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Why it matters

7/27/2014

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The great transformation in our culture brought about by the advancing belief in strong A.I.


In this article I wish to speak about the belief that has been at the core of my life, and to which many of the pages of this website are dedicated - this is the belief that man is more than a digital machine.  

I have devoted a good deal of my intellectual life to the aim of refuting the claim that digital computers are capable of replicating human intelligence.

Now I wish to explain why this matters.
That man transcends nature is a concept that is important and worthy of defence.  I am astounded that so few people have set out to do this. In fact, with the exceptions of Roger Penrose and John Lucas, I don't think I can mention a single living philosopher of note who has set out to refute the claims of strong A.I.  I am surprised by the absence of a response from any of the Churches.

In order to understand why it matters it is important to appreciate that human life and society are profoundly influenced by ideas. There is a core to human nature that is relatively permanent, but there are also changes.
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Change in human beliefs from age to age

Looking at the work of Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, one cannot but be impressed by the way in which the characters he draws are so similar to those that we meet in contemporary life.  Chaucer gives us a cross-section of what is essentially middle-class society, and these persons sparkle with the same passions, limitations, and narrow-minded rationalizations of their way of living that we meet every day. Each one of them says in his own voice - my way of living is the right and only way of living.  Going back even further, who can deny that the passions influencing the ancient Athenian, as evidenced in the writings, say, of Thucydides and Herodotus, do not speak of some underlying core of human nature that might be summarized by a single word: vanity?

Against that, it is clear that the beliefs of mankind alter from epoch to epoch, and that beliefs make a profound impact on living. It is precisely such a profound alteration to the spirit of man that we are addressing today. 

To give an example of this process of change, consider this quotation from a novel:

"It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you; and, besides the Bible bids us return good for evil"

These words, from the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte are placed into the mouth of a 13 year old schoolgirl called Helen Burns, who will shortly die of tuberculosis.  It is a reflection of a very different way of looking at reality - one that we no longer share. It is difficult to imagine a novelist putting such words into the mouth of a contemporary child. Compare those words with the following.
"It was just at the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion.  I was telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said - "why don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?" The next night I brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got along."

The first quotation was written in 1847, the second, by Henry Miller, from the Tropic of Capricorn, was written in 1957. There has been a huge sea-change in culture between the two quotations.  Culture is not permanent.

Human life is in constant flux.  Human beliefs and with it human conduct changes from age to age. There is a core to human nature, the passions, vanity and egoism, but there are also profound differences.
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The great transformation

What will be the change brought about when the belief that man is a digital machine comes to be universally accepted?

The first and actually most profound consequence of this will be that humanity will come to believe something that simply is not true. It is an immeasurable injury to believe something which is not true. Furthermore, at this time, there is simply no reason whatsoever to believe that computers are capable of being conscious. To suggest that my pocket calculator is capable of thinking is simply absurd, and yet, there is nothing in a digital computer that is essentially any different from the workings of a pocket calculator. As a fact, no computer even remotely approaches human intelligence, and all the claims about A.I. are exaggerated as are the predictions.
But I do not rest my answer to the question, why does it matter? on the enormity of the illusion that it would create. Besides, not everyone does agree that to believe a falsehood is an injury.

So let us be clear as to the consequences of this belief. There are some gawky attempts to claim that computers will have a religious  life, but once we truly come to believe that we are nothing but digital computers, then the belief in transcendence, on which religious life is based, will come to an end.
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13 years have elapsed since 2001.

This is not for any logical reason. In philosophy it is usual to argue that no value follows from a fact. This was introduced by David Hume. Thus, fact: Man is a machine; therefore, value: we ought to have sex with everyone we possible can before we are 30 years old so as to avoid the bitter disappointment of old age, is not a valid argument. Putting it the other way around, once it comes to be held as a general belief that man is a digital computer, then there will be no logical reason not to carry on believing in life after death or behaving in any particular ethical manner, including the extreme forms of altruism.

The answer to the question: why does it matter? lies in psychology, and what is akin to it, ethics.

A child is born.  By the age of four, not long after she can speak, she is using the ipod.* She communicates digitally with Facebook friends that she has never met in the physical word.  She goes to school and she is taught that she is a machine. She is encouraged to play digital games by his peers. Now what attitude to death and what rules of moral conduct does she acquire?
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[* See, for example,  http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1265637.  What is the age of the child in the photo?]

Concerning ethics, it is possible to claim that as the belief in man as digital machine gathers momentum it will provide a great impetus to egoism.  That people have always been selfish is without question, but there can also be an increase in egoism, and such an increase must surely be connected to some life-changing attitude to the very nature of the world. To believe that man is a digital machine is just such a life-altering attitude.  After that belief is accepted, what is the answer to the question: for whom and what do I live for? For god, for society, for your family, for your parents, for your children?  But there is the reply: God does not exist, society is an abstract notion akin to god; I live for these things so long as they provide satisfaction of my egocentric concerns. In short, I live for myself.

For the philosophers, I do not make this claim as a logical deduction that the world is composed of matter, therefore, I must live for myself only.  That is not logically valid, but psychologically egoism does not cohere well with a belief in transcendence.   "What we do in life echoes in eternity."  But there cannot be an echo if there is no eternity.

The great transformation and death

Concerning death, the child is already a master of digital communication before he even begins to grasp the nature of death.

A child begins to understand that death is an irreversible process around the age of four.  Only by the age of seven does a child grasp the idea of 'nonfunctionality' - that the dead body can no longer do things that a living body can do.  It is much later (my sources do not provide an average age for this) that a child grasps that death is universal.  Children persist in the belief that there are certain people who are exempted from death, and believe that they are one of those. 

Those opposed to the religious way of living claim that to believe in the afterlife is a form of illusion. They call it a kind of sop.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."  Stephen Hawking - interview in the Guardian newspaper, 15 May, 2011.

The conclusion that Stephen Hawking has reached will be the conclusion that the majority will reach. Reinforced by the culture of the day, it will be perceived as abnormal to believe anything else.

Having grasped the inevitability and universality of death there is hardly anyone who does not think about his death from time to time, and this consideration increases with the ageing process, as the natural end of life looms. Faced with the prospect of annihilation, oblivion, the utter cessation of conscious life, how will people respond?

"The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the world leader in cryonics, cryonics research, and cryonics technology. Cryonics is the science of using ultra-cold temperature to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so. Alcor is a non-profit organization located in Scottsdale, Arizona, founded in 1972." www.alcor.org.

"This guide is intended as a companion to the ACS article "Freeze A Jolly Good Fellow," which provides answers to the most frequently asked questions about cryonics and the American Cryonics Society's suspension program." www.americancryonics.org.
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More and more people will invest in methods to preserve their physical bodies in the hope of a physical cure to death.
"September 18, 2013 – Google today announced Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases. Arthur D. Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, will be Chief Executive Officer and a founding investor."  www.businessinsider.com

Human nature is always in flux. The idea of the permanence of death has already lead to changes in human behaviour. People are investing in the cure for death.

