Blog  No. 67: “Julliard Open Studios,” the AP that keeps on giving

By admin | Published: August 25, 2015

“Life is a unity: it would be very surprising if we could give fullest play to one of its functions while neglecting the other, or if to live our ideas should not help us to perceive them”

A.G. Sertillanges, O.P., in The Intellectual Life, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

I recently subscribed to “Julliard Open Studios” from Touchpress through the iTunes Store. Whether you enjoy the performing arts or not, you should subscribe because the episodes teach an approach to the performing arts that is fungible. Risking oversimplification, the overarching principles are: (1) precision of thought, feeling and emotion; (2) exploiting ambiguities to find new ways of giving the art life; (3) own the art.

Precision focuses and intensifies the artistic experience for the performer and the audience. Too many fine art photographers do not think carefully enough about exactly what they are trying to do when they capture the data. Ansel Adams taught previsualization as a technique, but he also intended the photographer to think about what he or she wanted to do or express before capture. Knives are sharp because they are pointed; photographs have more impact if the concept behind image is sharp as well.

Exploiting ambiguities gives the performing artist the means of exploring new worlds. Where the artist is clear and explicit the art demands fealty; but where it is ambiguous, license is given to create anew. Ambiguities left for the audience to consider can also increase the impact of the work by bringing it to life inside the mind of the audience. Photographers can distort normal viewpoints, photograph unusual subjects, blur or sharpen, remove or add color to create ambiguity in the final image and thereby open the gates of imagination; yes, ambiguity can be the precise point of the image.

Owning the art gives it life. Going through the motions is not enough; any artist worthy of the name must become the art; must possess it so thoroughly that it is him or her in a real sense. I remember when I first started showing my work I felt completely naked and was terrified–but this was a good thing! It meant that I was revealing my true self in my work. Living with our desire to create something beautiful helps us to perceive the beautiful all around us.

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Blog No. 65: “Beauty Will Save the World”

By admin | Published: June 1, 2015

I could not say it better, so I’ll just pass along the thoughts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Lecture

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Blog No. 64 “Art is Form Struggling to Wake from the Nightmare of Nature”

By admin | Published: May 14, 2015

The title is a quote from Sexual Personae  by Camile Paglia. Most photographers consider the words “natural” and “beauty” constant traveling companions. Its hard to imagine the images of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and other great conservationist photographers as anything other than recorders of natural beauty. Think about this for a minute, however: Is that what they really were?

They all captured a moment in time and manipulated the image in order to create a work of art. They did not simply document nature. Moreover, they chose nature’s best side so to speak. They photographed the Rocky Mountains, Carmel, the Adirondacks, etc.; with rare exception they did not photograph natural disasters, dead children, and the like.

I don’t agree with Professor Paglia entirely, however, because although primal, nature is not a nightmare. I do agree with her that our reaction to it, i.e., the frequently  beautiful ideas in our minds and the artifacts we create as a result, are the product of the human imagination, not nature itself.

The problem is that our brains are small and can’t focus on the immense flux of our natural existence so they freeze-frame and name it; once named, it is tamed and reason prevails; secretly, however, we know otherwise:

It is then that genius takes his lamp and lights it. And this dark, solitary, savage bird, this untamable creature, with its gloomy melancholy plumage, opens its throat and begins its song, makes the groves resound and breaks the silence and the darkness of the night.

Diderot, Salon of 1765, as quoted in The Roots of Romanticism, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts given by Isaiah Berlin

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Blog No. 63: Our reality comes into being because we ask it to

By admin | Published: March 19, 2015

Our world is not the objective world, but the subjective world; we have no direct knowledge, only perceived knowledge. We have subjective knowledge in two forms, conscious and unconscious. Think of an alarm clock that wakes us from an unconscious state to a conscious one; we hear the alarm before we are conscious enough to know that we hear it.  Moreover, we do not have infinite attention; we must focus our limited conscious attention for it to have any utility. This is likely a limitation caused by what our brain is physically capable of, and focusing our attention has the practical advantage of allowing us to discern that which we think matters from that which we think does not although this is commonly not a conscious choice.

