Saturday, August 06, 2022

WHAT ART CAN DO, part 1

Maxfield Parrish's landscape of a still winter night gives us a feeling of tranquility. 


As you look at this picture, you're on a planet spinning at 1,040 miles per hour, or .3 miles per second.  (That's at the equator.  You can calculate your own personal speed by multiplying the cosine of your latitude by 1,040).  The earth spinning beneath your feet is at the same time hurtling around the sun at 18.5 miles per second.  In addition, your entire solar system is cartwheeling around the milky way at 140 miles per second.  Even at that incomprehensible speed, it will take 250 million years for you to complete a single rotation around the galaxy.

Pitted against these facts about your situation, this tiny picture nevertheless controls your psychological outlook.  It outweighs the cosmos and gives you a feeling of calm.

68 comments:

kev ferrara said...

Trying to find out what a painting actually looks like from the digitizations online is not easy. However, in this case, I think it is safe to say that Parrish’s ‘Dusk’ looks more like this than the rather subdued shot you've posted.

The usual tell is that there are more distinctions of hue in the more accurate versions of paintings. Many poor reproductions and digitizations drop hue distinctions, both subtle and blatant. So simply ramping up the saturation of them in photoshop does not result in hue distinctions, but instead merely more intense chromas of similar hues.

So, for instance, in this case, if you look at the two windows of the house. If one were to ramp up the chroma in the version you posted, the windows would not become distinguished into yellow and orange as in the version on AllPosters.com I linked to. The color information in the reds simply isn't there to, if amplified, cause that stark distinction. You would instead get two different kinds of yellow, a pale cadmium yellow and a canary yellow.

I'd also point you to all the color variety in the foreground snow, which cannot just 'appear' by increasing saturation in photoshop.

Anyway, that's my heuristic.

David Apatoff said...

All good points, Kev. At the same time, the physical reality of the paintings may be nearly as elusive as the digital versions. The physical paintings have mostly been ravaged by severe craquelure, with shifting layers of oil and varnish sandwiched together and dried with heavy use of driers and heat boxes. Some colors have unfortunately faded as well. Jim Gurney has an interesting discussion of how the colors of "Daybreak" have changed with time. http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/12/daybreak-blues.html

kev ferrara said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
kev ferrara said...

Prints get exposed to a lot of different conditions that can affect their overall look. (Mold, humidity, excess heat, a dusty or smoky environment, etc.)

But with regard to the disappearance of any particular color, it is the fugitive nature of magenta printing ink after repeated sunlight exposure that is the main culprit.

An example of Parrish’s Daybreak that has been protected from sunlight reveals that indeed there was an operative magenta color press run.

Pinks and soft violets, being mere whisps of magenta, are the first to fade out. So the violet mountains in sun-faded versions of daybreak are the first to evaporate.

The cover to the Coy Ludwig Parrish monograph used a print of Daybreak that had had its magenta plate obliterated by sunlight. The result of removing Magenta, the M in CMYK, from the mix is that all that remains is Cyan, Yellow, and Black.

Which is to say, the Coy Ludwig cover repro is a great example not of ‘Parrish Blue’, but of Parrish Cyan.

Parrish Blue, by a contemporaneous account (1921) was a deep warm blue. More like this, I would guess.

With respect to how the originals look now, the important point to understand is that varnishes yellow over time. I believe Parrish used a lot of yellowing concoctions, and in various layers. So we see yellowing evident in a number of Parrish’s prominent works, from Garden of Allah to Puss In Boots. Daybreak is no exception, which is why there is a yellow shift of the painting away from well-preserved prints from the 1920s.

So, again, with a little bit of knowledge about printing inks, paint varnish, and the limits of photoshopping, we can greatly narrow the range of what an original could have looked like.

Donald Pittenger said...

I need to confess that I sometimes use the tools on my Apple iMac to correct images of art and automobiles found on the Web for illustrating my art and car styling blogs.

That's when the downloaded image strikes me as being wrong for various reasons. For example, a painting clearly yellowed by time. Another case is old color publicity photos of cars faded or otherwise distorted by time.

I know that my adjustments probably never result in perfect correction. But I fancy that I owe it to my readers to provide improvements to obviously flawed stuff.

Anonymous said...

These comments prove we think about little shit to avoid thinking about the dangers to planet earth.

JSL

kev ferrara said...

These comments prove we think about little shit to avoid thinking about the dangers to planet earth.

The fallout from the Attention Economy - this world-wide hothouse environment where any sensation-tactic goes, no matter how vile or dangerous, in the attempt to grab eyeballs, ratings, status, votes, funding, and political power - is that many highly mediated 'intelligent' people are no longer able to think clearly, no longer able to be logical or methodical about that which is actually within their grasp and at their scale; no longer able to find fascination or interest or engagement in art, craft, humor, culture, fine engineering, sober conversation, aesthetic contemplation, their immediate environment, their own future, or anything even resembling a normal personal life.

Instead, their mediated anxiety bounces their attention out to national moral panics, vast conspiracies, global catastrophism, endless intractable historical grievances, mass tribal warfare, and big, dumb, and dangerous top-down solutions to all of it (and hero-worship of any demagogic Messiah that offers to boldly "Do Something About It"* while quietly arrogating mass power, wealth, and prestige to themselves and their inner circle.)

Addicted to negative emotion and no longer able to even dare to think outside mass media scare narratives - trapped by the omnipresent corporate print, patter, and prestige cult where every political thought or point of view is either sacralized or demonized, and every personage either branded Brahmin or Untouchable - they snap under the constant indoctrination pressure, then self-select as sentries and snitches for the Great Cause, ever vigilant and ready to castigate or cancel anybody not also devolving into an hysterical unreasoning lump of anxiety and stress.

Well, count me out from all that jazz, my friend. I've long gone stoic and rogue from the Truman Show.

And, further, if I were you I'd get the hell away from media for a few weeks; take an extended Dopamine Fast. From here on out the scaremongering is only going to get worse, the tactics more desperate and low. And your Limbic System is already redlining.

kev

* Their corporate media-induced anxiety, really.

chris bennett said...

Beautifully said Kev.
And heartfelt gratitude for taking the time to do so.

David Apatoff said...


Anonymous/JSL and Kev Ferrara-- It may be presumptuous of me, but I hope that Anonymous/JSL was not addressing climate change; I like to think that he/she was reacting to my point that we are careening around the universe in dizzying loops at speeds so great they are almost incomprehensible, and yet our attention-- and our mood-- is shaped by a tiny rectangular image directly in front of us. I offered that as part of the uncanny power of art, something "art can do."

But doesn't our tunnel vision seem irrational to you, unless it is a psychological defense to keep us from confronting a reality too terrifying to contemplate, and over which we have no control?

If his/her point is that comments focusing on the refinements of hue in digitization is "little shit" compared to the larger reality I described out there, I find that difficult to dispute, except to say that if we tried to think about the "big shit" nonstop we'd go bonkers.

But Kev, let me approach the cosmic issue from a different angle: can you name a work of art created in the past decade that moves you or inspires you more or has more spiritual profundity than the photographs being released from the Webb telescope?

kev ferrara said...

But Kev, let me approach the cosmic issue from a different angle: can you name a work of art created in the past decade that moves you or inspires you more or has more spiritual profundity than the photographs being released from the Webb telescope?

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar disabused me of any lingering romantic notions I had regarding Outer Space as some glorious wonderland. There's nothing 'inspiring' to me about either vastness or nothingness, let alone the combination of the two.

