In recent weeks, we've looked at different approaches to figure drawing, and discussed how different artists can use the same human form as a vehicle for wrestling with very different types of issues of both form and content.
In earlier days when illustrators were classically trained in anatomy, figure drawing seems to have been a far more literal educational process. Here are some figure studies by illustrator E. F. Ward who was in George Bridgman's anatomy class (along with Norman Rockwell.)
The class sometimes drew figures in costume:
There has been a great deal of talk about artists revealing subliminal truth and the narrative fallacy in theor life drawing, but fromwhat I've read, Bridgman would have no patience or sympathy for such theories. He expected that the purpose of these studies was to learn anatomy.
"Bridgman would have no patience or sympathy for such theories. He expected that the purpose of these studies was to learn anatomy."
ReplyDeleteDid he preclude it beyond the learning-stage ?
Either way, when dealing with the human you're working with the narrative reality, subliminal or overt, whether owned up to or not.
Even denying the 'inner' is itself a proposition that can only exist in an inner.
Even in these studies. The human form is on a continuum from thought and feeling and story.
Bill
The discussions and comments trailing this series of posts examplify the obvious fact of meaning being a product, not a quality of mimetic art. The communicative effort is always cooperative in culture as in nature. A story cannot only be told, it must be heard.
ReplyDeleteAlso, equally as obvious, there can be many approaches to anatomy in art. A surgeon's knowledge does not equate to artistic skill. Where one observer might focus on the structural relationships of biologically differentiated masses, anonther might take a more phenomenological approach. A third will choose a medial path.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
'a product, not a quality of mimetic art'
DeleteBig sigh....
No, it's a quality of it. Ass about face, again.
Bill
Artists can't help but express what they feel and think with every mark of their pencils. Such is not expressable in words.
ReplyDeleteWith the great meat-headification that has overtaken supposedly intellectual society, fewer and fewer artists seem to know this. Those who work with stone tools - by which I mean digital tools - seem mostly unaware of this fact. And those who work with AI and monkey-hand tracing, are clearly completely unaware.
Has anybody else's blogger view/style changed today? It is quite annoying.
Yes Kev, me too. (har har)
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd changed some setting on my browser .
"A story cannot only be told, it must be heard."
ReplyDeleteYou are asserting a distinction between qualia and communication that doesn't exist. Can we understand a quality to be, without it being felt by some sensibility?
"The communicative effort is always cooperative in culture as in nature."
Cooperation is the wrong word. I'm now assuming that English is not your native language, and therein lies the continued confusion on the vocabulary. I'll repeat that Stanley Meltzoff said that the suggestions of art are so powerful that they should rightly be called commands. An aesthetic command is not agreed to. It is a subliminal manipulation. It is a communication obeyed without agreement.
Human beings are shockingly manipulable without their assent. Which is why governments, political parties, news agencies, social media platforms, and businesses all employ subliminal persuasion experts. To communicate orders to the dupe hordes to get them to behave on behalf of the knaves behind the scenes.
Kev Ferrara and Chris Bennett— if something has changed about blogger, I swear (once again) that I had nothing to do with it. I’m currently at Comic-Con in San Diego listening to a panel on the upcoming film, “Meth gator.” The creative team behind Sharknado was apparently rankled by the commercial success of Cocaine Bear, which they view as derivative work, so they’ve decided to outdo them with Meth gator. As far as I can tell, the moral of the story is, “Don’t flush your meth down the toilet,”
ReplyDelete"I’m currently at Comic-Con in San Diego listening to a panel on the upcoming film, “Meth gator.” The creative team behind Sharknado was apparently rankled by the commercial success of Cocaine Bear, which they view as derivative work, so they’ve decided to outdo them with Meth gator. As far as I can tell, the moral of the story is, “Don’t flush your meth down the toilet,”
ReplyDelete"We think that highly successful movie of a drug-enhanced beast is so derivative we're decided to rip it off."
The moral to that story is that a guilty conscience improvises justifications poorly.
The ^above^ anonymous comment is mine. Still getting used to the new blogger formatting.
ReplyDeleteYou are asserting a distinction between qualia and communication that doesn't exist.
ReplyDeleteDid you mean the opposite here?
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"Did you mean the opposite here?"
ReplyDeleteSo I was correct that English is not your native language?
Yes, English is not my native language, and I am not, nor have I ever been, a Communist AI.
ReplyDelete- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Taking a break from round-the-clock Comic-Con, now trying to catch up here (and now I see how blogger has tampered with its comment format):
ReplyDeleteAnonymous/Bill-- I think Bridgman belonged to that tough generation where you worked like hell to acquire as much objective knowledge and as many technical skills as possible, in the belief that once you'd paid your dues, a style would naturally evolve, and you would earn permission to unleash your subjective meanings. Until that day, striplings were supposed to keep their subjective meanings to a minimum.
By the way, Bridgman's original drawings are in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum, and are available (admittedly in low rez) on their web site. Worth visiting.
Postmodern anonymouse wrote: A story cannot only be told, it must be heard."
I think that's mostly true-- even hermit artists who work "only for themselves" and disclaim any interest in communicating to the uncaring, heedless world always seem to retain some tiny hope that their note in a bottle will be seen someday and perhaps some remote audience will appreciate it and maybe even be moved to pity.
I think that the Ferrara/Meltzoff "aesthetic command" is a delusion by those who would wish totalitarian powers for artists. Such a state of affairs would be nice, but sadly they simply do not exist (and sometimes that's for the best, as audiences sometimes tease out meanings which the artist didn't intend or to which the artist was oblivious). I agree that some elements of pictures come closer to "commands" than others, but so much of what Kev calls "qualia" depends on the receptivity and education and maturity and sensitivity of the viewer, and maybe even what the viewer had for breakfast that day. (For example, People educated in classical antiquity have a far better chance of appreciating Cy Twombly than those who are not.)
I also agree with Postmodern anonymouse that receptivity can occur on a social/cultural level, not just an individual level. Why was the culture ready for the colors of Bob Peak or the music of the Beatles in the 1960s, but not the 1950s?
"I think that the Ferrara/Meltzoff "aesthetic command" is a delusion by those who would wish totalitarian powers for artists. Such a state of affairs would be nice, but sadly they simply do not exist (and sometimes that's for the best, as audiences sometimes tease out meanings which the artist didn't intend or to which the artist was oblivious). I agree that some elements of pictures come closer to "commands" than others, but so much of what Kev calls "qualia" depends on the receptivity and education and maturity and sensitivity of the viewer, and maybe even what the viewer had for breakfast that day."
ReplyDeletePanamanian Night Monkey can't see blue, doesn't believe it exists.
When you feel the sense of action in a Frazetta painting, do you think you agreed to feel that sense of action?
No, you did not. The sensation just happened to you. You were essentially commanded to complete the effect of the suggestion (called "psychogenic closure" in the psych literature) by the structure of the effect and the way it played on your visual expectations. The structure and suggestive clues indicate what sensation is to be closed upon, thereby triggering your intuitive reflex to solve the visual mystery (the incompleteness of what is shown). Every effect in art is like that. If you can feel it. And great pictorial/narrative/poetic/imagistic art is built of little else but effects, at various scales.
Again, the visual cortex has far more connections and density than the intellectual faculty. And acts at lightning speed to resolve visual questions compared to the so called intelligence. Which is why it is found in those who have superhuman calculating abilities that their math skills, by some accident, are being hosted by, have been ported to, the visual cortex.
The effects of art, sensual illusions, are like magic to those who experience them. Mainly because it is enormously difficult to accurately locate the cause of effects in any case, but in art - where the causes of effects are deliberately hidden* - it becomes nearly impossible for the layman to figure out the magician's tricks.
*"Hide your artistry" - Alphonse Mucha
"People educated in classical antiquity have a far better chance of appreciating Cy Twombly than those who are not."
Really now. People "educated in classical antiquity" would ignore Twombly as a kind of pitiable adult child or a mental patient.
"aesthetic command"
ReplyDeleteIt's not an ego or dictatorial thing, quite the opposite. When working properly, a person making a picture is conforming the work to things that 'already are', even beyond the obvious thing of figurative fidelity to an objective subject (making the horse look like one) - it goes on into shape, form, pattern.... These are themselves, the notes they stike are their own objective qualities. The results they have in experiencemay be coloured by receptivity, capacity, culture and so on, that's another matter.
Moving backwards from any one of these studies, you see the human, the sex, the age....and then you *are* actually in a narrative - the time-related changes to the body, the accreted ones that have shaped its form, and the immediate ones of the posture with the implied movements (you could spin off from these points, and start imaging further narratives, but these would be a separate matter, and those indeed could fall into the whole cultural-subjective complexes.)
None of this is 'assigned' at the whim of culture or a set of agreed rules with a nominal or actual spectator.
(The philosphies that mix these two things up are the same ones that see all meaning as constructed. Which I suspect the 'postmodernist' was trying to sneak through a chink here.
It abstracts, and then seems to have trouble distinguishing the abstraction from the reality. It then got disconcerted when the abstractions/templates started to appear somewhat cardboard, and then just went with it - all meaning is a construct or is culturally-determined, requires an agreement...etc.. Even objective things like sex. Nutcases....)
