This year's "end" is a beautiful painting by the talented Greg Manchess
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| The end in both senses of the word |
Greg's painting is about the commitment necessary to take meaningful creative risks.
Greg observed, "If there’s no risk, the commitment weakens and ultimately doesn’t matter. There must be the risk of loss or failure, otherwise the challenge is minimal." This picture is about taking that big leap, by an artist who has done so many times, and now counsels students over their own fear of hitting the ground.
Commitment is an important message for the end of the year (and for every year). But I think this image summons additional power and profundity from the fact that it is an archetype. It spans a variety of human experiences and deals with the fear of losing our equilibrium in the broader sense.
Stephen Crane wrote from a poet's perspective about dreading the possible meaninglessness of life:
If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant --
What then?
Freud offered a psychiatrist's perspective in his classic Interpretation of Dreams (1900): the universal dream of falling from great heights is our subconscious way of dealing with sexual excitement and release followed by the spectre of punishment by reality (the hard ground).
Today, modern psychologists have a different perspective, focusing on clinical cures for basophobia, the fear of falling.
And this year in particular, many are concerned that the daily supports of civilization-- the rule of law, civil government, empirical science, democratic tolerance-- are being clawed away by rage, leaving society in free fall.
Greg's great Archetype stretches across many human endeavors. Some of them require a degree in psychiatry or auto mechanics. Some require the skills of a poet or a taxidermist. But dang if I don't love the way art spans them all, bringing them together in a single object of beauty.
Happy new year to you all!
150 comments:
Awesome painting! Happy new year.
Wishing you a very Happy New Year. Your hard work and love for illustration really show in this site…it’s a joy to visit, and I’m grateful for the passion you bring to it.
It's an incredibly impactful work. Dizzying. Like all the challenges we face this year and in the years to come. But we'll take the plunge with courage, and whatever happens, happens. Happy New Year
I take the intention of the picture to be a metaphor for total commitment, damn all fears and conventions. I was following Manchess closely when he created this, and one can find connections to his life and work in the idea if one has, or is, that bent.
I wish the shade areas on the figure reflected the sky rather than the airplane. The latter implication, in my view, grounds the otherwise dreamlike/metaphoric work too much in the real world of imperiled flesh, travel logistics, and flying machines. Which then implies in the image suicide as much as freedom.
Happy New Year all.
Manchess is one of the rare good artists in illustration today. No AI or digital BS. Thanks for sharing this, and happy new year to everyone here.
JSL
Movieac-- Thank you very much for your kind remarks. I confess that I do love this stuff. I'm a very lucky guy.
Albert Campillo Lastra-- "Impactful" is a good word for it. I also like the fact that after the initial shock of the image, there's plenty of subtlety to enjoy in Manchess' treatment of the figure, the freedom of her hair, the brush strokes on the left leg and arm or the right shin and knee, the effect of rushing air reshaping the body... some really good work here.
Kev Ferrara-- I like the ambiguity about whether this is suicide or freedom, or whether she is about to fly away on butterfly wings. The wild freedom of a buck nekkid woman in free fall from an uncertain source to an uncertain destination deserves a response with as much wild freedom in interpretation.
This was one from a series of paintings of nudes in the sky, in different poses which did not reflect shadows from a flying machine. Have you seen, and if so do you have thoughts on, the larger series?
MORAN, JSL, and all others--- Thank you for your comments and exchanges throughout the year, it's been an education. Happy new year!
Hmmm. But thanks for the New Year's wishes David.
I'm afraid I do not agree with you that this image is archetypical because it operates really as sign rather than symbol. That's to say: it just looks like a naked lady being pushed out of an aeroplane.
Though I will agree that is how everything feels at the moment.
chris bennett-- That's an interesting response. Why are you assuming that the lady was pushed out of an airplane rather than voluntarily leaping? Or for that matter, descending from outer space? She doesn't seem to be wriggling in fear, she seems to be calmly facing the onrushing ground with her arms spread aerodynamically. And what is the "sign" that she has neither parachute nor underwear?
Of course, perhaps she'll change her mind before she hits the ground, which reminds me of a Richard Thompson comic strip about a school room hamster that yearns for freedom, but once he is outside the school fence he panics: "I'm free! Help help! I'm free! HELP! Let me back in!" (The strip is worth revisiting for a good new year laugh: https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2016/10/im-free-help.html )
Why are you assuming that the lady was pushed out of an airplane rather than voluntarily leaping? Or for that matter, descending from outer space?
Because people do not normally voluntarily jump out of aeroplanes without a parachute or naked. For example: if I were to come across a naked man running out of a house I would assume the most likely explanation; that he was probably fleeing an attack while taking a shower or sleeping. I wouldn't immediately assume he was someone who had that moment decided to liberate himself from all inhibition and prove it by launching himself naked into the street.
And what is the "sign" that she has neither parachute nor underwear?
Er, that she is not wearing a parachute or underwear?
As for your seeing her as seemingly calm and aerodynamically spread, I direct your attention to almost any of the 9/11 photographs of people leaping from the twin towers.
Thanks for the Thompson strip - it gave me a smile!
What does it all mean, Basil?
Knowing nothing about the artist’s intention, not really interested in the alleged aboutness of the work, and slightly surprised by locals’
eager production of meaning entirely via focus on the mimetic content, I’d say that the most interesting thing about this piece is how the extremely fore-grounded body is is assigned the function of landscape while the landscape is made to appear as flat as the sky. This is where I find the risk of the piece, and this is where it succeeds.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
…also, Happy New Year & thanks for all the care, effort, anger and love shared by all in this little corner of the internet.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"I like the ambiguity about whether this is suicide or freedom, or whether she is about to fly away on butterfly wings."
Because people do not normally voluntarily jump out of aeroplanes without a parachute or naked
Since neither panic nor fear; nor suicidal depression is detectable in the figure or in the way it is expressed, I think it is safe to assume the picture is meant allegorically or symbolically; and not as a violent tragedy.
Which is why the shadows that seem to indicate the presence of an airplane just out of view in the foreground and above us drag against the meaning-feeling. Bright blue reflections in those shade areas would have created an expansive sense of air and dreaminess, pinging the quality of poetic ideality. And would have further situated the figure as actually in the sky. (Even if the shadows were cast by clouds, which are not in evidence, blue would be suffusing the shaded planes of flesh more than is in evidence. Blue is blasting every which way in a blue sky.)
"The wild freedom of a buck nekkid woman in free fall from an uncertain source to an uncertain destination deserves a response with as much wild freedom in interpretation.
There is only one thing happening in the picture. There is only one moment shown. What doesn't resolve isn't meant to resolve or has failed to resolve due to artistic error.
What resolves immediately is the sense that this is an allegory of some kind and not an attempt at narrative realism. Is this disputable?
"Have you seen, and if so do you have thoughts on, the larger series?"
They seemed like practice pieces for him to technically loosen up from his assignments.
Postmodern anonymouse-- The highly controlled range of value in the landscape, as contrasted with the high contrast intensity of the colors of the figure, is one of my favorite things about this painting. The great illustrator Harold von Schmidt used to be a master of that effect; he acquired that skill from his years on the prairie as a real cowboy, staring off into the distance at remote landscapes. It requires restraint and judgment.
I plead guilty to the "eager production of meaning entirely via focus on the mimetic content," and all such speculations should of course be entertained with humility and more than a grain of salt. Still, that's one of the best things that mimetic content is for. Manchess has assembled a highly incongruous collection of mimetic statements and set them loose for us to make sense of. A figure falling through space with no explanation? Naked with no explanation? What kind of world is she landing in below? If the woman was some pinup cutie in a space girl outfit the speculation would end right there. But she's not-- she's a woman of a certain age, with a certain muscle structure and dirty soles on her feet that reveal she's been walking around . What's the explanation for his choices? This painting strikes me as extremely fertile ground for the "eager production of meaning entirely via focus on the mimetic content," and that's fine.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "They seemed like practice pieces for him to technically loosen up from his assignments."
Would it make a difference that some of those other paintings of naked figures falling through the sky are 5 feet tall? That's a lot of canvas for a practice piece.
I agree with you that "this is an allegory of some kind and not an attempt at narrative realism." But an allegory of what? I think it's to the artist's credit that there are a number of different allegories that could fit snugly into this archetype. More detail would've been less. If she was wearing argyle socks that would've severely limited the allegorical range.
Would it make a difference that some of those other paintings of naked figures falling through the sky are 5 feet tall? That's a lot of canvas for a practice piece.
I think I mis-connoted what I was trying to get at. I feel strongly he was trying to get to a place a freedom with the series. And the scale plays into that. So he was looking or needed to practice freedom, but the picture was not a practice picture in the sense of a study meant simply for studio use.
>>>>>>>and dirty soles on her feet that reveal she's been walking around
Her soles aren't dirty. They're just in shadow. You can see where the one sole is partially in the light that it is clean.
~ FV
FV-- Isn't it interesting that when a figure has been stripped of all clues-- clothing, posture, facial expressions, surroundings-- we begin to imbue the tiniest remaining details (such as the soles of her feet) with significance.
Do her feet reflect "the presence of an airplane [or some other airborne object] just out of view in the foreground"? And if so, what does that tell us about the reaons for her fall? Are her feet just the unintentional residue from a reference photo? Are these earthy, natural middle aged feet to distinguish her from a fantasy nudie space girl? The human mind is made to search and search for clues. I bet Manchess never suspect he would need to contend with so many interpretations when he painted those feet.
"we begin to imbue the tiniest remaining details (such as the soles of her feet) with significance."