Unless of course infinite loneliness is exactly your kind of jam.

I'll trade you all outer space for a lovely breeze on a warm spring day.

chris bennett said...

I get the thrust of what you are saying here Kev, and empathise with its sentiment very strongly, but there is the notion of awe to consider and what it means as a function of our spiritual self.

Gazing up at the night sky we look directly at the grandest embodiment of the unknown which simultaneously keys us into awareness of our existential proximity to it. And the feeling of awe induced by an encounter with something feels to be an indivisible coupling of fear and the desire to emulate it in some way, the desire to both flee from it and approach it. It is like the frozen torpor of midwinter; the shadow of 'the lovely breeze on a warm spring day' - suffering and joy, death and life, not being and being, both necessary to give rise to the other.

chris bennett said...

This said, I do understand you were answering the point about that which can inspire, and 'suffering, death and not being' are, I completely agree, antithetical to that.

David Apatoff said...

Kev Ferrara and Chris Bennett-- Kev says "There's nothing 'inspiring' to me about either vastness or nothingness" but my view-- and I dare say the view of the history of religion, philosophy, literature, science, and yes, art -- is much closer to Chris's view. 10,000 years ago when the human mind was still half asleep, it was the vastness of the heavens that helped rouse us from our slumbers, that gifted us with dread and awe of infinity, that inspired mythology and made us curious about our own mortality. You can see it on the ceilings of ancient Egyptian tombs and in the first primitive scratching of Chaldean priests who scanned the night skies from their watchtowers.

Today when we aim the Webb telescope at a portion of space that looked completely empty and dark, we see cosmic pyrotechnics on a scale that is truly mind boggling. For me that is a lesson in the "wonder" of the skies, as well as a lesson in humility.

True, most of what we see appears incompatible with human life as we know it, and perhaps that inspires a feeling of "loneliness" in us when we aren't focusing on the printing techniques for Maxfield Parrish posters. Yes, it turns out that the universe doesn't revolve around the earth, and we may not be at the center of some "romantic" view of God's great plan, but I'd think that would inspire immense and profound feelings about how we should live our lives and even about art.

kev ferrara said...

10,000 years ago when the human mind was still half asleep, it was the vastness of the heavens that helped rouse us from our slumbers, that gifted us with dread and awe of infinity, that inspired mythology and made us curious about our own mortality. You can see it on the ceilings of ancient Egyptian tombs and in the first primitive scratching of Chaldean priests who scanned the night skies from their watchtowers.

Established. But you're asking me now. Not 10,000 years ago. Nor 200 years ago. I can place myself in the mindset of the ancients, and imagine the cosmos as myth or magical mechanism, I can cower before Greek Gods or Elder Gods, I can Charon myself steadily across Styx or chant myself silly at Stonehenge. But I can't claim those mindsets or experiences to be actually of me.

My take has always been that a few hundred years of fair-to-middling science by we symbol monkeys has yielded but a pittance of the total pie compared to the feast of knowledge yet to be prepared and served (thus the young whippersnapper Science™ should demonstrate the utmost epistemic humility at every opportunity).

No doubt, there are still great mysteries to the cosmos, and great answers.

But those answers are dots in an ocean of time and silence. Those that would seek those answers, the true answers, will need to go out and off into the real mystery. Telescopes are toys, photos capture surfaces. The explorers of forever, if they should dare to be true, would spill their lives connecting dot to dot, long lost and gone even at such a journey's beginning, soon after Goodbye. Long dead to us and probably to themselves soon enough. Madnesses come and go and everyone has their own oblivions to tend to.

As one of the very oldest aphorisms ever recorded put it, "Those who go over the hill do not return."

Regarding the cosmos as spectacle, I have a painter friend who insists that the pyramids are great art simply because they are gargantuan. If you shrink them to room size, no longer Art.

I think such a thought is at the heart of my beef with the victory of sensation over substantive structure. I suppose in this scheme if Jeff Koons could make a chrome dog the size of the Moon, he'd be the greatest artist in the solar system.

As far as feeling Spiritual Awe when confronted head on with the cosmic oceanic vastness of all, I get that from the night sky. A real experience, aesthetic to the core, thus undeniable. No dinky photo compares, no matter the scale implication.

Zemeckis' Contact with Jodie Foster did a better job than the new photos. There were any number of truly astonishing and kinetic shots of the cosmos in that movie. But those shots, still, were not the movie. The possibility of new insight makes everything potentially interesting to talk about. That the cosmos is vast beyond comprehension, bejeweled with glittering stars, and wrenched this way and that by terrifying forces is old news.




David Apatoff said...

Kev Ferrara wrote: "Zemeckis' Contact with Jodie Foster did a better job than the new photos."

Hey Kev, that movie was partially filmed at my law firm. The scene where Jodie Foster meets with a wealthy sponsor (with a big round desk) was filmed in our conference room, and Foster comes and goes through our lobby on the way to the meeting. Zemeckis shot it over the weekend to avoid interfering with business, but everyone came to work that weekend to watch.

Wes said...

Ha! The awe and wonder and mystical musings is mostly the result of a unfamiliarity of the sensibililty of the unknown and strange in the depths of a big nothing, zero, vastness, echo, or alienated landscape. It has little to do with the "the grandest embodiment of the unknown which simultaneously keys us into awareness of our existential proximity to it." When words fail us to name our feelings, we call them awesome and cosmic, closer to -- dare I say it -- God. The human ape has feelings too, but sometimes cannot name them. He will, and God will retreat a little farther.

The best "awe" of outer space are the spacefarers now hitting thier stride. It is the spectacular competency of their tiny vessels traversing in the cold nothingness safely with AI and maybe brave humans aboard to test the power of the nothingness that is awesome, not the void. It is the remarkable continuing story of the idiots not satisfied with the green grass of this valley and the reliably "lovely breeze" that is awesome. The horizon often beckons the restless, not because there is something awesome beyond it but because one might go beyond it. Who cares what is found? Its the going that is important.

Once, an idiot carved a rickety canoe and rowed out to an island a mile or two offshore. His village Shaman said he was crazy. He was, but he found a stash of booby eggs that was spectacular. Still, he was laughed at for almost drowning.

They said trains would blow out brains if they reached 35 MPH too.

Of course, no one really cares if a crass billionaire has a spaceship. He's still considered a piker. The scientists and social workers thinks he's wasting good cash that could be spent on the poor and the schools, or curing cancer, or promoting the arts. No one likes the look of his spaceship, because it looks like a penis.

Idiots abound, but most of them will stay on Earth.

David Apatoff said...

Kev Ferrara-- If we agree that the progress of science has far to go, I don't understand why you think the mindset of the ancients is so inapposite. The mysteries of the sky for them are the mysteries of the universe for us. If the scale of the sky is no longer enough to mesmerize us, the scale of the universe is guaranteed to keep our minds wondering for a long time to come.

I also don't understand why you seem to think that the magnificent Webb telescope, one of the supreme accomplishments of mankind, is a toy that creates pictures that only capture surfaces. No human being will ever go far enough "over the hill" to see the sights or collect the information that the Webb telescope gives us.

