art for humans

2006-10-28T01:34:00.001-07:00

2005-01-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

hey everyone.. have started a new blog at http://quazeecahoots.blogspot.com

2004-04-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

We haven't been playing with AFH since September... Once we reached the final Beta stage (the version that's up now), production on the site has been abandoned, until we publish a Flash-based streaming media weighted AFH (June 04).. Over the past 4 months I've traveled to Austin (twice), Kauai (5 weeks), Nashville (twice), New Mexico and West Virginia. In May I'll be moving my studio from West Virginia, where I've been based for the past 14 months, to Austin. By September we plan to open the 4D Media Program there, consisting of exhibition space, instruction on the 4D Method, and working New and Traditional Media studios. I'm also planning to re-animate ArtRadio, the Unframed column and an online Magazine. A television-based arts forum is in the works as well. I'm very much looking forward to a brutal production schedule, as soon as the boxes are unpacked in Austin. I'll be producing over 20 new bodies of work by the end of 04. The emphasis will be on painting, but photography and digital output will definitely be a part of the mix. The production schedule will kickoff with a mini-retrospective.

04-05 Series will include:

The Tropical Flora of Kauai
Ocean, Sky & Mountains
American War Boys
Texas Unfurled
SOCO Boheme (People Come/People Go)
Animations 2, 3, & 4
Steeplechase
After the Fire (Visions from Show Low)
Dancers
Tres Gentes
Windmills
Coast Line
Portraits

I'll begin building a collective of mostly Texas-based creatives over the summer. We'll produce our first show @the first of the year (05).

For more info: art@artforhumans.com

2004-04-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

Extracted from Bookforum (www.bookforum.com)
SPRING 2004

MAKING POUND NEW

THE FIRST COMPLETE COLLECTION OF POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS

BY GUY DAVENPORT

The French honor their writers by publishing them whole in good typography on India paper, meticulously edited and annotated, in Gallimard's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. This series, begun just after World War II, is understood to bestow official recognition on a writer; to be in the Pléiade is to be classique. Recently, however, when the Pléiade added Georges Simenon, voices were raised. Does the phenomenally prolific creator of Jules Maigret and tersely plotted psychological thrillers deserve to be on French bookshelves with Racine, Molière, and Apollinaire? André Gide, once an editor at Gallimard, thought so. French students think of Racine as homework; Simenon they read. Racine is Culture; Simenon is fun.

The inclusion of Pound in the Library of America—the publishing house Edmund Wilson campaigned for in the New York Review of Books and that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation brought into being in 1979—is as much a surprise as Simenon in the Pléiade. Although many will object, as they have over the years, that Pound's poetry is unintelligible, hopelessly obscure, perhaps not even poetry at all, the inevitable objection will be Pound's anti-Semitism, unrepentant Fascism, and the charge of treason in World War II for which he spent thirteen years in Washington's St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane. Here Pound found himself in a Kafkaesque double bind (complete with a psychiatrist named Kavka): To get out, he would have to be declared sound of mind. But if legally sane, his next venue would be a firing squad. One of the first things that happened to him in St. Elizabeths was being awarded the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry (for The Pisan Cantos). The prize was administered by the Library of Congress, and the money for this prize came from the Bollingen Foundation, which had it from aluminum tycoon Paul Mellon, son of Andrew, the secretary of the treasury from 1921 to 1932.

The press went into a paroxysm of indignation. Pound, who was known in literary circles as a powerful instigator of the modernist movement and as an erudite poet of awesome difficulty, was suddenly famous as a crazy, anti-Semitic Fascist. The facts are: Pound went to live in Rapallo, Italy, in 1925. Here he became fascinated with Mussolini, whom he saw as a reincarnation of the quattrocento feudal barons who ruled with sword and mace, encouraged the arts, and built Tuscan and Umbrian cities in which the Renaissance was born. Italy had twice civilized Europe, first under Augustus Caesar, second under the Medici and Borgias. Why not a third time under Mussolini, the Thomas Jefferson of modernism? So Pound argued in shortwave broadcasts from Rome. These nighttime broadcasts were monitored by the Federal Broadcast Intelligence Service of the FCC (which was not wholly skillful in following precisely what John Adams had to do with Confucius, or Major Douglas and Alexander del Mar with something called Social Credit). What the agents could hear was treason, which is legally defined as "aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war." Pound's anti-Semitism was bigotry pure and simple, a paranoid fantasy no less ugly for being a European prejudice with deep historical roots and awesome virulence. There is no available casuistry for excusing it.

Poems and Translations brings together for the first time all of Pound's poetry except his masterwork, the 823-page Cantos (available in its complete form from New Directions), with notes and a chronology of the poet's life that for information and clarity is better than any of the available biographies. The volume begins with a book that he typed and bound himself, Hilda's Book (1905ú1907), now in Houghton Library at Harvard. Pound reworked some of these poems for later collections, until he settled on an arrangement for his lyric poems, which he titled Personae (first published in 1909), for whose many editions over the years he continued to add and subtract poems.

Personae—actors' masks—evolved with something like a progression toward Pound's maturest style. His first poems are late Victorian, under the spell of William Morris and the Rossettis. Walt Whitman called the Pre-Raphaelite style "the Stained Glass School of Poetry." Pound's extrication from Wardour Street English is dramatized in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)—in what Pound described as a "Henry James novel in verse." Mauberley, an 1890s aesthete, assesses the age of Ruskin, Morris, and Wilde in relation to World War I and its aftermath of disillusion. He discards Swinburne for the hard, cut verse of Théophile Gautier; he discards pathos for irony:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

He would later combine Mauberley with his freely translated Homage to Sextus Propertius as the diptych Rome-London (1958): two private, alert sensibilities in the center of the world's largest empires, two masks through which the poet could comment.

Critics unwilling to give Pound high honors as a poet usually concede that he is an accomplished translator. He had to translate the Provençal and Latin poems he discusses in his collection of literary essays, The Spirit of Romance (1910). Having been given the sinologist Ernest Fenollosa's notebooks, he used them to invent Chinese poetry in English. Translation, in fact, became a guiding strategy for all of his poetic composition. The Cantos begin with a translation of the episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus talks with spirits of the dead. In order to speak they must drink sheep's blood. Pound saw a beautiful metaphor here: Translating provides blood for the past to have a voice.

The Cantos are so many dialogues with the past. The first thirty explore the Renaissance, particularly its recovery of the classical past and its geographical speculations whereby Mediterranean culture found routes to the Western Hemisphere and China. There's a block of Cantos for American history (Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren) and a block of Cantos for the long history of China. Pound's eye is always on resourceful intelligences, embodiments of the Odyssean archetype. When he wrote The Pisan Cantos he had come to that part of his Homeric parallel where Odysseus escapes from the goddess Calypso to return home. The later Cantos constitute a Paradiso where Pound conflates Odysseus's return with Dante to evoke an intellectual and emotional paradise.

In the US Army Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa, a mobile prison for the army's own offenders, Pound was kept in a cage made of sections of temporary airstripping. It was for him a strangely euphoric experience, with moments of mystical illumination. Humane officers allowed him into the company HQ, where he typed letters for soldiers (like Whitman in field hospitals).

The DTC experience tends to be all that marginally literate people know about Pound. I've heard of two operas being written about it. He emerged from the detention a broken man, talking nonsense to the FBI and counterintelligence. Arraigned in a Washington court, he was deemed unfit to stand trial. Pound's American publisher (and friend) James Laughlin hired a Quaker lawyer with skills in defending conscientious objectors and pacifists, and then the long thirteen years in a ward for catatonics began.

At St. Elizabeths Pound wrote some of his finest works: two more blocks of Cantos, Rock-Drill and Thrones, and what I think will be seen as his masterpiece, The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, which constitutes nearly one-fifth of the Library of America edition. This is one of the sacred books of China, the Shih Ching, or Book of Odes. Its compilation is traditionally ascribed to Confucius (sixth century BC), a contemporary of Sophocles. The text is much older. It includes folk songs, hymns, court poetry, and magnificent ritual odes.

What Pound did in this text was to construct a Well-Tempered Prosody to exercise his mastery of metrics and diction. Uncle Remus, Scots ballads, Elizabethan elegies, Thomas Hardy, Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Herrick—here we find a display of virtuosity without parallel. The only analogue I can think of is the Bible itself (at least a thousand years of Hebrew poetry interspersed with history, legal codes, and philosophy). The Greek Anthology, a collection of erotic and witty epigrams compiled from classical to Byzantine times, pales beside it. The first poem in Pound's Classic Anthology is an imitation of a medieval folk song that Pound sought to make imitate the sound of archaic Chinese:

"Hid! Hid!" the fish-hawk saith,
by isle in Ho the fish-hawk saith:
"Dark and clear,
Dark and clear,
So shall be the prince's fere."

Clear as the stream her modesty;
As neath dark boughs her secrecy,
reed against reed
tall on slight
as the stream moves left and right,
dark and clear, dark and clear.
To seek and not find
as a dream in his mind,
think how her robe should be,
distantly, to toss and turn,
to toss and turn.

High reed caught in ts'ai grass
so deep her secrecy;
lute sound in lute sound is caught,
touching, passing, left and right.
Bang the gong of her delight.

Pound wanted the Odes to be printed with the Chinese en face, as well as with a phonetic transcript. In 1954, Harvard University Press, the original publisher, promised to do this "later." I don't think Pound was surprised. New Directions had declined to print the maps of China his wife, Dorothy, had drawn for The Cantos. Laughlin, the impresario of modernism in the US, drew the line at poems with maps. (I wonder what happened to Canto 100—once the finale—which Pound showed me in 1952 at St. Elizabeths; it was entirely in Chinese.)

Pound never quite admitted that there was anything he couldn't do. To his most devoted readers, his English translations of Sophocles's Elektra and Women of Trachis are the oddest of his texts. He is redefining classicism in what seems like a rough-and-ready way, with no regard for "poetry." Yet they play well onstage, however much they grate on classicists' nerves. Pound had shown as far back as his translations of Japanese Noh plays that he could write lines that actors could speak. (As a longtime expatriate in Italy, he kept in touch with spoken American language through the movies, which he regularly attended.) He had written operas just as successfully (Cavalcanti, Villon), meant for radio, thirty years before Beckett made use of radio for serious art. Pound, old and in despair, described himself as merely a minor satirist. Was he thinking of his "Moeurs Contemporaines" (1919), the most civilized verses in American writing? Or was he drawing attention to the sharp-eyed satiric passages that run through all his work? Pound's satire, like Voltaire's, smiles. His vatic tones have claimed more attention.

His work has not been served well by printers, and he himself tended to be cavalier about texts. A New Directions proofreader queried mangos in a Canto; rather than correct it to magnos, Pound scribbled in the margin, "Love mangoes!" Typesetters typically confuse Greek letters in setting Greek quotations: nu with upsilon, theta with phi. Unfortunately, the Library of America text, which students will assume to be authoritative, displays the usual ineptitude with words in Greek. The tag from The Odyssey so neatly tucked into Mauberley has been set properly once, to my knowledge; here a hyperopic printer has seen an omicron with a soft-breathing above it as a delta. Polyphloisboio is misspelled on page 525. The Chinese characters are all set right side up; even so, a Chinese calligrapher might have been employed for an hour to graph them elegantly. What we have instead are Dorothy Pound's laborious tracings.

Even the most assiduous of readers will find the last eighty-five pages of this edition a surprise and a bonus: a dazzling appendix of uncollected poems and translations. For sheer eclectic range I can think of no rival. Bawdy medieval lyrics, Sudanese folk songs, parodies, political satires, and an ode on the 250th anniversary of Newark, New Jersey, that Whitman would have admired as timely exhortation and insult. Some scholar should give us a study of Whitman and Pound as public scolds and civic moralists.

When I met Pound in 1952 I was just out of the army, where I had kept on my desk at XVIIIth Airborne HQ (Fort Bragg) The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot and Guide to Kulchur. General Hickey, who disapproved of books, picked them up once and put them right back down. Our counterintelligence had discovered communist propaganda in several comic books in the PX, but even an Airborne general could see that my books were not from the PX.

Pound knew things that my education had left me wholly ignorant of. So I was not all that surprised when, at St. Elizabeths, he began our conversation by handing me a modern Greek translation of Cathay. "That's what poetry should look like on the page!" Next, he handed me his beautiful Cavalcanti: Rimi as an example of Fascist culture under Mussolini. I was there to talk about Leo Frobenius and the diffusion of culture and technologies. I was soon, however, being incited to study the rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy. I reminded myself that I was indisputably in a madhouse.

The great advantage of talking with Pound was to experience his talent for mimicry. He could do Yeats and Henry James, Joyce and radio evangelists, southern women and Kensington tobacconists. Was there any such person as "Ezra Pound" behind the personae? He had understood the profession of poet to be that of an impersonator of compelling voices (like, shall we say, Chaucer and Shakespeare?). The translators of the King James Bible had declined to sign their work. They had made Job, Elijah, and Paul speak English. Pound made Li Po, Confucius, Arnaut Daniel, and Villon speak English. To say that Pound was a great translator but not himself a great poet is to miss the genius of his enterprise. Culture continues; in the very process of being handed down it displays a radical inventiveness. Pound believed that Shakespeare's sonnets were ghostwriting, an empathic voice. His tragedy may be that when he was himself—the economic theorist who thought that banks cause wars and depressions—he got into serious trouble. The psychiatrists diagnosed him as a megalomaniac with delusions of being a great poet, economist, linguist, historian, and political adviser to heads of state.

There's a photograph in the Pound family photo album of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (the subject of four Cantos) with an elegant Ford Model T in the foreground. At its wheel is Ernest Hemingway; in the backseat are Ezra and Dorothy. It was Hemingway who got Pound interested in Sigismundo Malatesta (template of Mussolini). It was Malatesta (d. 1468) who fixed in Pound's imagination the idea of a duce who orchestrated architects, painters, poets, and scholars. This photograph is a symbol of loss. Hemingway's genius would be squandered, enervated by celebrity, and he would die an alcoholic and a suicide. Dorothy (née Shakespear) would live stoically for thirteen years in a Washington basement apartment in order to be with Ezra every single day. Though the Tempio began the Renaissance, it contains the tombs of the Byzantine scholars who brought Greek culture to Italy. Even the Model T (form and function in perfect balance) would evolve into a gas-guzzler with tail fins.

Among the Uncollected Poems we find, from Mencken's Smart Set (1916), "Reflection":

I know that what Nietzsche said is true,
And yet—
I saw the face of a little child in the street,
And it was beautiful.

This snowflake of a poem is kin to the more famous "In a Station of the Metro" (Poetry, 1913):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Hugh Kenner discusses Pound's gazing faces in The Pound Era. Their prevalence is a kind of trademark. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ends with a staring oval face (a soprano, singing beside a piano, as if in a painting by Eakins or Whistler). Trace the piano back to the lyre from which it evolved, and see a Eurydice frozen at the exit from Hades as Orpheus's lute "utters a profane protest." Eurydice and Persephone stand for the human spirit in Pound, usually symbolized by a beautiful face. Our freedom and mobility take priority over "what Nietzsche said," what governments, custom, and timidity dictate, and over the prison of the self.

Pound saw history as surges of the spirit in recurring epochs: Greece in the time of Sappho, Augustan Rome, medieval Spain and France, Italy in the fifteenth century. These were historical springtimes, returns of Persephone. He himself had exercised the gift of renewal as strenuously as Picasso and Joyce.

Richard Sieburth's notes and editing in both volumes are superb. His edition of the short poems and translations brings together for the first time sixty years of energetically dispersed writing. Sir Maurice Bowra said in a lecture at Oxford in 1949, "Ezra Pound is a bore, and an American bore." Many things but certainly no bore, Pound was surely American. Despite his long expatriate life, he was a pure product of his native land—as evidenced by his ambition, his idealism, and his epic-size personality. At last he has his definitive American edition.

Guy Davenport's most recent book is The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writings (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003).

2004-04-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

Decision to Write, a Poem

The bright white page
Is innocence
The white page is beauty unimagined

Keats, poor Keats
Died a year younger than I am today
Poor world
left to ponder what beauty was left in his beautiful romantic voice
Lucky world
To have his voice live on

Keats wrote “beauty is truth, and truth is beauty”
Keats was beauty and truth
The white page shining up at my eye in all its glory
The white page is truth

I am not Keats
I am an echo
Walt is not Keats
But we are all part of the same
We are all leaves of grass
Tickling the naked backs and breasts of young lovers

Shall the ink of my pen be let to flow
It is not our pen as I place it
My ego will be responsible

Is truth corruptible asks the page
Only by ego answers the universe

The ink holds no corruption
It is of the same as the page
They are of the same as Keats and Whitman
And we too are of the same

Again I face the page
Pen in hand
Walt giggling beside me
I PAINT THE PAGE
I paint the page because it and us are all part of the same
Part of beauty
Part of truth

By my friend John Guider's son

2004-01-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

Five Days in Austin:

Terry Allen at Austin Museum of Art ("Dugout")
ArtHouse opening
San Jose Hotel
Java Joe's (again & again)
Live Music
Ballet Austin
St. Edward's University
Creative Research Lab (UT)
Threadgill's
South Congress Cafe
Texas Music Cafe
Blue Theater (40 1 minute dances, 10 choreographers)
The Crowley Clan
Live Music
F8 Gallery
Much more...

Leave for Kauai tomorrow

2004-01-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

(http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200352)

KRONER, KRONER EVERYWHERE

In a troubled era for publicly funded art and culture, Die Zeit's Petra Kipphoff discovers an oasis of largesse in the Norwegian town of Kristiansand. Located on the south coast of Norway, Kristiansand recently sold its stocks in the hydroelectric company Agder Energi A/S to the Norwegian government, reaping a windfall of 2,200,000,000 kroner (326,000,000 dollars). Now, 1,440,000,000 kroner (214,000,000 dollars) from the sale have been used to set up Cultiva Kristiansand Kommunes Energiverkstiftelse, a foundation for funding local cultural initiatives. Starting this year, Cultiva Kristiansand will have to find ways of giving away 20,000,000 kroner—a task that may be more difficult than it appears. From the town's 72,000 inhabitants, only 288 made applications for grants this year. The lucky few winners (all 288 of them?) will be announced this week.

2004-01-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

(http://www.backstage.com/backstage/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2058668)

Arts' 2003 Funding Struggles Shift
States Replace NEA in Cutting Monies for Culture; DCA Funds Fall

By Roger Armbrust and Leonard Jacobs

In the 1990s, leaders in the not-for-profit arts community fought the good fight, saving the National Endowment for the Arts from extinction, even though Congress drastically cut funds. Meanwhile, America's state governments prospered and shared the bounty with their cultural agencies.

But with the beginning of the new century, states began to suffer the brunt of a national economy that had tanked and, by 2003, the nation's 50 state governments were consistently searching for ways to cut spending everywhere, including for the arts.

As early as Jan. 2, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) was reporting that state cultural agencies nationwide had seen their fiscal 2003 legislative appropriations fall by about $55 million from the previous year, a drop from $408.6 million to $353.9 million. The survey report noted that 42 arts agencies cited a decrease in their budgets, with 10 of those listing cuts of more than 15%, and 14 offices revealing flat budgets or modest increases.

The report emphasized that 62% of the funding decline resulted from cuts to the arts budgets of California and Massachusetts, which experienced a combined loss of $33.9 million. The NASAA survey noted that "prolonged economic uncertainty and sharply declining tax revenues have forced spending cutbacks across state government."

In New York, Gov. George Pataki used his New Year's inauguration to call for a united effort to close a $2 billion shortfall in the 2003 fiscal year followed by another $10 billion deficit the next. In revenue-starved California, Gov. Gray Davis proposed $3.4 billion in cuts, including a proposal to chop an additional $1.2 million from the state arts council budget.

In early February, government and the arts received a bright light with the U.S. Senate's approval of poet Dana Gioia as the new chairman of the NEA. But the arts-funding lights drastically darkened in New Jersey when Gov. James E. McGreevey said he was slashing the state's entire $31.7 million cultural budget. Jersey's government-arts-funding advocates immediately responded, working legislators to try to reverse, or at least greatly soften, the governor's ironclad decision. By year's end, the New Jersey Legislature and governor had agreed to keep the arts agency at funding equal to that of the previous fiscal year.

By April, the New York City-based Foundation Center had issued a surprising study showing that -- despite the terrible economy -- giving by the country's nearly 62,000 grant-making foundations had remained stable at an estimated $30.3 billion, a figure almost unchanged from the $30.5 billion awarded by foundations in 2001.

Also in April, the NEA's Gioia looked for the endowment hopefully to fill some of the gap left by states cutting their arts funding. In an exclusive interview with Back Stage, he said, "The current crisis in state arts funding reminds us of the importance of the federal role. I'm happy to say that, whatever cuts occur on the state level, the NEA contribution to state and regional arts councils will actually grow this year and the next. The arts endowment represents the one source of stability for many states; 40% of our money goes directly to state and regional groups.

"On a broader and less pecuniary basis, the importance of the arts endowment is to articulate from a national perspective a compelling and inclusive message of the importance of arts funding. The most effective way to build a case really comes from the national level. Otherwise, the individual states really are left without an umbrella of support."

'April Is the Cruelest Month'

But by late April, a more onerous view had begun taking shape, as The Chronicle of Philanthropy report on the "big rich" noted that 60 of the nation's most generous philanthropists had dropped their giving by $12.7 billion, to $4.6 billion. Corporate donations also had fallen by 14.5% to $9 billion.

The spring also began seeing the growing rain of individual arts groups' pain. Seattle's ACT Theatre needed to raise $1.5 million by April 15 to stay in business. Beating the arts-funding odds, it did get the money, led by five individual and foundation grants of $100,000 each.

But back east, the Harms Performing Arts Center in Englewood, N.J. wasn't so lucky. The center's trustees in April voted to close the stately theatre because of a $2.3 million debt. In New England, Connecticut Repertory Theatre suspended its long-established Summer Nutmeg Series summer theatre. In Minneapolis, the Guthrie Theater laid off six full-time employees in a move to balance its budget. In San Francisco, opera, ballet, and theatre all were feeling the brunt of bad economic times. Those stages' experiences mirrored many others nationwide.

By summer, funding advocates' eyes were focused on Congress and H.R. 7, the Charitable Giving Act of 2003. Of particular concern was a section of the bill that would prohibit foundations from including their administrative costs, such as salaries and expenses, as part of their giving. The section's intent was for foundations to actually give that much more to nonprofits rather than "write off" their own salaries and expenses, which could amount to more than $4 billion. By winter, the legislation had stalled in conference committee.

By late June, the long process for federal arts funding in Congress had begun with the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee proposing to bank the NEA with $117.5 million for fiscal year 2004. The funding amount aligned with President Bush's request for the federal arts agency, and stood $1 million more than that of the previous year's NEA budget.

By July, virtually every state arts council had received an appropriations decrease. Some cuts were draconian: 30% in Minnesota, 62% in Massachusetts, almost 80% in Florida, and a near defunding in Colorado. Compared to this, the cut sustained by the New York State Council on the Arts -- 15% -- seemed almost benign. At the time, budgets in California and a few other states remained in limbo.

By late July, the U.S. House of Representatives had passed an amendment granting the NEA a $10 million budget increase. The funding hike was earmarked for the agency's Challenge America initiative, a program designed to make the arts more widely available in underserved communities across the country. It raised the proposed NEA budget to $127 million.

By August, the California Legislature -- looking at a $38 billion deficit -- had reduced the California Arts Council budget to a paltry $1 million.

By November, Congress' Senate-House conference committee had agreed on an NEA budget of $122.5 million. And The Chronicle of Philanthropy, in its report assessing the 400 biggest charities in the U.S., showed a dramatic 26.5% drop in total revenue from private sources, falling from approximately $1.59 billion in 2001 to just $1.15 billion in 2002. More worrisome, of the 15 sectors represented in the survey, the figures for arts and culture groups showed the biggest drop overall.

Also as the year wound down, NASAA reported that state legislative arts appropriations for FY2004 had dropped $82.1 million -- from $354.5 million to $272.4 million. However, the report pointed out that two-thirds of the decline was due to cuts in the arts budgets of three states -- California, Michigan, and Florida -- which had a combined loss of $52.5 million.

DCA Budget Drops

On the local level, since taking office in 2002, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been facing billion-dollar deficits, and looking for ways to cut them sharply.

By March of 2003, his preliminary FY2004 budget called for $102.5 million for the city Department of Cultural Affairs. The funds would include $86.7 million for cultural institutions and $12.3 million for program groups, i.e., grants for not-for-profit organizations such as theatres and dance companies.

By late April, the harrowing state of the New York City economy -- a projected $4 billion deficit for the new fiscal year that would begin in July -- had led Bloomberg to wield the sharp budgetary ax again, including a 23% slashing of the DCA. That dropped the DCA to $94.6 million.

By late June, the New York City Council and Mayor Bloomberg had somehow managed to cover a growing $6.4 billion deficit by agreeing on a $43.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2004, the largest budget in the city's history. That action included restoring $24.1 million, or all but $3.9 million, to a budget for the DCA. The funding restorations put the overall DCA budget at $118.8 million, just over $11 million lower than the previous fiscal year's budget.

2004-01-12T09:25:00.000-08:00

(http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews1-8-04.asp?H=1)

STATE ARTS FUNDING CONTINUES TO SHRINK

Funding for state arts agencies decreased overall for the third year in a row, according to the most recent survey of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Total state arts appropriations dropped from $354.5 million in 2003 to $272.4 million in 2004, a plunge of 23 percent. Per capita funding fell from $1.21 to 93 cents for 2004.

The cuts in three states -- California, Florida and Michigan -- totaled more than $50 million and accounted for nearly two-thirds of the decline. (California was cut from $20.3 million to $1.89 million; Florida fell from $30 million to $6.68 million; and Michigan was down from $22.4 million to $11.7 million). The vast majority of the aggregate decrease came from severe cuts of 30 percent or more in nine states. State arts funding decreased for 34 state arts agencies in 2004.

New York is still the most generous of the states in funding the arts, appropriating $44.7 million for 2004, down more than 13 percent from $51.5 million in 2003. State arts appropriations had gradually increased through the 1990s, reaching a high of $446.8 million in 2001. According to the report, the cuts reflect an uncertain economy and record-setting budget shortfalls totaling $78 billion at the state level.

2004-01-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

(http://www.waterbasedinks.com/history.html)

WHAT IS A MONOTYPE?

It's a printing process where the artist doesn't have to worry about all of the "technical" aspects of printmaking and can instead concentrate on being creative. Energy, improvisation, gesture, impulse and chance are all characteristics of this printing process. It is the most "painterly" and immediately rewarding technique available for creating works on paper.

Monotypes are usually made by either painting or rolling inks onto a flat surface. This flat surface can be glass, Plexiglas, or sheet metal (etching plate). With the application of pressure the image will transfer onto the paper. Pressure can be the use of an etching or litho press, or hand pressure with a Pinpress, barren or any other means that will exert enough pressure to make the image transfer.

The ink used in a monotype can be applied with a brush, rag or rolled up with a roller or brayer. During the printing process depending on the method of application and the thickness and texture of the ink, the ink may spread and blur as it is blotted or absorbed by the paper. Usually the paper is placed on top of the plate used and the transferred image is a mirror image of the original. How the ink is applied and manipulated with all of its individual characteristics will be reflected in the print, which is what makes monotypes so unique.

Is it a monoprint or a monotype? Many publications use the terms interchangeably referring to works on paper as either monoprint or monotype regardless of how the images were created. This in turn leads to confusion among printmakers, artists as well as the general public. We hope to clarify this by first exploring the historical aspects of the monotype, some of its techniques and what is happening with this technique/medium in the contemporary art scene.

Historically what has come down to us as monotypes/monoprints were in existence since the time of Rembrandt (1606-1669). The monotype/monoprint was referred to subsequently by many different names such as: Adam Bartsch (1821) print cataloguer called the technique, "imitating aquatint", Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin called them "printed drawings", in the 1880's-1890's they were referred to as monotones or monochromes, also around the 1880's artists in the circle of Frank Duveneck in Florence and Venice called them "Bachertypes" because they were printed by Otto Bacher on his portable press. Similarly the American illustrator William H. Chandlee who made monotypes on a glass surface, called his prints "vitreographs" signifying glass prints, just as "lithographs" were printed from a stone.

Around 1960 Henry Rasmusen, author of the first important book on the monotype 2, Printmaking with Monotype wrote that some artists preferred the term monoprint as a way to distinguish it from the commercial typesetting method known as monotype. Later on in 1975 David Kiehl, a print curator suggested a difference between monoprint and monotype. Monoprint according to Mr. Kiehl was a unique image pulled from an engraved or etched plate. Subsequently Jane Farmer an independent curator wrote in 1978 in the monotype exhibition catalogue which she curated the following definitions for both monotype and monoprint. Monoprint, she defined as "a unique image where part of the image is repeatable on a fixed matrix and part is not."1 For monotype, she defined it as "Éa unique image where none or the image is from a registered, repeatable matrix."2 This definition has become the standard for distinguishing the two techniques. This definition is however, difficult to apply to new and inventive ways of printmaking. Monotypes may be somewhat misleading because 2nd or 3rd images can often be pulled, called "ghosts", "cognates" or "second pulls". Although much less intense than the original they tend to be more subtle, lighter and more atmospheric, characteristics which are often more desirable that the first pull.

HISTORY

Historically the first monotype was attributed to Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1616-1670) a contemporary of Rembrandt (1606-1669). Both artists were painter-etchers, Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione in Genoa. Both artists were experimenting with the printing process to create a tonal effect akin to their paintings. Although mezzotint was already invented it was still in its infancy and neither artist chose this particular path. Instead Rembrandt chose to leave film of ink on selected parts of his etched plates to create tone while Castiglione chose to draw into ink that was spread on a copperplate to create the first true monotype. It is believed that there was perhaps some cross-fertilization of ideas in that seeing some of Rembrandt's etchings might have influenced Castiglione.

Rembrandt created monoprints where he changed day and night through the manipulation of the wiping of the plate, which had an etched image. Castiglione however in his quest for created tone in printmaking made some 22 known images where he separated the bitten line from the plate tone to become the first practitioner of the monotype process. The monotype process however was not picked up by any major artist of any significance for years to follow. Somehow the uniqueness of this particular printing process was not favored over the ability to mass-produce images using other printmaking processes.

The only major artist prior to Degas (1834-1917) to pick up on the monotype process was William Blake (1757-1827) who appeared to use it with egg tempera to create some of his images for his poems. Probably using a screw press he printed his plates which were of stiff cardboard where he had used egg tempera, a water medium as opposed to an oil medium to paint the outlines of his designs. He then painted broad areas of color onto the rest of the board and printed over the initial outlines. He may have gotten as many as 3 impressions from each ink up and with these he worked over using pen and watercolor. His technique with which he was quite secretive never quite caught on either because of this secrecy or perhaps because he was out of the mainstream at the time. It was not until the etching revival of the 1860's that the monotype was also revived.

During the etching revival Vicomte Ludovic Napoleon Lepic (1839-1889) used a process he called, "l'eau-forte mobile" (variable etchings) where he used one set of an etched image of a landscape and created 85 dramatic variations on the basic composition simply by the wiping of his plate. He advocated that the artist who used etching should be a painter or draughtsman who uses the needle and the rag as another uses the paintbrush and pencil. Lepic claimed to have single-handedly inspired a new course for modern printmaking. "I claim authorship for 'variable etching', that is for the labor of art that permits us to break with common practices and obtain such results with the liberty of ink and rag. Besides, regarding its exclusive control, without their having to ask for it and even to those publishers of engraving who might request it, I bequeath my rag to all artists."3 His prints were monoprints and not true monotypes, but his etchings were so minimal and the attempts at creating paintings on the surface of the plate so ingenious that he is mentioned because of his influence on future artists like Degas.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) picked up the "rag" bequeathed by Lepic to become the greatest innovator and practitioner of the monotype in the nineteenth century. Edgar Degas by pushing the technique further than any artist before him made the monotype a more acceptable medium. He took advantage of the spontaneity of the medium and used it to its full potential, accidents and all. He experimented with the medium/technique to seek solutions to problems, which could not be fully explored with pencil or brush. As a result of this search, Degas created some 300-500 monotypes. Degas' enthusiasm affected other contemporaries who also explored the technique: Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Paul Gauguin to just name a few.

In America the main practitioners of the monotype were Frank Duveneck, William Merritt Chase, Charles A. Walker, and Maurice Prendergast. Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) fame is owed to great part to the survival of his monotypes in Boston and Cincinnati and the documentation of his followers/students of their "bachertypes" done in Venice and of their encounters with Whistler who may have been introduced to the monotype by them. William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) a painter and teacher who although was not the first to exhibit the monotype in America was a fashionable painter and as an art teacher was instrumental in popularizing the process. Charles A. Walker (1848-1920) appeared to have discovered the technique of monotypes independently of Chase and Deveneck. His main subjects were landscapes and imagery from the Barbizon school. Of the four the only one to really integrate into his "art" was Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924) who created over 200 monotypes. He exhibited and sold his monotypes throughout his career and although his monotypes were both well known and received there were few imitators.

The monotype process continued to grow both in Europe as well as in the United States. The "drawback" with monotypes was that there was no continuing history or tradition and that each artist seemed to discover and rediscover the medium over and over again in his or her way. Many artists began experimenting with the process like: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) who created over 100, Georges Roualt (1871- 1958), and Henri Matisse (1869-1954). On the American side there was: Milton Avery (1893-1965), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), Richard Diebendorn (b.1922), Robert Motherwell (b.1915), Mary Frank (b.1933), Nathan Oliveira (b.1928), and Jasper Johns (b.1930) to name a few of the better known contemporary artists. It is beyond the scope of this paper to include everyone who has done a monotype, but two books which are very good references are the Metropolitan Museum of Art's The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century and Joann Moser's Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America.

TECHNIQUE

Monotypes are primarily a painter's medium. Although it originated in the printshop it was born through the painter's imagination and restlessness. It also became a perfect tool for exploring improvisation. Historically the first monotype by Castiglione was in the dark field also known as reduction or subtractive monotype. The basic technique entailed the rolling up of a non-porous surface and in the case of Castiglione most likely a copperplate normally used for etching at the time, with printing ink. Most likely it was first printed in the same manner as the etched plate due to its historic relationship to the etching with damp paper and an etching press. Similarly the plate was most likely prepared in much the same manner as an intaglio plate before "wiping". In the dark field or reductive method the image is wiped with rags, finger or sticks which may very well have been the back of paintbrushes that can be used later to brush back into the image, to correct an edge or build tone. The removed or wiped areas would appear white in the finished print.

The second method that was probably realized from trial and error was that you can also approach the monotype from the additive or "light field" manner. Here a clean plate is used as an empty field or canvas and printing ink is applied much like oil paints. While the ink was quite thick and viscous in the dark field monotype, in the light field it is thinned with solvent making the ink resemble something like watercolor. Where more tone was desired more ink was added, when softer tones were desired, more solvent was used.

Intrinsic to monotype is the bit of ink left over after the 1st print is taken. Second and even third pulls result in fainter images known as "cognates", or "ghosts". While all printing processes can yield lighter impressions their ghosts in monotype play a special role because they create a new set of tonal values, which can be, reworked or merely used references for the next image or series.

The technique of monotype is quite varied and its beginnings has not been taught as much as rediscovered and reinvented by each artist who uses it. The artist in turn emdows the technique with his or her own style, technique and artistic concerns.

The question arises as to why a monotype and not a painting or watercolor? Why a "print"? The answer may be that a great deal of surprise is built into the printmaking process where the image is: reversed, the image varies depending on how it's inked, how much pressure is applied, is it printed by an etching press or by hand using a baren? There are a lot of unpredictables involved and the spontaneity of the process demands energy, improvisation, gesture, expressiveness and directness. The artist must also appreciate the lushness and sensuality of working with ink.

CONTEMPORARY MONOTYPES

The idea of the monotype as being a "bastard child" is no longer the prevalent case and has instead become the "favorite son". Perhaps it is the changing of the times. Much like the etching revival of the 1860's there is a revival of the print by the artist. There are similarities because the wiping of a monotype plate had to done by the artist, since the process of creating the image and the art of wiping the plate were identical. The idea of the artist manipulating the ink over the plate with their fingers and leaving their fingerprints have become a visual testimony to the artist's personal involvement in the printing process, not to mention leaving their actual fingerprints.

Milton Avery made some 250 monotypes during the 1950's, which he exhibited. Although opening to critical reviews not one piece sold. Apparently the hybrid nature of the monotype and the lack of an edition turned off collectors of prints. Painting collectors were not interested because they viewed the monotype as a print. Recently, however Milton Avery's monotypes as well as monotypes by other artists have been enjoying unprecedented popularity. Artists who have never printed monotypes are trying it and those that have been printing monotypes are exhibiting them.

The rediscovery of the monotype appears to have been greatly influenced by both the showing of 78 of Degas's monotypes in 1968 by Eugenia Parry Janis and the subsequent catalogue , which reproduced more than 300 of his monotypes. Of equal importance was the exhibition organized by Matt Phillips in 1972, The Monotype: An Edition of One which traveled throughout the United States. Artists that were influenced by one or both were numerous. Of note were Nathan Oliveira, Michael Mazur, and Richard Diebenkorn. Not only were these successful artists but they were also teachers and educators. Their taking the monotype as a serious medium could only have enhanced its acceptance not only amongst the artistic crowd, but perhaps a whole generation of artists who studied under them either directly or indirectly.

Jasper Johns was also one of the artists to realize the potential of the monotype as a creative medium. His early forays into the medium were as result of his taking his discarded lithographs ( which he was probably working with a master printer) and killing time by printing his own monotypes/monoprints over the "flawed" lithographs. This is quite reminiscent of the etching revival when artist wanted to reclaim the print by freeing it up from the craftsman, i.e.: master printer.

In our own quest in creating "the painterly print" we have searched along the lines of William Blake and Gauguin in exploring the use of a water based medium to execute monotypes. Similarly artists are seeking less toxic ways to approach printmaking and monotype is one area where that is quite easy. Much like Milton Avery who took up the monotype in the 1950's after a heart attack or Adolph Gottlieb in the 1970's when his health began to decline or Reuben Kadish in the 1980's when their health declined, artists of the 1990's are actively seeking easier ways of creating prints like monotypes without having to wait until their health declined.

