Hi, gang. I'm in Rome studying beautiful sculptures from antiquity.
This place would be a nightmare for Barney Bishop III because several of these sculptures have penises.
One thing apparent from these great sculptures is that each manifests an enormous struggle.
For example, artists struggled to escape mortality and the way of all flesh by preserving as much of tender skin and hot passion as they were able in permanent marble.
Or, some struggled to escape the limits of two dimensions, with art that literally jumps off the wall:
Many struggled against oblivion, and the inevitable loss of our personality, our face, our individuality. The memories of our loved ones gives us the consolation of a few extra years but even that is soon gone. In Rome we see miles and miles of busts of people hoping for a little endurance.
Artists today no longer have to struggle with these heartbreaking constraints. Digitization gives our work permanence. Video empowers us with motion, audio preserves our voices and our personalities, holograms give us three dimensionality. In so many ways, artists have been freed from the struggle that bedeviled earlier artists.
So what's the consequence of our freedom?
At the Villa Borghese modern sculpture is exhibited side by side with ancient sculpture, for comparison. Here are two sculptures by modern sculptor, Giuseppe Penone.
They are exhibited accompanied by long, pretentious explanations by the artist. Minor struggles will invariably produce minor art.
"Digitization gives our work permanence."
ReplyDeleteLike all those pieces of computer art that are preserved on floppy disks ? I think a marble statue, or even wooden or terra-cotta sculpture, will last very much longer than any digital data.
Data formats are a major problem.
Don
Getting into Vatican City ? Recall some fantastic stuff from a 98' trip .
ReplyDeleteNice post David, thank you.
ReplyDeleteConstraint compels. The sound from a string under tension.
Freedom dispels. The silence of a string unfettered.
Limitation is creativity's anvil.
Thank you for theses photos, I wish I was there!
ReplyDeleteSeems like the number one ability needed to produce the sort of shapeless "art" you show at the end is a total lack of shame. To display something that insignificant alongside such masterpieces is an insult to the concept of beauty itself.
Yet some fancy people don't see it that way, they keep pretending the emperor is not naked.
Your last line is profoundly quotable.
ReplyDeleteNo bedeviling artistic, existential and spiritual struggles have been surmounted, they simply go unaddressed under the endless onslaught of sensation. The New Religion seemingly believes that Transcendence can be obtained through constant distraction.
ReplyDeleteThe intellectuals of modernism were early adopters of the new religion, chitter-chattering in shallow city smartspeak, while the actual talents trained in the solid values of a passing age were holed up in their studios still distant enough from the Media Messiah to contemplate and imagine and concentrate.
Mr. Penone’s work is the end-stage product of the New Age, trivial and ephemeral – unfunny one line jokes manifested hurriedly, then padded by bafflegab. In the context of the rhythmic grand arcs of cultural achievement, it will be seen as sad and curious debris. And the vacuous and bewildered bureaucratic elites that today elevate debris with such smug self-assurance will be footnoted with pity, if they are even thought of at all.
I have some if Mr.Penone’s sculpture in my back yard, mulch anyone?
ReplyDeleteDon Cox-- It's true that digital immortality requires some maintenance. A digital image needs to be repeatedly passed forward, line a baton in a marathon race, to keep up with new viewing technologies, but at least it can be done. We can't say the same about Renaissance paintings. Time (assisted by war, vandalism, natural disasters) will surely end them all.Then we will only have their replicas.
ReplyDeleteAl McLuckie-- Definitely. You would not believe how crowd control has changed at Vatican city since 1998. But as I'm sure you recall, even if the crowds become unbearable around certain masterpieces, there are 43,000 lesser masterpieces that you can study up close for as long as you like.
chris bennett-- That "string unfettered" part is an especially nice analogy, and so true. I'll be stealing it in future conversations.
Greg-- It is marvelous here, everyone who is able should make the trip. Regarding your point about the lack of shame: If you view Mr. Penone's work in isolation, there are things to read and elements to think about. It's only when you place his work side by side with Bernini's greatest masterpieces at the Borghese palace that the verdict on his work becomes absolutely devastating. I'm sure that Mr. Penone viewed an exhibition of his work in that venue as a great coup, but one can only wince at his shamelessness.
ReplyDeleteUnknown- kind thanks.
kev ferrara-- I can't argue with you here. There are many moments where I think modern art should be strongly defended but this is not one of them. I wouldn't know where to begin. I thought about including one of the paragraphs of Mr. Penone's "bafflegab" explanations for his work, but I knew that would only infuriate the crowd more.
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ReplyDeleteIf you view Mr. Penone's work in isolation, there are things to read and elements to think about. It's only when you place his work side by side with Bernini's greatest masterpieces at the Borghese palace that the verdict on his work becomes absolutely devastating.
ReplyDeleteThe precise opposite is the case. The cultural product conceived by the ideology of materialist, relativist nihilism that is Post Modernism requires it to be set against its ontological opposite in order that its ironic or antagonistic or undermining message can be read. Such products achieve their public sustenance entirely from being parasitic on the host culture - it is no accident they are generally referred to as 'installations'.
The truth of all this might be appreciated if one imagines Praxiteles and Penone, each with their tools, marooned on separate, uninhabited islands. It is easy to accept the idea of Praxiteles, in his spare time sculpting the kind of figures you have been admiring in Rome entirely for the fulfilment it brings him in doing so, even though it is unlikely anyone will ever see them. Now let us hop over to Mr Penone's island. Can we really believe that he would be sweeping a pile of woodchips into a shallow heap on top of a flat boulder for the sake of the message it might embody (for example 'this once, but now doesn't, belong to an absent wood carving')? Well, yes, if you accept that he is delusional.
Now let us hop over to Mr Penone's island. Can we really believe that he would be sweeping a pile of woodchips into a shallow heap on top of a flat boulder (...)
ReplyDeleteThis is a powerful insight, Chris.
But I think David's point holds as well.
But it really depends on whether one is inclined to petulance or actual artistic appreciation. Which is an ego and narcissism issue. Which is (again) a problem of shallow attentiveness, constant distraction, and fragmented minds.
We here in this tribe of artsy old souls tend to respond on matters of quality and aesthetic effect, or at least appreciation of craft. But the number of people online who respond to works of art they aren't worthy to dust with reactive snide remarks is astonishing. Imagine being so resentful or smugly dismissive of other' achievements that tearing them down is actually reflexive?!
It also displays intense ignorance. Because the reality is, the snarkers actually have nothing to say in the face of aesthetic work. So they try to interfere with and ruin the whole public experience of it via agitating commentary, pointedly directing negative and positive (divisive) attention to themselves instead... to fulfill the Horror Vacui of their own psyches.
Just as so many 'professional' art critics and cultural academics in the last 100 years have spent their days - metaphorically speaking - walking in front of art works and waving their hands. To nobody's benefit but their own.
