I think Kathe Kollwitz is one of the most powerful and commendable graphic artists of the 20th century.
She faced a difficult life with courage and purpose, and became famous for her compelling images of injustice, war and poverty.
This week I'd like to showcase this lovely etching, which was the model for the cover of William Faulkner's 1929 novel, The Sound and The Fury:
Recently we discussed the 20th century move away from representational, narrative art and toward conceptual art which aspired to a higher role: capturing "abstract meaning and phenomena not
easily described by literal representations." Conceptual illustrators usually lack the technical skills of their predecessors; they tend to deal more in flat, simplified visual metaphors and other nonliteral approaches which don't compete with a camera. The conceit was that these new styles were more suitable than traditional skills for depicting today's "sophisticated concepts"
As far as I'm concerned, this lovely drawing by Kollwitz single handedly proves there is no reason why technical skill can't play a key role in grappling with the most profound concepts.
Kollwitz doesn't show us a mere cliché of a skeleton as the grim reaper. With brilliant staging, she shows us the methods of the grim reaper: coming from behind, attaching itself like a barnacle and slowly weighing down-- and wearing down-- its victim. It pulls her backward into the darkness while her muscles strain futilely for life.
In front of her, oblivious to the existence of death and insensitive to the mother's pain is young life-- selfish, grasping and also weighing down the mother caught between them. This is no candy coated vision of children for a popular fiction magazine, this is the greed of new life, doing what nature instructs it must do to preserve itself.
If any of you fans of conceptual illustration out there can offer examples to prove me wrong, I'd love to hear from you.
61 comments:
A master of depicting raw emotion - a couple of Odd Nerdrums works are on a similar level . Do you know how she worked ? Models or straight out of her head ?
Al McLuckie
As powerful a work of Art as the day it was created. And a great example where the allegory is built of such natural symbolic elements, it requires no commentary or additional explanation to make its meaning plain.
I believe neither the high modernists nor the high conceptualists have the faintest clue of how much density of language is inherent in the human body which cannot be replicated or matched by broad graphic generalizations and/or intellectual conceits.
Cannot believe that that is a drawing, it is a graphic print, could be a trial proof....sure looks like a dry point(engraving) with addition roulette marks.
I like the way the light on the woman's far inside left leg goes from hightlight to light raising and lowering in a repeating pattern from the knee to the calf and ending in the foot because it describes and feels like the unudalting nature of the lower leg. Interestingly the shading under the first metatarsal bone takes on the shape of the inside abductor muscle of the foot. The right leg on death"s side has been flayed revealing the muscle and pelvic point of the woman's lower body while becoming darker and heavier as if the leg is becoming meat merging into that darkness which all things return. It is almost like a ying and yang symbol and circular in composition.
Being able to do a drawing like this takes a high level of conceptualization. One has to wonder if today's, concepts are "truly," more sophisticated. Diagrams explain while art carries the rhythm of nature.
I have heard so much about Kathe Kollwitz that her imagery in my mind is always connected to the specific time and place of pre war Germany and Nazi Germany that I am not sure what I would think of the drawing's philosophical outlook without that context.
A lovely post David, thank you - I like your mention of how the young child's weight upon the mother is equal to that of death's (whom, I notice, the mother seemingly hides from the child). A heartbreaking image, redemptive in the fact of its existence.
"The conceit was that these new styles were more suitable than traditional skills for depicting today's "sophisticated concepts" "
Goya, as well, proved this conceit wrong well before it was ever uttered.
There is nothing so sophisticated in this world that a skilled draughtsman cannot express better than his inferiors.
Al McLuckie-- I know that she used models for her more ambitious and precise images. Her husband was a doctor who ran a clinic for poor and lower working class people and Kollwitz had no shortage of friends and contacts who would model in that environment. But if you look at some of her quick charcoal drawings, there's no doubt she made them up out of her head. I agree that she was a master of raw emotion, and she had plenty of experience to draw upon. She had two sons, the first killed in WW I and the second killed in WW II. She was hounded by the gestapo and haunted by depression, yet she produced stunning works.
Kev Ferrara-- I agree with you on both counts-- what a huge difference it makes that these allegories are "built of such natural symbolic elements." You don't need to know that a blue dress stands for X or a white lily in her hand stands for Y. This is as universal as it gets. And while we don't always agree on what takes place where form and content come together, I think you're spot on about "how much density of language is inherent in the human body." It would take a long, long time to try to unpack the language here, and you would do damage to the metaphor in the process.
Higgs Merino, you are correct, this is an etching. I am including it in this "one lovely drawing" series because the artist does, after all, draw on the etching plate.
Tom-- Thanks for your interesting anatomical analysis. Like you, my mind strongly connects her work with that period in Germany despite the fact that there are no clothes, uniforms, cars or architecture in her pictures to tie them to any particular period. A lot of the depth in her work comes from the era in which she lived. Two World Wars, poverty, hyper inflation, the rise of Nazism, not to mention the mistreatment of women in that culture. When the great German artist Menzel nominated Kollwitz's art for a gold medal the Kaiser Wilhelm II vetoed the award, saying "I beg you gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that would really be going too far."
chris bennett-- Many thanks. And did you notice that the child's outline is formed by mere dots from a roulette tool, rather than the strong black lines used to draw death? There's a lot going on beneath the surface in order to present us with such a strong, blunt image.
Chris James-- I hadn't thought about the Goya connection, but of course his etchings are powerful and dark like Kollwitz's and his life was filled with tragedy like hers. She was threatened by the Nazis and he was threatened by the inquisition.
A lot of artists lead comfortable lives but use their imaginations to create gloomy and disconcerting art. Some of that art can be very effective, but it seems to me that often there is an additional authenticity and depth in the work of artists who've experienced the tragic side of life.
I think it’s interesting that Death has her arms strongly pinned, and she can't grasp the reaching child, which reverses the more conventional sentiment of hope and grace of a mother "holding" onto her child in her arms above and beyond all else. That depictive choice must have been deliberately made to show that the desperate hold that death had on the protagonist. It’s a pretty radical image, startling, in that respect. But still, the imagery doesn't necessarily spell doom -- for death doesn't seem to have the advantage in the foothold; rather, Death is attached to her back but she has the strong foothold and has perhaps pushed death up against the wall. Her face seems to suggest torment but not pain. Will she win?