This is a change, and it is a change for the worse. Contrast this with the words of C.G. Jung when asked about death. 
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"You see I have treated many old people, and it is quite interesting to watch what the unconscious is doing with the fact that it is apparently threatened with the complete end.  It disregards it.  Life behaves as if it were going on.  And so I think it is better for old people to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly.  But when he is afraid, when he does not look forward, and he looks back, he petrifies, he gets stiff and he dies before his time.  But when he is living on, looking forward to the late adventure that is ahead, then he lives, and that is about what the unconscious is tending to do"  C.J. Jung 

A belief in transcendence is psychologically healthy, and the stripping away of this belief that is currently under way will lead to changes in the way we behave and the way in which we approach death.  Rather than looking on death as an extension of life, it seems that people as they approach death are becoming consumed by regret.  Since it is impossible to avoid making mistakes in life, the healthy way to approach the end of life is to embrace each mistake as a mistake, as if life were infinite and the mistakes were just part of life's learning experience - life's pilgrimage as it used to be called. In other words, to be psychologically healthy is to behave as if one were an infinite being.  

And it is the same for ethics as it is for death. To embrace a moral life it to live like an immortal being.

I am not advocating here reincarnation or some particular conception of the afterlife.  I agree with what Jung says in the interview, that the psyche is not confined to space and time as a fact, and that to live "properly" is to live as if one were an infinite being - in some sense or other.  That is the essence of moral life too.

The advocates of strong A.I. in fact strip away from humanity this belief, robbing Man of his Dignity.  If it were true, it might be something we had to swallow, like a bitter pill, but as it is not true, to advocate it on the basis of the flimsy knowledge we have of brains and the paltry performance of digital computers is not justified.

The whole discussion of death with Jung is very interesting, and I provide a transcript below.  The comments left by people on YouTube are also illustrative.  Most of those people believe, as the interviewer did himself, that death is final, and they cannot grasp what Jung is saying, or accept his claims about how the psyche is not entirely confined to space and time. The comments are highly illustrative of the transformation taking place in our culture at this time.  I do not doubt, also, that most of the readers of this page simply will not accept that death is not final.  

That man is in some sense a machine is true.  If we perform surgery we find mechanical parts.  But we have always known this.  It was known to Galen.  What is difficult to grasp nowadays that as a machine man is more than a digital machine; that there is still something special about him, and that there is no need to deny the sense of transcendence that his own unconscious psyche supplies.  

If it becomes accepted that computers are conscious, then our attitudes to death and ethics will change.  It will be perceived as irrational not to believe that death is final and it will be perceived as rational to act out of pure self-interest.  On the one hand, our psyche becomes a mere object to us, and on the other hand, all sentient beings become mere objects to us as well.  We are just one object living among others.

This is what a contemporary nurse writes about people who are dying.
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"When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made."  www.thefinancialphilosopher.com/2013/10/the-most-common-regret-of-the-dying.html

This illustrates the great transformation that is taking place in our society in our attitude to death.  That transformation makes us backward looking; it encourages a hostile attitude to ageing and goes hand-in-glove with the cult of youth that now pervades our society.  As we are conditioned by society, it is impossible for us to look on this issue indifferently, and perhaps my reader also simply cannot accept that death is an extension of life.

Most people are unaware of the great transformation because they do not read the literature of the past, and therefore do not see that even one hundred years ago a different system of thinking and explanation was then natural.  Because they know nothing else than the material way of explaining things, they take it for granted that any other system or type of explanation must be simply stupid.

If man ever comes to truly believe that he is nothing more than a digital machine, his conduct will be altered in ways that will be unimaginably different from the conduct of the past.



Appendices

The video of Jung follows below.  Firstly, in case this article is misinterpreted, I address a few additional issues.

1. Let me clarify where I stand on religion generally. Unlike some religious people I did not have a religious upbringing, so I have very little reaction to organized religion for or against.  For example, not having had anyone attempt to beat Christianity into me as a child, I find I have no antipathy towards Christianity whatsoever, whose founder, as evidenced by the words and deeds recorded in the Gospels, strikes me as a Man worthy of the most profound respect, and most worthy of all men to be called the Son of God. Against that, the issue of how much of orthodox Christian worship is founded on the words of Jesus of Nazareth, and the observation that the Church in whatever form it takes is open to the charge of hypocrisy have caused me never to take up orthodox Christian worship.  I also deeply admire the Eastern religions, while not in agreement with them on the issue of asceticism. Thus, I am not writing to defend a particular Church, but writing to defend the Dignity of Man. To summarize: I am not a bigot:  I do not identify religion with any creed or sect, and above all, what I like in religious people is what I like in atheists - sincerity. I particularly detest those who claim to worship a god but really worship their own self-interest.  

2. I would like also to be precise about what I am arguing against.  I am not denying that man is in some sense a machine, but I am denying that he is a computer.  I agree with Jung that as a fact, man lives partly in the "physical world" of space and time, and partly in the transcendent world not confined to space and time.  I am not a dualist in the sense of Descartes either. The particularly reductive form of mechanism that we are witnessing today is precisely the claim that we may build a computer that can be conscious.  Asserting that man is a machine does not in itself strip man of his Dignity, because as a machine man may still have what we may call a divine aspect.  The claim of strong A.I. is immensely arrogant as well - we've had the myth of Frankenstein ever since we've had myths - to warn us of consequences of such an arrogant attitude.  We are setting ourselves up as gods.  A computer is a digital mechanism that works in binary.  That a human being is also a binary machine is what I am denying, and all that I am denying.

3. I am not claiming that there is a conspiracy to force little children into being "narrow-minded materialists". However, there is clearly a cultural process that is tending to teach them that they are one thing rather than another. Religious education may be compulsory in the United Kingdom, but it is not taught with half as much vigour as science. Actually, science is neutral as to philosophy.  Science does not oppose religion, but the material philosophy is communicated nonetheless. There are all the unconscious cultural forces that make materialism into the all-pervading dominant cultural force of our age.  It's like any other evolution of a culture.  No one consciously sets out to do this, but it happens nonetheless.  

C.G. Jung - on death

This is the video clip of Jung talking about death.  After it I provide a transcript.  Not all the words of the interviewer can be heard distinctly.  This version of the interview is more audible than the other available at YouTube, but if you are interested in how the public perceives Jung's words and the comments left, then look at the other version (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOxlZm2AU4o).


TRANSCRIPT

Interviewer: You’ve said that death is psychologically just as important as birth, and like it, it is an integral part of life, but surely it can’t be like birth if it’s an end, can it?

Jung: Yes, if it’s an end, and there we are not quite certain about this end, because you know there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche that it isn’t entirely confined to space and time.  You can have dreams or visions of the future, you can see long cause and such things, only ignorance can deny these facts; it’s quite evident that they do in fact exist and have existed always.  Now these facts show that the psyche in part at least is not dependent upon these confinements.  And then what?  When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously it doesn't, then to that extent the psyche is not subjected to those laws and that means a practical continuation of life of a sort of psychical existence beyond time and space.

Interviewer: Do you yourself believe that there is ?? at the end, or do you believe…?

Jung: Well, I can’t say… You see the word belief is a difficult for me.  I don’t believe, I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis.  Either I know a thing, and then I know it, I don’t need to believe it.  I don’t allow myself to believe a thing just for the sake of believing it.  I can’t believe it.  But when there are sufficient reasons for a certain hypothesis, I shall accept these reasons naturally.  As you say, we have to reckon with the possibility of so and so.

Interviewer: Well now, you've told us that we should regard death as being a goal, and to shrink away from it is to evade life, and its purposes.  What advice would you give to people in later life in order to do this when most of them must in fact believe that death is the end of everything.