Indeed Kev.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for this is because the likes of Praxiteles know deep down they are in the service of something greater than themselves and that this, by its nature, is the source of fulfilment; to give oneself up is to be be filled by that that is higher.
The likes of Mr Penone, worshipful of the Post Modern doctrine, insist that only the self is sovereign. This hubristic denial of how the world actually works is at odds with our innate knowledge that this belief is untrue and as a consequence their proclamations become increasingly shrill in attempting to elevate the ideology they identify with by way of 'challenging' and putting down that that is other than they. To give oneself down is to be filled by that that is smaller. Ergo Tracey Emin; "It's art because I say it is".
I think at the beginning the postmodern voice had much more bravado. Like a child railing against his parents, a petulant punk knows exactly what he is fighting against - resentment being a driving fire.
ReplyDeleteBut, upon deeper analysis, having no idea what he is fighting for means the punk never actually knew what he was fighting against.
Which is to say, postmodernism is an intellectual excuse for ignorance and its handmaiden vandalism. An ignorance that can quickly turn to barbarism if power is added to prejudice. When the punk attains power or grabs at it, the impetus to vandalism becomes a real-life wrecking ball. The knife is put to the Mona Lisa. Fruit Juice hits a Van Gogh. A Waterhouse is hidden away and held hostage in favor of programmed collegiate hectoring.
In the context of that tack, these works of detritus from Penone seems more like a whimper by comparison. To continue the metaphor - they seem like a fading ember of rebellion from a man-child aged out of the hormones that fired his more confident days.
If postmodern had been growing in stature rather than fading all along, a giant crane would have been re-assembled inside the Sistine Chapel and pornography projected over Michaelangelo's frescoes. All Bernini's figures would be transitioned by chisel and painted with pride flag colors. There is only so much bullshit, destruction, and ugliness sane people can take before the eyes fill with blood, and the knives come out of the drawers.
Still, every wild animal is at its most dangerous in its death throes. Like Hitler blitzkrieging Germany defenseless, psychotic ideologies can do a lot of damage going down. And I expect we are seeing that now. Just not in Rome.
Agreed, punks have no idea what they're actually fighting for.
ReplyDeleteAnd while that is true, it's entirely normal. A rebel can never foresee the real-world outcomes of a rebellion. Our forefathers, who rebelled against King George, couldn't have predicted that in a relatively short span of time, homosexuality would be not only tolerated but celebrated on the facade of the White House. They couldn't have foreseen that "white man" would become a pejorative term, or that international corporations led by foreigners would form the backbone of American life. They would have considered those outcomes very strange indeed. All they knew was that they had an instinct that monarchy was wrong.
Deciding to rebel involves determining that it's worth diving into the unknown, given the current state of what is known.
Following a rebellion, the initial intentions are often loudly celebrated. However, only the naive would mistake the propaganda for the actual results. America isn't the "Republic" the forefathers intended, no matter how we pretend.
Similarly, when modernists revolted against classical art, they couldn't have possibly anticipated the consequences. They couldn't have imagined that anime, science fiction and fantasy art, and CGI, would become the most popular art forms in the Western world. Our institutions still propagate their notions of "pure art," but of course, much like with the American Republic, the actual results bear little resemblance to the propaganda.
Our forefathers obviously could not see two hundred years and twenty thousand knaves and fools into the future. But they spent a decade debating what the principles of this nation would be. Then actually rebuilt with philosophy, experience and wisdom what corrupt institutions they elected to destroy. Then took on the immense and very real responsibility of building and governing under the weight of their own decisions.
ReplyDeleteThe early modernists were not punks, but were after allowances for more of the poetry that was under development at the time. When Howard Pyle began at the Art Students League, the ASL was considered Modernist.
So 'Modernist' is another of those terms that has been twisted in time. The original Modernists did not rebel against Poetry, but toward it. The "High Modernists" (graphic designers and pretentious cartoonists) and Postmodernists rebelled against Poetry itself. Mostly because they didn't understand it, and either couldn't imagine they didn't understand it because they were left brain 'intellectuals' or didn't care about understanding because they were simply punks trying to get theirs without earning it.
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ReplyDelete> punks trying to get theirs without earning it
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's that simple.
The idea of "pure art" seems perfectly sound. We have "pure music," which is arguably the finest form of music. Music can convey deep poetry and emotion with only abstraction - so why couldn't the same be true for painting?
A perfectly viable hypothesis. Assuming the major hurdle was the conventions of representational art makes sense too. If pure art were possible, surely conservative tradition was the limiting factor.
Any intellectual young artist would be thrilled by the prospect of participating in the emergence of the new form. The reward to civilization would have been immense -- what if they had discovered Art's Bach and Mozart?
The fact that non-representational Art, for somewhat obscure reasons, is not actually possible would have been far from evident to anyone with an imagination.
Of course Mondrian or De Kooning, in their desperate and blinding hope, could have persuaded themselves that they were on the path to this new form. I'm confident they grappled despairingly with their canvases in an attempt to create a visual music. I suspect they did, sadly, try to earn it.
By the time post-modernists appeared on the scene, they instinctively sensed that the experiment had failed. The deity was not going to reveal itself. Surrounded by a group of dejected, weary-eyed believers still striving to unlock the secret to art, it's understandable that the post-modernists became pessimistic, resorting to pointless and ironic expressions of despair.
Any intellectual young artist would be thrilled by the prospect of participating in the emergence of the new form. The reward to civilization would have been immense -- what if they had discovered Art's Bach and Mozart?
ReplyDeleteFair enough. Except not very many High Modernists understood their mission as creating a visual form of classical or pure music. An art student of the era would be much more likely to hear ideas about visual music from narrative artists trained in visual poetics. The founding documents of High Modern art are design documents.
A number of High Modernists who attempted visual music came from narrative-poetic training. Frantisek Kupka for example.
But, again, you can see real visual music in Kotarbinsky, Brangwyn, Everett, and also George Henry of "Glasgow Boys" fame. (Or maybe "visual songs" is the more apt term?) You can also look at those who were slightly less inclined to defend their abstractions, as with Vrubel and Vuillard.
Point being, the High Modernists did not originate the idea.
The fact that non-representational Art, for somewhat obscure reasons, is not actually possible
I believe that the creation of a non-representational visual music is possible.
The problem is understanding the problem sufficiently. None of the modernists, not a single damn one, really sat down and analyzed just how complex so-called pure music (classical) really was as a starting point. That's the problem. Insufficient rigor and insight. (Which, frankly is what one might expect from a creative person who gets attracted to graphics and cartoons instead of the massively more difficult mode of poetic naturalism.)
Surrounded by a group of dejected, weary-eyed believers still striving to unlock the secret to art, it's understandable that the post-modernists became pessimistic, resorting to pointless and ironic expressions of despair.