If you move on from the human figuration, where a drawing of a human means 'human', the same applies to shapes, colours and so on. Some people may have some degree of difficulty seeing or feeling that the inseperability of the complex of qualities that we feel from a human is the same as being = to, or *meaning* human (because you can abstract the meaning inferred to stand on its own), but it should be easier with the more primal elements of form. A colour means itself and this is inseperable from its quality. A curve means that curved line you feel and see. Here, with these, the meaning can only be grasped by experiencing them, because the abstracted ideas of them used to describe or communicate rely on code (the communication can stimulate an inner imaginative recreation of them, though, but they do not exist in the code/language that was used to conduit).
As for communication, the need for audience, etc. No, the fusion of imagination and the subject, with or without a figuration (drawing/painting), is the basis, I think. This just recurs in the experience of any audience. But the quality and meaning exist already in the primary experience.
Bill
I cant say I entirely understand you Bill. Though much of what you say sounds strangely familiar. Do we know you by another name, perchance?
ReplyDeleteI now have a need to see a book of Ward's drawings (illustration work less so). I've spent some time since reading the post looking for one and have failed.
ReplyDeleteIs it. failure on my part or is there no such thing? I'd even be content if there's a website with a generous amount of images.
Can anyone help or is there in fact nothing to be found?
Thanks.
Aw, just rambling, probably repeating myself, this seems to be the same conversation for the past while, or gets drawn back into the same concerns, which on my part/hobbyhorse is the 'interiority'of things being the principal basis, matter (and expression) being a state of quality/mind, rather than the latter being a side-effect of matter.
ReplyDeleteAnd no - used 'Bill' since last summer, only one or two anon comments here prior to that, inconsequential . But I'm piqued - who/what were you thinking of ? I haven't used my real name, but I don't do 'personas'
Bill
Short version - quality, qualia - the thing we experience, either in complex combinations like the human form -
ReplyDelete(both in a spliced moment of just its immediate form, in its history of growth and change, which are a 'narrative' as is the posture and poise suggesting preceding and subsequent movement.....all a wider network of qualities going on from these..)
- or in simpler units like in a curve or a colour, are protean experiences of 'meaning', at its most basic and fundamental.
And the quality and the experience are a single phenomenon that can't be seperated. But, for me, I'd say that as the characteristics that create the quality-experience are located in outside things, your tree or whatever, and we enter into them via our senses - the light rays, the forms, the eye-organ and so on become quite literally a single thing (this from Goethe), and our brain is like a mirror. We're in the phenomenon and looking at its reflection in our mind.
So, the 'quality', which is a form/piece of 'mind', or spirit, is both part of ourselves but also simultaneously in the objective phenomenon (the tree). As it exists in potential in the tree before we experience it, the 'inner' also has a real existence in these things in the outer world, independent of us
(we only enter into them in experience, to the degree of our egoless attention, a kind of kenosis - this is where the qualities of pattern and so on in an artwork work their spell at the core level, before all the association-stuff; you linked an apt piece of a skull with smokey shapes here a few weeks ago which had this very strongly - part of the spell of the piece actually recedes as soon as you realise that some of the shapes you're looking at form a skull )
- a huge amount of what we define as matter is sense-dependent, (leave aside all our definitions and so on which are only code and maps), or all of it really as we can only define it in terms of our senses. i.e. as theotetically experiencable by sense or in its terms. 'Matter' is an illusion of, or is dependent on, our senses or postulated ones. But we know that things existed before we felt them, before similar mammals did, before life existed. Which puts qualia -'mind'stuff' or spirit - as the basic reality.
Sorry, it's a hobbyhorse as I said. A bit over-egged to be pinning on some life-studies here, but some related (some, in parts of what you, Kev, have said, I think/?) and some alternative points and suggestions keep being returned to here.
I need breakfast...
Bill
Thanks Bill, that was much clearer.
ReplyDeleteFor my part, I agree with the idea that we, in some sense, intuitively enter into the existence of objects by our perception of them. And that includes all the inherent aspects – natively meaningful to us - that altogether synthesize to form the object and give us clues to its nature, facture, origin, future, etc.
The question of whether meaning inheres to phenomena irrespective of our apprehension of it as a sign complex is a challenging one. Yet, it is so difficult to imagine that, for instance, a pyramidal structure with a wide bottom edge sitting flat on a ground plane does not inherently mean “stable” in some way that is beyond mind. The relationship is certainly stable beyond mind.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of discussing The Aesthetic, I take experiential sensation to be the fundament of meaning, with all complexes of meaning being built of meaning simplexes. I don’t quite know why the dryness of yellow, the coolness of blue, or the verdancy of green are so hard-wired in us. I just know they are very low-resolution abstract building blocks of more interesting content in art making.
I come from a non-religious background, and I’ve struggled with the meaning of ‘spirit’ for a long time. For the purposes of The Aesthetic, I don’t share the idea that it equates with qualia. I more understand it as the sense of a resonance song moving through (and thus affecting) material objects. Thus we detect the spirit of a great work of art by sensing its resonance song. Bad works of art lack both self-resonance and a kind of theme/song.
Yet, it is so difficult to imagine that, for instance, a pyramidal structure with a wide bottom edge sitting flat on a ground plane does not inherently mean “stable” in some way that is beyond mind.
ReplyDeleteIn a geological time frame, it might as well be upside down as far as stability is concerned.
…that said, what you wrote in response to Bill here is probably as close to my position as you’re likely to ever get, so cheers to that!
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"In a geological time frame, it might as well be upside down as far as stability is concerned."
ReplyDeleteI don't see your point. If the relational structure of the elements changes such that stability disappears, that is no longer what I'm talking about.
"what you wrote in response to Bill here is probably as close to my position as you’re likely to ever get, so cheers to that!"
Are you under the impression that I've changed my position in some way?
The point was simply that it is not difficult to imagine a circumstance in which your previously described pyramidal structure does not inherently mean "stable".
ReplyDeleteFire burns, but not meaningfully so. Pyramidal mountains endlessly form and crumble, needing no meaning either. Meaningless oceans of blood pump and squirt and spill. The sun rises and the sun sets, and in the black of the night, even red loses its range. This matters, but for the longest time by far, not in any mindful or meaningful way.
Both ants and humans perceive and build, but only human builders, apparantly, have that fatal flaw, that surplus of cognitive energy that drives it to not only see shapes and colours, but to imbue and embellish these with meaning. In the mind of this singularly meaningful animal, the pyramid is given meaning. And so is the blood spilt on the pyramid steps during an eclipse, to the pulsating rhytm of drums and in the flickering light of torches. The black, the red and the yellow - all are made to brim with meaning. So much meaning. Willed into being, observed, reported, retold and remade by immense mimetic capability. Meaning upon meaning, endlessly meaningful. Eventually, even the burns on toasted bread must be made to mean something! And isn't that the face of God in that cloud up there oh you missed it it's gone.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
The structure, not the instance. The geometric archetype. On its own in imagination, or inherent in a physical one when a person experiences it.
ReplyDeleteAs for ants, termites, birds.... it is probable that their 'minds'/cognitive apparatus inhabit the meaning of the structures they create in a much more fundamental way than we do, and the difference lies in their having a much lesser reflective - ie, abstracting - capacity about it.
You, on the other hand, really seem entirely unable to think in any other kind of way than in abstracting literalism, even to grasp any other mode of experience as a proposition.
Or to realise that that's an abnormal condition for most people.
People don't sew on meanings like that, they feel them with immediacy. You don't begin with a concept of 'green', or 'mother', and graft it on to the experience.
In the rituals you're talking about, every element is experienced the same way - especially for minds with those belief systems. The pinnacles of those temples were felt as both spatially and spiritually elevated, closer to the gods; they didn't have the abstraction of a concept that was added later.
They felt blood to be the life force, the didn't attach the idea of 'life-force' to the red liquid like algebra.
Every element in the development of the rituals over time was the same as part of the process.
Even your bloody toast - normal people *feel* the qualities of the shapes they experience in pareidolia.
(i) Not being able to, or (ii) thinking it's god, are both pathological conditions.
Bill
Kev - that merits a better reply than I can put together on the hoof, thanks. I'd like to jot down some things that sprung to mind and get back to this later if I get a chance
ReplyDeleteBill
“But the quality and meaning exist already in the primary experience.”
ReplyDeleteA natural mystic is onto something.
To Aristotle, contemplation was the highest virtue because it was most like the activity of God. Contemplation quells impulses in rational delight. To try and explain it, the nature of worship is a participation in contemplation upon contemplation, or God’s contemplative nature, where the participant experiences peace in a distinct yet sentient way, as a reflection God’s rational delight.
The means of rendering a story was secondary to Aristotle and that’s been an ongoing point made on this site. With the introduction of the term aesthetics in the early 19th century it may have been inevitable it would become for some its own end. Contemplation as the highest virtue, and life as story, were replaced societally in a kind of self sacrifice to the cause of utilitarian progressivism as human potential and endless arguments were made against life’s story and Aristotle’s comments on contemplation as untenable.
Sean Farrell
DeleteAs does that, Sean ! I'd like to get back to that as well. Just quickly, as Kev mentioned aesthetic as well (and I may be missing something in how the term was meant by him), as we're talking about figurative art which is meant to convey things in nature/the outer world, and as nature works on us in the same way as 'mere' aesthetic power, the two can (have to be ) be considered together.