Jung: You see I have treated many old people, and it is quite interesting to watch what the unconscious is doing with the fact that it is apparently threatened with the complete end.  It disregards it.  Life behaves as if it were going on.  And so I think it is better for old people to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly.  But when he is afraid, when he does not look forward, and he looks back, he petrifies, he gets stiff and he dies before his time.  But when he is living on, looking forward to the late adventure that is ahead, then he lives, and that is about what the unconscious is tending to do.  Of course, it’s quite obvious that we are all going to die and this is the sad finale of everything, but nevertheless there is something in us that doesn't believe it apparently.  But this is merely a fact, a psychological fact.  Does it mean to me that it proves something?  It is simply so. For instance, I may not know why we need salt, but we prefer to eat salt to, because you feel better.  And so when you think in a certain way you may feel considerably better.  And I think that if you live along the lines of nature, then you think properly.

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Impossible colours and how Leonardo painted

10/31/2013

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Colour and light are mental phenomena - they are created by the mind which uses light to illuminate reality and colour to separate objects.  Strictly, radiation is not light, and colour does not correspond to wavelength. 
    We experience light as generated at a locus of the brain called the "third eye" - which is situated in the middle of the forehead and just behind it.  In deep meditation it is possible to experience pure light emanating from this centre as waves or pulsations.
    For a given mental experience there is a physical counterpart within the brain, which may extend through a chain of causes outside the brain.  That is to say, an image may arise from a relationship with an object that we believe to be external to the mind.  But this is not always the case, such as in dreams and visions.
    In general we expect a correlation to exist between radiation as it is collected by the eye and the mental experience of light and colour.  Radiation is harvested by the rods and cones of the retina, which produce electrical messages that are sent to the visual cortex and interpreted.  But over-emphasis on this relationship leads to mistaken beliefs: firstly, that light is radiation and, secondly, that the relationship of wavelength to colour is exact.  In mathematical parlance, to the belief that there is a one-one functional relationship between radiation and colour.
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Light generated at the "third eye" in meditation. Image adapted from Robert Fludd.
    This mistake has been fostered by scientific studies of colour, beginning with that of Maxwell (1855).  From experiments, he deduced that there were three different types of colour receptor in the retina, which respond to radiation that correspond to red, green and blue light respectively.  Experiments in splitting sunlight with a prism and then combining pure radiations of these wavelengths in varying degrees lead to the conclusion that every colour (of given hue, saturation and lightness) is produced by an exact functional relationship with the incipient radiation.
    Mixing of radiation operates according to the principle of addition.  That is to say, that if pure radiation of red, green and blue wavelengths is combined, then the result is white light. 
    This contrasts with the principle of mixing in paint pigments, which is subtractive.  This means that if cyan, yellow and magenta pigments are combined, then the result is grey, tending to black.
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    What Maxwell, and subsequent experimenters overlooked, was a third type of combination of light that is neither additive nor subtractive, but participates in properties of both.  To experience this kind of combination of radiation consider the following.
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Look at the two crosses, and then by allowing yourself to become "cross-eyed" make a third combined image in the middle, one in which both crosses coincide.  At first this will be difficult, and the cross will have some tendency to oscillate.  (It is preferable to download the examples and print them to photographic paper than to view them on screen.)

    DOWNLOAD: Experiments in impossible colours

    If the blue and yellow colours in this example mix additively, then the combined image should be approximately white light and if they combine subtractively then the image should be green.
    Some people report that when they conduct this experiment they experience a new colour which partakes of both blue and yellow, and is neither white nor green.
    This is what I experience.  The outcome is not stable and oscillates between various combinations, as if my mind is trying out different options and seeking a stable solution.  Sometimes I experience the dominant colour as blue and sometimes yellow; then the yellow merges with the blue and produces a new colour.  This new colour is not green but is the blue-yellow colour that others have reported.  Sometimes there is a tinge of green.  There is a green "solution" to the problem, which is a kind of deep sea green (if seen on screen) but a paler variant (if seen on paper), but this is not more stable than the other solutions.  (I obtain the green solution particularly if the overlap of the crosses is far from perfect.)  Similarly, there is a greyish solution.  Sometimes the blue-yellow "new colour" solution appears as a texture of blue grains in a yellow sea and sometimes as a texture of yellow grains in a blue sea; but sometimes, and this perhaps momentarily, as a true blue-yellow fusion.  The black cross appears to float before the new colour, and everything is more radiant than the two images are separately.
    It is a new colour because it is not white and not green, but not yellow and not blue either.  I would not say that the mind has produced an entirely new hue, but that a colour that is impossible to define is produced that partakes of both blue and yellow and has a fluorescent and transcendent quality.  It also has a metallic sheen.
    To explain this phenomenon we may refer to what is known about the physiology of colour production within the brain.  Radiation, a phenomenon external to the brain, produces electrical signals in the retina.  It is accepted that there are three kinds of receptor (cones) in the retina - for "green", "blue" and "red" radiation.  These are the primaries.  The mixing of green and red primaries produces yellow, but this yellow does not correspond to an individual stimulus at the level of the retina.  So yellow is created at some later stage within the brain and at the "interface" between mind and brain. At the same time that yellow is manufactured, the brain interprets it as in direct opposition to blue, so it imposes a rule that a colour cannot be simultaneously blue and yellow, and that an admixture of blue and yellow amounts to white light, since it is composed of all three primaries.
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    In the experiment that produces the "impossible colour" of blue-yellow we have a situation in which blue light enters the cortex via the left eye and yellow light via the right.  Let us hypothesise that in the cortex the two channels (left and right) are processed separately, so that the cortex manufactures a blue colour for the left channel and a yellow colour for the right channel.  At a stage further to the back in the cortex, and later in the processing, the information from the two channels is combined, and it is here that the "contradiction" is experienced; the brain attempts to overlay the blue and yellow colours, one on the other; it constantly experiments with "solutions", sometimes interpreting the resultant as a sea of blue dots in a yellow lake and conversely, but on other occasions, actually producing a colour that is judged by the mind as both blue and yellow simultaneously.  I shall call this a "transcendent" colour rather than an "impossible" one.
    It must be remembered that the situation described is "apparently" unusual and artificial.  However, I scare quote this immediately, because I shall suggest below that the production of transcendent colours is much more normal than we suppose, and actually part of our daily lives.  For the present, however, let us acknowledge that it is not usual to have light of opposing colour radiation enter different eyes and be combined in the manner of deliberate lack of normal focus (by going "cross-eyed").  It does not occur in the splitting of light radiation.
    Now let us consider whether this new colour is produced by addition or subtraction.  In fact, both these principles refer to physical processes that occur outside the brain and significantly prior to the production of light and colour, which are mental phenomenona.  Addition is appropriate to the addition of radiation, and subtraction occurs in paint pigments, which arises because paints absorb light and only reflect part of it.  Thus, when addition occurs colours become less saturated and less intense.
    Because both blue and yellow radiation are presented to the left and right eyes respectively, there is no mixing either of radiation or of pigments, so neither addition nor subtraction apply.  However, a radiation sufficient to produce a strong colour sensation is presented to each eye separately, so when the two channels are combined (presumably in the cortex) then the resultant "impossible" or transcendent colour is interpreted as more intense than either radiation separately, and hence has a fluorescent character.  So the combination partakes of the addition of colour, without being identical to it since it is not actually combined as radiation.  The resultant is certainly not white light.  Likewise, the resultant colour partakes of the subtraction of colour.  This is because it is a synthesis of the blue colour presented to the left eye and the yellow to the right, so it is a synthesis of both.  But it is not green because green arises from the pure subtraction of colour pigments as a result of increased absorption of the incipient light, and this colour is more intense not less. 
    It is customary to classify all colours according to a "colour space" or "gamut".  The experiment we have just conducted indicates that the standard gamut must be extended to an extra "dimension", since the "impossible" blue-yellow colour is not represented within it.  It is a combination that lies either behind or in front of the diagram, depending on which way you choose to define your axis of transcendent subtraction of light creating a more intense image than either source.  This lays open the possibility of a transcendent addition of light (resulting in impossible colours but of lower intensity than the sources).  Furthermore, the term "dimension" must be used with care - since any two colours may have transcendent subtractive and additive combinations, any attempt to create a geometric (vector) space out of these colours is doomed.  It is not a dimension in the usual sense.
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Radiation that has been split in a prism may be additively recombined to produce white light. This process occurs outside the brain. The colours that you see in the above picture are created in your mind.
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Mixing of paints on an artist's palette is by subtractive mixing.
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This diagram is typical of the representation of colour space (gamut). The whole space represents all the colours that the eye can see, and the triangular region the colours that a computer monitor can display. (This means that the colours outside that triangular region in the diagram are not true representations of the colours that you and I can see, because they are being displayed right now on your monitor. For example, the red that you can see is far more intense than the red displayed above that lies outside the triangle.)
Pigments