A fairly recent innovation involving monotypes has been the creation of the Monothon by Master Printer Ron Pokrasso, which harks back to Duveneck (1880's), and his "boys" where monotypes were created as recreation during large gatherings. In the case of the Monothon artists are invited to create monotypes. There is a fee, but a sponsor can cover this. At the end of the Monothon printing sessions one print of each artist is chosen and the prints are both displayed and auctioned off. There have been Monothons in Sante Fe, New Mexico where it started to California and most recently at the Connecticut Graphics printcenter in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Researching and reading about the history as well as the techniques involved in creating a monotype has been tremendously enlightening. Much like other painter/printmakers we thought we had stumbled upon this painterly printing technique all on our own. Instead, we learned that the monotype has been around as long as the 1640's when both Rembrandt and Castiglione, painter/printmakers were experimenting with creating tone in their etchings. Further research introduced us to the monoprinter Vicomte Ludovic Lepic, the "queer fish"4 as referred to by Degas who bequeathed his "rag" to all, but it was Degas who realized the potential of this "rag" and ran with it. Interestingly these "painted drawings" were never exhibited widely if at all during Degas' lifetime, but somehow they managed to survive to inspire yet another generation of Artists like Michael Mazur, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira. The monotype has managed to maintain its momentum and has even managed to achieve its own website, www.Monoprints.com. So, we guess it is safe to say that the monotype will continue to grow and evolve even as we write this paper!

Notes
1 Moser, Joann. Singular Impression: The Monotype in America,
(Washington, D.C.:The Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997) p. 2
2 Ibid., p.2
3 Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the
Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum
of Art ,1980), p. 19
4 Ibid., p. 23
Bibliography
Ayres, Julia. Monotype: Mediums and Methods for Painterly Printmaking.
New York: Watson-Guptill, 1991
Laliberte, Norman /Alex Mogelon. The Art of Monoprint: History and Modern
Techniques (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1974)
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the
Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ,1980)
Moser, Joann. Singular Impression: The Monotype in America,
(Washington, D.C.:The Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997)

© 1999 Rostow & Jung All Rights Reserved.

2004-01-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

(http://www.abc.net.au/arts/fertile/essay_2.htm)

A Brief History of the Community Arts

By Graham Pitts, Editor
Graham Pitts is an Australian writer who has worked on more than thirty community arts and public arts projects. He is also the editor of the …such fertile ground… critical analysis.

In Australia what is now called "the community arts" or "community cultural development" dates back to at least sixty thousand years. The ancient arts of the indigenous people were presumably not greatly dissimilar to those used to describe the community arts in the contemporary magazine Artwork:

"Arts practice and creative expression are at the heart of a community’s vitality. People have always come to sing, to tell stories, to enact rituals, to celebrate, to mourn and to mark significant events in their lives. Besides being able to see great art, people need to actively participate in these activities. This is what is meant by the term "community arts": it might be a new name but it is not a new idea."

Arts in which the community is involved certainly pre-date the contemporary Western idea of an individual artist who works in isolation from, and often in opposition to, the community in which she or he lives. The individual artist model became dominant in Europe only after the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The specialization of skills and the diminution of humanistic values led to the romanticized idea of artistic "Bohemians" who, in the social mythology, led tortured lives of creative output in poverty-stricken garrets and died young as the result of alcohol or success. This was not always true as there were acceptable types like middle-class novelists and salon painters but there was not much doubt generally that artists were quite different to "ordinary" people.

In many non-Western countries this idea would cause bewilderment. In Bali, for example, until the coming of white artists in the first half of the twentieth century, there was no word in the island languages for an "artist". The rituals and celebrations of Bali were, and to some extent still are, an integral part of everyday life. Everybody was involved and though some people were regarded as more gifted than others, why should these individuals become the sole creators or participants with everyone else being relegated to the status of an "audience"? Bali is not alone in this. The simple fact is that in most areas of the world, for most of recorded history, there has been no division of art from life and no segregation of the artist from the living community.

Thus any definition of the "community arts" or "community cultural development" tends to fail because definitions are about exclusion whereas what one wishes to define is as amorphous and as multi-faceted as "the arts" or "culture" itself. At its most basic level one might say that the community arts are about any form of the arts in which non-artist members of a community are involved in a participatory manner. This participation may range from consultation with an artist to the total creation and production of an artwork by the members of a community themselves.

However the arts remain difficult to define. Where does one draw the line between "crafts" and art and into what area does "the art of cooking" fall? This difficulty led to a change of terminology in Australia in 1988 when "the community arts" became "community cultural development". In order to understand why this change was made, and why such a cumbersome and bureaucratic phrase became acceptable, one must summon up some history of governmental arts funding in Australia. One must also understand that such funding is usually via Local Councils, State Departments (e.g., Arts Victoria is part of the Department of Premier and Cabinet) or via a major Commonwealth statutory authority, The Australia Council for the Arts.

The Australia Council was formed in 1975 to foster the arts in Australia as, in part, a way of encouraging a sense of national identity. It is indeed difficult for people to identify with their country if the art and media available to them reflects an alien set of values from another region or country. The Council oversaw six separate Boards which funded Theatre, Literature, Craft, Music, Dance and Aboriginal Arts. These Boards, with the exception of the Aboriginal Arts Board, were located within the paradigm of "the individual artist". But, responding to trends from within Australia and from overseas, the more collectively-minded advocates of the community arts increasingly decried much of what was funded as typically "elitist" art created by individual artists for a section of society which was quite small but nonetheless represented the "dominant culture."

The community arts activists through a sophisticated political campaign which cited "democratisation of the arts", "accessibility", "equity" and "arts for the people" brought about the creation of The Community Arts Board in 1979. This was strongly but unsuccessfully resisted by most of the other Boards of the Australia Council with arguments about "artistic excellence" which persist to this day (the argument being that the inclusion of non-artist members of a community in arts production lowers the quality of production.)

The term "community arts" thus gained official currency in Australia and was described by the Community Arts Board as those arts which were accessible to all Australians and which offered opportunities for participation by a broad cross-section of society. Early projects included the dispatch of an art teacher to work with Aboriginal communities as they began painting on canvas those images which hitherto they had dyed in the sand, the encouragement of circus and physical theatre activities for regional or "western suburb" children, and a plethora of dance, theatre and mural projects involving many different ethnic, female and regional communities. However there was still unease about the word "arts" as it was perceived to be uncomfortably synonymous with the more exclusive variety of arts being funded by various State agencies and the other Boards on the Australia Council.

The term "community" also became contentious and has remained so, though the Community Arts Board defined "a community" as "a group of people with a community of interest, issues or concerns". The Board also began to use the term "art-worker" in preference to "artist" as "art worker" embraced organisers or "facilitators" who often worked in community arts projects. "Artist" was also denigrated as a word loaded with intellectual baggage from the perceived elitist "fine arts" or "mainstream arts".

In 1989 the Australia Council changed the name of the "Community Arts Board" to "The Community Cultural Development Board" with later name-changes so that all the Australia Council "Boards" have now become "Units". This change of terminology from "community arts" to "community cultural development" was reflected by, or forced upon, those practitioners who sought the funds necessary for their work from the Council. It was nonetheless defended as a genuine attempt by The Australia Council to come to grips with the difficulties of defining the community-based work then underway.

"Culture" seemed to encompass activities over and above the limitations of "the arts" and "development" is nothing if not positive. Thus "cultural development" has been fore-grounded in such statements as: "It is through the things we do together as groups and communities that we gain a sense of collective identity, a sense of place and sense of belonging. When we value these things a positive concern for our social well being follows and we begin to take charge of our present and shape the future to meet our aspirations".

Deborah Mills, the then Director of the Community Cultural development Board, later offered more complex reasons. "Culture", according to her, is a much better word to use than "arts" as it attempts to move beyond nineteenth century notions of art and the privileging of use-by dated notions of "creativity" over others which were part of every day life, like gardening and cooking. "Furthermore community cultural development can be defined as people working together to bring about improved understanding and/or changes important to them in their lives. Community development is an unashamedly political process and a collective communal process. Community cultural development is a collaborative process, often involving artists working with communities using creativity interpreted in the broadest sense, as a way of illuminating (not merely reflecting) and/or changing people’s lives. There is a direct connection between the practice and the political, social and cultural context of today."

Be that as it may, confusion reigns whenever attempts are made to settle on any exact definitions. Even those who extol the virtues of "community cultural development" tend to slip into the use of "community arts" as a less cumbersome and more expressive terminology. In any event "culture" is a word perhaps just as slippery as "arts" and the admixture of "community" makes the whole mess of pottage a semanticist’s poison. Some writers try to escape ambivalence by referring to "art in a community context" or "community-based art" whilst others fall with relief into the related but different areas of "public art" and "cultural planning". The good news is that despite the tendentious terminology some very worthwhile work is done and often done very well. It is also done in many and diverse ways. It is possible that in the end the community arts is not a form of art but rather a variety of processes.

These ways of creating art in a community context can perhaps best be exemplified by the prepositions "in", "for" "with" and "of" and "by".

Ten years ago when life was much more simple (for everything is more simple if it happened in the past) only "with" and "for" seemed important. Arts "for" the people were products created by an artist or artists (which includes writers, actors, designers and all those who practice the arts) and this "art for the people" was aimed at spiritually hungry or artistically deprived consumers. But arts "with" the people was what occurred when communities had a vital say in all aspects of creation and production and were themselves the target audience.

However "with" and "for" were not seen as mutually exclusive opposites, but as either ends of a continuum. An article written in 1991 argued that: "The long term political benefits of community art work cannot emerge without a judicious blending of both "with" and "for". To lean too far in the direction of with leaves one at the mercy of entrenched prejudice of a community, and denies some of the essential value of community theatre work. Alternatively, to lean too far the other way runs the risk of the arrogant elitism which serves only to alienate a community. A clear understanding of the virtues and dangers of each extreme position, and the sensitivity and flexibility to know how to arrange the blend for each project, are part of the necessary skills of the community art worker."

A more complex and contemporary analysis, using the prepositions "in", "for" "with" and "by" involves the power relationship between communities and artists should an artist be involved in a process of creation and production consisting of constant and myriad artistic decisions.

An artist may work "in" a community but the artist has the sole right to decide which themes and what materials may be exhibited or performed in a venue chosen by the artist. For example an artist might take up a residency "in" a community of iron-ore miners in Australia but produce something which is of interest to only one or two critics in London or New York.

An artist may work "for" a community in that the members of that community can be seen by the artist as the target audience. They can approve of what has been done for them or they can refuse to view the work and they can, if they wish, publicly deny its validity. But all the creative decisions have been made by the artist and the members of the community are treated not as active participants but as passive recipients of what has been selected or made and presented. The touring of a play about factory workers in factories or factory-towns would be an example of such a community art "for" a community.

Artists work "with" a community when the members of the community are consulted at vital stages of the work. This would presumably commence at the beginning when the artist presented her or his idea or ideas for consideration and debate. The process would continue as the work developed often with members of the community involved not only as consultants but also as co-creators or performers.

It is also possible that an artist works "with" a community because the community has already decided the themes and nature of what they wish to create with an artist and therefore present the artist with a set of decisions which have already been made. However the artist then works within these parameters and becomes in many ways the critical decision-maker as she or he is the more experienced and/or trained in the art of making art. For instance a mosaic may be commissioned by a community of people who wish to celebrate a local event. These people might choose the design from amongst the options suggested by the commissioned artist and they might well assist in the physical production of the final image but the mosaicist is the "expert" (for why else employ an artist at all?) and key decisions are made by the artist in consultation "with" the community.

Art "by" a community implies or even dictates that no artist is involved (or at least no artist from outside that community is involved.) The community is in total control. The power of deciding everything in what should be selected or made and presented is made by the community. The final work is presented by the community and it is aimed at, or attended by, only that community. Ipso facto, artists (or at least artists from outside) have no role to play. Such artwork is "in", "for", "with", "of" and now in a very pure sense completely "by" the community. This is probably the closest one can get in the Western world to the paradigm of "art" in places like Bali where the "artists" are virtually indistinguishable from the members of the community. It is also probably the ultimate ambition of the community arts or community cultural development: to become redundant in that such processes are no longer needed as art has become a commonplace part of everyday life.

© Graham Pitts, 2002.

2004-01-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

(http://newdeal.feri.org/art/art09.htm)

The Evolution of Western Civilization
By James Michael Newell

This essay incorporates two separate draft texts by James Michael Newell for Art for the Millions entitled "The Evolution of Western Civilization" and "The Use of Symbols in Mural Painting."

My first consideration in approaching the work of decorating the library of the Evander Childs High School in New York City was its physical dimensions which are approximately one hundred by sixty feet. The space to be decorated, except for pilasters dividing the long wall, presented a continuous stretch about eight feet high around three sides of the room above the wood paneling and bookshelves. Murals for a room of such proportions must be planned to an over-life-size scale and must be bold in design if their meaning is to reach the students seated in different parts of the room.

I offered these first impressions to the principal and art director of the school and suggested for a subject an interpretation of a progression of events, perhaps the story of mankind. They felt that since the high school is located in the Bronx, a series of panels depicting the history of that section of the city would be more appropriate. The Bronx history was gone into thoroughly, and at the same time rough sketches were drawn for a series of murals describing the growth of western civilization. The latter plan was no more than tolerated until the color sketches were completed. Then they were approved with real enthusiasm.

As the painting progressed, the students and faculty of the school showed more and more enthusiasm for the work. In fresco painting, the artist scales up his sketches to a full-size drawing or cartoon as a preliminary to the actual work on the wall. This he judges in place, and makes any necessary corrections in drawing, scale, position and relation of objects, or volumes on the cartoon. The mason meanwhile is preparing the wall for the paint.

Satisfied with his drawing, the artist selects a portion from it that can be painted in one day and the corresponding section of wall is covered with the thin finish coat of mortar (a mixture of marble dust and lime), which is troweled to a smooth finish.

The outline of the drawing is then transferred to the fresh wet mortar and the artist begins to paint. Each day a new section is patched to the previous day's work. The students on their way in and out of the library stopped to ask questions and inform each other about the art process and the meaning of each section. They recognized events, criticized the knot in the cowboy's scarf and the proportion of the mechanic's hand. They were seriously interested in the work and studied carefully an exhibit I arranged in a case in the library to show the process of fresco, its history, and photographs of Italian, Mexican, and American murals. Representatives of the school paper interviewed me and took photographs of the work in progress.

The faculty of the science and chemistry departments were most helpful in technical suggestions and instruction in locating and lending apparatus for models. Wherever possible I have used as models people from the school—the engineer, the man pouring glass, the gentlemen of the jury—are all connected with the school, so that a great variety of people have contributed to and are enjoying sharing in the work.

In time, of course, these resemblances will be forgotten and my mural will stand on its essential meaning. This leads me to some thoughts on the use of symbols in mural painting.

The desire to put into concrete form reactions to events, human behavior, the particular beauty of the color and arrangement of a spot in nature is the common urge of artistically creative people. In choosing a vehicle of expression, each artist is guided by his keener sensitivity to the beauty and force of music or words or color and form. And again the musician, the writer, or the painter chooses to express himself, according to his personality and way of thinking, in straight recording or picturization, or in symbols interpreting the significance of a form or an event.

In the first instance we think of the painting of a portrait of a racehorse. Exact to a hair in color, height, length, head and body structure, it is a record of the outward appearance of that horse. The death scene of a general, the coronation of a king are other examples in which the portraiture, the clothes worn, and the attending personages are pictured as they appear to the eye. Because of this fidelity to nature, the exactness in the copying of detail, the picture mirrors the event. Similarly, the landscape that matches blade for blade, leaf for leaf, nature's arrangement stands as a record of the outward appearance of a scene.

n a symbolic painting, the artist utilizes the pictorial record as a dictionary. Out of his experience and knowledge he creates a new and personal form through which to interpret events and feelings. He exaggerates and reserves arbitrarily. There is no attempt to record events exactly. Rather, he tries to recreate the sense of significance of a generalized event.

Mural painting, most often placed in public buildings, is seen by a very great many passing people, who represent a variety of ideas and are engaged in different callings. It is therefore by nature not intimate, but general or universal in thought and appeal. Through its monumental approach it goes beyond the recording of outward appearance to include also the inner significance of the society and time in which it is painted. In expressing himself through the portrayal of his ideas on a limited wall space the artist has a very real need for a universal language in order that his work may be easily read. He therefore invents symbols—a shorthand or phonetic language—through which to convey his thought.

A symbol can be conceived as an arrangement of objects or lines or forms whose presence and relationship stand for a meaning. Its power is felt through its concentrated picturization of an idea. Its significance is manifested by its representation of the peaks, the mores, the supremes of human possibilities, of physical properties, of beliefs.

Symbols used in painting have gone through a very academic period. Recognizable objects held in the hand of the stately figure of a woman have sufficed for symbolic reference. Many of the objects can be traced through centuries of painting. The scales of justice are obvious. The triangle and T-square and the mortar and pestle are often-used symbols of the architect's and chemist's professions. Here the material object designates the meaning of the figure, which is, in itself, without expression. It might be said to be negative. On the other hand an inanimate object used alone may have great power and significance. Bread or wheat, which is abundant in life-sustaining food value, becomes a symbol of life itself. Embodied in two pieces of wood in the form of a cross is the supreme sacrifice of Christ and all his moral and ethical beliefs. Through usage, objects become the symbols of qualities or conditions, as the olive branch does for peace. In more formal settings emblems and seals and also flags are the symbols of schools and organizations and countries as they picture what each collective body stands for.

The mural painter today prefers to use for his symbol not the mortar and pestle but the figure of the chemist himself, suggesting his work and its social relationship. Without meaningless gadgets and endowed with human and understandable life, the symbol becomes a real and vital force. Again the figure of the American pioneer might be used, and it will stand not alone for the man but for the physical endurance, the courage, the adventurous, inquisitive spirit that founded a new and free country. As the way of living and the social problem change, new symbols become universally accepted as significant of new ways, new standards. The use of electricity, a new force and necessity in the present-day world, has revolutionized living, comfort, and health. its tremendous powers out of control work immediately for man's destruction. Mechanized transportation and quick communication of various sorts envelop the world, changing time and space. They draw people and countries closer together and also, by eliminating borders, involve people and countries in each other's affairs. These influences are universally incorporated into living so that man's use or conquest of them becomes significant in the world of today.

This wide and varied activity is so highly involved and its reactions and repercussions so far-reaching that it must be simplified by the artist who is attempting, through pictures, to interpret his world. Through the use of such symbols he can throw together with great freedom a variety of situations and point up his belief and emotion through their arbitrary juxtaposition. With economy of line and simplicity of mass he produces a strong clear picture of an idea, recognizable and interesting to consider.

Thus, to return to my work at Evander Childs High School, the murals in progression around the library show primitive man building his society, youth migrating from it to new lands, the meeting and mingling of tribes, the clashing of eastern culture and scientific knowledge with western force, building knowledge and ideas of law and democracy.

The dark ages of plague are shown next, with the church alone perpetuating knowledge. Then come the beginnings of scientific experiment and the awakening of the people to nature, the force of which destroys their bondage and leads to the great flowering of the Renaissance. The exploration which follows founded a new country to which all nations and all time have contributed, and which has developed into a varied, dynamic, and powerful civilization. In this way I have tried to interpret in pictorial symbols the important historical forces that determined the evolution of western civilization.

2004-01-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

Art Becomes Public Works

Florence Loeb Kellogg
(http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/34279.htm)

Art Becomes Public Works

by Florence Loeb Kellogg
Survey Graphic, Vol. 23, No. 6 (June, 1934), p. 279

WHEN the CWA admitted artists suffering from the depression to a place in its program, last December, the federal government suddenly found itself fostering a burst of creativeness in the fine arts that is unique in the history of democracies. The art lovers responsible for the Public Works of Art Project, most notably its guiding spirit, Edward Bruce, attorney and artist of Washington, had no intention of wasting this opportunity by setting artists and craftsmen at busy-work. Paid for out of public money, their work would belong to the public, to be placed in any building or park supported by federal, state or municipal taxes. Public buildings and parks could benefit by good art; consequently the best of the artists eligible for this aid must be chosen.

It was the interpretation of this dual purpose, to benefit both artists and the public, which produced bitterness, particularly in a few centers where many artists congregate or there is a movement for "proletarian art." Twenty-five hundred were to be employed. (The Art Digest estimates that we have between twenty and fifty thousand people who consider themselves artists.) The regional committees, to whom the responsibility for projects and employment of artists was turned over, carried out their functions according to their best lights. Most of the artists in the country displayed pride in sharing in the project and good-will towards it even if for one reason or another they were excluded. Many, though ineligible, contributed pieces of work or gave their services without pay in order to have part in the enterprise.

The decentralization of the project made it a success and holds promise of further good results. The administrative office in Washington, under the Treasury (in whose jurisdiction public buildings come), with Mr. Bruce as secretary of the advisory committee and Forbes Watson, formerly editor of The Arts, as head of the technical staff, gave over the regional responsibility to sixteen committees and their subdivisions. Experts served without remuneration on these committees, museum directors, art teachers and art lovers, some six hundred throughout the country, and worked tirelessly to make the movement of consequence. Leaders, artists and the public of each section came to know one another. Even in some of our larger cities little money had hitherto been spent on decorating public buildings, and requests for artists' services poured in. Artists, who were paid craftsmen's wages of from $23.50 to $42.50 a week and supplied their own materials when these were inexpensive, were aided in some community projects where the cost of materials was high, by public subscription. At the close of the project a number of regional divisions held local exhibitions.

The public now owns, at a cost of less than a million and a half dollars, about fifteen thousand new works of art. These range from prints, which can be issued in some quantity, to what seems to be the most ambitious of the undertakings, the decoration of the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, in which forty-four artists and their assistants were engaged. Actually 3671 men and women were employed, for varying periods of time, in the less than five months' duration of the Public Works of Art Project. Except where sketches for special pieces of work had to be passed on in advance, the artists worked with complete freedom. The general assignment was the American scene.

A cross-section of the work done, as assembled for the past month at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, proved stimulating not only for the excellence of the work of many unknown or little known artists but for the many-sided picture it incidentally gave of a vast country. Some sculpture was shown but the exhibits were of necessity mainly easel paintings. In one small gallery were grouped art objects made by Indian artists—pottery, Navajo rugs, a religious wood carving, mural decorations; in another, things made for children—paintings, tiles, ceramic figures, marionettes.

This representative showing and a file of books containing hundreds of photographs gave an idea of the scope of the project. A record of some current activities has been made: CCC and CWA scenes, city slums and the subsistence homestead movement, an interpretation of New Deal economics, a series of Boulder Dam paintings. There are portraits and busts of well-known American figures, as, for instance, Steinmetz, Booker T. Washington, Paul Revere, Stephen Foster, Judge Payne, even Paul Bunyan; and scenes of earlier days, of historical events and of places of national interest. Other useful commissions have been executed, such as glazed clay figures for a school for the blind, paintings of local trees in their environment for a children's room in a library, bas reliefs of animals and decorative maps for elementary schools. Textiles, ceramics, carved furniture, wrought-iron weather vanes have come under the project.

Schools, zoological gardens, libraries and hospitals, particularly for their children's departments, municipal auditoriums, state universities and normal schools, city halls, county courthouses, post-offices, customhouses, museums, Ellis Island, the Naval and Military Academies,—institutions all over the country had seized this opportunity to decorate walls or add sculptural details. This decoration varies in importance. Much of it is merely pleasant, some is more ambitious. Three panels of farm life painted by a group of artists for Iowa State College, two panels on Negro life painted by a Negro artist for a Negro high school, and decorations for the teachers' colleges and state historical society in Oklahoma, by Indians, are of special interest.

What of the benefit to the artist in times of depression? The letters received by the administrative office show once more how little the artist measures his career by the money he makes. Though he chooses dire need no more than an other man, he asks mainly for a chance to do his work. Letters refer gratefully to the actual relief the weeks of employment offered (typical is: "I had not been on the commissary but I have been almost there many times"), but all of them dwell on another benefit of this nation-wide encouragement of art. They speak of the restoration of morale, of renewed self-confidence, of the sense of being at last acknowledged as an important member of the social family, with a place in the economic system.

"Never in my career," to quote from one letter, "have I experienced such a sense of lift as I feel now in my work for the government. No newspaper criticism, however kind, no exhibition of my work, no scholarship, no patronage, has fired me as does this project."

Edward Bruce, who is no enthusiast for our addiction to the gold-leaf embellishment of public buildings, points out that the project "has created for this country a new and finer definition of public works." If this country-wide use of the artist's work in public places should continue, we shall yet have art for the people, where the people can see it. Artists will develop in stature to meet the need.

2004-01-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1932d.htm#23)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's address at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932

President Jacobs, members and friends of Oglethorpe University, and especially you, my fellow members of the Class of 1932:

FOR ME, as for you, this is a day of honorable attainment. For the honor conferred upon me I am deeply grateful, and I felicitate you upon yours, even though I cannot share with you that greater satisfaction which comes from a laurel worked for and won. For many of you, doubtless, this mark of distinction which you have received today has meant greater sacrifice by your parents or by yourselves, than you anticipated when you matriculated almost four years ago. The year 1928 does not seem far in the past, but since that time, as all of us are aware, the world about us has experienced significant changes. Four years ago, if you heard and believed the tidings of the time, you could expect to take your place in a society well supplied with material things and could look forward to the not too distant time when you would be living in your own homes, each (if you believed the politicians) with a two-car garage; and, without great effort, would be providing yourselves and your families with all the necessities and amenities of life, and perhaps in addition, assure by your savings their security and your own in the future. Indeed, if you were observant, you would have seen that many of your elders had discovered a still easier road to material success. They had found that once they had accumulated a few dollars they needed only to put them in the proper place and then sit back and read in comfort the hieroglyphics called stock quotations which proclaimed that their wealth was mounting miraculously without any work or effort on their part. Many who were called and who are still pleased to call themselves the leaders of finance celebrated and assured us of an eternal future for this easy-chair mode of living. And to the stimulation of belief in this dazzling chimera were lent not only the voices of some of our public men in high office, but their influence and the material aid of the very instruments of Government which they controlled.

How sadly different is the picture which we see around us today! If only the mirage had vanished, we should not complain, for we should all be better off. But with it have vanished, not only the easy gains of speculation, but much of the savings of thrifty and prudent men and women, put by for their old age and for the education of their children. With these savings has gone, among millions of our fellow citizens, that sense of security to which they have rightly felt they are entitled in a land abundantly endowed with natural resources and with productive facilities to convert them into the necessities of life for all of our population. More calamitous still, there has vanished with the expectation of future security the certainty of today's bread and clothing.

Some of you--I hope not many--are wondering today how and where you will be able to earn your living a few weeks or a few months hence. Much has been written about the hope of youth. I prefer to emphasize another quality. I hope that you who have spent four years in an institution whose fundamental purpose, I take it, is to train us to pursue truths relentlessly and to look at them courageously, will face the unfortunate state of the world about you with greater clarity of vision than many of your elders.

As you have viewed this world of which you are about to become a more active part, I have no doubt that you have been impressed by its chaos, its lack of plan. Perhaps some of you have used stronger language. And stronger language is justified. Even had you been graduating, instead of matriculating, in these rose-colored days of 1928, you would, I believe, have perceived this condition. For beneath all the happy optimism of those days there existed lack of plan and a great waste.

This failure to measure true values and to look ahead extended to almost every industry, every profession, every walk of life. Take, for example, the vocation of higher education itself.

If you had been intending to enter the profession of teaching, you would have found that the universities, the colleges, the normal schools of our country were turning out annually far more trained teachers than the schools of the country could possibly use or absorb. You and I know that the number of teachers needed in the Nation is a relatively stable figure, little affected by the depression and capable of fairly accurate estimate in advance with due consideration for our increase in population. And yet, we have continued to add teaching courses, to accept every young man or young woman in those courses without any thought or regard for the law of supply and demand. In the State of New York alone, for example, there are at least seven thousand qualified teachers who are out of work, unable to earn a livelihood in their chosen profession just because nobody had the wit or the forethought to tell them in their younger days that the profession of teaching was gravely oversupplied.

Take, again, the profession of the law. Our common sense tells us that we have too many lawyers and that thousands of them, thoroughly trained, are either eking out a bare existence or being compelled to work with their hands, or are turning to some other business in order to keep themselves from becoming objects of charity. The universities, the bar, the courts themselves have done little to bring this situation to the knowledge of young men who are considering entering any one of our multitude of law schools. Here again foresight and planning have been notable for their complete absence.

In the same way we cannot review carefully the history of our industrial advance without being struck with its haphazardness, the gigantic waste with which it has been accomplished, the superfluous duplication of productive facilities, the continual scrapping of still useful equipment, the tremendous mortality in industrial and commercial undertakings, the thousands of dead-end trails into which enterprise has been lured, the profligate waste of natural resources. Much of this waste is the inevitable by-product of progress in a society which values individual endeavor and which is susceptible to the changing tastes and customs of the people of which it is composed. But much of it, I believe, could have been prevented by greater foresight and by a larger measure of social planning. Such controlling and directive forces as have been developed in recent years reside to a dangerous degree in groups having special interests in our economic order, interests which do not coincide with the interests of the Nation as a whole. I believe that the recent course of our history has demonstrated that, while we may utilize their expert knowledge of certain problems and the special facilities with which. they are familiar, we cannot allow our economic life to be controlled by that small group of men whose chief outlook upon the social welfare is tinctured by the fact that they can make huge profits from the lending of money and the marketing of securities--an outlook which deserves the adjectives "selfish" and "opportunist."

You have been struck, I know, by the tragic irony of our economic situation today. We have not been brought to our present state by any natural calamity--by drought or floods or earthquakes or by the destruction of our productive machine or our man power. Indeed, we have a superabundance of raw materials, a more than ample supply of equipment for manufacturing these materials into the goods which we need, and transportation and commercial facilities for making them available to all who need them. But raw materials stand unused, factories stand idle, railroad traffic continues to dwindle, merchants sell less and less, while millions of able-bodied men and women, in dire need, are clamoring for the opportunity to work. This is the awful paradox with which we are confronted, a stinging rebuke that challenges our power to operate the economic machine which we have created.

We are presented with a multitude of views as to how we may again set into motion that economic machine. Some hold to the theory that the periodic slowing down of our economic machine is one of its inherent peculiarities--a peculiarity which we must grin, if we can, and bear because if we attempt to tamper with it we shall cause even worse ailments. According to this theory, as I see it, if we grin and bear long enough, the economic machine will eventually begin to pick up speed and in the course of an indefinite number of years will again attain that maximum number of revolutions which signifies what we have been wont to miscall prosperity, but which, alas, is but a last ostentatious twirl of the economic machine before it again succumbs to that mysterious impulse to slow down again. This attitude toward our economic machine requires not only greater stoicism, but greater faith in immutable economic law and less faith in the ability of man to control what he has created than I, for one, have. Whatever elements of truth lie in it, it is an invitation to sit back and do nothing; and all of us are suffering today, I believe, because this comfortable theory was too thoroughly implanted in the minds of some of our leaders, both in finance and in public affairs.

Other students of economics trace our present difficulties to the ravages of the World War and its bequest of unsolved political and economic and financial problems. Still others trace our difficulties to defects in the world's monetary systems. Whether it be an original cause, an accentuating cause, or an effect, the drastic change in the value of our monetary unit in terms of the commodities is a problem which we must meet straightforwardly. It is self-evident that we must either restore commodities to a level approximating their dollar value of several years ago or else that we must continue the destructive process of reducing, through defaults or through deliberate writing down, obligations assumed at a higher price level.

Possibly because of the urgency and complexity of this phase of our problem some of our economic thinkers have been occupied with it to the exclusion of other phases of as great importance.

Of these other phases, that which seems most important to me in the long run is the problem of controlling by adequate planning the creation and distribution of those products which our vast economic machine is capable of yielding. It is true that capital, whether public or private, is needed in the creation of new enterprise and that such capital gives employment.

But think carefully of the vast sums of capital or credit which in the past decade have been devoted to unjustified enterprises--to the development of unessentials and to the multiplying of many products far beyond the capacity of the Nation to absorb. It is the same story as the thoughtless turning out of too many school teachers and too many lawyers.

Here again, in the field of industry and business many of those whose primary solicitude is confined to the welfare of what they call capital have failed to read the lessons of the past few years and have been moved less by calm analysis of the needs of the Nation as a whole than by a blind determination to preserve their own special stakes in the economic order. I do not mean to intimate that we have come to the end of this period of expansion. We shall continue to need capital for the production of newly-invented devices, for the replacement of equipment worn out or rendered obsolete by our technical progress; we need better housing in many of our cities and we still need in many parts of the country more good roads, canals, parks and other improvements.

But it seems to me probable that our physical economic plant will not expand in the future at the same rate at which it has expanded in the past. We may build more factories, but the fact remains that we have enough now to supply all of our domestic needs, and more, if they are used. With these factories we can now make more shoes, more textiles, more steel, more radios, more automobiles, more of almost everything than we can use.

No, our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink. We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend this capital at home and abroad.

I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer. Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.

It is well within the inventive capacity of man, who has built up this great social and economic machine capable of satisfying the wants of all, to insure that all who are willing and able to work receive from it at least the necessities of life. In such a system, the reward for a day's work will have to be greater, on the average, than it has been, and the reward to capital, especially capital which is speculative, will have to be less. But I believe that after the experience of the last three years, the average citizen would rather receive a smaller return upon his savings in return for greater security for the principal, than experience for a moment the thrill or the prospect of being a millionaire only to find the next moment that his fortune, actual or expected, has withered in his hand because the economic machine has again broken down.

It is toward that objective that we must move if we are to profit by our recent experiences. Probably few will disagree that the goal is desirable. Yet many, of faint heart, fearful of change, sitting tightly on the roof-tops in the flood, will sternly resist striking out for it, lest they fail to attain it. Even among those who are ready to attempt the journey there will be violent differences of opinion as to how it should be made. So complex, so widely distributed over our whole society are the problems which confront us that men and women of common aim do not agree upon the method of attacking them. Such disagreement leads to doing nothing, to drifting. Agreement may come too late.

Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the Nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.

Do not confuse objectives with methods. When the Nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!

2004-01-03T08:53:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from:

New Deal Cultural Programs:
Experiments in Cultural Democracy
by Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard
© Copyright Adams & Goldbard 1986, 1995

@ http://www.wwcd.org/policy/US/newdeal.html#FAP)

The Federal Art Project

At its height in 1936, the FAP employed 5,300 visual artists and related professionals. Director Cahill oversaw several major endeavors: a murals project executed more than 2,500 murals in hospitals, schools and other public places; an easel painting division produced nearly 108,000 paintings; a sculpture division produced some 18,000 pieces; a graphic arts workshop; a photography project served mainly to document the WPA; a scenic design division provided models of historic stage sets and architectural models for planning and educational use; a poster division; and a stained glass division centered in New York.

The Federal Art Project also compiled a 22,000-plate Index of American Design, dispatching artists to record a wide variety of American designs in furnishings and artifacts from the colonial period on. The Arts Service Division provided illustrations and the like to the WPA's writers, musicians and theaters. The Exhibitions Division organized public showings of all WPA artists and students.

Hundreds of teachers were employed by the Art Teaching Division in settlement houses and community centers; in the New York City area alone, an estimated 50,000 children and adults participated in classes each week. The FAP also set up and staffed 100 arts centers in 22 states; these included galleries, classrooms and community workshops and served an estimated eight million people. These local centers also received some $825,000 in local support; some survive to this day.

Many artists who have since become famous were part of FAP. Philip Guston, Moses Soyer, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jacob Laurence, Ivan Albright, Marsden Hartley, Philip Evergood, Mark Tobey -- these were just a few of the painters for whom the FAP provided a living and the chance to find "a new orientation and a new hope and purpose based on a new sense of social responsibility."

2004-01-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from the American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works: http://aic.stanford.edu/treasure/)

CARING FOR YOUR PAINTINGS

Paintings may be objects of great beauty or of historical importance, providing an important cultural link with the past. They may have great monetary value or have sentimental value to their owners. Whatever the case, paintings are fragile creations that require special care to assure their continued preservation.

Paintings consist of various layers. The paint is applied to a support, typically canvas or wood, which is first primed with a glue-sizing and/or ground layer. Traditional paintings are finished with a coat of varnish. Contemporary paintings, naive, or folk art may not have a ground layer or varnish coating. Paintings that do not have all of the traditional layers may be more fragile and susceptible to change or damage. The paint layers can be made of pigments in oil, acrylic (or other synthetics), encaustic (wax), tempera (egg), distemper (glue), casein (milk), gouache (plant gum), or a mixture of media. The paint can be applied on a wide variety of supports. Although the most common are canvas and wood, other supports include paper, cardboard, pressed board, artist's board, copper, ivory, glass, plaster, and stone. Paintings on canvas are usually stretched over an auxiliary wood support. An adjustable support is called a stretcher; a support with fixed corners is called a strainer.

Paintings change over time. Some inevitable results of aging, such as increased transparency of oil paint or the appearance of certain types of cracks, do not threaten the stability of a painting and may not always be considered damage. One of the most common signs of age is a darkened or yellowed surface caused by accumulated grime or discolored varnish. When a varnish becomes so discolored that it obscures the artist's intended colors and the balance of lights and darks, it usually can be removed by a conservator, but some evidence of aging is to be expected and should be accepted. However, when structural damages occur in a painting such as tears, flaking paint, cracks with lifting edges, or mold, consult a conservator to decide on a future course of treatment for your painting.

MAINTAINING A SUITABLE ENVIRONMENT

It is important to maintain a proper environment for your paintings. The structural components of a painting expand and contract in different ways as the surrounding temperature and humidity fluctuate. For example, the flexible canvas may become slack or taut in a changing environment, while the more brittle paint may crack, curl, or loosen its attachment to the underlying layers. If a painting could be maintained in an optimum environment, in one location at a constant temperature and humidity level, many of the problems requiring the services of a paintings conservator could be prevented. Paintings generally do well in environmental conditions that are comfortable for people, with relative humidity levels between 40 and 60 percent. Environmental guidelines have been developed for different types of materials. Paintings on canvas may react more quickly to rising and falling humidity levels than paintings on wood panels, but the dimensional changes that can occur in a wood panel can cause more structural damage. Owners of panel paintings should be particularly conscientious about avoiding unusually low or high relative humidity and temperatures to prevent warping, splitting, or breaking of the wood. Museums strive to maintain constant temperature and humidity levels for works of art, but even with expensive environmental control systems this task can be difficult. In most cases, gradual seasonal changes and small fluctuations are less harmful than large environmental fluctuations. Avoiding large fluctuations is very important. For example, a painting stored in what would generally be considered poor conditions (such as a cold, damp castle in England) may remain structurally secure for centuries, but begin to deteriorate rapidly if moved into "stable" museum conditions simply because of the extreme change in its environment.

One of the simplest and most important preservation steps you can take is have protective backing board attached to paintings. A Fome-Cor (or archival cardboard backing) screwed to the reverse of a painting will slow environmental exchange through a canvas, keep out dust and foreign objects, and protect against damage during handling. Be sure that the backing board covers the entire back of the picture; do not leave air vent holes, which can cause localized environmental conditions and lead to cracks in paint. The backing board should be attached to the reverse of the stretcher or strainer, not to the frame. Have a conservator or reputable framer attach it for you.