ReplyDeleteWhich was what I meant in the first comment up above, while Bridgman's obviously right in setting the elaborated narrative aside for learning the fundamentals, elements of it are always there (narrative = chords or arrangements of qualities/qualia; these in turn = elements of primal 'meaning').
Bill
Yes Bill, I agree with what you said about the EF Ward drawings capturing things beyond just trying to get the anatomy.
DeleteMy use of the term aesthetics was the same as Kev’s definition below which refers to visual reality verses any kind of preemptive symbolic suggestion. Also, the means were secondary to the story with Aristotle, as it has been explained and argued on this site that the idea, or story comes first.
It would be too quick a judgement for one to assume Aristotle had a preexisting notion of God which distorted his observations on contemplation. Imitation is a mode of learning, or contemplation where the nature of things are observed. That’s basic to things he built upon it, like story. In common parlance, that’s how contemplation is understood. A lesser known distinction is that some contemplation includes and is defined by a balm that quells impulses and such can be present intermingled in different kinds of reflections and observations, but is discerned as unique because it may also arrive as a particular silence that is visited upon one, quite unique in presence from one’s own existing efforts or condition of self. It’s likely Aristotle intuited something to embellish his notion of contemplation with the divine designation and not the other way around.
Back when they first began removing cataracts I think in the 1970s, people who had them from birth struggled to learn to see. Some wanted to go back to their internal way of sensing the world. Even in the most basic things there is a learned familiarity.
So what is the point? In intimate observations and interiority there are things that resonate, not just in the what the eyes learned, or discover, or through learned symbols, but in the heart, in its formation of ideas, in presence and other mysterious stuff.
“The point was simply that it is not difficult to imagine a circumstance in which your previously described pyramidal structure does not inherently mean "stable".”
ReplyDeleteYes, if you destabilize a stable structure, it will no longer ‘mean’ stable. Are you possibly understanding the word “stable” to mean permanence, despite my explanation having no indication of the involvement of time, stone, or erosion?
The thesis under consideration is that, in some sense, the being of a thing is inseparable from its meaning; that the form is functional and the function is definitional. Pointing out the crucial role of wide bases to the manifestation of any particular standing arrangement in which a wide base participates is hardly “seeing things” as per your attempted pareidolia analogy. Wide bases function to stabilize structures on a ground plane whether we bear witness to this function or not. And if every reasonable mind that could possibly exist would note that same truth, how is that truth an invention of any of those minds?
Chlorophyll - verdancy incarnate - allows out the green wavelength of light. These wavelengths, the prime index of vegetative life, don’t cease to emanate from verdancy if we close our eyes. Taste a rose petal one day, and see if does not taste how it looks. There are deep and profound connections between the nature of a thing and all the signs it gives off, because the nature of a thing is the cause of all its effects, all of what it does and affords.
“Fire burns, but not meaningfully so. Pyramidal mountains endlessly form and crumble, needing no meaning either. Meaningless oceans of blood pump and squirt and spill. The sun rises and the sun sets, and in the black of the night, even red loses its range. This matters, but for the longest time by far, not in any mindful or meaningful way.”
Assertions aren’t arguments. Contend with the material. Don’t just restate your thesis in different ways.
Kev mentioned aesthetic as well (and I may be missing something in how the term was meant by him)
ReplyDeleteThe direct sensing of meaning visually rather than the intellectual decoding of it through symbol translations. (Originally: The science of what is sensed and imagined.) In art, aesthetic experience takes the form of sensed illusions caused by our intuitive imaginative closure of suggestive visual relations.(Or something like that.)
A small contribution to the intriguing turn the discussion has taken:
ReplyDeleteIf hunger gives meaning to food it follows that food gives meaning to hunger. So, one can reasonably say that on a higher level if the thirst to understand gives meaning to phenomena it follows that phenomena gives meaning to the thirst to understand. And it's not unreasonable to see that if the base of a mountain gives meaning to its summit then the summit gives meaning to its base. A line of reasoning which, I believe, also holds for the human sense of place within the cosmos, in other words, the means by which meaning flows between the heaven and the earth.
>>>>>If hunger gives meaning to food it follows that food gives meaning to hunger.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by "gives meaning?""
~ FV
FV,
ReplyDeleteGood question, and thank you for asking it.
I think the best way of answering is to imagine yourself hungry and sitting down with a cooked steak in front of you. The steak, the plate, the fork and the knife are related to your hunger in different ways and therefore given different meanings by your hunger. And each give different meanings to your hunger; the steak its satiation of the hunger, the plate the vessel of its satiation, the knife and fork the preparer and deliverer of satiation.
Now imagine you have eaten the steak and you are no longer hungry. The meaning of the steak, plate, knife and fork are now changed. The plate, knife and fork are now objects that need washing up and tidying away. The meaning of the steak is now that of a body integrating within your body, and the meaning the steak now gives to your body is that of satisfying digestion.
By gives meaning it sounds like you mean alters meaning. That doesn't explain where meaning comes from in the first place.
ReplyDeleteA dirty fork is still a fork if its dirty, inherently the same tool. It became dirty as you were using it. Was it altering in meaning as you used it? No because you were still using it to eat with as it was getting dirty.
> If hunger gives meaning to food it follows that food gives meaning to hunger.
ReplyDeleteAnd hunger gives meaning to satiety, which also gives meaning to gluttony, and on and on, so that all meanings are interrelated with all other meanings.
Alternatively, it may be clearer to understand that rather all "experiences" are related to those other alternative experiences one could be having. In other words, during the experience of one event, we have a distant sense of the experience of another better, worse, or different alternative event.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, when we experience hunger, we also feel, in some sense, the ghost of the experience of fullness. It's not that the "meaning" is related, but that the things themselves are actually related. That is, the "meaning" is merely an abstraction of the real relationships between phenomena.
Similarly, in art, we feel not only what is depicted in the picture but also what could be in the picture but isn't. Thus, a painting of a hungry person also evokes in our minds a virtual experience of what a vision of a healthy, happy person would provide, and we feel that absence of sensation, just as a hungry person experiences the lack of fullness.
>>>>>Similarly, in art, we feel not only what is depicted in the picture but also what could be in the picture but isn't. Thus, a painting of a hungry person also evokes in our minds a virtual experience of what a vision of a healthy, happy person would provide, and we feel that absence of sensation, just as a hungry person experiences the lack of fullness.
ReplyDeleteWhat are you talking about? Anything could be in a picture and isn't. Does a guy standing evoke a guy running, a guy sitting, or a guy laying down? or all three?Or maybe a girl standing? Does a guy eating grapes evoke a guy eating chicken? Or a guy not eating grapes? Are most pictures of guys not eating grapes? Does a dance scene evoke a scene where everybody is standing still? Or dead? Or in a police lineup?
Nobody experiences art like this. You're chasing after a runaway theory. Most people just try to understand the story while under the radar enjoying the pretty shapes and colors and patterns.
~ FV
Nobody experiences art like this. You're chasing after a runaway theory. Most people just try to understand the story...
ReplyDeleteYes, they do. And the "story" is built as much by what is not in the picture as by what is also.
The feeling when looking at a picture of a mother who is missing a child is shaped not just by what it depicts, but also by what it does not—the smiling child. Part of the impact and meaning of that picture is created in our minds by thinking about our own child, and what it would be like if they weren't there.
When we look at a picture of a serene, empty lake, we experience not just the lake, but also the absence of people, pollution, etc. We feel that it is serene not only because no one is there, but also because we have been to places where people are, so we have experienced the opposite. The absence of a sensation can be itself a part of the sensation.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not just opposites. If we look at a colonial farmer's family eating slowly and graciously at a winter table, we can imagine what it would be like if they were eating gluttonously. We can also imagine what it would be like if they were not able to eat at all. Both of these alternatives can be encompassed in the meaning of the family eating, so the picture signifies not just what is present but also these possibilities.
"The absence of a sensation can be itself a part of the sensation."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think so. Everything has an alternative or opposite or has moved from one state to another.
It doesn't need to be an exact or single alternative, either - the steady postures in the figures above hold the viewer's interest in their calmness which still feels held in tension against their implied possibility of action.
"it's not unreasonable to see that if the base of a mountain gives meaning to its summit then the summit gives meaning to its base. A line of reasoning which, I believe, also holds for the human sense of place within the cosmos, in other words, the means by which meaning flows between the heaven and the earth."
Yes, it feels like a polarity. The base of the pyramid* or mountain taut against its tip.
And the thinking-feeling individual being existing in both the centre-point of his or her self and in all the outer phenomena to which we're strung by senses. We feel ourselves existant as independent of this whole net of phenomena but our existence is characterised by exiting the self and feeling their qualities.
Or, like you said, and Sean, between ourselves and 'upwardly' in contemplation, feeling for meaning. Which anciently placed the gods with the stars; transcendent meaning(s) as the constellated phenomena in polarity against the earthly, or individual, microcosm.
Sean - the cataract patients, yes, seeing is willed focus and attention, Goethe seemed to guess that development of the eye from light-receptive cells was connected with this.(Evolution has been called Goethe's intuition of metamorphosis strung across enormities of time, maybe we see an element of it recapitulated in babies learning to see, the process quickened by attention and stimulation, and stalled by neglect)
But it's also an emptying, you only see when you are stilled; ie, without interposing things between .