For those playing the home game, it is worth pointing out that the above mode of considering pictures is a matter of semiotics, not aesthetics, nor poetics. Semiotics is most strongly associated with how we understand photography; via literalist deductive reasoning which satisfies our Sherlockian intellects which long for narrative closures.
While this picture is strong in the Aesthetic effect department, I think the reason we fixate on its Semiotics is because the Poetic layer is absent. While the Semiotic layer is slightly confused...
Whether her soles are dirty are not is a bad pictorial question. Same with any questions with respect to the reference. Good chit-chat questions. But bad artistic questions.
I might be able to shed a little more light on all this.
I think the image in question is trying to be a representation of Icarus half-succeeding, a kind of ambivalent triumph/failure of the Übermensch. But it doesn’t work by virtue of the following reasoning:
She is not a superhero because she is naked with feet of clay and wears no costume of otherness – the superhero is a sort of demi-god, an attractive gargoyle protecting its adopted church, an outsider bringing its power to the service of those who have accepted them, which at scale can be seen as that from far away come to save us, the transcendent saviour if you will.
But she seems to be something like the imminent attempting to be transcendent. And deep down we know this is not possible. Every iteration of culture except our own knows that this only works the other way around, that’s to say the transcendent precedes the imminent. Which is why the secular age came up with the superhero to fill its latent ontological vacuum.
So, there’s no getting around it: She has left her wings behind in the form of the aeroplane we are observing her from and right off the bat we know that the idea of her flying is a lie.
For me, the angle of her fall, her aggressive muscularity, the landscape and altitude, and even, strangely, her nudity, combine to give me the distinct impression that she is the personification of a bomb just released from a hatch.
"combine to give me the distinct impression that she is the personification of a bomb just released from a hatch."
Not to get all deductive-semiotic up in here, but she seems to be descending toward an unpopulated and bucolic countryside without a target in evidence.
And her pose, while arguably similar to a dropped missile just tipping earthward, is actually more similar to base jumpers. And - a quick ill-advised google search reveals - there have been nude base jumpers photographed/recorded.
she seems to be descending toward an unpopulated and bucolic countryside without a target in evidence
I’m experiencing that as bombing guerrillas. In footage from Vietnam, for example, it’s often impossible to determine exactly what is being targeted. But I agree that if that were actually his intention, we should see an airstrip or a village.
These meaningless pictures invite that sort of game: one projects meaning where it isn’t there.
These meaningless pictures invite that sort of game: one projects meaning where it isn’t there.
Well I dunno.
I think there is sufficient meaning in this picture such that we can't say it is meaningless or anti-meaning in the postmodern sense. There's a nude lady falling in the sky above a country setting. That is a coherent narrative idea. With a tremendous amount of meaning just in that coherence.
That she seems to have a shadow on her legs that does not much reflect the surrounding sky (which seems to indicate the presence some large dark object above and behind her)... adds a mystery. Arguably an inartistic one. But maybe I am wrong on that quibble.
As our Lady Godiver does not seem in a panic, and the artist doesn't seem to be adding any subliminal comment to that effect, we should assume there is no danger. We are thus in a fantasy. Which is not to say, as Chris points out, that she is some kind of superhero; given the lack of any such indicators.
Which is why I take the piece as allegorical/symbolic.
That the allegory isn't specified, doesn't negate all the other story specifics presented. Every good picture necessarily has inherent mysteries regarding the immediate past and future which bracket the singular visualized moment. Yes, the narrative here is somewhat more unexplained than most narrative art. But asking for more clues is like talking to the wall. This is the picture; wysiwyg.
"Lady Godiver" That's hilarious!
I’m not sure an unspecified allegory is an allegory at all. I agree the picture has the appearance of an allegory, but it seems like this “narrative apophenia” is where its content ends.
"I’m not sure an unspecified allegory is an allegory at all."
Leaving aside my grab at freedom thesis; something inside Mr. Manchess sent him off to create this series of sky nudes. I presume that internal voice is a poet. Must have been.
We are not always in touch with the specificity of what we are driven to do; we sometimes remain ignorant of the connection between our actions and their motivations. He may not even understand the why of the series.
Also, let's remember that good art shouldn't be readily translatable into English. Maybe what we have here is an "aesthetic allegory" A piece that is clearly symbolical, but written wholly in the language of art, so undecodable. An allegorical corner case.
Allow me to reintroduce myself
My name is All these strained epicyclicals, no matter how intricately constructed, will never satisfy. Just as no amount of revolution will put the Earth back at the centre of all things, there is no heart of the matter to be found at some sublime center of any given work of art. Meaning is always produced, never inherent.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"Meaning is always produced, never inherent."
How do you know this?
"Meaning is always produced, never inherent."
Postmodernism and clickbait are the same thing.
“Clickbait” is a feature of the attention economy, which commodifies and capitalizes on mental capacity. It is a tool for surplus extraction, to the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the many.
“Postmodernism”is a floating signifier.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Because it is tautologically true.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Postmodern Anonymouse, do you think that 'meaning' is that which can only be spoken of - and agreed upon collectively - between two (or more) people in the form of a verbal or written language ?
Yes. Meaning is entirely a product of language, and one cannot escape the bounds of language. This is what is meant by the notion of there not being any "outside-text", which imbeciles have misunderstood to mean that tHE raDICal Left Evil PoStModernItSTS claim that there is nothing outside of the text, which again equals that nOTHing iS True, eVeryTHINg PermittTEd!
Tangentially, few are as unsurprised by the current status quo of Western real politics as readers of Baudrillard, who correctly identified the simulated reality that followed Marxism's failure in the 60s/70s. The illusory spectacle of soft power and Fukuyama's notion of the End of History which was maintained in the following decades is finally being decimated by Trump's radical honesty. What the imbeciles (on the left as well as on the right) still fail to understand is that the PoStModrNiST project was descriptive, not normative - and that the French nerds would have laughed (or cried) and what their children have wrought in the their name.
Just as PKD's was right when he wrote "The empire never ended", and as Carl Schmitt was in postulating that "The sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception", Baudrillard was and will be right in his understanding of the state of things.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Sounds like orc mischief to me.
Meaning is entirely a product of language, and one cannot escape the bounds of language.
If someone smacks you in the face you don't need language to know what it means. When you cradle a baby in your arms you don't need language to know what it means. When the rain hammers down on you all night and the morning sun falls upon your face you don't need language to know what that means...
If someone smacks you in the face, what does that mean?
When you cradle a baby in your arms, what does that mean?
When the rain hammers down on you all night and the morning sun falls upon your face, what does that mean?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
PomoAnon: "Yes. Meaning is entirely a product of language, and one cannot escape the bounds of language."
So if you go hiking alone, climb a mountain, witness a beautiful view from the top, cook some food on a stove, get chased by a bear, avoid getting mauled by the bear by ducking into a cave... none of that has any 'meaning' unless you convert it into language first ?
(Chris beat me to the same point while i was drafting this)
When the fox scurries over boulders to catch the hatchling rock ptarmigan in the light of the full moon, catches its prey and returns to the den to momentarily fill the bellies of its cubs, all the while aware of the scent of a recently present wolverine, what does it mean?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
It means that the fox has evaded danger and satiated the hunger of its cubs, for now.
If you were really unable to derive 'meaning' from your immediate environment and sensory experiences (which you're suggesting) you would be walking around wide-eyed, unable to make sense of anything you saw, and even unable to understand the basic cues from your own body telling you that you're hungry or cold etc. You would be like an alien just dropped into a completely new and unintelligible world. This clearly isn't the case.
It means that the fox has evaded danger and satiated the hunger of its cubs, for now.
Does it mean this to the fox, or to you?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
As I said; Postmodernism and clickbait are the same thing.
One off-putting, necessarily poorly-worded and poorly-defined strike at some basic value like meaning and the sad little egotistical schmuck gets all the attention he desired. The solipsistic word-games involved are just a routine, practiced academic sophistry.
Or he's an A.I.
Either way, it's attention-stealing, time-wasting clickbait. There is no reasoning with clickbait. None of the prior arguments that destroyed the view were remembered. It exists only to take attention and to immiserate or demoralize.
It exists only to take attention and to immiserate or demoralize.
It exists to challenge the priestly takes on what works art might mean.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"It exists to challenge the priestly takes on what works art might mean.
Your entire "challenge" consists of repeatedly insisting on some ethereal and solipsistic definition of 'meaning' that you never deign to fully articulate, let alone justify.
That's classic dogmatism. And dogma is always a power play. While word game arguments are always sophistry; well-oiled escape hatches for when caught out as an intellectual fraud. Your desire is not to educate, but to take high status in the conversation. That's your lone value and interest. What a waste of time.
https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2022/12/one-lovely-drawing-part-68.html?m=1#comment-form
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Postmodern Anonymouse
For your consideration:
1) The stance on subjective interpretation (by others) of the mimetic content in comment section in the above linked to post vs the stance in the present comment section.
2) Look up the definition of «meaning». Consider its etymology. What sets it apart from muddily synonymized terms?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"1) The stance on subjective interpretation (by others) of the mimetic content in comment section in the above linked to post vs the stance in the present comment section."
I have no idea what you are getting at. Please make it clear because I have no desire to chase down your riddles.
"2) Look up the definition of «meaning». Consider its etymology. What sets it apart from muddily synonymized terms?"
Look up the definition of meaning?? What is this, high school?
I'm an etymology fanatic. Etymonline.com is one of my favorite sites. I've used it extensively. I've also looked up every important art word in the available dictionaries back to the 16th century, including in art dictionaries. That includes breadth, rhythm, form, expression, and, yes, meaning. I daresay, I know more about Aesthetic theory than you can guess at.