DISPLAYING PAINTINGS

The display of paintings requires careful consideration. Direct sunlight can cause fading of certain pigments, increased yellowing of varnish, and excessive heat on the painting surface. It is best to exhibit paintings on dividing walls within a building rather than on perimeter walls where temperature fluctuations will be greater and condensation can occur. If paintings are placed on uninsulated exterior walls, it may help to place small rubber spacers on the back of the frame to increase air circulation.

Although a fireplace is often a focal spot for a room, a painting displayed above a mantel will be exposed to soot, heat, and environmental extremes. Hanging paintings above heating and air conditioning vents or in bathrooms with tubs or showers is also inadvisable because the rapid environmental fluctuations will be harmful. Select a safe place away from high traffic and seating areas.

When lighting paintings, use indirect lighting. Lights that attach to the top of the frame and hang over the picture can be dangerous. These lights cast a harsh glare, illuminate and heat the painting unevenly, and can fall into the artwork causing burns or tears. Indirect sunlight, recessed lighting, or ceiling-mounted spotlights are best for home installations. Halogen lamps are increasingly popular, but halogen bulbs emit high levels of ultraviolet light (the part of the spectrum that is damaging to artworks) and should be fitted with an ultraviolet filter when used near light-sensitive materials. These bulbs also have been known to explode and may pose a fire hazard. Tungsten lamps may be preferable for home lighting.

HANDLING PROCEDURES

Pictures are usually safest when hanging on a wall, provided that they are well framed, with the picture and hanging hardware adequately secured. If you must store a painting, avoid damp basements or garages, where pictures can mold, and attics, which are very hot in the summer. A good storage method is to place the paintings in a closet with a stiff board protecting the image side of each artwork and a backing board attached to the reverse. Here again, a backing board attached to the reverse can protect your painting.

Do not risk damaging your paintings by moving them any more than is absolutely necessary. If you must remove a painting from the wall or move it to another room, clear the pathway of furniture and obstructions and prepare a location to receive it. The frame must be stable and secure. If it is old or there is glazing (glass), ensure that it can withstand being moved. Determine if you can lift the painting safely by yourself. If the frame is massive or the picture is wider than your shoulders, ask someone to help you. If the painting is of a manageable size, lift the frame with both hands by placing one hand in the center of each side. Always carry it with the image side facing you. Remove jewelry, tie clips, belt buckles, or other clothing that might scrape the surface. Hang paintings from picture hooks (not nails) placed securely in the wall; a heavy picture requires two hooks. Before hanging, examine the back of the painting to ensure that the hanging hardware is strong and secure. If the painting is framed, the hardware should be attached to the back of the frame, not to the stretcher or strainer. If picture wire is used, attach a double strand of braided wire to the sides of the frame (not to the top edge) with "D" rings or mirror plate hangers (see diagram). These types of hangers are secured to the wooden frame with two to four screws. Hanging can be more complicated with contemporary paintings that do not have protective frames. Moving and hanging unframed or large paintings safely may require the services of professional art handlers, who may be reached by calling a local museum, historical society, or reputable art gallery.

FRAMING

If you intend to buy a new frame for a painting or have a painting treated by a conservator, take the opportunity to have it properly framed. Ideally, a painting should be held in the frame with mending plates that are attached to the frame with screws. Brass mending plates can be bent and adjusted so there is light pressure on the back of the stretcher or strainer. Sometimes nails are used to frame paintings, but nails can rust, fall out, or protrude through the canvas. Ask the framer or conservator to pad the rabbet, the part of the frame that touches the face of the painting, with felt or another suitable material to protect the image.

HOUSEKEEPING GUIDELINES

After carefully examining your paintings for loose or flaking paint, dust them every four to six months. Feather dusters can scratch paintings. Instead use soft, white-bristle Japanese brushes, sable (such as a typical makeup brush), or badger-hair brushes (called "blenders" and used for faux finishes). Never try to clean a painting yourself or use any liquid or commercial cleaners on a painted surface. Commercial preparations can cause irreparable damage to the fragile layers of a painting. Avoid using pesticides, foggers, air fresheners, or furniture sprays near artworks. Remove paintings from a room before painting, plastering, or steam cleaning carpets or wallpaper. Return the artworks only when the walls and floors are completely dry.

DISASTERS AND OTHER PROBLEMS

If a disaster such as a flood or fire occurs in your home, remove paintings from standing water or debris. If the paint is flaking, lay the painting flat with the image side up to limit paint loss. Consult a professional conservator as soon as possible for assistance in limiting damage to your artwork. Wiping smoke, mud, or other contaminants from a painting may result in additional damage. An information packet on disaster recovery is available from the American Institute for Conservation.

Other problems will require the help of a professional conservator. Insect infestation, flaking paint, paint loss, torn canvas, cracks with lifting edges or planar distortions (wrinkles or draws in the canvas), mold growth, grime, or very discolored varnish are problems that only a professional conservator is trained to address.

2004-01-01T08:34:00.000-08:00

(Beautiful bit of writing extracted from SOBERING THOUGHTS @ artrat.co.uk - http://www.artrat.co.uk/Hasta_Siempre.htm to be exact)

HASTA SIEMPRE

It was around ten years ago I moved to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Ten years since I read Leonard Cohen’s ‘Beautiful Losers’. It was a shoddy copy I’d found among a box of discarded books in my friends’ flat. They’d moved there from Barcelona to teach English like me, and the books had been left by the previous occupant.

He was called Richard and she was called Sarah. They were a good laugh and we would go out drinking together. We quickly mushroomed into a group of friends, all there for similar reasons. I shared a flat with a German girl called Brigitta and we all lived within fifteen minutes of each other.

We’d go out getting drunk, smoking dope, dancing in seedy nightclubs, hanging out at three in the morning in a bar frequented by drunks and prostitutes. ( This bar sold the most deliciously unhealthy burgers I’ve ever tasted and ever will )
I was teaching in a school to children and adults – I can’t remember much about this, since social life was all I lived for. We had parties in each others’ houses and generally pissed around like ex-pats do. It was a good time.

One Friday we had some friends round and I went to buy some cigarettes. I thought I’d call Richard and Sarah to see if they wanted to come around.

I can’t exactly remember the conversation but it went something like this –

Me-‘Hey Sarah, Kathy and Brigitta and me(etc.) are here having a drink. Do you want to come over? We’re maybe going to see a band later.’

Sarah-‘No, I don’t think so. We’re staying in tonight I think.’

Me-‘Aww, come on –it’s really cheap.’

Sarah-‘No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Haven’t you heard what’s happened?’

Me-‘No…What?’

Sarah- ‘I don’t really want to see anybody. I think I’m going a bit loopy.’

Me-(chuckling) ‘Yeah, I know what you mean!’

Sarah-‘Do you? DO YOU know what I mean?’

Me-(nervous laugh)’..no, not really..’

Sarah-‘Ah,it’s okay.I’m okay…I’ll see you next week.’

When I got back upstairs to the flat, I told everybody about my strange conversation with Sarah. They told me that on Thursday she’d tried to slit her wrists and DIDN’T I KNOW?!!

No, nobody’d told me. It was the last time I spoke to her.

She disappeared on her way to work the following Monday and was found on the Wednesday. Richard had taken a walk along the cliffs where they had been together once or twice and a dog led him to her, near a little cave.

She had overdosed on rum and pills.

All this goes nowhere to explain much. What is there to say? That she seemed she had everything to live for and she was bright and funny and all those bullshit clichés? Is it a measure of our own ego that we all probably thought we could’ve said or done something to help her but didn’t?

I still have that copy of ‘Beautiful Losers’.

She’d let me have it because she said she would never read it.

‘Too depressing’, she laughed.

2004-01-01T08:29:00.000-08:00

Hung out to dry by the sponsors
(Extracted from http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1113964,00.html)

Art's corporate backers decide what we can see in public spaces

Peter Kennard
Tuesday December 30, 2003
The Guardian

Five weeks ago I was asked, along with the artist Banksy, by Damon Albarn to produce an image symbolising peace and Christmas, to be projected on Trinity House in the City of London as part of the Brighten Up London campaign. I was told it was a project organised by Bob Geldof and sponsored by Orange. There were expenses but no fee. To make a public artwork was my spur, to make an image of hope after a year of war.

It was a chance to use a public place to make an iconic image that would reflect the hopes of millions. I tried to visualise the phrase "peace on Earth" by using a painting of the Virgin Mary, replacing her face with an image of the Earth and turning her halo into a peace symbol - a simple juxtaposition creating a photomontage that does not contradict Christian belief but interprets it for a world in danger.

After this - silence. The day for the projection came and went with no projection, followed by a series of confused messages about problems with the image. Eventually, Niamh Byrne, head of media relations at Orange, told the Guardian on December 24 that even though she found the image "absolutely fantastic ... what we were looking for was something that people from little children to grandparents could appreciate". My picture did not, apparently, fall into this category.

I will leave it to the grandmothers who recently risked their lives disarming nuclear submarines in Scotland, and to the many thousands of elderly people and children who went on peace marches in 2003, to respond to the condescension of that remark. I will turn instead to the mission statement on the Orange website: "We are ready to push the boundaries and take risks; we are always open and honest; we say what we do and we do what we say; we want to make a difference to people's lives."

I read on and find that Orange linked up with Index on Censorship this year to launch the Orange/Index debates to discuss issues of free expression, aimed particularly at university students (one hopes no little children or grandparents unwittingly attended). I hereby award the Orange prize for fiction to Orange.

Orange have created a lot of publicity for themselves by sponsoring the Brighten Up London campaign. We Londoners have been lucky enough to see images of mince pies freshly baked by Nigella projected on to one building, and hearts projected on to another. (You guessed it, Heart 106.2 is one of the project's sponsors.) In all, nine buildings were used as screens for a variety of Christmas-type baubles that did not even reach the aesthetic levels of the cheapest Christmas cards.

The patrons of contemporary art, the Medicis of today, are the corporations. They give the impression of supporting dissident views and freedom of expression, but if there is any danger that your sponsored work encourages even a modicum of critical debate, you're out the door. The sponsors are in it to ratchet up "the buying mood".

Censorship of culture is something one does not speak of in the free market - it brings back images of Lady Chatterley and the Lord Chamberlain. But in the visual arts it is an increasing determinant of what people are allowed to see in public spaces. Exhibitions cannot take place if they are not sponsored. A few years ago, the Tate even had trouble finding a sponsor for a Francis Bacon show, as the work appeared a bit too visceral for shareholders to support.

In the case of an exhibition of my own work, entitled Images against War, at the Barbican Centre in 1985, two of the works were censored at the last minute. One was hastily unscrewed from the wall and the other, which could not be moved quickly enough, was covered with an old grey blanket. The censorship of these two works only lasted for one morning. It was the morning a high-ranking Chilean official was scheduled to address a group of bankers at the Barbican. The directors of the Barbican thought that he might be offended by two of my paintings, which were symbolic representations of the barbarism that had taken place directly after the military coup of 1973. Q. Who finances the Barbican? A. The Corporation of London.

Artists are being hung out to dry. Don't take my word for it - go and see the illuminated buildings for yourselves. Tomorrow, they will all have a special New Year celebration stamp projected on to them. Can't wait.

· Peter Kennard's most recent publication is Dispatches from an Unofficial War Artist (Lund Humphries)

peter@peterkennard.com

2004-01-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from Leigh Oswald's January Perspective on artnet.com)

Artistically, there is no time for shrinking violets or gentle esthetics. Bold, daring courage is the esprit de temps for 2004, but irony can never be far from the mood. However with Uranus now established for the duration in Pisces, there is an awakening of a more universal, spiritual consciousness and a greater sense of numinosity and a hunger for higher ground, artistically, politically, socially and spiritually. This has to be a source of optimism.

The huge growth in use in art of photography and video installation, which has been so apparent in 2003 (seen notably in London in works by Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides and video pioneer Bill Viola), will continue to be the case in 2004. Again we have Uranus in Pisces to hook that one onto.

There will be a greater need to experience total emotional immersion in a work of art, even though there will be many a critic (like Tate chief Nick Serota) who views this tendency with cynicism, looking with suspicion on the need for an irrational, quasi-spiritual art experience. Yet it would seem that this type of experience will be a growing yearning in the collective unconscious. As suggested by Olafur Eliasson, maker of the triumphant Weather Project installation at Tate Modern, we need to "watch ourselves emoting." This is often the only way we can reassure ourselves of our humanity, in a seemingly increasingly dehumanized world. Again Uranus in Pisces and Neptune in Aquarius will ensure this zeitgeist prevails.

Fortunately Mercury moves direct in Sagittarius from the 6th, announcing a resumption of normalcy in communications and travel, and writers feel liberated again. From the 15th when Mercury moves back into Capricorn there will be an economic reality check and a growth in pragmatism.

Venus in Aquarius until the 15th emphasizes the experimental in art especially in installation work. From then Venus shifts into Pisces and changes the mood into a more ethereal and numinous one. Music, photography and film will all be especially favored then.

Mid-month is a wild and exciting time for innovation and genius in the arts, when Uranus makes a knee trembling conjunction with Venus in Pisces.

This brings a unique window of opportunity for a ground-breaking new chapter in artistic consciousness to be born, that sets the tone for many years to come, so exploit.

The full Moon in Cancer on the 7th awakens lurking demons and the unconscious will not be kept in check, especially in the Cancer-ruled U.S., and the new Moon in Aquarius on the 21st is a time for initiation and innovation.

2003-12-23T23:10:00.000-08:00

Still Life with Blood

A shanty on the windward side of the island.
He stoops in the doorway, ringing a bell.
The sand (until it ends) is Robert Ryman.

Horses on a t-shirt
Bottles in a bucket
Play the harmonica, louderlouder

Next we'll gather by the Joshua tree.
Her bikini at her ankles and neck.
The camera automatic focus click wind.

Expletive deleted

2003-12-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

AFH Book Recommendation for Christmas:
(Extracted from artnet.com @ http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/index/kuspit/kuspit12-15-03.asp)

Art Buccaneer and Gambler
by Donald Kuspit
Rita Hatton and John A. Walker, Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, Ellipsis, London, 2003, £20.

Rita Hatton and John A. Walker's Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi is an important, terrifying book -- perhaps the most important, terrifying book you're likely to read about the socioeconomic realities of the contemporary art world. Hatton and Walker offer what they call "a hostile critique written from an anti-capitalist standpoint," but their generalized anti-capitalism is less to the point than their very detailed, meticulously researched description of Charles Saatchi's comings and goings -- power and authority, more particularly, the power and authority of his money -- in the art world.

The terrifying thing is that the money gives him the right to create art value where there is none -- to create art history where there is little or no esthetic and intellectual value, as Hatton and Walker argue. They make it clear that Saatchi is a speculator in art futures, and that art itself has become a speculative enterprise with no clear future -- except the future it has on the art market, which is where art history is really made.

It is as though Saatchi completes what Marcel Duchamp initiated: the de-estheticization and ultimately devaluation of art. There is no longer any such thing as art that is intrinsically art. It all depends on who backs whatever they're backing as art -- who makes an argument that convinces us that it is art, if never with any clear, definitive understanding of what it means to say that it is art. We are never sure what makes it so special that we are willing to accord it the "status and dignity of art," as André Breton said Duchamp did when he labeled banal objects as works of art, in effect graduating them from naive second-class citizenship to sophisticated, aristocratic treasures of civilization. Intellectualizing banal objects into stillborn works of art, he made an ironical case for art while undermining it. (Duchamp, incidentally, was obsessed with money, a fact documented in the "Dada in New York" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Where intellectuals once gambled on the meaning and significance of art -- and Duchamp's readymades are intellectual gambles that would collapse into triviality without the interminable theory that backs them -- Hatton and Walker make it clear that only money, audaciously betting that what it bets on will be an art-historical winner, gives art meaning and significance. Intellectuals don't mean a damn in the world of money, which now has its own legitimacy -- it alone has intrinsic value. They are simply advertisements for the art, just as Saatchi, who made his fortune in advertising, chooses art that calls attention to itself, preferably with all the blatancy of an advertisement, as Hatton and Walker argue. Their message is that so-called art has no inner dignity and social status apart from the dignity and status that money and advertising give it. They also show that there is no real risk involved: Saatchi makes money by dumping art that seems like a bad bet on the art market (most famously Sandro Chia©ˆs work). The dumping itself makes the art a bad bet, that is, devalues it artistically -- after all, the only value it had was the value of the money bet on it.

The book begins with an account of the founding and growth of the advertising empire of Charles and Maurice Saatchi, showing how their work for Margaret Thatcher put them over the top. They eventually lost control of their empire, but Charles had begun to invest in art, first by collecting it, then by opening a gallery which doubled as a museum. He eventually became a patron, cultivating artists -- many of whom were slavishly submissive to him, whatever their disclaimers (after all, he enriched them) -- and finally organizing the so-called "Sensation," "Neurotic Realism," and "Young British Artists" (yBa) movements. He became prominent on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Gallery, and began making gifts to the latter -- another way of promoting his purchases and gaining power over the system of art information, as well as stifling critical dissent.

Hatton and Walker document Saatchi's buying and selling of art and its profound effect on the art market as well as on the conception of art. They show how he in effect controlled the production as well as distribution of art. Most subtly, they show how his efforts to make a quick buck from art led to the production of quick art -- "amateurism," as they call it. They show how art is trying to emulate the speed with which money moves in a global economy. Clearly, the changing value of art on the global art market reflects the changing value of money in the global economy.

They also analyze its effect on artists, most worthily Damien Hirst, whom Hatton and Walker compare to Gordon Gekko, the hero of Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street. "Integrity is bullshit," Hirst said, "I'm not anything at heart. I'm too greedy" (quoted on p. 37). Gekko: "It's all about bucks. . . . Money isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here [he points to a Miró], I bought it ten years ago for $60,000. I could sell it today for $600,000. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes the more desperate they want it -- capitalism at its finest. . . I create nothing. I own" (quoted on p. 114). Gekko is clearly more Saatchi than Hirst.

The book is essentially a sociological analysis, as its use of Thorsten Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption and Raymonde Moulin's analysis of the art market makes clear. Hatton and Walker also offer some trenchant insights into Saatchi's character, based on accounts of his behavior -- apparently as impulsive, and when necessary as ingratiating, as that of much of the British art he supports, or rather uses to make money. There are also many quotations from artists and art thinkers critical of Saatchi's influence, which is generally regarded as pernicious, particularly because it draws attention away from other kinds of art, obscuring awareness of the full range and complexity of contemporary art production.

Saatchi's defenders are also quoted, as though to add a momentary balance to the lopsided case Hatton and Walker make against him. They also show how Saatchi's collecting of British art coincided with Thatcher's -- and Anthony Blair's -- efforts to "re-brand" Britain as a hot entrepreneurial society, thus helping it shed its clichéd image as a hide-bound tradition-oriented society, where the landed gentry and propriety mattered more than rootless money and slick success.

The Saatchis, who immigrated to Britain from Iran, are certainly examples of the new upward mobility that both the Tories and New Labor encourage. Hatton and Walker make it clear that Saatchi is not corrupt; for them, the system is necessarily corrupt in capitalism. What they neglect to note is that it has encouraged and supported a good deal of important art that has nothing to do with the kind of quick-fix art that Saatchi generally admired -- art of lasting not simply market value, that is, art that transcends the capitalist system to offer values that from Hatton and Walker's standpoint are alien to it.

Nonetheless, Hatton and Walker do make it clear that to have power over art, as Saatchi does, is to have the ultimate power that money can buy.

DONALD KUSPIT is professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.

2003-12-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

For a tremendous article on dimensional aesthetics, please go to:

Tout-fait
The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal
Volume 2, Issue 5 (April 2003)
www.toutfait.com

and read:

Complexity Art
by Roberto Giunti
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/giunti/giunti1.html

2003-12-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from the 1997 Performance Studies Conference archive @ http://webcast.gatech.edu/papers/arch/Auslander.html ...cites found there)

Ontology vs. History:Making Distinctions Between the Live and the Mediatized

Philip Auslander

Despite the substantial interest in thinking about the ways in which performance can interact with media and information technologies evidenced by this conference, there remains a strong tendency in performance theory to place live performance and mediatized or technologized forms in opposition to one another. The terms of this opposition focus around two primary issues: reproduction and distribution. Herbert Molderings defines the question of reproduction by saying that "in contrast to traditional art[,] performances do not contain a reproduction element. . . . Whatever survives of a performance in the form of a photograph or video tape is no more than a fragmentary, petrified vestige of a lively process that took place at a different time in a different place" (172-3). Or, in Peggy Phelan's succinct formulations, performance "can be defined as representation without reproduction" (Unmarked 3); "Performance's being becomes itself through disappearance . . ." (Unmarked 146). In terms of distribution, Patrice Pavis contrasts the one-to-many model of broadcasting with the "limited range" of theatre: "media easily multiply the number of their spectators, becoming accessible to a potentially infinite audience. If theatre relationships are to take place, however, the performance cannot tolerate more than a limited number of spectators . . ." (101). In these formulations, live performance is identified with intimacy and disappearance, media with a mass audience, reproduction, and repetition. Phelan offers an apt summary of this view: "Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward" (Unmarked 149).

Overtly or covertly, the writers I just quoted valorize the live over the mediatized, as is evident in Molderings' contrast between "lively" performance and "petrified" video. Even Pavis, who argues that theatre needs to be seen in relation to other media, nevertheless refers to the influence of other media on theatre as "technological and aesthetic contamination" (134; my emphasis). All too often, such analyses take on the air of a melodrama in which virtuous live performance is threatened, encroached upon, dominated, and contaminated by its insidious Other, with which it is locked in a life and death struggle. From this point of view, once live performance succumbs to mediatization, it loses its ontological integrity. At one level, the anxiety of critics who champion live performance is understandable, given the way our cultural economy privileges the mediatized and marginalizes the live. In his analysis of the political economy of music, Jacques Attali describes the current historical configuration as dominated by a "network of repetition" in which only mass-produceable cultural commodities have value (87-132). In this account, live performance is little more than a vestigial remnant of the previous historical order, which can claim little in the way of cultural presence or power. Phelan claims that live performance's inability to participate in the economy of repetition "gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge" (Unmarked 148). I would like to suggest in passing that in the context of a mediatized, repetitive economy, using the technology of reproduction in ways that defy that economy may be a more significantly oppositional gesture than asserting the value of the live. I am thinking, for instance, of Christine Kozlov's installation, Information: No Theory (1970), which consisted of a tape recorder equipped with a tape loop, whose control was fixed in the "record" mode. Therefore, as the artist herself noted, new information continuously replaced existing information on the tape, and "proof of the existence of the information [did] not in fact exist . . ." (in Meyer 172). The functions of reproduction, storage, and distribution that animate the network of repetition were thus undermined by this way of using the very technology that brought that network into being. In this context, reproduction without representation may be more radical than representation without reproduction.

It is clear that the impulse to set live and mediatized forms in a relation of opposition is ideological in nature. Perhaps making a virtue of necessity, some theorists argue that live performance's existence on the margins of the economy of repetition makes it an oppositional discourse. Molderings describes performance art as a direct counter-response to television's banalization and objectification of the visual image (178-79). Phelan picks up this theme in a discussion of Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, suggesting that Smith's performance, which incorporates, alludes to, and goes beyond the widely disseminated media images of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, "seeks to preserve and contain the chaotic flood of images the cameras 'mechanically' reproduced." Phelan observes that this way of seeing the relationship between the live and the mediatized is based on "an old boast--television cameras give you only 'images,' and theatre gives you living truth" and emphasizes the degree to which Smith's performance is indebted to "the camera that precedes and frames and invites" it ("Preface" 6). She goes on to suggest that Smith's performance "also offers another way to interpret the relation between film and theatrical performance: the camera's own performativity needs to be read as theatre" ("Preface" 7). Even though Phelan describes a subtle interaction between live and mediatized forms that goes beyond simple opposition, her suggestion that the action of the camera be seen as theatre tends to reinscribe the traditional privileging of the live over the mediatized: it is by entering the space of theatre, or being seen as theatre, that media images become subject to critique. I believe that the privileging of live performance as a site of critique is sufficiently engrained that if I were to insist that the relationship between Smith's mediatized sources and her live performance suggests that we should see her performativity as television, that characterization would be thought to imply that her discourse cannot function critically.

My purpose here is to destabilize these theoretical oppostitions of the live and the mediatized somewhat, first by reference to what might be called the "electronic ontology" of media (these initial observations will not pertain to film, of course, whose ontology is photographic rather than electronic):

the broadcast flow is . . . a vanishing, a constant disappearing of what has just been shown. The electron scan builds up two images of each frame shown, the lines interlacing to form a "complete" picture. Yet not only is the sensation of movement on screen an optical illusion brought about by the rapid succession of frames: each frame is itself radically incomplete, the line before always fading away, the first scan of the frame all but gone, even from the retina, before the second interlacing scan is complete. . . . TV's presence to the viewer is subject to constant flux: it is only intermittently "present," as a kind of writing on the glass, . . . caught in a dialectic of constant becoming and constant fading. (30-31)

As this quotation from Sean Cubitt suggests, disappearance may be even more fundamental to television than it is to live performance‹the televisual image is always simultaneously coming into being and vanishing; there is no point at which it is fully present. What presence it does possess is only a subjective effect created by the viewer's perceptual schema. At the electronic level, the televisual image is hardly a petrified remnant of some other event, as Molderings would have it, but exists rather as a lively, and forever unresolved, process. For some theorists, the televisual image's existence only in the present also obviates the notion that television (and video) is a form of reproduction. Contrasting television with film in this regard, Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow point out that where film sides towards instantaeous memory ("everything is absent, everything is recorded‹as a memory trace which is so at once, without having been something else before") television operates much more as an absence of memory, the recorded material it uses‹including material recorded on film‹instituted as actual in the production of the television image. (54-56)

Regardless of whether the image conveyed by television is live or recorded (and, as Stanley Cavell reminds us, on television there is "no sensuous distinction between the live and the repeat or replay" [86]) its production as a televisual image occurs only in the present moment. "Hence the possibility of performing the television image‹electronic, it can be modified, altered, transformed in the moment of its transmission, is a production in the present" (Heath and Skirrow 53). Although Heath and Skirrow are referring here to broadcast television, what they say is as true for video as it is for broadcast: the televisual image is not only a reproduction or repetition of a performance, but a performance in itself.

If we shift our gaze from the electronic writing on the glass to consider, for a moment, the nature of the magnetic writing on a videotape, another issue comes to the fore. Cubitt posits as a crucial feature of the medium "the phenomena of lost generations" resulting from the various stages of life a video image is likely to pass through, "from master to submaster, to broadcast, to timeshift, where it begins to degenerate with every play" (169). Video shares this characteristic with other means of technical reproduction, including photographic and sound recording media. Since tapes, films, and other recording media deteriorate over time and with each use, they are, in fact, physically different objects at each playing, even though this process may only become visible when it reaches critical mass (e.g., when the film or video develops visible flaws). Each time I watch a videotape is the only time I can watch that tape in that state of being because the very process of playing it alters it. The tape that I initially placed in my VCR or audio player started disappearing the moment I began watching it or listening to it. Disappearance, existence only in the present moment, is not, then, an ontological quality of live performance that distinguishes it from modes of technical reproduction. Both live performance and the performance of mediatization are predicated on disappearance: the televisual image is produced by an ongoing process in which scan lines replace one another and is always as absent as it is present; the use of recordings causes them to degenerate. In a very literal, material sense, televisual and other technical reproductions, like live performances, become themselves through disappearance.

I want to worry this question of reproduction in one last context, by considering the related issue of repetition. Writing on the experience of film, Cavell observes that movies . . ., at least some movies, maybe most, used to exist in something that resembles [a] condition of evanescence, viewable only in certain places at certain times, discussable solely as occasions for sociable exchange, and never seen more than once, and then more or less forgotten. (78)

It is remarkable how closely Cavell's description of the film experience parallels descriptions of the experience of live performance. The fact that Cavell is talking about the past, probably about the heyday of the American film industry in the 1930s and 40s, and about a way of experiencing film that we no longer believe to be typical, is critical. Film is no longer an unrepeated experience confined to particular places and times; people frequently see their favorite films multiple times, and have opportunities to do so afforded them by the movies' appearances on cable and broadcast television, and videocassettes. If we want to, we can own copies of movies and watch them whenever, and as often, as we wish. Whereas film was once experienced as evanescence, it is now experienced as repetition. The crucial point is that this transition was not caused by any substantive change in the film medium itself. As a medium, film can be used to provide an evanescent experience that leaves little behind, in the manner of a live performance, or it can provide an experience based in repetition and the stockpiling of film commodities. Cubitt makes much the same point with respect to video, arguing that repetition is not "an essence in the medium" (92). Rather, "the possibility of repetition is only a possibility"; the actual use of the medium is determined by "the imaginary relation of viewer and tape . . ." (93). Repetition is not an ontological characteristic of either film or video that determines the experiences these media can provide, but an historically contingent effect of their culturally determined uses.

Just as recording media like film and video can provide an experience of evanescence, so, too, live forms such as theatre have been used in ways that do not respect, or even recognize, the ostensible spatial and temporal characteristics of live performance. One such example would be the WPA Federal Theatre's 1936 production of It Can't Happen Here, which opened simultaneously in eighteen different American cities. The intention of this experiment is clearly suggested by a contemporary account which observes that the Federal Theatre produced the play "after a motion picture corporation decided not to do it" (Whitman 6). To take a more current example, producers of the genre Elinor Fuchs has called "shopping plays" envision live performances as repeatable commodities. Barrie Wexler, the California producer of Tamara, "franchises . . . Tamara worldwide, replicating the product in exact and dependable detail. 'It's like staying in the Hilton,' he explains, 'everything is exactly the same no matter where you are'" (Fuchs 142). In both these cases, live performance takes on the defining characteristics of a mass medium: it makes the same text available simultaneously to a large number of participants distributed widely in space. In fact, Hollywood saw the Federal Theatre as a competitor, and opposed it (Whitman 130-32). It is crucial to observe that the intentions underlying these two examples of this use of the live medium are very different, and each is arguably reflective of its historical moment. Whereas the Federal Theatre Project's practices grew out of a generally left-populist attitude, shopping theatre "mimics in its underlying structures of presentation and reception the fundamental culture of contemporary capitalism" (Fuchs 129). The ideological positioning of these productions is determined not by their shared use of live performance as a mass medium, but by the different intentions and contexts of those uses. Ironically, shopping plays like Tamara commodify the very aspects of live performance that are said to resist commodification. Because they are designed to offer a different experience at each visit, they can be merchandised as events that must be purchased over and over again: the ostensible evanescence and non-repeatability of the live experience become selling points. This may be what Fuchs has in mind when she says that "In this theater . . . we are seeing the commodification of the theatrical unconscious" (129).

I am suggesting that thinking about the relationship between live and mediatized forms in terms of ontological oppositions is not especially productive, because there are few grounds on which to make significant ontological distinctions. Like live performance, electronic and photographic media can be described meaningfully as partaking of the ontology of disappearance ascribed to live performance, and can be used to provide an experience of evanescence. Like film and television, theatre can be used as a mass medium. Half jokingly, I might cite Pavis's observation that "theatre repeated too often deteriorates" (101) as evidence that the theatrical object degenerates in a manner akin to a recorded object! The more serious point is that to understand the relationship between live and mediatized forms, it is necessary to investigate that relationship as historical and contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined.

As a starting point for this exploration, I have proposed that, historically, the live is an effect of mediating technologies. Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no such thing as "live" performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. The ancient Greek theatre, for example, was not live because there was no possibility of recording it. In a special case of Baudrillard's well-known dictum that "the very definition of the real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction" (146), the "live" can only be defined as "that which can be recorded." (Although I realize this is a contentious point, I will stipulate that I do not consider writing to be a form of recording in this context, for several reasons. Scripts are blueprints for performances, not recordings of them, even though they may contain some information based on performance practice. Written descriptions and drawings or paintings of performances are not direct transcriptions through which we can access the performance itself, as are aural and visual recording media. In everyday usage, we refer to "live" or "recorded" performances but not to written performances or painted performances, perhaps for this reason.) This means that the history of live performance extends over approximately the past 100 to 150 years, and is bound up with the history of recording media. To declare retroactively that all performance before, say, the mid 19th century was "live" would be an anachronistic imposition of a modern concept on a pre-modern phenomenon. There is a question of whether to date the precise point at which live performance came into existence from the advent of photography or that of sound recording. Although my point here does not depend on making a choice, I will suggest that whether or not photographs can be seen as recordings of performances depends on the degree to which extension in time is considered an essential characteristic of performance. If still photographs capture only individual moments in time, can they be said to record performance, which Herbert Blau has described as an intrinsically "time-serving" form? Inasmuch as performance documentation is one of the emergent issues of this conference, I hope that this question can serve as the basis for futher discussion.

On this basis, the historical relationship of liveness and mediatization must be seen as a relation of dependence and imbrication rather than opposition. Similarly, live performance cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization, since the live was brought into being by the possibility of technical reproduction. This problematizes Phelan's claim that "To the degree that live performance attempts to enter into the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology" (146), not just because it is not at all clear that live performance has a distinctive ontology, but also because it is not a question of performance's entering into the economy of reproduction, since it has always been there. My argument is that the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction, that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.

I have borrowed these catgeories from Patrice Pavis's "Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference." They are two of fifteen vectors identified by Pavis along which live performance and media may be compared.

Attali ascribes the development of the network of repetition to the invention of sound recording technologies (32).

Phelan describes Smith's Twilight as signalling a shift in the relationship between television and theatre: "formerly, live theatre hoped to find itself preserved on television, while Smith's performance transforms the "raw" televised story into stylized, well-rehearsed drama" ("Preface" 6). I tend to see Smith's work as belonging to a general cultural trend in which mediatized events are reconfigured as live ones. This trend dates back at least to the mid-1950s, when television plays like Twelve Angry Men and Visit to a Small Planet were presented on Broadway, and has accelerated in recent times with the restaging of music videos as concerts and of cartoons as live musicals. In considering the relationship between theatre and television, does Smith's derivation of her performance from documentary sources constitute a new development, or the extension of an established cultural trend into a new area?

Kozlof's tape recorder installation replicates this process of the continuous replacement of electronic information. The difference is that whereas in the normal usage of video this process is, the necessary condition for the creation of a perceivable image, it becomes, when applied by Kozlof to sound recording, a way of making an imperceptible sound image that exists only theoretically.

The quotation embedded in this quotation is from Christian Metz.

It is worth wondering about the implications of digital reproductions for this position, since at least some digital media ostensibly do not degrade. My present feeling is that it's too soon to tell whether or not that's true.

My insistence that how technologies are used should be understood as effect rather than cause derives from Raymond Williams's critique of technological determinism in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (113-28).

2003-12-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~wiz/thesisproposal.html#_Toc442560508)

The Design of Personal Ambient Displays
by Craig A. Wisneski

Thesis Proposal for the degree of Master of Science
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
January 1999...

3.2 Tangible Interfaces and Synchronized Distributed Physical Objects

The decision to make ambient displays with physical objects was not arbitrary. It follows a trend toward Tangible Interfaces in human computer interaction and communication. Tangible Interfaces represents a general approach to human-computer interaction that puts greater emphasis on physicality than traditional graphics-based interfaces. With Tangible Interfaces, people make full use their hands and bodies while interacting with information. They allow people to their spatial and kinesthetic senses in understanding situations, and leverage the human ability for multi-modal interaction. Examples of Tangible Interfaces include Illuminating Light, Triangles, PingPongPlus, and mediaBlocks [18,19,20,21,22,23].

Two other Tangible Interfaces, the inTouch and the PSyBench, provided particular inspiration for ambient display design in that they deal with issues of communication, collaboration, and awareness of remote colleagues. They are examples of Synchronized Distributed Physical Objects [15]. A Synchronized Distributed Physical Object creates the illusion of a shared physical object across a distance by physically synchronizing the states of distant, identical copies of an object, using telemanipulation technology. The goal is to enhance real-time remote collaboration and communication by bringing a greater sense of touch and physicality to distributed multi-user interactions.

2003-12-12T22:43:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from "Full Canvas Jacket; Noteworthy Unhinged Lunatic Rants @ http://www.ratbags.com/ranters/charlesvind010808.htm)

Fundamental theory of Physics by Charles Noonan Vind
Posted by Charles Noonan Vind to the newsgroups sci.astro, alt.sci.physics.new-theories, alt.paranormal.crop-circles, alt.alien.research, alt.sci, sci.skeptic, alt.alien.visitors
8 August 2001
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Newton. Einstein. Vind.
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The Physical Universe may be governed by a single basic ENERGY STRUCTURE -a basic substrate for all matter. All more complex forms of matter may have evolved from this basic ENERGY STRUCTURE. THIS structure of energy should be what determines the basic laws of physics and how they work. In other words should be a template for the creation of all matter in our universe and its STRUCTURE serves as the language or DNA that determines the physical properties of matter. STRUCTURE could even be considered to be the LANGUAGE of MATTER and ENERGY. It also seems possible that this structure may have also itself evolved from a more fundamental phenomena that is nested within its STRUCTURE and that this phenomenon may have the potential to produce many different ENERGY STRUCTURES---each of which would produce different forms of matter that would have differenta physical laws. There may even may be yet still more fundamental phenomena nested within this structure giving rise to the possibly of a nested set of fundamental energy structures.

Getting back to this UNIVERSE--I further postulate that in addition to having a basic STRUCTURE this basic energy substrate(of our universe--as well as the one for many others) should have a basic operating frequency--its wavelength based on its size. This frequency aspect is important because I believe that a possibility exists that a dimensional spectrum may exist that is based on frequency domains. I would ideally think of this spectrum as being perpendicularlly oriented to 3-dimensional space as we CURRENTly know it. This offers the possibility of many universes existing in the same 3-D spatial dimension but seperated by an ENERGY DIMENSION that runs perpendicular to it. These different universes may be in the same 3 dimensions but their ENERGY/FREQUENCY dimension or domain would be different, just like in a STACKED deck of cards where the cards share 2 dimensions but are seperated by a third dimension. These different universes share a 3 dimensional space which is seperated by this additional ENERGY/FREQUENCY DOMAIN. Another way of thinking about what I have just said is to think of 3-D cylinder projecting infinitely in both directions. These two infinitely projecting directions of the cylinder may be thought of as the ENERGY/FREQUENCY spectrum that I just theorized. Each universe exists in a frequency domain which can be thought of as a thin slice(cross section) or a single plane in this infinitely projecting cylinder. Each plane or cross section would represent a 3-d spatial universe that could be infinitely projecting at right angles to this infinitely projecting frequency(of ENERGY) or hyperspatial dimension. Second I want to point out that this energy/frequency dimension may in itself be multidimensional. I also want to note that there may be many more dimensions--spatial, as well as energy(maybe space is actually composed of modules of energy) and that alternatively our 3 dimensional space may also be a finite space or a superdimension(3 spatial planes fused together since there has never been any evidence to indicate any dimensions less than three although there may be alien dimensions that could have less)-- this dimension may be nested within a larger dimension and this larger dimension may be part of a still even greater spatial dimensions. A heirarchy could exist consisting of a nested set of spatial dimensions within spatial dimensions just as their may also be nested set of energy structures within energy structures. Our 3d space could be represented as 3 spheres in a larger sphere and this larger sphere could be one of 3 spheres in a still larger sphere(and so on). There may be also universes that are so alien to us that they may never be accessed because the structure of their matter and energy and the phenomena that composes it are so fundamentally different. There may be universes that are even so bizarre and exotic in relation to our own that the fundamental material and structure that underlies their composition cannot even be defined as energy, at least not as we know it.