Bill
(* and the pyramid is, Kev, the par excellance exemplar of the quality of stability - we feel tension steadied in the security of the form, but we couldn't know 'stability' without feeling the insecurity of the potential sliding away of the diagonals or sides. This is where meaning and quality are united, as against definitions which are abstractions. The pyramid is the crystal of Stability)
Bill,
DeleteAristotle was thinking and yet experienced elevated levels of sensation in contemplation, looking, discerning. Something he described as closer to the activity of God. A harmony of things, mind, heart, order. I was attempting to describe some examples.
The story of the blind people having their cataracts removed came from a book called “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”. With their fresh eyes, they said people looked like walking trees. In the movie “At First Sight”, the same description was used. They needed to become familiar with what they were looking at; shadows, shapes, the functions of what each thing was. Yes, like a child.
In art there’s the restriction to visual elements, but not everything is fully restricted to sensations. There is meaning in understandings between visual elements as Chris pointed out, which means there is recognition learned at some level. Doesn't recognition in some way function as thought? Then there is the story and what is suggested. There is allegory. There is what is resolved in a story and unresolved, or tragedy. So the life of a piece is not fully restricted to sensation, but includes learned or recognizable things, alluding to things known and unknown. There is mind. There is heart. All of these fall into the area of aesthetics, yet they are not without learning, even specific learning. One can’t contemplate any of these without some use of thought. As people discuss the many matters of story as it regards visual art, is the word aesthetics sometimes more confusing than it is useful? Yes, to eliminate text-like, sign-like communications, and replace them with forces, surfaces etc, within a mentally constructed story.
How can thinking in Aristotle elicit exquisite sensation in contemplation if thought were not associated with some permeating order? An order, or some permeating presence of intelligence you sensed internally in the simple figure studies.
A more obvious question in art might be, does it make one in some way more human or less human?
Forgot to sign it again, Sean
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBy gives meaning it sounds like you mean alters meaning.
ReplyDeleteNo, I mean that a particular relationship between things gives or endows a particular meaning between them. Hence my sentence on the previous post; 'the meaning of a chair is given to you when you sit on it'.
That doesn't explain where meaning comes from in the first place.
It does if you see that meaning is a property of relationship between things. Since all things are in one sense or another necessarily related it therefore follows that relationship must be prior to the realities that are related, which means that meaning itself must be an ontological primitive. In other words, meaning is the foundation and summit of the mountain of reality.
The thesis under consideration is that, in some sense, the being of a thing is inseparable from its meaning; that the form is functional and the function is definitional.
ReplyDeleteObviously the two must be connected in some way. But for me, being undeniably rooted in Continental thought as I am, existence preceeds meaning. Existence is made meaningful after the fact. The simplest argument I can offer in support of my assertion of meaning being a product of language is the fact of its absolute confinement to language. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
There are forces, particles, atoms and molecules. There is matter and then there are shapes. There are ants, and there is man. There is perceptual constancy and there is mimesis. There is language, and then - then there is meaning. Colours are made meaningful. Shapes. Blood is spilt on the pyramid, it's shape made to mean stability (beyond mind, mind you!), while one non-pyramidal celestial body eclipses another in the meaningful heavens above.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"meaning being a product of language is the fact of its absolute confinement to language"
DeleteNo, that's the encoding of meaning at a remove - ie, an abstraction.
Meaning is felt, literally felt - not metaphorically.
A square means a square. 'Four equal sides at right angles' is an abstracted definition.
Weight is felt - physically or in memory of the physicality, or sensed in a way that resonates with the feeling. But it has a quality of feeling that doesn't exist in the mechanics of the senses.
Same with colour - you can define it by analogy or scientifically in terms of wavelengths of light.
Both are abstractions from the experience, the first can have a kinship that is often found in metaphors which takes beyond analogy and have a concurrence of its quality (which can even enlarge or make the quality clearer), the second is an abstraction (but is elucidary in other ways).
But you feel the quality of yellow, the quality is its meaning.
This is why meaning and quality are the part of the same thing. Or meaning is composed of chords, arrangements or narratives of qualities.
You can seperate these meanings from the experience, but if it's inwardly done, ie in memory, it is a recurrence of the quality-meaning, otherwise you've just encoded it in language or by some other means. The shared nature of language (and often it's own mimetic, aesthetic forms and how these are used artistically) means that you can convey meaning to another person through it, but the meaning-qualities are then occuring in the person not in the language anymore than meaning of words resides in the signals in the telephone line.
(except sometimes in its mimetic/aesthetic poetry, 'tip-toe', 'pitter-patter', 'leaping light'....'path' suggests the gentle slap of bare feet on ground, or simpler cow's 'moo'.)
Bill
[Edit for spelling/clarity:
Delete'Both are abstractions from the experience, the first can have a kinship that is often found in metaphors which can take the relation beyond mere analogy and create a concurrence of its quality (which can even enlarge or make the quality clearer), the second is an abstraction (but is elucidatory in other ways).' ]
(Bill)
Existence = to exist. How do you know what 'exist' means ? By existing. Try thinking about this in terms of individual things instead of in stories.
DeleteBill
Since all things are in one sense or another necessarily related it therefore follows that relationship must be prior to the realities that are related, which means that meaning itself must be an ontological primitive.
ReplyDeleteWhile discussing a platonic relationship between things can be fun, it is not necessary for explaining meaning in pictures, and is liable to confuse the issue by making it seem overly woo woo.
I believe the metaphysics of qualia is irrelevant from the standpoint of meaning in art, and we can proceed without resolving it. It doesn't matter whether the relationships, qualities, or quantities depicted in the picture are platonic, incidental, or emergent. We only need to agree that they exist as more than mere mental phenomena. Allowing an argument to expand into a theory of everything is a sure-fire way to lose the argument.
Moreover, making it seem mystical would be a shame since the fundamental argument of 'meaning as abstractions of real qualities' is the most concrete and down-to-earth explanation for meaning.
"I believe the metaphysics of qualia is irrelevant from the standpoint of meaning in art, and we can proceed without resolving it."
DeleteYes, but there are always qualia and the best art is best because it can reproduce or convey them. A lot of the reactions to the life drawings here for the past few weeks were responses to them.
Bill
" 'meaning as abstractions of real qualities' is the most concrete and down-to-earth explanation for meaning. "
DeleteThat's at a remove. The dog's hunger is its own meaning.
The plate of food is a lot of qualities (shapes, smells, colours, tastes), but doesn't 'mean' satiety except in an encoded way (even though it also has a real relationship to it - ie, it will fill him up), which is a quality of condition, the meaning of which is only really found in it itself.
Bill
The simplest argument I can offer in support of my assertion of meaning being a product of language is the fact of its absolute confinement to language.
ReplyDeleteMeaning is in no way confined to language. If I am hungry, a plate of food means something very concrete to me. A hungry dog, likewise, knows the meaning of that plate of food despite not knowing a single word in any language.
Warning - Continental Thought Can Damage Your Existence
ReplyDeleteBill
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI believe the metaphysics of qualia is irrelevant from the standpoint of meaning in art... It doesn't matter whether the relationships, qualities, or quantities depicted in the picture are platonic, incidental, or emergent.
ReplyDeleteThe relationships within a painting are what give it aesthetic existence and are not in themselves depictions of anything. So I consider them to be prior to the sensed structures that the relationships are bringing about. This process, that of optical relationships forming the picture itself and the aesthetic meaningful sensations induced thereof, is the same as that going on in the real world it is depicting. For this reason I believe that the ontology of meaning in the world at large relates directly to where meaning in a painting occurs.
...the fundamental argument of 'meaning as abstractions of real qualities' is the most concrete and down-to-earth explanation for meaning.
But meaning, if you understand it to be an ontological primitive, cannot by definition be an abstraction, or abstracted.
What I mean by "abstracted" is that experienced phenomena must be sensed before they can be felt. These senses act as a kind of user interface for the mind as it interacts with the infinitely precise complexity of objective reality.
ReplyDeleteAn apple is red, but the red we know is the user interface icon for red. A single Red, as the lossless objective phenomenon alone, contains more information than can possibly be captured by the mind. For the mind to interact with that phenomenon, it must iconify it, much like the way the File Explorer on your computer makes comprehensible the unrelenting complexity of trillions of gate transistors.
The meaning is objective in the sense that yes those transistors/red wave lengths exist. When we delete a file or paint something red we are interacting with an objective thing (transistors or wave lengths). But it is abstract in the sense that it will always be virtualized by our sensory systems, and the sensory systems of people we show them to.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteIf I understand you correctly, it is true that our level of being means we will understand things within the frame of that level. We drink water, not H2O. We hear middle C not 256 Hz. But this does not mean that our sensory experience is some kind of abstraction of the lower levels of interpretation. In fact, interpreting water as H2O is the abstraction, not the other way around. Hearing middle C is not a virtualization of 256 Hz.
We drink water, not H2O. [...] In fact, interpreting water as H2O is the abstraction, not the other way around.
ReplyDeleteI'm not comparing water with H2O, our highly abstract mental concept of the chemical nature of water. I'm comparing water (as we drink it) with WATER (as it exists outside our sensory perceptions). That is, the substance itself, with all its characteristics and nature, more specific than any water we've ever experienced, a whole cosmos of quality.
Yes, the water I'm talking about is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but it's not made of the "ideas" of hydrogen and oxygen as written down in a book. Rather, it is made of the actual, incredible substances H and O themselves, which have their own characteristics and nature, and are composed of real things, with infinite precision.