It leaves the outcome of the desperate moment in doubt, it seems to me.
Fun stuff!
A timely post.
Wes,
Interesting observations, and prompted some reflection:
Without life there can be no death, without spring there is no autumn, no growth without decay, no day without a night, and neither has the upper hand for long. They are mutually defined by each other as symbolised by the famous Taoist yin and yang symbol, which, I can't help noticing, the Käthe Kollwitz drawing evokes in its general graphic.
Was Kollwitz aware of this? It doesn't matter if she was or wasn't, the truth of the image is embedded in the drawing itself, intrinsic to its realisation.
Well Chris that’s why I wrote “I am not sure what I would think of the drawing's philosophical outlook without (the German) context.” Where a westerner sees life and death as a struggle and a drama a Taoist would see harmony and beauty in the natural order of things.
I didn’t know that Menzel had nominated Kollwitz for an award David, that is quite a recognition, it must have been quite satisfying being acknowledged by such master even if Kaiser Williem II turned out to be such a dolt about it.
Tom,
I mentioned the yin and yang/chaos and order polarity as a fact of existence. One may view the struggle between them as a beautiful harmony or just the natural order of things, but either way this fundamental truth of beingness underpins both, regardless of cultural belief. So personally speaking I do not read the Kollwitz drawing as a 'take' on this, German or any other.
I'm a skeptic when it comes to whether the universe/existence has any order, let alone anything resembling a polarity or natural bent. It certainly has univocity where life and death is concerned, but death is inimical to life, so I can't see any harmony here. But I appreciate that you saw the yin/yang; I didn't even see it until you mentioned it, even though I thought the shadow looked strange.
I love that you all can see so much in these works. Thanks!
I'm a skeptic when it comes to whether the universe/existence has any order
I guess you must has some other explanation as to why the sun rises every day. Would be interested to hear it.
The universe has many tropes -- repetition being the most prevalent. Perhaps "in the beginning", there was one "trope" that explained all or most things. We seem far in time and space to settle on a single grand unified theory (GUT) or even a double theory. We exist in a changing and increasing plurality, whatever singular trope once ruled existence is becoming distant and perhaps increasingly irrelevant, like an absent God that forgot it created us for some grand purpose we never knew.
Ha!
I'm open to suggestions, however.
Wes,
You sound smart. And lost.
Calling consistency of phenomena "tropes" is just a parroting of a common pomo buzzword. It's boring hearing it. After all, it's not an argument. You don't really believe it down in your bones. It's really just a ploy developed by pseudo-intellectual academic posers jonesing to sound insouciantly cynical about science (to their latest collegiate crop of potential cult members; who should probably change majors immediately, before they're macked on.) It's solipsistic chic chit chat pretending to be deep.
But, that's the zeitgeist. So I guess I shouldn't come down on you too hard.
The 'trope' idea makes no attempt to explain the endless evidence of the existence of countless dependent structural relationships that map and iterate across time and space to link and explain phenomena. So it isn't just phenomena that 'repeats.' It's the phenomena behind the phenomena too. And the phenomena (or noumena) behind that. Which all, for some damn reason, seems to have a consistent logic to it. The internal consistency of reality is way deeper than half-baked postmodern poses and buzzwords.
Why do you think so many mathematical equations and other diamonds of timeless wisdom are so effectively predictive? Why do you think physicists and mathematicians keep going deeper and deeper in the way they seek to prove the validity of their ideas, and keep finding new structure obeying coherent logics? Do you think predictive equations would work without being grounded in some profound structural consistency to the nature of reality?
Maybe you have an example where electrical theory breaks down? Where current flows both ways in a circuit at once? Maybe you think the feedback relationship between action and consequence has no pragmatic value? Or no material reality? Have you looked into Evolutionary Epistemology at all?
Anyway, that's enough. Don't be so confident in your complete lack of confidence. You may just be ignorant of how right your being already knows itself to be.
Good retort. Much to think about, thanks. Dunno about the post-modern stuff or "porno buzzwords", never read much of that stuff. I was mainly taking a Santayanan postion, who noted: "[T]he problem for all natural philosophy . . . is to ask how things hang together, and to assume that they do hang together in one way or another."
Do we keep our assumption that all things hang together when perhaps they don't? Yin/Yang, Tao, God, Platonic "Froms", GUT and genetic exceptionalism are all "tropes" that assume some singularity. Lots of reason to doubt any or all of those. Yeah, there are lots of tropes, and many hang together locally, but its doubtful the whole darn thing hangs together. Consistent reality is just a norm, and is often found wanting, and can be scorned (de-horned). Emerson said something similar.
Art is unreal, plural and is constantly evolving beyond what came before. Its a much better "trope" for thinking about might exist than what acheives mere Being. Aristotle, no post-modernist, said that, I believe.
A living skeleton on a back of a naked mother says nothing about reality (how could it?), but says everything about how we feel about existence. I love the fact that someone can find yin/yang in a work, whereas another finds perhaps hints of Horace's "Undaunted (Wo)man".
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Wes, You sound smart. And lost."
Kev, You sound like someone who once was lost but now is found. Many seekers of truth have legitimately concluded that the Newtonian universe is merely a thin rationalist delusion superimposed upon an unruly quantum universe (or multi-verse). Nevertheless, they make their peace with it because it is intuitive and demonstrably useful for the visible portion of the tiny duration of our lives. They sense that to pursue truth any more aggressively than that would only lead to exhaustion and divert energy from our love lives.
I understand and respect that choice, but I also respect the restless souls who continue to flog themselves to find a deeper truth in our existential void.
Even before we learned that those mathematical equations are not "so effectively predictive" on a quantum level, Bertrand Russell was cautioning us not to extrapolate too much from math: "Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover." (A quote I've used more than once on this blog.)