Sorry, but I think this is also an ahistorical view. So much of postmodernism - in terms of its hip productions of the 1960s and early 1970s - derive from the belief that any sensation at all is art. And the reason the whole thing fails is because it is all predicated on that lie. (I am leaving aside the political aspects of pomo which, in actuality, is the majority of the philosophy.)
> not very many High Modernists understood their mission as creating a visual form of classical or pure music.
ReplyDeleteMaybe not the late modernists, but the early modernists very explicitly saw this as the goal. Kandinsky tells us in 1909--
“Music, by its very nature, is ultimately and fully emancipated, and needs no outer form for its expression*). Painting today is still almost exclusively dependent on natural forms taken from nature. The painter's contemporary task consists of testing its power and means of counterpoint, as music did in the attempt to apply these means for the purpose of creation. […] From this inner tendency will arise, in the future, the truly monumental art, which today we can already foresee.
Anyone, who absorbs the innermost hidden treasures of art, is an enviable partner in building the spiritual pyramid, which is meant to reach into heaven. “
He saw this as the common goal of the artists moving towards abstraction at the time --
“Whether consciously or not, the artists gradually turn to their material to test the balance of each separate element's innermost value, out of which they derive their creations of art.
The natural result of this striving is a comparison of the elements of each art with those of another. In this instance, we learn the most from music. With few exceptions and deviations, music has, for centuries, been the art which has used this means, not so much to represent natural phe- nomena but rather, as an expression of the artist's spiritual life and to the creation of a unique life of musical sounds.
A painter who finds no satisfaction in the mere representation of natural phenomena, however artistic, who strives to create his inner life, enviously observes the simplicity and ease with which such an aim is already achieved in the non-material art of music. It is easily understandable that he will turn to this art and will attempt to reciprocate it with his own medium. From this derives some of the modern search in painting for rhythm, mathematical abstract construction, colour repetition, and manner of setting colour into motion. “
> I believe that the creation of a non-representational visual music is possible.
I’d be interested in hearing more about that.
> So much of postmodernism […] derive from the belief that any sensation at all is art.
Teens will loudly proclaim that morality is fake. Of course, those same teens will have the most idealistic and extreme moral positions on any topic. Ask them about the evils of world history or economics, and you quickly realize that, rather than being amoral, they’re moral to the point of a spiritual affliction. They adhere to deontological ethics to the point that they cannot conceive of just war, self-defense, private property, meat consumption, wealth inequality, and so on. What gives?
In the post-modernists, one finds the same phenomena. An extreme belief in the awe inspiring, new agey religious power of art. Art becomes a full-blown cult for them. Simultaneously, they will say that anything is art, including a can of the artist’s shit. This is pure defense mechanism. When one has such an intense adoration and veneration for the power of art and artist, it becomes unbearable to accept the possibility that there are limits or boundaries to its power and profundity.
The act of proclaiming that anything can be art and that every interpretation is equally valid provides refuge for the cognitive dissonance. It allows them to protect the sacredness of their ideal of art from the brutal reality that art is perfectly normal.
I think it is worth pointing out that Post Modernism in the visual arts came about between 1900 and 1915 with the ideas of people like Marcel Duchamp which coalesced into Dadaism following WW1. Which means it arrived on the scene in tandem with the ideas of, for example, Kandinsky and the rise of 'pure abstraction' in painting.
ReplyDeleteAnd it is also worth pointing out that during this same period atonality began to arise in classical music. (Its apotheosis reached in 1952 with John Cage's 4'33; three movements where the musicians do not play their instruments)
And to my mind this is the clue as to why music is not as 'purely abstract' as is so often assumed. Without getting into the weeds I'll briefly suggest that tonality or key centre is the sense of home in any piece of music, even when it undergoes a series of key modulations. I'd also suggest that the mimetic properties of painting are equivalent to this 'home'. In other words; the abstractions that form the language of any branch of art are a journey from, and return to, a performative 'home'.
Which means that in light of this, Post Modernism can be seen as a wilful distrust and dissociation from the idea of existential belonging as a fundamental value. We are back to the belief in the sovereignty of the self.
I don’t think it makes sense to conflate atonality and John Cage's 4'33". Atonality still falls in and out of aesthetic communication, despite the lack of a tonal center. Each phrase seems to “talk about” missing modulating tonal centers. Our brain fills in the gap, so that we feel we’re “falling through” keys and modes, without any of them ever resolving. The goal is the discovery of a "new, freer sound”. That’s a sort of music, if a profoundly unpleasant one. (As an aside, Kandinsky was notably influenced by Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 in 1909, credited with opening his imagination to the possibility of pure painting. When we look at a Kandinsky, he’s trying to make a visual Shoenberg not a Debussy.)
ReplyDelete4'33", along with found-sound pieces of the digital era and found objects in postmodernism, serve to draw our attention to the qualia of non-musical sounds. As you well know, sounds and objects possess remarkable beauty in their own right. Making us sensitive to them is a popular project, going back to Daoists in the millenia before Christ. Like atonality, found qualia is perpendicular to the goals and methods of traditional art, but it’s an unrelated project with very different goals.
I wouldn’t lump either of those movements in with the central essence of postmodernism, which is about transferring concept not experience. The can of the artist’s shit does not exist to transfer qualia of any kind, whether created or found. Instead, it’s just a joke. Self-defensive pessimism resurfaces when an idealistic philosophy falls short of its promise. In the 20th century, with march of idealistic philosophy after philosophy, it was bound to happen repeatedly.
Kandinsky tells us in 1909--
ReplyDeleteYes, Kandinsky was one of those who believed in the visual music idea. He probably got the idea while in Von Stuck's circle. If ever somebody didn't understand music, it was VK, the exact person who set out to make visual music. The contents of his manifesto fall somewhere between design and palmistry.
When one has such an intense adoration and veneration for the power of art and artist, it becomes unbearable to accept the possibility that there are limits or boundaries to its power and profundity.
The act of proclaiming that anything can be art and that every interpretation is equally valid provides refuge for the cognitive dissonance. It allows them to protect the sacredness of their ideal of art from the brutal reality that art is perfectly normal.
This is a very interesting insight, Richard, about the True Belief involved. I hadn't thought of it this way.
I'll add that much of the lure of ideality is its lack of complexity and confusion. Surety leads to clear purpose, and clear purpose just feels good. Action can then be direct and flying high with righteousness.
The thing about unrecognized cognitive dissonance is that it tends to stem from a paucity of imaginative power. One can hold contradictions in the mind if the contradicting ideas never actually have a aesthetic/haptic reality. If they're just ghost symbols of ideas they'll simply float through each other rather than clash.
This is the great danger of ideology when it attaches to the weak minded. It goes unnoticed that the proffered thoughts are phantoms. The unmooring of the mind from reality that is accomplished by postmodern indoctrination goes a long way towards ensuring phantom-mindedness. Making any given sucker in the cult ripe for further manipulation.