    When an artist paints he gathers together pigments onto a palette, where typically he mixes them before applying them to a surface.  This combination is by additive mixing resulting in less intense colours.  Hence, for example, if I mix on my palate cobalt blue with cadmium yellow the resultant green colour will be less saturated and less intense than either the cobalt blue or cadmium yellow alone.  Thus, paintings produced by this method tend to become dark.   This accounts for the dull appearance of many paintings.  This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing.  If one wants pure, saturated colours, then that must be for a reason, and the mixing together of pigments produces a painting that has a certain character of unity based on their lack of saturation and intensity. 
    The problem of colour composition in a painting is to juxtapose different colours without producing a kind of mental dyspepsia.  It is for this reason that over the centuries artists have evolved the one colour, two colour and three colour compositions.  In a one colour composition, just one colour dominates and all other regions are variations of that colour, or close approximations.  It is the safest way in which to produce a painting that is harmonious, and most successful colour compositions work on this principle in one way or another, even where there are apparently two principle colours, or even three.
    Nonetheless, since the additive mixing of pigments produces duller colours, it follows that for the artist the primary colours are all and every pigment that he or she uses.  If you wish to have a pure green, then you must start with a pigment that is pure green, such as cadmium green.   You cannot mix a pure green from blue and yellow.
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Example of a three colour composition by Vermeer.
    For an artist there is no such thing as just three primary colours.  To be sure, it is possible to produce paintings with just three colours in addition to white and black, but that is a deliberate choice that produces a particular kind of aesthetic experience.  Indeed, the choice of his or her palette is therefore the principle first concern of the artist in working with colour.
    Pigments are chemicals - that is to say, they are sources of radiation that produce colours within the mind.  As such their radiation can be analysed by physical methods, such as spectroscopy.  Each pigment has a different spectrum.  Each pure pigment produces a radiation of a characteristic radiation, which in turn elicits a colour response from the mind.
    The production of colour in the mind is a form of judgement; if I see green then I judge that the object is green.  But each judgement of colour is also essentially bound with other judgements as to the value and meaning of the colour.  The meaning of colour is to an extent influenced by social and cultural factors.  For example, in Western cultures red signifies danger but in Chinese culture it signifies good fortune and joy.  A more universal element of the aesthetic experience inextricably bound up with the seeing of colour is its value.  I propose as an axiom of colour aesthetics that every pure pigment elicits a positive value tone.  We cannot help liking pure colour.  To prove this, obtain samples of several pigments and compare your experiences of them without reference to other other colours.  Naturally, we have favourite colours, but this does not prevent us appreciating any pure colour.
    The principle difficulty of the artist is to juxtapose colours in such ways that the same love of the purity of single colours is elicited.  It is only from the juxtaposition of colours that complex meanings, including social meanings, can be elicited.  The danger with all colour compositions is either dullness or excessive excitation and hence the experience of ugliness from either under excitation or from over-excitation.

Paint

A paint is comprised of two principle ingredients - a pigment usually ground as a fine powder and a binder that holds and glues the pigment grains together.  Sometimes fillers and dilutents are added to a paint.  The combination of a pigment with a binder is also called a medium. For a given pigment, the difference between two media is imparted by their different binders.  The historically older forms of binder are animal glue (size), plaster and egg yolk.  In relatively modern times we have various plant oils, of which linseed oil shall be our main example, and synthetic resins called acrylics.  There are differences obvious to any artist between the two media.  Principally, acrylic dries quickly and is opaque, whereas oil based paints (linseed) "dries" slowly and is translucent.
    The "drying" process of oil paint is not one of evaporation.  It is a chemical reaction in which oxygen is absorbed from the air; the media increases in size and mass as it hardens.  The chemical process is one of the formation of cross links between adjacent molecules as free-radical polymerization brings about the oxidation of double carbon-carbon bonds.  With the "drying" process there is also some darkening of the material.
    Different pigments are classified for use with linseed oil in terms of their opacity.  Cerulean blue, for instance, is classified as an opaque pigment whereas ultramarine is translucent.  However, it is important to realise that this is a relative classification only, as all pigments in linseed oil are translucent.
    This creates both the chief difficulty and the chief advantage of oil paint.  It is difficult to create an opaque, "solid" body of colour with oils, but their translucency opens up other possibilities.
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Sandro Boticelli - The Birth of Venus
    In order to overcome the problem of opacity Renaissance artists developed the technique of painting in layers.  This technique has been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, but that is in fact incorrect, as it was well-known before Leonardo.  The use of linseed oil as a binder, that is to say the invention of oil painting, is attributed to van Eyck, but it quickly spread from Flanders to Italy.  Leonardo was one of the first to experiment with it.  Prior to that many paintings were produced using egg yolk as binder - the medium being known as egg-tempera.  Artists such as Botticelli painted in thin layers of egg-tempera.  Van Eyck is said to have used thin layers of both tempera and oil in his paintings.  So the technique of layering paint was well-known prior to Leonardo.
    Typically, a painter begins by laying a ground, that is often white, and in Renaissance times could be comprised of white lead in oil.  Then he makes an under-painting, usually in earth colours such as raw umber.  Finally, he starts to build up layers with other pigments.  Pigments may, of course, be mixed on the palette prior to application, but it is also possible to work a single pigment onto the surface.  The assumption here is that by placing layer up on layer a complex colour effect will develop.  If one wishes to model the soft effect of light falling on a shoulder, then alternating between successive layers of titanium white, for the light, and browns, pinks and yellows for the shadows can produce the desired result.  Each thin layer is called a glaze.
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Leondardo da Vinci - Adoration of the Magi. This is an example of an underpainting.
It is a question: how many layers need to be added in order to obscure another layer below it?  Since painters like Titian are said to have used up to thirty layers, the answer to that question may be: "thirty or more".  Does every layer in a painting by Titian, even the most remote layer belonging to the under-painting, contribute to the overall image?
This is a question for scientific research, but I can speak from experience.  Firstly, since in oil painting every layer is translucent, even when a so-called "opaque" pigment is used, then every layer can contribute to the overall impression.  Secondly, in practice, after three layers the fourth layer seems to start to disappear.  However, this is partly illusion, because, thirdly, the painting seems "finished" when the application of a top layer is no longer able to make a significant difference by itself to the overall colour, tone and modeling of the image.  This proves that the three layers "rule" is an illusion, since here a single layer makes minimal difference to the surface impression.  This is because the "volume" of radiation emitted from the lower layers is now overwhelming.  
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Radiation enters a series of translucent layers; only a proportion of this radiation is reflected back to the eye by any given layer.
    At the early stages each glaze is very thin and the bulk of the radiation is emitted from the white ground.  When the painting approaches "completion" this means that the ground itself is no longer making the biggest contribution to the overall impression, so a single final glaze seems to make a minimal impression.
    It is, of course, possible to place contrary colours in layers.  Thus, for example, one can place a layer of blue pigment and over that  a yellow glaze. 