Usage changes. I'm asking for your usage of the word meaning. If you don't want to provide it, because you're a supercilious chicken shit, please god fuck off.
If you have to ask then you do not know.
And this is because you do not understand that propositional knowing is downstream of perspectival, procedural and most fundamental of all, participatory knowing.
“ What the imbeciles still fail to understand is that the PoStModrNiST project was descriptive, not normative”
It’s a poor description with weak explanatory power.
The phenomena identified and exceptionalized by postmodernists are better explained by the natural cycles of cultural organization common to human societies in general, rather than evidence of an epistemic collapse. By pluralizing and clearing historical narratives, humanity is not entering a fundamentally new condition, but continuing long-standing evolutionary dynamics that have always governed how societies generate, preserve, test, and transmit meaning, albeit more rapidly.
What we are witnessing is not the death of metanarratives, but a standard revision of incomplete ones, not unlike Rome’s after the faith in the pantheon weakened but before Christianity took over. Societies are continually engaged in the development and testing of more accurate, reality-tracking metanarratives.
Any system embedded in reality that selects for survival, coordination, power, stability, or utility is necessarily selecting for epistemic accuracy, because successful action requires models that track real structure. Just as biological vision evolved not to seek truth but to enable survival, yet nonetheless came to track reality, traditions, legal systems, religions, and art function as collective perceptual organs. Systems that are broadly poor at truth-finding and error-correction fail when confronted by epistemically stronger systems.
Accordingly, long-lasting institutions are best understood as epistemically fit. Longevity itself is evidence of epistemic strength relative to environmental constraints. Greek philosophy, Roman law, Catholic theology, Enlightenment science, and the American constitutional order did not succeed through rapid revision, but through slow, organic, conservative evolution toward reality. Rapid, flailing updates are epistemic pathologies, not virtues.
Authority, as such, is not anti-truth, but evolutionary and epistemically hygienic. Legitimate authority emerges because it preserves, compresses, and transmits reality-tracking knowledge across generations. Enforcement mechanisms function as memetic hygiene, protecting slow-evolved knowledge from high-velocity, low-fidelity mutations. Societies differ ultimately in how well they distinguish healthy dissent from memetic noise. This distinction marks the difference between rudimentary and advanced societies.
Pluralism exists not because there is no truth, but because truth emerges slowly under constraint, and premature closure is more dangerous than prolonged competition.
I’m not certain I understand how these points are antagonistic to «postmodernism», which is neither a system nor an anti-system. Again, as a whole (which it isn’t either), whatever predictive power it might be said to have (as per Baudrillard, for instance), flows from it havibg been been accurate in its description of the state of things, not from any normative corruption of reality.
(Also, Lyotard isn’t the president of the postmodernists.)
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Nicely put Richard - a coherent explanation of how the forces at play here actually lay themselves out in the field and behave across time.
Language is a product of meaning, po'mo' twat, not vice versa.
Bill
“ What the imbeciles still fail to understand is that the PoStModrNiST project was descriptive, not normative”
Everything told to college students becomes prescriptive. All programming eventually becomes axiomatic and worldview, which eventually becomes - must become - action. One easily notes that the most programmable among us are not only obeying what they are told to do and think, but will also hallucinate what they are told to see and experience.
Why do you think the most manipulative, obsessively controlling people in the world fight so hard to control the schools and the media. And complain so hysterically when they lose any mass foothold on the public consciousness, or in the training of children.
Anybody who lived in the before times can see the cultural societal change and how it stemmed from ideological teaching; entirely inorganic; obviously astroturfed by organized activists who wanted a legion of vandals and chaos agents to bring down the impediments to their struggle for power and control.
Pluralism exists not because there is no truth, but because truth emerges slowly under constraint, and premature closure is more dangerous than prolonged competition.
Charles Sanders Peirce saw truth-seeking as a kind of direction toward a worthy but essentially unobtainable endpoint, that the grand group of all rational and circumspect investigators would get us closer and closer to over time; provided the way of inquiry was not blocked.
I suppose the appeal to and/or desire for a return to German idealism (but not along the Marxian vein, obviously!) makes sense here. Also, blaming the french nerds for your failing education system is like blaming Seneca for Andrew Tate.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>>>>>>>"I suppose the appeal to and/or desire for a return to German idealism (but not along the Marxian vein, obviously!) makes sense here."
Where are you getting that?
~ FV
Well, things have certainly taken a juicy turn while I was away. The twin assertions that "Meaning is entirely a product of language, and one cannot escape the bounds of language" is certainly a bold one, and seems to have stirred up a lot of questions, appropriately. Some of those responses are over my head (like the whole thing about the fox feeding her young-- what is this, a Socratic dialogue?) and some of them, mainly the gratuitous insults, are beneath me. But in the middle there's a whole lot of exciting grist for the mill.
Regarding postmodern anonymouse's initial assertion, as far as I know, most anthropologists believe there was drawing before there was language, and most linguists believe that we had communicative "sounds" (like the whimpering of wounded animals or threatening snarls or cooing affection) far longer than we've had language. (On this last point, the linguist/semanticist S.I. Hayakawa wrote some fascinating essays.) It takes a more confident person than I to say that those millennia of pre-language activity were "meaningless" by anyone's definition of the term.
It never takes long for these conversations to veer into everyone's favorite bête noire, postmodernism, but I think even that conversation is more constructive and better asserted than usual. Postmodern anonymouse's point, "Fukuyama's notion of the End of History which was maintained in the following decades is finally being decimated by Trump's radical honesty" had me nodding in agreement for the first half and doing a spit take with my coffee over my keyboard for the second half. Both extremes seem to me to be inconsistent with the 18th century empiricism on which I was weaned. If anyone out there is prepared to risk getting hit by a lightning bolt from the heavens, I'd love to hear an explanation of "radical honesty."
But while we're on the subject of truth, Richard writes: "Pluralism exists not because there is no truth, but because truth emerges slowly under constraint, and premature closure is more dangerous than prolonged competition." To me, this is another bold statement. Richard, at the risk of sounding like Pilate, can you give me an example of an absolute truth that has emerged "slowly under constraint" or any other way? It seems that before a lasting answer can emerge, the questions have already changed. (I assume your truth has to be absolute and unchanging because if it's subjective and temporary it doesn't really count as a Truth, does it?) The rise of existentialism (and perhaps its bastard stepchild postmodernism) is mainly attributable to the fact that a lot of very smart people of good faith tried for a long time to find absolute truths they could build upon (as opposed to absolute beliefs they were willing to kill for) and mostly ended up being frustrated.
"an example of an absolute truth that has emerged "slowly under constraint" or any other way? "
Selflessness, self-sacrifice, without benefit to the group to which one is affiliated. Ethical and moral urge without reward, material or egotistic.
Bill
It predates German Idealism by as long as human memory and experience.
Very briefly, regarding just one of the points you bring up:
The radical honesty of Trump occurs in his dismantling of the hyperreality of Western liberal democracy. Europe is slowly (too slowly) realizing that antagonism to illiberalism a la Carl Schmitt was purely a European takeaway from the two world wars, and also that all those soft power initiatives were indeed mere illusion. A surprising amount of people were blinded by the tradion leading up to Aaron Sorkin’s disneyfied version of the US, but I can’t believe many now still do.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
That a truth is absolute does not mean that our understanding of it must be absolute, nor even that it is fully expressible, but only that it exists and constrains reality in a way that allows us to slowly interpret the contours of those constraints.
You seem to be conflating subjective with provisional. The fact that for 40,000 years we did not know about DNA does not mean we were dealing with subjective material, only that our understanding of heritability was incomplete. When one farmer realized that producing cuttings allowed him to preserve the traits of an original organism, and another realized that breeding a plant with another exhibiting similar traits would more often retain those traits, they were both exploring the contours of truth. That their strategies differed does not mean they held “competing” truths, only incomplete ones. They did not realize that they were ultimately engaging in the same underlying process, reproducing genes to replicate traits, via different mechanisms. A Big-Endian/Little-Endian debate between cultivarists and breeders would not make the underlying truth subjective.
Similarly, in art, when painters discovered that flattening the range of values and shifting them toward blue in a landscape created a sense of distance, they were feeling out the contours of reality without understanding that atmospheric perspective is caused by miles of water vapor suspended in the air. That the effect worked was sufficient to show that they were exploring truth, even without a fully expressible explanation.
These is statements generate ought statements when combined with desire-based constraints:
If one wishes to retain certain traits in an organism, one ought to produce a cultivar or breed it with a similar organism, unless one knows a better mechanism for reproducing those traits.
If one wishes to create a sense of spatial expanse in the viewer of a painting, one ought to leverage atmospheric perspective.
I think a useful way to understand the idea of ‘absolute’ or fundamental truth is to relate the question to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, a problem that remains utterly resistant to attempts to solve it because the modern era approach is founded on the belief that all phenomena emerge from purely material, blind processes. But when we posit that consciousness is an ontological primitive, that’s to say material reality is nested in consciousness a far more parsimonious understanding presents itself.
So, regarding the ‘problem of Truth’, if we say that meaning is what brings reality into being and ceases to function and therefore exist without it, we have a firmer grip on what we are dealing with regarding deep truth. This is to say that a pattern found to iterate across all domains would be the acting out of a deep truth. For example, ‘The Heaven and the Earth’ is an existentially fundamental top-down bottom-up symbiosis in that it can be recognised in the relationship between head and feet, tree and root, seed and flower, plan and implementation, architect and bricks, carpenter and wood, conscience and morality…
‘There’s good in this world Mister Frodo’ – I’d say it was something to do with our being in alignment with Truth.