What GRAVITY might be? If what I have said so far is basically or at least generally correct then what is gravity and is it warping space or something embedded within it. Maybe the force we call gravity in our universe does not warp space itself, at least not absolute space-which may actually consist of a system of massless structures that do not directly interact with the matter in our universe. If there are many spatial dimensions(seperated by frequency) occupying the same 3D space but seperated through a hyperspatial dimension then it seems impossible that matter is actually warping space but something that is perhaps embedded within space. Before I can go into this any further I will have to DIVERGE somewhat an explain some basic phenomena that may exist at some very fundamental levels of reality. As I have said I suspect that our universe is based upon a basic ENERGY STRUCTURE and that this STRUCTURE determines all of the laws of physics(operating conditions), as well as the fact(at least in this theory) that all more complex forms of matter evolved from this STRUCTURE(BASIC) of ENERGY. This energy structure should be present in all more complex matter and the more massive a particle is the more units it should contain, as this basic energy structure should always have the same mass as every other unit of this basic structure. This would mean that when a mass is accelerated by an apllied force and the mass increases there is a tranfer of this basic energy structure into that mass. If the object is decellerated then some of these energy units are removed and transferred elsewhere. An alternative explanation to the above paragraph is that there may be a multitude of universes with the same basic energy unit and that this unit is contained within the matter of all these universes. Each universe may still have different laws of physics when you go up a scale or maybe several scales of structure where then you would have a basic structure different and unique for each universe.

Know it is already known that all the forms of matter discovered so far are in constant motion. Electrons spin around atoms, the particles in the nucleus have motion, as well as the quarks that are said to exist spin around each other in composite structures(protons, neutrons, ect). I suspect that this basic energy structure also has spin or motion. In fact I think that motion is essential to everything. As these different structures move I believe they radiate out energy that becomes what are known as the fundamental forces. One example is the strong force-- which I essentailly think is energy at the quark wavelength. I believe that the spin of this basic energy structure itself may explain where the force of gravity originates. Before I go more into gravity first let me remind you all that in order to get all of this constant motion(which radiates the forces of nature out into space) of all of these different levels of structure--from the basic energy structure upward to the atomic level--there should be an ENERGY SOURCE. I believe that this energy source(MEDIUM) is embedded within space and just like the basic energy structure has a particular frequency of operation. I further believe that this medium DRIVES all forms of matter in our universe and is a medium of consisting basically of currents(QUITE POSSIBLY ELECTRICAL IN NATURE) of energy that pervade the cosmos. The medium that powers the structure of energy for our universe is perfectly matched for the matter in our universe. It is complimentary with our basic energy structure. It should essentially drive all matter(and produce all of the corresponding forces) by flowing through these basic energy structures. This is what gives all matter its motion and it is this motion that produces all of the forces and their associated fields. If there was no motion there would be no reality as we know it--the universe would have no properties or more specifically the universe would not be. One real world analogy of how motion gives matter its properties is to remember what an airplane propeller looks like when it as full speed--it looks like a solid object--the same is true for all these different levels of structure. This is why matter looks solid because all of its tiny constituents are in constant motion. By the way, Every universe should also have its own medium which would also be perfectly suited for its basic energy structure. Now onto how I think gravity may work.

I believe that the gravity is the result of the motion of the basic energy structure itself. Remember this structure is what is PLUGGED into the POWER GRID that powers the motion of all the matter in the universe. The currents of energy that compose this grid-like medium are perfectcly suited for this structure and therefore supplies the energy that drives this structure and all the more complex forms of matter. Anyway I think that as this basic energy structure is in motion it may produce a waveform of energy that corresponds with its structure and this radiates out into the medium itself. Now since the waveform coresponds to the basic energy structure and this structure is complimentary to the MEDIUM itself I believe that this waveform may interface with the medium in someway thereby causing the medium to ward towards the direction of mater that is producing this field. The more energy units a mass contains the more distortion it causes because all of these units should have come into existence at the same moment and would therefore be in phase with each other and produce the phenomenon of constructive "wave" interference. Also this warpage of the medium would be analagous to what EINSTEIN called a warp in space but it is actually the medium of energy currents (or you may also think of them as perhaps sheets of energy that matter moves about on) that are being warped. The reason why these warps( in the medium) affects matter is because all matter is attracted to this medium via the basic energy structure. In essence this would unify space(or rather the medium within it) and matter itself as a single force. Gravity would be the interaction of space(medium of energy) and matter(basic energy structure). There are a number of well known physicists who already describe gravity in the terms that space grips matter and matter grips space. These concepts fit nicely into my theory of the space medium being warpedessentially by matter waves. I also would like to be sure and point out the fact that this flowing medium of energy currents acts also as a communication grid for matter and if there was a void or pocket somewhere where this medium did not exist then it would become an inpenetrable void that could not be penetrated because matter can only travel within this energy grid(medium) embedded in space. A very easy analogy would be looking at objects that move on a computer monitor. The objects wil only move along this 2-d space because it contains a medium that permits the objects to move around. Objects cannot move off of the computer screen onto another. I also want to also point out another way how gravity may work in this system of energy. It could be that each basic unit of energy attracts one unit of current from the medium so the more massive an object the more current it pulls toward it thereby concentrating the currents of energy as well as aligning them--possibly somewhat similar to the way magnetic fields work. The currents of energy being more concentrated in a given area of space may then have more grip-- or a stronger attaction to matter at its most basic structure. In fact all of the fundamental forces may essentailly be the same(electromagnetic) phenomenon except at different magnitudes and with different strengths. There may also be forces that are nested within the basic energy structure that are even more fundamental and work at even smaller magnitudes that may be beyond the laws of physics, at least as we know them. These subforces may act to bind the substructures that compose this basic energy structure and is possible that these substructures could be arranged an infinite number of ways producing other physical laws that may compose other universes.

I want to state at this time that this theory is part of a working and ongoing effort by myself to explain nature and the cosmos at the most fundamental level possible. This is of course a theory and I cannot verify it but many of the points I make are self supporting to some extent. There are certain things in nature we can observe that may give insight into how things work at a smaller scale or a more fundamental level. One important thing is that gravity appears to be a form of elastic energy. If you throw an object up into the air and watch it and note the pattern of deceleration as gravity pulls it back down you will notice that this pattern of deceleration takes on an elastic phenomenon. This elastic behavior is quite similiar to the behavior of molecular materials with elastic properties such as rubber tubing. If you take a piece of rubber tubing of sufficient length and attach one end to the ceiling of your home and on the other end connect an appropriate mass to it and then drop the mass in midair you will notice the same behavior that gravity displays as it decelerates an object. Therefore gravity should be an elastic force or elastic fields of energy. Since according to my theory gravity is produced from the motion of this most fundamental energy structure of the universe and it's wave interaction with this medium it should also be that this most basic energy structure(and the medium for which it travel along) should be elastic in nature itself. Since there is already a large body of knowledge in regards to molecules that have elastic properties then maybe the structure of these molecules may give some insight into the basic structure of energy itself and how it is configured.

I know want to mention one the key features of how the universe works in terms of this basic energy structure. As I have stated I think gravity is produced from the most basic unit or structure of energy and that this structure produces a force which may be wave of energy that has a waveform that interfaces with the medium of energy (that powers all the matter in our universe) and causes it to bend toward matter. Well as the force propagates out through this medium that is embedded in space it(gravity) as you know falls off in its strength with distance as do the other forces such as electrmoamgnetism and the nuclear forces. Therefore there must be somewhere in this system of energy an element of friction embbedded within it that may cause energy to dissipate. If there were less friction gravity would take longer to diminish and therefore would have a greater effect at longer distances, and if there were more friction gravity would fall of faster. Anyway I believe this friction component and the value it has is critical to the stability of our universe. It may also play a key role in determing the speed of light. It is the friction component and the resulting fall off of gravity and the other forces which may allow our universe to exist in the way that it does. This is becuase as energy from gravity and electromagnetic forces falls off it may be reabsorbed back into this spatial medium of energy that I have been speaking off. IN ESSENCE THE UNIVERSE MAY BE A "CLOSED --FEEDBACK LOOP--OF ENERGY"-- MATTER and ENERGY may form a continous FEEDBACK LOOP SYSTEM(THE UNIVERSE). THIS IS PROBABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT IN MY WHOLE THEORY.

If you have been patient enough to read through this very long article I thank you and hope you will respond if you have any additional information to support it or modify it perhaps. This is only a theory and to really know how reality operates at these very funamental levels you would have to experience them directly through some sort of visual interface that humans could themselves develop and interface with. Even so I think there are alot of little hints in things we do know and things we can observe in nature as well as understanding HOW THINGS WORK that point in the true direction of how nature may work on very small scales(it's most fundamental levels). If the basic structure of energy and all of its properties could be accurately discerned including its waveform and frequency which as I stated may play a key role in gravity by causing the space(energy medium to warp) then it may be possible to produce antigravity effects by taking this waveform and shifting it out of phase by 180 degrees. Perhaps this is already being done. Also if there is frequency(hyperspatial) dimension that exists in orthogonally TO the 3Dspatial dimension then perhaps a technology of frequency shifting matter to a higher frequency domain where you could traverse the same distance in space in much LESS TIME--due to the possibility of less friction, a higher energy state, and therefore greater speed in this higher domain could possibly be developed. Maybe this has already been done. Anyway I guess that is all I have to say for know, THANK YOU for your attention.
Charles Noonan Vind
Visit my website at:
New theories on the fundamental physics of space, matter, energy, and consciousness: http://www.west.net/~simon/index.html

2003-12-12T22:24:00.000-08:00

Posted by: TIRANS @ http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/topic/8274-1.html

I was talking with my sister over Thanksgiving about Monet, and his techniques in painting. While I lay in bed thinking about these things, I suddenly had an epiphany, which spawned the writing below:

4th & 5th Dimensional Observation & “Z-Junction” Variability
Vectors of Observation & Dimensional Membranes

Imagine all the optical data that exists at any observation point in three-dimensional planar space. Consider that observation can be made from any perspective at any one singular point of observation. That is, optical information flows onto that point from 360 degrees of 3-d space. For now, to make it easier to visualize, let’s assume that optical information comes in only from a constricted angular viewpoint, say, 180 degrees. Observing the 180 degrees of 3-d planar space as colors (optical information), now set this spectrum of observation on a 2-dimensional plane. Observation is made from this central point (in the case of 180 degrees) as a definite vector whose angular direction sets the control point of symmetry, while the planar dimension through which this vector of observation is made looses all value when we convert all 3-dimensional optical data onto a 2-dimensional plane. Although the set value is meaningless, lets say for the point of conceptualization that the angular vector of observation always describes the ‘z’ dimension. In true 3-dimensional space, absent of gravity, there is no meaning in applying terms such as “up”, ”down”; ”left”, or “right”. Thus, as we cast this moment of observation onto our 2-dimensional plane; definite direction in terms of the ‘z’ direction looses all true meaning. Consider again that the vector of observation forms the central point of geometric symmetry in our 2-dimensional plane, such as the center point of the circle above. We now reapply the 3rd dimension ‘z’.

While infinite smallness is true, there is some definite “bottoming out” of space for that spatial dimension-system. This “bottoming out” is set by that dimensional realm’s time frequency, and is indirectly described in our dimension by Planck’s constant . Thus, we use the term “relative infinite”.

As in the circle above, consider a vertex point of x and y lines to be junction points where the z-dimension is formed. The empty space in between these lines form definite 2-dimensional space. The angle at which these lines intersect the z-junction remains constant in terms of x & y. However, when we reapply the 3rd dimension to our z-dimensional plane, we can change the value of these z-junction to any arbitrary value, though all of these z-junction points must remain relative to themselves in correlation with this arbitrary change. Any arbitrarily assigned value is true within 4th dimensional space – granted that all points within the system adhere to each other in their correlative, inter-related change of values. This forms the very basis by which 4th dimensional planar space is formed. For every set value of 3rd dimensional, there is relative infinite 4th dimensional space. For 5th dimensional spaces, every z-junction value may be variable, at independent, totally arbitrary values. This is contrary to 4th dimensional spaces (to reiterate), where all z-junction values are intrinsically inter-related to one another, and thus cannot behave independently of one another.

The 4th dimension is time dependant. The 5th dimension is not (at least, not in any linear manner in which we may understand “time” in this, the 3rd dimension).

Subatomic particles are comprised of smaller particles, which in turn are comprised of smaller particles, to infinity. However, (and that’s a big one!), this infinite smallness is relative, bound to a “bottoming out” value that is governed by dimensional limit in potential energy [the “speed of light”, or the absolute limit to the frequency of electromagnetic energy found within that system], which sets the frequency of time. These absolute values in the upper limits are directly related to setting the absolute values in the lower limits. At any given dimensional state, there exist absolutes in describing that energy state’s upper & lower limits. That is not to say that values outside those boundaries do not exist; they simply exist/are at different dimensional energy rates. The values that determine these constant values of dimensional energy phase separation – solid membranes of quantum & cosmic energy division – are rigid and definite. These values are determined by the cyclic number base and the periods of celestial time intervals determined using this number base in its application to cosmological observation – or, tentatively, subatomic particle orbital pathways and the time-dependant nature of quantum interactions.

In the 4th dimension, at any given point in time, T, any given point within a set 3rd dimensional space may rationally become any other point, relative to itself. So, in a sphere, the outermost point may become the inner-most point, for every value [x,y,z]. The inverse of this is also true. The addition of a 4th dimension to a 3rd dimensional volume allows for the spatial inversion of that field.

4th Dimensional “Volume”

In order to get the 4th dimensional “volume”, you must exclusively multiply just the radius value, r, by 6 [which doesn’t really exist in the traditional sense] :

Bear in mind that the above outlay is a 2-dimensional representation of 4th dimensional space; that these inversion reflections take place in volumetric space. Notice that ‘K’ is the diameter of the original 3-dimensional sphere.

While the above graph may help to visualize the effective “space” that is gained by adding another dimension to a 3-d object, bear in mind that the actual volumetric space remains absolutely constant. Rather than physically expanding in volumetric dimensional ‘girth’, t he 3-dimensional space remains constant, while with the addition of the 4th-dimension, objects are now able to freely move in manners that were otherwise wholly impossible. Notice that every dotted circle (and the infinity of others which lay between each one) represents the 4th dimensional movement – a reflected or partial inversion – over some z-junction point. All other points in that system remain reliant upon each other, with every z-junction point that is crossed. With the addition of yet anther dimension to the 4th, there exists quite literally an infinite amount of 3-dimensional space – volumetric or otherwise. In the 5th dimension, z-junction points may reflect off each other, independent of original 3-dimensional, time-dependant form. Thus a z-junction point (or, one of the dotted circles) may reflect off another, and that, off yet another; onto infinity [and beyond!].

Z-junction points are able to reflect off themselves in any direction in the 5th dimension, in manners that defy – and pretty much completely obliterate – any measure of common sense. The 5th dimension allows for a potentially infinite amount of vectors to project in infinite directions, all reflecting time-independent permutations of one definite 3-dimensional planar space. As far as solving for volume goes, in 5th dimensional space volume is solved by:

V = whatever the hell you want it to be!

Rather, we may be able to calculate some value that may vaguely resemble a “volume” by determining how much space-time our 5th dimensional cookie monster may have consumed. In the 5th dimension, our 3rd dimensional linear-time serves as an abstract form of planar “space”. There surely exists some manner in which to precisely calculate the “volume” of a 5h dimensional object – first, by calculating the amount of space-time it “consumes”, and then, by calculating the volumetric equivalency of this initially derived value. Either way, any such “volumetric” calculation would serve as more of a rational equivalency; a means by which to compare the ratio of ‘volumetric potential’ between systems of different dimensional states. I think this could be done using complex matrices…

I drew some pictures too, but I can't post them here.... anyways I thought it'd be cool to get some feedback on these ideas, from people who can actually appreciate these sort of things!!!

2003-12-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from PICA's Time Based Arts Festival @ http://www.tbafestival.blogspot.com/)

Time Based Art
In Three Parts

I. Time
From Old English tima derived from
IE. di-men, meaning Base *da(i)-,
To divide up

Part I, duration & continuance
Defined as 1. unlimited duration in which things
happen in the past, present or future
Every moment there has ever been or ever will be
a) the entire period of existence of the known
Universe,
of finite duration as distinguished from Infinity (like
time-limited humanity dancing on special order crutches
calling himself the Crutchmaster. Grab him by the elbow
to help &
he knows you already a thousand times) to part
To divide up, whence Tide, see tide
Sanskrit dati, (he) cuts off
Originally a period of time, now only in combinnaaaa
....shhhhuns [as in Nations)
(bringing it from the street to the stage).

II. Based

(bas)d, Old French, definition three
the Principle or essential ingredient
or
As an adjective; to put or rest (on)
As in
To base a guess on past experience, (Like I wanted
to weep like all the times before
when I've heard stories
like Coco Fusco's character told
of being a young girl drugged and humiliated at
the hands of a someOne in someKind of power.
But I couldn't. Weep that is. The story being told for the
titillation of the others off stage---
like me? I don't want to think this--- asking
to hear more, see more, feel more
"...I came here for the necro act...go grrrlllss! LOL")

III. Art

Middle English derived from OFr. arte < L.
Artis, ars,*ar- To join, fit together, whence
Arm, articulate. Number 1
Human ability to make things; creativity of humans
as distinguished from the world of Nature. (Like Manuel
Pelmus and company
slowly unravelling bigRolls of bubble wrap
while twisting & stretching &
stepping on ragtag bits of civilization and doing it
some more then some more then some more?)
Making or doing of things that display form
Beauty, and unusual perceptions (then yes)
4. any craft, trade, or profession or its principles
as in--the cobbler's art [derived from "cob"
b) a leader: chief Or americanized--the central
kernel-bearing part of... Or
4 again, a male swan.]

Art (archaic) learning or branch of learning

As a synonym, the word
Denotes in it's broadest sense Merely
the ability to make something or to execute a plan

Art 2, archaic 2nd person, singular, present tense,
Indictative of Be: used with Thou.

Lilian Gael
poem #2 in: Etymology, With Websters 2nd Edition as Muse

# posted by Lilian @ 9:32 AM

2003-11-30T22:38:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from ArtKrush @ http://www.artkrush.com/thearticles/025_wos_hemingwayonmiro/index.asp)

WAYS of SEEING: 1934

ERNEST HEMINGWAY on
JOAN MIRO

When I first knew Miro he had very little money and very little to eat and he worked all day every day for nine months painting a very large and wonderful picture called The Farm. He did not want to sell this picture nor even to have it away from him. No one could look at it and not know it had been painted by a great painter and when you are painting things that people must take on trust it is good to have something around that has taken as long to make as it takes a woman to make a child (a woman who isn't a woman can usually write her autobiography in a third of that time) and that shows even fools that you are a great painter in terms that they understand.

After Miro had painted The Farm and after James Joyce had written Ulysses they had a right to expect people to trust the further things they did even when the people did not understand them and they have both kept on working very hard.

If you have painted The Farm or if you have written Ulysses, and then keep on working very hard afterwards, you do not need an Alice B. Toklas.

Finally everyone had to sell everything and if Miro was to have a dealer he had to let The Farm go with the other pictures. But Shipman, who found him the dealer, made the dealer put a price on it and agree to sell it to him. This was probably the only good business move that Shipman ever did in his life. But doing a good business move must have made him uncomfortable because he came to me the same day and said," Hem, you should have The Farm. I do not love anything as much as you care for that picture and you ought to have it."

I argued against this explaining to him that it was not only how much I cared about it. There was the value to consider.

"It is going to be worth much more than we will ever have, Evan. You have no idea what it will be worth," l told him.

"I don't care about that," he said. "If it's money I'll shoot you dice for it. Let the dice decide about the money You'll never sell it anyway."

"I have no right to shoot. You're shooting against yourself."

"Let the dice decide the money," Shipman insisted. "If l lose it will be mine. Let the dice show."

So we rolled dice and I won and made the first payment. We agreed to pay five thousand francs for The Farm and that was four thousand two hundred and fifty francs more than I had ever paid for a picture. The picture naturally stayed with the dealer.

When it was time to make the last payment the dealer came around and was very pleased because there was no money in the house or in the bank. If we did not pay the money that day he kept the picture. Dos Passos, Shipman and I finally borrowed the money around various bars and restaurants, got the picture and brought it home in a taxi. The dealer felt very bad because he had already been offered four times what we were paying. But we explained to him as it is so often explained to you in France, that business is business.

In the open taxi the wind caught the big canvas as though it were a sail and we made the taxi driver crawl along. At home we hung it and everyone looked at it and was very happy. I would not trade it for any picture in the world. Miro came in and looked at it and said," I am very content that you have The Farm."

When I see him now he says," I am always content, tu sais, that you have The Farm." It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things. Although Juan Gris painted how it is when you know that you will never go there. Picasso is very different. Picasso is a business man. So were some of the greatest painters that ever lived. But this is too long now and the thing to do is look at the picture: not write about it.

2003-11-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from PS1's online forum "Who Cares", a discussion of public art, audiences and the museum @ http://www.ps1.org/cut/forum/forum1/forum.html)

The Audience's Responsibility -- "...Are we too soft on the audience? Don't they have a responsibility to meet the artist half way?...."
Tom Finkelpearl -- July 16 -2001

The question here is not what art is about, but whether an artist working in the public realm has a particular responsibility to his/her audience that is different from artists working in a museum or gallery. But I think that it is interesting that Clark turned to the role of the audience. Are we too soft on the audience? Don't they have a responsibility to meet the artist half way? If people are content to absorb media culture, watch seven hours of TV a day, and eat at McDonald's is there any hope that art can go any farther than mere amusement? I visited Long Island City High School recently and spoke with four classes about the public art projects there. Of course there were many students who were uninterested and/or uninformed about the art. However, I was pleasantly surprised that quite a few knew about the art and had taken time to learn about the artists' intent, even in the face of Mel Chin's rather obscure installation.....

2003-11-30T17:19:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from the website of the Estate of David Smith @ http://www.davidsmithestate.org/statements.html)

Tradition and Identity, by David Smith

The following speech was given on April 17, 1959, at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, which Smith attended for a year in 1924-25.

When I lived and studied in Ohio, I had a very vague sense of what art was. Everyone I knew who used the reverent word was almost as unsure and insecure.

       Mostly art was reproductions, from far away, from an age past and from some golden shore, certainly from no place like the mud banks of the Auglaze or the Maumee, and there didn’t seem much chance that it could come from Paulding County.

       Genuine oil painting was some highly cultivated act that came like the silver spoon, born from years of slow method, applied drawing, watercoloring, designing, art structure, requiring special equipment of an almost secret nature, that could only be found in Paris or possibly New York, and when I got to New York and Paris I found that painting was made with anything at hand, building board, raw canvas, self-primed canvas, with or without brushes, on the easel, on the floor, on the wall, no rules, no secret equipment, no anything, except the conviction of the artist, his challenge to the world and his own identity.

       Discarding the old methods and equipment will not of course make art. It has only been a symbol in creative freedom from the bondage of tradition and outside authority.

       Sculpture was even farther away. Modeling clay was a mystic mess which cam from afar. How sculpture got into metal was so complex that it could be done only in Paris. The person who made sculpture was someone else, an ethereal poetic character divinely sent, who was scholar, aesthetician, philosopher, Continental gentlemen so sensitive he could unlock the crying vision from a log or a Galatea from a piece of imported marble.

       I now know that sculpture is made from rough externals by rough characters or men who have passed through all polish and are back to the rough again.

       The mystic modeling clay in only Ohio mud, the tools are at hand in garages and factories. Casting can be achieved in almost every town. Visions are from the imaginative mind, sculpture can come from the found discards in nature, from sticks and stones and parts and pieces, assembled or monolithic, solid form, open form, lines of form, or, like a painting, the illusion of form. And sculpture can be painting and painting can be sculpture and no authority can overrule the artist in his declaration. Not even the philosopher, the aesthetician, or the connoisseur.

       I have spoken against tradition, but only the tradition of others who would hold art from moving forward. Tradition holding us to the perfection of others. In this context tradition can only say what art was, not what art is. Tradition comes wrapped in word pictures; these are traps which lead laymen into cliché thinking. This leads to analogy and comparative evaluation and conclusion, especially in the hands of historians. Where conclusions are felt, the understanding of art has been hampered and the innovations of the contemporary scene are often damned.

       Art has its tradition, but it is a visual heritage. The artist’s language is the memory from sight. Art is made from dreams, and visions, and things not known, and least of all from things that can be said. It comes from the inside of who you are when you face yourself. It is an inner declaration of purpose, it is a factor which determines artist identity.

       The nature to which we all refer in the history of art is still with us, although something changed; it is no longer anecdote or robed and blind-folded virtue, the bowl of fruit, or that very abstract reference called realistic; it is very often the simple subject called the artist. Identifying himself as the artist, he becomes his own subject as one of the elements in nature. He no longer dissects it, nor moralizes upon it; he is its part. The outside world of nature is equal, without accent, unquestioning. He is an element in the atmosphere called nature, his reference to nature is more like primitive man addressing it as “thou” and not “it.” Aura and association, all the parts into the whole expression, all actions in an emotional flow, manifest the artist as subject, a new position for the artist but natural to his time. Words become difficult, they can do little in explaining a work of art, let alone the position of the artist in the creative irrational flow of power and force which underlies the position and conception. Possibly I can explain my own procedure more easily. When I begin a sculpture I’m not always sure how it is going to end. In a way it has a relationship to the work before, it is in continuity with the previous work—it often holds a promise or a gesture toward the one to follow.

       I do not often follow its path from a previously conceived drawing. If I have a strong feeling about its start, I do not need to know its end; the battle for solution is the most important. If the end of the work seems too complete and final, posing no question, I am apt to work back from the end, that in its finality it poses a question and not a solution.

       Sometimes when I start a sculpture I begin with only a realized part; the rest is travel to be unfolded, much in the order of a dream.

       The conflict for realization is what makes art, not its certainty, its technique, or material. I do not look for total success. If a part is successful, the rest clumsy or incomplete, I can still call it finished, if I’ve said anything new, by finding any relationship which I might call an origin.

       I will not change an error if it feels right, for the error is more human than perfection. I do not seek answers. I haven’t named this work nor thought where it would go. I haven’t thought what it is for, except that it is made to be seen. I’ve made it because it comes closer to saying who I am than any other method I can use. This work is my identity. There were no words in my mind during its creation, and I’m certain words are not needed in its seeing; and why should you expect understanding when I do not? That is the marvel—to question but not to understanding. Seeing is the true language of perception. Understanding is for words. As far as I am concerned, after I’ve made the work, I’ve said everything I can say.

2003-11-30T10:03:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from an online dialog hosted by Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen @ http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/LIS/discuss/37.html)

Artistic Integrity

...I would like to raise a wholly separate issue for discussion--maintenance
of artistic integrity in a copyleft regime. One of the inherent qualities
of the digital medium is that it allows easy modification and
(re)distribution. Art/cultural products are the expression of the ideas of
the creator; when that product is modified, the original intent or
expression of the creator is changed. Presumably, most artists would not
care if a person modified the original work solely for personal use. The
problem arises when the modified product is redistributed. In a copyleft
regime, what would be the ideal licensing structure for cultural products?

It will be beneficial at this point to review the distinguishing features
of software and art. Both are expressive, but software is functional,
whereas art is not. This distinction is what mandates a different
analysis. Art cannot be made objectively better or worse through
modification, though it may be better according to personal preference.
Additionally, many artists consider their works to be a whole expression of
an idea; modification undercuts the integrity of that expression. Of
course, this may not be an issue when works are done collaboratively (see
the section "Revising the Author" on the LIS website), but I would
speculate that for most artists the thought of someone changing their work
is disturbing.

If a GPL-type license were applied to art, modification and redistribution
would be legal as long as the derivative work carries "prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any change." But this
is insufficient to maintain artistic integrity because the original parts
and modified parts cannot be distinguished. The derivative work could
change the meaning of the original, such that the original creator does not
want to be associated with the derivative in any way. One possible
solution is limit the license to distribution, but not modification.
Another is to require that the original be presented along with the
modified version.

However, there are several problems with creating any new, copyleft,
licensing regime for artistic works. First, there is no central authority.
Free software has the advantage that it is based on a kernal that is GPL'd,
thus everything derivative of it is covered, and there is a central
enforcing authority. Artistic works have no common basis and no central
authority. Although there could be a multiple licenses made to match the
creator's preference, most artists don't possess the means to enforce a
license. Whether the creation of a central artistic, public licensing
authority would be feasible, and what form(s) it would take, is an
interesting question that I will leave for consideration.

I'm sure I have missed something (or many things!) in my brief analysis,
and would like to hear what others think about the subject . . .

-Alison Wilkey

2003-11-29T00:53:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from icograda.org @ http://www.icograda.org/web/feature-past-single.shtml?pfl=feature-single-2.param&op2.rf1=59)

The Spanish language version was first delivered as the opening presentation of the Jornada Grafica at the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, in November of 1998.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Design Tools and Culture in the Digital Age
by Rafael Fajardo, MFA and Rex Koontz, PhD
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Design Tools and Culture in the Digital Age
A Rhizomic Model for Design

Introduction

This is a paper about what design does in the digital age. It is not a musing on the nature of design, nor is it particularly interested in the difference between the X-acto knife and the lasso tool (both are nothing more than instrumental devices, after all). Instead, we focus on design and the secretion of meaning in a digital world. We ask the question: where are design and designers in the new structuring of meaning we see on the web and in other new media outlets?

Through the exploration of this question we attempt to construct the philosophical underpinnings for a new media pedagogy that is content-driven and not tool-driven, that has a firm foundation in actual design and new media practice but that also challenges rapidly congealing perceptions about the education for new media production.

A Rhizomic Model for Design

Graphic Design practice is in a state of confusion. Clients are bringing designers problems that are infinitely more complex than those they have had to cope with previously. Additionally, these problems cannot be resolved by traditional designers acting alone, but now require a suppleness of knowledge and a broad range of expertise deployed in an intensively collaborative digital environment.

To add to the confusion, audiences for design have become more fragmented and diverse, reflecting the cultural multiplicity, competing paradigms of knowledge, and globalization of markets experienced by economic and cultural forces throughout the world.

This situation has been well documented in the professional literature and fora. Case in point: At the 1995 biennial AIGA conference in Seattle, two imminent designers - William Drentell and Nancye Green - spent forty minutes discussing the confusion that reigns in current design firms. Lorraine Wild, award winning practitioner, educator, and writer recounted this discussion at a symposium sponsored by the Jan van Eyck akademie in the Netherlands, and then reaffirmed and published its arguments in her essay entitled That was then, This is now, but what is next (Wild 1997:19-20). Wild was called on to further elaborate her position in Steven Heller s book The Education of a Graphic Designer (Wild 1998: 39-52). Wild s view, which we share, is that pedagogy must move to respond to these shifts.

Design pedagogy, and to a certain extent the larger design culture, have largely failed to take into account these cultural shifts. We believe that this disjunction between design pedagogy and practice goes to the heart of current debates in design culture, and that a re-thinking of design pedagogy is integral to a reading of the changed landscape of design culture. This changed landscape is just one symptom of what the anthropologist James Clifford (1988) has mapped out for larger movements in contemporary world cultures: that of a rejection of a single metanarrative, in this case the metanarrative of modernist design culture, for competing narratives incorporating new audiences and cultural producers who often inhabit what has been considered the non-modern Third World.

In addition to changes in design culture, the tools of production for print media have changed dramatically in the past ten years and are going to be in a dynamic state of flux for the foreseeable future. Moreover, the introduction of dynamic new media spaces and their attendant evolving production tools present an ever-changing landscape for graphic design theory, practice, and pedagogy.
Thus, both the design process and the audiences for design have been undergoing significant transformations. We need to respond to these changes in some productive fashion, both as design practitioners and design educators.

Graphic Design takes as its task the resolution of communication needs of corporations and institutions. In this tradition, Graphic Design has been subservient to these same corporations and institutions. Projects and programs are initiatied by commission, and intellectual content is generated and channelled chiefly by the patron. While we concentrate on the changing structures of creation in design culture, we acknowledge that the preponderance of design is and will be created on commission. We also acknowledge that the basic tenets of the commission are and will be generated by the patron. This said, there also exists a space wherein the designer actively engages in the intellectual content, and this space is continually expanding and transforming with the advent of new media in design.

New media has created new audiences for design and expanded others. The international scope of design has been more than enhanced, it has been exponentially expanded. A page or site designed by someone in Guatemala may be seen by her colleague in Norway who otherwise would have little or no access to traditional Guatemalan media and the attendant design culture. It is crucial that designers themselves come to terms with these emerging and shifting audiences. Edwin Schlossberg (1998:5) expressed this when he said What I am interested in is calling attention to the discipline of looking at the audience as part of the act of composition or design. This attentiveness to audience has been developed in other domains of the liberal arts, especially Literary Criticism (Fish 1980) and Art History (Freedberg 1989), but has yet to become a mainstay in the training of designers.

Archaeology of the Figure of the Designer and Design Practice

Modernism s influence in the world of art/making may be located in the drive toward avant-gardism and through the legacy of the Bauhaus. Octavio Paz has pointed out the intimate link between the rise of Modernism and the logic of the avant-garde in his geneaology of Modernism: Modernism started in the Eighteenth Century with criticism as a philosophical method. Then Modernism emerged as a political method-revolution which was critical of what existed in the name of the utopia that could be...Finally Modernism became an artistic method-the avant-garde, which made a radical break with cultural tradition...The avant-garde was driven by its escape from the past into the future (Paz 1992). This legacy continues to exert a strong influence on the basic culture and pedagogy of Graphic Design.
The members of the Bauhaus saw history as a dead convention. Hoping to escape that convention they would identify it, codify it, and then reject it in order to create a new canon to guide their lives. What they did not anticipate was that the cycle of rejection - canonization - rejection would turn as regularly as the tides, dooming those of us who follow to participate in the reactionary rejection of what has come before. We continue to rupture for the sake of rupture, starting over again at every turn in hopes of re-injecting the modernist metanarrative with life. In this, perhaps, we are approaching a lack in human dignity, living in a perpetual present, deluding ourselves that we are creating some future. If Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus masters intended to form a dialectic relationship with the history of artmaking, then they seemed to have missed the crucial synthetic moment in the idea of dialectic which would have given us a way out. In order to escape the fetters of a reactionary form of modernism, it is essential to not reject anything out of hand, but to carefully consider what it is to be kept, and what is to be tossed aside.

We must document and codify the existing state of culture, with an awareness of historicity and a clear definition of the goals of change. Thus to understand contemporary design practice one must have access to contemporary critical theory, especially that which deals with the history of cultural movements.

More than simply understanding these cultural movements, designers need to be able to articulate their stance vis-a-vis the intensive pace of change both in culture and in the design tools around which the discipline organizes itself. The Bauhaus tradition of education and the canonized grand masters denied the importance of linguistic ability for the visual artist and designer. The principal heir to the Bauhaus tradition of design in the United States, Paul Rand, stated: A student whose mind is cluttered with matters that have nothing directly to do with design...is a bewildered student (Rand 1993: 217). Rand has long been acknowledged as the eminence grise of Modernist graphic design. From his seat at Yale, pronouncements like this one have carried enormous influence in design culture and pedagogy.

Redefinition of Design Education and Practice

In general, the Modernist graphic designer was to keep her hands busy and her mind on the task. Lorraine Wild, as a practitioner and educator, has argued that in addition to the Modernist visual training of the graphic designer, must be added the following: [1] learning how to learn; [2] learing to use writing to facilitate conceptual development; [3] placing an increased emphasis on verbal expression, rhetoric and storytelling; [4] understanding film and film editing; [5] understanding the structures and narratives of games; [6] understanding the social, cultural and functional possibilities of real and simulated public and private spaces; [7] utilizing collaboration, teams, and consensus building; and [8] using surrealism, bricolage and other forms of subversion to encourage entrepreneurialism (1998:18).

Gunnar Swanson (1994) has also called for a redefinition/re-thinking of design as a liberal, rather than visual art. In fact, design practice has outstripped pedagogy in becoming liberal. Moreover, a definition of design pedagogy that excludes the liberal arts, and particularly critical theory, is no longer tenable in many areas of design practice, especially those that utilize the layering, intersections, and linkages of new media.

Narrative as Node

While the design situation is saturated by the continually changing tools of new media, in pedagogical theory we need to latch onto something that does not change so rapidly yet is still integral to attempts at communication and expression across media. That element is some form of narrative. The creation and dissemination of stories, whether pedagogical, commercial or artistic, is, we would argue, the basic problem of design.

Roland Barthes (1988: 95) states the world s narratives are numberless and the act of making them is universal. More than simple, ubiquitous storytelling, narrative may be seen in his model as the connective tissue of communication theory, a part of which must be deployed in design practice. The static model of design, embodied in the logo mentality, has now been superseded in the layered universe of the web, where logo is in fact a narrative stretched over web pages and spaces. Thus narrative is the space where formal design problems and intellectual content collide, and the designer must control this juncture.

Much of the storytelling done by traditional print-based graphic designers has been done unconciously due to the lack of widespread, high-quality semiotic training. This does not mean that the power of narrative structures had not been treated earlier. Esther Parada, in her article C/Overt Ideology: Two images of Revolution described and analyzed a particular example of traditional print layout as the structuring of a tale. She shows how the New York Times presented a particular bias toward images of Latin Americans in the structuring of their day to day coverage through editorial decisions on photograph choice and page position. In this sense, we are advocating nothing new, but we must point out the still radical ramifications of the semiotic critique to design pedagogy.

Moreover, in the case of new media, these narrative spaces are continually expanding and accelerating their pace of change.
Thus the designer must be able to conceive, create, and understand narrative if they wish to remain relevant in these new spaces. Here the terrain shifts away from the question posed earlier by Swanson, Is Graphic Design a liberal art? and moves towards the understanding of Graphic Design as the design of narrative. Narrative is a large part of that space where the designer wrestles actively with intellectual content. As Parada explained, when designers create narrative spaces, they not only tell a story, but they create content through the very act of structuring the tale. This is especially evident in new media design.