Finally, I don't understand your point about scale. Surely size is a key facet of quality; there's a difference between a Persian miniature and a mural. Your painter friend who talks about shrinking the pyramids to room size seems misguided. Speaking as someone who has been inside the real pyramids, you'd have to change not only their vastness in dimensions, but also their vastness in age, their vastness of religious purpose, and the vastness of their surrounding desert context. What you'd have left is still art, but a fundamentally different kind of art. Try consulting a sculptor next time.

chris bennett said...

David,

...and Foster comes and goes through our lobby on the way to the meeting. Zemeckis shot it over the weekend to avoid interfering with business, but everyone came to work that weekend to watch.

I wonder what the weekend turnout would have been had the postman ('mailman' in US I believe) been delivering some new photographs from the Webb telescope? ;)

Wes,

The awe and wonder and mystical musings is mostly the result of a unfamiliarity of the sensibililty of the unknown and strange in the depths of a big nothing, zero, vastness, echo, or alienated landscape.

This proposition does not account for the feeling of awe that catches us in countless normal situations, to name just three off the top of my head; a talented gymnast at work, (the dipole sensation of wanting to meet them coupled with self-consciousness of one's own physical inferiority), or the moment of take-off in an aeroplane (the thrill of being a bird coupled with the fear of falling), or a confrontation with a ferocious dog (the opportunity to become braver than you think you are coupled with the desire to run).

When words fail us to name our feelings, we call them awesome and cosmic,

The naming of a feeling is not the feeling itself. The belief that naming something means we understand it is a delusion. Thus all experience is, at root, mysterious.

It is the spectacular competency of their tiny vessels traversing in the cold nothingness safely with AI and maybe brave humans aboard to test the power of the nothingness that is awesome, not the void.

I believe you are conflating novelty afforded by the latest technical achievements with wonder at the unknown.

The horizon often beckons the restless, not because there is something awesome beyond it but because one might go beyond it. Who cares what is found? Its the going that is important.

One could as easily say there is no point going beyond if it doesn't matter what is found. "The going that is important" is the pursuit of stimulation for its own sake.

Idiots abound, but most of them will stay on Earth.

Even the AI types have discovered that intelligence requires embodiment. Our bodies are of the earth and in reciprocal relation to it. And so our understandings of what is around us (even spectrographs of galaxies) is ontologically grounded in terms of a body's relation to that which it beholds.

There is the seeking of distraction because meaning has not been found.
And there is the search for meaning because distractions lead nowhere.

kev ferrara said...

Just time to bop in for a second, to share a striking new oil sketch just posted by Zhaoming Wu that struck me as relevant to several of the overriding questions ricocheting around this board: What can art do? What mysteries capture us?

Wes said...

Chris,

Couple of points:

"The belief that naming something means we understand it is a delusion. Thus all experience is, at root, mysterious."

Naming is precisely understanding, but not a final understanding - there is always room for more naming. Its a grasping of experience, not the experience. Naming helps experience not be so mysterious. Its a Platonic notion that a name is a truth, as you note, which is delusional. But aren't you making that (Platonic) error by assuming the great unknown is a "thing" that cannot be understood, only experienced? It seems as if you've reified a great nothingness into a specifc thing. Like a landscape, its an abstraction (and a fun one), but its less real than the beautiful twilight of a Parrish dusk.

"I believe you are conflating novelty afforded by the latest technical achievements with wonder at the unknown."

Admiring a gymnast's skill is also conflating technical acheivement with wonder and amazement. Its the wonder of human competence where nature gave no imperative, but the human animal impulse found something worth creating. Parrish's twilight is awesome because he named it and could recreate at will what nature does blindly and randomly.


"Our bodies are of the earth and in reciprocal relation to it. And so our understandings of what is around us (even spectrographs of galaxies) is ontologically grounded in terms of a body's relation to that which it beholds."

Yes, our umwelt "grounds" us, but we humans are not bound by that ground. Our peculiar umwelt is adaptable and flexible. Loren Eiseley noted that we are the sole creature that has escaped the determinancy of nature.

Cheers!

Richard said...

Surely this also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

kev ferrara said...

If we agree that the progress of science has far to go, I don't understand why you think the mindset of the ancients is so inapposite. The mysteries of the sky for them are the mysteries of the universe for us.

The sky is so nearby. While lightyears take light years to fly.

As well, mythologies (and ideologies, religions, cults, political parties, editorialists, critical theorists, propagandists, etc.) offer facile pre-baked answers to impossible and scary pre-baked questions. The given paradigm, for which the faithful tune in, provides instant inserts for the known slots marked ‘unknown’.

I don’t believe in ready answers, nor ready mysteries. I don’t even know what the actual mysteries of the universe are. How am I to understand mysteries beyond physicality? Beyond time? Beyond dimension?

Some of the mysteries may be the mysteries of the mind transposed, resulting in an intractable confusion of admixed mysteries. (For to see the sky is to see the sky behind our own eyes. And the same goes for what we see through a telescope or microscope. Even the telescope is behind our eyes.)

I am fully prepared – having ruminated on Riemannian Manifolds, gravity/time dilation, Hopf Vibes, nonlocality, and “the speed of light squared” – to accept that much of the truth is so far beyond human experience that it is literally unfathomable. In fact, as early as High School physics/calculus I was stopped dead by ‘imaginary numbers’ and the introduction of the Square Root of Negative 1. (I shake my head to this day at the blithe way we all accepted what actually would baffle us silly if we gave it a moment’s consideration.)

So my view is we most likely cannot embody the greatest knowledge enough to truly understand it.

Meanwhile, the ancients thought they could know. And moreover, they thought they could guess.

All to say, my mind is already blown by the cosmos and consciousness. And, that I can see, there isn’t a next paradigm beyond where I am now that further explodes out the pre-blown brain. Which is not to say that I think the issue of the universe is a dead end. Except insofar as it is an aloof infinity.

kev ferrara said...

Naming is precisely understanding, but not a final understanding - there is always room for more naming. Its a grasping of experience, not the experience. Naming helps experience not be so mysterious.

It is exactly the anti-anxiety property of naming - the satisfactory feeling it gives that a mystery has been more or less tamed simply by its labeling - that encourages the pretension that it is knowledge.

In reality, names are stickers. Remembering all the stickers and which stickers go on which items are trivia games.

Wes said...

"In reality, names are stickers. Remembering all the stickers and which stickers go on which items are trivia games."

Sadly, this is the theory of the con man too, but not worthy of the serious seeker of reliable knowledge e.g., engineer. The con man hopes the con will accept the stickers randomly chosen to compel belief (On Sale $9.99!). That's his game, but not so trivial if one is scammed.

The engineer knows that the cosines that help build the golden gate bridge were not mere stickers of a trivial game, nor mere pretensions that made the builders feel better.

The notion that knowledge is mere pretension is the Shaman’s religion; he counts on it.

Richard said...

I wonder how many making layers he went through to make this picture. Having that sky wash and snow wash be so wet, yet having so much detail sitting right over top of it, without (it appears) the use of any gouache or casein layers, had to be a brutally painstaking process

Richard said...

**masking layers

Sorry, autocorrect

chris bennett said...

Wes,

But aren't you making that (Platonic) error by assuming the great unknown is a "thing" that cannot be understood, only experienced?

When I say 'all experience is, at root, mysterious' I'm not saying experience cannot therefore afford us understanding but that this understanding is partial, necessarily constrained within the narrow band of our senses.