I wonder if Greg Manchess is reading the tangents in these comments, and thinking WTF?
Come on dude, that's such a lame contribution. If you have nothing to say, don't say it.
Bill-- Your examples of "absolute truth" all seem to be subjective notions of virtue that are shared by many but not everyone. They're followed by fewer and worst of all, are unverifiable. What am I missing?
Postmodern anonymouse-- I thought your point about honesty might be more focused on art than politics. (For example, Picasso's point that "art is the lie that makes us see the truth.") I singled out your phrase, "Trump's radical honesty" because I thought that Trump's detractors and supporters both agree that Trump is a pathological liar; the only question was whether his accomplishments justified it. Is "radical" honesty a form of honesty different from empirical honesty?
Joel Fletcher-- Greg Manchess understands that once an idea is unleashed onto the internet, it becomes ferae naturae, not mansuetae naturae. No one, including its creator, controls where it may go. Of course, one could make a similar point about all art, once it leaves the studio. At what point do the intentions of the artists cease to govern?
Truth does not need everyone to notice it, agree with it, care about it, or even be aware of it at all. It sounds like you’re confusing truth with consensus.
>>>>>>>>>"Trump's radical honesty" because I thought that Trump's detractors and supporters both agree that Trump is a pathological liar; the only question was whether his accomplishments justified it.
You still watch MSNOW and CNN, to this day the central clearing houses for Democrat "Deep State" propaganda, hoaxes, slandering, and lies. You probably still quote from West Wing. Maybe sit this one out.
What Trump told the truth about was the important stuff, that our government is precariously corrupt, profligate and unaccountable to our nation's interest, teetering on the edge of fiscal disaster. That the neoliberal internationalist project is insane, destructive, and full of self-dealing globalists, arms manufacturers, and political kickback schemes. George Soros uses his sway over the Democrat party to make billions from NGO scams while sponsoring radical activists and sending people like you over the cliff of political hatred and fantasy. Hollywood and our schools have been overrun by ridiculous dimwitted ideological hacks and queer activists who seem disinterested half the time in doing their actual jobs, and our so-called "mainstream media" is completely compromised by all of the above and Big Pharma.
We have serious problems. Real problems. Trump's blustering isn't one of them.
~ FV
Nah FV, the worst thing the Democrats are doing is to women. They're crushing women with addictive propaganda making them totally miserable, hateful and nuts. 60% of young liberal women are now diagnosed with a mental disorder. Relentless radicalizing Dem/Leftist propaganda is ruining their lives, putting them in harm's way, preventing them from having decent relationships with normal dudes or getting their lives together. But the elite scum know scaring women (and dumb minorities) sick is the only shot they have at winning elections legally.
"Your examples of "absolute truth" all seem to be subjective notions of virtue that are shared by many but not everyone. They're followed by fewer and worst of all, are unverifiable. What am I missing?"
"Few follow it," but everyone has had at least an an intermittent experience of realising that there is a genuinely disinterested virtue (i.e., non-rewarding or egoic) that exists and occasionally occurs in the world. Everyone except the pathological. Realising/experiencing that kind of transcendent goodness is a pretty big truth, not only that virtue is real but that something that can be shorthanded as 'goodness itself' is. I don't think the realisation was always there but was hard-won in the way Richard described.
Anyway, as Joel was doubtless nudging & I agree, let's segue back to the naked lady.
Bill
FV-- I apologize, I didn't think I was saying anything controversial. I wasn't referring to the lies claimed by his former business partners or by his golfing buddies or by the Democrats. I wasn't referring to the lies claimed by the press (although you can find the "top 16,000 lies" documented in one handy book by the fact checker at the Washington Post if you're interested). I wasn't even referring to the lies described by leading Republican intellectuals such as George Will. No, to clarify, when I referred to Trump "supporters," I only counted current MAGA enthusiasts. You know, the confidential emails from Fox News that came out during discovery in litigation, the statements by pundits such as Laura Ingraham or by Republican senators when they didn't think they'd be quoted. I wasn't trying to stir up a ruckus, I just thought everybody already recognized that part.
Like you, they believe that "What Trump told the truth about was the important stuff," which apparently doesn't include who won a presidential election, or who should be jailed or executed, or that Trump has a secret "full and complete health care plan" that he'll release in two weeks, as he has been promising for eleven years. (In fairness, Trump has dropped a few tantalizing tidbits from his plan, such as that he has negotiated a 600% decrease in the price of pharmaceuticals-- very impressive to the non-mathematicians in the crowd.)
Anyway, go ahead and respond all you want about my communist delusions. I promise I have no more rebuttals for you. As Joel and Bill wisely suggested, I'm moving back to the naked lady, which-- as I said-- I like very much.
>>>>>>>although you can find the "top 16,000 lies" documented in one handy book by the fact checker at the Washington Post if you're interested
You're funny. Smack dab in the middle of the propaganda bubble you are.
~ FV
Dave, you should have some kind of countdown clock on your site showing how many days it takes for even the most non-political entry’s comments to devolve into politics. I think this one took 14 days. Dismaying, isn’t it?
Postmodern anonymouse-- I thought your point about honesty might be more focused on art than politics. (For example, Picasso's point that "art is the lie that makes us see the truth.")
I think it was, fundamentally. Trump’s radical honesty isn’t about being truthful. Neither is mimetic art.
«' The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.'
- Ecclesiastes»
-Baudrillard
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Postmodern Anonymouse
The problem of "Absolute Truth" is that people are associational, paradigm-dependent thinkers. When the slightest crack of doubt appears in one absolutist claim, the tectonic shifts and all others suddenly come into question. Jeopardizing the dam of circumspection holding back an easy and wild slide into hair-on-fire radical relativism. The dogma of absolutism in the first place is the very thing that causes the rebound into fruitcake gnosticism encouraged in radical collegiate environments.
The fruitcake gnostics emphasize the problems of absolutist dogma for this reason, as the easily-dismissable strawmen to their strategic push for radical relativism. Few are taught that truth is not just a philosopher’s or theologian’s word. Rather it was the philosophers and theologians who ruined the common pragmatic usage by building so many of their projects around the necessity for absolute cosmic grounding. They utterly overweighted the concept by assuming/implying that only Absolute Truth could be truth. Thus either we are omnipotent like gods, which we ain’t, or there is no truth at all.
This absurd dichotomous argument and its attendant rejection of the concept of lower-case truth was quietly abandoned in the 1970s by linguists, as they simply could not rid any viable linguistic theory of the necessity of some concept of truth. The early Pragmatists had also already dealt with this problem.
Having said that, it is hard to argue with the Absolute Truths behind such statements as: “You can’t turn the spinning wheel both ways at once.” “If you put two shells together with two other shells, you will have a collection of four shells.” “We cannot experience an effect and its causes simultaneously.” “Solipsism is self-contradictory.” “Changing your personal definition of something doesn’t change it in reality.” And so on.
In fairness, it was David who brought it up
I'd dispute “We cannot experience an effect and its causes simultaneously.”
Quality, the unition of experience with the thing, eg colour. The 'causes' of the quality are something else than it itself, and more like facilitating conditions.
The basic quality of self-awareness would be another one, which is even more hair-sliver thin before the awareness begets an abstraction, shadow-version of the experience. /B.
"The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none"
- Only in a game with invented rules entered into by its inventor can this sort of drivel be kept up.
Bill
«Only in a game with invented rules entered into by its inventor can this sort of drivel be kept up.»
Welcome to language, my brother in meaning-production.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Sorry, strange nutcase; the game can be played but isn't reality. I don't share your weird disorder.
Bill
Postmodern anonymouse-- But aren't some simulacrums false? Or at least farther from the truth than others? That's certainly the case with mimetic art. There are all kinds of truth-- there's tautological truth, there's (as Kev Ferrara just suggested) mathematical or self-definitional truth. There is (despite Richard's skepticism) consensus truth. But I suspect the reason we're all here is that we find the truths of art more interesting and meaningful than other kinds.
Henry Pitz once said that "Drawing brings the reward of enhanced perception." I believe that, and I'll add that AI, whatever its ultimate results, robs us of that reward because it sidesteps the close looking and the hand crafting that pull us closer to a truth.
If we look at the Manchess naked lady I think we see those enhanced perceptions at work: gravity works differently on a figure who is (literally) upended, head down. And onrushing wind distorts the body in a variety of ways that show the reality beneath the surface (the skin flaps the way it does on those arms because it is anchored by bones and joints, unlike the hair which flaps freely, etc. ) There's truth in the way the shoulders and arms are pushed back by the onrushing wind, and in the positions of those fingers. And what does the body language tells us about her attitude toward the onrushing doom? There are several different interpretations in the comments above. Manchess did all this and more.
You'd be right t say that these truths are not the definitive Epistemological Truth, that they don't answer existentialism or the rational skeptic crack in Descartes' cogito, but in the search for artistic truth I favor Emerson's advice, "Be content with a little light, so it be your own."
Bill, it is possible that the insight about effects and their causes is not absolute, but I have not been able to break it so far, and you haven't either.
Color, one of your examples, is obviously an experience unlike the invisible electromagnetic fluctuations that cause it. So it would surely support my position.
With all sensations there is a moment of phenomenal state change, a transformation or translation, producing a cut, edit or splice point of infinitely small measure, bifurcating physical cause from received effect.
As far as I can tell, one can drill down on any transformational cut point and find a defining stepwise structural change necessary for the cause to have become the effect.
"There is (despite Richard's skepticism) consensus truth."
Sorry. What we think about anything does not make it so. What defines truth is that it is abstract, ports between similar suites of facts, and is predictive. Not that people believe it.