Yes, the experience of your hand skimming across the water in a canoe contains more concrete information than a chemistry textbook can ever tell you about real water. But there is still an even realer water, beyond the walls of our sensory organs, which is even more tangible than our own filtered sensory experience will ever allow us to comprehend.
To deny that the water beyond the limits of our senses is more real is a form of solipsism. Accepting that it exists does not lead to relativism. Quite the opposite, it provides the firmest possible foundation. It answers the most basic riddles of relativism—how you and I can canoe on the same lake and experience two totally different waters. When we realize that true water is much more than just your water or my water, the paradox disintegrates.
Meaning is in no way confined to language. If I am hungry, a plate of food means something very concrete to me. A hungry dog, likewise, knows the meaning of that plate of food despite not knowing a single word in any language.
ReplyDeleteIf you are hungry, you are hungry. If there’s a plate of food, there’s a plate of food. Let’s presume these are facts, and not merely representational expressions. None of these facts mean anything in and of themselves.
But of course the plate of food might mean something to you . It might mean the whole world and everything in it. You might end up writing a seven volume work of fiction and have it published as In Search of Lost Meaning, to great success! After having eaten the food, presumably.
There were no building blocks of meaning in that meal, though. There were particles, atoms and molecules, arranged by certain laws and principles into matter - and after having perceptually interacted with these, you devised letters, morphemes and words into sentences, arranged according to the particular linguistics of your tribe.
The dog? It entirely disregarded the painting of a plate of food, and farted meaningfully.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
- Here's some facts.
ReplyDelete- Facts don't mean anything.
- They might mean something to you.
- But they don't mean anything.
- Facts are facts.
- Words are words.
- Dogs fart.
Cool story bro
'Anonymouse' has to be having a laugh. Nobody can be that stupid.
ReplyDeleteBill
Don't assign it anything and you'll be fine
ReplyDeleteBill
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI'm not comparing water with H2O, our highly abstract mental concept of the chemical nature of water. I'm comparing water (as we drink it) with WATER (as it exists outside our sensory perceptions). That is, the substance itself, with all its characteristics and nature, more specific than any water we've ever experienced, a whole cosmos of quality.
ReplyDeleteThe phrase 'water as H2O' was simply my shorthand for what you have just described above.
…there is still an even realer water, beyond the walls of our sensory organs, which is even more tangible than our own filtered sensory experience will ever allow us to comprehend.
Why is an experience of water that extends 'beyond the walls of our sensory organs' more real? To the stone age man the sun rises out of the ground, flies slowly above us and goes back inside the ground again. This experience is no less real than the one Neil Armstrong had from the window of the Command Module – a mottled blue ball alone in the darkness reflecting light from a blindingly bright point opposite it.
To deny that the water beyond the limits of our senses is more real is a form of solipsism.
I have nowhere said that our senses are superior to what might be thought of as more comprehensive forms of awareness.
…there is still an even realer water, beyond the walls of our sensory organs, which is even more tangible than our own filtered sensory experience will ever allow us to comprehend.
But tangibility is a human-centred experience. Our sense of meaning will necessarily be within the human framing. This is not the same as saying that meaning is the sole prerogative of humans.
“The simplest argument I can offer in support of my assertion of meaning being a product of language is the fact of its absolute confinement to language. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
ReplyDelete?? So, again, your proof of your contention is to restate your contention?
I’m certain you’re good at something, but it isn’t logical argument.
In Wittgenstein’s era, we didn’t know much about either clinical narcissism or neuro-atypical personalities. Which led many to take seriously some philosophizing of his that actually required diagnoses.
It is now rather common to find that egotistical, frustrated, insular, bookish types often take meaning in words rather than the world. In no small way as a manner of justifying their intolerance and retreat from real experience, the complexities of real interactions with real people, and other uncontrollables. Academicism is, in a sense, an entire priesthood founded on the escape into code-based linguistificaiton by certain retreating personality types.
What are you good at, dear Postmodest Anonymouth? What do you love? What is your favorite art? You reveal nothing, and that puts you in a superior position in terms of your ego only. That is, all you are revealing is that you want to feel superior to others here. But why are you here beyond that purpose? You clearly think you have nothing to learn.
Aesthetic plus Poetics.
ReplyDeleteThe question is can one build the poetic entirely aesthetically. That is, can one follow the Dunn adage, “Don’t paint a picture of a man, paint a man.” And in the act of doing so, can we also reveal something about that man and his circumstance that cannot be stated. Archetypes would not be presented as static symbols. But as compositions unto themselves that express who they are by what they afford or do, and how their expressions make you feel or what they make you think about. That way the picture has its own reality, generated in the imagination by the judicious use of pictorial suggestion. So that the picture no more refers to the world than the world refers to itself.
_____
In terms of missing elements informing the experience of a picture, I did color experiments on the question of color balance a while back. And found that the tertiary colors are not missed if absent, but the lack of any one primary (red, yellow, blue - including in mixtures) puts a big dent in the sense of completion. The primary is definitely missed if absent.
One of the reasons a single person in a picture suggests the idea of loneliness is because it lacks balance. Balance would entail the presence of another person; like balances like. Anything, any element without relation is anomalous and incomplete.
Which is all to say, we miss something in a picture when the picture has been either deliberately or accidentally unbalanced in relation to that primary element.
?? So, again, your proof of your contention is to restate your contention?
ReplyDeleteProof? I don’t have any proof, and I also have nothing to prove.
I am arguing against the assertion that meaning is an intrinsic and esoteric quality in the wonderful works and stories shared here on this splendid site, specifically when alledged attunement to these emanations of meaning is leveraged as argument for - or even proof of - superior understanding. I love art, but have little love for art hierophancy.
…And, whether or not the propositional calcus of an argument is valid, has no bearing on it’s truth value. This is foundational to that particular language game.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I don’t have any proof, and I also have nothing to prove.
ReplyDelete“The simplest argument I can offer in support of my assertion of meaning being a product of language is the fact of its absolute confinement to language."
An argument purports to prove something, no? To offer proof? Through a set of agreed-upon facts, through some logic that others can follow. Tautologies don't qualify.
"I am arguing against the assertion that meaning is an intrinsic and esoteric quality in the wonderful works and stories shared here"
An argument purports to prove something, no? To offer proof? Through a set of agreed-upon facts, through some logic that others can follow.
Dealing with you is truly a mad-hatters tea party.
All you do is repeat the same assertions as if they are arguments. Then deny you are making arguments or trying to prove anything by asserting you are making arguments. And you clearly know nothing about the material beyond whatever goofy dogmatic training in continental philosophy you take to be gospel. And then you get angry at people who dissent from your authority as some kind of intelligent arbiter of any of this material. But you say nothing, offer nothing and prove nothing.
Aesthetics and Poetics - you know NOTHING about this material So STOP SAYING IT DOESN'T EXIST you arrogant left-brained autistic schmuck.
Ok, 'Truth-value'....
ReplyDelete1. "the obvious fact of meaning being a product, not a quality of mimetic art."
2. "Fire burns, but not meaningfully so"
3. "Existence is made meaningful after the fact. The simplest argument I can offer in support of my assertion of meaning being a product of language is the fact of its absolute confinement to language. "
Let's start with the painful clanger at the end and get it out of the way.
• How do you ascribe meaning using language ?
You have a word and apply it to experiences ? Ok. Does the word have a meaning ? (nb; all referents are ='meaning', yeah, I know, but you seem to have missed this.....)
Why of course it does.
• From whence the meaning ? No, the concept is not the source of the meaning, although the meaning may have passed through the concept along the way.
From a thing to which the word refers ? Yes, a 'thing'. No, not 'only sometimes' from a thing - all the time, the broadest application of 'thing' is the correct one to use.
How did you come to know that thing ? ..........................................................................................[whispers - "from a mind-sense-feeling experience"]
Yes, you saw, felt, imagined, heard....experienced something. That is what the name means.
No, the name came after.
No, everything in language came about in this way.
Even the big abstract-seeming intellectualisations. Even the little bits that look like mortar that join all the nouns and verbs together. Geometrical abstractions, wind, ghosts, pretensious academic jargon in the social sciences...th' lot.
Even big complicated ideas. Elaborate concepts. Nonsense ones from Foucault. All made of arrangements of and relations between of things. Relations, too, are things.
Ok, that's #3. Now, let's apply it to #2 (which will also do a 'therefore...' job for us for #1).
• What's 'fire' ? What's 'burns' ? Very good. Now, what's 'meaningfully' ? Outside of your sentence. Right.
So you weren't talking about the building-blocks, but about the concepts people might put on to the phenomenon. Give an example of some of these things the fire doesn't mean until somebody attaches a bit to them with language, ehm, 'burning up in passion'....'consuming, wasting'...life-'n'-death-stuff.
Look at each, what are they made of ? Yes, remeber - concepts, too, are based on experinces. Groups of them. Each with their own meaning. Synthesising together. Which happens before they are named. Or even, if the synthesis occurs after naming, they are still founded on the experience, sans language, prior to naming.
So, where does meaning come from ?