The thickness of the layers

The thinner the layer, the more the radiation passes through it, so the more translucent it is.  However, this creates a problem: how thin can a layer be?
    When painting with linseed oil as binder, the oil tends to bobble up and form globules.  This means that there is a lower limit as to how thin one can make a layer with linseed oil.  To overcome this, one may experiment with diluents or thinners, such as turpentine.  It is a matter for each artist working with layers to experiment, but in my experience the use of turpentine makes little difference.  In the first instance, the layer is thinner, but the turpentine quickly evaporates from the surface, leaving just the binder, and the oil once again agglutinates.
    Leonardo da Vici is said to have used up to fifty thin layers - for example, in the Mona Lisa.  In order to achieve this he must have discovered a special formula, an admixture of oils, diluents and other components, that enabled him to paint in microscopically thin layers.  Wax may have had something to do with this.  To support this conclusion we have the following anecdotal evidence from Vasari's Life of Leonardo da Vici.

Once, when he was commissioned a work by the Pope, Leonardo is said to have started at once to distil oils and various plants in order to prepare the varnish; and the Pope is supposed to have exclaimed: 'Oh dear, this man will never do anything.  Here he is thinking about finishing the work before he even starts it!'

The Pope's conclusion is wrong.  Varnishes are made from the resins of trees, and are not in general distilled from plants.  Also, it is possible to paint with varnish as a binder, or to mix varnish with oil to create a unique medium.  Leonardo's fascination with experimental science is well-known. Thus, Leonardo was not thinking about finishing the work before starting it; he was distilling oils in order to create a new medium for thin layer painting. 
Layering and transcendent colours

In our first experiment with transcendent colours, above, we combined blue radiation with yellow radiation presented to different eyes.  But we now see that there is another way of combining colours by presenting them to each eye simultaneously.  This is through layering. 
    Consider a layered surface in which there is some alternation of different pigments between the layers.  For definiteness, consider alternating blue with yellow pigments in layers.  Then each eye individually experiences blue and yellow in layers.  We may hypothesise that reception of the radiation is also differentiated and layered.  Thus, from a single eye, it is possible to relay to the cortex signals corresponding to distinct blue and yellow hues; so the same transcendent subtractive combination occurs in the cortex as would occur had the different colours been presented to different eyes, and a transcendent colour is produced.
    I am suggesting that part of the mystery and supernatural quality of the work of Leodardo comes from the experience of transcendent colours in his work.  I should add some explanatory remarks.  (1) I am not assuming that Leonardo is alternating between yellows and blues in his work, which I am considering for illustrative purposes only.  Nonetheless, blues may be present in a part that may be experienced as overall transcendent brown.  (In fact, van Eyck is famous for his frequent use of ultramarine glazes throughout his paintings.)  Predominantly, Leonardo will be alternating between lighter and darker pigments of his palette.  But, in fact, there is evidence that Leonardo used lapis lazuli (true ultramarine) in his composition of the Mona Lisa.  This would produce layers of ultramarine and browns and hence transcendent colours.  (2) I suggest that every combination of different pigments in layers produces a colour judged by the mind to be transcendent.  So the argument presented here does not depend on just one transcendent colour combination. (3) It should also be born in mind that transcendent colours are not different hues, in the sense, for example, in which green is a different hue to either blue or yellow.  Transcendent colours are colours that are judged (unconsciously) by the mind to simultaneously partake of two colours without being a blend of them.  For example, blue-yellow as opposed to green.
    From this point of view, rather than being unusual and "impossible", transcendent colours are normal, or should be.  I say, "should be", because those surfaces that produce stable hues would, according to this theory, be those that are uniform throughout their layers.  Such surfaces are artificial.  For example, a manufactured paint that is uniformly mixed and put on in several layers to produce a surface in which the radiation is wholly undifferentiated. 
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Pascal Cotte, a French engineer who took “ultra-detailed digital scans” of the “Mona Lisa,” says he can now tell us a lot more about what Leonardo‘s masterpiece is supposed to look like. Cotte created a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the light blues and brilliant whites he thinks represent the painting in its original form. Last year, we had another report about scientific analysis (using infrared reflectography) of this endlessly fascinating lady. Source: http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2007/10/mona_lisa_revealed.html
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Leonardo da Vinci - The Mona Lisa
    As we turn from nature to an artificial environment, from country to town, we increase the frequency with which we meet such uniform surfaces - we see them whenever we see paint, and that is everywhere these days.  So our contemp0rary world is reducing the variety we have in the experience of colour.
    Metals provide another kind of surface that induces transcendent colours.  Who can say that gold is a colour?  Compare the computer generated colour gold with any gold surface.  Gold is a transcendent colour, and so too is silver, and any other polished metal. 
   
    A polished metallic surface is a layered one.  Polishing increases the smoothness of the surface, so light penetrating the surface is reflected uniformly, at the same angle, rather than scattered.  The metal ions which absorb the incipient radiation and re-emit it are arranged in a crystal lattice that can be considered as a series of layers.  Radiation does not get all absorbed by the first layer; most of it passes through several layers.  Thus, light emitted from a polished metallic surface is layered.  I suggest that it is this layering that is responsible for the mental experience of a metallic colour.  Metallic colours are transcendent.  It is the layering itself that produces metallic lustre, but there may be some variation also in the wavelengths of the radiation.
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The crystal structure of a polished metal surface produces a complex reflection as radiation is returned from multiple layers within the crystal structure. I suggest that metal surfaces produce transcendent colours.
    This is also why the transcendent colours produced by the layering of pigments also have a metallic quality.  The metallic sheen is part of the judgement of the mind that the colour is transcendent.  For example, if you make alternate layers in linseed oil of raw umber and titanium white, then the result is a transcendent colour of a gold like quality.  This is remarkable, because raw umber is not a colour that one would otherwise have expected to produce such an aesthetic experience.
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What actually is the colour of the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo

Before reaching a conclusion about Leonardo, I wish to mention two other products of the technique of painting in thin layers; which are sfumato and chiaroscuro.  Sfumato, which means "smoky", is the name given to paintings in which there are no hard lines.  In fact, when painting with linseed oil, it is very difficult to obtain sharp lines, and the Renaissance artists must have had special formulas for producing them.  Many, like Durer and Bosch, were trained a sign writers, and would have acquired formulas from their apprenticeships.  When painting in thin layers the diffusion of pigment across a layer is the rule.  Furthermore, as radiation penetrates through the layers, it will be diffracted and diffused; so the particular "transcendent" quality added to a painting that successfully produces sfumato derives from the technique of layering. 
    Chiaroscuro refers to the use of strong contrasts of light and dark - and is also achieved through layered painting.  The smooth, imperctible blending of regions from light to dark, from one hue to another is achieved through thin layers.  There is some debate as to whether Leonardo painted with his fingers in order to achieve surfaces in which brush strokes do not appear.  As it happens almost every artist that ever lived has painted with his or her fingers at some point; but fingers also leave finger-prints, and the brushless surface is a product of the technique of painting in thin layers in which the layers diffuse and flatten.  When several layers are combined any strokes in one layer are masked by strokes in another, thus cancelling each other out.  So the strokes cannot be seen even if they are present.
    Now we can draw conclusions about the aesthetic experience of Leonardo's paintings.  Leondardo painted in thin layers, using up to fifty in a work like the Mona Lisa.  As a result, his work contains transcendent colours.  These, in addition to the sfumato and chiaroscuro, contribute to the overall sublime, spiritual and mysterious aesthetic experience of a work by Leonardo.  The colours of a work of Leonardo can never be reproduced by photography, which can only give a definite hue to each pixel.  This also applies to the work of other artists who paint in layers.  For example, it is not possible to compare the experience of seeing Botticelli's Birth of Venus with a reproduction.  If you wish to experience the unique aesthetic quality of a work by Leondardo and other Renaissance artists that paint in layers, you have to go and see them in the flesh. 