As Einstein said of the 100 scientists who that gathered to essentially denounce his theories false by consensus, "If I was wrong, then only one (argument) would be enough."
That's all correct of course, but it still lies outside it. There's something really fundamental though in that something which is objectively not a part of us becomes so 'subjectively', or we it. The usual definitions 'cause...effect' are only provisional and fall apart when speaking about experience because of this. Just a tangent to the points you were making earlier though, so please disregard.
Bill
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Sorry. What we think about anything does not make it so."
Sure, there's a whole cadre of truths for which the maxim, "reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away." I agree with that maxim and love to apply it to any of those tidy issues involving physical sciences where truth can be definitively proven within a finite period of time. Unfortunately, enlightenment thinkers, natural philosophers and social scientists spent centuries learning the hard way that there are all kinds of knotty questions where the "correct" answer can never be deduced that way.
The great philosopher William James articulated the Pragmatist Theory of Truth, which is basically "truth is what works." This is, I believe, close to your view but is not the same because functionality is not identical to scientific proof. Under James' approach, if the world thinks that something works, then it is "true" until the world stops thinking it works. In these circumstances, what we think DOES make it so.
There are some risks to the pragmatic approach, because unless it is married to robust free speech with the opportunity to challenge the status quo, it has the potential to lapse into "truth is what is useful," which could be exploited by authoritarians. But we can't indefinitely delay answering questions surrounding issues like abortion, nor can we solve social problems by saying "what we think doesn't make it so." So as William James might ask, "You got something better?"
The great philosopher William James articulated the Pragmatist Theory of Truth, which is basically "truth is what works."
As a historical point of fact, Charles Sander Peirce, the founder of the Pragmatist movement had his own Pragmatic maxims that preceded James'. And as a great friend and mentor to William James, he was horrified by James' facile and sloppy formulation. And told him so in correspondence. A bit of a rift developed temporarily because of it, despite James' extreme reverence for Peirce's intellect and influence.
Peirce then tried to distance himself and his movement from James' dubious but unsurprisingly popular formulation. And in doing so attempted to change the movement name to the unwieldy "Pragmaticism." But the die had already been cast, and his attempt to split the movement from James' sloppy bowdlerization of it failed.
I'll see if I can find Peirce's exact pithy quote regarding the absurd consequences of James' formulation, but it is little different than what I've already said regarding "consensus truth".
My own view regarding "what works", is not that it is true, but that it is making contact with the true insofar as whatever aspect of it that is working is causing the effect of success. And it might be quite difficult indeed to figure out just what that causative agent is within the effective act.
As an example: Many people have been helped in their depression and anxiety by taking SSRIs. Therefore, we must conclude that SSRIs are making some ground contact with reality that is bringing about the emotional stabilization in many users. For 35 years the public was told that these drugs work by "correcting chemical imbalances in the brain".
But now it seems that wasn't true at all. Rather it seems to work by generating cellular energy in the mitochondria, and the reason it is so dangerous to get off of is because it seems to weaken our own ability to make mitochondria naturally. Thus if somebody goes cold turkey off SSRIs, their mood plummets into the abyss. Which reveals a possible deeper truth that mood and cellular energy production are intimately related.
It was not anybody's "thinking" nor any collective belief that made the drug work as far as it did.
Kev Ferrara-- I sense another rabbit trail here, just as we were turning our attention back to the naked lady.
I think you overstate the differences between Peirce and James-- three philosophers in prolonged discussions in the Metaphysical Club-- Peirce, James and Dewey-- all contributed significantly to the development of pragmatism, and all continued to develop it, although their paths did vary, as one might expect. Not even the Beatles could stay together forever. Too much talent to march in lockstep but they all continued to admire each other.
The fact that James ended up more prominent and successful than Peirce may be the perfect vindication of James' "truth is what is useful" approach. If Peirce believed that truth depended on how beliefs ultimately withstood future scrutiny, while James believed truth depended on what worked and was useful, whose philosophy do you think better served a robust, growing nation building railroads and taming frontiers? Peirce was the darling of the mathematicians and his theories of infinity may someday be proven "true" with the help of extraterrestrial intelligence but James' "sloppy" formulation proved to be more... useful.
I encourage you to read and watch Cheryl Misak on Peirce and ignore Menand's ideologically-tinted short-handing of him in his The Metaphysical Club.
Peirce's reputation has been steadily rising for decades, and will continue to rise. Had Frank Ramsey not died so young, the re-assessment would already be complete and integrated into the world. Whole academic departments have dedicated themselves to bringing to light more of Peirce's work from even crumpled brittle fragments of his notes. And what they are finding is extraordinary. Not just further elucidation of Pragmatic insights, but also deep innovations in everything from telemetry to mathematics to semiotics to computing to sociology to logic to economics, and so much more. Entire digitizations technologies have been developed to decipher his unpublished manuscripts, such is their importance deemed. Not for nothing is he considered the American Aristotle. If James' fame and fortune are more important to you, so be it. He's great, I agree. But Peirce is a titan.
James and Dewey were Peirce's students. Peirce originated Pragmatism as a philosophy and developed the grounding for it. The pragmatic difference between "Use whatever works" and "Truth is whatever works" is negligible. The problem is James' latter formulation pretends to be metaphysics. Peirce's pragmatic maxim was about meaning, an attempt to short circuit the problems of metaphysics. His struggle with the nature of truth was a lifelong battle that only will come to light fully in time and in the form of kind of dialogue.
Somebody said that Manchess painted other pictures of nudes falling from the sky. Do you know where they can be seen? Eric Fischl did a series of sculptures of the bodies falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11. They're beautiful like this painting but they're different.
JSL
On his website, really nice paintings.
Bill
(Three stitched together about halfway down the sequence here:
https://www.manchess.com/images/o7qnpg15y04mla05chwopzun6di1qy )
The triptych lends itself so much more readily to an allegorical, dreamy interpretation, because there's much more ambiguity in the staging and posing, and the figures don't look like they've just jumped out of a plane or off a cliff. They could be floating upward or gently drifting.
Yes, like dreaming as you say, or some kind of sky-birth. Really nice work, the figure in that nebulous setting.
Bill
>>>>>>>>Under James' approach, if the world thinks that something works, then it is "true" until the world stops thinking it works. In these circumstances, what we think DOES make it so.
And you believe this nonsense?
I guess then if "the world" thinks something is false, that makes it false until "the world" stops thinking it's false. Even if it's true?
This is pure crazy talk. Is this some kind of New Agey thing you got from taking mescaline at a spiritual retreat? Or is it some communist or postmodern gobbledygook? Really disconcerting that you actually seem to believe in such magical thinking.
~ FV
FV-- You seem deeply troubled. Let me bring this back on topic with an example that may cool your fevered brow: If you leap naked out of an airplane, odds are pretty good that you will hit the ground, splat. We don't understand exactly why. We've become pretty good at mathematically describing gravity (thanks to Isaac Newton) but we don't know what it is and we may never know. Now, good ol' William James would say, "Hey FV-- every time I've seen someone jump out of a plane naked they fall to the ground. There may come a day when physicists learn how to float upward, but until that day comes I'd say it would be pretty useful for you NOT to jump out of any airplanes naked."
Here James is, trying to be helpful and you go and call him all sorts of nasty names.
All simulacra are false. Or, they’re less real. Copies of copies. Consider Plato, who obviously wasn’t a fan of mimetic art, seeing as everyday reality to him was a lesser copy of ideal forms.
(As an aside: Of all the competing schools of philosophy more or less co-existing in ancient Greece, the Western world, via Christianity, decided Plato’s was the best. Image if Western culture instead had opted for stoicism!)
But in hyperreality, the precession of simulacra results in a situation where there is no longer any «real» for the simulacrum to be a copy of. In this sense, the simulacrum is true.
Trumps’s radical honesty lays bare the absence of reality in the (true) simulacrum, the simulation world order the liberals of the West have living in. It was all just a dream. Or, to reference Borges, a 1:1 map of a world that has disappeared.
How does this relate to art? Well, «postmodernism» similarly points towards the cultural collapse of metanarrative as a necessity. Not only does the mimesis of Manchess’ nude not flow from God or Ferrrarian principles of eternal aesthetic principles, it is entirely, entirely open for interpretation (meaning-production). It can even be claimed to obfuscate the loss of reality by attempting to depict something «realistically». As a cultural gesture, it becomes void, false, untrue.
Me, I like it.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
(On my comment on German idealisn further above, I most likely misremembered what elements of Kant and Hegel were actually imported by the Pragmatists.)
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Respectfully, that is NOT what you wrote.
Here's what you wrote >>>>> "What we think DOES make it so."
Did you miswrite what you meant?
~ FV
You think a wealthy morally-superior progressive lawyer like David is going to admit to a Trump-defending peasant like you that he was wrong?
I'm with Postmodern Anonymouse. "Me, I like it." You philosophers can talk forever but I just like an awesome painting.
Talking about art and how it works or what makes it good can be very helpful for understanding it.
But if you just want to look at art, you don’t actually need to read the comments at all. The pictures are pretty much all at the top.
Not only does the mimesis of Manchess’ nude not flow from God or Ferrrarian principles of eternal aesthetic principles,
You really must explain now and again - even just for a lark - what it is you're talking about.
Also, still waiting for your absolute ironclad definition of "meaning. (Or the exact dictionary that has the entry for the word that you absolutely subscribe to.)
it is entirely, entirely open for interpretation (meaning-production).
Oh, it is?