This is not a matter of "half-baked postmodern poses and buzzwords," it's a matter of tough minded physicists who used our enhanced tools (admittedly created with the benefit of your "coherent logics") to follow the string further and further until it led them over a cliff.
Wes wrote: "Do we keep our assumption that all things hang together when perhaps they don't? Yin/Yang, Tao, God, Platonic "Froms", GUT and genetic exceptionalism are all "tropes" that assume some singularity."
I'm not sure that assumption is universally shared. I can't speak with conviction from personal experience, especially since so much of the world has recently been converted by the effectiveness of Kev's Newtonian physics, but there has long been a serious argument that the fragmentation that bedevils us is a phenomenon of language and culture rather than biology or human nature. Western culture since at least the time of the ancient Greeks seems to have struggled with a gap between human consciousness and the surrounding physical world. As a result, we live with vexing dichotomies we cannot resolve, such as the fissure between perception and reality, form and content, mind and body, faith and reason, etc. But eastern cultures historically seemed less troubled by these fissures.
I often refer people to Koestler's profound cultural comparison, The Lotus and the Robot on this subject but for a more recent philological discussion of the implications of the difference between east and west on this issue, David Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" has an interesting chapter entitled, "Fragmentation and Wholeness."
He distinguishes the ancient Greek focus on quantitative analysis and measurement of the world (the Greek word "metron") from the East where "the notion of measure has not played nearly so fundamental a role. Rather, in the prevailing philosophy in the Orient, the immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named, described, or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality....[the eastern concept of] 'maya' obtained from the same root [as metron] means 'illusion'. This is an extraordinarily significant point. Whereas to Western society, as it derives from the Greeks, measure, with all that this word implies, is the very essence of reality, or at least the key to this essence, in the East measure has now come to be regarded commonly as being in some way false and deceitful. In this view the entire structure and order of forms, proportions, and 'ratios' that present themselves to ordinary perception and reason are regarded as a sort of veil, covering the true reality, which cannot be perceived by the senses and of which nothing can be said or thought."
Accurate or not, I think we can at least consider that the problem Santayana has gluing things together does not pose a problem to cultures with different languages and philosophies.
David and Wes,
I think, however, we can all agree that art is a language concerning itself with truth as experienced within the human context. It is not reaching for any kind of absolute truth in the way physics does.
It is a language dealing with the deepest constants within the human psyche and is why I believe art does not evolve but rather changes its face to suit whatever the cultural habitat it is being used in. It's the reason ancient stories are just as resonant today with any cultural 'updating' only providing the means for the contemporary audience to more readily experience its narrative beats.
So one may argue that in terms of 'ultimate reality' the idea of duality (chaos and order say) may be just a human construct, but for us humans our minds are innately wired to experience (and then interpret) the things of the world as protagonists. I can tell myself that my feeling cold is just the current metabolic state of my body, but I never quite shake off the feeling that it is out to get me.
David wrote
"to follow the string further and further until it led them over a cliff."
Or maybe the string just brings them back around to where they started, not knowing. All points on a circle are an equal distance from it's radius. Just because one's viewpoint is on one side of the circle it doesn't negate the view viewpoint of the other side. All thought contains its opposite. If one thinks in terms of straight lines as the west has one will never arrive at their destination. If one sees the line as circle one has already arrived.
Chris wrote,
"So one may argue that in terms of 'ultimate reality' the idea of duality (chaos and order say) may be just a human construct, but for us humans our minds are innately wired to experience (and then interpret) the things of the world as protagonists"
Then why are we most happy when we are not "thinking," of ourselves?
For precisely that reason Tom. Happiness is the holiday from conflict.
Kev, You sound like someone who once was lost but now is found.... so much of the world has recently been converted by the effectiveness of Kev's Newtonian physics... Many seekers of truth have legitimately concluded that the Newtonian universe is merely a thin rationalist delusion superimposed upon an unruly quantum universe (or multi-verse).
If you have some evidence, ANY evidence, that the universe is not consistent at some fundamental level, that it is NOT obeying some kind of physical rule set that causes a decipherable order that produces a consistency of phenomena, let's hear it. Otherwise, you are just asserting without justification.
To say there is consistency or order not a strictly 'Newtonian' view per se. I think you may be confused about the differences between Newtonian and Relativism/Quantum. The latter isn't some call to abandon all reason or rhyme. It isn't a throwing up of the hands. Quantum mechanics is the MOST effective predictive system of them all, in fact. It has guessed at mysteries (missing particles) that later were found. Miracle? Or structural truth? (Hint: the latter.)
Just because we understand the possibilities of physics, quantum foam, theories of multiple universes, warped space time, the holographic universe theory, the question of anthropomorphism, and worm holes and singularities and mystery of the origins of anything... as well as the fallibility of human investigators.... that doesn't mean there is no coherence to reality that is predicated on a coherent understructure of consistent-in-rule 'noumena' (for want of a better term.)
chris bennett-- you say that art isn't reaching for "absolute" truths, yet you also say that it deals with timeless "constants" that never need updating and that our minds are "innately wired" to experience these things a particular way-- all of which sound about as close to an "absolute" as humans can get. I don't disagree with your points, I just suggest that your own vocabulary betrays the ambivalence which I think underlies this field, and which should keep us from getting too cocky.
As for your point that "art does not evolve," I'd concur that art doesn't progress in the same way that science does, but there is room between "progress" and mere "process" for what art does, and I haven't found a better word for it than "evolve." How else to describe the transformation of art from its earliest tentative origins-- the first explorations of impressionism, the earliest drawings by Sargent or Homer, the first signs of the Italian Renaissance-- and the full mature art produced at its peak, once it has been enhanced by trial and error, and by observation of the efforts of other artists?
Tom-- and yet, sometimes the definition of a truth is that its opposite is not true. I think your point applies to some of what art does, but unless we can say that that some aspects of art are wrong or bad or false we have art devoid of standards. The great Niels Bohr said, "the opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." One problem we may have classifying art is that its profound truths are inextricably commingled with correct statements.
Let me see if I can make a very simple argument, David...