No.....not 'language'....... 😕
Bill
Again, I have nothing to prove. My arguments aren’t offered as premises in a closed circuit of mathematical reasoning. There’s no way I can prove that meaning does not reside in the heart of things, just as I can’t prove the non-existence of God. But I can certainly still argue meaningfully on the matter.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of somehow proving the meaning contained in a vase is anathema to me - but not because it isn’t possible to devise a logical argument that yields a precise level of meaning. My problem is with what comes next, the sleight of hand in which this systemic product, this logical truth, this crudely drawn map, is made a requisite tool for navigation of the territory. The meaning of the vase becomes dogma, and the dogma defines the vase.
I prefer a dialectical approach, in which ideas are exchanged, intermingle, and produce new ideas. Simple as that. But I can’t prove this either.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Bill,
ReplyDeleteI am sorry - I struggle to understand the structure of your last post, so I’ll just hazard an answer to your concluding question. Is it …"from a mind-sense-feeling experience"?
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Would you prefer it in jargonese ? It doesn't need to be, it's composed of very, very simple (and obvious) facts.
Delete"But I can certainly still argue meaningfully on the matter"
You can't. Not at all. I feel like a bully, but you're an idiot.
Or somebody taking the piss
Either way, that's enough time spent on your clutter.
Bill
ReplyDelete>>>>>>The idea of somehow proving the meaning contained in a vase is anathema to me - but not because it isn’t possible to devise a logical argument that yields a precise level of meaning. My problem is with what comes next, the sleight of hand in which this systemic product, this logical truth, this crudely drawn map, is made a requisite tool for navigation of the territory. The meaning of the vase becomes dogma, and the dogma defines the vase.
Don't think anybody here thinks like this or thinks this is what is being discussed. So I doubt anybody knows what you're talking about.
~ FV
The idea of somehow proving the meaning contained in a vase is anathema to me - but not because it isn’t possible to devise a logical argument that yields a precise level of meaning. My problem is with what comes next, the sleight of hand in which this systemic product, this logical truth, this crudely drawn map, is made a requisite tool for navigation of the territory. The meaning of the vase becomes dogma, and the dogma defines the vase.
ReplyDeleteTranslation: I don't want to accept that there is truth, because if we discover that some things are true, other things might become false, and that sounds a lot like fascism to me.
So, where does meaning come from ?
ReplyDeleteNo.....not 'language'....... 😕
Bill, do you really believe this?
Logos refers to what is, and also understanding through language.
This is where language becomes significant, more than instruction, both pictorial language and verbal language. It’s beginnings are made of recognitions which are learned, seen and experienced. Recognitions are part of mind-sense-feelings. The sense to fear something can be felt through the anger and threatening nature of another’s voice, even in one’s writing. Language and imaging, can be integrated and work together at lightening speed.
FV obviously isn’t familiar with the conversation. But to say language isn’t a source of feeling is to separate language from its thought-mind-sense-feeling. Yet words do induce deeply felt experiences with new insights one may never have thought of before. It is true that insights can be born of language interacting with language. Discerning the difference between receptivity and ambition is to understand a complex pair of movements one may never actually observed carefully except in noting one is not the other. But, one can transmit such meaning to another through language. That means language which is made of mind-sense-feelings can transmit things one would never have thought of, or otherwise experienced. However, we probably learn more life lessons through obstacles, which are forces.
To most people who are unfamiliar with the subject of aesthetics, this is how they understand common spoken language. One doesn’t have to understand aesthetics to know language is made of emotional intonations and can be complex, or profound in simplicity. Contemplation is a good example of a disposition that makes learning possible, docility, but few think of it because they were taught it when they were too young to take notice. Many things transmitted in language may become familiar and may even be loving acts, without one actualizing or observing their potential.
So language is important to emotional development because it can bring notice to overlooked or assumed things
The notion that the label isn’t the thing, is foreign to the way people understood language for millenniums, when one’s word was a contract. To understand that visual art has meaning which is not of verbal intonations is a truth the average person probably hasn’t thought too much about. But to throw out words as entirely separate from their intonations isn’t possible except in utilitarianism, which is fairly new as a concept and has had disastrous effects on imagination and emotional understandings.
This notion that words are merely symbols disconnects the sound meaning of the letter from the word meaning, and words from their relational meanings, and suggestions to more complex thoughts. Back when Ken Burns first introduced his Civil War Series, there was some music accompanying the letters written between husbands and wives, but what blew people away was the tenderness and dignity of the writing. If the words didn’t possess mind-sense-feeling, then all the music in the world wouldn’t have sold it.
Translation: I don't want to accept that there is truth, because if we discover that some things are true, other things might become false, and that sounds a lot like fascism to me.
ReplyDelete(trying my hardest to not read this in the voice of Jordan B. Peterson)
Not a completely unfair interpretation, I suppose, but arguing against essentialist aesthetics does not equal advocating universal relativism. One can appreciate a well wrought urn without subscribing to either extreme.
---
Postmodern Anonymouse
Hello Sean -
ReplyDelete"Logos refers to what is, and also understanding through language.
This is where language becomes significant, more than instruction, both pictorial language and verbal language"
I was thinking of that actually.
But for non-Christians, and Christians, I don't think it's 'language' in how it was brought up above.
Logos (the aspect of it under discussion) can only be understood in the sense of 'that which brings about quality' - pictorial communication is a subset of sensory communion which is a subset of any communion - and is thus known. (With further implications in the Christian religious sense, but this part is relevant outside it).
The communion and knowing are the basis of language, but 'word' - Word - is the instance of Being and Knowing.
You see red, you know red. Your hear the word 'red', you know red, but only because you have first experienced red. The matter-that-conveyed-red-via-sight was language, the knowing was that bit of logos which is red. You hear r-e-d, the word was language, the knowing was logos.
You could say that creation - matter - is language, and it is, so yes - everything I said above was false.
But materialism is an abstraction of matter from quality (or quality-matter - the created Word, or the existant universe if you're not explicitly religious).
Man experinced first sense and quality and encoded it in language (all of the earliest forms of words signify both the quality or inner and the outer or material aspects as a unity, historically the separation of two distinct modes of perception as expressed in language came later).
While languages thus were a recapitulation of Logos (transmit meaning from mind to mind, enacting world-meaning) or potentially so, they're also potentially an abstraction from it, inevitably so. This abstraction - and the claim that it is the source of meaning - is what was being criticised above.
Bill
' You hear r-e-d, the word (small 'w') was language, the knowing was logos (both/either small 'l' and large 'L')'
ReplyDeleteBill
I think FV is correct, a vase means a vase. The mouse-cretin can't seperate this from further layers of meaning ('meaning contained *in* a vase') attributed to one, or an inferral from the thing; or realise that these, too, arise from further primary experiences or chords of them together
ReplyDelete(eg, the simulataneous quality experience of a hollow earthenware vessel and a natural spring and the female form and an intuition of a naiad, in experience - sight, hallucination, memory or imagination, or any together - independent of a heard vocalisation, or a reading of a written word).
Bill
Sean,
ReplyDeleteYou are not answering the question '...where does meaning come from?'
Language is a means by which meaning is communicated, it is not the source of meaning.
As I have already argued earlier; I believe meaning to be "the property of relationship between things. Since all things are in one sense or another necessarily related it therefore follows that relationship must be prior to the realities that are related, which means that meaning itself must be an ontological primitive. In other words, meaning is the foundation and summit of the mountain of reality."
You guys should spend less time spilling text and more time refining it for the sake of those reading along.
ReplyDelete___
A vase presents affordances that are unique to it in its capacity as a vase. But a thing named a vase can be used to catch a bug or knock out a burglar or sip water from. And things not named 'vase' can be used as a vase. So labels don't contain the meaning.
To define words by other words is tautological. Meaningless. Coherence theories of truth are for people who lose themselves in the game-like hermetic perfection of a particular symbol system. They forget where their abstractions come from; outside the system.
To wit: A word only has meaning as it relates to experience, either directly or through other words that have real and direct connections to experience. Often words only have meaning insofar as they can coerce people. One cannot find the meaning of an effective lie by consulting a dictionary. Word delivery shades meaning, can even reverse the meaning of a word through sarcasm. How is inflection diagrammed? Where is it in the coding of the language?
As for art....
There is too much meaning required in a work of art for any one thing to only mean that one thing. Every object evokes the era and culture, maybe the socioeconomic status or taste of the fictional people. Every object is part of a pattern and pattern is expressing something. Every object helps set space and space has expressive import as well. And so on. The one thing an object isn't used for is what it would actually be used for in real life. Because the work is a fiction. The water in the vase isn't water. The flowers in the vase aren't flowers. The hollow of the vase isn't hollow. And there's nobody really in the picture to enjoy the flowers or the vase anyway. The vase then - even though we might identify it as a vase - is mostly there to say things other than 'vase'.
On meaning being purely relational...
The more primary any particular meaning is, the less it can be moved through relation changes. One can make, through changes in color context, a warm gray seem vaguely yellow, vaguely green, or vaguely blue. But one cannot make a hot red change its cast. Hot red stays hot red no matter what. The principle is that the intensity of a note - which signals its purity - creates its own stability, its own pole in conceptual space. Even if you use the butt of a gun to squash a bug, it is still overwhelming a gun and not a fly swatter. Because every aspect of its design is optimized to fire a projectile from the hand. A vase is much easier to move in meaning because it is not intense in its uniqueness.
"So labels don't contain the meaning.
ReplyDeleteTo define words by other words is tautological"
For vase "mean a vase" ?
Not meant as a label.
'vase means vase' shorthand for: 'The experience of the combination of qualities is the meaning.'