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ReplyDeleteI agree that if it did work, that’s how it would work.
ReplyDeleteBut I don’t see any evidence that it does. If that were the case, I would expect to find among the abstractionists a canvas that has at least touched the simple emotional profundity of a short synth midi melody. But no where do I see such a thing in abstract art.
If I’m missing these non-representational works that illustrate pure emotion in colorful squares and rectangles, maybe you could point me to them?
Does Mondrian’s boogie woogie for example contain the emotional content of even the most basic 80s minimal electronic track?
I don’t think it makes sense to conflate atonality and John Cage's 4'33". Atonality still falls in and out of aesthetic communication, despite the lack of a tonal center. Each phrase seems to “talk about” missing modulating tonal centers. Our brain fills in the gap, so that we feel we’re “falling through” keys and modes, without any of them ever resolving. The goal is the discovery of a "new, freer sound”. That’s a sort of music...
ReplyDeleteIn a strict technical sense Richard, you are right. But if atonality is taken to its absolute limit case it meets the domain of noise, the meaningless. And although the concept of 4'33 is that the auditory content of the performance becomes the sounds of the audience and whatever else itself, and argued that this "serves to draw our attention to the qualia of non-musical sounds", this is not the same thing as authored sounds designed to communicate meanings to the listener.
I wouldn’t lump either of those movements in with the central essence of postmodernism, which is about transferring concept not experience.
I can't agree with this. The latrine signed R.Mutt would make no experiential sense to anyone unaccustomed to the cultural significance of museums and the art of the past, and atonal works make experiential sense to nobody. Both appeal exclusively to the intellect, concepts as means by which a tradition can be broken in the hope (at best) it will yield as yet unexplored aesthetic pastures new.
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ReplyDeletePerhaps a short story is due;
ReplyDeleteIn an age distant from our own, either buried deep in our bygone past or projected far into the unseen future, an intelligent species evolved, analogous to our own Lyre Birds. Mastering a lifetime of sonorous education, they were endowed with the gift to replicate any sound with striking authenticity – a volcano's furious eruption, the gentle ruffling of ship sails, the resounding crunch of boots on gravel, the soft whispers of leaves rustling in the wind, even the gurgling sigh marking the passing of a revered bird. Through this extraordinary talent, the artists of the Empire of Lyre Birds wove sonic tapestries of breathtaking richness and depth, transporting their audience to distant realms through auditory narratives.
Across the empire, tens of thousands of birds labored tirelessly in their studios, each meticulously crafting these auditory experiences and imprinting their unique signature onto every replicated sound. The citizens of the empire, brimming with pride for their auditory skills, considered their avian kin – those reliant solely on tones and songs for communication – as far lesser beings. Young Lyre Birds, yet to master the art of sound reproduction, chirped and tweeted innocently like any other fledgling.
During a particularly progressive epoch in their history, a group of cultural dissenters emerged, advocating a radical theory. They postulated that within the immature twittering of the juvenile birds lay the seeds of a new, non-representational kind of sound. The populace, largely dismissive, labelled this noise as "Muuuu-sic", an onomatopoeic term echoing the infantile sounds produced by the younglings. They understandably write off this idea as an attempt by less talented individuals to achieve fame through incoherent babbling, bypassing the need for mastering the complex skill of sonic imitation.
The early instigators of this rebellion, mesmerized by the concept of 'style', started deviating from the traditional path, introducing non-naturalistic tones and overtones into their sonic renditions. Later, the more audacious ones dared to abandon representational sounds altogether, orchestrating symphonies of seemingly discordant tones. To the uninitiated, this barrage of sound seemed no different from the cacophonous babbling of unrefined songbirds. Despite the public mockery, these avant-garde artists stood their ground, and curiously enough, some of the esteemed institutions began endorsing their unconventional approach.
However, in comparison to their millennia-old tradition of representational sonic arts, this experimental form seemed incredibly nascent, nothing remotely comparable to a Mozart Concerto in its grandeur.
Yet, if we in our own world are willing to entertain the idea of non-representational visual art as you suggest, shouldn't we also acknowledge and celebrate the equivalent pioneers among the Lyre Bird rebels—our own Kandinskys and Mondrians—cherished by the erudite, even though they lack skill in our ancient art form?
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ReplyDeleteI am not citing Mozart as an example of representationalism. That was a poorly formulated aside.
ReplyDelete(Although, I do think that even Mozart falls into a sort of representationalism from time to time. There are, for example, near the end of Mozart's K. 279 Allegro bouncing two-fingered piano lines which I swear are indistinguishable from the movements of a tottering juvenile bunny rabbit.)
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ReplyDeleteI think I should explain that my own pet biological theory has strong implications for ability to meet you in this conversation:
ReplyDeleteI believe that music is not just an artistic creation, but a biological phenomenon that traces back to the very origins of human evolution. An example of convergent evolution between man and songbird.
Take a time machine journey back to two million years ago --
I contend that you would witness the spectacle of naked cavemen standing on rocks singing complex melodies in a manner akin to a mockingbird's song. We were, even then, a profoundly social species, so I also suspect you’d also see packs of cavemen harmonizing in intricate group performances.
I see this as the fundamental factor in our unusual evolutionary path. The selection of males based on their musical prowess exerted powerful selective pressures, favoring larger brains, unusual cognitive capabilities, and complex vocal chords, ultimately paving the way for human speech and intelligence.
Having evolved for music, I believe we have inherent biological systems for appreciating and understanding it. In my view, music's meaning doesn't require translation through sign – it communicates directly with our emotions, just as dance does for bees. Our innate response to music, even as infants, is remnant of this primal "Bird Song Man".
Given this, I’m squarely at odds with The Nabis. Instead, I am drawn to the opposite idea – that we should not expect for human emotions to inherently correspond to visual stimuli, at least not in a manner that is objective and non-representational, musical. The combination of this red, blue, and purple, for instance, does not elicit a fixed, innate emotional response in the same way a musical phrase would.
Our visual cues are removed from our primal biological responses, as a difference of kind. Consequently, I think the concept of 'visual music' is, for our species, a biological non-starter. For humans to make visual music, we’d have to have born chromatophores, a cuttlefish.
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ReplyDeleteThe factors influencing the quality of the red or green are as numerous as the complexities of the world. We are subconsciously sensitive to the phenomena of even the tiniest changes in color. It's natural you would find unpredicted and difficult to memorialize relationships between those palettes, as no one can document all the ways color and light interact to express related circumstances.
ReplyDeleteBut the inability to identify those phenomenal relationships, doesn’t prove that color spaces cluster around anything more than circumstance.
Beyond the most obvious, that some reds hint at off-canvas sunsets, while others evoke off-canvas lava flows, while still others mean Tiffany glass, we have a 100-layer cake of optics, season, atmospheric water vapor, surface phenomena, culture, and memory.