Postscript

There is a good deal of scientific literature on the topic of "impossible colours" and the mechanism within the brain for the perception of colour.  The notion of an "impossible colour" seems to have been first presented in the journal Science in an article entitled On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue by Hewitt D. Crane and Thomas P. Plantanida (September 1983). 
    The purpose of my article here is to present some observations and reflections of my own and my prime focus is aesthetics rather than science.  It would be nice to think that scientific study of the kind of complex surfaces that I discuss here would result.  I can see no evidence that such complex surfaces have ever been considered.  Behind the scenes, both in my own writing and in the writing of colour theorists, is a great deal of "philosophical noise". 

1.
If impossible colours exist (I prefer the term transcendent colours) then this undermines the foundation of modern science.  This foundation was originally expressed by Galileo at the outset of his polemical essay The Assayer.


"Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. "
[The Assayer (1623), translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661)]


This states that everything in nature can be described mathematically.  In the case of colour perception it finds expression the the notion that human perceivable colours can be described by mathematical coordinates in three dimensions.  It is a precise mathematical functional, vector like relationship.  The existence of impossible colours undermines this assumption.

2.
Secondly, there is the issue of whether everything worth knowing can be obtained by scientific observation.  Now since any critique of the scientific method may be taken by some as an act of heresy, I wish immediately to state my utter admiration for the scientific method.  My criticism is precisely what Shakespeare put into the mouth of Hamlet addressing his friend, Horatio, a representative of the modern, empirical way of thinking.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet (1.5.166-7)

(As an aside, this is a two line refutation of the bogus theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon.)  My own approach here has been avowedly phenomenological as opposed to empirical, in the sense of scientific experiment.  But actually, I do not reject the possibility of some scientific study into these matters, only, that I am not conducting such a study here, and do not accept that my conclusions and speculations are undermined by that as a fact.  Obviously, I reject the idea that all things that can be known, or are worth knowing, can be obtained by the scientific method alone.  Everyone in fact agrees that colour is a mental phenomenon, that is, belongs to the domain of the mind, spirit or psyche - whichever term you prefer - rather than the brain.  That there should be identifiable locus within the brain where the various stages of colour processing "take place" is a natural consequence of the fact that the brain is made of neurons and that space is space - for where else would it take place?  This should not blind us to the fact that colour itself, as subjectively experienced, does not belong to the physical world.  Colour is not radiation.

3.
That does not mean that there could be no scientifically testable method for verifying the existence of transcendent colours - only, that the test must be fair.  I have an article before me now, by P.J. Hsieh and P.U. Tse entitled Perceptual color mixing upon preceptual fading and filling-in does not result in 'forbidden colors'.  [Vision Research 46, 2006]   The obvious criticism of this paper is that it simply does not replicate the very basic kind of colour combination illustrated above with the blue and yellow surfaces.  My own downloadable collection of samples contains situations that might correspond to those they construct and I would agree that the results are very different.  I do not think that from their article alone it would be possible to replicate their experiments, their descriptions, despite technical jargon, are not sufficiently clear for a construction manual.  A second profound criticism is that their logic is self-evidently circular.  They give their subjects the task of matching two surfaces using a computer screen; in doing so they assume what they have to prove, namely that the surface they have to match belongs to the usually accepted colour gamut.

4.
Can the mind be reduced to a mechanical procedure?  It seems to be a sensible question, with no obvious answer, but it is heresy these days to suggest that the answer is "no". 
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Art and Religion

5/5/2013

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How art and religion became separated, and why it is now once again possible to conjoin them.
We now know the answer to Cicero's question: who and what are the gods?


The Homeric conception of the gods

    In Homer the gods are like persons; they manifest themselves directly to the heroes, sometimes appearing as themselves, sometimes in disguise by pretending to be someone else, and sometimes through portents, dreams and signs.  This is the most fascinating part of the Homeric conception of the gods, because it is so alien from anything we can relate to.  We have no conception whatsoever of a conversation, face to face, with a god or goddess; no conception of the gods discussing things among themselves and then sending Hermes or Iris, or some other deity, to convey the result of their deliberations directly to the persons involved, and even offering them safe conduct through the enemy lines.  There is an unanswered mystery as to what Apollo joining a battle and fighting in person might mean for the average Greek; what did the incident in The Iliad where Diomedes fights the gods convey to the contemporary audience? 
    The Iliad, written around C7th B.C. is about an idealised past, set about four or five centuries previously. Yet for Homer's audience the idea of the gods walking among them was not inherently impossible, but whether they thought they had examples of this in their own lives is not clear.  It is not absurd to think so.  We may assume that their experience of immanence fell short of the depiction in the epic, but they were sufficiently familiar with it to feel no strangeness in the representation.  The idealisation is also supported by the notion of the decay of man – a proto version of the fall – in which the heroes belong to a distant better age, were stronger, bigger than contemporary specimens of humanity, and closer to the gods.  Some of them were children of the gods, some were their lovers.  
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The Greek Myth of Creation by Peter Fekete
    Another fascinating question is: what does it mean to say that your wife is a goddess? Or that you are the child of a god?  Robert Graves would interpret this as a euphemism for illegitimacy and suggest that a son of Thetis is an illegitimate offspring of the temple dedicated to that goddess, the product of the practice of ritual prostitution in her name.   Being married to the goddess makes one into the ritual consort of the temple priestesses.  However, The Illiad itself does not hint at this interpretation in any way.  In The Iliad a wife is a wife, a son is a son – there is no question of this being a euphemism.   The Greek had a day-to-day experience of the immanence of the gods that made it creditable for them to ascribe real parentage to them.

Statues of the gods

    It is now accepted that The Divine Pimander, attributed to the Egyptian Magus Hermes Trismegistus, is a pious fraud written by in the 2nd Century AD.  Even so, the account in the Pimander of how magicians could call down spirits to inhabit statues is an important indicator of another psychological experience of the gods from which we in our plastic age are now excluded.  The philosophy of The Pimander echoes the myth of man's fall, and argues that man is descended from "demons" who are "akin to the gods".
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Trinity of Horus, Osiris and Isis
     "You must know, O Ascelpius, the power and force of man.  Just as the Lord and Father is the creator of the gods of heaven, so man is the author of the gods who reside in the temples.  Not only does he receive life, but he gives it in his turn.  Not only does he progress towards God, but he makes gods."
    "Do you mean the statues, O Trismegistus?"
    "Yes, the statues, Ascelpius.  They are animated statues full of sensus and spiritus who can accomplish many things, foretelling the future, giving ills to men and curing them."