Bill
Bill,
ReplyDeleteThe tautology remark was aimed at those that seem to think a meaning system can be an island. That an entirely self-contained (thus utterly self-referential) symbolic framework can even have meaning. Shows a mental disconnect between symbols and aesthetics and, in turn, aesthetics and the world.
The "more time refining" comment was more aimed in your general direction. And anybody else who cares to take the note.
Ha. Noted, will also apply to my reading.
DeleteBill
Bill,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughtful response. Also for clarifying your points regarding FV. Yes, aesthetics is a subset of sensory communion, which is a subset of any communion. Nicely put.
Knowledge has a tendency to fall in love with itself. I don’t know why but it can be very dismissive of non facts and anything not useful to itself. Maybe it’s because there’s a sense of completion in knowledge and it is useful. It does seek to be at home with itself as people rightfully seek such.
We have little access to the meanings of our beginning, our middle, and our end. In short, the bulk of our existence takes place in an experiential unknowingness, undiscerned, an experiential wilderness. Much is self learned regarding where we are and is non specific as we encounter love or its lacking. We come up not knowing very much and of course our end, death is a not-being. People avoid it like the plague. To make matters worse the marketplace is the source of a lot of life’s formation today which is total propaganda and false love.
Going more deeply into thought, thoughtfulness, consideration and deeper consideration is our life story. Its end is dependent on it. Such regards the imagination and depth beyond what one is given or has known. Language is indispensable in leading one further to a deeper experience, understanding, or sense of communion. But such isn’t self evident. Somehow, someway, the encouragement to seek being more deeply human comes from somewhere. It’s encouraged and must be encouraged. Yes it can come from inside but for many reasons, that’s a rocky process.
I don’t believe that language is relegated to a label or afterthought because such would define the self as a blank slate, and experience as limited to the organic dismissing story where things happen outside the self. Language can teach activities that engender courage, or as mentioned earlier, the highest virtue being contemplation. The writings of Aristotle for example are still quite valuable. Of course common language is a code, but it’s also a universal that all people have language. We may not all process verbal and organic information the same, but we all do it.
At performances of Shakespeare Behind Bars in Kentucky, prisoners testify to how Shakespeare taught them how to understand their own conflicts. The men who were given access to the program tended to be long term prisoners. When I relayed the story to a friend he said, Isn’t it a pity it took them so long to become human.
I do believe thoughtfulness for example has unplumbed depths exceeding ordinary experience and that language can lead one to levels of the poetic that is rarely found in modern public discourse. Thoughtfulness is an experience. A thoughtful touch is experienced. I experienced it in your very thoughtful note. Not as an afterthought but in the very reading of your note.
<<<<<<arguing against essentialist aesthetics does not equal advocating universal relativism.
ReplyDeleteAs kev points out, you just make an assertion as if it's an argument and you think it's a mic drop.
Simple question here is, if there's no limiting principles to anything, then what would prevent absurd relativism from cropping up everywhere?
~ FV
Chris, Thanks for your comment.
ReplyDeletePeople do tend to discard interests beyond themselves, just as knowledge tends to discard things it has determined to be unimportant.
I’m not arguing against a symbiotic relationship between observation and its expressions. I am bringing attention to Aristotle’s observation that contemplation is the highest virtue. One has to experience it as the highest virtue to come to that conclusion. He didn’t imply that all things could be fully known by contemplation either.
Returning to the cave drawings by the prehumans, Neanderthal man. Those drawings were a contemplation on the animals through the expression of line drawing. They came from the highest virtue, contemplation. This highest virtue could be said to be sacred, because it is of a nature of rational delight. If one sees with such eyes, they see anew.
Our recognitions become knowledge through familiarity, though they may remain nonverbal. They become like knowledge, assimilated and assumed. So if we see the drawings as failing to attain the fullest potential of art, say as scribbles on a napkin, we are seeing them through a screen of presumption based on being on the other side of that potential, even though “seeing” the drawings seems to come before its conclusion.
Following that line if true, then we see things as just this, and just that. Before we know it, all is just this and just that, and things lose value. Everything continues to lose some level of value until we just start kicking things around in presumption. I think that is the condition of our tired culture which has rejected the notion of the sacred and as a result it has no sense of the sacred or even gratitude.
So what is it that gives something this quality of being sacred? Is it contemplation or the discovery of the nature of the sacred in contemplation, in this disposition? Is this something discovered in itself, and not an afterthought?
In a culture where nothing is sacred we deserve to be miserable because we made it miserable by embracing the notion that nothing is sacred and that everything is just knowledge and therefore, old, beneath us and so subject to us.
The antagonism between “mind, sense, feeling” strikes me as a contradiction. I agree as Bill put it, that mind, sense, feeling is a sensory subset of communion. Yes we compare but by a mind process. How is sensory reality to be interpreted, in the context of being known or discovered; being just this or that, or being from that garden of rational delight?
This subject is not an easy one. That we can both recognize (know) something and yet not know its depths is not an easy idea. That there may be a greater beauty to be known is not self evident. Thanks for bearing with me.
Sean
E.L. Wisty returns
ReplyDeleteYou're like that mothballed old uncle at the family party that sits down next to a young person on the couch and holds their wrist so they can't get away while you talk. Have a point. Get to the point. Try to make it about art.
~ FV
The point is that we cite Aristotle for his thoughts on stories and poetics as they regard art, but we reject his understanding that contemplation from which his thoughts arose, was understood by him as coming from a virtue he likened to a mystery he called God.
ReplyDeleteThat is, thought and insight does not and cannot emerge from sensation by itself. It requires a human mind that can get beyond itself.
I doubt that spending your life staring into the distance thinking about divine objects will make anybody a great artist. Pretty sure Aristotle would have included that recommendation in Poetics if that's what he meant. Nice job ruining the thread tho.
ReplyDelete~ FV
I doubt that spending your life staring into the distance thinking about divine objects will make anybody a great artist. Pretty sure Aristotle would have included that recommendation in Poetics if that's what he meant. Nice job ruining the thread tho.
ReplyDeleteHe kind of did, actually. You just haven't read it.
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Postmodern Anonymouse.
<<<<He kind of did, actually. You just haven't read it.
ReplyDeleteWhat are you talking about? Show me where in the Poetics he says that.
I'll wait while you furiously google it.
~ FV
Meaning isn't an essential quality, remember?
ReplyDeleteUnless you are able to read the Poetics not only as one part of a larger corpus of thought texts by Aristotle, but also as having a dialectical relationship to the works of earlier philosphers (especially Plato), you won't see it, no matter where I point. A good starting point might be paying attention to the mentions of nature and mimesis, and going backwards from there. But if you're unwilling to put in that effort, you won't see how Aristotle might in fact have thought that contemplation, the ability to stare "into the distance thinking about divine objects" might, in fact, not only be a worthwhile pursuit of philosophers, but also a prerequisite legitimization for good artistry.
Instead, all you're likely to see is Robert McKee - or, at best, arguments for why CGI is bad. Which, in itself, is fine...but incomplete. Because the full meaning of the Poetics cannot be found in the text alone.
See, I might disagree with Sean Farell's particular reading of Aristotle as his works pertain to the discussion at hand. But I (think I) can trace some of the lines in the web of meaning he is presenting. And the connections are interesting. Same goes with Ferrara's essentialist/esoteric aestetics. And Apatoff's curatorial and editorial approach to the works presented on this blog. Juxtaposition, contrast, friction, alignment - all of the above, of the old and the new. The high and the low.
Meaning continues to be produced.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>> A good starting point might be paying attention to the mentions of nature and mimesis, and going backwards from there. But if you're unwilling to put in that effort, you won't see how Aristotle might in fact have thought that contemplation, the ability to stare "into the distance thinking about divine objects" might, in fact, not only be a worthwhile pursuit of philosophers, but also a prerequisite legitimization for good artistry.
ReplyDeleteDon't try to 'instruct' me, bro, on what to read and what paths to take to "understand at your level." You might fool your dumb friends with the haughty act and handwaving -- "we smart people, not lazy like you, can see the idea is applied across Aristotle's entire corpus, we can trace the lines of thought." But I'm not buying it. I've seen enough here and I've seen your type before.
I'll read your response for what it is; an attempt to push the idea that you were correct all along, while whispering barely audibly that Poetics does NOT in fact contain any such passage as you claimed. You're like every narcissistic babyman on the internet who can't tolerate being wrong, being seen as the mediocrity they are, or knowing that nobody is nearly as impressed with them as they are. Every trick you have is a bitch move.
Poetics is as close to a practical manual for narrative that survives from antiquity. Yes, creative people need to dream to write and draw. But that isn't what Poetics is about. And it certain doesn't say to contemplate "divine objects". Which, presumably, you don't even believe in and probably couldn't even define.
~ FV
"Same goes with Ferrara's essentialist/esoteric aesthetics."
ReplyDeleteYour labeling is facile and distorting.
I only argued the essentialist viewpoint for the sake of discussing the possibility that there is meaning beyond the mind. As I stated earlier (and many times prior) for the purposes of discussing Aesthetics at a practical level, I take experiential sensation to be the fundament or origin of meaning. With all sensual complexes of aesthetically expressed meaning being built of sensually meaningful simplexes; all derived from the relationship of the world and our senses. Abstraction and suggestion are directly involved - as they are key to the creation of effects - visual epiphany, catharsis, archetypes... Even references, symbolism, and on and on.