Unfortunately, this also has the effect of limiting our world; we discern because we eliminate. If the world is conceived of as an infinite flowing river, then we choose what to see, hear, smell and touch. That choice eliminates those things we don’t care about, or should care about but don’t, from those things or the thing we do care about; in short, we go through life ignoring most of it as I’ve noted in previous blogs. Our motive for discernment is a question that we need answered for some reason. The things we don’t perceive are the things we think unimportant or already known and hence don’t question. I answer the door and focus on who knocked, not the doorjamb because I already know it and in this context it is unimportant. Thus, our world is the world we are aware of, but we are aware of it because we have asked a question, even if only subconsciously: Who is it? What is it? Where am I? In a real sense, our reality comes into being because we ask it to.

Therefore, it is critical that we ask good questions because asking the wrong questions can lead to a poorer reality. The only way to ask good questions, and thereby lead a good life, is to approach the world with love, which is to say an open heart and mind. This is not to say that the reality we end up with will be wonderful necessarily, but it will be most certainly be awesome. This then becomes the starting place for more questions, which will hopefully lead to good answers about living a good life.

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Blog No. 62, Life Overflows the Vessels of Reason

By admin | Published: February 26, 2015

Only when it was too late did I come to understand that the processes of life overflow the vessels of reason, that the most meaningful elements in human experience, sensitivity to beauty, devotion to one’s kind, are not matters to be determined by syllogisms.

—Elisha ben Abuyah, from As a Driven Leaf

Note that Elisha uses his reason to conclude that reason alone was not enough for a human being to lead a good life; human nature had to be considered. More error has been propounded by unwise leaders who fail to recognize this fact than any other.

Oddly, contemporary art is simultaneously hyper-rational and anti-reason in that it questions the validity of reason itself; a form of skepticism on steroids. It denigrates any sensitivity to beauty or devotion to one’s kind as an echo of a paternalistic white-male Western past. In short, it denies our human nature. This “New Soviet Man” attitude toward people, the logical outgrowth of the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, is not only wrong-headed, being anti-human, it is evil; think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as discussed in a previous blog.

Art properly resides at the crossroads of reason and nature, but it too can be led astray. Notice how the progress of reason has moved art from the Romantic to the Modern to the Postmodern to the Contemporary, each new step expanding the role of reason while narrowing the reference period of time from over half a century to decades to now, the moment. At this point we have left human experience altogether and focused on human reason and its shortcomings.  Going from moment to moment is not communication with our fellow artists of the past; it is soliloquy and a symptom of the arrogance of our radical individualism; they felt and thought; we simply think abstractly without a firm grounding in our humanity.

My intolerance towards contemporary “art” (see my last blog among others) is a rebellion against this attitude.  Art should be loving; a sharing of experience for the edification and enjoyment of all, not simply a work to establish the greater glory of the artist and her perspicuity. Of course the artist has something to express and that is important, but it’s importance should not just be for the artist who feels compelled to express himself; it should be to the audience as well. It should also be more than documentation of what we anticipate is there “in reality,” but should communicate what is their imaginatively. It is our imagination that fails us with contemporary art. As Claudio Magris noted in his wonderful book, Danube:

For Hölderlin there were still gods on the riverbanks, hidden, and misunderstood by the men of the night of exile and the alienation of modern times, but nonetheless living and present. Deep in the slumber of Germany, dulled by the prose of reality but destined to reawaken in some Utopian future, slept the poetry of the heart, of freedom, of reconciliation.