This statement also represents an idealisation of the past - a  hearkening back to an imaginary time when people conversed with art, and  not merely stood before it.  Though we are excluded by our crystalline consciousness from any experience  that might correspond to the experience of gods in temples, it is not unreasonable to assume that the initiates of temples had some kind of psychological experience akin to conversing with the gods.
    This conclusion is supported by what little we know of the ancient mystery cults, the most famous of which is the Eleusinian mysteries, which were celebrated until AD392 when they were closed by Theodosius I.  At the apex of the ceremony it seems that initiates experienced some strong psychological phenomenon that included visions of the afterlife that hailed the immortality of the soul.

The Age of Faith

    The triumph of Christianity over Paganism represented a sea-change in the attitude of Western man not only to God, but to Art.  The doctrine that statutes could be inhabited by spirits was swept aside by the prohibition on worshipping graven images.  We gave up conversing with the gods, and began praying to Him instead.  One product of this alteration in our collective religious experience was a period of iconoclasm, as a result of which we ask: Where now is the statue of Athena Parthenous sculpted by Phidias for the Acropolis?  It was last heard of in Constantinople in the C10th AD.  The statute of Zeus, also made by Phidias, that was erected at Olympus was destroyed much earlier, though we do not know exactly when, and we have no idea what the sculpture looked like.  
    As Christianity ascended to its dominant position we acquired a different attitude to art: while the gods did not literally inhabit the statues that depicted them, works of art could nonetheless mediate between man and god.  The Icon was born.  The mystical depiction of God  - now as Christ, or his Mother, now as the dying god of the Cross, now as the divine child - could assist the adept in his progression to god - not through conversation, but through meditation, mediation and imitation.  This was the Age of Faith.
    There was no shortage of philosophical justifications for this attitude of veneration.  The representation of Christ as an icon answered the obvious question, "What did the Lord look like?" and  invoked an attitude of veneration towards Christ, identified as an archetype.  St. Basil the Great (329 - 379 AD) wrote, "The honour shown the image passes over to the archetype."  The attitude was supported by the belief that man was created in the image of god, and that Christ was God incarnate.
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Crucifix by Cimabue, Basilica of St. Croce, Florence
    It was inevitable that some of these images should have a pagan origin.  This is clear in the case of the icon of Mary Mother of God and her Divine Child, which were drawn from the Greco-Roman cult of Isis and her child Horus.  

The Age of Illustration and the Age of Plastic

    During the Renaissance the Age of Faith gave way to another age, the "Age of Illustration".  This marks a further weakening of the attitude of people and their artists towards the archetype that artists represent.  It is in this context that the Greco-Roman gods, who as indicated above were never really expunged from the iconography of the period of faith, began to make their systematic reappearance.  This went hand in hand with the secularisation of society.  Wealthy patrons whose devotional attitude had somewhat diminished, sought new themes, and the stories of the pagan gods provided source material.
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Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian in the National Gallery, London
   Despite the diminution of the devotional attitude, Greek myths were regarded as useful sources of moral and philosophical points; we looked through the portal of the painting into an abstract world of ideas.  
    No one who contemplates contemporary society could be unaware that since the Renaissance our attitude has undergone a further alteration, and that we now inhabit the "Age of Plastic" - a period in which all vestiges of the ancient veneration of art as a portal onto a divine or higher world has been lost.  It would seem that all connection between art and the gods has been lost.
At the crux of the crisis

    Rome was already in the grip of religious scepticism by the time Cicero asked the question: who and what are the gods? Reading his On the Nature of the Gods one is struck not only by his inability to come up with a plausible answer to this question, but also by the inadequacy of the other answers that he records among his contemporaries.  In that work one character called Velleius offers the Epicurean justification for the existence of the gods, that they exist in a psychological sense only, but Cotta’s reply seems correct: “... So undoubtedly closer to the truth is the claim made in the fifth book of his Nature of the Gods by Posidonius, whose friendship we all share: that Epicurus does not believe in any gods and that the statements which he made affirming the immortal gods were made to avert popular odium.”  
    The crisis in the Greco-Roman world began around 500 BC when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Democritus, Sophocles and Euripides all questioned the whether the myths handed down to them about their gods could be literally true.  Plato, for example, is hostile towards Homer and would ban poetry from his Republic because of its corrupting influence.  Nonetheless, faith in the gods as reflected in the myths persisted and it was the task of thinkers to reconcile this faith with some higher notion of godhead.  The best of these attempts is reflected in the works of Sophocles and Euripides who interpreted the gods as archetypes.
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Vincenzo Foppa - The Young Cicero Reading
    Philosophers such as Aristotle and the Stoics ignored this approach taking the view that the myths are false fairy tales and that a wiser understanding of the gods dispenses with them altogether.  The notion of the gods is separated from the myths, the myths are open to assault as redundant superstitions reflecting a crude notion of morality.  The general impression is that by the 1st century BC informed, educated Romans could not see a rational connection between their mythology and their notions of morality; they could not rationally justify their mythology and did not believe that the myths that their religion was based on were anything other that superstitious tales handed own to them from less civilised ancestors. They did see the functional need of a state religion, but intellectually could not justify it.  
    It is extraordinary that this attitude is represented in Cicero's work by none other than Cotta,  the High Priest of Rome.  He states:

    "First of all Zeno, followed by Cleanthes and then by Chrysippus, landed themselves in great and wholly unnecessary difficulties in seeking to make sense of lying fables, and in seeking to explain the reasons for the names of individual things.  By so doing, you Stoics are surely admitting that the facts are at odds with popular beliefs, for figures dignified with the title of gods turn out to be properties in nature, and not personal deities at all."
 
    Cotta, the defender of religion and Rome’s high priest, rejects the myths as lying fables.  He attacks in similar manner the idea that there is a single deity called Hercules. It is implied that there is a pure Roman version of all the core myths that matter, but this is not even sketched.  Official Roman state religion is become identified with some elevated notion of morality, and all the myths are being systematically rejected as false fables.

Revival of the gods

    We are in a position to reverse this long trend towards the art of the plastic age, but answering clearly Cicero's question: who are the gods?  The solution presented by Euripides, that the gods are archetypes with objective existence, can now be revived, following the work of Jung and others.
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Greek vase painting - Herakles and the Learnian Hydra
    It is often said that Eurpides represents a new scepticism towards the existence of the gods.  One must accept that a critical attitude towards myth is reflected in his work, but atheism is not.  He stands towards the beginning of a whirlwind crisis of faith that swept the ancient world for he acknowledges that the true identity of the gods, or god, cannot be revealed in the myths as we have them. Herakles, the man, who in the grip of an archetype, murders his wife and family, speaks for Eurpides:
What you say of the gods is hardly relevant.
I don’t believe gods tolerate unlawful love. 
Those tales of chainings are unworthy; I never did
And never will accept them; nor that any god
Is tyrant of another.  A god, if truly god,
Needs nothing.  Those are poets’ lamentable myths.
    Yet Eurpides does not reject the existence of the gods, only that the myths are not direct illuminations of divine nature; they are divine illuminations of human nature.  Hera did not make Herakles mad because she was jealous; Hera is a name for the whole complex of unconscious forces that make Heracles who he is.  Hera is the subconscious of Herakles.
     The gods of the myths represent aspects of our psyches; Euripides is so close to the Jungian theory of archetypes that we may say of him that he believes the gods are archetypes.  In his work the true nature of god, or the gods, becomes open to speculation.  The notions of freewill, moral responsibility and redemption are conveyed in these myths; also the notion of god’s ultimate forgiveness of sin; what Herakles suffers from is a form of original sin and by acknowledging that at the end, he takes a profound step to winning God’s grace.  Though the story is truly terrifying, the conclusion is not pessimistic.  
    A similar response is created in Alcestis, which is the story of a wife prepared to sacrifice herself for her husband.  Medea, the story of a woman who murders her children in order to revenge herself on her husband, Jason,  is somewhat different, for the protagonist Medea is infernally evil and Jason does not make the essential step towards self-knowledge, so his fate hangs in the balance.  Thus, although  it is true that there is a questioning aspect to the work of Euripides that places him in a new world that is full of doubt and uncertainty with regard to the nature of the gods, Euripides was not a non-believer, and his attitude towards Greek myth was also highly respectful. 
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Greek vase painting - Medea boiling a ram.
    The doubt in the existence of the gods that gripped the Roman world was only delayed by the advent of Christianity which may now be seen to have failed to stem the tide of atheism.   Furthermore, while it may be said that the Christian concept of God as Love is superior to the pagan, Christianity also rejected the truths about the psyche that the pagan myths represent, truths that Euripides made an attempt to  uncover.  The answer has still not been given to Cicero's question: who and what are the gods?