Further, the specific, traditional identity of the Graphic Designer is superceded by our proposed liberalized intellectual structure. Our narrative model dissolves the traditional distinctions between Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Architecture, and the domain of human intention and creates/reveals an underlying discipline or activity of intention->action that we can simply call design. The model allows us to recognize/articulate the underlying interconnections between these (and other) traditionally disparate fields.

Definition of the Rhizome and Sketch of the Rhizomic Designer

Design for us, then, is the signing of the world. It exists in intention, communication act and tangible artifact. It may no longer be limited to graphic practice or surface styling, for the very simple and pragmatic reason that many designers do not function in and may never have functioned in that space. New Media Design, to give but one example of emerging design spaces, is about creating densely layered experiences in which text and image meld with multimedia in an architecturally designed narrative space.

Recent moves in philosophy may serve as a useful model for conceptualizing changes in design practice and their impact on the identity and training of the designer. The same sort of layering and linkages of relationsips have been described in philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri s (1987) in their book A Thousand Plateaus. In essence, Deleuze and Guattari argue that intellectual pursuits may no longer be bounded by straight linear thought processes. The intellectual may no longer be content with mastery over single topics and lines of thought such as Hegelianism, structuralism, phenomenology, etc, any one of which may be considered as a single, bounded narrative told in a shared, bounded, and isolated cultural framework, that of Western philosophy. Instead, the new intellectual must be prepared to think in multiple fields of enquiry, and most importantly must be able to relate these fields to each other. Their analogies are that of a tree and a rhizome: in the arboreal model of knowledge, one masters a discourse that grows from roots into a trunk and later branches.

This is the classical and modernist conception of knowledge. In the rhizomic model, knowledge is constructed like tubers growing horizontally-the connections may be made anywhere along the grid of growth (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 6-7). In this way knowledge becomes an assemblage where competing voices and discourses are fashioned into richly layered narratives. These narratives do not deny multiplicity, but instead celebrate it. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 7), the rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. Furthermore, there are no ideal audience members in their model of knowledge, only a heterogeneity of audience groups, who speak different philosophical or cultural languages and dialects.

The analogy with the current situation in design culture is clear: no longer can we master a single narrative, that of modernist design, but instead we must develop the intellectual tools to craft and relate multi-layered narratives. We may also no longer rely on the single, platonic ideal of the modernist design audience, but must instead acknowledge the heterogenous audiences for design as those audiences continue to expand and diversify. In this way, knowledge of the multiple narratives of design culture and its richly heterogeneous audiences, culled from training in critical theory and history, as well as the ability to construct viable multi-layered narratives of one s own, truly is the power of the designer.

2003-11-28T10:24:00.000-08:00

NEW ART IN THE SIXTIES by Clement Greenberg

THE JOHN POWER LECTURE IN CONTEMPORARY ART
DELIVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
ON FRIDAY 17 MAY 1968

(originally)
PUBLISHED BY
THE POWER INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY 1969

(Extracted from abstract-art.com word repository @ http://www.abstract-art.com/abstraction/l5_wordings_fldr/g1_Greenberg-Avntgrde.html)

THE PREVALENT NOTION is that latter-day art is in a state of confusion. Painting and sculpture appear to be changing and evolving faster than ever before. Innovations follow closer and closer on one another and, because they don't make their exits as rapidly as their entrances, they pile up in a welter of eccentric styles, trends, tendencies, schools. Everything conspires, it would seem, in the interests of confusion. The different mediums are exploding: painting turns into sculpture, sculpture into architecture, engineering, theater, environment, "participation". Not only the boundaries between the different arts, but the boundaries between art and everything that is not art are being obliterated. At the same time scientific technology is invading the visual arts and transforming them even as they transform one another. And to add to the confusion, high art is on the way to becoming popular art, and vice versa.

Is all this so? To judge from surface appearances, it might be so. A writer in the Times Literary Supplement of 14 March 1968 refers to ". . . that total confusion of all artistic values which prevails today". But by his very words this writer betrays where the real source of confusion lies: namely, in his own mind. Artistic value is one, not many. The only artistic value anybody has yet been able to point to satisfactorily in words is simply the goodness of good art. There are, of course, degrees of artistic goodness, but these are not different values or kinds of value. Now this one and only value, in its varying degrees, is the first and supreme principle of artistic order. By the same token it is the most relevant such principle. Of order established on its basis, art today shows as much as it ever has, Surface appearances may obscure or hide this kind of order, which is qualitative order, but they do not negate it, they do not render it any the less present. With the ability to tell the difference between good and bad, and between better and worse, you can find your way quite well through the apparent confusion of contemporary art. Taste, i.e., the exertions of taste, establish artistic order-now as before, now as always.

Things that purport to be art do not function, do not exist, as art until they are experienced through taste. Until then they exist only as empirical phenomena, as aesthetically arbitrary objects or facts. These, precisely, are what a lot of contemporary art gets taken for, and what many artists want their works to be taken for–in the hope, periodically renewed since Marcel Duchamp first acted on it fifty-odd years ago, that by dint of evading the reach of, taste while yet remaining in the context of art, certain kinds of contrivances will achieve unique existence and value. So far this hope has proved illusory. So far everything that enters the context of art becomes subject, inexorably, to the jurisdiction of taste-and to the ordering of taste. And so far almost all would-be non-art-in-the-context-of-art has fallen rather neatly into place in the order of inferior art. This is the order where the bulk of art production tends to find its place, in 1968 as in 1868–or 1768. Superior art continues to be something more or less exceptional. And this, this rather stable quantitative relation between the superior and inferior, offers as fundamentally relevant a kind of artistic order as you could wish.

But even so, if this were the only kind of order obtaining in new art today, its situation would be as unprecedented, still, as common opinion says it is. Unprecedented even if not confused. The good and the bad might differentiate themselves as clearly as ever, but there would still be a novel confusion of styles, schools, directions, tendencies. There would still be phenomenal if not aesthetic disorder. Well, even here experience tells me–and I have nothing else to rely on–that the phenomenal situation of art in this time is not all that new or unprecedented. Experience tells me that contemporary art, even when approached in purely descriptive terms, makes sense and falls into order in much the same way that art did in the past. Again, it is a question of getting through superficial appearances.

Approaching art in phenomenal and descriptive terms means approaching it, first of all, as style and as the history of style (neither of which, taken in itself, necessarily involves quality). Approached strictly as a matter of style, new art in the 1960's surprises you–if it does surprise you–not by its variety, but by the unity and even uniformity it betrays underneath all the appearances of variety. There are Assemblage, Pop, and Op; there are Hard Edge, Color Field, and Shaped Canvas; there are Neo-Figurative, Funky, and Environmental; there are Minimal, Kinetic, and Luminous; there are Computer, Cybernetic, Systems, Participatory-and so on. (One of the really new things about art in the 60's is the rash of labels in which it has broken out, most of them devised by artists themselves-which is likewise new; art-labelling used to be the affair of journalists.) Well, there are an these manifestations in all their variegation, yet from a steady and detached look at them through their whole range some markedly common stylistic features emerge. Design or layout is almost always clear and explicit, drawing sharp and clean, shape or area geometrically simplified or at least faired and trued, color flat and bright or at least undifferentiated in value and texture within a given hue. Amid the pollution of novelties, advanced art in the 60's subscribes almost unanimously to these canons of style–canons that Woelfflin would call linear.

Think by contrast of the canons to which avant-garde art conformed in the 50's: the fluid design or layout, the "soft" drawing, the irregular and indistinct shapes or areas, the uneven textures, the turbid color. It is as though avant-garde art in the 60's set itself at every point in opposition to the common stylistic denominators of Abstract Expressionism, art informel, tachisme. And just as these common denominators pointed to what was one and the same period style in the latter 40's and the 50's, so the common denominators of new art in the 60's point to a single, all-enveloping period style. And in both cases the period style is reflected in sculpture as well as in pictorial art.

That avant-garde art in the latter 40's and in the 50's was one, not many, in terms of style is now pretty generally recognized. Lacking the perspective of time, we find it harder to identify a similar stylistic unity in the art of this decade. It is there all the same. All the varied and ingenious excitements and "experiments" of the last years, large and small, significant and trivial, flow within the banks of one, just one period style. Homogeneity emerges from what seemed an excess of heterogeneity. Phenomenal, descriptive, art-historical–as well as qualitative–order supervenes where to the foreshortening eye all seemed the antithesis of order.

If this gives pause, the pause should be taken advantage of to examine more closely another popular idea about art in this time: namely, that it moves faster than ever before. The art-historical style of this period that I have so sketchily described–a style that has maintained, and maintains, its identity under a multitude of fashions, vogues, waves, fads, manias–has been with us now for nearly a decade and seems to promise to stay with us a while longer. Would this show that art is moving and changing with unprecedented speed? How long did art-historical styles usually last in the past-even the more recent past?

In the present context I would say that the duration of an art historical style ought to be considered the length of time during which it is a leading and dominating style, the time during which it is the vessel of the largest part of the important art being produced in a given medium within a given cultural orbit. This is also, usually, the time during which it attracts those younger artists who are most highly and seriously ambitious. With this definition as measure, it is possible to see as many as five, and maybe more, distinctly different styles or movements succeeding one another in French painting of the 19th century.

First there was David's and Ingres' Classicism. Then from about 1820 into the mid-1830's, Delacroix's Romanticism. Then Corot's naturalism; and then Courbet's kind. In the early 1860's Manet's flat and rapid version of naturalism led the way, to be followed within less than ten years by Impressionism. Impressionism held on as the leading manner until the early 1880's, where the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat and then the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh became the most advanced styles. Things get a little mixed up during the last twenty years of the century, though it may be only in seeming. At any rate Bonnard and Vuillard in their early, Nabi phase appear during the 1890's, and Fauvism enters the competition by at least 1903. As it looks, painting moved faster between the mid 1880's and 1910 or so than at any time within the scope of this hasty survey. Cubism took the lead away from Fauvism within hardly a half a dozen years of the latter's emergence. Only then did painting slow down again to what had been its normal rate of change between 1800 and the 1880's. For Cubism stayed on top until the mid-1920's. After that came Surrealism (I say Surrealism for lack of a better term: Surrealism's identity as a style still remains undetermined; and some of the best new painting and sculpture of the latter 20's and the 30's had nothing to do with it). And by the early 1940's Abstract Expressionism and its cognates, tachisme and art informel, were on the scene.

Admittedly, this historical rundown simplifies far too much. Art never proceeds that neatly. Nor is the rundown itself that accurate even within the limits set it. (What I see as hurried stylistic change between the 1880's and 1910 may turn out under longer scrutiny to be less hurried than it now looks. Larger and unexpected unities of style may become apparent-in fact, they already are apparent, but this is not the place to touch on them, despite all they would do to strengthen my argument here.) But, for all the exceptions that can rightly be taken to my chronological schema and what it implies, I do think that there is enough unquestionable evidence to support my point, which is that art-historical styles in painting (if not in sculpture) have tended since the beginning of the 19th century (if not before) to hold their positions of leadership for on an average of between ten and fifteen years.

The case of Abstract Expressionism does more than bear out this average; it exceeds it, and would go to show that art actually moved and changed more slowly over the last thirty years than in the hundred years previous. Abstract Expressionism in New York, along with tachisme and art informel in Paris, emerged in the early 40's and by the early 50's was dominating avant-garde painting and sculpture to a greater extent even than Cubism had in the 20's. (You weren't "with it" at all in those days unless you lathered your paint or roughed your surfaces; and in the 50's being "with it" began to matter ever so much more.) Well, Abstract Expressionism collapsed very suddenly back in the spring of 1962, in Paris as well as New York. It is true that it had begun to lose its vitality well before that, but nevertheless it continued to dominate the avant-garde scene, and by the time of its final retreat from that scene it had led art for close to twenty years. The collapse of Abstract Expressionism was as sudden as it was because it was long overdue, but even had its collapse come five or six years earlier (which is when it should have come) the span of time over which Abstract Expressionism held its leadership would still have been over the average for art styles or movements within the last century and a half.

Ironically enough, the seemingly sudden death of Abstract Expressionism in 1962 is another of the things that have contributed to the notion that art styles turn over much faster, and more abruptly, now than they used to. The fact is that the demise of Abstract Expressionism was an unusually lingering one. Nor did the art-historical style that displaced it come into view nearly so suddenly as the events of the spring of 1962 made it appear. The "hard" style of the 60's had already emerged with Ellsworth Kelly's first New York show in 1955, and with the renascence of geometricizing abstract art in Paris in the mid-50's as we see it in Vasarely. Thus there was an overlapping in time. There was an overlapping or transition in terms of style too: the passage from the "painterly" to the "linear" can be witnessed in the painting of Barnett Newman, for example, and in the sculpture of David Smith, and in an artist like Rauschenberg (to name only Americans). That the scene of art, as distinct from the course of art has known abrupt changes and reversals lately should not mislead us as to what has actually happened in art itself. (It is again ironical that the overlapping, the very gradualness involved in recent stylistic change, made for the impression of confusion, at least in the first years of the 60's, as much as anything else did.)

What at first did surprise me in the new art of the 60's was that its basic homogeneity of style could embrace such a great heterogeneity of quality, that such bad art could go hand in hand with such good art. It took me a while to remember that I had already been surprised by that same thing in the 50's. Then I had forgotten that, because of the subsequent collapse of Abstract Expressionism, which seemed to me to separate the good from the bad in the art of the 50's pretty correctly. All the same, some of my surprise at the great unevenness in quality of new art in the 60's remained, and remains. Something new is there that was not there in Abstract Expressionism when it first emerged.

All art styles deteriorate and, in doing so, become usable for hollow and meretricious effects. But no style in the past seems to have become usable for such effects while it was still an up-and-coming one. That is, as best as I can remember. Not the sorriest pasticheur or bandwagon-jumper of Impressionism, Fauvism, or Cubism in their first years of leadership fell below a certain level of artistic probity. The vigor and the difficulty of the style at the time simply would not let them. Maybe I don't know enough of what happened in those days. I will allow for that and still maintain my point. The new "hard" style of the 60's established itself by producing original and vigorous art. This is the way new styles have generally established themselves. But what was new, in scheme, about the way that the 60's style arrived was that it did so carrying not only genuinely fresh art but also art that pretended to be fresh, and was able to pretend to be that, as in times past only a style in decline would have permitted. Abstract Expressionism started out with both good and bad, but not until the early 1950's did it lend itself, as a style, to specious as distinct from failed art. The novel feature of the "hard" style of the 60's is that it did this from the first. This fact says nothing necessarily compromising about the best "hard-style" art. That best is equal to the best of Abstract Expressionism. But the fact itself would show that something really new, in scheme, has happened in the new art of the 60's.

This schematically new thing is what, I feel, accounts for the greater nervousness of art opinion that marks the 60's. One knows what is "in" at any given moment, but one is uneasy about what is "out". It was not that way in the 50's. The heroes of painting and sculpture in that period profiled themselves against a background of followers fairly early on, and for the most part they remained-and have remained–heroes. There was less question then than now of competing tendencies or positions within the common style. Just who and what will remain from the 60's, just which of the competing sub-styles will prove out as of lasting value–this remains far more uncertain. Or at least it does for most critics, museum people, collectors, art buffs, and artists themselves–for most, I say, if not exactly for all. This uncertainty may help explain why critics have lately begun to pay so much more attention to one another than they used to, and why even artists pay them more attention.

Another cause of the new uncertainty may be the fact that avant-garde opinion has since the mid-50's lost a compass bearing that had served it reliably in the past. There used to be self-evidently academic art, the art of the salons and the Royal Academy, against which to take position. Everything directed against or away from academic art was in the right direction; that was once a minimal certainty. The academy was still enough there in Paris in the 20's, and perhaps even in the 30's, to assure avant-garde art of its own identity (André Lhote would still attack a salon exhibition now and then during those years). But since the war, and especially since the 50's, confessedly academic art has fallen out of sight. Today the only conspicuous fine art–the exceptions, however numerous, are irrelevant–is avant-garde or what looks like or refers to avant-garde art. The avant-garde is left alone with itself, and in full possession of the "scene".

This hardly means that the kind of impulse and ambition that once went into avowedly academic art has now become extinct. Far from it. That kind of impulse and that kind of ambition now find their way into avant-garde, or rather nominally avant-garde, art. All the sloganizing and programming of advanced art in the 60's, and the very proliferation of it, are as though designed to conceal this. In effect, the avant-garde is being infiltrated by the enemy, and has begun to deny itself. Where everything is advanced nothing is; when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over.

Not that the avant-garde ever really meant revolution. Only the journalism about it takes it to mean that–takes it to mean a break with the past, a new start, and all that. The avant-garde's principal reason for being is, on the contrary, to maintain continuity: continuity of standards of quality–the standards, if you please, of the Old Masters. These can be maintained only through constant innovation, which is how the Old Masters had achieved standards to begin with. Until the middle of the last century innovation in Western art had not had to be startling or upsetting; since then, for reasons too complex to go into here, it has had to be that. And now in the 60's it is as though everybody had finally–finally–caught on to this: caught on not only to the necessity of innovation, but also to the necessity–or seeming necessity of advertising innovation by making it startling and spectacular.

Today everybody innovates. Deliberately, methodically. And the innovations are deliberately and methodically made startling. Only it now turns out not to be true that all startling art is necessarily innovative or new art. This is what the 60's have finally revealed, and this revelation may indeed be the newest thing about the bulk of what passes for new art in the 60's. It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling–or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste. A corollary of this is the realization that the aspects under which almost all artistic innovation has made itself recognized these past hundred years have changed, almost radically. What is authentically and importantly new in the art of the 60's comes in softly as it were, surreptitiously in the guises, seemingly, of the old, and the unattuned eye is taken aback as it isn't by art that appears in the guises of the self-evidently new. No artistic rocketry, no blank-looking box, no art that excavates, litters, jumps, or excretes has actually startled unwary taste in these latter years as have some works of art that can be safely described as easel-paintings and some other works that define themselves as sculpture and nothing else. Art in any medium, boiled down to what it does in the experiencing of it, creates itself through relations, proportions. The quality of art depends on inspired, felt relations or proportions as on nothing else.

There is no getting around this. A simple, unadorned box can succeed as art by virtue of these things; and when it fails as art it is not because it is merely a plain box, but because its proportions, or even its size, are uninspired, unfelt. The same applies to works in any other form of "novelty" art: kinetic, atmospheric, light, environmental, "earth", "funky", etc., etc. No amount of phenomenal, describable newness avails when the internal relations of the work have not been felt, inspired, discovered. The superior work of art, whether it dances, radiates, explodes, or barely manages to be visible (or audible or decipherable), exhibits, in other words, rightness of "form".

To this extent art remains unchangeable. Its quality will always depend on inspiration, and it will never be able to take effect as art except through quality. The notion that the issue of quality could be evaded is one that never entered the mind of any academic artist or art person. It was left to what I call the "popular" avant-garde to be the first to conceive it. That kind of avant-garde began with Marcel Duchamp and with Dada. Dada did more than express a wartime despair of traditional art and culture; it also tried to repudiate the difference between high and less than high art; and here it was a question less of wartime despair than of a revulsion against the arduousness of high art as insisted upon by the "unpopular" avant-garde, which was the real and original one. Even before 1914 Duchamp had begun his counterattack on what he called "physical" art by which he meant what is today vulgarly termed "formalist" art.

Duchamp apparently realized that his enterprise might look like a retreat from "difficult" to "easy" art, and his intention seems to have been to undercut this difference by "transcending" the difference between good and bad in general. (I don't think I'm over-interpreting him here.) Most of the Surrealist painters joined the "popular" avant-garde, but they did not try to hide their own retreat from the difficult to the easy by claiming this transcendence; they apparently did not feel it was that necessary to be "advanced"; they believed that their kind of art was simply better than the difficult kind. And it was the same with the Neo-Romantic painters of the 30's. Yet Duchamp's dream of going "beyond" the issue of artistic quality continued to hover in the minds at least of art journalists. When Abstract Expressionism and art informel appeared they were widely taken to be a kind of art that had at last managed to make value discriminations irrelevant. And that seemed the most advanced, the furthest-out, the most avant-garde feat that art had yet been able to perform.

Not that Duchamp's ideas were particularly invoked at the time. Nor did Abstract Expressionism or art informel belong properly with the "popular" avant-garde. Yet in their decline they did create a situation favorable to the return or revival of that kind of avantgardism. And return and revive it did in New York, notably with Jasper Johns in the latter 50's. Johns is–rather was–a gifted and original artist, but the best of his paintings and bas-reliefs remain "easy" and certainly minor compared with the best of Abstract Expressionism. Yet in the context of their period, and in idea, they looked equally "advanced". And under cover of John's idea Pop art was able to enter and give itself out as perhaps even more "'advanced"–without, however, claiming to reach the same levels of quality that the best of Abstract Expressionism had. The art journalism of the 60's accepted the "easiness" of Pop art implicitly, as though it did not matter, and as though such questions had become old-fashioned and obsolete. Yet in the end Pop art has not succeeded in dodging qualitative comparisons, and it suffers from them increasingly with every day that passes.

Its vulnerability to qualitative comparisons–not its "easiness" or minor quality as such–is what is seen by many younger artists as constituting the real failure of Pop Art. This failure is what, in effect, "novelty" art intends to remedy. (And this intention, along with other things, reveals how much "novelty" art derives from Pop art in spirit and outlook.) The retreat to the easy from the difficult is to be more knowingly, aggressively, extravagantly masked by the guises of the difficult. The idea of the difficult–but the mere idea, not the reality or substance–is to be used against itself. By dint of evoking that idea the look of the advanced is to be achieved and at the same time the difference between good and bad overcome. The idea of the difficult is evoked by a row of boxes, by a mere rod, by a pile of litter, by projects for Cyclopean landscape architecture, by the plan for a trench dug in a straight line for hundreds of miles, by a half-open door, by the cross-section of a mountain, by stating imaginary relations between real points in real places, by a blank wall, and so forth. As though the difficulty of getting a thing into focus as art, or of gaining physical access to it, or of visualizing it, were the same as the difficulty that belonged to the first experience of a successfully new and deeply original work of art. And as if aesthetically extrinsic, merely phenomenal or conceptual difficulty could reduce the difference between good and bad in art to the point where it became irrelevant. In this context the Milky Way might be offered as a work of art too.

The trouble with the Milky Way, however, is that, as art, it is banal. Viewed strictly as art, the "sublime" usually does reverse itself and turn into the banal. The 18th century saw the "sublime" as transcending the difference between the aesthetically good and the aesthetically bad. But this is precisely why the "sublime" becomes aesthetically, artistically banal. And this is why the new versions of the "sublime" offered by "novelty" art in its latest phase, to the extent that they do "transcend" aesthetic valuation, remain banal and trivial instead of simply unsuccessful, or minor. (In any case "sublime" effects in art suffer from a genetic flaw: they can be concocted–produced, that is, without inspiration.)

Here again, the variety of nominally advanced art in the 60's shows itself to be largely superficial. Variety within the limits of the artistically insignificant, of the aesthetically banal and trivial, is itself artistically insignificant.

2003-11-28T10:17:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from abstract-art.com @ http://www.abstract-art.com/abstraction/l5_wordings_fldr/p75_ro-mr_da.html)

George Pusenkoff
Allianz Versicherung
Cologne

Unlike many younger artists who use the computer as an extension of traditional atelier tools, George Pusenkoff studied computer sciences (in Moscow) before beginning his art studies. A few years after completing his degree in fine arts he moved to Cologne, where he rapidly established himself as one of the most gifted representatives of a new, digital sensibility.

While many of his contemporaries suppress the zigzag configurations of electronic images, Pusenkoff has long used the pixel as a structural tool and esthetic marker that he applies to all sorts of painterly investigations. He scans into the computer such works as Kazimir Malevich's Black Square and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing to produce pixilated studies, then meticulously transfers the digital image onto canvas, complete with the task frame.

Pusenkoff mostly uses square formats that suggest a continuation of the painting-is-dead dialogue introduced by Malevich's famous all-black canvas. But they also constitute a reprise of Josef Albers's "Homage to the Square" series, now given a sprightly interior rhythm through the quadratic pixel structures. Despite the electronically derived from, a palette reduced to primary colors and black, and a flat painting technique, the works are far from anonymous. As though by electronic sleight-of-hand, Pusenkoff has succeeded in creating a form-language that is distinctly his own, while allowing each recycled source—from Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue to Leonardo's Mono Lisa—to assert its own individuality. Pusenkoff reveals and dramatizes an inner pictorial reality that recalls—perhaps not unintentionally Malevich's concept of a "fourth dimension" in painting. (In June, Pusenkoff also showed at Galerie Ernst Hilger in Vienna.)

—David Galloway

2003-11-28T00:39:00.000-08:00

An understanding of Free Speech and 4D cannot be attained in one unwilling to address the issues of “binding force” and aesthetics in spiritual terms. The 4D method (art) cannot be learned through the written word solely. It must be experienced, as well. Preferably, oral and written supporting language is provided to those interested, while they experience 4D art in a Free Speech environment. The language of 4D is not the language you are reading here. This language is out of context. The value of this essay is almost entirely introductory in nature (though the humble “author” acknowledges this essay’s value to the causal advantage-seeker or skeptic).

An aside: The entirety of this essay is dedicated to the encouragement of “Choice” in the reader. My observations and conclusions, though admittedly cryptic at times and fragmented, are intended by the writer only to produce a context in which the questions “What is Art?” and “Who is an artist?” can be re-examined relative to Choice. “WCM”, “TM”, “causal advantage-seeker” are abstract terms representing modalities. They are not in any way meant to diminish the contributions of all the human beings (of whatever description) who have, each in a unique way, evidenced humanity through Choice or as a result of choices made by other human beings. Choice happens in the context of Creation. The nature of Choice is inextricably bound to the spiritual nature of human beings, no matter what science and academia would have us believe (for science and academia would have us believe that they, through the powers of the human intellect, can define and therefore control Choice). By the way, this essay is structured according to the formal method for transmitting spiritual lessons orally, as given me by Tarahumara Rudy (and refined in practice by many others, since, each of whom I owe tremendous gratitude)… It is being typed on a G4, dual processor 1.25 Ghz Apple computer with a 22” Apple Cinema Display, which recently allowed me to create binary images that read as “contemporary art” when viewed from “actual pixels” to 1600 magnification… like the Samurai sword whose edge just disappears under an electron microscope…

…Back to the potatoes of Potatoland, and how they refer to Free Speech. “Force” is really inadequate as a description of Free Speech. Free Speech is faceted and layered, a dynamic reality consisting of indefinite combinations of time, space, light and motion. I say “indefinite”, because the application of causality applied to Free Speech State “A” ends the reality of Free Speech “A” and starts a new one (as in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), Free Speech “B”. I say “reality”, but in human experience, Free Speech is interpreted in narrative terms, on an individual basis, which individual narrative then becomes available for exchange with other individuals, again on an individual, narrative basis. Free Speech is the medium for Choice. Choice is the intentional application of causality upon the faceted, layered, dynamic reality (I call Free Speech), consisting of indefinite combinations of time, space, light and motion. The medium of Choice is spiritual in nature. As such, it is dependent upon a Witness: As in the Hebrew God revealing his perfectly reflexive Name in the presence of Moses.

One more aside: The formal Witness to the 4D art exchange is the 4D art critic. Please note, however, that all participants in the 4D art exchange play the role of Witness at some point during the production. What are the job requirements for the 4D art critic? The 4D art critic must have experience as artist, gallerist, viewer and writer, and must be knowledgeable about and active in the community for which he is writing. The 4D art critic must also be familiar with Free Speech and the 4D aesthetic. The 4D artist and curator share the responsibility of acquainting the art critic about 4D, should this be necessary. The 4D artist and curator must provide the art critic access to any aspect of the project the art critic finds inspiring or interesting.

Like “potato”, “Free Speech” is an idea, a mental construct meant to contain a description or definition of something specific in the universe. …But “potato” does not in actuality describe an individual, specific potato. Neither does it describe the distinctions between each potato, nor the contents of each potato; neither who grew an individual potato, nor where and how. “Potato” doesn’t describe the content of the potato. In fact, “potato”, as an “idea of potato” doesn’t serve much use at all, except as a social agreement among people. It is a generality that is interpreted individually. Without such a social agreement, none of the mechanisms for transactions involving potatoes can exist. By nature, social agreements (for our purposes here) are a communing of like-minded spirits, the medium of which are human bodies. If one discounts that definition of social agreements, one cannot attain to an understanding of the 4D method. I say “spirit”, meaning the indefinite medium for the individual narrative. In Potatoland, the potato is an important part of each individual’s narrative. Potatoland is a place (albeit a hypothetical one). Therefore, each Potatolander’s narrative is site-specific. We’ll consider Potatolanders a race, defined by their site-specificity, potato-centric culture, and the physical attributes they develop after eons of living in Potatoland, eating potatoes and speaking Potatish the way they do (every linguistic element is shaped like a potato). As a race, Potatolanders share a narrative. I won’t try to describe their God, out of respect for the hypothetical Potatolanders, whose God is not my own.

Art is an indicator and activator of Free Speech. It is not Free Speech. Free Speech is the medium for Art, in the same way that Free Speech is the medium for Choice, and the medium for any human exchange. Art is not Choice, but is a function of Choice and a medium for Choice. Free Speech shares its “place” in human affairs with divinity and dreaming.

Let’s form a working construct for the combined elements of 4D. This is a fun exercise, because I know that when I formulate an arrangement of these elements, a second arrangement will reveal itself. The second arrangement echoes the first arrangement. The third echoes the first and second, and the first and second combined, and so on. So, Time is the medium for Memory, Presence and Vision. Space is the medium for Reflection (as in Mirror), Causation and the Object. Motion is the medium for Synthesis, Void and Celebration. Light is the medium for Revelation, Progression and Specificity. Then, Time is to Motion, as Light is to Space. So then, the motion of time in a void reveals a specific progression of light in space. We have cause to celebrate! We’ve synthesized a reflexive object that memorializes the presence of vision. And so on.

Therefore, a Free Speech environment, while a 4D art exchange is in progress, cannot contain to successive moments that are exactly the same. In order to create such an environment, the 4D artist must introduce elements that exhibit the characteristics of light, motion, space and time. Creative vehicles for these elements include theatrical and musical performance, text (spoken and read), moving images (film, slide, animation and video), architecture, design (graphic, interior, lighting, exhibition and fashion or costume), illustration, binary, internet-based, and so on.

Paintings and sculptures are the hinge upon which the 4D viewers’ perceptual doors swing open. The 4D artist relies on his creative partners to establish a context for art that activates the viewers senses and redirects them from the mundane (3D, 2D, 1D) towards the hyper-mundane. The mundane is the medium for the divine dream. Let’s take language as our example. Everyone in the little town of Tuber knows that Tommy Etuber’s always writing poems about potatoes in his little notebook. Tommy loves hash browns. Every time he finishes a meal that includes hash browns, Tommy exclaims, in the classical Tuberian lyric form, “Jugga do nal/Nugga jo dal/Dal jo jugga/Nal do Nugga/No do Jugga Nugga dal!” Everyone always laughs when he does that. Loosely translated, his Potatish poem reads, “Language is breath transmuted into meaningful sound, through the mechanisms of the mind, body, emotion and spirit. For the purposes of the 4D art exchange, the poet is the medium for poetry.” Artist John always invites Tommy Etuber to his openings and feeds him hash browns.

2003-11-28T00:28:00.000-08:00

Meaning in Contemporary Art
(Extracted from http://www.vceart.com/explore/ideas/)

Finding Meaning – Historical Background

In the past, meaning in an artwork was often seen as something fixed, and primarily determined by the artist. Artists often created an artwork with very specific ideas about what they wanted to communicate. For example, they might be interested in describing the appearance of someone or something, in telling a story, or in conveying a particular mood or feeling about their chosen subject.

The use of recognised visual signs, including symbols, styles and conventions, helped artists communicate their intended meaning to others. For example, in a portrait, the sitter's pose and dress, the setting, and even the size of the portrait and the way it was framed, could convey many ideas about the sitter's status and power. Art elements such as line, colour, tone and shape were also used in particular ways to communicate meaning. For example, depending on the context, red could suggest blood, violence, passion, energy and heat. While many of the signs used by artists were widely recognised, great authority was often attached to the opinions of art critics and art historians in interpreting meaning in artworks.

However, until recent decades, art history and art criticism were dominated by methodologies, values and structures that meant that art critics and historians often had a relatively narrow focus when examining an artwork for meaning. Most frequently, for example they would find meaning in an artwork by looking at the work in relation to Western art traditions. There was little acknowledgment of the meanings that different cultural, personal or other perspectives might generate.

Finding Meaning – Contemporary Art

Over the last thirty years there has been significant analysis of how meaning is constructed around an artwork. There has been particular importance attached to the role of the viewer as an active participant in the process of constructing meaning around an artwork. It is acknowledged that the knowledge, ideas and experiences that an individual brings to an artwork will influence the meaning they find in that artwork. The meaning that any one individual finds in an artwork will potentially be quite different to that found by another person. It may also be different to that which the artist originally intended.

It is also acknowledged that where and when an artwork is seen can influence the meanings that are associated with it. Within contemporary visual culture therefore, the meaning of an artwork is often seen as fluid – because it is not fixed to any one viewpoint, time or place.

Artist's Role in Constructing Meaning

In producing an artwork, artists can use materials, techniques and art elements in many different ways to communicate particular ideas, feelings or effects. However, once an artwork is publicly displayed, the artist's intentions may be unknown to the viewer, and the use of materials, elements and techniques in the work may suggest different meanings to those that the artist originally intended.

Some artists do provide clues outside the artwork itself that might suggest a particular way of looking at the work. This is sometimes simply done through a title, or it can involve a more extensive explanation of intentions – perhaps on an extended label, in an interview, catalogue or some other text. However, even when artists provide information about their intentions, it does not preclude the viewer from finding other meanings in the work.

An acute awareness of the role of the viewer in determining the meaning of an artwork within contemporary visual culture means that contemporary artists are generally open to different interpretations being made of their work. Often the titles or information provided by an artist are specifically intended to encourage speculation about the meaning of the work.

For example, consider the possibilities for interpretation suggested by titles such as Ricky Swallow's Vacated Campers or Anne Zahalka's The Marriage of Convenience.

Some contemporary artists give visual expression to the idea that an artwork can have multiple meanings by using ambiguous, layered or fragmented imagery in their work. Consider, for example, the use of layered and fragmented images in the work of Bernhard Sachs.

There are a number of contemporary artists who prefer to give no clues at all about the meaning of their work – leaving viewers to make their own observations and conclusions about the work without any preconceived ideas. Louise Hearman, for example, does not discuss the content of her work and even uses a numbering system to title her works to avoid the meanings that might be suggested by words. She is, however, fascinated by the different meanings others find in her images.

Viewer's Role in Constructing Meaning

Within contemporary visual culture the audience for art is recognised as diverse – made up of many different individuals, from art 'experts' to casual observers. Each individual brings knowledge, experiences and ideas to looking at art that will influence the meaning they find in the artworks they view. Many factors, including the viewer's gender and cultural, religious, social or political background may influence the viewer's knowledge, ideas and experiences.

The unique experiences and ideas that each viewer brings to an artwork potentially means that the meaning they will find in the artwork will be different to that which others find, or that which the artist originally intended. The active role that viewers have in constructing meaning around an artwork has led many artists/theorists to believe that viewers actually complete an artwork.

The viewer's interaction with an artwork can vary greatly. It can range from a personal and emotional response to the formal, symbolic or expressive elements in the work, to a response where the viewer adopts a particular perspective, perhaps influenced by ideological or other factors. For example, an individual with a strong background in traditional Chinese ceramics might find meaning in the symbolism and decorative and technical qualities of Ah Xian's China China series. Another viewer might link Ah Xian's reworking of traditional Chinese decorative techniques to Postmodernism. Yet another viewer might respond more personally and emotionally to the way the human form has been represented in the works.

Influence of Place on Meaning

The meaning that an artwork communicates to a viewer can be influenced by the context in which the work is seen. This context includes where and when the viewer sees an artwork.

Often the physical place/space where an artwork is seen will have values associated with it that suggest particular meanings. For example, when we see an object in a gallery space we generally understand the object to be art. However we might not necessarily understand the same object as art if we see it displayed in our local convenience store. Different museums/galleries are often associated with particular values or ideas that may also add to the meaning of an artwork. For example, we may expect that works in some contemporary art spaces will challenge traditional ideas about art and artmaking, but not look for the same sort of meaning in works presented in other more traditional spaces.

In texts, or in galleries/museums, artworks are usually presented in the context of other artworks and particular ideas or themes that can also influence the understanding a viewer develops of a work. For example, works from Christopher Langton's Souvenir series have been presented in many different contexts including the following:

* The Persistence of Pop, Monash University Museum of Art exhibition toured to regional and interstate galleries (1999-2000), based on themes of Pop art and its influence on contemporary art.

* Facsmile, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art and Centre for Contemporary Photography collaborative exhibition toured to Caracas, Venezuela (1999) before touring regional galleries in Victoria (2000); featured artists who incorporate reproduction and reprographic technologies in their work.

* Our place, Monash University Museum of Art exhibition presented at Monash University's campus in Prato, Italy (2001); explored issues of Australian identity.

Influence of Time on Meaning

The meanings associated with artworks can also be influenced by when we see an artwork. Often the factors that influence the meaning of an artwork can change over time. For example, contemporary audiences might not understand the symbolism that was used in many early Christian religious paintings. Even in a relatively short span of time, meanings can change because of new experiences and knowledge that we acquire as viewers.

For example, consider the spectacle of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. Its strongly nationalistic spirit and the extensive use of inflatables, may give many viewers a new context for looking at works in Christopher Langton's Souvenir series (link above left).

The knowledge that people have of the events associated with the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 may lead many viewers to find different meanings and significance in Bernhard Sach's DEMONSTRATION: SPECIAL RELATIVITY: NEW YORK CITY 5.15 AM, 1994 [KA].

2003-11-26T15:50:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from ArtForum's feature discussion "Global Tendencies/Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition"; located online at http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5682?sid=90fd3389d580bdd39154b5814579ef55)

When Francesco Bonami, director of last summer's Venice Biennale, famously wrote in his exhibition catalogue that "The ‘Grand Show' of the 21st century must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist inside the structure of an exhibition . . . a world where the conflicts of globalization are met by the romantic dreams of a new modernity," it was reasonable to imagine that he was responding to structural and thematic questions posed by Okwui Enwezor in his Documenta 11 of the preceding year. After all, the Nigerian-born curator, focusing on the issue of globalization, had in a sense defocused his event, dividing it into "platforms"—conferences and lecture series engaging figures from a wide range of disciplines—that took place at different locales around the world over the course of the year leading up to the installation in Kassel. Of course, this very commonality sets up a significant contrast. Enwezor's globalism resonated differently from Bonami's: The same word typically used—as at Venice—to describe an ever-expanding circulation of communications and commerce (with all the attendant conflicts that such connection entails) was in Kassel linked to the acute value of regionality and difference, where the emergence of the local and particular precluded the possibility of any unifying system or thematic but nevertheless comprised a field of what could be called "minor knowledges."