 

 

 

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Blog No. 61, Art Must be Intolerant

By admin | Published: January 25, 2015

In its own way, literature always was, is, and must be intolerant.   And the clearer it is, the more intolerant it is—that is part of its nature.  We can have lunch every day in the Writers’ Club with anyone we want, or go fishing with anyone we want.  But the minute we begin turning a blind eye to what we don’t like in each other’s writing, the minute we begin to back away from our own inner norms, to accommodate ourselves to each other, cut deals with each other over poetics, we will in fact set ourselves against each other, because we will naturally begin to subtract from our own uniqueness and thus retreat from ourselves—until one day we will disappear in a general fog of mutual admiration.

—Vàclav Havel, “On Evasive Thinking”

To be honest, I don’t like most photography and I certainly don’t like contemporary photography–I  am intolerant. I go to shows and galleries, hoping to find something interesting, something one can learn from, but with few exceptions it is a wasteland of the common place (the strange having become commonplace).  I agree with Ansel Adams who once said something to effect that if he truly admired another photographer’s work he would be doing it himself.

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Blog No. 60, Eroica

By admin | Published: January 9, 2015

If you have seen the BBC’s movie, Eroica, you should go to YouTube and watch it. In brief, it portrays the first public presentation of Beethoven’s new symphony at the palace of  Prince Lobkowitz. The music itself is conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardner with a 23-piece orchestra using period instruments as it was originally performed. Of course the music is awe-inspiring and it is interesting to see how the wealthy aristocrats walked around the room to listen to the band.  What is most interesting, however, is to watch the various characters reaction to the music.

Recall that the French Revolution had just completed its bloodiest phase and that Napoleon had been sweeping through Europe–not a good time to be the establishment. The important thing is that, contrary to the historicist critique of current academia, Beethoven was moving out of his cultural context, beyond even what he himself had originally entitled the piece, “Bonaparte,” into what we call the Romantic Era. The radical intellectual shift in perspective required of by this new work is reflected differently in each of the characters, but is best expressed by Haydn who comments that Beethoven had made the heroic artist himself the center of his art and that thereafter nothing would be the same.

This undercuts the entire post-modern, “contemporary” paradigm that makes us slaves to our current social construction of reality. Moderns were in the thrall of reason; Postmoderns and Contemporary Artists are in the thrall of anti-reason, which is not the same thing as emotion because anti-reason argues that reason itself is suspect. Eroica points to the radical error of the post-modern/ contemporary paradigm by its very existence because Beethoven consciously stood outside his own cultural context and pointed to an entirely new age by changing the then current artistic paradigm. He did this by expanding the definition of beauty; this doesn’t sound terribly revolutionary, but revolutionary it was because it changed the point of reference.

Eroica‘s revolution in beauty is a great place to note that when the artist concerns him or herself with beauty, as Beethoven did in Eroica, they are not concerned with mere prettiness. Beauty has power, and breadth and the divine in it; discord is an element of beauty because discord is the nature of life.

 

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Blog No. 59: The Immateriality of Art

By admin | Published: January 8, 2015

I only rarely talk about my images in part because words are icons of ideas and ideas concern materiality unless used for special purposes; one must think of something.

Art deals with the supernatural, as I recently discussed in these blogs. Even the poet uses words only esoterically, pointing to the supernatural experience of something. In the opera “Pagliacci,” the clown (pagliaccio in Italian) Canio has married a beautiful young “Columbina,” a manipulative tart, and given her a home off the streets where he found her. She falls for a younger man and as Canio puts on makeup for the show he sings “Vesti La Giubba” (On with the show); the most moving line is: “ridi pagliaccio” (laugh clown!). So, I could say in words: “Canio is betrayed by the woman he loves” and you would understand what happened. The reality of hearing the music while seeing Canio smearing on his makeup, however, takes the audience to a supernatural place where the heartbreak is experienced, not simply understood;  that experience is immaterial, but very real.

Art’s value is expressing and thereby sharing this vital aspect of our lives. It reminds us who we really are and that we are all brothers and sisters in this incredible natural world because we alone can stand apart from it.