Any experienced painter knows how absurdly microscopic shifts in hue and saturation dramatically change the meaning of a light source. But they also learn that those same microscopic shifts can produce similar effects in many different scenarios. Tiny increases in saturation near the top edge of an object affects, for example, the perceived translucency of the object, as more translucent objects appear more saturated due to sub-surface scattering.
For the concept of color chords to present a persuasive alternative explanation for these interrelated experiences, one would expect to find non-representational art pieces with similar palettes also providing related experiences. However, this doesn't hold. When representational grounding is absent, the palette offers only the smallest possible insight into the experience provided by those same colors in the representational work: https://imgur.com/a/YVOrkjw
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ReplyDeleteAnd of course unrelated colors can cause a sense of the discordant as well. Just as a C and a Gb in the same octave sounding together sound tense and cause ear stress.
ReplyDeleteAnd to add substance to your earlier point about a colour combo made to behave differently by the juxtaposition of further colours; add an E and a B to the C and Gb tense combo and you achieve a major chord with a sense of bittersweet enchantment.
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ReplyDeleteIt is a useful heuristic to analogize between artforms. Those kinds of analogies serve as intuitive bridges between different forms of expression.
ReplyDeleteIn architecture, the culinary arts, gardening, and theater we find harmonies, melodies, chords, counterpoints, and so on variously described. We talk about art’s “poetry”, and music’s “color”. Doric columns have “rhythm”, and flowers arranged have “rests”, poems have a “coda” and musical harmonies have “texture”.
Many theorists thus assume that “They work for the same reason”.
This idea, while certainly intriguing, requires more scrutiny. Yes, colors have relationships. It may even be useful to describe this relationship as a kind of resonance, in that they can “harmonize” or be “discordant”. That is, they can feel some kind of good or some kind of bad when next to eachother. So can flavors. But we should exercise caution not to attribute undue weight to these analogies, lest we conflate heuristic utility with hard evidence of correspondence (whether neurological or functional). Is it even the case that the "some kind of good" we find in visual harmonies is the same kind of good? I don't think that's been demonstrated.
Certainly, one can imagine a chemist producing an everlasting gobstopper that steps through layers of carefully balanced flavors, with several bright herbaceous citrus flavors that are strung between the layers providing “melody”, and several repeating layers providing a “return to a theme”, with “bass notes” of earthy and round flavors. No doubt the chemists of the future will create incredible richness of experience in this way. But music, it will never be.
We can know first-hand, not from dense argumentation, but our own experience, that a “pure art” will never be music. The evidence is there in every Kandinsky, Persian Textiles, and Decorative Mosaic. Our world has spent fortunes and the work of countless lifetimes attempting to produce a abstract art with the musicality of even the first three notes of hot cross buns. No such thing has ever been produced. Nowhere in the multitudes of nature can such a thing be found either.
Even if we dispense with the requirement of harmony, discordance in the visual arts lacks the immediate, palpable tension found in music. No number of colors picked at random provides the sort of visceral cacophony of three randomly selected frequencies.
If any such evidence exists purely in the abstract, let is be shown. Otherwise, if you are confident that such a thing can be produced, why are you here telling us about it rather than producing it? Surely, that would be the culmination of a lifetime.
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ReplyDelete>>No number of colors picked at random provides the sort of visceral cacophony of three randomly selected frequencies.
ReplyDeleteNever saw a DeKooning???
I think this was one fantastic conversation that ended on an note that didn’t quite capture the merits of the conversation. Richard’s point that visual art depends on representation was never quite answered since art isn’t music, though the underlying parts of art are so similar to that of music and other arts. His idea that music was born of birdsong and developed language, implying the development of other forms of communication using drumming codes and dance as language and meaning, ritual, etc. is very interesting in that it substantiate language, giving it a body and form.
ReplyDeleteKev asks the most mysterious question, is sensation enough? Sensation is not necessarily a feeling and a feeling isn’t by itself fully rational or fully intelligible. Opera is overwhelmingly of feeling but not necessarily rational.
Even though the abstract expressionists worked against poetry, they had their moments where things were expressed without their expected forms. For Example, Clyfford Still did at times represent space without three dimensional form. It was an inverted process of finding new ways to express assumed things by stripping away their expected associations. But like sensation, is it enough? It was enough for some people, but Kev’s notion that it could be so much more, even symphonic is an imaginative possibility that is worth the consideration. At the very least, abstract art could be much richer than it’s been.
Another interesting point in the discussion was the idea that the corrupt institutions of the past were destroyed and that the framers of the Constitution were versed in rigorous philosophy. But what was destroyed was more than that. One of our most destructive modern notions was the early Renaissance idea of nominalism which is associated with nihilism because it leads to the idea that if words are without substance then the whole is eventually understood as nothing. Another Renaissance idea that has taken hold of our world is syncretism which is a simplistic religious idea that also removes the discernment to distinguish things, thus lumping the universal into an overly simplistic imaginative reality rather than objective reality. Both ideas were condemned as errors before the modern era commenced and its revolutionary chaos took root.
The previous notion destroyed along with the institutions was that all things were held together by truth. Though not physical, truth is also not merely imaginative because it was understood as a binding force. Truth was believed to have force because in it one could understand and feel its tranquility and its power to dispel vagaries and the distractions of wants which were associated with sensation, sometimes of feeling, but destructive because it bound one to a smaller part, rather than the larger order. I think we can agree that this religious notion of truth as both a mystery and a binding force is not a common concept today, but I suggest, even by analogy it might have a place in answering the question of whether a sensation is enough. That’s not to say the answer is an easy one. Within a larger order of binding truth permeating reality, a sensation is still in some way significant even if by itself it lacks the intelligibility to understand itself. The question of whether sensation is enough is a good one, possibly unanswerable, but one that points back to mystery, a concept which was also destroyed by modern hubris.
> The previous notion destroyed along with the institutions was that all things were held together by truth. Though not physical, truth is also not merely imaginative because it was understood as a binding force. Truth was believed to have force because in it one could understand and feel its tranquility and its power to dispel vagaries.
ReplyDeleteModernity isn’t the end of a belief in truth. It signifies the resounding victory of truth over all of culture.
Modernity’s chief concern is dispelling vagaries --
That our world can be broken down into perfectly rational and measurable systems of matter and law, a world composed of mathematical, physical, biological, chemical, and neurological fundamental entities. That there is a truth, and that it can be definitively ascertained via experimentation and predictive modeling.
This is belief in truth in its most potent and extreme form.
A world of total epistemological knowability. A paradigm in which any notion deemed worthy of consideration must first be truth-y, axiomatically. Debate not centered in fact is null and void, and the importance of beautiful or useful fantasies is dead.