What has led you to believe in an "unruly quantum universe" is precisely the belief in the infallibility of the math and physics that got you there; predicated exactly on an underlying order or logic which you long to deny.
Kev Ferrara-- try telling that to Schrödinger's cat (assuming it's alive to hear you). If you are saying you hope that someday we will find a way to resolve the multiple paradoxes of quantum theory I share your hope but that's a far cry from being "the MOST effective predictive system of them all."
I know we've made some progress in understanding what Einstein could only call "spooky action at a distance," the entanglement of two remote particles where altering one somehow affects the other. Our quantum entanglement experiments with the electrons in diamonds have shed modest light on the distance aspect, but the underlying counter-intuitive, seemingly irrational mysteries of quantum reality remain. Sure, we now have labels like "super position" to describe paradoxes such as matter occupying more than one position at the same time, but a label isn't a harness. Unless you can find a reliable way to predict when your subject matter will be a particle or wave, here or there, then or now, first or last, you'll always have trouble employing matter in the useful way that Newton did. To quote Bohr again, "everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real... If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it"
No one is talking about throwing up their hands-- the central credo of this blog is that the absence of meaning in the universe is no excuse for sloth or impatience. However, the second most important principle is that we can't blind ourselves to structural flaws in reason, empiricism or language.
Chris –
You noted:
“. . . .in terms of 'ultimate reality' the idea of duality (chaos and order say) may be just a human construct, but for us humans our minds are innately wired to experience (and then interpret) the things of the world as protagonists. I can tell myself that my feeling cold is just the current metabolic state of my body, but I never quite shake off the feeling that it is out to get me.”
This is insightful, and parallels with Santayana’s notion of “animal faith” as a driver of knowledge, belief, myth, concept, idea, etc. Truth with a capital T is not the key determinant, since we act on many things whether out of respect for truth or not, and many things e.g., art, poetry, music, religion, don’t need to be true to be beautifully, strongly resonant.
Techne and episteme become demonstrable over time and space, leading to Truth; I take that to be Kev’s main point, valid enough. I don’t have an argument with that, with the caveat that the larger and puffier the claim to Truth, the more likely it will deflate, hopefully comically. But I think you’ve hit the nail on the head that regardless of our larger myths that seek order and perhaps harmony, the “cold” still seems out to get us. There’s a lot of subtle wisdom in that observation, which western philosophy has mostly ignored, probably because it comes from the subject, and seems not “objective” enough for truth.
Both Shakespeare and E.M. Cioran had good insights about truth (toothaches and shitting the bed), but their better insights were about resonant art and myths -- Birnam Wood and the ideal time before we born, respectfully. We don't have to believe in them to love them.
you say that art isn't reaching for "absolute" truths, yet you also say that it deals with timeless "constants" that never need updating and that our minds are "innately wired" to experience these things a particular way-- all of which sound about as close to an "absolute" as humans can get. I don't disagree with your points, I just suggest that your own vocabulary betrays the ambivalence which I think underlies this field, and which should keep us from getting too cocky.
Regarding humankind I don't see the term 'constants' as meaning the same as an 'absolutes'. The evolutionary time frame involving modern humans puts it outside the long term mutational effects of natural selection. Thus, for all practical purposes the innately human characteristics of our consciousness can be considered to be constant throughout our cultural history.
How else to describe the transformation of art from its earliest tentative origins-- the first explorations of impressionism, the earliest drawings by Sargent or Homer, the first signs of the Italian Renaissance-- and the full mature art produced at its peak, once it has been enhanced by trial and error, and by observation of the efforts of other artists?
As I said, I consider these manifestations of the look of art to be mere changes of its face to suit whatever cultural habitat it is being used in. To think of this as an evolution is to see the language of art as an entity mutating in response to a changing human consciousness. And, for reasons I have already given, I do not believe this to be so.
David, it really seems you don't understand the nature of this argument.
QM IS the most predictive system we have. (Got a better one?) You've completely ignored, I see, its ability to successfully predict the existence of very peculiar and anti-intuitive particles. Convenient. You've ignored the fact that to get to all the spooky stuff, you need to believe in physics and math in the first place, which is predicated on the consistency of phenomena and the ability to make discoveries that have a continuity of applicability through time.
Just because QM is incomplete or its relationship to Relativity is as yet unresolved, does not mean there is some grand woo woo at the bottom of it all for you to imply. If you think chance exists in the universe, if you understand ergodicity, it must be everywhere. And there would be no rules at all.
That Quantum Entanglement keeps happening, IS A CONSISTENCY of PHENOMENA that you must reckon with. Thereby, it is obeying some underlying order. The holographic people posit that the reason we see 'spooky action at a distance' among entangled particles, is because we are seeing the same particle in two different places at once, as when we look at the corner of fishtank and see the same fish through two different panes of glass. The Bohmian people posit links in the fabric of reality that are non local. Others posit links that are faster than light.
Whether any one of these views is the actual case, each is still an underlying rationale for the why of quantum entanglement. And the fact that a plausible underlying rationale can encompass the phenomena is good evidence that there must be some consistency to the phenomena in question.
Schrodinger's Cat is cocktail circuit patter. Just because the fixation of a particle is probabilistic, doesn't mean it has no physical principles predicating its behavior.
Unless you can find a reliable way to predict when your subject matter will be a particle or wave
A photon looks like a particle when it is emitted or absorbed. An electron looks like a particle when it interacts with other objects in certain ways such as in high-speed collisions. The other known particles are more complicated to research, and I don't have time right now to do that.
However, this line or thinking does not matter, because the argument is not about having absolute knowledge about the structure and behavior of waves or particles, but about acknowledging that there is some fundamental consistency guiding the structure and behavior. So even if we don't quite understand it, we simply observe it being either a particle or a wave, and that tells us something. Particles have certain characteristics and math. Waves have certain characteristics and math. We don't get nothing, chaos, or randomness, with no observed characteristics or abstracted math. We get a particle or a wave, depending on the situation. And that's enough to appreciate the existence of a guiding order, rule set, principle-set, consistent kind of force complex, or what have you, predicating the phenomena.