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No. 58: The Necessity of True Myths

By admin | Published: November 16, 2014

Moderns tend to think of myth as a false story told in ancient times to explain the workings of the natural world before we had science.  Most cultures have a foundation myth that explains and legitimizes the culture. It also serves as a warning, there be dragons here! In other words, foundation myths point to the line beyond which it is not healthy for reason to go. In Blog No. 57 I said:

Can any experience be trusted? Can only experience be trusted? Assume that there is more than our subjective reality, an objective reality; God’s reality as it were. How exactly could we know it? For that matter, how would any physical being know it except through experiencing it? In the end does this mean that we must trust to our humanity because we have no other choice?

Also, I pointed out in Blog Nos. 54 and 55 that we are essentially supernatural creatures. Taken together these observations point to the need for myth; not myth in the sense of simply being a false narrative to sooth  our quite logical insecurities living as we do in this awesome place, but myth in the sense of something mysteriously truthful that can poetically help us understand our experience of life as a supernatural creature in a natural world. In other words, don’t think in terms of Athena being born from the forehead of Zeus, think of Homer or the Psalms.

This is an argument for the value of art in its broadest sense. Myths have been artfully created over time and throughout human history to explain our experience of existence in a material world because we are at the limits of our reason and sense perception. We feel these tools, sense perception and reason are lacking and that more is needed to express and explain to each other what we experience.

Christianity has provided the central myth of western man for two millennia, combining as it does Greek thought and Christian revelation. As such, it has provided a magnificent narrative about how we got here, how we became flawed in our materiality and how we can return to our true selves through love. Of course other major cultures have their central myths too. Plato discussed the need for a noble lie in the Republic. I disagree. We humans search for a noble truth that reflects our reality as supernatural creatures imbedded in a material existence.

“What is truth?” is of the course the famous question. As mentioned numerous times in this blog, the central problem is our limited capacity; “the truth” in its totality is too complex for us to grasp, so, given our limitations we can only understand shards of it. Religious belief of some kind is good because it acknowledges the supernatural nature of our experience and therefore incorporates more truth in its explanation of human reality than reason alone can provide. This is not to say that the form of belief isn’t important, because of course it is, but it is to say one must have faith first to have even a limited understanding of the truth.  The Dali Lama once commented that westerners should remain Christian and not try to convert to Buddhism because Christianity is a beautiful version of the truth as western culture understands it.  He was acknowledging that one should not try to step out of one’s culture because that cannot be done. We need true myths, but they must be completely a part of us to have the magical power they need to allow at least a little more light into our cave.

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Blog No. 57, The beast most innocent

By admin | Published: October 21, 2014

–The beast most innocent

That is so fabulous it never sleeps;

If I can keep against all argument

Such image of a snow white unicorn,

Then as I pray it may for sanctuary

Descend at last to me,

And put into my hand its golden horn.

From “I see a girl dragged by the wrists” by Philip Larkin

“Against all argument,” there’s the rub: to make sense of life must reason give way and allow a unicorn to pass? Am I really just  a romantic or is this truly the nature of things? After all, it was Milton’s Satan that was the very picture of reason; one is even compelled to admit that he is far more attractive than God in the poem. Reason makes its siren demand for our attention, but must we make it the mere stable boy of our unicorn?

The real question I suppose is whether we can trust our humanity. Is our longing to touch a unicorn something to be relied upon or is it a childish dream for something beyond the quotidian? In Philip Larkin’s poem quoted above the poet also ponders how everything can be remade “with shovel and spade” and yet each “dull day and each despairing act builds up the crags from which the spirit leaps.” Does our inner self hear a call or do we need to hear the call to bear the weight of material reality?

Art’s concern with beauty is motivated by a desire to share our experience of beauty in all its complexity with others. But, can this experience of beauty be trusted? Can any experience be trusted? Assume that there is more than our subjective reality, an objective reality; God’s reality as it were. How exactly could we know it? How would any physical being know it except through the subjective experiencing of it? In the end doesn’t this mean that we must trust to our humanity because we have no other choice?

 

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