Indeed, few terms are so frequently bandied about in artistic dialogue today as "globalism," and yet few terms are so multifarious in their current usage, or unfold in so many dimensions. For example, the rhetoric of globalization allows for discussion of neocolonialism in an expanded art marketplace while at the same time entertaining the notion that New York has ceded its historical position as the city that "stole the idea of modern art" (perhaps becoming instead the capital of capital), and coinciding with these insights is a still-developing sense that tiers of access to information exist within the worldwide artistic community, dividing those who can from those who cannot afford to crisscross the globe and so speak knowledgeably of a contemporary art-world suprastructure.

Nothing in contemporary art speaks so directly to all of these issues as the large-scale exhibition—from Documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well as any number of other biennials that cropped up around the world during the past decade. This type of exhibition, endowed with a transnational circuitry, assumed the unique position of both reflecting globalism—since these shows happen in locations throughout the world, however remote—and taking up globalism itself as an idea. Establishing a new curatorial class able to bring artists together from wide-ranging geographic and cultural points, the large-scale exhibition altered the kinds of visibility afforded artists and so fundamentally changed the conditions of artistic discussion, ultimately forwarding the position that no show could, or should, presume an all-encompassing thesis—at least not in conventional terms and form. Rather, the exhibition extends through time and across geography to include panels, lectures, publications, performances, and public works that fall well beyond the parameters of the traditional show, and lies well beyond the grasp of any single viewer. In turn, these exhibitions have come to marshal the forces of any number of disciplines, including art history and theory, which leads one to the question of whether the critical function is in some sense migrating from critic to curator, or indeed whether such nominal distinctions are useful at all. (As Catherine David, curator of Documenta 10, says in these pages regarding related shifts in terminology, "The question for me is not about . . . who is the artist but about how to produce, discuss, debate, and circulate to various audiences a certain number of ideas and formal articulations proposed by author(s). At this level, I think that many people . . . with whom I am working no longer correspond to the economic, social, and cultural figure of the ‘artist' as it has been constituted in the modern age.")

2003-11-26T13:17:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from Rudy Rucker's "(Beginnings of) A Writer’s Toolkit"; http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/writerstoolkit.htm)

Writing is like...

Drawing and Painting

In 1998 I was working on an odd book called Saucer Wisdom which included a lot of drawings, supposedly made by saucer abductee Frank Shook. Given that the drawings weren’t supposed to be by a professional artist, the publisher let me draw them myself, which I enjoyed. Working on the drawings, I began seeing a lot of analogies between drawing and writing.

(i) In drawing I make a quick sketch in pencil, then ink it in, then white out certain pieces and redraw them. In writing I try and write a rough version of the section pretty quickly, then go over it and tune it, and then there will be things that don’t work that I have to keep redoing.

(ii) In drawing, whenever there is a part I’m confused about (like two hands holding each other) I end up having to use lots and lots of white-out there, and the surface ends up all bumpy and crufty on the paper and never does look as smooth and clean as the rest of the picture. This is the same in writing, the transitions or actions I’m not clear about take the most rewriting and reworking. But I don’t think it’s necessarily true that a rewritten patch has to be bumpy and crufty as does a redrawn patch; the bumpiness is partly a result simply of the not-so-great physical properties of the white-out I use.

(iii) In drawing I’d sometimes think that if only I could take the time to fully visualize the difficult passage then I’d be able to draw it clean and right the first time. But often it just seemed too hard to think, and I’d go ahead and draw it wrong, just so I could have something to work off of. In writing I think that if only I could fully think a scene through I can write it much more effectively. But many times it’s just too hard to think the whole scene through, I feel like being active, in touch with the medium, so I go ahead and write even though I’m not sure what I’m doing.

(iv) In both cases I need to be clear when something that might have the superficial appearance of a finished piece really is still just a sketch that needs to be reworked. I was kind of surprised how prolonged is the process of making a drawing; I hadn’t realized it would take so much revision. By long experience, I am of course familiar with the huge amount of revision a written scene takes. But it’s good to see this confirmed by my experience with drawing.

(v) My cartoonist friend Paul Mavrides said about my drawings, and cartooning in general, "It’s not the realistic style that matters so much. It’s having something to say." And this insight makes me feel free to write a little more cartoony and sketchy sometimes. And it helps me fight my feeling of being inferior to a fine literature exponent who creates beautifully textured descriptions and aperçus (shading and perspective!) in a work that perhaps doesn’t have as much to say as I hope mine do.

(vi) I got a deeper appreciation of the concept of “eyeball kicks,” as exemplified in cartoons such as Well Elder’s work in Mad magazine or in Walt Kelly’s Pogo. Elder’s eyeball kicks are, to me, of a piece with the piled-on detail of Bosch’s teeming works. A higher apotheosis is reached in the later Brueghel where there is still very much action, but the surface doesn’t teem, it is harmonious and integrated. These guys have always been touchstone icons for the kind of novels I want to write. Ideally each chapter of a novel can be like a single canvas.

2003-11-26T10:43:00.000-08:00

(Extracted from "Circus Maximus throws creativity into the ring" by Alan Bostick, Nashville Tennessean, 11/21/03... you can find the rest of the article at http://www.tennessean.com/entertainment/arts/archives/03/11/42800407.shtml?Element_ID=42800407)

...This time around, in addition to Abrams and his music, expect contributions from visual artists R . Ellis Orrall, Rachel Kice and Paul McLean; noted Nashville composer, poet and musician Marcus Hummon; and a handful of performance poets.

McLean, a former Nashville artist now based in West Virginia, said that his contribution, a 72-minute work of animation titled Fall, fits in well with the theme of this particular Circus Maximus installment. The one-word theme is ''Cultura,'' which Abrams says is an Italian word broadly signifying the concept of culture.

McLean calls his own contribution ''almost a snapshot of contemporary culture,'' drawn as it is from what the artist describes as thousands of photographs and paintings covering topics from ballet to history to politics.

The artist said the parade of colorful scenes is saved from sheer randomness by an over-arching sense of order: ''After 20 years, I have my own visual language. It's my job to give the images a sense of order that makes sense to me and what I believe will make sense for the viewer.''

Fall is not intended, however, to be viewed passively as a film on a screen, but as the viewer comes and goes, moving about this space where so much else will be going on...

2003-11-16T20:39:00.000-08:00

How I Drew One of My Pictures: *
or, The Authorship of Generative Art
Adrian Ward BSc & Geoff Cox MA(RCA)
Sidestream, London & CAiiA-STAR, School of Computing, University of Plymouth, UK

e-mail: adrian@signwave.co.uk & geoffcox@excite.com
(Supporting images and references located at http://www.generative.net/papers/authorship/)

Abstract

The concept of value is traditionally bestowed on a work of art when it is seen to be unique and irreproducible, thereby granting it authenticity. Think of a famous painting: only the original canvas commands genuinely high prices.

Digital artwork is not valued in the same way. It can be copied infinitely and there is therefore a corresponding crisis of value. It has been argued that under these conditions of the dematerialised artwork, it is process that becomes valued. In this way, the process of creation and creativity is valued in place of authenticity, undermining conventional notions of authorship.

It is possible to correlate many of these creative processes into instructions. However, to give precise instructions on the construction of a creative work is a complex, authentic and intricate process equivalent to conventional creative work (and is therefore not simply a question of 'the death of the author'). This paper argues that to create 'generative' systems is a rigorous and intricate procedure. Moreover, the output from generative systems should not be valued simply as an endless, infinite series of resources but as a system. To have a machine write poetry for ten years would not generate creative music, but the process of getting the machine to do so would certainly register an advanced form of creativity.

When a programmer develops a generative system, they are engaged in a creative act. Programming is no less an artform than painting is a technical process. By analogy, the mathematical value pi can be approximated as 3.14159265, but a more thorough and accurate version can be stored as the formula used to calculate it. In the same way, it is more complete to express creativity formulated as code, which can then be executed to produce the results we desire. Rather like using Leibnitz's set of symbols to represent a mathematical formula, artists can now choose to represent creativity as computer programs (Harold Cohen's Aaron, a computer program that creates drawings is a case in point).

By programming computers to undertake creative instructions, this paper will argue that more accurate and expansive traces of creativity are being developed that suitably merge artistic subjectivity with technical form. It is no longer necessary or even desirable to be able to render art as a final tangible medium, but instead it is more important to program computers to be creative by proxy.

[The paper refers to Autoshop software, available from http://autoshop.signwave.co.uk]

Authorship

Traditionally, the concept of value is bestowed on a work of art when it is seen to be unique and irreproducible, thereby making it authentic and granting it 'aura'.[1] More recently, emergent technical possibilities emphasise processes of creation and creativity in an age of infinite reproducibility. Therefore, through reproduction, this lack of aura accounts for the emancipation of the artist from the religiose mythologies of creativity, authenticity and authority.

Although the 'author-god' might be dead (according to Post-Structuralist theory), we are forced to accept this 'death' as an inability to claim the privileged source of meaning or value of a work of art and artist.[2] This is by no means new; there are numerous precedents for collaborative experimentation in creativity and automatism within a history of art-machines, robotics, and deferred authorship: the use of chance by dadaists, and automatism by surrealists, aimed to stimulate spontaneous and collective creative activity and to diminish the significance of the artist. As the creating subject or author has largely been discredited and dematerialised over the years, there is a pressing need to examine new demarcations, and the functions released by this disappearance.[3] Perhaps 'the death of the author' is simply too literal, (too obvious and final) a metaphor to offer a critique of the productive apparatus by which contemporary creative operations using computers are organised and regulated.

The mathematical value 'pi' can be approximated as 3.141593, but a more thorough and accurate version can be stored as the formula used to calculate it. By analogy, it is more precise to express creativity formulated as code, which can then be executed to produce the desired results. Rather like using Leibnitz's set of symbols to represent a mathematical formula, creative work can now be expressed as computer programming (itself necessarily mathematical, a creative practice in itself). Programming is no less a potential artform than painting is simply a result of technical procedures (paintings are 'readymades' according to Duchamp, as they use 'found' manufactured materials as a result of commodity production). Under the conditions of the dematerialised artwork, it is no longer necessary or even desirable to be able to render art as a final material object or dead-end commodity; it is as if process and code is now rendered as the material artwork.

Execution

When a programmer develops a generative system, they are clearly engaged in a creative act but what kind of process is being executed? An artist makes creative decisions to produce a final artwork, yet it would be futile if these decisions were the same every time. In this sense, the focus of creating generative art is not trying to achieve a balanced output, but to capture these decisions as logical structures. The computer executes these rules but never produces the same result twice. In this sense, the code could be seen to be more like the chaos mathematics used to simulate complex systems than a mathematical formula like pi. Ironically, perhaps this idea of unique execution could be seen to re-establish aura, yet the decisions the code takes to arrive at a final result are of little significance (as in the case of a random number generator, for example). Perhaps the lack of aura is maintained all the same.

Creative decisions are influenced by various indeterminable factors, and in this way creativity cannot be simply reduced to a problem-solving activity or code that makes decisions. A great deal of generative art appears to focus on giving the computer some limited form of intelligence so that these decisions can be made, either through the use of neural networks or reference-based systems. However, a great deal of these so-called creative decisions made by artists are driven by chance, or other imperceptible influences. Why attempt to capture a creative action as a formal logical procedure, when in fact a random decision is often more suitable? Throwing paint on a canvas is not governed by precise directions of where the paint will go, but simply by the decision to do so. The decision was made and the action was unpredictable. In the same way, code systems undertake decisions, but the actual execution is (or can appear to be) random.

Generative creativity

Clearly the production of generative systems through this precise execution of decisions (and not actions) is a rigorous and intricate creative procedure. Moreover, the output from generative systems should not be valued simply as an endless, infinite series of resources but as a system - and not just any system, but a social system. It is possible to resolve many creative processes into instructions, but crucially according to Csikszentmihalyi: '... creativity does not happen inside people's heads, but in the interaction between a person's thoughts and a socio-cultural context'.[4] If this is the case, does the computer programmer then, offer a radicalised art practice that reflexively engages with the productive apparatus and social context? If so, this surprisingly echoes what Walter Benjamin recommended in 1934 for radical art practice:

'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [sic] products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.'[5]

Both the laboratories of art and science require reflexive work to fully comprehend their processes. Invention and innovation is made possible by groups and individuals operating necessarily within social systems and specific discourses. By programming computers to undertake creative instructions, it is possible to argue for more accurate and expansive traces of creativity that suitably merge artistic subjectivity, social context with technical form. For instance, to make a system more intelligent it needs to operate socially, as with a Neural network that needs feedback in order to learn.

Emergent creative practices have sought to examine creativity in the light of scientific investigations in artificial life, simulating the characteristic processes of living things, from the operations of ecosystems and evolution to the encoding of DNA. Eduardo Kac's Genesis, commissioned by Ars Electronica 1999 is a striking example of this tendency. The key element of the work is the reproduction of an 'artist's gene', synthetically created by translating a sentence from the book of Genesis into Morse Code, and then converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed for the work.[6]

One consequence of this emerging field are wild claims exemplified by writers like Kevin Kelly (in describing the work of artist Karl Sims) claiming: 'The artist becomes a god'.[7] It has to be remembered that the 'death of the author' (as well as Nietzsche's claim that 'god is dead') was a metaphor to site the production of meaning in the act of viewing or reading; and so counter supplied dogma of authoritarian communication and in the spirit of democratic politics, in other words.[8] So any claim that meaning now lies in the code, or that reality has collapsed into the code (to paraphrase Baudrillard out of context), must be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. This is rather like the biological reductionism of much of the debate about genetic engineering that negates social structures.

Creativity has become the engine for 'cultural reproduction' in the factories of Western technoculture so caution is necessary.[9] Creativity has become a buzzword for western governments who valorise their creative industries,[10] and continue to mythologise individual practitioners for the benefit of 'cultural capital' and the 'free-market' - which tautologically isn't free at all. But these 'false gods' or ideologies do not go unopposed, with active networks such the Free Software Foundation promoting shared 'open source' code, collective authorship and the legal protection of free distribution.[11] Moreover, it is significant to note that this year's (1999) Ars Electronica Golden Nica award (for 'net.art') was awarded not to an individual artist but to the Linux operating system, the operating system of choice for the Free Software Foundation. Based on a set of false principles, some 'hackers' have taken Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, and/or Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux as god-like. It is interesting to note that people are eager to attribute religious properties to key figures in movements that question traditional notions of authorship and creativity. Addressing this issue, Danny O'Brien explains that 'when we don't understand the motivations of others, religion stands first in line to explain'.[12] The spontaneous and irrational actions of the creative human subject seem to be neatly explained in the dogma that 'art is a gift from the gods'.[13]

Autonomy

The core of human creativity is notoriously difficult to define, as an individual and social phenomena. These cultural anxieties are expressed in many forms including intellectual property, from the patenting of software code to human genes.[14] It is somewhat ironic to note that both machines and humans are more or less programmed, but not through 'natural' causes but cultural determinants. This is a recognition that subjectivity is determined by other destabilising forces and that creative-subjectivity itself is socially encoded. Echoing one definition of subjectivity that lays emphasis on discursive frameworks, the artist is revealed to be a rhetorical invention operating in much the same way as a coded machine that follows a crude rule-based system, auto-generating what already exists. If the artist has always been 'automated' to some extent, this offers the opportunity to mount a critique of autonomy as much as creativity. The point here is not to build artificial intelligence or life but to question the artificiality of its deployment in creative endeavours (or something along those lines).

Many generative systems rely upon creating autonomous systems which can, to a limited degree, be aware of their surroundings, and therefore respond to their environment. The basic notion is that it applies logic it has learnt of the outside world to whatever input is given, causing new reactions which can be captured as creative output. However, trying to imitate art by imitating life is an unnecessary confusion. In this respect, Autoshop makes no attempt to be autonomous. It truly is a mechanic reproduction of creative decision-making, and so avoids the issue of 'artificial intelligence'. If a non-artificial intelligence system can still be seen to be creative (because the code is merely an extension of the artist's own logic) then there is no need to deploy artificial intelligence, as the artist already possesses intelligence (or not as the cause may be).

Creative agency

The creative subject has been traditionally viewed as possessing quite distinct cognitive and mechanical processes with other workers or machines playing a secondary subservient role. This has clearly changed but the auto-generative art-machine relies on its code, and as much as generating a deferral of authorship is still encoded and authored in itself. As Haraway says: 'it is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.'[15] Former firm distinctions between biology, technology and code, are now unreliable, and under these changing conditions it is the issue of autonomy (rather than creativity) that appears most pressing. Both the social practices of science and art serve to establish myths of autonomy. Indeed, where does generative art generate from and under what conditions? There is a danger of excluding the possibility of the human subject as a potential agent of change in these scenarios.

If both humans and machines are conceived as coded devices, the computer programmer works in a tradition of a bricoleur in the assemblage and hacking of code, rearranging its structural elements. Coding is the ability to make judgements and render those as logic; for programming has always been about solving problems using logic. If we could resolve our creative impulses as series of logical decisions, we could code them. Yet, subjectivity is embedded in the social system like code itself. Its manipulation therefore is crucial to effective programming and an understanding of ideological processes.

Numerous so-called creative works play with ideas of randomness, but it is intention and purpose that are crucial (in this way, the truism of monkeys with typewriters eventually coming up with the complete works of Shakespeare misses the point). Rather, Autoshop uses irony to articulate some of the expectations of commercially-available software and the limits of its functionality. Without this strategy, there is a danger here of irony merely perpetuating what it wishes to critique; in other words parody falling into pastiche. It purposefully breaks the logical sequence of prediction and consequence: if such and such, then do the following or something else. Extending this, one can make a compelling argument that Autoshop should only be appreciated as software, its output irrelevant. With this in mind, it is proposed that the next version of the software might 'patch' a bug so there is no 'Save As' feature at all. What this serves to emphasis is that creativity lies not in the modification of rules, but in setting the criteria for the rules, rather like conceptual art. Oddly, much 'neo-conceptualism' manages to avoid having a concept.

Practices that insist on separating form and function operate impoverished theories of representation. Creativity lies somewhere in the link between the act of representation and conceptual clarity. An automated programme might use its representational strategies but it has no concept in itself. This paper argues that responsibility for the concept as well as the criteria for the rules and code, remains in the domain of the author.

2003-11-16T12:47:00.000-08:00

JOHN TOTH @ AUDART's "Art & Technology Circus"
(Extracted from www.audart.com/circus/circle0.htm)

In A Circle

In A Circle is a sculptural fabric installation that I designed for the "Art and Technology Circus". The installation of fabric is a structure for activity and performance. Within this performance structure I have asked choreographers, composers, visual artists, technicians, cyber artists, dancers, musicians, singers, poets, actors and performance artists to collaborate. Thinking on the multi definitions of a circus led us to focus on the "circus ring" or "circle".

The mission of In A Circle is to refine the definition of the collaboration of art and technology, emphasizing the use of technology guided by the natural process of art making. The exploration and demonstration of the lowest of low technologies to the newest and highest levels of technology (Silicon Graphics, FORE Systems, ImageTel International, Oki Network Technologies) will reveal the meaning of technology as a system of principles rather than a history of tools. The quality of choices in manipulating the tools towards intentionality and meaning is the technology. A pencil is a link in a chain of rings that provided a technology of externalizing thoughts, emotions, spirituality's and other senses into a tangible reference. Technology is the system that gives our voice an audience. Idea becomes substance because of technology.

Technology does not have something to say; people do! In all senses of the definition we homo sapiens have been exploring technology for hundreds of thousands of years. Technologies give rise to many ways to communicate. The choice of which technology to use, gives our ideas articulation, nuance and variation. The same "idea" can be expressed in many ways.

Art and technology implies there is a connection between the choice of tool and process as it relates to intent. As communicators we must find many ways to express ourselves, so as we move through life experiences we articulate our ideas for each new encounter.

What computer technology does, is give us a broad range of choices in output. Variation on variation is at your finger tip. As choice makers, the goal of art making becomes exploring relationships between artistic tools and expression. What do we really want to say? How can we articulate the ways in which we say it so that each new audience understands.

In A Circle uses a circle as a metaphor and structure for defining a system of communication and interaction.

It is no surprise that the early theaters of Greece were circular with all the seats facing inward. Another circular structure is Stonehenge and it is theorized that from the center a viewer could look outward sensing ones place in the cosmos. As a metaphor, a circle has many meanings. The word circus is of Latin origin meaning circle. A circus is a place where activity occurs within a ring.

At the circus, the ring gives focus to a performance. There are also three ring circus's where the coordination of many acts take place at one time.

In A Circle is a collaboration that will use the internet and other technologies to link groups of participants in many sites and cities. The core collaboration at this point is the linking of live performances in Buffalo and New York City via the internet I will create fabric installations in multiple sites that will define the structure and framework for performance and art. Artists in Buffalo include composers, poets, video artists, musicians and visual artists. Artists in New York City will provide choreography, dance , theater, video, opera, composers, musicians, visual arts, cyber arts. Teleconferencing and live internet connections technically directed by Audart founder, Neil London, will bring interactive possibilities between performers at different sites. (a dancer in one city will duet and improvise with a dancer in another city or a visual artist and musician might interact with several dancers in other cities).

There are many distant interactions that take place every day. The question that comes to mind is, What is the quality of the interaction? Is it satisfying and engaging? Does the quality of the communication make us want to come back?

EARLY THINKING....

I have been creating a very dense layered fabric environment in my studio that is a kind-of 3 dimensional Jackson Pollock or a 3-D map of the web of the universe. While I was constructing this room sized environment I noticed different kinds of behavior that the installation seemed to provoke. I noticed the recurring cycles or levels: Below, In The Middle, Above. There were many transitions between these levels: Rising, Sinking, Floating, Spinning, Getting Stuck, Breaking Free, etc. A question for collaborators is, How do you define these states of being? Some examples of what is Below a circle: the earth, the womb, fertility, the lower chakras, the intestines, water, death, rebirth, sleep, dreams, drunken monkey, green, nature, soil,...

2003-11-16T12:44:00.000-08:00

...this place, if I could describe this place, portray it, I've tried, I feel no place, no place around me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't flesh, it doesn't end, it's like air... - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

2003-11-15T22:30:00.000-08:00

STAIN

Not funny cartoons. – Roy Lichtenstein

The arc does not
end
in the concrete spheres of cars racing through
spilt dots

Polypheme grows a new eye

As we march
one step two step
right left
into the cannonade

I hear the pipes

only Lover kisses this bowed neck
like a thousand yesses breathed
into these lungs
the moon full high above
in a new house
the Lady away

The pipes surge with the line
Drums & we blink into the sun

One night a pal broke his bike
150 yards of flesh & steel
painting blacktop with glittering life
Blonde along for the ride
with him to Valhalla
Or hell or the next life
whatever

Polypheme James Dean
cig drips from smirking lips
leather & denim & cotton
Icon charnel dream tool
Blowing sax
woodies low on the nose

Form in the Dictionary of ideas
Five forms real as the web page
01s they're made from

The arc has six corners
More more more
the form emerges at @15d or so
Layers

Hidden in the deleted
text is the secret
no Muse could resist

One day a spectrum shower
dressed our Saturn in the universe colors
- we're taking them back (one
at a time)

RL: I don't think I know why, but I am.

The arc is like the dart
board wire frame

Bam.

At that moment.
The light of every place
known by these eyes

live(adj) in my body

2003-11-14T23:53:00.000-08:00

Roy Lichtenstein BBC Interview 1966

Originally recorded in January 1966 by David Sylvester in New York City for broadcast by BBC Third Programme.The interview was reedited for publication in 1997 for David Sylvester's "Some Kind of Reality".

David Sylvester: What do you think of as the main sources of your language?

Roy Lichtenstein: Well, I think in some ways, really, Cubism, but of course cartooning itself and commercial art are obviously an influence. But I think the aesthetic influence on me is probably more Cubism than anything. I think even the cartoons themselves are influenced by Cubism, because the hard-edged character which is brought about by the printing creates a kind of cubist look which perhaps wasn't intended.

DS: The kinds of cartoons which you've borrowed from, which you've parodied, are of a fairly limited kind. You draw on those which are fairly straightforwardly realistic.

RL: Not funny cartoons.

DS: No. And I take it that this is a deliberate choice. Or is it just an instinctive preference you've never thought about?

RL: Well actually, you know, the first few cartoons I did were Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The first one, I think, was Mickey and Donald on a raft. Mickey Mouse had caught the back of his coat with his own fishing-rod and said: " I've caught a big one now" or something like that. I forget exactly how it went.*
(Note:* Look Mickey, 1961. In fact the characters were fishing from a jetty and it was Donald Duck who said "Look Mickey, I've hooked a big one".)

DS: What gave you the idea of doing it?

RL: Well this particular one was on a bubble-gum wrapper, and it was a kind of obvious joke. The first ones were very obvious jokes. But I kind of rejected the idea. There's a tendency to make the cartoons look interesting, and when the original work already looks interesting, or inventive, it takes away I think from - well, maybe this isn't really a reason, but whatever the reason was, I seem to prefer rather straightforward cartoons.

DS: What suddenly gave you the idea of using cartoon images in the first place?

RL: I was sort of immersed in Abstract Expressionism - it was a kind of Abstract Expressionism with cartoons within the expressionist image. It's too hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren't very successful. I've got rid of most of them, in fact all of them. They encompassed about six months. I did abstract paintings of sort of striped brush strokes and within these in a kind of scribbly way were images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In doing these paintings I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at, and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me. I first discussed it and thought about it for a little bit, and I did one really almost half seriously to get an idea of what it might look like. And as I was painting this painting I kind of got interested in organising it as a painting and brought it to some kind of conclusion as an aesthetic statement, which I hadn't really intended to do to begin with. And then I really went back to my other way of painting, which was pretty abstract. Or tried to. But I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. I couldn't keep my eyes off it, and it sort of prevented me from painting any other way, and then I decided this stuff was really serious. I had sort of decided that as I was working on it, but at first the change was a little bit too strong for me. Having been more or less schooled as an Abstract Expressionist, it was quite difficult psychologically to do anything else.

DS: All the same, the love of the cartoons took you over quite quickly, if one thinks of your output between the beginning and end of 1961. Was the main attraction the kind of visual language orwas it the kind of imagery?

RL: Well, I think that it was the startlinq quality of the visual shorthand and the sense of cliche - the fact that an eye would be drawn a certain way and that one would learn how to draw this eye that way regardiess of the consequences, these ideas being completely antithetical to the ones I felt had to do with art at the time. And I began really to get excited about this. The cliche is a cliche if you don't know anything else, but, if you can alter this cliche slightly, to make it do something else in the painting, it still seems to retain its cliche quality to people looking at it. In painting, more than in some of the other arts, I think, one assumes that because it looks like a cartoon its really just the same. Whereas in music, I think, if you alter a popular tune just slightly, the alteration would be immediately perceptible and it would look artistic. In painting you can alter the image of an eye or nose, a shadow or something from a complete cliche, without its ever being understood that anything is happening artisticaliy.

DS: In what direction do you try to alter the cliche?

RL: Actually, in a number of ways. Sometimes I try to make it appear to be more of a cliche, to kind of emphasise the cliche aspect of it, but at the same time to get a sense of its size, position, brightness and so forth as an aesthetic element of the painting. And they can both be done at once, as you can certainly do a portrait of someone and also make it art.

DS: What is the kind of thing that you might do in using cliches from cartoons in making a painting? I mean: what would be lacking in the cliche that you would want to give it?

RL: There's a sense of order that is lacking. There is a kind of order in the cartoons, there's a sort of composition, but it's a kind of a learned composition. It's a composition more to make it clear, to make it read and communicate, rather than a composition for the sake of unifying the elements. In other words, the normal aesthetic sensibility is usually lacking, and I think many people would think it was also lacking in my work. But this is a quality, of course, that I want to get into it.

DS: But often the adjustments that you make are very small.

RL: Yes, and I think that that's it. I try in a way to make a minimum amount of adjustment. Sometimes you get a very interesting image that would almost be good by itself except that this was not the artist's intention. I think that one needs more than pure intention to make a work of art: in other words, my intention to exhibit doesn't automatically make it a work of art. But the original cartoonist has a job to do. He gets a story out and he's very good at his craft and puts it together and it's very interesting, but it isn't really inventive and it isn't really formed. I think it's inventive only in a mass way, that it has become inventive if you suddenly sit back and look at it and say: "My God, look what's happened to this image. We take this for an eye and this for a shadow under a chin and look what it really looks like." But this has gone on from generation to generation of illustrators, each one adding a little bit to the last, and it's become a kind of universal language. So I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way. I think it's maybe the same kind of thing that you find in Stella or in Noland where the image is very restricted. And I think that is what's interesting people these days that before you start painting the painting, you know exactly what it's going to look like - this kind of an image, which is completely different from what we've been schooled in, where we just let ourselves interact with the elements as they happen. This highly restrictive quality in art is what I'm interested in. And the cliche - the fact that an eye, an eyebrow, a nose, is drawn a certain way - is really the same kind of restriction that adds a tension to the painting.

DS: You were saying that sometimes you actually want to emphasise the cliche. Now this, I take it, would have to do not so much with its formal properties as with its meaning and its place in people's perceptions?

RL: Yes, I think so.

DS: But what is it that interests you about emphasising the cliche? You obviously enjoy the cliches of the romantic or adventure style strip cartoon. You like calling attention to these cliches. You like pointing them up. You like in a sense making them more like themselves than they really are.

RL: I have a feeling that in many ways I don't do as well as the original cartoons in this way. By the time the painting is put together, a lot of the impact of the original cartoon is really lost.

DS: But is being interested in these cliches like people who care for Mozart and Beethoven also caring for Rogers and Hart and the Beatles? They wouldn't do so in a patronising way; indeed, a piece of popular music might mean a great deal to them because of its associations. Is this your attitude to the strip cartoons, or is it not that at all? Or is it partly that and partly something else?

RL: I'm not sure that what I'm going to say is really true. I don't care whether they're good or bad or anything else. But they are subject matter, and I'm only using them and I am re-interpreting them. If I were working from three-dimensional things - trees and so forth or gas-stations that actually existed - there would be no problem. The only thing I'm doing is that I'm not putting perspective into it, so that I seem to be doing the same thing that they're doing. In other words, they're making a flat image and I'm making a flat image, and mine is very much like theirs. But the real difference is the fact that there's really no perspective in my images, which I think is an element of the work. I both like and dislike the cartoons. I enjoy them, they're probably amusing in some way, and I get a genuine kick out of them, though usually only a few frames will be really interesting to me. They're even strong in some ways. I think when they're very well drawn, certain sections - it may be partly accidental or maybe it's an innate ability on the part of the person that is doing the cartoon - really may be good. But by and large I think I look at them as being kind of hokey, just as I would look at those three-dimensional plastic photographs. That kind of material has been a silly thing for us to be spending time and technology on.

DS: Insofar as they are silly, do you enjoy the absurdity of the activity of going to a great deal of trouble to blow these cartoons up and make them a little more beautiful than they are? And, by the way, admit that maybe they're less so? Is this an absurdity that appeals to you?

RL: I think so. But I don't think of myself as really blowing them up and altering them. I get involved with them to the extent that I am no longer thinking in terms of the original, although I must admit, when I'm finished, there's a striking similarity between the two. But the whole fact of using the cartoons is lost. I work on several of them for a month or so, and on the first day or two I'm really involved with the original image, and after that I'm working on the painting.

DS: Partly because you begin, I believe, by making a drawing, and you paint from that drawing.

RL: I make a drawing from the original cartoon, or rearranged from a group of cartoons. Or they might be made up: they range from being completely made up by me to being very close to the original. And then that drawing is projected on canvas. This is a rather recent development; I used to do them just fresh and from the cartoon itself. Everybody thought that I was projecting them up, so I did. But then I work on that drawing in pencil on the canvas for quite a while, and then I work on the painting, finishing it for quite a while too.

DS: But once you've done the drawing, do you ever refer back to the original cartoon?

RL: Rarely. Rarely.

DS: By using a subject which is absurd, are you saying: "I am using subject matter; I am not painting abstract pictures. All the same, the subject matter is absurd, so it doesn't really matter."?

RL: No, I think I'm really interested in what kind of an image they have and what it really looks like as well as the formal aspect of it. Let it go at that. I'll just do it anyway. I'm interested in the kind of image in the same way that one would develop a classical form, an ideal head for instance. Some people don't really believe in this any more, but that was the idea, in a way, of classical work: ideal figures of people and godlike people. Well, the same thing has been developed in cartoons. It's not called classical, it's called a cliche. Well I'm interested in my work's redeveloping these classical ways, except that it's not classical, it's like a cartoon. I'm interested because of the impact it has when you look at it, not because it does anything formally. As a matter of fact, it's really contradictory to form, it's a restriction on form. I mean, you have to take into account something else while you're forming this painting. The hair, the eyes, whatever it is, have to be symbols which - it's sort of funny to say this - are eternal in this way. In realising of course that they're not eternal. But they will have this power of being the way to draw something. I don't know how to express it beyond that, but if it didn't quite look like the kind of eye I wanted it to look like and the kind of mouth I wanted it to look like, I would be changing it; it would bother me a lot. It isn't purely a formal problem. I'm not sure exactly why I do this, but I think that it's to establish the hardest kind of archetype that I can. There's a sort of formidable appearance that the work has when this is achieved. I think it also doesn't become achieved unless it's in line formally; just by itself it doesn't work. In other words, the enlarged cartoon itself would not do anything; it would be a kind of joke. But I think it's when the formal and this aspect of it being the right kind of eye come about, you have something. I think, really, that Picasso is involved in this. In spite of the fact that it seems as though he could do almost any kind of variation of any kind of eye or ear or head, there are certain ones that were very powerful and strong because of the kind of symbolism that he employed. And I don't know the meaning of this. It's what I think I'm up to, anyway.

DS: When you're doing, for example, the girl Iying on the pillow with the balloon caption saying: "Good morning.. . darling", this girl is a certain modern ideal in exactly the same way as the classical head of Venus is also an ideal kind of beauty. The readers of those magazines would like to look like that; they believe in it as an image. Now, do you believe in it as an image, as well as not believe in it?

RL: No, I don't really believe in it.

DS: I mean, do you like girls who look like the girls you paint?

RL: The kind I paint are really made of black lines and red dots; I see it that abstractly. It's very hard for me to fall for one of these creatures, because they're not really reality to me. However, that doesn't mean that I don't have a cliched ideal, a fantasy ideal, of a woman that I would be interested in. But I think I have in mind what they should look like for other people.

DS: What would you expect would be the reaction to seeing one of your cartoon paintings of somebody who was in the habit of reading these cartoons with complete seriousness, if there is anybody who does?

RL: I have had actual experience in this way. When I was doing the paintings for the World Fair, I was doing them out of doors in front of my garage in Jersey, and people would pass by and make comments, and you got all kinds of comments on various levels. You would get children who would realise that this was rather funny for art, which was rather sophisticated. And you would get older people who thought I was doing a very good job of it, just like the cartoonist: it was wonderful art for this reason.

DS: But as to your attitude towards these cliche goddesses, you say that it's not a particularly affectionate attitude?

RL: Well I don't know. I think it is and it isn't.

DS: I mean obviously it's ironical, but how ironical?

RL: Let me put it this way. I can realise that, when I was a child and looked at the comic books, these women were really convincing. I really thought these were very beautiful women. Now I see the drawing in it and they don't look that way to me. I mean, you could really have a love affair with these women as a child, and now these don't mean that to me in the originals, in the comic books. I realise that some are drawn better, hit the cliche better, than others. As I said, i'm interested in kind of getting the archetype that will hit this cliche, but also be powerful as a drawing. It can easily be both. It has to fit a number of things. It has to be interesting and consistent in colour, and everything has to be up there all at the same time, and this has to do, on a very obvious level, what it's intended to do, to tell a simple story. I believe in the story in one sense and obviously don't believe in it in the other
sense. It has to be right to make it all work as a visual thing. On the other hand, there's very little sense in a painting of a girl looking at a photograph of her gentlemen friend and saying "Good morning... darling." At the same time, it sums up a lot of things. Everybody believes in it on one level and everybody talks like this, in spite of the fact that it looks funny when you read it.

DS: I'm interested that you've already read a story into this picture by talking about her looking like this at her gentleman friend, not at her husband.

RL: I wish you hadn't brought that up.

DS: This does suggest that you are interested in the literary qualities of these images.

RL: I don't think I know why, but I am.

DS: You don't think you know why.

RL: No. I think I can make up reasons, as I've been making them up, but I'm not really sure they have anything to do with it. It's just that it has a certain kind of impact on me when all of this is right, even when the statement is a cliche. There are different kinds of statements that I put into these paintings. Some of them are very cliched, something that could be said thousands of times and has been. But I've done one of a scientist which is just a very long sentence which has so many subordinate clauses in it that you have no idea what the man was saying to begin with, so that's in a way humorous for another reason. And it also takes up a block of space in the painting, which interests me too. This becomes kind of Pop poetry in a way. But usually the statement is succinct and cliched and it's exactly like the drawing in that way. And I just like it when it falls in place that way. I don't really know why. And as you've seen, it's very different from the kind of work I was doing earlier. That was the opposite of the cliche, so it's been a kind of learning process to me. I think the idea isn't so much to mystify other people as to make an interesting problem for me to do. Maybe it's interesting because it's so different from what I've been schooled in.

DS: It's an extension of something that's always been done a great deal in art, which is using subject matter that has hitherto been regarded as being taboo, or beneath the artist's dignity, and showing that he can make art out of this.

RL: That's what realism is.

DS: That's what realism is. And what about the paintings which are

adaptations of fine art images, your Picassos and your Mondrians?

RL: I kind of wish you'd explain them to me, because it really doesn't do the same thing. It takes something which is already art and apparently degrades it. It's like a five-and-dime-store Picasso or Mondrian. But at the same time it isn't supposed to be non-art. It's a way of saying that Picasso is really a cartoonist and Mondrian is too, maybe. I don't really know. I don't think I understand it, but I think that it's a way of making cliches that occur in Picasso more cliched - a way of re-establishing them but also making them not a cliche. I think that it does just that.

DS: Yes, and that of course brings us to the most recent work, the abstract expressionist brush-strokes.

RL: Yes, this is in line, pretty much, with the attitudes to Picasso and Mondrian.

DS: Because those brush-strokes are cliches, aren't they? They've become cliches of contemporary art. I suppose that Rauschenberg was the first person to comment on this when he made a very slashing dribbly abstract expressionist painting and then made a duplicate of it. That, I take it, was the first move in this direction.

RL: Yes.

DS: And you're really continuing this by doing these big slashing brushstrokes but doing them in a way in which they've been very meticulously and carefully formed and shaped.