There's nothing postmodern about this. The discovery is ongoing.
Techne and episteme become demonstrable over time and space, leading to Truth; I take that to be Kev’s main point, valid enough. I don’t have an argument with that, with the caveat that the larger and puffier the claim to Truth, the more likely it will deflate, hopefully comically.
I agree that claims of absolute timeless universal truth in all times and all realms is absurdity. I presume that when the word "truth" was invented, its understood definition made no such omniscient claims. Its reference realm was probably inflated to fantastical godlike status by ancient academic philosophers 'accidentally' inflating their own statures during public pontification sessions. Originally, truth was probably just a useful term for (what even its most ardent detractors now understand as) an inescapable aspect of thought and understanding.
It has been said of recent that Truth is what is predictive. In my own view, the prediction aspect of truth is the result of truth, not its nature. Truth predicts because it is a recurring abstract dynamic relationship among a particular suite of elements which also recur through time. Or; Truth is what connects and comprehends facts; and similar suites of facts, through time, will precipitate out the same truths. Which is why truth-structures predict.
Chris Bennett wrote: "for all practical purposes the innately human characteristics of our consciousness can be considered to be constant throughout our cultural history."
But if innately human characteristics differ from culture to culture, how "innate" are they? The culture of maya (Hinduism and Buddhism) emphasizes the intuitive, subjective, mystical side while the culture of metron (Kev and the ancient Greeks) emphasizes the search for objective law in nature. The implications of such a cultural polarity run pretty deep: the Dionysians vs. Appollonians, the materialism of the Ionians vs. the mysticism of the Eleatics, Plato/Plotinus/Augustine vs. Aristotle/Albert/Aquinas in a tug of war over the role of the senses, yin vs. yang (or rather masculine logic vs. feminine intuition)... these differences are so fundamental to our perceptions and our values that both the rationalists and the anti-rationalists can't help but view their own perspective as the "innate" one. People fight wars over this stuff.
chris bennett also wrote: "I consider these manifestations of the look of art to be mere changes of its face to suit whatever cultural habitat it is being used in. To think of this as an evolution is to see the language of art as an entity mutating in response to a changing human consciousness. And, for reasons I have already given, I do not believe this to be so."
I think there's an argument to be made for changing human consciousness, but I don't think we need to go there. When I think of instances where art "evolves," one of the easiest is the maturation process, either for an individual artist or for a school of art. Do you think that maturation, where ideas are refined and enhanced, and increase in depth, is merely "a change of face" to suit a cultural habitat?
Kev Ferrara-- It's quite possible that you're correct, that I don't understand the nature of the argument.
Or perhaps I just don't share your religious faith that behind all the manifold paradoxes of the quantum universe we will someday discover a set of physical rules consistent with the Newtonian mechanical model of the universe, empirically discernible and based upon a mathematical mode of perception. Despite your certitude, that's all it is: faith. I recognize there are reasons for your faith that it may happen someday; this mode of investigation has (mostly) served us well so far, but at the same time what we thought we learned using our five senses and intuition turns out to be inconsistent with quantum reality. That chair on which you sit contains about as much solid matter as 3 specks of dust in a room, yet nevertheless there you sit.
If Schrodinger's cat has become "cocktail circuit patter," it's for the very reason that people who employ common sense think quantum reality is loony.
I just don't share your religious faith that behind all the manifold paradoxes of the quantum universe we will someday discover a set of physical rules consistent with the Newtonian mechanical model of the universe, empirically discernible and based upon a mathematical mode of perception.
David,
I don't know whether the rules will be physical in the strict 'Newtonian' sense that you want to pin on me. But they will have their own physics, in the sense that they will exist in a realm that has its own unique definition or behavior, its own predicates and consequences. For nothing is without predicate, and all predicates have consequences. We are the evident product of the generative realm's consequences. We are here, therefore something is there and doing us.
How can we be here without a direct consequential line of support stemming from the deepest foundation of reality, whatever that might be?
What else do you dream there is in the causative realm beneath, between, and behind our reality? What else can a realm have but a particular nature? And what does it mean to have a nature except that there are consistencies to it, unique to it, evident if such evidence could be in some way apprehended?
I mean, what is your fantasy here? That there is the possibly of some undergirding reality that isn't even itself? In the sense that there is a realm that has no definition even in its own terms?
This is why your take is the real faith. You want to imagine that there is something that begat us without having any ability to do so; that there can be that ability to generate the existent in a realm without the intelligibility of consequence... which causes product. You can pretend to believe that there can be ability without some kind of physics; and that a physics can derive from a non-physics, but you can't really embody that belief. Because it is only a belief in the mind. And 'non-physics' is merely a wispy notion built of words in the mind, with no meaning to it at all; merely a symbolic chimera. Less than a faith.
David: "That chair on which you sit contains about as much solid matter as 3 specks of dust in a room, yet nevertheless there you sit"
So what ? We don't experience the world at the quantum level. If you can't pass your hand through it, then 'solid' is a perfectly good word for the quality of wood or metal at our scale of sensory experience.
This digression into quantum physics is irrelevant to how we make and understand art which, as Chris has already pointed out, is concerned "with truth as experienced within the human context".
Laurence wrote
‘This digression into quantum physics is irrelevant to how we make and understand art which, as Chris has already pointed out, is concerned "with truth as experienced within the human context".’
I’m would think something that would change one’s viewpoint or understanding of the world could have a profound affect upon ones art or art itself. A new understanding of space, or thinking of space in a new way could greatly change how one makes their art. It could reveal the difference in thought patterns between a culture that values objects to a culture that places more value on the space that contains the objects.
Tom,
Einstein's theory of general relativity has been with us for over a hundred years. Can you think of any art that it has had a 'profound effect' upon ? Or is there any quantum physics inspired art that you think is worth mentioning ?
I completely agree that there is no relation between quantum mechanics and art. Art's poetics have their own unique sensual-emotional physics; nothing to do with the strange principles we've enumerated of the subatomic realm. And I also agree that attempts to make "science art' are just a cheap attempts to piggyback on Science's good name or grade school-level projects.