For example; I understand that water quenches my thirst, but have no idea how. So, I study biology and furnish myself with a number of reliably predictive propositions about how the body communicates to itself its need to imbibe water. But I have only extended my understanding with a bunch of qualifying propositions and have no idea how these things function at a lower level. So, I study chemistry and furnish myself with more reliably predictive propositions about what is happening within the body at a chemical level. But I have no idea what makes all that tick. So, I study physics, and then quantum physics, which tells me there is another level below subatomic particles which requires the building of a collider three times the diameter of CERN to have a hope of knowing what that might be. And on it goes.

My point here is that while propositional knowing (science) digs deeper and deeper or climbs higher and higher, it remains at all levels outside direct experience of what it is examining. So, I come back to the bodily level - the feeling of water on my parched tongue is literally tasting a mystery that surrounds us from the deepest to the highest.

Admiring a gymnast's skill is also conflating technical acheivement with wonder and amazement. Its the wonder of human competence where nature gave no imperative, but the human animal impulse found something worth creating. Parrish's twilight is awesome because he named it and could recreate at will what nature does blindly and randomly.

If you believe that nature 'does' what it does blindly and randomly then it follows that Parish himself and his 'will', which must, by your argument, be prefixed 'so-called', together with the painting of his Twilight, all be a product of blind chance. So what's so awesome about that?

My answer would be that it points to the deep inadequacy of the reductionist materialist model of reality.

Yes, our umwelt "grounds" us, but we humans are not bound by that ground. Loren Eiseley noted that we are the sole creature that has escaped the determinancy of nature.

Our tools delude us into thinking this. I'm a bird because I control an aeroplane or a fish by strapping on some scuba gear, or a giant because I operate a crane or mechanical digger. In truth I am only extending my reach in terms of my body but in no way am I transcending it.

To unpack this a little: Yes, the human mind has devised ways of organizing populations numbering millions, but the individuals comprising these artificial social mechanisms remain bound by the same bodily limits that constrained our earliest ancestors; we can only manage so many loved ones, friends and acquaintances. Regardless of travel by fast machines or instant communication everywhere or constructing skyscrapers, we can't help but feel distance by how far we can see and walk, time by the rising and setting of the sun, amount by how much we can hold.

Next time you look at a photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy, billions of miles across and thousands of years completing one revolution, note the only way you can relate to it; a stirring of a cup of coffee.

kev ferrara said...

Or is it a truth that ad hominen attacks are aways wrong?

Idiots abound, but most of them will stay on Earth.

Sadly, this is the theory of the con man too, but not worthy of the serious seeker of reliable knowledge


Do you know how to argue a point in good faith?

The engineer knows that the cosines that help build the golden gate bridge were not mere stickers of a trivial game

You aren't distinguishing name from meaning. There are many meanings that have no name, and many names that have no meaning.

The notion that knowledge is mere pretension is the Shaman’s religion; he counts on it.

You've managed to nest a No True Scotsman fallacy inside of a Strawman fallacy. That wins you something, but not an argument.

kev ferrara said...

I wonder how many making layers he went through to make this picture. Having that sky wash and snow wash be so wet, yet having so much detail sitting right over top of it, without (it appears) the use of any gouache or casein layers, had to be a brutally painstaking process

Exactly.

Parrish was famously quoted as saying his work was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. He would often have a dozen paintings drying at once, because each glaze layer on each picture alone required weeks of drying time. His studio was more of craftsman's workshop than an artsy atelier.

I don't know the maximum number of layers of oil glazes he ever laid on a single picture, but I do know that there is something uniquely eerie about his paintings because you kind of see through them. The layers of glazed colors don't reflect light as opaque paint does. Rather it feels like the glazes filter the light as it bounces off the white ground behind the layers and back up through them toward the eye.

I have never seen a brushmark on any of his pictures. I believe he used poncing and stippling to apply his thin oil glazes through finely cut friskets.

Wes said...

"You've managed to nest a No True Scotsman fallacy inside of a Strawman fallacy. That wins you something, but not an argument."

Ha! You've managed to miss the point to make the point. Touche!

kev ferrara said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
kev ferrara said...

Ha! You've managed to miss the point to make the point. Touche!

You win again Zorro. Just like in the movies.

Wes said...

Chris,

Great comments. Much to mull over here. This is nice gem, almost poetic:

"Regardless of travel by fast machines or instant communication everywhere or constructing skyscrapers, we can't help but feel distance by how far we can see and walk, time by the rising and setting of the sun, amount by how much we can hold."

chris bennett said...

Thank you Wes. And thank you for your considered push-back and challenges, a fruitful dialogue.

Sean Farrell said...

Chris brought up the key word of understanding in the concern between language and existential reality. An infant trusts its mother in innocence, but it has learned to trust its mother, a lion cub learns to snap the neck of its prey from its mother, a person experiences terror observing a brutal crime. All are nonverbal and of understanding. Language is an aid in understanding and itself can be brutal, simplistic, crude, or refined. We accumulate nonverbal and verbal understandings which can be codified as memories or recognitions and they shape habits in an individual, but they’re shared through a medium such as art, music, talking, even writing.

The painting by Zhaoming Wu is filled with understandings the artist intended, but the painting is understood without necessarily noting all of the intentions verbally. Yet when pressed to describe what one sees they might describe some of what was thoughtfully intended. Verbal and nonverbal areas are not foreigners but benefit each other in understanding. An artist asks, what different colors can one recognize in a particular color.

Understanding is both nonverbal and verbal and can be arrived at through either. Forgiveness is a simple concept that is arrived at verbally. Forgiveness is not the label of a thing, but an act which has yet to happen. It releases one from the current action of holding a grudge. A nonverbal state previously inflamed by some misunderstanding is relieved of tension through forgiveness. So it’s a very complicated act which changes one’s will. Will is a kind of hell and yet it’s neither a picture or an object. Will is a reality that’s difficult to understand and is often assumed as part a concrete self, when it's often habit. Verbal understandings can be trained into nonverbal understandings or what one might call second nature, but it's learned. All understanding makes way for further understandings. No need to jump in the same puddle all the time.

Sean Farrell said...

The nonverbal may be by its nature mysterious but it can be just as readily mundane. The mystery that is confounding is the more important one. I recall an experience David described of awe that overcame him before the cave drawings in France. Though one may not be ready to call such religious, many people have experiences which are described poetically in the Song of Solomon as a Stag. It has particular characteristics; that of entering silently of its own accord, having grace, dignity, tranquility, beauty devoid of human wants and desires, and leaves one just as silently, affecting one by its gratuity, purity and tenderness. Sometimes such experiences can be very subtle.

Someone told me the stag or deer appears around the border of the cloth upon which the Eucharist is consecrated in the Catholic Mass, symbolizing the same. The experience is confounding because it can engender a profound desire to recapture its qualities without fully understanding its nature, like a new friend. The Hindus embraced its humility and built a society upon it and the Buddhists embraced its harmony. The Buddhists and Catholics created their own contemplative practices, meant to prepare one by way of prayers and meditations to enter into the experience known as contemplation. Many pitfalls accompany the subject and one is the tendency to by will demand too great a self annihilation. Forgiveness or compassion aren’t givens either and the sensual nature of the experience could become its own end missing the gratuity required of reception. What I’m trying to get at here is that this nonverbal event requires language to guide and understand the nature of what’s experienced. Moderns assume it’s some biochemical event leaving us without the meanings which define our humanity. So language isn’t simply the labeling of something, but an indispensable part of recognizing our human being, because it reaches into things which that are neither three dimensional or pictorial, thus the use of the poetic imagery. The goal is to understand, by nonverbal and or verbal means.