Modernity does not doubt objectivity in art because they disbelieve in truth. Instead, modernity categorizes truth in art as superstition, because big-A Art would presuppose the existence of phenomena that cannot be reduced to knowable materiality. According to the truth regime, dreaming about such non-measurable things is heresy. To find the truth about art, in the regime of truth, we must use only neuroscience and sociology. We must describe it in factoids.
In times of yore, truth was not nearly so powerful. Fantasy was an imperative, and discourse was founded in a generous suspension of disbelief--
Man was unprejudiced to the existence of things no one had ever seen and could not prove. His dreams had magic, and his feelings had inherent value. The Old Testament accepted the existence not just of El but of Baal/Hadad and Ashera as well, the Romans saluted Syria's Invictus Sol. Early explorers saw voodoo magic in the Caribbean and giants in Patagonia and sea monsters in the south pacific and mermaids in Florida.
Today, no such freedom from truth is allowed. Any thought or notion that does not accept “facts” as paramount is "superstition", and superstition is irrefutably irrelevant. Let there be no fairies or monsters, no King Arthur, no Jesus Christ, no true love, no heaven, no Art.
The regime of truth tells us:
“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”
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ReplyDeleteThank you Richard for so passionate a creed explaining our new reality.
ReplyDeleteYou are indeed a true believer.
Yes, one could suppose all truth is attainable by way of science, but it too begins with the assumption that truth is the binding force of reality, perhaps more rigidly so as I hope to explain.
I’m not disagreeing with factual truths, but how people intuited such
prior to science must have been a very good trick.
The founders believed as you do that science would undue superstition and they were
of the evolutionary optimism that sprung forth from the Renaissance. Yet it immediately morphed into revolution arriving 600 years later at an unmoored ahistorical
subjective era as few could have ever imagined. What went wrong?
The modern world embraced nominalism and the ideology of syncretism,
but why, as neither are remotely true nor scientific.
You didn’t bother addressing any of that but insisted the fault was in some
abandoned superstition rather than a possible misstep in modernism itself.
Your creed has no place for its own errors no less ambiguities or mystery
as an experiential reality. In fact you view such as something to be smashed
not unlike the fascist subjectivity passing itself off as sensitivity.
Cain didn’t kill Able because he had a chemical imbalance. He felt unloved and
an unfairness which he experienced as a sensation of anger and was taken by it.
Life is experienced not in a lab, but isn’t it ironic that such subjectivity has
overtaken the optimism that all would be bound by scientific truth? One can
see how a denial reverts to its own optimism, of course it’s all scientific, yet ignorance prevails and around again the denial goes, never understanding that while we learn things, we are creatures of habit, impulses and sensations we don’t fully understand.
The question Kev asked is a profound one, is sensation enough?
It’s experiential, which may be why you ignored the question. But such
is real and as impulse can get the better of people. Sensation as thoughtfulness can be the better of us. Such doesn’t come as canned thought or rote knowledge.
It comes with a learning curve and that curve is experiential.
Kev,
ReplyDeleteThe reason I think your question is so profound is because we use knowledge to decipher sense experience and quite often can’t immediately understand what is being sensed. Why is something bothering one? It might be pride, embarrassment, or a sense of jealousy at another's dignity because the other is happy in themselves. There are any number of very human things we experience that reflect on our humanity, our imperfection, our wants.
We dance around trying to avoid our humanity and that’s quite ridiculous until we recognize our humanity in our ridiculousness. Then once accepting our reality, are so relieved to be human. Each area of this dance of life is experienced as a type of sensation. Even confidence, or the joy of being at ease are as much apart of the experience of living as facts or fantasies of some social attainment, social perfection, creating a better world, etc.
Yes of course there are many forms of ridiculousness and dangerous forms of being ridiculous, but what a joy to be human when one realizes they are. It’s not something we learn and then simply understand forever. It has to be relearned over and over as each expression and moment is unique. When we begin to recognize the disposition of being human we recognize it as a kind of home, a truth.
But that we experience all these things which are each true as also part of the larger truth that binds us to being true. One falls in love with it like an artist falls in love with space, color, ideas, paint, light. It is both a refined and existential thing. It’s all apart of life. So truth in life is intuited, sensed, then wrestled with and understood. The resulting disposition is the product which is sensed. The product of science or arduous thinking is something else, it is useful or insightful but is separate until through reflection it becomes part of being human and that insight creates a disposition, which again is sensed. A patient is healed for example.
So while sensation isn’t very good at understanding itself, sometimes requiring a certain self conviction and recognizing one’s own human ridiculousness, reflection delivers one to a deeper type of sense experience. In the same way one senses truth, peace, love, even happiness for the well being of a friend, though such is by no means automatic or even natural and for some like myself, a real achievement. It all involves levels of our humanity reflecting on itself in a larger reality. In this context, the notion that one is loved is very helpful and the feeling of being at home in this world is something that is also experienced, not canned or rote. It can’t be conjured. One can’t force it because it’s a different kind of will, a desire to know one’s self. it is something one brings themselves to willingly.
cntinued below.
Putting the term sensation into this area of discerning truth is part of the greater truth the ancients experienced. It’s not folklore or fantasy. Even in a painting one can experience multiple types of sensations which are quite human and finding the edge between mere sensation, feeling and human thoughtfulness can be very hard to discern. That’s why I find your question so hard to answer and possibly impossible. That thoughts can have such effects hardly reduces them to a sensation, yet one may experience such clarity in the company of sensation. It’s a little like chasing a ball of yarn. At some point, sensation can posses or engender a profound thoughtfulness while at other times it is thought that engenders a sensation. It sounds rather subjective but like a sound or combination of sounds one can get to know them. When the mystics talk of their relationship with the truth as in God, this is what they are talking about. They experience such as a characteristic of refinement which they in their humanity interact with. If such sounds imprecise it’s because the relationship is living and of sense/thought/feeling. Where it gets more curious is when such acts in total silence.
ReplyDeleteHowever one reads what I’m saying, it is quite different than concepts of egalitarianism, or reaching singularity, or shaping someone else’s mind through coercion as some other universal ideas considered to be impositions. It’s far more than that. The idea that such will be catalogued into a science of experience may happen, but that catalogue will be something quite different, an altogether different language than that of experience.
Sean
Kev,
ReplyDeleteThe truth I’m talking about is the truth of our humanity, by which we are drawn to tender dimensions of the human heart. The area is in some ways a secret because its off the beaten path of survival and self concerns.
What you’ve been discussing regarding the nuances of sensations in color correlating to sounds has raised very human questions such as the one in this thread, is sensation enough?
To Richard and yourself I share the book below that was just released about a scientist and friend of ours here in Columbus regarding the nature of the sun written by a Professor Unzicker from Germany.