The only reason I addressed the reference to the strangeness of the quantum realm was because it is (and subtly was being) misused as a justification for the tendentious and destructive postmodern views of art, which enable and boost poseurs, hucksters and Maoists while denigrating the talented, accomplished and apolitical. With the end result of politicizing and trashing our culture, one of the few saving graces of society.
That postmodern shibboleths stem not from reason and study, but are psycho-social manifestations of the tumultuous late 1950s and 1960s, makes it all the more difficult yet all the more necessary to combat them, in my view.
All there is, are relations between things. How one conceives, and constructs their work of art is a product of how one thinks of space. A change of outlook doesn’t mean you literally do paintings about quantum mechanics but if the notion of emptiness or the immeasurable can profoundly affect what you choose to empathize in your work. The emptiness might charge your brush with the energy to travel though across, around, up and down the objects that inhabit that space as if everything is a continuum with nothing in the way to stop you.
And remember mathematician and scientists like to compare their solutions and theorems to works of art.
All there is, are relations between things.
Unique sensations have qualia that are somewhat like monopoles. In that, while they could be felt more acutely (maybe) in relation/contrast to other sensations, they still are quite decidedly isolated and unique in their feeling (at some sufficient state of purity.)
So, for instance, Blueness or G-flatness or the smell of cranberry or parsley or mold. These sensations cannot be achieved in experience through relations to other things, only through direct experience of the thing itself. So no, there are more than just relations to our experience.
How one "conceives and constructs their work of art" can be the product of far too many factors to bother listing. Anyway, inspiration is a different matter than an attempt to actual portray something literally. At this point, mathematics/geometry seems to be the native language of physics. While Art is the native language of sensational experience.
Regarding math; Something can be beautiful (some equations, some women, some sunsets, etc.) without being art, obviously. Colloquially speaking, many will simply call anything they find attractive or pretty 'art'. That doesn't make it so. If we prioritize the words people use in our thinking, we will end up lost.
Kev Ferrara-- Well, that's certainly an interesting twist on the Novum Organum: according to you, cautioning against the hubris of a priori deduction is now the act of "faith."
I'll respectfully decline your invitation to articulate the metrics of a new natural philosophy (the name for physics prior to the scientific revolution). When I suggested it would be presumptuous for you to dictate the characteristics of such a science (math based, consistent, causal in nature, etc.) it's not because I thought you were less qualified than I. It's because you'd have to understand more about the nature of time than Einstein, Hawking and Sean Carroll combined to understand whether what we currently think of as "causation" is pushed from the past, pulled from the future, affected collaterally by configurations of the universe, or simply not real. So, no offense intended.
Laurence John wrote: "We don't experience the world at the quantum level."
I just looked back to see how the heck we ended up on this topic when we started with an etching by Kollwitz. I blame it on Tom, for introducing the contrast between western and Taoist reactions to death.
In answer to your comment: Well, I agree that we don't consciously experience the quantum level through through our five senses (although even that may change). The portions of our reality that are flat out contradicted by the quantum world are currently far removed from our normal activities so why don't we just sit on the chair and shut up? After all, we live with lies as a practical expedient all the time, why not live with these ones?
Outside of Neo in The Matrix movies, the two groups who I think should be most concerned about this set of issues are 1.) cosmologists / theoretical astrophysicists and 2.) artists. The lies of the material world don't affect whether your car starts when you turn the key in the ignition, or whether you are able to buy groceries at the store. But they do affect the future of the universe, and whether everything that we do will simply fade into meaninglessness as the universe expands, all life ends, the stars flicker out, until there are only black holes which eventually evaporate into empty space forever. They do affect how the universe began, and why, and the role of entropy (which is the only reason we can have the apparent experience of standing up and sitting down in a chair).
You and I won't be around to see how the universe ends (unless you know a secret that I don't) so your question, "so what?" is a very proper question to ask. I suppose I have an old fashioned romantic notion of art: that despite their lowlife qualities in the everyday realm of the five senses artists at their best strive to be part of something bigger than themselves, that they are in some ways seekers of a certain kind of truth, that they bathe in principles that are potentially limitless, and that they aspire to meaning (which is of course affected by the nature of the ending of all life).
Tom: "The emptiness might charge your brush with the energy to travel though across, around, up and down the objects that inhabit that space as if everything is a continuum with nothing in the way to stop you"
Possibly. If you can utilise a broad concept like 'emptiness' to be a better painter of form, go for it.
Personally, i think the results would more likely resemble the emptied out canvases of modernism and minimalism. Couldn't the dark paintings in Rothko Chapel be subtitled 'the empty space between one atom and another in the chair you're sitting on' ?
;-)
Tom, Laurence John and Kev Ferrara-- Yargh, here I am sitting at my desk in my office, waiting for an oasis between projects so I can respond to last night's comments and as soon as I hit "send" and return to the comments, I find my answer is already 5 comments behind. Well, OK, so much for that. Here are just a few additional reactions before I bow out for a while:
Laurence John wrote: "Einstein's theory of general relativity has been with us for over a hundred years. Can you think of any art that it has had a 'profound effect' upon ? Or is there any quantum physics inspired art that you think is worth mentioning ?"
Of course: Cubism. Surrealism. Dada. Futurism. Abstract art. All those "Maoists" that Kev complains about. Every 20th century art form that is based on the disenchantment that reality is a lie, that the Newtonian promise of scientific salvation through progress will not materialize, that the age of reason was, in part, an illusion, stems in part from what Freud taught about the nature of our objective rationality and what Einstein taught about the objectivity of the universe. The cultural impact was indirect but immense, like the impact of Kepler and Galileo teaching us that our humble little planet is not the center of God's universe. This is what fueled existentialism. And when Joseph Conrad presciently wrote, "we live in the flicker" he could have meant the quantum mechanical fluctuations which may account for the energy which randomly fuels life in the universe.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Art is the native language of sensational experience."
Don't you hear sex laughing at you when you write things like that?