Richard said...

> His studio was more of craftsman's workshop than an artsy atelier.

It shows in his work, unfortunately.

kev ferrara said...

Language can be an aid to understanding...

We accumulate nonverbal and verbal understandings.


I think these two notions are at odds, Sean.

It is a common mistake to think of an understanding as ‘verbal’ or 'textual.' But to imagine that the signs in your mind contain meaning is just like saying that a sign on a wall contains meaning. It doesn't. The meaning is in what understanding is communicated into you, such that you can feel that understanding. And if you don’t feel that understanding, there hasn’t actually been understanding, only its illusion.

We all have had the experience of explaining something to somebody and seeing in their faces that they haven’t actually apprehended or digested the idea. We can detect when the insight bomb hits the target versus when it doesn’t. When it hits, we can sense that the meaning has been felt. When it misses, even if they can repeat our exact words, we sense a nothingness behind the eyes.

Not coincidentally, we have learned from brain imaging some key internal differences between dead metaphors and live metaphors. The live metaphors actually activate in the brain a sensual cascade; they are felt (aka apprehended aesthetically). Whereas the dead metaphors have little sensual charge to give them vivified meaning. They have become rote, ‘understood’ in some static, academic, dull way.

All to say, the verbal is a tool or aid to understanding, yes. But it itself is not understanding. Just a sign pointing hopefully, sometimes helpfully, toward aesthetic force complexes that correspond to real experience.

The nonverbal may be by its nature mysterious but it can be just as readily mundane.

“Pyle’s main purpose was to quicken our souls so that we might render service to the majesty of simple things.”

"Everything is dramatic, if we could only see it so. Even a flower."

(Harvey Dunn quotes)

Mundanities by
Emil Soren Carlsen
Hovsep Pushman
Walter Hunt Everett

Sean Farrell said...

We experience language as well as use it and meaning doesn’t have to ring a bell on a brain scan. Nor do insights always require felt experiences. Memories, ideas and images collide bringing new insights all the time, sometimes with very little effort on our own part.

We don’t separate images from their evoked feelings or music from its evoked feelings and I don’t think one can separate words from their evoked feelings, and if it can be so for one it can be so for all because each are forms of recognition. Words can be as emotional as affection because they are apart of us.

For decades I believed words were put pointers but found it too rigid a position taking too much for granted. Language is part of us like our hands are part of us. We probably don’t have to use words as much as we do, but without them we would be terribly limited. We only need to see the effects of illiteracy to observe its imprisonment.

I love the Pyle and Dunn quotes.
Thanks for the stunning paintings!

kev ferrara said...

Sean,

I agree about the importance of literacy for communicating knowledge and expanding one's scope of understanding. That's a different kettle of fish. Glad you liked the quotes/images.

The implication of your latter day conversion regarding words is that symbol, definition and meaning are not only inseparable to the point of being in synthesis, but also that each case of such a synthesis is itself an existential reality.

You can believe that all you want, but you can't argue for it coherently.

Images and Music are different than words because they, generally, convey meaning aesthetically, and thus require no decoding. To the extend they do require decoding, they present anaesthetically, like words; symbols requiring reading, then reference to the code, then revivifying as aesthetic meaning based on the symbolic decode result.

Language, in the sense of the speech or text, is actually not like our hands. It is like our faces, at least somewhat. The space in the brain where language resides is also where facial recognition and facial decoding resides. The language of the face is in fact the ancient brain circuitry upon which our kluged modern day language has been retrofitted. And, rumor has it, face-blind people tend to be those whose text/verbal language obsessiveness has essentially driven out their ability to read the language of faces.

Sean Farrell said...

Ask a blind person whether there is emotion in language. There is emotion in most of the language that takes place on almost any blog and this one is no exception.

Yes, a single word is a pointer, but there's a difference between a single traffic sign and a sentence and a sentence and more complex communication. The way people use language is smack full of emotions, patience or a lack of patience, clarity or confusion, will or empathetic self giving, proving a point of letting one slide and so on.

Try painting without any codified behavior and you wouldn't get the cap off a tube of paint. The presumptions we carry about what is purely existential is rather romanticized.

We can't remove what is evoked from art, music or language. We can only remove language from the mix when it doesn't evoke emotions.

The hands, the feet, the face, my point was that we can't separate ourselves from language. This is a puddle, the confounding experience is the sea.

kev ferrara said...

Emotion is general aesthetic understanding; it is embodied. Yes, one 'hears' emotion through language, no one is arguing against that. The question is the source of that understanding.

Language hangs the elements of its lexicon on a structural grammar. The lexicon is all code signs that require the cultural code book to read. If you don't have the code book, the signs are gibberish. The rote and codified nature of both the structural basis and codex of a language is inherently academic, abstracted, 'intellectualized.' There is no naturalness to it. Thus there is no emotion in language per se.

Where language content alone causes emotion, outside of performative additions, it must first get through the decode process (this cannot be escaped, one cannot feel a word, one must read it), in order to prompt the feeling in the context of other feelings, knowledge, perspectives, etc.

Where written language is functioning as poetry and given that "poetry communicates before it is understood" (eliot) it is functioning as music. Since each letter in written language is a piece of code itself, designated as intellectual representing certain sounds by fiat, one cannot know the music unless one first decodes the letters into their sounds. And then, concatenating sound upon sound, one vivifies the rhythm, tension, release, and melody; the encoded music, of each line, line by line, into the song of the paragraph. This, or else the text cannot communicate in the aesthetic mode as music does.

Where spoken language causes emotion due to pure performative expression (yelling, sobbing, joyfully yelping)... that too is functioning as music upon our souls, so to speak. There is hardly a relation between words yelled in anger or yelped in joy and words written articulately and deliberately in terms of the way they are essentially conveying meaning. Performative emotion spreads by physical forces of various sorts, vibrations, vibration types, harmonics, amplitudes, and other forms of touch - from body to body.

Aside from musicality, there is textual implication to poetry. This is purely post-music and post-decoding.

Artfulness is suggestiveness. To be suggestive requires related terms to imply what is not present but which is yet abstractly installed. There is a distinct qualitative difference between the terms of art - which are not codified - and the coded terms of a lexicon.

Where the terms of art are codified, we are dealing with conventions. And, despite your assertion, many artists can open up a tube of paint without falling into conventions.

Sean Farrell said...

I’m not arguing with your basic aesthetic statement which you’ve made clear before.

I’m trying to broaden the understanding of codification to include things we assume are instinctive but are in fact learned. Yes, art and music present themselves aesthetically, non verbally, but the codification in them isn’t just of artistic conventions. They’re of intentions that are codifications of a cultivated and civilized nature. Feeling can be incredibly refined or left to defend itself in a wilderness.

The Pushman you posted is an ode to civilization and painted with superior sensitivity. The amount of civilization embedded in the painting itself is impressive and a reflection of the subject. The tension between the image on the wall and the taller figurine along with the other two objects is fantastic.

I agree with you that deep down in us is an organic core that’s extremely sensitive and that sensitivity experiences the shame of being vulnerable. In the course of pursuing knowledge that interior core is no less vulnerable, but knowledge is used to defend it like a scar defends a wound. Knowledge becomes weaponized as a manner of justification. It’s not hard to argue that having forgone the manners and codes of civilization, people are left to defend themselves ever more so with knowledge inching its way towards an intolerance of all knowingness and violence. Even a nod can address a person adequately compared to endless communications and the defenses required of every statement in the absence of manners. The whole rumble elevates subjects above their civilized purpose. We know everything until we figure out we don't.