"The Liquid Sun: A Coming Revolution in Astrophysics" by Alexander Unzicker
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7613YD8/ref=sr_1_2?crid=5VI4IZWQ3D6Q&keywords=%22the+liquid+sun%22+books&qid=1686053678&sprefix=the+liquid+sun+books%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-2
This link is a video of Professor Unzicker defending Pierre Robitaille’s Liquid Hydrogen Model of the Sun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w21K4KiYd4I
> You are indeed a true believer.
ReplyDeleteNo, you misunderstand me.
I’m not allied with truth, but with whimsy. I'm arguing against your half-steps. We must reject the realm where true love is a myth whole cloth, we should welcome a most extreme form of faith in fancy.
In my home, four young people are nurtured with tales of magic. They believe that our garden is the home of fairies, and gnomes live in our attic. Under the old bridge, a troll maintains watch. The tooth fairy gathers their milk teeth, essential for her enchantments. Apollo, Hermes, Zeus and Athena lend an ear to their innocent prayers. They feel the constant, unseen presence of our ancestors, guiding and protecting us. King Arthur and Robin Hood are figures rooted in history. They tread carefully to avoid bad luck, and eagerly chase good. They relish the story of their great grandmother’s encounter with the Blarney Stone, bestowing us with the gift of gab. They believe in their eudaimonia and destiny, written in the stars.
With practice, half these things I believe myself. I hope to believe more as time goes on.
It is my philosophy that in the material realm, with enough investigation, we will discover that it contains no content at all. Everything human is eradicated there. All of life must and can only be in fiction, that is the sole place mankind CAN live.
Militantly, we must rebuild a world in which the unfettered landscape of dreams is held in higher regard than Renaissance’s truth. Creative thought must become again the canvas upon which our shared reality is painted. We must place our faith in the potent magic of the life, valuing it as more real than the dead matrix of the factual world. We must find our way back to the dark ages. I wait patiently for Merlin.
Indeed I did. Thanks for your explanation. Your approach is a curious one I will be thinking about.
ReplyDeleteIt is possible to hold to the truth of our humanity and truth in science and Pierre Robitaille is one who does both. Pierre encouraged my son who just defended his PhD last week. His professor said he sought candidates who had the spirit necessary to overcome the many disappointments and failures of research and encouraged his candidates to do normal things and be silly. There's some truth to what you're saying.
Maybe the battle with the emptiness has taken away our humor in more ways than I've considered.
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ReplyDeleteNo, I offered the book to you and Richard.
ReplyDeleteYes, I was aware that your question regarded whether something non representational was enough to validate a piece of art. But fragments as you put them are the substance of an understanding, the stuff of, the body of the recognized idea which isn't as independent as language suggests. At least that was what I'm trying to say. The final idea isn't necessarily understood in the felt experience and can even engender a new sensation or thought/feeling, not because one is a fragment of the other, but because one is an understanding of the other. If art were just the afterthought it would lack the emotional reality which you find lacking in abstract expressionism.
I agree with your general idea in the emotional basis of our organic person, but I'm not sure the term fragment is useful and we've had this discussion before. The emotion is itself and exists whether we think we're smarter than it or not. That each can influence the other, a sensation, feeling and thought, makes it very hard to claim one is the end result of the other. What is in these things you are calling parts have the integral substance of beauty or the discordant as a property. Yes good things can come from mismatches with creativity. I agree with that too.
To exploring non representational art, you are also suggesting that parts can possibly be coherent as a whole in composition. It's an idea that demands one look at the parts as emotionally real and I think they are even when technically useful, just as space is perceptually real and also emotionally real, existentially mysterious. Another question might be, is mystery enough.
I was trying to show in the comparison that the emotion is present even if it is a property. I think we're talking about something that isn't as separable as we render them for communication purposes and to that end the comparison to human emotions was useful. At least I saw it was useful to what I thought you were asking.
not because one is a fragment of the other, but because one is an understanding of the other.
ReplyDeleteTo be more specific, one is a new understanding of the other, a new emotional state.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteYour observation that science crushes humanity is very interesting and the idea of abandoning
it to imaginative innocence is too. A lot of insights come out of seemingly nowhere in moments unrelated to a previously occupying problem. We really don’t know where exactly or how insight suddenly appears out of nowhere.
Innocence, trust, even the old notion of virginal thought referred to a state of mind freed from unrelenting wants. People don’t see the merits of any of this anymore, rather we expect the mind to function with machine like categorizations when organically things overlap. Thoughts understood create emotional realities just as thoughts misunderstood create emotional realities. Sense realities can be happy. Can anyone really analyze the experience of happiness?
Then there’s sufferability, something modern people could use more of, that having suffered through a lot of life, not crushing the young with the same. I appreciate you sharing your approach with your children.
The recognition that all things are in some way true doesn’t really mean we can discern all things and I think you’re onto something in that science has created a type of machine-like expectation of people and also language which just isn’t the nature of either.
Kev,
ReplyDeleteJudging by your message pruning, I'm assuming you're rethinking a direction you had taken.
If so, perhaps you could tell us where you went wrong, and what direction you're thinking now instead?
Richard,
ReplyDeleteAll of the aesthetics stuff I write here is based on stuff I've researched, considered and hashed through long since. There was nothing in what I said that I have been able to defeat so far. So it is what I currently believe.
The conversation changed, and I wanted out. I'm here to dance, not to wade through mental molasses. Also, I never like leaving any technical research online, even in the skimmed form I write it here. Especially now that AIs crawl through everything, stealing automatically.
By the way, I enjoyed your cartooning on your Instagram feed. It made me happy.
It’s a given that a sensation is part of the body of a whole image, rather than a fragment of an unrealized thought.
ReplyDeleteThere’s a big difference.
Aesthetically speaking, a whole image is made of sensations each of which has its own
particular content and is part of the body of the image. That's a given.
The Brandywine School was ensconced in new think modernism.
I was also showing the connection between emotion/sensation/feeling and the word and how they were linked.
I did that because words were transformed into a mere symbol in the late 19th century by a revived nominalism, something that has undermined meaning in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Each of the above are distinctions with real meaning and consequence.
Don’t be like that Kev. No harm was done.
ReplyDeleteNever said a word against your statements on musical imagery or against non-representational possibilities. Thought your passages were quite interesting and said as much. I was also was complimenting others contributing to the conversation.
The notion that language is but a directive has done incredible damage and I don’t need to do research to make such an observation. The Founders didn’t need to justify what they observed and testified to as self evident with epistemology or research either.
I was trying to reconnect verbal and written language back to its sense-substantive source because such reconnects it to the imaginative and sense-image making process and its humanity, where as they say mystics and poets meet. That effort to sever written language from its organic roots actually has a history and not everyone is familiar with it.
Even fantastic and brilliant artists have been smitten with trendy nonsense so don't read too much more into that comment than what was.