The point is really about our use and abuse of whatever “models” we prefer. Some of us don’t think much of the models, reliably predictive or not, as a form of Truth, though they have much pragmatic value, to be sure. Or you might say, Truth is overrated. Current quantum model reify themselves endlessly, so there is reason to doubt them. But they may indeed be valid.
Anyway, a better approach is to have them but not worship them.
Fernando Pessoa says this best in his wonderful poem “The Keeper of Flocks” written by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro, proving that art can say more than philosophy when we are desperate for wisdom:
XXXVIII
To the true and primitive man
Who saw the sun rise and didn’t worship it yet.
***
XXXIX
Because the only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning at all,
It’s stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there’s nothing to understand.
Yes, this is what my senses alone have learned:—
Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
***
The Occident makes too much of its “models”, especially when they have the ring of truth. Have them handy, but don’t believe in them.
It's because you'd have to understand more about the nature of time than Einstein, Hawking and Sean Carroll combined to understand whether what we currently think of as "causation" is pushed from the past, pulled from the future, affected collaterally by configurations of the universe, or simply not real.
We shouldn't speak for others about this particular question.
Are we here, or are we not?
If we are here, then we are caused to be here.
It does not matter just how, or if we ever learn just how. But there must be rules to reality's and our generation, even if we never understand them.
If there were no rules to how reality is generated, it would not have the consistency it evinces! Get this through your dopey mopey mop top! The same phenomenal stuff keeps happening, neverendingly!
On the other hand, if you think we are here without predicate, without causation.... which is to say, *!!*By Magic*!!*... that is a religious or supernatural statement.
Don't you hear sex laughing at you when you write things like "Art is the native language of sensational experience."?
If you think sex is first and foremost a symbolic/linguistic act, then I'm laughing at you. (I mean, since we're launching laughing-vectors.)
By the way, wash your hands frequently, stay off public toilets and out of crowded rooms. Beg off big events. Don't shake anybody's hand, and carry disinfectant wipes if you take public transportation. This goes for everybody reading this. There is no harm in being paranoid.
But if innately human characteristics differ from culture to culture, how "innate" are they? The culture of maya (Hinduism and Buddhism) emphasizes the intuitive, subjective, mystical side while the culture of metron (Kev and the ancient Greeks) emphasizes the search for objective law in nature. The implications of such a cultural polarity run pretty deep: the Dionysians vs. Appollonians, the materialism of the Ionians vs. the mysticism of the Eleatics, Plato/Plotinus/Augustine vs. Aristotle/Albert/Aquinas in a tug of war over the role of the senses, yin vs. yang (or rather masculine logic vs. feminine intuition)... these differences are so fundamental to our perceptions and our values that both the rationalists and the anti-rationalists can't help but view their own perspective as the "innate" one. People fight wars over this stuff.
I think you are talking about belief systems here, not the innate hard wiring of the human brain whose primary sense of values are an evolutionary emergent phenomena arising out of our pre-primate ancestors' central nervous system going back through eons of time. That humans are occasionally aggressive is down to our brain's innate hard wiring, but that which constitutes the reasons for using aggression is externally varied. In the case of nations/tribes it is generally the protection of whatever belief system it is that grounds their member's vital sense of context, i.e. belonging.
A culture is defined by the nature of its belief system. To sustain the idea that it is defined by differences in the innate hard-wiring of groups of humans is the very thing that intensified the horrors of the 20th century to a pitch that rings in our conscience to this day. And that's something we can both agree on.
When I think of instances where art "evolves," one of the easiest is the maturation process, either for an individual artist or for a school of art. Do you think that maturation, where ideas are refined and enhanced, and increase in depth, is merely "a change of face" to suit a cultural habitat?
Yes, I do! :)
If the language of art were something that evolved within an individual then no one else but that individual would understand it. The graphic language, because it is not written as a consensus code like text, has to, by circumstantial necessity, be legible to us entirely on a sensuous level. There is simply no difference at all between the graphic language employed to produce the prehistoric cave paintings in France and anything done ever since.
Picasso's late Musketeer paintings employs the same language as his Blue Period the cartooning is just more jumbled up and interrupted. The same goes for the eighty year old Hockney's gigantic pictures of trees and his student work. The 'roughness' of Rembrandt, Constable, Turner and Titian's late paintings is simply a 'shorthand' version of the language employed in their earlier work.
In these cases I would say the 'cultural habitat' is that of the artist's own changing concerns and preoccupations.
David: "Every 20th century art form that is based on the disenchantment that reality is a lie..."
Point taken David.
Personally, the fact that reality looks vastly different when viewed at the quantum level (e.g. that my 'solid' chair has lots of space in it) has never freaked me out, or seemed like a 'lie'. To our human eyes, a carpet bug is barely visible. Viewed under an electron microscope, it looks like an alien monster. Zoom in even further and it gets more abstract. Scale is amazing.
But then I'm a Gen-Xer, so by the time I was a young man existentialism was old hat. Plus, I never believed in a god, or a larger 'meaning' to the universe anyway. So, scientific discoveries were/are interesting information, rather than existential-dread inducing.
I do think that the art movements you list had as much (or more) to do with the horrors of WW1 (among other things) than the theories of Einstein, but maybe that's for another comment section.
Cubism. Surrealism. Dada. Futurism. Abstract art. All those "Maoists" that Kev complains about.
Huh? Don't put those words in my mouth.
Maoism is demanding control of the superficial content of art (or any communication at all) so that it functions as political propaganda for your chosen cause. It demands that art cannot be about truth and the sharing of that truth with community, only politics.
I was referring to the political project of postmodernism, which has led us to 'woke' and what is now called 'cancel culture' and 'grievance studies.' And stuff like this.
chris bennett-- Bless you for returning the conversation to images.
Personally, I see material differences between the younger and more mature versions of some of the artists you mention. The younger Rembrandt was painting the details on lace collars and individual hairs. The older Rembrandt had very different priorities-- the young show off was replaced by a sadder but wiser artist, employing a different palette tinged with melancholy, resulting in richer, more profound pictures. I think tracking his self portraits alone shows a growth trajectory. The same with Turner; his younger works such as Interior of Salisbury Cathedral seem to have been done by a very different artist than Rain, Steam and Speed. Can you see a young Turner (or any other artist in his era) creating Death on a Pale Horse? Contrast young Monet with his immense late abstract water lilies, or Degas' young realism with his his late impressionism.