A voice is a unique thing which is part of us and can’t be separated from us. It’s as unique as a chick’s call to its mother in a flock of 100,000. Our voice is part of us, not separate from us, despite the scandal of numerous languages.

We can’t open a tube of paint without having opened tubes before and the struggles people have opening new safety caps on bottles is a testament to how confusing and difficult a simple procedure becomes with endless defensive requirements. We wouldn’t open the tube if we had no reason to open it, which requires a memory. All memories, learned non verbally or verbally are codified and become habits, mentioned earlier.

Talking has become barely worth the effort because the process of talking without said manners and conventions makes it a frenzy of self protective behaviors hidden in defensive accusations. The frenzy isn’t inherent in language itself which attempts to convey one thing to another, it’s in the paranoia of the vulnerable self expressing itself without the protective conventions making discussion amenable.

The experience which confounds doesn’t present itself as a visual event, nor as language, yet has recognizable attributes which functioned not just as a framework for civilization but as the object of its love.

I’m sympathetic with your concerns for the problematic nature of certain languages that are disconnected with our nature.

David Apatoff said...

Kev, what do we know about that Walter Everett painting? I assume it was done in oils, from the period when he used flat colors and an unorthodox palette. Still, I never would've placed it as a painting from the first half of the 20th century. It looks like a digital painting, and the appearance of transparency is new to me. Very impressive work.

chris bennett said...
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chris bennett said...

Maybe this will help a little with the dialogue between Sean and Kev:

A child learns the language of speech by noticing the correspondence between a thing and a sound which is made salient to the child's attention by the parent simultaneously pointing and naming. This principle, once familiar, allows the child to accept, again through the act of pointing, the correspondence of an action to a sound. Followed by correspondences between actions and things. And so this process stacks up to ever greater complexity and subtlety into something we call spoken language.

And for this to take place the child's understanding must be prior to language in order to intuit what is going on and is therefore distinct from it. Language is a tool, and a tool is innocent of the purpose for which it was made.

kev ferrara said...

Kev, what do we know about that Walter Everett painting?

I also assume it was done in oils. Though some works from his 30s era are done in Tempera. So there is that possibility.

I think the image I linked to might be just a touch oversaturated. But just a touch.

The still life is in the family collection, looks to be about 20" x 20" or so. And it has a sequel. Some time later, after a layer of dust had settled over the still life, Everett painted it again.

Sean Farrell said...

Yes Chris, spoken language is learned phonically in relation to things. Dewey tried to teach reading visually with the Dick and Jane books with very poor results. My age group was part of that experiment. The infant learning to trust her mother is through a language of affection and presence. It’s felt and sensed externally and internally but not necessarily by a visual process, at least in the earliest weeks. Yes, I remember my daughter looking at my finger instead of where I was pointing. She didn’t say a word for four years and now has a job as a linguist.

We learn and interpret things on a bunch of levels. We learn about very complex concepts like willfulness and forgiveness using words as I mentioned. Parts of complex concepts can be learned through sense and example but not all. Language shapes and fills out our intuitive understandings which we may but not necessarily know what to make of.

When Kev sent paintings of the mundane I thought was going to see some spectacular paintings of car dealerships.

Thanks and have a good one. Sean

kev ferrara said...

Sean,

I don’t understand why you are expanding out the discussion of symbolic and linguistic codes to include codes of conduct.

That opens the door, in this context, to interpret artistic standards, even artistic ideas, as codes of both conduct and language, and therefore as something requiring linguistic translation and interpretation in order to understand.

Which is exactly the opposite idea altogether to aesthetic creation and the suggestive nature of artmaking; where universal intuition is the sole essential interface, the ‘intellect’ and all its tribalisms bypassed by design.

During the aesthetic phase of viewing art, the extent the audience engages with the intention of the artist is purely dependent on the extent to which that intention has been materialized on canvas and is felt as sensual meaning by the viewer. But that which is manifested unintentionally is equally sensed by the audience. And how many could distinguish one from the other?

After the aesthetic phase of viewing art, as I've pointed out all too often, anything goes as far as interpretation. For example...

The Pushman you posted is an ode to civilization

That is your opinion of its intent. And like all post hoc verbalizations of experienced aesthetic content, a whole lot is begged, borrowed and lost in the translation.

---

It is true some behaviors that start out inorganically become routinized with time. That doesn't make them codes in either sense you are using. Sometimes though the behavior does start out as a code. One learns “lefty loosey, righty tighty” as a child. Eventually, repeating the words by rote stops being necessary; we instinctively twist counterclockwise to remove a jar lid. True.

But this is a simple physical act.

Qualitatively diametric, to decrypt lexical efflux of labyrinthine grammatic tectonics without mental reflux is to obdurately auto-insist upon the assiduous realtime grokking of a possibly quite turbulent cipher torrent.

Richard said...

>20" x 20" or so.

39” X 40”, oil on canvas

> And it has a sequel. Some time later, after a layer of dust had settled over the still life, Everett painted it again.

And evidently the sequel has been lost

Sean Farrell said...

Okay, so I’ll tell you again. I brought in conduct as an example where aesthetic interpretations are inadequate to fully understand complex implications from experiences and have said so to Chris and earlier. The business of aesthetics verse linguistics had been brought up by Wes and yourself earlier. I gave the example of Dewey bringing a visual approach to teaching reading as an example of pushing a concept where it never belonged. It turned out to be a disaster lowering the IQ’s of children.

Why the notion of memory as a code is problematic to you is something of a mystery to me. Seems clear enough. Something can’t be recalled without being in some fashion a memory. A thought not there is recalled or triggered by associations and becomes retrievable. There’s no thing stored called a memory like a jar of jelly in a closet, so it takes another form. I never referred to it as linguistic code and why would I? There have been other names used for it in animals and sports training, but it doesn’t so much matter how it happens because nobody knows exactly how it happens. I went over the terms I was using several times and it was clear I wasn't referring to recognition as a written code.

To me Pushman is an ode to civilization whether he intended such or not. It was my comment on the picture. No I wasn’t attempting to sum up my entire aesthetic experience in words.

kev ferrara said...

The sequel.

kev ferrara said...

(I don't know why I wrote 20" x 20" when it was obviously twice that size. Brain hiccup.)

kev ferrara said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
kev ferrara said...

I brought in conduct as an example where aesthetic interpretations are inadequate to fully understand complex implications from experiences

Since, to a large degree, conduct is an aesthetic matter, the point you seek to make is not clear as you think.

However, it is obvious, and nobody is arguing against the idea, that in many instances what is said or written can be an aid to understanding. This does not make language per se (naming) an inherent container of meaning or understanding.

Nor does a lateral chain of associations entail that a code is in place. Particularly since associations are classically understood as sensual in nature, nonlinear, and not necessarily predetermined. (One can take many routes to any Rome in the mind.) Meanwhile code is understood as being a system of rote commands and substitions where every answer is predetermined.

All to say, at this point I have no sense of the coherence of your theories of mind, meaning, symbol, language, naming, or code.

But you do seem like a good person, which is far more important to me.

chris bennett said...

I had not seen the sequel to Everett's still life painting and did not know it existed, so it was a treat to discover it here. It looks like its been damaged by fire, is that true? That or submerged half way into boiling pitch.