So I would be as near to the mark as anybody else if I interpret the picture as, say: About the plight of clay pot makers in ancient Turkey? The dissolution of the family? The problem of Schadenfreude among long term sports fans? An aerial restatement of the Scorpion and the Frog parable? A commentary on racism and sexism in the Air Force? An illustration of the aphorism, "Look before you leap?"
Can you explain your second argument here? Given that it is not any of those things, wouldn’t you be equally (that is, 100%) wrong in any of these cases?
Can you explain your second argument here? Given that it is not any of those things, wouldn’t you be equally (that is, 100%) wrong in any of these cases?"
I think in some of my obviously off-the-mark interpretations, one can find tiny threads of relation to the image (Air Force, leaping, sexism, schadenfreude, etc.). But even though those weak interpretations fare better as takes than the obviously non sequitur interpretations, all of them are clearly far worse than a well considered (unforced, comprehensive) interpretation.
Implied overall point being that the more penetratingly one perceives the image - mimetically, narratively, abstractly, aesthetically, poetically, musically, stylistically, technically, archetype-ally, linguistically, graphically, compositionally, and finally synthetically - the less it is "entirely entirely open for interpretation."
We may not know the truth or answer but - by combining many different forms of educated sensitive observation - we can significantly narrow the range of strong solutions, excluding in the process a presumably infinite number of stupider interpretations. (I take as a given here that the point of the interpretation game is to figure out the most plausible overfit, rather than to play the game merely as an exercise of one's own imaginative whimsy.)
Great point Kev, thanks for staying with this through some of the dogma-formulated pushbacks. What you say explains why my response to the image was that it looked like a naked lady being pushed out of an aeroplane - this being the most "plausible overfit".
However, upon a little reflection I realise my response to David that the image is not archetypal was to do with seeing it from a physicalist, effect-cause position. There is when dreaming the sense that we are flying or hovering above the earth and this can be considered, like the presence of water or not being able to run properly, as belonging to one of the archetypal dream states.
Conceding therefore that there is an archetypal element to the image I realise now why this particular painting doesn't work for me. In art the normal and the paranormal, in this case a human falling and a human flying, must synthesise in order to function as an archetypal image. An example of this would be Michelangelo's first Pieta, the one with Christ laying on Mary's lap. Yet even if we did not know the Christian story behind it, what we automatically feel is the dying soul cradled in someone's arms as a mirror of the newborn held by its mother.
The problem with the conception and realisation of the "Lady Godiver" image (thanks Kev!) is that of a Pieta sculpture that immediately calls up the scenario of a half-dressed bloke lolling unconscious on a daintily concerned woman's lap.
>>>>>>>>>>"A surprising amount of people were blinded by the tradition leading up to Aaron Sorkin’s Disneyfied version of the US, but I can’t believe many now still do."
>>>>>>>>>"Trumps’s radical honesty lays bare the absence of reality in the (true) simulacrum, the simulation world order the liberals of the West have living in. It was all just a dream. Or, to reference Borges, a 1:1 map of a world that has disappeared."
There are two distinct Truman Shows crumbling under Trump’s “the fantasy is dangerous and over” steamroller, not just one.
The first is the Sorkin fantasy world, which stems from the “Camelot” of the JFK presidency (fashion, wealth, manners, the high arts, charity, the dream of a permanent peaceful “Liberal World Order”, and the intellectualism of “The Best and Brightest” combine to form a high-status TV ready ideality. Half real, half Hollywood BS.)
And then there’s the dystopian unreality stemming from the George Soros “reflexivity” method of creating (through wall to wall mass media propaganda and education manipulation) a nightmare world of hoaxes, hate, fear, slander, and constant agitation and pressure. The “reflexive potential” of which all load anticipated cultural “trigger moments” - weaponized flash points designed to push the anxiety-ridden and engaged flock toward enraged radical activism and street violence. Which can be exploited to install radical authoritarian governmental changes. This is what we have been enduring with increasing intensity since Clinton, which reached peak insanity with George Floyd, BLM and cancel culture.
That Soros taught this method to the CCP in the 1980s before buying long term control of the routed Democrat party and turning them into the leftist shit show we see today demonstrates the evil and danger of the man and the mentally insane party he sent over the cliff. As Soros said, he “takes a certain malicious pleasure in shorting an institutional favorite." The United States itself being the target in his megalomaniacal crosshairs, as England had been earlier.
~ FV
Somebody's been reading James Lindsay.
This is an art blog. You must be looking for the crazy motherfucker blog.
>>>>>>>This is an art blog. You must be looking for the crazy motherfucker blog.
I know you're too in deep to get out now, but these are facts. Soros has been the premier donor of the Democrat party for 30 years. Hillary Clinton's Top Aide just MARRIED George Soros's woke son who has now taken the reigns of the Soros operation. The Reflexivity thing is from SOROS' OWN BOOK. The whole street activist playbook is well known, and has even been put online in a easy to read format by Democrat operatives: https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tactic You can find recruiting posts for their political theater operations on craigslist. Phone tracking reveals that many protestors get shipped around the country.
(Childish ignorance of how the modern Democrat party works to influence and sow chaos is the hallmark of the Modern Democrat.)
~ FV
Chris,
I'd say my earlier response longing for blue reflected light in the shaded areas of the legs is getting at the same issue. The wish for more visual magic to take the picture entirely out of the materialist sensibility and fully into the ethereal realm of metaphor and allegory.
I"d need to think more about what an "Archetypal Image" per se is to comment on your sense of what that entails. Although, as you know, I always want more magic synthesized with my mimesis.
I fully 100% agree with you, and still think you should pipe down
weak interpretations fare better as takes than the obviously non sequitur interpretations
How? This whole “interpretation game” seems to have nothing to do with the painting at all.
The picture is the picture. The affects it generates are made solely by what is there: this particular vantage, this naked woman, this sky painted in this particular way. Looking at the picture does not, as an experience, have anything to do with freedom or suicide or implied narratives or symbolic backstories that aren’t actually present. It “means” neither freedom nor suicide nor anything else in that register; it means this visual configuration, felt as such.
In that sense I find myself forced to agree with Postmodernist that it is “entirely, entirely open for interpretation”, where the “interpretation” in this case seems to mean the free invention of concepts and narratives that are not in the picture at all and are in no respect related to the experience of looking at it.
I fail to see how any of these invented stories in this thread offer anything more than when Twombly titled his scribble "Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus". How can they be better or worse? They seem to all be purely 100% pulled out of everyone’s asses.
The picture is the picture. The affects it generates are made solely by what is there: this particular vantage, this naked woman, this sky painted in this particular way. .
You don't need to tell me back what I've taught you.
My first instinct was that the picture had a particular kind of unreality to it. She's nude, no parachute, no fear, no plane. Big simple elements; idealized. Allegory is a logical conclusion; something symbolical rather naturalistic. Yes, the picture is the picture. But the tightly composed idealized strangeness begs a question.
She has zero fear of anything, and is miles up, plunging. My interpretation was that it was metaphor for total commitment, damn all fears and conventions. I believe this take be at the same level of abstraction as the picture, comprehensive of it and unforced; nothing extra is needed in the picture to make the take work, no visual inventions are prompted. (If you can smash a hole in my take, please do so. That would be interesting.)
Bear in mind, that I do not say that mine is the only possibly allegorical solution to the question posed by the picture. Merely that it is a strong candidate; in the near range of the vibe, only 14.6% pulled out of my ass.
I think it is clear that my personal interpretation is better than my anti-take "it's an aerial version of the Scorpion and the Frog parable" which forces us, in trying to retrofit the image to the assertion, to start inventing things that are not in the picture. (A 71% ass-pull)
Saying this plummeting sky nude picture is a re-statement of "Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus" would be an even worse assertion. As no abstract or concrete parallels can be sensibly located to ground the assertion; nothing maps. (100% sourced from human ass.)
Also, still waiting for your absolute ironclad definition of "meaning.
This reminded me of DFW’s essay "Authority and American Usage", which I now plan on re-reading this weekend. So, thanks!
What you ask for is, in principle, impossible. Meaning is always and endlessly deferred.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
There are two distinct Truman Shows crumbling under Trump’s “the fantasy is dangerous and over” steamroller, not just one.
The tricky thing here is that Trump’s radical honesty does not not reveal reality, it reveals a lack (or lacking) reality. In extremely (extremely!) pop-cultural terms: If Trump is Neo, you still have to remember that “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.” - Baudrillard
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Postmodern Anonymouse
You're the worst.
You crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists are even worse than the toothless ignorant white trash and the racists that make up the rest of the MAGA base. Can we return to art please?
You're like a hipster fourth grader. You get off on name-calling and you believe everything your screwed up mom tells you.
Bear in mind, that I do not say that mine is the only possibly allegorical solution to the question posed by the picture.
But why seek an “allegorical solution” to begin with? What is the point?
I can understand doing so if the image is being used to illustrate a book cover, an article, or something similar, and we want to better understand the relationship between the image and the text. But when the image is presented to us as Art rather than Illustration, why should we try to force it into illustrating a text that does not exist?
"What you ask for is, in principle, impossible. Meaning is always and endlessly deferred."
The resident A.I. (Arrogant Ignorant) on Meaning...
1. My definition of meaning is the one and only, you dUmMiEs.
2. Just look up the correct definition in a dictionary, but I won't tell you which.
3. Actually, meaning is forever unknowable, including the meaning of meaning.
4. Ha ha. I'm so smart. I read DFW!
It boggles the mind that Blogger does not allow us to block trolls, idiots, bots, and mental cases.
"But why seek an “allegorical solution” to begin with? What is the point? I can understand doing so if the image is being used to illustrate a book cover, an article, or something similar, and we want to better understand the relationship between the image and the text."