I'd also say the "belief systems" we've been discussing have a direct impact on art (as well as music, literature and other aspects of culture). Asian art has historically had a very different aesthetic from Western art or African art or Pacific island art. Urban art is frequently distinguishable from rural art.
Laurence John wrote: "I'm a Gen-Xer, so by the time I was a young man existentialism was old hat."
Please tell me what comes after existentialism! I thought the problem with existentialism is that it was the ultimate reduction, the final dead end. Once you reluctantly conclude that the universe is meaningless, what can you do for an encore? People once hoped that analytic philosophy might provide escape from the box, but I don't know anyone who thinks that anymore. If existentialism is "old hat" the world has been waiting for your new hat!
Kev Ferrara: "...what is now called 'cancel culture' and 'grievance studies.' And stuff like this."
I don't know why you choose to project the decline and fall of western culture from the misbehavior of a band of brats from a third rate (and failing) college that no one would've heard of if Fox News and that ignorant gorilla Jim Jordan hadn't turned it into a cause célèbre. If I were you I'd worry more about the cultural impact of Trump University because it embodies how a mobster president succeeds in rallying the credulous, the gullible and the envious on a national scale.
The younger Rembrandt was painting the details on lace collars and individual hairs. The older Rembrandt had very different priorities-- the young show off was replaced by a sadder but wiser artist, employing a different palette tinged with melancholy, resulting in richer, more profound pictures. I think tracking his self portraits alone shows a growth trajectory.
I don't disagree with any of that David, or your observations on the trajectories of the other artists you mentioned. My point is that the fundamental principles of the plastic language they employed to do these things remained entirely constant throughout.
My point also applies to the effect of belief systems. An Easter Island totem and a Renaissance statue employ exactly the same plastic principles but to different effects.
(Cultures may bank their wealth differently but the principles of arithmetic are common to all - and that goes for greed and good housekeeping and productive commerce, if one wants to talk about the hard-wiring of the human psyche.) :)
I don't know why you choose to project the decline and fall of western culture from the misbehavior of a band of brats
If only one side were awful, I wouldn't be worried, I'd have some place to go. What you dismissively call 'brattiness' (assault, hostage-taking, criminal menace, human rights violations) is a separate (although not insignificant) issue from the blinkered and resentful Manichean viewpoint animating it. Which, for anybody paying attention, has clearly spread far and wide throughout the west, creating a climate of fear and hysteria around the exercise of basic freedoms - like the expression of heterodox economic, social, or political views.
It can easily be argued that this all originates in the intense Manichean framework of postmodern theory, which states that all is relative; there is no truth to any matter you might consider. There is only power differentials at work; one person using so-called "science" "facts" "argument" "reason" "ethics" "morals" or "logic" as a way to confuse, demoralize, dominate and oppress another. Every claim or statement is 'rightfully' seen as a political power play. Thus the Maoism (and barbarism) of Postmodernism.
An Easter Island totem and a Renaissance statue employ exactly the same plastic principles but to different effects.
Chris,
I agree that both primitive and advanced work is speaking in the same visual language to the human intuition. But I'm not sure I get what you mean by "the same plastic principles." I think the kinds of effect types being used in primitive versus advanced work are quite different qualitatively. As well, the sheer amount of effects available and evident in advanced work is an order of magnitude greater than those used and found in primitive works.
I assume you know this, but I thought I'd point it out for the folks at home.
Laurence wrote
“Possibly. If you can utilise a broad concept like 'emptiness' to be a better painter of form, go for it.”
Look at the paintings of China! Look at the drawings of Ruben’s. For an artist a flat piece of paper is space! Wasn’t the dictum of Leonardo’s on drawing something like, to bring relief to a flat surface. Art always seems to be reconciling or harmonizing apparent opposites. Hasn’t some of math and science greatest efforts been geared toward describing “surfaces,” I wasn’t denying form, but a sense of nothingness might allow one to conceive the relation of parts differently.
Kev wrote
‘’So, for instance, Blueness or G-flatness or the smell of cranberry or parsley or mold. These sensations cannot be achieved in experience through relations to other things,”
Isn’t hearing, smelling and seeing all in relationship to ears, noses and eyes?
Isn’t hearing, smelling and seeing all in relationship to ears, noses and eyes?
We may be talking past each other. I am talking about what constitutes our experience, and thus what predicates meaning and understanding (thus Art.)
So yes, the olfactory faculties are related to the nose, and the nervous system, and the brain, and the sinuses, and whatever fragrant molecules wisp into our beaks (and so on.) And thus, one can say, as you did "all there is, is relations."
But that is only true really from a kind of inhuman meta-perspective where all is anodyne and abstracted. Which is not a mode of life anybody embodies. Rather we live our lives wholly embedded in sensual meaning.
(I'm sure you know this. I'm only clarifying for the folks at home.)
Not trying to prove you wrong but I'm trying to upload a drawing of the same trinity, Death, a mother and her child. By Heinrich Kley.
In case i cant, its in the Lost Art of Heinrich Kley. Vol I page 195. It seems to have a been a common theme in those days. They were both drawn in the same era, late 19th and early 20th century.
I'm sorry I could not figure out a way to upload it. But do look it up.
Sincerely,
Amitabh
I agree that both primitive and advanced work is speaking in the same visual language to the human intuition. But I'm not sure I get what you mean by "the same plastic principles." I think the kinds of effect types being used in primitive versus advanced work are quite different qualitatively. As well, the sheer amount of effects available and evident in advanced work is an order of magnitude greater than those used and found in primitive works.
Yes, I agree, absolutely. What I mean by the expression "the same plastic principles" is " the same visual language" as you put it. I'd say, off the cuff, that the defining characteristic of primitive work is its naivety regarding the potentials of the means employed.
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