RL: And of course I'm not sure that Kline didn't do this too in his own way. They look like a brush-stroke but they're not one brush-stroke. I hear there were drawings for them. They are certainly reworked when you look at them, not spontaneous brush-strokes. i think this is true of all of them really, that they were symbolising brush-strokes, they were symbolising that art is art, but at the same time they were drawing a picture of a brush-stroke. It has at first a degrading aspect, the fact that it takes something which had a certain sensibility before and leaves that out, and puts it in again, in the same way that I would take Picassos which, when you really look at them, have very odd shapes, that are something like a triangle - only, I'll really make a triangle out of them to make it more of a cliche. But, at the same time, it is somewhat bent towards forming a work of art, so that it has this little twist to it also, so that it's re-establishing it as art but with more of a cliched manner. I think I'm doing the same thing with the brush-strokes, simplifying them and epitomising them but still trying to make an organisation out of them.

DS: You've actually made them, it seems to me, look more violent. In building them up in this meticulous way, you've made them more violent and aggressive and slashing than they ever are when they're made in a slashing way.

RL: Well I hope so.

DS: The thing that impresses me about the biggest and perhaps the best of these recent paintings....

RL: In America the biggest is the best.

DS: ... is that I see humour in it but I also see it as a very dramatic painting. And this, I take it, was also part of your intention.

RL: Yes, I think that's always part of my intention.

DS: In other words, it's another case of degrading the thing and then building it up again, is it? The abstract expressionist brush mark is meant to be a dramatic mark. You make a joke about it, but you make it dramatic again. In the same way as you do with the Picassos: you degrade Picasso but aiso try to take it back to art.

RL: And I think that there's maybe the same element in the Picasso and the brush-stroke that's in almost all subject matter that's violent, sentimental, romantic, highly emotionally charged. But the method of doing it is the very removed method of commercial art. And it's really not so much that I use that method, but that it appears as though I've used it and as though the thing has been done by a committee of people rather than an artist at work.

DS: In the abstract expressionist brush-stroke paintings and especially in the biggest one, each dark and light in the stroke of the brush is brought out by being carefully drawn, meticulously done. And one of the reasons why the result seems peculiarlyviolent and aggressive is because of the imagery of things like teeth and other jagged, tearing things that are seen in your carefully done image of the violent brush-stroke and are much more vivid there than they are in the original violent brushstroke. Were you conscious of making this sort of imagery of teeth and knives and other violent instruments?

RL: No. I did notice that some of the edges of the brush-strokes looked like explosions and things, but I really wasn't thinking of any other imagery except the obvious.

DS: But you did want it to be violent and dramatic, through making the darks blacker and the lights more vivid and so on.

RL: Yes. And its size. These would be very large brush strokes for anybody's painting. They're blown up and magnified even by comparison with brush-stroke paintings that were very large when they were done. I wasn't able to make anything that would look like a brush-stroke, they all looked like something else, and it took me a while to develop the symbolism which would remind people enough of brush-strokes and would be the kind of shape I could use in painting. I mean a brush-stroke really doesn't look anything like these things: you'd have black lines around solid colours, and it just isn't anything like a brush-stroke any more than a cartoon head is like a head. Or a photograph of a head. It was a question of developing some kind of ciiche or some kind of archetypal brush-stroke appearance which would be convincing as a brush-stroke, and which would be in line with elements I like to use and am familiar with using.

DS: In some of your last abstract paintings before you started to do Pop Art, I've noticed that there are passages where you've got what seems to be a trail left by a very wide brush very charged with paint, with the paint put on heavily across the canvas. And it struck me that there it was as if those marks were not merely slashing brush-strokes, but almost like illustrations of slashing brush-strokes; they had a peculiarly concrete and material quality in the paint.

RL: I think I was aware of that.

DS: At that time?

RL: Yes, not to the same degree as later, but I think I recognised that I was making brush-strokes like brush-strokes.

DS: Without any humorous intention?

RL: Yes

DS: And when you started to have the idea of doing these new brushstroke paintings, you didn't think back at all to the last abstract expressionist things you yourself had done?

RL: No. But I realised after I had done some that there was a similarity between the two. The kind of brush-stroke in some of these is very much like the kind I was doing then. This was maybe more a parody of myself than anyone. But I think that these brush-stroke paintings are really not so much a parody of anyone's paintings as an epitome or codifying of brush-strokes. I think it's a sort of synthetic Abstract Expressionism. It's really in a way what Synthetic Cubism did to collage, in that it made a picture of a collage. And this was in some ways a picture of a brush-stroke.

DS: Yes, and in Synthetic Cubism there was plenty of play of that sort. Was this a painting of a piece of grained wood, was it a piece of grained wood, or was it a cut out piece of paper imitating grained wood?

RL: That element of play in Cubism: where the play becomes more literary, it led to Dada. I don't think that my work relates to Dada, though probably everybody's painting is influenced by Dada, including Jackson Pollock's. But I think that the principal influence was Cubism and still is.

2003-11-14T23:48:00.000-08:00

"A Propos of Measuring a Mobile" by Alexander Calder
upubl. MSS, 1943, The Calder Foundation, New York

It was more or less directly as a result of my visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, and the sight of all his rectangles of color deployed on the wall, that my first work in the abstract was based on the concept of stellar relationships. Since then there have been variations from this theme, but I always seem to come back to it, in some form or other. For though the lightness of a pierced or serrated solid or surface is extremely interesting the still greater lack of weight of deployed nuclei is much more so.

I say nuclei, for to me whatever sphere, or other form, I use in these constructions does not necessarily mean a body of that size, shape or color, but may mean a more minute system of bodies, an almost spheric condition, or even a void. I.E. the idea that one can compose any things of which he can conceive.

To me the most important thing in composition is disparity. Thus black and white are the strong colors, with a spot of red to mark the other corner of a triangle which is by no means equilateral, isosceles, or right. To vary this still further use yellow, then, later, blue. Anything suggestive of symmetry is decidedly undesirable, except possibly where an approximate symmetry is used in a detail to enhance the inequality with the general scheme.

The admission of approximation is necessary, for one cannot hope to be absolute in his precision. He cannot see, or even conceive of a thing from all possible points of view, simultaneously. While he perfects the front, the side, or rear may be weak; then while he strengthens the other facade he may be weakening that originally the best. There is no end to this. To finish the work he must approximate.

In a way it is even desirable that one face be of finer quality than the others, for this gives a head and a tail to the object and makes it more alive.

A knowledge of, and sympathy with, the qualities of the materials used are essential to proper treatment.

Stone, the most ancient, should be kept massive, not cut into ribbons. The strength must be retained.

Bronze, cast, serves well for slender, attenuated shapes. It is strong even when very slender.

Wood has a grain which must be reckoned with. It can be slender in one direction only.

Wire, rods, sheet metal have strength, even in very attenuated forms, and respond quickly to whatever sort of work one may subject them to. Contrasts in mass or weight are feasible, too, according to the gauge, or to the kind of metal used, so that physical laws, as well as aesthetic concepts, can be held to. There is of course a close alliance between physics and aesthetics.

Strength and durability in sculpture are highly desirable. However, fineness and delicacy may be even more essential to the general concept, and it will then be necessary to decide which is to control the design.

Also there is the possibility of using motion in an object as part of the design and composition. The sculpture then becomes in one sense a machine, and as such it will be necessary to design it as a machine, so that the moving parts shall leave a reasonable ruggedness. Even those sculptures designed to be propelled by the wind are still machines, and should be considered thus, as well as aesthetically.

However the mechanical element must never control the aesthetic. Much better a poor machine and a good sculpture.

So-called Industrial Design is not a fine art. Its motive is to instill "style," i.e. a yearly trend, be it up or be it down, to our daily commodities. There are a certain makes of automobiles, whose body designs of a few years ago were simpler and much better than those of 1941-42. And after accustoming ourselves to the hardy simplicity of Army trucks and Jeeps for a few years we are threatened with being subjected to cars after the war whose design will be essentially that of the 1941-41 vintage.

As mobiles are so particularly my product I feel a word or two about their measuring and handling to be fitting.

A mobile in motion leaves an invisible wake behind it, or rather, each element leaves an individual wake behind its individual self. Sometimes these wakes are contracted within each other, and sometimes they are deployed. In this latter position the mobile occupies more space, and it is the diameter of this maximum trajectory that should be considered in measuring a mobile.

In their handling, i.e. setting them in motion by a touch of the hand, consideration should be had for the direction in which the object is designed to move, and for the inertia of the mass involved. Perhaps it is necessary to be fairly familiar with at least the type of mobile in order to decide upon the direction in which it will best move, but a simple glance should be sufficient to estimate the inertia of the various masses. A slow gentle impulse, as though one were moving a barge is almost infallible. In any case, gentle is the word.

2003-11-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

On Realism and Art
Roman Jakobson

The following essay first appeared in 1921. It is collected in Readings in Russian Poetics, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. (Extracted from Context, A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture, www.centerforbookculture.org)

Until recently, the history of art, particularly that of literature, has had more in common with causerie than with scholarship. It obeyed all the laws of causerie, skipping blithely from topic to topic, from lyrical effusions on the elegance of forms to anecdotes from the artist's life, from psychological truisms to questions concerning philosophical significance and social environment. It is such a gratifying and easy task to chat about life and times using literary works as a basis, just as it is more gratifying and easier to copy from a plaster cast than to draw a living body. In causerie we are slipshod with our terminology; in fact, variations in terms and equivocations so apt to punning often lend considerable charm to the conversation. The history of art has been equally slipshod with respect to scholarly terminology. It has employed the current vocabulary without screening the words critically, without defining them precisely, and without considering the multiplicity of their meanings. For example, historians of literature unconscionably confused the idealism denoting a specific philosophical doctrine with a looser idealism denoting behavior, motivated by other than narrow considerations of material gain. Still more hopeless was the web of confusion surrounding the term "form," brilliantly exposed by Anton Marty in his works on general grammar. It was the term "realism," however, which fared especially badly. The uncritical use of this word, so very elusive in meaning, has had fateful consequences.

What is realism as understood by the theoretician of art? It is an artistic trend which aims at conveying reality as closely as possible and strives for maximum verisimilitude. We call realistic those works which we feel accurately depict life by displaying verisimilitude. Right off we are faced with an ambiguity, namely:

1. Realism may refer to the aspiration and intent of the author; i.e., a work is understood to be realistic if it is conceived by its author as a display of verisimilitude, as true to life (meaning A).
2. A work may be called realistic if I, the person judging it, perceive it as true to life (meaning B).

In the first case, we are forced to evaluate on an intrinsic basis; in the second case, the reader's individual impression is the decisive criterion. The history of art has hopelessly confused these two interpretations of the term "realism." An objective and irrefutable validity is ascribed to individual, private local points of view. The question as to whether a given work is realistic or not is covertly reduced to the question of what attitude I take toward it. Thus meaning B imperceptibly replaces meaning A. Classicists, sentimentalists, the romanticists to a certain extent, even the "realists" of the nineteenth century, the modernists to a large degree, and, finally, the futurists, expressionists, and their like have more than once steadfastly proclaimed faithfulness to reality, maximum verisimilitude--in other words, realism--as the guiding motto of their artistic program. In the nineteenth century, this motto gave rise to an artistic movement. It was primarily the late copiers of that trend who outlined the currently recognized history of art, in particular, the history of literature. Hence, one specific case, one separate artistic movement was identified as the ultimate manifestation of realism in art and was made the standard by which to measure the degree of realism in preceding and succeeding artistic movements. Thus, a new covert identification has occurred, a third meaning of the word "realism" has crept in (meaning C), one which comprehends the sum total of the features characteristic of one specific artistic current of the nineteenth century.

In other words, to the literary historians the realistic works of the last century represent the highest degree of verisimilitude, the maximum faithfulness to life.

Let us now analyze the concept of verisimilitude in art. While in painting and in the other visual arts the illusion of an objective and absolute faithfulness to reality is conceivable, "natural" (in Plato's terminology), verisimilitude in a verbal expression or in a literary description obviously makes no sense whatever. Can the question be raised about a higher degree of verisimilitude of this or that poetic trope? Can one say that one metaphor or metonymy is conventional or, so to say, figurative? The methods of projecting three-dimensional space onto a flat surface are established by convention; the use of color, the abstracting, the simplification, of the object depicted, and the choice of reproducible features are all based on convention. It is necessary to learn the conventional language of painting in order to "see" a picture, just as it is impossible to understand what is spoken without knowing the language. This conventional, traditional aspect of painting to a great extent conditions the very act of our visual perception. As tradition accumulates, the painted image becomes an ideogram, a formula, to which the object portrayed is linked by contiguity. Recognition becomes instantaneous. We no longer see a picture. The ideogram needs to be deformed. The artist-innovator must impose a new form upon our perception, if we are to detect in a given thing those traits which went unnoticed the day before. He may present the object in an unusual perspective; he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his predecessors. Thus Kramskoj, one of the founders of the so-called realist school of Russian painting, recounts in his memoirs his efforts to deform to the utmost the principles of composition as advocated by the Academy. The motivation behind this "disorder" was the desire for a closer approximation of reality. The urge to deform an ideogram usually underlies the Sturm und Drung stage of new artistic currents.

Everyday language uses a number of euphemisms, including polite formulas, circumlocutions, allusions, and stock phrases. However, when we want our speech to be candid, natural, and expressive, we discard the usual polite etiquette and call things by their real names. They have a fresh ring, and we feel that they are "the right words." But as soon as the name has merged with the object it designates, we must, conversely, resort to metaphor, allusion, or allegory if we wish a more expressive term. It will sound more impressive, it will be more striking. To put it in another way, when searching for a word which will revitalize an object, we pick a farfetched word, unusual at least in its given application, a word which is forced into service. Such an unexpected word may, depending on current usage, be either a figurative or a direct reference to the object. Examples of this sort are numerous, particularly in the history of obscene vocabulary. To call the sex act by its own name sounds brazen, but if in certain circles strong language is the rule, a trope or euphemism is more forceful and effective. Such is the verb utilizirovat [to utilize] of the Russian hussar. Foreign words are accordingly more insulting and are readily picked up for such purposes. A Russian may use the absurd epithets gollandskij [Dutch] or morzovyj [walrus-like] as abusive modifiers of an object which has nothing to do with either Holland or walruses; the impact of his swearing is greatly heightened as a result. Instead of the infamous oath involving copulation with the addressee's mother, the Russian peasant prefers the fantastic image of copulating with the addressee's soul--and, for further emphasis, uses the negative parallelism: tvoju dusu ne mat [your soul not your mother].

The same applies to revolutionary realism in literature. The words of yesterday's narrative grow stale; now the item is described by features that were yesterday held to be the least descriptive, the least worth representing, features which were scarcely noticed. "He is fond of dwelling on unessential details" is the classic judgment passed on the innovators by conservative critics of every era. I leave it to the lover of quotations to collect similar judgments pronounced on Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Andrei Bely, and others by their contemporaries. To the followers of a new movement, a description based on unessential details seems more real than the petrified tradition of their predecessors. But the perception of those of a more conservative persuasion continues to be determined by the old canons; they will accordingly interpret any deformation of these canons by a new movement as a rejection of the principle of verisimilitude, as a deviation from realism. They will therefore uphold the old canons as the only realistic ones. Thus, in discussing meaning A of the term "realism" (i.e., the artistic intent to render life as it is), we see that the definition leaves room for ambiguity:

A1 : The tendency to deform given artistic norms conceived as an approximation of reality;
A2 : The conservative tendency to remain within the limits of a given artistic tradition, conceived as faithfulness to reality.

Meaning B presupposes that my subjective evaluation will pronounce a given artistic fact faithful to reality; thus, factoring in the results obtained, we find:

B1 : I rebel against a given artistic code and view its deformation as a more accurate rendition of reality;
B2 : I am conservative and view the deformation of the artistic code, to which I subscribe, as a distortion of reality.

In the latter case only those artistic facts which do not contradict my artistic values may be called realistic. But inasmuch as I hold my own values (the tradition to which I belong) to be the most realistic, and because I feel that within the framework of other traditions my code cannot be fully realized even if the tradition in question does not contradict it, I find in these traditions only a partial, embryonic, immature, or decadent realism. I declare that the only genuine realism is the one on which I was brought up. Conversely, in the case of B1, my attitude to all artistic formulas contradicting a particular set of artistic values unacceptable to me would be similar to my attitude in the case of B2 toward forms which are not in opposition. I can readily ascribe a realistic tendency (realistic as understood by A1) to forms which were never conceived as such. In the same way, the Primitives were often interpreted from the point of view of B1. While their incompatibility with the norms on which we were raised was immediately evident, their faithful adherence to their own norms and traditions was lost from view (i.e., A2 was interpreted as A1). Similarly, certain writings may be felt and interpreted as poetry, although not all meant as such. Consider Gogol's pronouncement about the poetic qualities of an inventory of the Muscovite crown jewels, Novalis's observation about the poetic nature of the alphabet, the statement of the Futurist Krucenyx about the poetic sound of a laundry list, or that of the poet Xlebnikov claiming that at times a misprint can be an artistically valid distortion of a word.

The concrete content of A1, A2, B1, and B2 is extremely relative. Thus a contemporary critic might detect realism in Delacroix, but not in Delaroche; in El Greco and Andrei Rublev, but not in Guido Reni; in a Scythian idol, but not in the Laocoon. A directly opposite judgment, however, would have been characteristic of a pupil of the Academy in the previous century. Whoever senses faithfulness to life in Racine does not find it in Shakespeare, and vice versa.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a group of painters struggled in Russia on behalf of realism (the first phase of C, i.e., a special case of A1). One of them, Repin, painted a picture, "Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son." Repin's supporters greeted it as realistic (C, a special case of B1). Repin's teacher at the Academy, however, was appalled by the lack of realism in the painting, and he carefully itemized all the instances of Repin's distortion of verisimilitude by comparison with the academic canon which was for him the only guarantee of verisimilitude (i.e., from the standpoint of B2).

* * * *

Meanwhile, those art historians who, as we have already indicated, were primarily associated with the later imitators of "realism" by virtue of their aesthetic code (the second phase of C), arbitrarily equated C and B2, even though C is in fact simply a special case of B. As we know, meaning B covertly replaces A, so that the whole difference between A1 and A2 is lost, and the destruction of ideographs is understood only as a means of creating new ones. The conservative, of course, fails to recognize the self-sufficient aesthetic value of deformation. Thus, supposedly having A in mind (actually A2), the historian of art addresses himself to C. Therefore, when a literary historian brilliantly declares that "Russian literature is typically realistic," his statement is tantamount to saying, "Man is typically twenty years old."

As the tradition equating realism with C became established, the new realist artists (in the A1 sense) were compelled to call themselves neorealists, realists in the higher sense of the word, or naturalists, and they drew a line between quasi- or pseudo-realism (C) and what they conceived to be genuine realism (i.e., their own). "I am a realist, but only in the higher sense of the word," Dostoyevski declared. And an almost identical declaration has been made in turn by the Symbolists, by Italian and Russian Futurists, by German Expressionists, and so on and on. These neorealists have at various times completely identified their aesthetic platforms with realism in general, and, therefore, in evaluating the representatives of C, they had to expel them from the ranks of realism. Thus posthumous criticism has periodically questioned the realism of Gogol, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Ostrovski.

The manner in which C itself is characterized by historians of art, especially historians of literature, is very vague and approximate. We must not forget that the imitators were those who decided which characteristics typified realism. A closer analysis will no doubt replace C with a number of more precise values and will reveal that certain devices which we indiscriminately associate with C are by no means typical of all the representatives of the so-called realist school; the same devices are in fact also found outside the realist school.

We have already mentioned the characterization of progressive realism in terms of unessential details. One such device--cultivated, incidentally, by a number of the representatives of the C school (in Russia, the so-called Gogol school) and for that reason sometimes incorrectly identified with C--is the condensation of the narrative by means of images based on contiguity, i.e., the use of the normal designative term. This "condensation" is realized either in spite of the plot or by eliminating the plot entirely. Let us take a crude example from Russian literature, that of the suicides of Poor Liza and Anna Karenina. Describing Anna's suicide, Tolstoy primarily writes about her handbag. Such an unessential detail would have made no sense to Karamzin, although Karamzin's own tale (in comparison with the eighteenth-century adventure novel) would likewise seem but a series of unessential details. If the hero of an eighteenth-century adventure novel encounters a passer-by, it may be taken for granted that the latter is of importance either to the hero or, at least, to the plot. But it is obligatory in Gogol or Tolstoy or Dostoyevski that the hero first meet an unimportant and (from the point of view of the story) superfluous passer-by, and that their resulting conversation should have no bearing on the story. Since such a device is frequently thought to be realistic, we will denote it by D, stressing that this D is often found within C.

A pupil is asked to solve a problem: "A bird flew out of its cage; how soon will it reach the forest, if it flies at such a such a speed per minute, and the distance between the cage and the forest is such and such?" "What color is the cage?" asks the child. This child is a typical realist in the D sense of the word.

Or, an anecdote of the type known as an Armenian riddle: "It hangs in the drawing room and is green; what is it?" The answer: "A herring."--"Why in a drawing room?"--"Well, why couldn't it hang there?"--"Why green?"--"It was painted green."--"But why?"--"To make it harder to guess." This desire to conceal the answer, this deliberate effort to delay recognition, brings out a new feature, the newly improvised epithet. Exaggeration in art is unavoidable, wrote Dostoyevski; in order to show an object, it is necessary to deform the shape it used to have; it must be tinted, just as slides to be viewed under a microscope are tinted. You color your object in an original way and think that it has become more palpable, clearer, more real (A1). In a Cubist's picture, a single object is multiplied and shown from several points of view; thus it is made more tangible. This is a device used in painting. But it is also possible to motivate and justify this device in the painting itself; an object is doubled when reflected in a mirror. The same is true of literature. The herring is green because it has been painted; a startling epithet results, and the trope becomes an epic motif. Why did you paint it? The author will always have an answer, but, in fact, there is only one right answer: "To make it harder to guess."

Thus a strange term may be foisted on an object or asserted as a particular aspect of it. Negative parellelism explicitly rejects metaphorical substitution for its proper term: "I am not a tree, I am a woman," says the girl in a poem by the Czech poet Sramek. This literary construction can be justified; from a special narrative feature, it can become a detail of plot development: "Some said, 'These are the footprints of an ermine'; others reported, 'No, these are not the footprints of an ermine; it was Curila Plenkovic passing by.'" Inverted negative parallelism rejects a normally used term and employs a metaphor (in the Sramek poem quoted earlier: "I am not a woman, I am a tree," or the following from a play by another Czech poet, Capek: "What is this?--A handkerchief.--But it is not a handkerchief. It is a beautiful woman standing by the window. She's dressed all in white and is dreaming of love."

In Russian erotic tales, copulation is frequently stated in terms of inverted parallelism; the same is true of wedding songs, with the difference that in the latter, the constructions using metaphors are not usually justified, while in the former these metaphors find motivation as the means by which the cunning hero can seduce the fair maid, or as an interpretation of human copulation by an animal incapable of comprehending it. From time to time, the consistent motivation and justification of poetic constructions have also been called realism. Thus the Czech novelist Capek-Chod in his tale, "The Westernmost Slav," slyly calls the first chapter, in which "romantic" fantasy is motivated by typhoid delirium, a "realistic chapter."

Let us use E to designate such realism, i.e., the requirement of consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices. This E is often confused with C, B, etc. By failing to distinguish among the variety of concepts latent in the term "realism," theoreticians and historians of art--in particular, of literature--are acting as if the term were a bottomless sack into which everything and anything could be conveniently hidden away.

This objection may be made: no, not everything. No one will call Hoffmann's fantastic tales realistic. But does this not indicate that there is somehow a single meaning in the word "realism," that there is, after all, a common denominator?

My answer is: no one will call a "key" a "lock," but this does not mean that the word "lock" has only one meaning. We cannot equate with impunity the various meanings of the word "realism" just as we cannot, unless we wish to be called mad, equate a hair lock with a padlock. It is true that the various meanings of some words (for example, "bill") are far more distinct from one another than they are in the case of the word "realism," where we can imagine a set of facts about which we could simultaneously say, this is realism in the meaning of C, B, or A1, etc., of the word. Nevertheless, it is inexcusable to confuse C, B, A1, etc. A term once used in American slang to denote a socially inept person was "turkey." There are probably "turkeys" in Turkey, and there are doubtless men named Harry who are blessed with great amounts of hair. But we may not jump to conclusions concerning the social aptitudes of the Turks nor the hairiness of men named Harry. This "commandment" is self-evident to the point of imbecility, yet those who speak of artistic realism continually sin against it.

--Translated from Russian by Karol Magassy

2003-11-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

("Enter art as a tool for phenomenological exploration"... The co-opting of the artist's "seeing" and process of making art by cognitive theorists is of interest to me, especially in pursuit of an understanding of the re-defining of art by mind-scientists in the terms of their semi-scientific/semi-philosophic non-aesthetic discipline - PJM

Art as enaction
Alva Noë
Moderators: Noga Arikha, Gloria Origgi, Donald Glowinski

The act of art has turned to a direct examination of our perceptual processes. - Robert Irwin

1. The paradox of perceptual transparency

When we try to make perceptual experience itself the object of our reflection, we tend to see through it (so to speak) to the objects of experience. We encounter what is seen, not the qualities of the seeing itself.

This is a familiar theme in philosophy. An accurate description of visual experience will confine itself to, for example, mere blobs of color. When we talk of what we see (e.g. deer grazing on a lawn), we “go beyond” what is strictly given to us in experience.

Kant attacked this idea of Hume’s and insisted that we falsify experience when we attempt to describe it in these supposedly neutral terms. I am not more faithful to my experience of the deer, but less, when I try to describe it in terms of brownish blobs on a green background. To be faithful to the experience as I actually enjoy it, I must talk about the way the experience purports to represent the world. To describe experience, then, is to describe the experienced world. And so experience is, in this sense, transparent.

The transparency of experience poses a problem for any attempt to make perceptual experience itself the object of investigation in the way that has interested philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists. This leads us to inquire: can there be a phenomenology of experience, a science of consciousness?

One way to appreciate the paradoxical nature of this problem is to consider it in connection with a similar problem faced by representational painting. If a painter sets him or herself the goal of depicting a scene, then the painter must attend not to the scene itself (as it were), but rather to the way the scene looks (i.e. from a given vantage point). This is in part what Ruskin had in mind when he wrote (in his Elements of Drawing): “The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of...flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, — as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight”.

One consequence of this is that, although it is possible to make a picture of a room, it is not possible to depict our experience of the room. There can be no pictures of the visual field itself.

Can there be a science of consciousness, then, if the object of consciousness itself is too slippery or transparent or vague to be captured in thought? Is phenomenology possible?

In this short paper I make two claims. First, I argue that phenomenology is possible, but only if we adopt a new conception of experience which I call the “enactive” conception (borrowing a phrase used by the late neuroscientist Francisco Varela and his collaborator Evan Thompson). The basic idea of the enactive conception is that experience is an activity of encounter with the world; it is temporally extended; its character is fixed by laws of “sensorimotor contingency.”

Second, I argue that art can make a contribution to the study of perceptual consciousness. What I call “experiential art” can provide perceivers with occasions to catch themselves in the act of perceptual exploration and can play a role in phenomenological investigation.

2. The enactive approach to perceptual consciousness

If perceptual experience is transparent in the way we have considered, then there can be no representation of experience itself in thought, or science, or art. We know, however, that it is possible to represent experience in thought, science and art. (Don’t we?) This entails, then, that experience cannot be transparent in the way we have considered; that we have mischaracterized experience.

One approach, then, to the paradox of transparency is this: we reject the way of thinking about perceptual experience that invites the metaphor of transparency. And what way is that? It is the way of thinking about experience according to which we think of the content of experience as like the content of a picture. The hallmark of pictorial content is that it is given all at once – in high resolution, sharp focus, uniform detail, from the center of the picture to its periphery. A basic fact about perceptual experience is that it doesn’t present the world in this way.

Consider your present visual experience. You look at your room. You experience it as densely packed with details – objects and their spatial arrangements, their colors, and so on. You thus encounter the world as detailed in your experience. But crucially, the fact that you now experience the world as detailed does not entail that, right now, you represent all that detail in consciousness. It is clear that you do not: some items are in the center of your focus and attention, others are only dimly present, as background detail, and much detail is altogether absent from your current experience.

Importantly, the fact that you are only immediately aware of a relatively small amount of detail is no obstacle to its being the case that you experience the presence of a detailed environment. First, we experience the environment as fully detailed, all at once; we don’t experience ourselves as, as it were, simultaneously representing all of its detail. (When you touch something with your eyes shut, you feel its shape, but it doesn’t seem to you as if you are actually making skin-to-item contact with every part of its surface.) Second, the sense in which we experience the environment as present in all its detail, even when we only attend to the environment in this or that limited respect, consists in the fact that we have access to the detail, and that we are familiar -- in a basic, practical way -- with the fact that we have access to it.

Consider an example: you may experience the sofa as visually present, even though you only see the parts of the sofa’s surface that are not blocked by the coffee table. The table prevents you from seeing the sofa in totality, yet you experience it as completely present. You experience as present in totality that which you only experience in part.

How can this be?

One answer – the standard answer offered in cognitive science – is that we interpret our limited sensory experience in the light of our knowledge. If we didn’t know what sofas were – if we didn’t have these concepts -- then we wouldn’t have a sense of the complete presence of this object. We don’t really experience the objects as wholes; we infer their wholeness.

This proposal is clearly right to some extent. But it can’t be the whole story. I take it that it is a basic fact of our perceptual phenomenology that we do not merely think the presence of the occluded bits of the sofa, we experience its presence in a perceptual modality. Consider, for example, Kanisza’s triangle:

The occluded portions of the disks located at the vertices are surely sensed, not merely thought, to be present.

Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon – the sense of the perceptual presence of that which is, strictly speaking, absent - is the fact that we experience objects, such as a tomato on a counter in front of us, in three-dimensional fullness – as present as voluminous solids – even though, strictly speaking, we can only perceive the facing sides of objects. Surely the tomato looks to be a voluminous whole.

Indeed, we can contrast the sense of the strictly unseen parts of the tomato as perceptually present, with the sense of the presence, say, of the space behind your head, or the room next door, or the building next door, or the Eiffel Tower. These other items are also “felt” to be present, but not as perceptually present. They are present merely as thought. The sofa and the tomato, in contrast, are not merely thought to be present as wholes, although they are thought to be present as wholes; they are – or so I would urge -- experienced as present as wholes.

If it were not possible to explain this distinction between that which is unperceived and that which is unperceived but nevertheless perceptually experienced as present, then perhaps we should be forced to admit that the distinction was, in fact, chimerical. But we can explain it.

The basic idea is this: the kind of access we have to the things we perceive as present is different from the kind of access we have to things whose presence is merely thought or inferred.

Consider, first, that our perceptual lives are structured by “sensorimotor contingencies”. When you move toward an object, it looms in your visual field. When you move around it, it changes profile. In these and many other ways, sensory stimulation is affected by movement. These patterns of interdependence between sensory stimulation and movement are patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Perceivers are implicitly familiar with these sensorimotor contingencies.

Consider, second, that your relation to the environment is mediated by patterns of sensorimotor contingency. If you see an object, then your relation to it is governed by eye-movement-dependent patterns of sensorimotor contingency. For example, blinking momentarily disrupts sensory stimulation, and turning away changes the sensory stimulation in familiar ways. Stopping your ears, in contrast, makes no difference to your visual experience of an object. This is because auditory sensorimotor contingencies are irrelevant to vision.

We are now armed with the tools we need to understand the experiential presence of objects whose parts are, strictly speaking, unperceived. Consider, for example, the tomato. It is present in full because our relation, even to its strictly unseen portions, is mediated by distinctly visual patterns of sensorimotor contingency. A movement to the left brings hidden bits of the tomato into view. A step forward and around brings other bits into view. Our relation to the tomato, seen and unseen, is mediated by these patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Moreover, we know that it is. We may not know this in any explicit way that we could formulate in sentences. But we know it implicitly. This implicit knowledge is manifest in the way perceivers spontaneously crane their necks, peer, and move about in order to perceive that which is of interest. The visual character of the relation to the tomato comes out in such facts as that, for example, moving the hands, or stopping and unstopping the ears, makes no difference at all to the sensory stimulation received from the tomato.

In contrast, my relation to the Eiffel tower, or to the room next door, is not mediated by any patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Stopping and unstopping my ears, shutting my eyes, turning around, make no difference to my relation to those things. These items are present to consciousness, yes, but only thanks to the power of thought.

Of course there is no sharp line here. I don’t see the space behind my head, but the merest movement of the head brings it into view. And if I am in Paris, then walking to the window may be all that is needed to bring the Eiffel Tower into view. I am related by sensorimotor contingencies even to places on the far side of the earth, at least if we are willing to consider very complex contingencies.

Perceptual states are characterized not merely by the fact that the relation between the state and its object is in this way movement-dependent. They are also characterized by the fact that movements on the part of the object grab our attention. The desk in the room next door might jump up and down without provoking any change in my sensory stimulation. But a movement on the part of the tomato in front of me is likely to stimulate me, thus attracting my attention, provoking further movement on my part. Perceptual states, then, are states whose relations to their objects are characterized by movement-dependence, on the one hand, and object-dependence on the other.

According to this approach to perceptual experience, the content of an experience is not given all at once, as is the content of a picture given all at once. Rather, the content is given only thanks to the perceiver’s exercise of knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies. The content of experience isn’t really given at all – it is enacted.

Perceptual experience, according to this enactive approach, is itself a temporally extended activity, an activity of skill-based exploration of the environment.

3. Perceptual experience isn’t transparent after all

One strategy, then, for coping with the paradox of transparency is to give up the pictorial conception of perceptual content. This is the strategy that I advocate. However it is important to resist giving into dogmatism on this score. There remains a sense in which perceptual experience is transparent. We typically reflect on our experiences as modes of access to the world – our thought, our attention dwell in the world conceived of as made up of objects, properties, and facts. Thus, for example, when we take our experiences of the tomato, the sofa, and the cat at face value, we say such things as: “there is a tomato,” “that’s a nice couch,” et cetera. In this case, we enjoy experience in the mode of transparency.

But there is another mode in which we can enjoy our experiences. This is the mode of activity. When we reflect on our experiences in the mode of activity, we are reflecting on them as themselves things we do, and on the world as given as affording this or that possibility for movement or action. We rarely reflect on experience in this mode, but we do so sometimes, and we can do so if we wish. Art, or other spectacles (e.g. the performance of a magician) provides a natural occasion for this sort of reflection in the mode of activity.

4. The project of phenomenology

Phenomenology is hard to do in the transparent mode, and indeed, it may be impossible. For that to which we can turn our attention, when we are in the transparent mode, is the world itself.

But phenomenological reflection can proceed in the mode of activity, when we reflect on the way the world becomes available to us through our active exploration.

Enter art as a tool for phenomenological exploration. Consider the way a Richard Serra sculpture presents a surprising environmental occasion for phenomenological self-reflection. The pieces overpower and overwhelm, induce giddy disorientation, and generally make us aware of what it is like to be a perceiver, an enactor of perceptual content. When we explore a Serra sculpture we actively explore an environment and the sculpture provides a context in which we are enabled to catch ourselves in the act of exploring the world.

Or consider a Chuck Close painting, a large format portrait whose content dissolves into an abstraction of pixels as move closer, regaining sharpness and form as we move away.

Artists like Close and Serra make experience their subject matter, not by attempting to depict experience itself, but by providing perceivers an opportunity of self-aware enactment.

Artists expose enactment for what it is, and so they enable us to understand our active role in perceptually experiencing the world.

5. Pictures and phenomenology

There has been a considerable amount of investigation of pictures, pictoriality, and the relation between these and perception. A recurring theme in these discussions is the idea that a picture — a line drawing, say — depicts because the drawing gives rise to a representation in us (e.g. the retinal image) like that which we would enjoy were we to look at the depicted scene. Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, writes, for example, that a picture “is nothing but a more convenient way of arranging matter so that it projects a pattern identical to real objects”. The idea is that we experience the depicted scene, when we look at a picture, because the picture produces in us just the effect (or nearly the identical effect) to that which would be produced by the actual scene.

That the brain would need to make assumptions to get from the retinal image to a description of the world is clear: there’s just not enough information in the retinal image to specify uniquely the environmental layout. In this way, Pinker suggests that the mechanisms by which we interpret pictures as depicting are the same as those that control how we interpret the retinal image as depicting. Seeing pictures, on this sort of view, is like seeing a retinal image. It is vision at one remove.

A similar idea has been proposed by Hayes and Ross, building on the work of Marr. They suggest that line drawings represent because they correspond to psychologically real means of representation in the brain. That is, what explains the fact that the visual system readily interprets the line drawing as having the pictorial content it does have is the fact that the line drawing is like the brain’s own drawing of the depicted scene.

There is clearly something right in these proposals. When you view a picture and view it not as a bit of canvass or paper or whatever, but as a picture with a content, then there is a definite sense in which you see that which is depicted by the picture. So there must be some similarity between the state you are in when you look at a picture of x, and the state you are in when you actually look at x.

I am skeptical of this standard view, however, for I am skeptical of the idea that perception proceeds, as it were, from the retinal image to the perceived world. According to the enactive view, we do not construct the world from the retinal image, we encounter it in our active exploration making use of our understanding of patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Perception is not a process of constructing an internal image, so it seems implausible that pictures depict by producing the sort of representation in us that the depicted scene would produce.

It is not pictures as objects of perception, that can teach us about perceiving; rather, it is making pictures — that is, the skillful construction of pictures — that can illuminate experience. Making pictures is a way of enacting experience.

Picture-making, like experience itself, is an activity. It is at once an activity of careful looking to the world, and an activity of reflection on what you see and what you have to do to see. The painter literally enacts the content of a possible experience.

The artist, then, is a kind of experience engineer.

Consider: the painter does in fact need to “discover appearances,” as the Impressionists thought. Great care is needed, though, if we are to comprehend what sort of discovery this is. To discover appearances is not to turn one’s gaze inward, as it were, to sensation and subjectivity. Rather, it is to turn one’s gaze outward, to the world, but to the world thought of in a rather special way. The painter attends to the world not qua domain of facts and properties, states of affairs, (et cetera), but rather, to the world as it presents itself to us, as it affords us with opportunities for movement, thought and action, to the world qua a domain of skillful perceptual activity.

To make pictures is to take up the phenomenological stance on the world. For this reason, it is to the activity of picture-making, then, that I think phenomenology can turn for instruction about how to do phenomenology. As we have seen, this is the key to the seeming paradox of perceptual transparency: to reflect on experience is of necessity to reflect on the world around us that we perceive. But there are two ways to do this. On one way, we reflect on that world as a domain of facts and states of affairs. On the other, we reflect on the world as a domain for active exploration. The dual-aspect of experience is mirrored, then, in two ways of thinking about the world. Phenomenology, then, aims at the second way.