As I've remarked before, visual allegories are a form of text writing. Their particular unreality is due to our intuition that the objects and their relationships are purely symbolic rather than naturalistic.
The resident Art Hierophant on meaning:
1. I think it is clear that my personal interpretation is better than everybody else’s.
2. If 1 is challenged, and/or the internal contradictions of my aestethic cosmology are somehow challenged, my ad hoc complications will become increasingly florid.
3. When 2 has run its course and my epicyclicals are exhausted, I’ll turn to ad hominems.
4. Eventually, I’ll regret my 3s, and quietly delete them.
A flaw rotates forever, unresolved.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Hierophant? Epicyclicals? I love it. Fancy rare words but poor reading comprehension. Color me impressed.
1. For the Nth time… "My" understanding of functional aesthetics is roughly that which coalesced into usable broad form around 1905 (give or take 50 years, it took two millennia to get there). I’ve done my best to restate its tenets in more modern aesthetic terms with no reference to the supernatural, and to logically fill in blanks left in the extant note sets. As I try to treat this investigation scientifically, I spend a great deal of time trying to break every aspect of the theory. Thus...
2. If you'd like to share an example of an “internal contradiction” - some major flaw I've missed, or something I’ve said that you feel is “ad hoc” or unnecessarily "florid", I’m all ears. (Or, if you know of a better overall art theory that has succeeded as well or better in fostering as many great talents and as many popular, beautiful and meaningful works of art worldwide as it evolved through the last 2000 years, that would even be more useful and interesting.)
3. I don't think anybody understands your "epicyclical" barb. Or the criticism “Ferrarian eternal aesthetic principles". What risible Western chauvinist principles are you disputing exactly: Unity? Relation? Rhythm? Breadth? Poesis? Theme? Development? Synthesis? Suggestion? What??
4. Yes, every once in a while I will reconsider how severe a posting comes across, especially when not intended to wound.
Unity? Relation? Rhythm? Breadth? Poesis? Theme? Development? Synthesis? Suggestion?
I’m still waiting for the absolute ironclad of these terms.
And, for every work of art discussed, the exact dictionary that has the entry for your particular application of a term when pontificating about how your interpretation of a work of art is superior to everybody else’s. Because surely you must have access to some universally agreed upon lexical definition of Unity, Relation, Rhythm, Breadth, Poesis, Theme, Development, Synthesis and Suggestion that is also immediately understandable as instantiated in the Manchess?
If not, what epicycles of florid language must be invented for you to at the same time insist that a particular instantiation of said properties are inherently present and perfectly graspable in the work, while at the same time insist that any failure to see this obviousness is due to there existing a language behind language that language cannot language about. How will you demonstrate that clearly, the Sun does in fact revolve around the Earth - one must just be sensitive enough to grasp the minutia of epicyclical showmanship!
Failing that, am I an AI, a Communist agent come to drain previous bodily fluids, a destroyer of college kids and comment sections, a scam, what?
Failing that, this post will make no sense as you most likely will have begun deleting the preceding ones.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"some universally agreed upon lexical definition of Unity, Relation, Rhythm, Breadth, Poesis, Theme, Development, Synthesis and Suggestion that is also immediately understandable as instantiated in the Manchess?"
Well, just on this point, I think you've hit on why you provoke the reactions you get.
You don't *need* semantic definitions of these things as they are *instanced* in pictures, or not, in a way that language can't reach. Word-language here (the visual realm) might be as far from that of pictures as 0/1 (?) binary or whatnot is from a lyric poem.
The 'unity' in the painting might be the relation between the two dominants - the figure and its setting. It might be broken by a second skydiver. Or if handled in a certan way, pose, placement + c there would be 'relation'. There is more 'poesis' in the other nudes in the sky on Mr Manchess' site linked above - intheir imaginal power they transcend the solely natural instance of a naked body at a height which might, as the first one, have an odd but explicable reason for being there. The bodies reach a peak which is a pique of feeling between the world andvthings beyond it, they proke sensory and para-sensory ('spiritual' in any and the broadest of responses that anybody might have for the term, thus both variable and common, particular and archetypal) feelings AND connections; the connections alone would fit your thesis of meaning=is attributed, and only in part - as those attributed typically have a familial relation (hence the ease-of-fit of attribution), a common or overlapping poetic meaning-relatiin with qualitative cores. Like a Pieta to a Madonna & Christ-Child, to a Isis & Horus drpped in a well, to infinite memories-depths of mother-&-childs, to a little-proto-mammal curled around eggs in a nest, to a visual of a small circle emerging from a larger and retaining a delicacy of attachment which suggests frailty, protection, newness, emergence. 'Photos' from space show the birth of stars or planets, and all these are stirred, and again the relation is the important point - the analogies aren't algebraic.
That's 'posis' of the kind instanced in, say, a Paolo & Francesca or Pieta. There's visual poetry of the kind closer to that of the circle emerging from the circle, the kind that might beget these sort of narratives but don't require them. The kind that make a picture beautiful and involving irregardless of subject, the interplay of colour, shape, form and so on. One line that appears bowed among ten that are taut; a dark-red note in a sea of green, horizontal curls receding to a horizon...and so on. The last has 'rhythm', but might be monotonous, so they then curl variably, creating tension.
Surely there's someting here you can expand on in thought to give examples of the others as they exist in pictures - instances in pictures are really the definitions in the arena of the latter.
Bill
[posis<poesis, or just 'poetry' / B.]
Bill,
First, I understand at least partially why and how I provoke. And some of it is intentional, some is not. As I’ve stated before, I do enjoy and absolutely prefer what I experience as good craft over bad craft - in the making of my house as well as in the art on the walls of its interior. I think most people do, even when they get rich by appearing to not to. But I am not a philosophical idealist (until put in a foxhole, I suspect), and especially object to the religious mystification that tends to follow such schools - be they Moslem, Kantian, Marxist or Artsy-fartsian.
Secondly, I find many of your posts difficult to get through (which I’m sure many here experience when/if reading some of with my own posts), but often enough containing moments of pure beauty and elegance that I always read them. In a sense, it’s an inverted experience of reading Ferrara’s texts, which are usually clearly and elegantly constructed, with moments of collapse. So, thanks.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
It's not really philosophical idealism, and certainly didn't arise from it. I've skim-read a few small chunks of that, and I like those parts which approach it. But it's really far more basic than that. It as fundamental and undeniable as the kind of experiences toddlers get from painting, storytime or a traipse in the woods, and really the same thing. Not a system to argue against another. It doesn't have tenets. Religions might arise from it but not vice versa. It's a sensibility, it can be honed but everyone has it. ('Mystification' is when people masturbate with it.)
Bill
I’m still waiting for the absolute ironclad of these terms.
No, you aren’t. And you weren't. You never mentioned it until just now.
If anybody has been confused about the definitions of Unity, Relation, Rhythm, Breadth, Poesis, Theme, Development, Synthesis, Suggestion, and so on down through the years, either I have gladly answered them or they haven't mentioned it. I’ve also droned on about the words in the other list: mimetically, narratively, abstractly, aesthetically, poetically, musically, stylistically, technically, archetype-ally, linguistically, graphically, compositionally, and synthetically. If you sincerely don’t know what I mean by any particular word, ask.
"If not, what epicycles of florid language must be invented for you to at the same time insist that a particular instantiation of said properties are inherently present and perfectly graspable in the work, while at the same time insist that any failure to see this obviousness is due to there existing a language behind language that language cannot language about" (he said floridly).
How many times must I say it? In how many different ways? Most of what makes art function so powerfully (for those in the normal distribution of aesthetic sensitivity) and also so interesting to make, discuss and teach is the sublated and subliminal, that which is hidden - concealed in fact, purposefully.* That which suffuses, that which is ghosted or grafted or superimposed, the evoked, the intervals rather than the notes, the strange space between what is known versus what is actually seen but only felt; which is that which is not concretely mimetic and not easily labeled.
What most picture inspectors invariably detect and intellectualize about is only the label-able tip of the iceberg of what is actually going on. This is something I’ve been trying to teach here forever, many have caught on. But now and again a particular mind-type pops in to tell me I’m pretentiously peddling self-aggrandizing delusions. I try to bid them adieu nicely; this information is not for them. Then not so nicely. Because I am trying to correct a problem that people like them caused.
* “Hide your artistry.” ~ Alphonse Mucha ; “Art is the hiding of art by art.” ~ Joseph Pennell ; “Composition is the thing that haunts.” ~ N.C. Wyeth : “It is the invisible thing that makes a picture a good one.” ~ Harvey Dunn : “Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood” ~ T.S. Eliot
No one, not even Bill, can give you a definition of unity or poesis that will make you understand it any more than he can give a definition of blue, loud, the taste of salt, or the feeling of being off balance that would cause you to experience those things.
Look to the pictures. It’s not magic or high fallutin’, kev is talking about very regular stuff if you can turn off your left brain long enough to see it.
You're all assuming a lot because you don't know what's in the artist's mind. What if this woman was someone Manchess knew? What if she was a lover flying away free, or he felt like pushing his ex-wife out of an airplane, or if someone he cared about was facing a terminal illness? That would change everything you're talking about.
JSL
How could that change anything, when none of that is in the picture?
Fundamentally because there isn’t anything in the picture. No woman, no poesis, no manchess, no mimesis, no meaning. It is, if anything, a digital echo of a reproduction of an arrangement of pigments on a surface.
The leaf insect isn’t a leaf. The leaf isn’t a leaf insect. The fire doesn’t burn with meaning. There’s no poetry in the starry sky.The landscape isn’t unbalanced. The blue isn’t the wrong value. The face on the burned piece of toast isn’t Jesus.