I understand not everyone agrees with the idea that our written language is limited to the directive function but in trying to make a case against such I realize I’ve overstayed my welcome on the subject here.
For honesty’s sake, let your insults remain as your own emotional craziness has been part of the process we’ve shared too and that's part of being human too. You were a little sensitive to my comments. Take care.
"I was trying to connect this to that. I was trying to make this case about that."
ReplyDeleteDo you really think people are actually wading through your fogbanks of meandering and equivocating prose... collating the scatterplot of half-thoughts into a coherent narrative that even you yourself couldn't be bothered to formulate? Like you're some kind of beatific guru on the mountaintop leaving a trail of wisdom pearls for your acolytes to trace back up to The Truth?
Got news for you. Almost nobody cares. Because the tedium and difficulty of trying to parse your prose and connect up everything you say into a coherent point - that somehow relates to art - while staying awake just isn't worth it.
We're nice people here. We've tried. We really have. But having tried too many times, I know - we all know - there's no goldpot full of insight at the end of your plodding sermonizing. There's just more emo-shtick. And sociological-religious claims. And semiotics claims that "you don't have to research". And now pseudo-science recommendations. (Oh sorry, I mean pseudo-science offers.)
Talk about nuts.
Maybe you should try a more overt form of crazy. It wouldn't kill you to say something entertaining.
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ReplyDelete"The fact that non-representational Art, for somewhat obscure reasons, is not actually possible would have been far from evident to anyone with an imagination."
ReplyDeleteWho says non-representational art is "not actually possible?" There's plenty of it about, at least a century's worth or more, much of it quite beautiful. What are the "somewhat obscure reasons" you assert make non-representational art impossible?
"Of course Mondrian or De Kooning, in their desperate and blinding hope, could have persuaded themselves that they were on the path to this new form. I'm confident they grappled despairingly with their canvases in an attempt to create a visual music. I suspect they did, sadly, try to earn it."
"Desperate?" "Despairingly?" "Sadly?" Many do think they did successfully create a "visual music," as you put it, and not merely futile decades of wasted effort and failure. I prefer deKooning to Mondrian, but I see beauty in the works of both artists.
Robert,
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be something of 'the coincidence of opposites' necessarily at work in the visual arts; at one pole we have complete, flat-out mimeticism in the form of the photograph or trompe l'oeil painting and at the other pole we have pure design with no authored reference to anything outside itself.
Hence there is, by definition, no abstraction (as in 'pulling out of or dragging away') going on at the extreme of either pole. But the formation of poetry necessarily involves the act of abstracting from experiential reality itself. Consequently the plastic arts must occupy always somewhere in-between these two extremes and so require the coincidence of opposites, or 'coincidentia oppositorum' as Iain McGilchrist prefers to refer to it, to sing poetically of the world.
This, BTW, leads me to believe that there is so obvious correlate between music and plastic art.
> What are the "somewhat obscure reasons" you assert make non-representational art impossible?
ReplyDeleteShakespeare employed many of the same devices (e.g., alliteration) that make lilting, tralling, and scat sound good. And when set to a melody, lilting can be incredibly beautiful. But without the grounding of poetry or music, lilting and scat are just gibbering noise...
Here's a question for you -- why is it that when we play every note of a song simultaneously it does not still make art? Surely, quite a bit of what makes music into music is the selection of notes, timbre, instrumentation, etc. Why don't they still add up to something when you throw out the dimension of time?
More generally, why is it that some artforms can be broken down into sub-parts and the parts alone are still Art, while others when broken down do not remain Art?
On the other hand, why is it so SIMPLE to generate artistic expressions in certain artforms? Just yesterday, I was playing a basic repeating bassline on the piano, while my seven-year-old improvised some little melodies. Despite her lack of formal musical education, her melodies were emotive and interesting.
If I were stranded on a desert island and had to choose between a child's piano improvisations or the entire canon of non-representational art throughout human history, I believe I would get more spiritual sustenance in the child's experiments. But why is that so? It’s obscure.
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ReplyDeleteIndeed Kev, and I can readily think of a list of graphic couplets with similar rhetorical interpretational alternatives. (I remember a graphic exercise you set both of us long ago that involved designing a graphic equivalent for the sense of gravity.)
ReplyDeleteSo I believe I see the point you are trying to make.
But music, with the exception of the isolated chord, is temporal in the substantiation of relationships, whereas the relationships that communicate in plastic art, with the exception of the isolated line, are substantiated across space.
And although I'll need to think further on the matter, this curious 'inversion' of how the two art forms substantiate including what constitutes the exceptions to their condition with a chord sensed spatially and a single line sensed temporally, seems somehow connected to why we do not, and maybe cannot, experience plastic art as 'visual music'
PS: Your second post appeared only after I had posted my reply to your first, so apologies if my discussion of the temporal nature of music comes across like I was not paying attention.
ReplyDelete> In music the narrative image forms as it explains itself through time; the total work unfolds as a drama as it goes along.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. So to have an answer for why some artforms can be broken down into sub-parts and others can't, we need to have a model for the mechanisms of the artform itself.
So to return to Rob's question -- "What are the 'somewhat obscure reasons' you assert make non-representational art impossible?"
Not to be coy, but, because that's not how art works. The art in art, like the poetry in poetry, exists in the relationship of the telling to the subject. If one removes all subject from poetry, we are left with atonal scat. If one removes all subject from art, we are left with scribbles and splatter.
Music can do things that painting can't for the unremarkable reason that they are different.
Why can't we remove the representations from Art? For the same reason we can't remove the Daffodils from I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by Wordsworth.
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ReplyDelete"If one removes all subject from poetry, we are left with atonal scat. If one removes all subject from art, we are left with scribbles and splatter."
ReplyDeleteWho is to say there is not or cannot be beauty in atonal scat, or in scribbles and splatter?
I enjoy atonal scat in the form of music from many purveyors of "free jazz," or "free music" as it is also called, as well as scribbles and splatter in the paintings of a number of non-representational painters. (Atonal scat in the form of writing does not reach me.) At the same time, there are free musicians and non-representational painters whose work leaves me unmoved, indifferent. How can I qualify what it is about those artists/musicians whose scat and scribbles appeal to me, even excite me, and those who don't? Honestly, I cannot. It's a mystery to me, one I have no inclination to solve. I don't need to understand or justify to myself why I like or dislike an artist or a work of art.
(I first saw Cy Twombly's art in reproduction and his work didn't do a thing for me. When I saw several of his paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was electrified by them! It was a visceral reaction, and that's good enough for me. His work in reproduction still offers me only faint pleasure, diminished by its loss of scale and the presence of his marks on canvas. De Kooning's work didn't reach me when I first saw it. Over time, I gradually came to appreciate his work, like learning to appreciate a flavor or texture in food that is initially off-putting, until now I take great pleasure in almost all of it...with the obstinate exception of his bronzes.)