to our fine arts – which clearly come from us.

But people now have little interest in these. While I, living in isolation in rural Costa Rica, enjoy them immensely (via books and the Internet).

2012
07/28
CATEGORY
Art
Internet
Life in Central America
Literature
Philosophy
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Things Have Their Own Minds

This is obvious when it comes to computers. But we have always known this – and we should ask ourselves why we have forgotten it.

For example, in the kitchen just now I was looking at a large papaya. It obviously had a personality of its own, that I wouldn’t have seen if I wasn’t thinking about this. I would have just chopped it up and eaten it.

I have been vaguely aware of an annoyance with all the books I have about the way people relate to their things, thinking somehow that they were missing a huge point. They have been, and now the reason is obvious:

Everything has its own spirit – something we have always known, but decided it was unscientific.

This was a loss from both the aesthetic and religious viewpoints, because we lost our emotional relationship to everything else in the world – natural and man-made. A very big loss.

But, with our reduced sensibility, we proceed to produce ever more powerful things (using ever more powerful technologies) – giving no thought to their emotional impact on us. As result, their minds have taken over our minds. And we have become unable to see this, and happily proceed to destroy our world to make it safe for them.

There is even a theory that explains this – Actor-Network Theory (ANT). One of its main theorists, Bruno Latour, said:

he had been helpfully reminded that the ANT acronym “was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler” (the ant, Latour 2005:9) — qualitative hallmarks of actor-network epistemology.

The Mormons compared themselves to a bee hive, and made no bones about it. And having a Mormon background myself, I can understand the appeal and the appropriateness of the metaphor. It implies hard work – but no intelligence.

Exactly the situation we are in now.
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As soon as I publish this, if find something on the Web about this very subject: Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself . This says, in effect, that management types (the suits) can mess up any neat technology. This implies that people (the worst kind of people) are in control – but only in a negative way.

Looking at this from the ANT perspective – our things are even more interested in destroying us, than they are in bettering themselves.  It doesn’t take a genius to see where this puts us.

2012
07/01
CATEGORY
Art
Morality
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Abstraction of the Object

I am quoting again from The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford, page 246. The text is accompanied by a series of paintings. I have chunked up the text into more paragraphs.
—
Interest in the external world was not confined to the scientist. What the physicist observed in terms of matter and motion, the painter described in terms of light and shape, color and texture, seeking verisimilitude and life-likeness…

The search for the object began early; but as in the detail from Tintoretto’s Last Supper, the object remained a subordinate part of the painting whose meaning lay elsewhere.

In Vermeer’s The Cook interest is divided between the figure and the utensils, both treated with almost photographic realism. But in the painting below the maid’s face is hidden: she herself has become part of the “still life.”

Finally, in Chardin’s characteristic study the object becomes completely detached from other human interests, and is significant in its own right: the breadishness of the bread, the copperishness of the copper, have become values…

Nothing became quite real for primitive man until he subjectified it and personalized it: now the test of reality becomes objectification and depersonalization. The last step in this process was the camera…

Having by strenuous self-elimination achieved achieved objectivity with respect to the external world, man must now by an equally rigorous discipline achieve a complementary subjectivity by a renewed command of the inner world. Instead of freezing out feelings, emotions, internal states, he must utilize them more intensively and rationally: only so can he do full justice to all the dimensions of human experience.

This healing of the split personality of modern man is today one of the critical tasks of education.
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As usual, I relate this to developments in Software – in the obsession with object-oriented programming in the Nineties. This was nothing but the attempt to model people as objects – which as programmers are now beginning to realize, did not accomplish much.

2012
04/29
CATEGORY
Art
Philosophy
Software
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Gertrude Stein and the Nazis

NY Review – Missionaries

Several books are reviewed in this article. The one I am interested in is Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fäy, and the Vichy Dilemma. Here is a quote:

Janet Malcolm had much to say about Stein’s relations with Fäy during the Vichy period in her New Yorker essays of June 2, 2003, and November 13, 2006, which became her excellent book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The friendship contributed to Stein’s Vichyite leanings and was helped, considering Fäy’s anti-Semitism, by what Will calls the “fluidity” of Stein’s Jewish affiliations. Assimilation buttressed her modernist bona fides, or so Stein believed. She came to see Christianity as the salvation of France. Jewishness became for her “a form of transgressive identification,” as Will puts it, a view acknowledged in private “in intimate moments with Toklas.” She sounds from this account like a classic self-hating Jew, whose ticket to acceptance was a perch in high culture.

And another, even worse:

“Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize,” she meanwhile told The New York Times Magazine in 1934, and, alas, she apparently meant it. “He is removing all elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she explained. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.”

And about the art she (but primarily her brother Leo) collected:

What might be called the inherent narcissism of modernist abstraction, with its inward-turning focus on its own formal means and devices, its willful divorce from the sort of close social observation and proletarian politics that caused writers like Dreiser, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis to be tarred as anti-modernists, is not incompatible with the clean-sweep radicalism promised by fascism. Nor is it inconsistent with the notion of a centralized, supreme author, or authority.

I get the Review in both the online form (which comes to my inbox first) and then the paper form, which shows up in Costa Rica about a week later. For me, the paper form is much better. Having both, so I can refer to it as I have done here, is perfect.

2012
04/25
CATEGORY
Art
History
Literature
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When Art was Ornamental

Harper’s – Byzantium

From the first page of this article:

Pagan classicism – mamoreal, monumental, certain of the primacy of earthly life – yielded to Christian abstraction and introspection. Art was now the ornamentation and the not celebration of a transitory world; the physical world would never again be heroic.

This article has much artwork which you can see in the online version. The important point, for someone like me, used to realistic art, was how it showed mental imagery, not visual imagery (as the Greek statuary had done). This is what mamoreal means (I had to look it up myself).

One more quote:

In 628 the emperor Heraclius summoned Mohammed’s cousin Abu Sufyaan, messenger of the messenger of God, and put to him many questions by which he hoped to weigh the authority of the Prophet. He asked: “Has any among your people claimed to be a prophet before him?” He was told: “No.” He asked “Was any among his ancestors a king?” He was told: “No.” He asked “It is the noble among the people or the weak who follow him?” He was told: “The weak.” He asked: “Are his followers increasing or decreasing in number?” He was told: “They are increasing.” He asked: “Does he break his promises?” He was told: “No.” Heraclius concluded: “Verily, what what you say is true, he will rule the ground beneath my feet.”

2012
04/24
CATEGORY
Art
History
Religion
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Swinging Baby Bonobo

PhotoBotos

You gotta see this!

There is a refuge in Costa Rica where you can share your breakfast with the monkeys (two different species), and they are far and away the best part of the show.

I subscribe to this site, and get an excellent photo from it every day.

2012
04/16
CATEGORY
Art
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