But from what is legible its fascinating to see how this somewhat poster-like manner of Everett's can evoke something like dust and demonstrates how much textural suggestion is carried out purely by shape relationships. Chardin would have been interested - maybe he sent down an angel to burn it... :)

Sean Farrell said...

Kev,
I appreciate your compliment very much.

I did refer to habits in the course of my notes which have something to do with rote. We refer to them being stored for lack of a better word, yes, though they come apart and back together when triggered in the mind through a series of non linear impulses. That people don’t have to learn to walk everyday implies something is stored which carries out a predictable behavior and that’s why I used the term code, and when damaged in accident people sometimes need to relearn simple things forming new pathways.

But I also referred to complex implications arising from the confounding experience, which I'm referring here as aesthetic because of its beauty is of a on verbal nature, but in truth no one knows exactly what is going on since there’s not always a particular connection between the stimulation at the time and the experience. David was looking at something beautiful but a similar experience can happen without any particular visual or external sensory input. So there’s something called discernment to meditate and ponder the nature of the event. The experience can happen in the presence of verbal communication, for no apparent reason, or in the receptivity of listening to someone. Nothing in particular is required to bring upon the beauty of the experience, which is another reason it's referred to as confounding and yet none of that denies that visual beauty in painting is a conduit for an aesthetic experience.

As you once mentioned, a painting isn’t going to elicit an aesthetic experience for everyone. You’ve been walking the walk for a long time so understand the terrain. You developed in another sense of the word, a habit.

In the religious world, the practices of prayer and humility for example are done as habits so one’s behavior comes in closer accord with the beauty and attributes of the confounding experience. Thus a nun wears a habit. I know this doesn’t fit the Hollywood version of a nun, but when I asked my Irish wife what the nuns were like in Ireland growing up she thought about it a minute and said slowly, they were very refined, soft spoken, elegant and then added, they were lady like.

"Since, to a large degree, conduct is an aesthetic matter, the point you seek to make is not clear as you think.”

This was my initial point in joining the conversation, that the confounding experience I referred to is incapable of discerning itself and tends to certain errors by its desire to reexperience the event. The attributes I mentioned initially as desirable through the image of a stag were fleshed out by the Spanish poet, St. John of the Cross when for instructional purposes he described one of his poems.

One error is to demand by will an extreme denial of self and language in order to enter into the non verbal experience. In other words, one overdoes it. The other I mentioned was to hunger for its sensual pleasure without recognizing the higher nature of its characteristics. Both errors sought to jettison our verbal capacities in hope of finding the aesthetic (sensual) pleasures in disregard of its inherent refinement, behavioral purposes or higher nature. The container of meaning as you put it is in the self and a part of our self is discernment by reason. Though of a different nature and not to be confused with contemplation, it is within the same container of being and need not be at cross purposes with experience and is an experience in its own right; though not the fulfillment of desire. Written or spoken language is not within the container of a painting, yes that’s true. But the confounding experience is not fully containable in either visual or any externally sensory experience. It can come and go through any of them or interiorly, regardless.

No, it’s not as clear as anyone thinks, but it's not hopeless either, one can get find themselves close and with a difficult and mysterious subject, that's pretty desirable.
Thanks,
Sean


Wes said...

This is a really nice statement, very insightful and beautifully said:

"Though of a different nature and not to be confused with contemplation, it is within the same container of being and need not be at cross purposes with experience and is an experience in its own right; though not the fulfillment of desire."

Sean Farrell said...

Thanks Wes,
One of the few sentences that I didn’t botch editing and forgetting tenses or leaving extra words floating among missing letters.

The subject is filled with great beauty because it is beautiful and sensed and no
one can’t be faulted for their frustrations with language in trying to share it with others, no less on a blog.

Still, if people are inclined to become beasts when they can’t formulate simple
communications without frustration, then when all walk away from this subject with their heads intact it’s a success because this is a very difficult subject, stunted not just by prejudices, impulses, expectations and egos but by language misunderstanding its relationship with experience and experience not understanding the purpose of language.

Language can be a conduit to the elusive experience just as art, when its higher
properties are internalized, as they are internalized in a painting.
Kev has taught me a lot about art in this manner and if the silent aspects of
the confounding experience could be better understood it would go a long way
to resolving the confusion between experience and reflective understandings.
Sean

kev ferrara said...

Sean,

You’ve run with the word ‘code’ in seven different directions since you descended into the fray. You equated it to learned habit, with mores, with learning how to walk, with mental association…

All this is quite far off from my original point about code, which was to distinguish the linguistic shell of an idea, the surface symbolization, from the aesthetic source of its meaning. Which I can assure you, after years of research, is not in the symbol. (Thus symbol and meaning must be separate conceptual entities. Even when visually synthesized. And they provably are distinct, I also can assure you. Or else Art would not be strange and powerful.)

One of your attempts to de-differentiate symbol and aesthetic meaning I’ll isolate and steelman as follows: Since we can learn things by rote which then become instinctual – the instinct being the conduit of aesthetic experience - then why can’t words also take that course and themselves become aesthetic like the terms of art?

Quite simply, because there is no iconicity to words. Except occasionally and in a rather weak onomatopoetic way. Words are a fiat currency. Whereas art, in all forms of its plasticity, is essentially and naturally iconic. Thus inherently aesthetic.

It can never be so that a word becomes iconic in any absolute sense. For the code, not abstracted similitude, is the thing that must be apprehended, its decrypting forever the entry to its meaning. The iconicity of a word, if it has any at all, is limited and final just so the coding takes primacy.

Also; do not confuse lightning quick decoding which leads to an aesthetic internal reaction with direct aesthetic experience. These are structurally different communication events.

Code is code. It requires precision translation. Whereas a toddler can draw a face and it is instantly recognized as so, simply because iconicity rules intution.

I have a few older friends, intelligent people, who were suffused in the brilliant-on-paper Whole Word Identification teaching debacle of the 1960s. And who, to this day, still have trouble reading. This is telling us something quite clearly about just how coded language actually is; failing to read the code in all its detail causes a decrypt fail. Whereas in aesthetic experience, minute details are the last fish in the barrel worth shooting.

Richard said...

> The sequel.

Oh that’s cool! Sounds like they tracked it down last year. Thanks for sharing

Sean Farrell said...

I used the term code in an accommodating fashion and thought it was self evident. DNA possessed in cells is organic and is referred to as code. Electrical impulses can move DNA according to experiments Luc Montaigne was working on before he died. We talk in terms of memory, recognition, recall and identifications interchangeably, because they involve some translation process within the mind and we do so without pretending to understand the exact physical translations taking place in the mind.

There is a connection in the mind between words, images and experiences as memories. Dreams may involve words, images and experiences, so somewhere each are recorded as memories and in the mind they share some process that allows them to reform sometimes as multimedia type dream events.

Whole Word Identification is a good example of the damage that comes from over isolating a subject. Teachers today are using a varied approach between phonics and reading interests. However one learns to read, to maintain and improve one’s vocabulary it has to be practiced and integrated with reading and interests as you certainly know well.

The distinction between iconicity and word symbol is a separate subject from how one can shed light on the other. Even in drawing attention to their distinctions you are demonstrating one purpose of language. My explanations tried to expand their beneficial relationship using the example of the confounding experience which expresses itself silently and is not necessarily visual. My point was that it’s not realistic to assume people can translate inarticulate complex felt experiences into understandings that necessarily benefit a person. Again I did so by showing how wonderful experiences can send one in the wrong directions missing the higher nature of the refined event and how language can aid in understanding such errors.