Until you look at it, and the process of making it mean something inexorably begins.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Maybe it's in the picture but you don't see it. Maybe Manchess sees it because he put it there and he doesn't feel the need to explain it to you. Maybe he leaves it open so that you can project your own wife being pushed out of an airplane.
JSL
What most picture inspectors invariably detect and intellectualize about is only the label-able tip of the iceberg of what is actually going on. This is something I’ve been trying to teach here forever, many have caught on.
Well, yes, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", said someone smarter than any of us here.
And so, again, it is left to the picture priests to detect and intellectualize about the supposedly un-label-able bottom of the iceberg of what is actually going on?
Because no one seems more willing to verbally interpret in no uncertain terms, and to the exclusion of all other interpretations, the verbally un-interpretable, than you.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Both the leaf and the leaf insect are those properties that that they have, including those they share in common.
Some degree of these properties are sense perceptible to other lifeforms;
In particular here are those which create an overlap in form 'appearance'.
The senses of at least one of whom has inner qualities open up to it by these perceptions. These aren't invented or attributed, but perceived, and are the stronger when attentiveness eclipses anything we ourselves bring independently.
They aren't illusion, as they are held in common.
And are built into the structure of the world. A wall that looks unbalanced will fall down , the quality of discordant tension communicates a reality better than does any secondary language based on this prime. Tonnes of other examples.
There are relations between qualities - light colour + heat cold, smell + taste; and some far more subtle between appearance, sounds, and deeper qualities in the nature of the things that create them.
This is base 'meaning', the things that the monosyllabic ur-elements of language attempt to represent. It can be supposed that in origin this was through an affinity of some kind that suggested fitness to the thing represented, but whatever the case this isn't how things stand now, the 'meaning' mostly is and is learned as 'equal to'.
This creates a possibilty of a parallel world of meaning that can have the illusion of being autonomous. And then systems of thought can be built up, and have been, to allege that the original is an illusion. Some here might have just enough wit to realise that their untethered system would be thus be unreal too (but not enough to recognise the original error), so they voluntarily acquiesce to the state of philosophical games on floating island-realities and mental disorder.
The figuration involved in painting works in the same way as the camouflage.
'Sky falling woman flesh blue warm cool,' then 'free fear' might arise associatively, then you're off in secondary tiers of meaning, symbolism, allegory and narrative (which all root back to groups of qualities themselves, and have affinities at various points in their growth with those of the painting and its subject, which makes the fit).
This is nursery level stuff, so I won't bring it up again.
And I suspect that you're just doing it at this stage for attention, as you half-admitted.
Bill
You live in an alternate reality bro. Clearly on tilt. Touch grass.
And so, again, it is left to the picture priests... the supposedly un-label-able bottom of the iceberg...in no uncertain terms, and to the exclusion of all other interpretations, the verbally un-interpretable...
You've been triggered. Congratulations.
"Maybe it's in the picture but you don't see it."
The intuition must be able to pick up the subliminal information. Or else the effect of the idea will not come across.
The whole point of studying how sublation and subliminals work is to learn how to encode information under the radar. And eventually get good at detecting it. If such ideas as you've mentioned are truly encoded in the work, you should be able to figure out how and where if you spend enough time getting beyond mimesis. (As opposed to just waving a hand and declaring the problem unsolvable and the information unknowable. Art is Stage Magic, not actual supernatural legerdemain.)
Maybe Manchess sees it because he put it there and he doesn't feel the need to explain it to you.
The suggestion is either in there or not. And if it's in there, again, you should be able to locate the components of the suggestion. If you can find any evidence for any of your theoretical subliminals that aren't purely subjective/imputed from without, that would be very interesting to hear about.
"Maybe he leaves it open so that you can project your own wife being pushed out of an airplane."
I think we all agree it's been left open. And I think your wife should be worried.
That presentation was well considered Bill. Just writing this to tell you I appreciated it and that we seem to be almost wholly in accord.
Until you look at it, and the process of making it mean something inexorably begins..
Once more into the breach…
The nature of art is suggestive. As Stanley Meltzoff pointed out, the suggestions of art are so forceful they are better understood as commands. We are prompted to close on all the suggestions by the suggestions themselves as installed by the artist; the intervals/gaps/lost edges in the suggestions being installed at the same time.
We are powerless to influence how we apprehend artistic suggestions. It just happens. That’s why there’s this thing called “aesthetic arrest” - which I understand to be the ecstatic stun of the entire suggestion complex of a work of great art uploading at lightning speed into the mind and at once “closing” as a unified visual epiphany.
Therefore, we no more provide the aesthetic-poetic meanings of art than a puzzle solver “produces” the answers to a crossword puzzle. The creator of the crossword puzzle has left all the blanks intentionally, with the intent that you solve them according to his plan, by his clues with his answers. There is no other way to solve the crossword; he has set the whole thing up such that you can only close down on the answers as he set them down and as he organized them.
When you set those answers down you have merely solved the puzzle. You have not produced the puzzle.
It is the same as a stage magician and the effect of a particular trick on the audience. We complete the trick by command according to the Magician’s plan, not by any active effect-production in the mind. The magician produced the effect with the minds of the audience as unwitting accomplices.
Interpretation is a different kettle of fish, post-aesthetic-arrest, a different language superposed over the aesthetic; based mostly on an analysis of the mimetic-narrative level.
If you only grok the mimetic-narrative level, none of what I am saying will be available to you.
The amount of patience it takes to re-explain these things to you through your rage-wall of impenetrable arrogance should make me a shoo-in for eventual sainthood. Have a nice day.
Dude literally doesn't believe he can understand anything without thinking about it first. Totally up in his own head. A bizarrely disembodied sense of reality. Must be autistic.
~ FV
If there's anything sensible in it, Kev, I probably nicked it from somewhere.
Bill
Fundamentally because there isn’t anything in the picture. […] Until you look at it, and the process of making it mean something inexorably begins.
Until you look at a collection of atoms, gluons, quarks it is not cancer. A completely pointless distinction when talking to oncologists on an oncology blog.
The amount of patience it takes to re-explain these things to you through your rage-wall of impenetrable arrogance should make me a shoo-in for eventual sainthood.
No special prize for restating the precise numbers of angels able to dance on the head of a pin, I’m afraid. I respect that you subscribe very passionately to a very specific belief system, but it’s just not one I share.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I respect that you subscribe very passionately to a very specific belief system, but it’s just not one I share.
Reality is that which, whether you believe in it or not, does not go away.
Speaking of reality, let’s have a little reality check. Your smug condescension warrants it.
You are not an art teacher. You're not even an artist. You’re not even an amateur.
You've done no research - zero - into the history of the material under discussion or its practical application over time; how it was used, how it evolved through art history, how often it was discussed and by whom. Nor have you applied any of these ideas even if just to test them. In short, you have no education in this material, no real interest in it, and no aptitude for it.
You share no anecdotes about your experience in the arts or with other artists or art teachers. And you recommend no sources for further study. One naturally assumes you have none to give.
Not at all coincidentally you have never said a single thing here that could help any artist make better art, or understand it at a deeper level. Ever. Not one. Nobody taking a break from their drawing board, easel or art program would ever come here to read you for inspiration or insight.
You have two things to say, both reeking of narcissism and solipsism: “All meaning is linguistic and wholly produced in the viewer's mind". And it’s corollary, "I don’t care what you or anybody says. If I don't know it, see it or sense it in art, it isn't there.”
Readers can judge for themselves whether your actual value here as a contributor - or even as a mind - matches your stratospheric self-perception. I’ve already made my view clear. I do not respect you at all.
People on this blog use fancy words and alternative reality to excuse supporting a vulgar disgusting lying rapist depraved monster who shits on a century of bravery and hard work by patriots. Does that Neo bullshit really help you look in the mirror?
I think s/he was looking at your personal presidential animus wryly, rather than supportively.
These pompous rants are entirely a self-serving part of your Groundhog day routine. You’re on a keyboard, not a pulpit.
The Manchess is a gem, a many-faceted gem that can produce a multitude of effects. As I’ve already posted, what struck me first was the sculpted landscape of the rendered female form contrasted with the smooth values of the actual landscape. This creates a dizzying effect which supports the subject. It’s obviously well-crafted. There’s no hesitation in the work (which also supports the subject). The manner seems brimming with controlled abandon, which also…etc.etc. There are the obvious connections to myth, to the life of an artist, to the tradition of the nude in art, etc. And it’s a cool image of a woman in the sky.
In short, I like it.
I’m also certain some historian of ancient Turkey might find resonance with the plight of clay pot makers in the piece, as I’m sure it might provide some sense of connection, comfort or catharsis to someone experiencing a dissolution of family.
There are may ways if seeing it. Much meaning to made. Endless, in fact. It is without end, which in the context it it shared, also…
It all depends on how you look at it.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I enjoy watching you reword what I've just said against you in the next post to me. I put up 4 points of crit. You put up 4 points. I call you arrogant. You call me arrogant. You do whatever it takes to stay on offense and not be put in a position where you must actually attempt to defend or justify your collegiate solipsism or your ignorant dismissals of basic art theory. (I mean, the Famous Artists Course is freely available on the net. Read a book.)
You like the painting. You responded to some of its effects. How nice. Yes people can interpret it personally to their heart's content, and they can find uninteresting chit-chat connections to art history. A museum docent position awaits.
>>>>>vulgar disgusting lying rapist depraved monster who shits
"You're the vulgarian, you F*CK!" ~ A Fish Called Wanda
~ FV
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