And I've also discussed the point that I consider Aesthetics and Poetics as essentially tied up together in great narrative work. There are no labels for this system of belief in academic philosophy, no investigation that I have found either. The literary term 'Imagism' comes close. Except (I've found) the Brandywine version of Imagism is much richer and deeper a mine than the Ezra Pound (et al) understanding. The only problem being that there is no formal organized record of its beliefs, only pages and pages of notes by different practitioners over a period of decades, and all the art itself which manifests the teaching in paint. Part of the Famous Artists Course gets at some of it, though only in a somewhat curt or pat way so young students - who the courses are aimed at - can understand. (There were some involved in the writing of these books that were part of the Brandywine tradition.)
As far as esotericism in aesthetics, the field of aesthetics with respect to Art is, at bottom, an investigation of the experience of subliminal phenomena. So not only is it "esoteric" by nature, its essential anti-obviousness must make it a rare and immeasurably difficult field of inquiry. It goes without saying that not everybody can get it. Including some very smart intellectuals who are otherwise highly perceptive.
Lastly, (and again) Dean Corwnwell said that "Art is a language separate and distinct from literature. Anything that can be sufficiently expressed in words is an unfit subject for a painting." Given this view - which I take to be true - any attempt I make to pinpoint some gut instinct about the tone of a work of art or series of, for example, life drawings should not be understood as my attempt to make an exact translation of that artwork. The 'underlanguage' or 'underpoetry' of art, especially in impromptu works, is rarely so isolable or dead specific.
A story allows us to see ourselves in others, to step back and objectively experience the gamut of meanings and reflections which in the throes of our own experiences we can’t otherwise discern. It isn’t an explanation or resolution, but allows the viewer or the reader to experience an internally objective sense of being, in the observed.
ReplyDeleteThe men in the Shakespeare theater program realized their potential by becoming more human, more thoughtful by seeing themselves in the conflicts of others. They went beyond themselves through art, story. It’s a thing of beauty. They entered a receptive reflection, a self examination, a part of contemplation, (an action most like the activity of God). Virtues are also expressed experientially and understood the same way. Watching men guide a final piece in a suspension bridge with their feet at the edge a great drop is courage understood vicariously through a sense of fear and awe.
The other line I was trying to present was that the world of sensation is learned and can become tired with familiarity. It’s subject to the same presumptive degeneration that thinking is subject to. A virtue like courage, endurance or humility captured in a story/picture is important for it revitalizes one from the downward drift towards presumptive arrogance in knowingness. Without the virtue of receptivity in contemplation, human nature drifts into a self unaware of its own traps. So it’s in one’s interest to suffer the vulnerabilities of contemplation to remain open.
The concept of the sacred isn’t just staring into nothingness, but an experience of something unlike our assumed notions of self. In it there is both objectivity and receptivity. Its emotional atmosphere is reflective and experienced as curiously fresh, though at home, familiar; unrestrained by the weight of a self in search of endless affirmation. A funny thing about contemplation is that in its docile disposition, one has a tendency to notice a lot of things.
"The other line I was trying to present was that the world of sensation is learned and can become tired with familiarity. It’s subject to the same presumptive degeneration that thinking is subject to. A virtue like courage, endurance or humility captured in a story/picture is important for it revitalizes one from the downward drift towards presumptive arrogance in knowingness."
ReplyDeleteWhat doesn’t seem to cross your puffy-floaty cloud mind as you blissfully stare into the distance is that in order to present courage, endurance or humility – or any abstract virtue, value, character trait, moral, state of mind, or sensibility - an artist must translate those experiences into visual-narrative terms.
Which is at first a wholly imaginative matter – as the dreaming of a general effect suffused with the moral feeling and yoked to some event, setting, and character drama. But then as one tries to justify this expressive dream of meaning, one realizes it all must be orchestrated; the general realization requires local and then specific realization, spot on target to the pictorial point. Local and specific belief/empathy too. And that means one must accomplish the back-engineering of the general meaningful gestures and effects into component suggestive abstractions that cause and create those larger narrative gestures and effects.
That’s what composing is; aesthetic-poetic engineering. It is technical and imaginative at once. Eventually the wholistic dream of meaning must be wholly broken down into its component sensations in order build it fresh in a justified way to achieve the intended gestalt with integrity.
The idea that one can create a work that embodies and does justice to any worthy moral end without engineering it expressly for that purpose is naïve and dilettantish.
Got it? See how it all fits together?
Good. Now you can stop pretending you know some deeply human/spiritual artistic secret that I haven’t considered.
"A funny thing about contemplation is that in its docile disposition, one has a tendency to notice a lot of things."
Your docile disposition and meandering pontifications are no doubt producing masterpieces for the ages.
The idea that one can create a work that embodies and does justice to any worthy moral end without engineering it expressly for that purpose is naïve and dilettantish.
ReplyDeleteBut can one be "too much" of an engineer? Or too one-dimensionally engineering-focused?
For an artist to have a worthy moral end, there are a lot of "spiritual" and sentimental conditions that must be satisfied. Often, those conditions are at odds with the sort of psychologies that produce a good engineer.
Your labeling is facile and distorting.
ReplyDeleteYes, you’re right. Though not, believe it or not, applied in bad faith. Paraphrase is heresy, but heresy of necessity.
I think I appreciate and agree with everything you wrote in the post following the above quote.
I (obviously) don’t at all think that the lack of formal systematization of thought should be regarded as argumentative failure. There are epistemological complictions to the clearly well thought out system of aesthetics you advocate, but I think you’re aware of them & have come to the conclusion that they don’t really matter in any practical sense. That’s fine. I also do not think these opinions matter the slightest to you, and that’s fine as well. I have nothing to prove, either.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Poetics is as close to a practical manual for narrative that survives from antiquity.
ReplyDelete[…]all you're likely to see is Robert McKee[…]
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"But can one be "too much" of an engineer? Or too one-dimensionally engineering-focused?
ReplyDeleteFor an artist to have a worthy moral end, there are a lot of "spiritual" and sentimental conditions that must be satisfied. Often, those conditions are at odds with the sort of psychologies that produce a good engineer."
I tried to include that very point in my last post; that engineering alone won't do. Maybe I didn't emphasize it enough.
It is absolutely a huge challenge... to hold to the heavenly feeling and yet engineer the hell out of something. Crazy difficult. Which is surely one of the main reasons why there are so few truly great artists. In any medium. (And even the greatest have faults.)
I know I've discussed this necessary feeling WITH engineering dynamic before but...
• This is one reason why "handwriting" is so integral to artistic greatness. Because even with the clockwork precision of the composition acting like an emotion/meaning engine churning behind the scenes, it is the artist's handwriting and care that helps humanize everything. The artist's sensibility becomes a tone that haunts the pictorial mechanism.
• Virtuosity (or at least facility) is also highly important to handwriting; because the artistic difficulties in the making of a picture can overwhelm any other subliminal message therein. The artistry has to feel easy and natural, so the viewer trusts the authority of the author and falls into belief in the picture.
• Also Performance. Because performance (embodiment and dramatic belief) humanizes and naturalizes everything that has been otherwise duly arranged.
• Naturalism is also key, and what I call a "feel for the real." Howard Pyle was considered one of the great composers of all time; yet he told his students, "I put as much effort into making my pictures look like they are not composed, as I put into composing them." (paraphrased)
Holding feeling through the engineering is maybe the greatest challenge in all art. A number of painters and songwriters discuss the importance of composing quickly the whole picture or song. In one sitting, or in one day. Because it is so easy to lose touch with the ephemeral tone that gave rise to the creation in the first place. It may come one day and never return again. This requires not just a great facility on an instrument or in a medium, but a virtuosity with the “compositional instruments” (so to speak) as well.
Does that clear up the question at all?
"There are epistemological complications to the clearly well thought out system of aesthetics you advocate, but I think you’re aware of them & have come to the conclusion that they don’t really matter in any practical sense."
ReplyDeleteI take what is effective and coherent to house the true in some essential way. Makes for good teaching and guarantees fruitful inquiry of a more technical sort if one wants to drill down for deeper principles. I take all epistemic questions very seriously. Which is exactly why I've long since jettisoned linguistic-coherence theories of meaning as essentially tautological in their solipsism, thus indefensible.
<<<<<<Poetics is as close to a practical manual for narrative that survives from antiquity. […]all you're likely to see is Robert McKee[…]
ReplyDeleteWhaaat? Postmodern Babyman still needs to be a tiny tiny tiny bit right, so he isn't shown to be totally wrong and a bs artist? What a good use of everybody's time!
Okay Lil' Snooty Babyman, let's all pretend there's some vague whiff of a reference in Poetics to religious notions, divine objects and such. That way you were a little tiny bit correct. Feel better now?
~ FV
Aw, f'k him. You were right - there isn't.
DeleteBill
(that in reply to FV on 'mouse's silliness.....comments are appearing in different places depending on the format this site is viewed in, not sure if that's new.../Bill)
Delete“What doesn’t seem to cross your puffy-floaty cloud mind as you blissfully stare into the distance is that in order to present courage, endurance or humility – or any abstract virtue, value, character trait, moral, state of mind, or sensibility - an artist must translate those experiences into visual-narrative terms.”
ReplyDeleteI never questioned any of that.