Thank you for further explaining the aesthetic nature and iconicity of art. It has been of great help to me in too many ways to explain and I am grateful, but for reasons unknown to me, you have no idea why I “came into the fray”. I came into the fray to bring peace to the never ending fray between words and aesthetic experience which need not be there. So that if one wants they can draw beauty from the confounding experience and the aesthetic experience and imbue such beauty into their behavior, one’s use of language, their interior person, their friendships, one’s entire life with the same if they are so interested.

kev ferrara said...

DNA possessed in cells is organic and is referred to as code.

Organic does not mean aesthetic.

memory, recognition, recall and identifications

Both associative chains and pattern matching are fitness and resonance processes, not code. One square looks like another because both cause the same feeling of squareness; the ease with which the feelings merge is conceptual digestion.

Regarding dreams and memories involving words. No one will dispute that the brain can conjure up the sound of words. We can even see words, or the number 5, in the mind. Which only serves to point out that everything in experience, real or imagined, has surface aesthetic content. That’s why we have cameras.

A memory can be beautiful. A memory can contain words. Yes. We might remember a beautiful scene in a film, and remember the dialogue. Yes. These things seem to us as wholes. But even color is separated from value in the Visual Cortex’s processing.

Even in one’s own dreams symbolic code still needs translation. Sleeping off a bad emotional experience once, I had a dream where I heard the phrase, “That psyched!” shouted. I had no idea what it meant until I woke up and realized it was a spoonerism of the phrase “That sucked!” and the word “psychology.”

We argue with ourselves. We fight against characters or events in our nightmares. One hemisphere begs the other to level up to an improved paradigm.

We aren’t as hooked up internally as we might think. We contains selves; we are partitioned. The particular partition that does the word business is uniquely apart from all others in several key ways (see previous point on its hijacked nature.)

There is no ‘fray’ between the aesthetic and the coded, between feeling and symbol, between poetry and a data dump. They are just different types of communication with different structures. Yet indeed, as you say, they can come together and form unitary emotional moments; memories, dreams, movie scenes, comic panels, and so on.

Thanks for the challenging conversation.

Sean Farrell said...

Kev,
You know I didn't imply that DNA being organic was aesthetic and that I used it to connect the word code to something that was outside your definition of text as code, yet still was code because the word code can be used in different ways. That's all.

Yes, biology is a complex system. But do the divisions of different bodily functions really define our different selves?

What we do defines much of what we are. We often do what we feel like doing or what we can with the best of our ability to figure out what we should do. Our understandings grow and change over time and one can say, that is what I was then and now I'm a different self. But for good or bad, the things we do catch up with us and such is a fair way of defining much of what we are. Still, we are more than that, because we are also the love others have for us. So yes, we are not confined to what we think we are, or what we are at some earlier time, that is true.

I enjoyed the conversation as well.

kev ferrara said...

You know I didn't imply that DNA being organic was aesthetic and that I used it to connect the word code to something that was outside your definition of text as code, yet still was code because the word code can be used in different ways. That's all.

No, I didn't know that. I frankly often struggle to figure out your reasoning or the thrust of your arguments because you write so discursively. I try to never to argue in bad faith.

I thought the thrust of your argument was that anything that went on in the brain without conscious thought was natural to it, thus aesthetic and uncoded. I assumed you were laying the groundwork by pointing out that our genes, utterly natural to our biology, were a form of code.

The definition of text-as-code is a special case of code generally, but is not fundamentally different. Code generally is a series of formalized commands useful for some endeavor that, depending on what inputs show up, cause predetermined actions or outcomes. Like Algorithms, Dogma, etc.

Somebody says "Thank you" you say, "You're Welcome." You see 22 + 19, you carry the one. One of the three Stop Codons shows up and the polypeptide decouples from the translation machinery. And so on.

Sean Farrell said...

I don't even know enough to assume the kind of suggestion in your last sentence. It is general knowledge that the brain is a more flexible system than mechanical.

But to rephrase a line about what we are, which includes many things we don't understand, we are the love that comes our way as well, because it affects us and in a sense feeds us whether we give it much thought or not in our isolated times. I added this because to tally our actions and errors alone is too narrow and bleak.

In a simpler time one just asked is he or she good for their word and that referred to the most important part.

kev ferrara said...

we are the love that comes our way as well

Sure. Wholistic or traditional ways of understanding ourselves and our works are just as valid as the more incisive or intellectual.

Which circles me back to a previous point of yours. That we can find in art other 'messages' 'encoded' besides those that I was addressing.

For example: We can intuit artistic ethics by noting the craftmanship and drawing quality of a work. We can sense temperament or sensibility by noticing the level of refinement and sobriety vs. exaggeration and whimsy. The taste of the clothing and decor chosen, even the physiognomy of the characters is indicative of something. We can detect era, culture, influences, ambition. We can detect sadness or joy, a full vs. empty life, level of art education or visual erudition. Imagination vs. construction. Procedure, and fear vs. courage, ineptitude vs. virtuosity in that procedure. And so on.

Some of this can be understood under the heading 'expression.' Some is sensed sympathetically or empathetically. And some stuff is sloppiness or accidental disunities that can be investigated outside the Aesthetic Window. (Like too-noticeable artifacts from the technique which distract from narrative belief.)

On the expression end, as with everything else in art, there is a wholistic way of looking at it, there's a way of appreciating it from a distance as an aficianado or historian or sociologist, and there's a way of going deep technically. I'm not much for the Heideggerian mode of art analysis, nor the theories of untethered academics. But as long as the technical and analytical doesn't overwhelm the spiritual, and as long as the technical and analytical is actually true and sufficient and yet still open, I think it adds a great deal. I've certainly had my eyes opened.

Sean Farrell said...

Kev,
Given that the brain has its own place to process language and we agree that language is apart of us I would like to add something that reflects on David’s post of the Maxfield Parrish serving as a refuge of tranquility nestled paradoxically in the wildly violent tempests of the universe with its incredible velocities.

To describe it is to leave it in the mind for further meditation. I brought up love because it’s an understandable and felt experience. Though there’s wisdom in self interest, self understanding requires guidance. Guidance isn’t just verbal though it may begin so. It can be a thought or a picture, sometimes neither but both, a
thought-picture.

Here’s an example. I’m concerned for someone passing a test who I know is struggling. I begin by thinking about them as a thought or picture and thought. In the process my heart is warmed for the person concerned and such comes to share interior space with the thought-picture of the person becoming a place of felt-thought-picture.
If the heartfelt increases and a silence begins one is advised to abandon the vocal-picture aspect and allow the silence of the confounding experience to be its own will. This is called mental prayer, a place of refuge similar to the Maxfield Parrish but in an interior way. It's an old practice written about in the late 1300s and 1500s.

But it is very rare person today whose heartfelt love of art has brought them to the aesthetic experience. Your persistence in trying to explain such a difficult subject and its relation to composition has been hard to understand not so much because we read words, but because so few have experienced such and it is far more difficult to recognize what one is talking about without having had the experience; leading one to believe that vocal language has no relation to deeper understanding. It does depending on its relationships. So I have ventured all over to explain the confounding experience, the interior life and its relationship to language so to compare with the aesthetic experience. Again a thanks to you for your efforts to explain a mysterious subject. Be well, Sean