This has two important implications. First, phenomenology isn’t reflection, if we think of this as a kind of introspection. Second, to engage in phenomenology is, if the enactive view is right, to study the way in which perceptual experience — mere experience, if you like — acquires world-presenting content. For the world as a domain of facts is given to us thanks to the fact that we inhabit the world as a domain of activity.

2003-11-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Essence of Inspiration
by Emmanuel Forgolou (June 29, 2001)

[Extracted from www.CapitalismMagazine.com... Might be renamed "The Essence of WCM Inspiration" - PJM]

Summary: Every expression that appeals to man's highest ideals is a source of inspiration. It is the quick route that bridges a man's emotions to his thoughts and reveals his innermost soul through his responses. The importance of inspiration for human life is based on the nature, role, and needs of human consciousness. It is fuel for his soul.

One man is inspired by looking at the skyscrapers and another by the open spaces and yet another by the Grand Canyon. If looking at the majestic creations of men inspires one man, another is inspired by looking at the untamed nature and by thinking what he could do with it.

What does it take for a man to find inspiration? Why is it that what may inspire one to ever higher heights leaves another indifferent?

Inspiration is the quick route that bridges a man's emotions to his experiences and reveals his innermost soul through his responses. It is a lightning-like, spontaneous process resulting from the subconscious mind's reaction to man's experiences and as such it gives a revealing snapshot of all the thoughts, values, and emotions an individual has accumulated in the course of his life. Any experience that appeals to the contents of man's mind and soul elicits a response of inspiration.

The importance of inspiration for human life is based on the nature, role, and needs of human consciousness. In addition to understanding the requirements of his survival in abstract form, man also needs to perceive them in concrete terms. By observing the real-life manifestations of his ideas, he realizes first-hand that success and happiness are possible. Not only is this experience a source of happiness and thus an end in itself, but it also gives him the energy and emotional fuel he needs to pursue and realize his values, thus furthering his survival.

It is no coincidence that the foremost source of inspiration is art. The very role of art is to concretize man's metaphysical values. By virtue of his ideas, a rational man admires majesty and grandeur, the glory of man emerging triumphant over nature, the radiant image of man the creator, man the conqueror, man the hero. This is precisely the image conveyed by the works of the greatest artists in the history of humanity, which provide the rational man with priceless emotional fuel and the fervent desire to measure up to the example of his artistic archetypes.

You can tell a lot about a man's soul from his reaction to the novels of Ayn Rand and Victor Hugo, the statues of Phidias, Praxiteles and Michelangelo, the paintings of Da Vinci, Rafael, and Rembrandt, and the music of Mozart, Rossini, and Bellini. The man who cherishes his humanity and aspires to realize his potential, the only being who deserves to be called human in the true sense of the term reacts with awe, ecstasy, and rapture. The sights and sounds of great art excite his spirit and elevate his soul, creating in him the realization that he lives in a universe he is proud to call his own, a great man living in a grand world, at peace with himself and existence. This experience conveys the meaning of the maxim that art portrays the world as it might be and ought to be.

Of course, other cultural expressions can also be sources of inspiration. Science is the most obvious instance of man conquering nature, which is why scientific achievements provide great nourishment for the rational mind. The skyline of New York and other big cities is a concrete embodiment of human creativity and as such expresses the best in man. All the technological achievements of our time from medicine to computers and from the exploration of space to nuclear science provide evidence of grandeur that elevates the spirit of the rational man.

The same is true for philosophy that upholds the power of reason and glorifies man like the ideas of Aristotle, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Ayn Rand. Athletic achievement is another important source of inspiration, which is why athletes of the stature of Babe Ruth rank among humanity's greatest heroes. Every expression that appeals to man's highest ideals is a fountainhead of inspiration.

When a rational man is inspired by nature, this is because to him it represents an untapped human potential. Nature is the domain where man's creative ability is applied and his heroic potential realized. While in man-made objects the source of inspiration is the actual, in nature man is inspired by the potential. Empty spaces can be filled with orchards, factories, shopping malls, art museums, laboratories, and other monuments of human civilization.

Since nature provides the resources man uses to create his civilization and advance his life, it is like a blank canvas and the palette of a painter or a block of marble to be molded by a sculptor. It inspires him to use his imagination like a paintbrush or chisel and shape the world in the image of his vision. To a creator, untamed nature is a challenge to subjugate it to his purposes.

Just as various men apply their abilities and energies to different areas of endeavor, they also respond to different sources of inspiration. Others have a greater response to art, others to science, others to sports, and still others to the potential offered by nature. An artist finds his greatest inspiration in the majesty of an exquisitely sculpted human body, an architect in grand buildings or open spaces where he could build, an explorer in steep mountains or inhospitable terrain that he could conquer. Like every other aspect of human behavior, there are several options with respect to inspiration.

Of course, this does not mean that inspiration is a subjective phenomenon, far from it. Although it can have many different sources, inspiration arises from the application of general facts about human nature to the particular context of every individual. This is analogous to man having several options in his choice of career, friends, leisure time activities, and other values, yet those activities are not subjective, but governed by objective standards. This explains why Ayn Rand was inspired by the New York skyline when other people can only see the dirt and the noise and why Amundsen was inspired by the challenge of conquering the elements and reaching the South Pole while others view the Antarctic merely as a vast stretch of dreadful nothingness.

All of man's actions and behaviors are motivated by the same fundamental cause, the requirements of his survival. At every moment man has to act to sustain his life. The reason why he should think, be honest, just, productive, and show integrity is because those qualities are mandated by the requirements of his survival. The same is true with inspiration. To successfully pursue and realize his values man needs to be spurred to decisive action by the spark generated by the concrete image of those values. Man is inspired by certain experiences precisely because this emotional reaction is essential to his survival.

This is why and how the requirements of man's survival qua man shape the kind of experiences that inspire him. Reason, success, harmony, achievement, and grandeur are qualities required to sustain human life, which is precisely why observing their manifestations inspires the rational man. Thus, while various men are inspired by different experiences, these experiences need to demonstrate those characteristics in order to serve as sources of inspiration. In contrast, qualities that negate the requirements of human survival, such as irrationality, confusion, failure, and mediocrity, do not inspire the rational man, but are instead sources of revulsion.

It is a sad commentary on our time that the rational man has to turn to the past in his quest for artistic inspiration. Acting as a barometer for present-day culture, modern "art" is perverse and grotesque and as such it invokes feelings of contempt and loathing rather than inspiration. In contrast, the glorious eras of Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment produced art that reflected the ideas prevailing in those periods, which is why it worshipped and glorified instead of denigrating and demeaning man. It is such art that invokes in man a feeling of exaltation and the sheer joy of being alive.

Music, my own foremost source of inspiration, occupies a special place in this context. Contrary to the visual arts, music has an immediate impact on the soul by directly touching man's emotions without any intervention by the conscious mind. Music reached its peak in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with giants like Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, masters who created with the sound of their music the harmony and grandeur achieved on canvas and in marble by Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Having been weaned on the classical tradition, I seek my greatest inspiration in the instrumental music of the eighteenth century and operas composed in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is an instance where I am old-fashioned and proud of it. For me nothing can match the inspiration of a Mozart symphony or a Rossini opera. As the orchestra plays the crescendo that culminates in the grand finale and as the singer's voice rises towards the high note that underscores the majesty of an aria, I am on the top of Mt. Olympus, reveling in ambrosia and nectar and breathing the pristine air reserved for the immortals of the Olympian pantheon. This is true heaven. Amen!

About the Author: Dr. Emmanuel Foroglou runs a web site at www.foroglou.org.

2003-11-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

Brand pollution
Harish Bijoor
(Extracted from The Hindu Business Line - PJM)

Society will bear with commercial use of its utilities up to a point of time. When things seem to go a bit too far, it will aim to rein in the marketer in his outdoor conquests.

EYEBALL to eyeball marketers Coke and Pepsi (mentioned in alphabetical order), gobbled up precious newsprint last fortnight. Both were in trouble with the long arm of the law! Both were hauled up with warnings and an initial piffling fine of Rs 2 lakh each. The latest news is that both offenders will need to fork out Rs 5 crore and the Himachal Pradesh Government an additional Rs 1 crore to rectify damage. The charge: "commercial vandalism"! Both brands went about town painting hoary old rocks in Himachal Pradesh with their individual brand messages. If Coke did one, Pepsi did another! Till the courts took note and imposed a fine, invoking the charge of commercial vandalism with gusto! Brands are all about visibility. About recall. About reminder prompt-value. What better way to achieve this than dominate the great Indian outdoors!

Look around in your city and you don't notice the trees anymore. They are all hidden behind majestic new hoardings. With cutouts and advertising appeal of every kind staring back at you and all the traffic and chaos around.

Keep looking and you don't see the flowers around. All you really see are the posters that dot the walls for every brand of movie, tooth powder and evangelism on sale! The flowers are still around, but the visual shout of advertising is so high that all else that is natural is subdued into the background. Keep looking keenly. You don't notice the good old architecture of the good old buildings in the neighbourhood. Everything is dwarfed by the paintings on the walls, paintings on the garage shutters and the banners and buntings that scream brand messages, both sublime and ridiculous!

Brand managers and their implementing cousins out in the field have been pushing the boundary of the acceptable for a long while now. It starts with the need of the brand. The brand desires and deserves visibility. The first great thing to do is ensure a wide and deep distribution of the brand in the marketplace. Ensure its visibility at the point of purchase through the means of product display and point-of-purchase aids such as posters, danglers, crowners and wobblers!

The brand also needs to be visible not only at the point of purchase, but also at every point in the visual continuum that a consumer lives through. It starts with pieces of advertising messages that reach the home of the consumer with television, the friendly radio station and the omnipresent newspaper doing their bit.

With advertising in-home having been done and tackled, the brand demands more. More visibility and more attention. The realm of outdoor advertising of every kind is therefore explored. More innovative the brand manager, greater is the variety of media used to promote the brand name. You start with the hoarding, go to the banners, move on to wall site paintings, shutter paintings, temple-wall paintings and even public urinal paintings, if you are really desperate for attention. Barber shops, garage shutters, beauty parlours, cold storages and even the vegetable vendor's cart and your friendly dhobi's trolley get painted in a bid to achieve visual dominance in the marketplace.

The dictum is short and clear. Paint everything out there that stays in the marketplace. Anything that is inanimate offers an opportunity to be painted with brand messaging. The brand manager and those in the marketplace do a pretty good job really! Till public sensitivity wakes up and objects!

The great Indian outdoors provides two types of media. One is paid for and the other unpaid. Most unpaid space is normally available outside city limits indeed. The rest need to be paid for in terms of rentals, corporation taxes and such other outflows. The marketer of the noodle and Nirodh alike go gung-ho in the marketplace occupying outdoor territory by the square foot as their brands ramp up operations.

Brand managers need to wake up to the situation at hand. Society at large will bear with commercial use of its utilities up to a point of time. And then, when things seem to go a bit too far, there will emerge a movement that will aim to restrict and inhibit the brand marketer in his outdoor conquests. Use the utility and use the space. But for heaven's sake, avoid abuse. Brands and their managers need to wake up to the sensitivity, as represented by the charges of commercial vandalism. The future will be full of new phrases one will have to tackle. "Visual shout"! "Brand pollution"! "Brand overdose"!

Time for the industry of branding in the country to set for itself a code of self-regulation that will lay down the dos and don'ts. Much as we have a set of ethics in the advertising of brands, we need a quick set of ethics that will lay down the rules of what outer boundary to stretch in the name of brand innovation, and what not to!

The brand marketer needs to get sensitive to society, the environment and the possible harm (both physical and psychological) that brands can do in the short and long term. Responsible branding is therefore a subject that needs a debate and resolution. The environment at large, and society in particular, are two entities the brand evangelist will need to keep in mind as he rolls out his brand juggernaut into action.

Is it okay to paint those rocks? Is it okay to paint that temple wall? Is it okay to nail those tinplates on to trees in the neighbourhood? Time to sit up and take note. Do it or be told to do it!

(Harish Bijoor is a brand domain specialist based in Bangalore. Feedback can be sent to bleditor@thehindu.co.in.)

2003-11-12T22:39:00.000-08:00

Plagiarist.com Poetry Archive

Dream Song 125: Bards freezing, naked, up to the neck in water
John Berryman

Bards freezing, naked, up to the neck in water,
wholly in dark, time limited, different from
initiations now:
the class in writing, clothed & dry & light,
unlimited time, till Poetry takes some,
nobody reads them though,

no trumpets, no solemn instauration, no change;
no commissions, ladies high in soulful praise
(pal) none,
costumes as usual, turtleneck sweaters, loafers,
in & among the busy Many who brays
art is if anything fun.

I say the subject was given as of old,
prescribed the technical treatment, tests really tests
were set by the masters & graded.
I say the paralyzed fear lest one's not one
is back with us forever, worsts & bests
spring for the public, faded.

2003-11-12T22:11:00.000-08:00

Weights, Measures and Prices of Artistic Genius
Bruno Corradni, Emilio Settimelli
Milan, Italy
March 11, 1914

Criticism has never existed, and does not exist. The passéist pseudocriticism which has been nauseating us up to now has never been more than the self-abuse of the impotent, the peevish outbursts of failed artists, fatuous prattle, arrogant dogmatism in the name of non-existent authorities. We Futurists have always said that this amphibious, uterine and imbecile activity has no right to make judgements. Today sees the birth in Italy of the first real criticism, thanks to Futurism. But since the words critic and criticism have already been besmirched by the foul use that has been made of them, we Futurists are abolishing them, once and for all, and will use in their place the terms measurements and measurer.

Observation no. 1.

Every human activity is a projection of nervous energy. This energy, which is one of physical constitution and of action, undergoes various transformations and assumes various aspects according to the material chosen to manifest it. A human being assumes greater or lesser importance according to the quantity of energy at his disposal, and according to his power and ability to modify his surroundings.

Observation no. 2.

There is no essential difference between a human brain and a machine. It is mechanically more complicated, that is all. For example, a typewriter is a primitive organism governed by a logic imposed on it by its construction. It reasons thus: if one key is pressed it must write in lower case; if the shift and another key are pressed, it follows that it must write in upper case; when the space-bar is pressed, it must advance; when the back-space is pressed, it must go back. For a typewriter to have its E pressed and to write an X would be nonsensical. A broken key is an attack of violent insanity.

A human brain is a much more complicated machine. The logical relationships that govern it are numerous. They are imposed on it by the environment in which it is formed. Reasoning is the habit of linking ideas in a particular way. It is useful because it coincides with the way in which the phenomena of our reality develop. But they coincide because our reasoning is drawn from the reality that surrounds us. If our world were different, we would reason differently: if chairs falling over usually caused deafness of the left ear in all cavalry officers, this relationship would be true for us. Thus, most notions are arranged in every brain in a definite pattern. For example, snow-white-cold-winter, fire-red-hot, dance-rhythm-happiness. Everyone is capable of associating blue and sky. While on the other hand there are pieces of knowledge between which it is difficult to establish a relationship, because they have never been associated together, because there are no obvious similarities between them.

Observation no. 3.

Nervous energy, in the act of applying itself to a cerebral task, is faced with a combination of elements arranged in a particular order. Some united, close, like and similar, others distant, unconnected, extraneous, dissimilar. The energy acting on these particles of knowledge can only discover affinities and establish relationships between them by mixing and separating them and by forming combinations.

From this springs Futurist measurement, which is based on the following incontrovertible principles:

1. Beauty has nothing to do with art. Discussing a painting or a poem, by starting with the emotion that it gives one, is like studying astronomy by choosing as one's point of departure the shape of one's navel. Emotion is an accessory factor in a work of art. Whether it is there or not, varies from individual to individual and from moment to moment - it cannot establish an objective value. "Beautiful" or "ugly", "I like it" or "I don't like it", this is all subjective, gratuitous, uninteresting and unverifiable.

2. The sole universal concept: value, determined by natural rarity. For example, it is not true for everyone that the sea is beautiful, but all must recognise that a diamond has great value. Its value is determined by its rarity, which is not a matter of opinion.

3. In the intellectual field the essential (not casual) rarity of a creation is in direct proportion to the quality or energy needed to produce it.

4. The combination of elements (drawn from experience) more or less dissimilar is the necessary and sufficient raw material for any intellectual creation. The quantity of energy necessary to discover affinities and establish relationships between a given number of elements is greater when the elements to be combined are more distant, more unlike each other, and when the relationships discovered are more complex and more numerous. That is: the quantity of cerebral energy necessary to produce a work is directly proportional to the resistance which separates the elements before its action is felt and to the cohesion which unites them afterwards.

5. The Futurist measurement of a work of art means an exact scientific determination expressed in formulas of the quality of cerebral energy represented by the work itself, independently of the good, bad or non- existent impression which people may have of the work.

All this brings about a completely Futurist conception of art, that is to say essentially modern, without preconceived ideas and brutal. This resolute surgery will complete the destruction of the traditionalist view of Art with a capital A. Here in the meantime are a few immediate consequences:

1. Immediate disappearance of all intellectual sentimentality (corresponding to an amorous sentimentality in the field of sensuality) which forms around the word "inspiration". Having demonstrated the puerility of the idea that a work of art should move us, it is more than justified to work lucidly, coldly, even with indifference and laughingly on a particular theme - e.g., given 43 nouns, 12 atmospheric adjectives, 9 verbs in the infinitive, 3 prepositions, 13 articles and 25 mathematical or musical signs, to create a masterpiece in words-in-freedom using only these.

2. Logical abolition of all kinds of illusion about one's own value, of vainglory and modesty, for which there will no longer be any reason, given the possibility of an exact and unchallengeable evaluation. Right to proclaim and affirm one's own superiority and one's genius. The Futurist measurer will be able to issue certificates of imbecility, mediocrity or genius to be appended to personal identity papers.

3. Because all that matters is the quantity of energy manifested, the artist will be permitted all forms of eccentricity, lunacy or illogicality.

4. For the same reason, the concept of art will have to be enormously widened in another direction too. There is no reason why every activity must of necessity be confined to one or other of those ridiculous limitations that we call music, literature, painting, etc. And why one should not for example dedicate oneself to creating objects out of pieces of wood, canvas, paper, feathers and nails, which, dropped from a tower 37 metres 3 centimetres in height, would describe, falling to the ground, a line of more or less complexity, more or less difficult to obtain and more or less rare.

Therefore every artist will be able to invent a new form of art, which would be the free expression of the particular idiosyncrasies of his cerebral make-up, with its modern madness and complication, and in which would be found, mixed in accordance with a new measure and scale, the most diverse means of expression - words, colours, notes, indications of shape, of scent, of facts, noises, movements and of physical sensations; i.e. the chaotic, un-aesthetic and heedless mixing of all the arts already in existence and all those which are and will be created by the inexhaustible will for renewal which Futurism will be able to infuse into mankind. In addition Futurist measurement will clear away from our civilisation, which will be full of the new "geometric and mechanical splendour", the stinking dung heap of long hair, romantic neckties, ascetic-cultural pride and of idiotic poverty which delighted former generations. The work of the Futurist measurer will have as its immediate effect the definitive placing of the artist in society. The artist of genius has been and is still today a social outcast. Now genius has a social, economic and financial value. Intelligence is a commodity in vigorous demand in all the markets in the world. Its value is determined, as with every other product, by its essential rarity. A given quantity of a commodity known to be saleable acquires, in a certain market, a fixed value; however, it rarely happens that one manages to establish a fixed value for a certain quantity of artistic energy, determined by an objective state of affairs which can be verified by anyone. A piece of gold, or a precious stone, has in the world at a given moment a well-defined rarity value on the basis of which the buyer's price is determined. The Futurist measurer will have therefore to analyse the work of art into the individual discoveries or relationships of which it consists, determine by means of calculations the rarity of each discovery, that is the quantity of energy necessary to produce them, fix on the basis of this rarity a fixed price for each one of them, add up the individual values, and give the overall price of the work. Naturally the price must always be justified by a formula of measurements which would indicate the quantity of artistic energy represented by the work and the higher or lower quotation for artistic energy on the market at that moment.

While on one side Futurist measurement will give the artist unchallengeable rights, on the other it must impose on him precise duties and responsibilities. For example, a painter who has attributed to his painting formulas of value indicating, let us suppose, that it contains 10 discoveries of the first quality (30 lire each), 20 of the second (18 lire each), 8 of the third (10 lire each) and fixes the price at 740 lire, if by chance it happens that this is checked and that some of the discoveries have a lower value than indicated or indeed have no value, he must be put on trial for fraud and fined or sent to prison. We therefore ask the state to create a body of law for the purpose of guarding and regulating the sale of genius. One is astonished to see that in the field of intellectual activity fraud is still perfectly legal. It is really a relic of barbarism that survives anachronistically in the midst of modern progress. In this field Futurist fists are logical and necessary - they fill the functions which in a civilised society are carried out by the law. Being absolutely certain that the laws for which we are calling will be given to us in the very near future, we demand at once that D'Annunzio, Puccini and Leoncavallo be the first to be tried on the accusation of persistent fraud contrary to the public good. These gentlemen in fact sell for thousands of lire works whose value varies from a minimum of thirty-five centimes to a maximum of forty francs.

Until these laws are enacted, we should regard ourselves as inhabitants of a barbarous country. And so be it. But where barbarism rules, the fist and the bullet are arguments that count. Let us therefore conduct the discussion in this way.

As can be seen, the Futurist evaluator will exercise an effect totally different from that exercised today by the traditionalist critic. He will be a true professional, doctor and psychologist, fulfilling an office made valid and practical by the law. The same for the artist. Tomorrow we should fix on to our front doors plates reading - mensurator, fantasticator, philosopher, specialist in astronomical poetry, genius, madman. Yes, Madman, because it is time for madness (the upsetting of logical relationships) to be made into a conscious and evolved art. An individual who is able to construct in his own mind a complicated lunacy assumes a value. A good madman may be worth thousands of francs. Another activity that will be purged and regulated by Futurist evaluation is prostitution. For here too there are often forced victims of deplorable frauds

And now affirming: (1) that intuition is no more than rapid and fragmentary reasoning, that between reasoning and intuition there is no essential difference and that therefore any product of the latter may be controlled by the former; (2) that reasoning and intuition are cerebral functions explicable and traceable down to their smallest details, using a Futurist analysis of the contents of knowledge down to its mediumistic depths; (3) that Futurist measurement will be made in accordance with logic (together with the relationships which govern material reality, reflected in the human brain), with the physical laws of energy and with the circumstances, independent of all subjective considerations (we have valued at 12,000 lire a picture by the painter Boccioni which makes us feel indescribably sick; and we are forced to admit the enormous value of an onomatopoeia by the poet Marinetti, which is hideously ugly, anti-aesthetic and repulsive); we form the following absolute:

Futurist Conclusions

1. Art is a cerebral secretion capable of exact calibration.

2. Thought must be weighed and sold like any other commodity.

3. The work of art is nothing but an accumulator of cerebral energy; creating a symphony or poem means taking a certain number of sounds or words.

4. The kind of work has in itself no value; it may acquire a value through the conditions in which it is produced.

5. The producer of artistic creativity must join the commercial organisation that is the muscle of modern life. Money is one of the most formidably and brutally solid points of the reality in which we live. It is enough to turn to it to eliminate all possibility of error and unpunished injustice. In addition a good injection of financial serum will introduce directly into the bloodstream of the intellectual creator an exact awareness of his rights and responsibilities.

6. In addition to the words "criticism" and "critic" the following terms must be abolished: soul, spirit, artist and any other word which like these is irremediably infected with traditionalist snobbery; these must be replaced by exact denominations like: brain, discovery, energy, cerebrator, fantasticator, etc.

7. All past art must be resolutely thrown overboard, art which does not interest us and which besides we are unable to measure given our absolute and necessary ignorance of all the details and circumstances which constitute the framework of life in which it was created.

8. The stupendous importance of our affirmations regarding the will of genius and of Futurist renewal must be exalted.

We are extremely pleased to see that Futurism, born in Milan, and launched five years ago for the whole world by the poet Marinetti in the columns of Le Figaro, having triumphed in the field of art with words-in-freedom, plastic dynamism, antigraceful, polytonal music without quadrature and the art of noises, is about to burst into the laboratories and schools of passéist science, the museums and cemeteries of mummified syllogisms and torture-chambers of free creative madness.

2003-11-12T08:27:00.000-08:00

From a paper released by the Association of Art Museum Directors. I found the priorities of interest.

Association of Art Museum Directors
41 E. 65th Street
New York, NY 10021
Tel: 212.249.4423
Fax: 212.535.5039

To ensure public benefit from loans and donations to museums by private collectors of works from their
collections, museum directors – in consultation with trustees and staff – weigh
the following questions:

• Is the work, in terms of content and quality, consistent with the mission of
the museum and the context provided by its permanent collections and
programs?
• Does the work enhance the educational opportunities provided by the
museum to the public?
• Does the work reflect the interests of museum constituencies?
• Does the work enhance the museum’s leadership position as a cultural
and educational resource to the community?
• Does the work bring new art, new knowledge and/or new cultural
perspectives that enhance the community’s quality of life?
• Is the collector an individual with a reputation of integrity whose
involvement enhances the museum’s program?
• Are the collector’s motives transparent and acceptable to the museum?
• Are there restrictive conditions on the loan or gift that place an undue
burden on the museum?
• Are the provenance and ownership of the work known and acceptable to
the museum?
• Are there legal or ethical issues associated with the gift or loan that can be
anticipated by the museum?
• Are there security and/or conservation considerations related to the loan
or gift?
• Does financial support provided by collectors primarily enhance the
museum’s fulfillment of its public and scholarly mission?
• Does the collector have an established history of philanthropy and
sustained commitment to the museum?

2003-11-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

I found this on an Australian student's website. It's his definition of Contemporary Art. I might say it's the WCAS definition of art:

Contemporary art is about critiquing contemporary society.

Contemporary art is about change, new direction and about moving forward.

Contemporary art is about breaking old traditions

Contemporary art is about taking risks and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in art

Contemporary art is about art

2003-11-12T08:06:00.000-08:00

The following "artists on art" were extracted from www.constable.net

2003-11-12T07:56:00.000-08:00

Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)
Excerpted from "My Painting" in Possibilities I, Winter 1947-48 (source: Johnson)

My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

From an interview with William Wright in 1950 (source: Johnson)

WW: Mr. Pollock, in your opinion, what is the meaning of modern art?
JP: Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.
WW: Did the classical artists have any means of expressing their age?
JP: Yes, they did it very well. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims -- the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.
WW: Mr. Pollock, there's been a good deal of controversy and a great many comments have been made regarding your method of painting. Is there something you'd like to tell us about that?
JP: My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique.
WW: Mr. Pollock, the classical artists had a world to express and they did so by representing the objects in that world. Why doesn't the modern artist do the same thing?
JP: H'm -- the modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The moderns artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world -- in other words -- expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.
WW: Would it be possible to say that the classical artist expressed his world by representing the objects, whereas the modern artist expresses his world by representing the effects the objects have upon him?
JP: Yes, the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
WW: Mr. Pollock, isn't it true that... your technique is important and interesting only because of what you accomplish by it?
JP: I hope so. Naturally, the result is the thing -- and -- it doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

From a response to a questionnaire, Arts and Architecture, February 1944 (source: Johnson)

Q: Do you think there can be a purely American art?
Pollock: The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd.... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.

2003-11-12T07:52:00.000-08:00

Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)
Excerpts from Mondrian's essay Plastic Art & Pure Plastic Art, which first appeared in 1937 in the British journal Circle. (source: Herbert)

"Although Art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the esthetic expression on oneself, in other words, of that which one thins and experiences. The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively. Thus we see in every work of figurative art the desire, objectively to represent beauty, solely through form and color, in mutually balanced relations, and, at the same time, an attempt to express that which these forms, colors, and relations arouse in us. The latter attempt must of necessity result in an individual expression which veils the pure representation of beauty."

"The laws which in the culture of art have become more and more determinate are the great hidden laws of nature which art establishes in its own fashion. It is necessary to stress the facts that these laws are more or less hidden behind the superficial aspects of nature. Abstract art is therefore opposed to a natural representation of things. But it is not opposed to nature as is generally thought. It is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but is one with true human nature. It is opposed to the conventional laws created during the culture of the particular form but it is one with the laws of the culture of pure relationships.

First and foremost there is the fundamental law of dynamic equilibrium which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by the particular form.

The important task then of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms or free lines. We must bear in mind, however, a distinction between these two forms of equilibrium in order to avoid confusion; for when we speak of equilibrium pure and simple we may be for, and at the same time against, a balance in the work of art."
"In order that art may be really abstract, in other words, that it should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance. In painting, the primary color that is as pure as possible realizes this abstraction of natural color. But color is, in the present state of technique, also the best means for denaturalizing matter in the realm of abstract constructions in three dimensions; technical means are as a rule insufficient."

"According to our laws, it is a great mistake to believe that one is practicing non-figurative art by merely achieving neutral forms or free lines and determinate relations. For in composing these forms one runs the risk of a figurative creation, that is to say one or more particular forms.

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form. We note thus, that to destroy particular form is only to do more consistently what all art has done."

"In general, people have not realized that one can express our very essence through neutral constructive elements; that is to say, we can express the essence of art. The essence of art of course in not often sought. As a rule, individualist human nature is so predominant, that the expression of the essence of art through a rhythm of lines, colors, and relationships appears insufficient. Recently, even a great artist has declared that 'complete indifference to the subject leads to an incomplete form of art.'

But everybody agrees that art is only a problem of plastics. What good then is a subject? It is to be understand that one would need a subject to expound something named 'Spiritual riches, human sentiments and thoughts.' Obviously, all this is individual and needs particular forms. But at the root of these sentiments and thoughts there is one thought and one sentiment: those do not easily define themselves and have no need of analogous forms in which to express themselves. It is here that neutral plastic means are demanded.

For pure art then, the subject can never be an additional value, it is the line, the color, and their relations which must 'bring into play the whole sensual and intellectual register of the inner life...,' not the subject. Both in abstract art and in naturalistic art color expresses itself 'in accordance with the form by which it is determined,' and in all art it is the artists task to make forms and colors living and capable of arousing emotion. If he makes art into an 'algebraic equation' that is no argument against the art, it only proves that he is not an artist."

"It is therefore a mistake to suppose that a non-figurative work comes out of the unconscious, which is a collection of individual and pre-natal memories. We repeat that it comes from pure intuition, which is at the basis of the subjective-objective dualism.

It is, however, wrong to think that the non-figurative artist finds impressions and emotions received from the outside useless, and regards it even as necessary to fight against them. On the contrary, all that the non-figurative artist receives from the outside is not only useful but indispensable, because it arouses in him the desire to creative that which he only vaguely feels and which he could never represent in a true manner without the contact with visible reality and with the life which surrounds him.

...That which distinguishes him from the figurative artist is the fact that in his creations he frees himself from individual sentiments and from particular impressions which he receives from outside, and that he breaks loose from the domination of the individual inclination within him.

It is therefore equally wrong to think that the non-figurative artist creates through 'the pure intention of his mechanical process,' that he makes 'calculated abstractions,' and that he wishes to 'suppress sentiment not only in himself but also in the spectator.' It is a mistake to think that he retires completely into his system. That which is regarded as a system is nothing but constant obedience to the laws of pure plastics, to necessity, which art demands from him. It is thus clear that he has not become a mechanic, but that the progress of science, of technique, of machinery, of life as a whole, has only made him into a living machine, capable of realizing in a pure manner the essence of art. In this way, he is in his creation sufficiently neutral, that nothing of himself or outside of him can prevent him from establishing that which is universal. Certainly his art is art for art's sake ... for the sake of the art which is form and content at one and the same time."

2003-11-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

Max Beckman (1884 - 1950)
Excerpts from the lecture On My Painting, given at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in 1938. (source: Herbert)

"My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting -- to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence.

What helps me most in this task is the penetration of space. Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality."

"When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting. It is not the subject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting. Therefore I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting."

"In my opinion all important things in art since Ur of the Chaldees, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this Self for which I am searching in my life and in my art.

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement; for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our Self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make."

"Color, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Color also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to light and, above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on color at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work. Pure colors and broken tones must be used together, because they are the complements of each other."

2003-11-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Odd Nerdrum
Excerpts from an advertisement published in ARTnews, October 1999

"A work of kitsch is either good or bad, and good kitsch must not be classified as art. This would be an error of judgement. Kitsch is not modern art. Kitsch refers to the sensual and the timeless."

"Innovation is of no importance, nor is originality. Going in depth and becoming engrossed is the goal, for in the depiction of nature itself lies the individual expression."

"Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion."

From 'Kitsch -- The Superstructure of Sensuality', Nedrum's speech at the Haugar Art Museum in Tonsberg, Norway, 19 June 1999

"But let us for a minute look at what is lacking contemporary art. What do we miss? I see four things: 1. The open, trustful face, 2. The sensual skin, 3. Golden sunsets, and 4. The longing for eternity. Taken together, these values add up to kitsch -- whether we like it or not.

The concept of Kitsch, in the derogatory sense of cheap decoration, came into use a hundred years ago when the new Modernism clashed with the old European culture -- the stagnant and regressive world. Most people in the art world seem to believe that if 17th-century Rembrandt had lived today, he would have been a Jackson Pollock or a conceptual artist. I don't. People develop according to their own needs. I don't believe that all talented people bow to their times and follow the Zeitgeist. Rembrandt was dictated by his gift for drawing, just as Puccini was dictated by his melodic repository. A modern atonal composer is a completely different person. He is not as strongly controlled by his own destiny, and is free enough to experiment. Rembrandt would hardly have painted his 17th-centry Dutch interiors today, but the same eyes would have been there, the same darkness and the same sensual skin. As strange as his heartfeltness and entire being was to his own times, so it would seem to us. Even his most timeless pictures would be considered kitsch if they had been painted today.

...Today, the solid superstructure Art has become an overwhelming force, unparalleled in history. It protects all kinds of intellectual scribble, while a beautifully drawn nude can be criticized to pieces, because a work like this lacks a respectful superstructure.

...The great misconception of the modernists is that they have demanded everything that a classical figurative painter can not give them -- constant renewal, exciting experiments and compliance with contemporary styles, etc. A painter using the old master style is sensual. His aim is to become engrossed in his work and skillfully render life's eternal moments without prejudice. But in doing this, he is not protected by his time. He has to compete with the best ever created in all times. This is a heavy burden to bear, which becomes heavier when his striving is ignored or een laughed at. When additionally he claims to be an artist, he is of course placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. Because he is in a false situation, all he does is wrong.

...Kitsch must be separated from art. A kitsch painter works toward different goals than the artist. I know that kitsch is a difficult word, but being strictly pragmatic, it is the only thing which can give the sensual form of expression a superstructure of its own, something which can in its turn restore the shine to a beautiful work. Maybe then can the others -- the modernists -- gain respect for such a work, when it honestly presents itself for what it is, and does not come disguised as art."

From Nerdrum's speech at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, 24 September 1998
[editor's note: on how he came to the decision that he was not about art, but kitsch:]

"My path to this insight ran through art history and the story of the great Cezanne breakthrough at the beginning of the century -- how art became the metaphysical applause for the new sciences, and how it got its meaning and substance by being the expression for a certain truth. It could be the truth about man as a social being, as a rational or irrational being, or the truth about the agonized or ironic relationship between the artist and reality. From that time on, art received its justification for existence from the rebellion against tradition, history and power in all forms. Subsequently, it became a characteristic trait with the new art to seek innovation instead of tradition, and legitimize itself by something outside the work of art."

"Kitsch is about the eternal human questions, the pathetic, whatever its form, about what we call the human. The task of kitsch is to create a seriousness in life, at its best so sublime it will bring the laughter to a quiet."

From 'Nerdrum on Kitsch', cover story in Morgenbladet, Oslo, 23 October, 1998, interviewed by Sindre Mekjan

Mekjan: What is beauty?
Nerdrum: "The presence of substance, the sublime presence of matter when light hits it in the dark. When the light tears the darkness off the naked bodies, this beautiful expression originates."
Mekjan: Much of the criticism against kitsch and bad art is ethical.
Nerdrum: "Yes, because kitsch somehow wants to be left alone with its beauty and drama. I believe I am a genuine kitsch personality. I have no ideology, and have never had. I have no religion, but I know a madonna can be badly painted and become a mockery to religion. Well painted, it can surpass religion -- that is what is so amazing about kitsch. On its highest level it transcends truth. At its lowest, truth laughs at it. Kitsch is the credo of aesthetics. It is an experience of life at its most wonderful, without involving morality. If you do involve morality, it's no longer kitsch, its art - religion. Aesthetics is and will be a problem for all of us, because it is all we are left with at the end of the line. We are kitsch on our deathbeds."

2003-11-11T22:03:00.000-08:00

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE IN ALL MEDIA
November 11, 2003

Visual artist Paul McLean will premier a feature-length digital animation at the Circus Maximus event “Cultura”, on November 22 at the Castle Door. McLean’s animation is titled “FALL (Fine Arts Theatre: Lost in Translation)”. “FALL” is a tapestry of images and moving pictures that in sum provide a window to the artist’s world, the creative process and gesture, contemporary aesthetics and culture.

****************

Four years in the making, “Fall” contains new works combined with segments from pieces produced for several of McLean’s multi-disciplary/multi-media Journeyman Project, Art for Humans, 01 and DDDD exhibits and events. Themes coursing through the animation include: Fall (the season); Dance; the creative process as it reveals itself in making art and love; Games of skill; Craft and Community; and many others. At times, McLean uses computer software/hardware as expressive painting tools, making transparent that magical medium. The process and product of McLean’s work in digital animation is Fourth Dimensional, based on 4D aesthetic and scientific theory and practices. The result is a densely layered and faceted sequence of images, which unfold in a non-linear, time-aware manner, elucidating basic but relevant thematic and dramatic concepts drawn from human experience.

Since 1997, McLean has been at the bleeding edge of binary art. His first digital animation was included in the DDDD exhibit “Sirens + Conflagrations” at Cheekwood Museum’s Temporary Contemporary installation galleries. Since then, McLean has presented his digital work - in print, web and moving image forms – in many galleries, museums and alternative artspaces. Most recently (spring and summer 2003), McLean traveled to Eureka, California for a series of residencies and exhibits hosted by the Morris Graves Foundation, The Ink People Center for the Arts and Riverwind, LLC. McLean is currently in the final stages of producing a proposal text for The Journeyman Project, a series of residencies and productions spanning the next several years.

McLean’s work in digital animation began as an answer to the question of how Motion has been depicted in Western plastic and camera-based arts. Each frame of McLean’s digital animations can be output as a standalone artwork.

*********************

Contact:
Paul McLean
E-mail: art@artforhumans.com
URL: www.artforhumans.com