Answer to Cicero's question

The gods are semi-autonomous complexes of the human psyche capable of objective manifestation, and therefore, also objective constituents of the collective psyche.  Although they are not persons as such, it is possible to commune with them.  Metaphorically speaking, and in an objective sense too, they continue to walk this Earth and to direct all our actions.  
    As such, it is permissible and appropriate to venerate them, and it is the function of art to facilitate this.  Art and religion may once again be conjoined.




 


 
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Why photographs do not depict nature

11/11/2012

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A simple proof that we do not see in perspective

    There is a myth that photographs represent reality.   This a myth, because cameras do not see at all.    
    It is true that what cameras reproduce accords to the laws of perspective.  By contrast, the human mind-eye does see, but as a literal fact, not in perspective.  Although the human lens is similar to the lens of a camera, the images we see are constructed in the brain for the mind, and the mind’s eye invests everything that it sees with its knowledge.  Nature is full of concepts. 
    We have two terms – reality and nature.  I shall reserve the word reality for what is altogether transcendent.  We do not directly perceive reality. 
    What we do directly see, hear, touch and so forth, I shall call nature.  Nature in this sense is a construct of the human mind, and does not exist independently of the mental endeavour to understand “what it sees”.  Yet it is nature –  it is precisely what we grasp with our senses – the very things we see.  The raw material, the un-interpreted sensory information received by the eye, is never directly experienced in consciousness; what is seen is that which has already been interpreted.  We are generally unaware of this active process of interpretation by the mind because it takes place at an unconscious level. 

Within this very body, mortal though it be, and only a fathom high, but conscious and endowed with mind, is the world.   THE BUDDHA

    Nature is not a given something in front of which one can set a lens and passively record.  Nature only exists before and for the mind.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.  PAUL CEZANNE

    To focus a lens means to bring an object into sharper definition.  To focus for a human mind means to pay closer attention to the object in view – to study it – to reach for an understanding of it, to bring that understanding into consciousness.  A camera as such can never focus in this sense, though the possibility of photography as art rests on the ability of the photographer to use the camera as if it were his mind’s eye.  Looking is not the same as seeing.

I don’t paint things.  I only paint the difference between things.  HENRI MATISSE

    Because nature is not a given something but is constructed for the benefit of the mind, our experience of nature is always charged with emotion.  A human being cannot look at anything without having some kind of emotional reaction to it; we have strong words, too, for the extremes of this reaction – beauty, the sublime, love, passion – and terms of negative emotion – hatred, anger, disappointment, disgust. 

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all... feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end.  PAUL CEZANNE

A camera, merely as a camera and not as the instrument of the artist, never records emotion.  Emotion is only ever depicted in a photograph by virtue of the human ability to project emotion into what it sees.  In other words, the human mind learns to interpret photographs as if they were nature.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.  ORSON WELLS.

When looking at photographs the human mind reinvents what is given in raw sensation to make the photograph seem more natural.  In effect, and unconsciously, we lie to ourselves in order to convince ourselves that what we see in a photograph is nature.
    In fact, interpreting photographs is a social skill that in our Western cultures we learn from an early age and take for granted.  We get very lazy when looking at photographs.  But the skill of understanding that a photograph is supposed to be a depiction of nature, if it has not been learned in early childhood, is an overwhelmingly difficult task for the mind.  Take a photograph to a remote place in the world, if one still exists, show the aboriginals there a photograph of yourself, and they will not understand or see what on earth it is.  To understand a photograph is not an innate skill, but a social skill acquired in childhood.  And something else is lost in the process.

Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.   PABLO PICASSO

One consequence of this social skill is that we accept as “good” photographic images that would look absurd if replicated in a drawing.  For example, when shadows fall on a hand so as to make the hand look like rubber.  The depiction of a hand to reveal an element of structure is very important when making a drawing of one. 

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance.  ARISTOTLE

There is a curious double-bind at work these days: we go to an Art Fare, see a painting of a photograph that represents a hand as a piece of rubber, and then convince ourselves, because it is a painting of a photograph that the hand looks “real”.  It’s a joke!

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.  AUGUSTE RODIN

Because nature is always replete with emotion, that art which copies nature, has never sought to replicate it the manner in which a camera may be said to replicate it.  Artists have never sought to replicate things in this sense.  Do you think Goya or David attempted to replicate what they see?  Like all artists, they charge their works with the emotion that they already found replete in nature. 

Art is a harmony in parallel with nature.   PAUL CEZANNE

Art is primarily concerned with the expression of value.  In portraiture, art is sometimes concerned with the expression of character, which is a spiritual value.  The work of Ingres is a good illustration. 
    What the artist does when he or she draws from life is nothing like and never has been like what taking a snap involves.  When drawing from nature the artist tries to bring into consciousness and so depict on the paper what his mind does unconsciously in its construction of nature.
    The eye sees in three dimensions created from the stereographic superposition of slightly different images from both eyes – separated by the nose.  A drawing is a two dimensional reproduction of three-dimensional solids and must inevitably employ conventions.  These conventions are derived from the unconscious manner in which the mind interprets space – by creating borders and differential shades where surfaces meet.  The mind is active in this process, thus separating the mental image from the photograph irrevocably. 
    I have nothing pejorative to say against photography as art.  I do not decry it, but I am not a photographer myself.  What I can say is that when photography becomes art, the photographer plays the same game as the artist.  He arranges the image, or selects from copious copies of the same event; he arranges the lighting; he arranges the exposure, and so on.  So, by means of the choices of the photographer, the photograph interprets what it sees, and so mirrors the unconscious processes of the mind.  Thus photography becomes art.

Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature.  This is proved by the rarity of the ‘good’ photograph.  LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY

    For the artist to draw directly from photographs is as dangerous as injecting heroin.  Dangerous for his art, and problematic for his soul.  It is a bad habit and likely to lead to bad effects.  The artist must see and look; and photographs provide only limited possibilities for this.  It is not that it is entirely impossible to use photographs in some way as a source, but just that the habit so addles the brain that once it has developed it’s hard to get out of it.  And what if you’ve built yourself some kind of reputation as an artist on the basis of copying photographs, making a grid or projecting them onto a blank canvass and painting by numbers; and then you wake up in the middle of the night one day in a cold sweat, in a blue funk, and realise you can’t draw?  It’s embarrassing.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.  LEONARDO DA VINCI

    I would not deprecate the use of photographs as an aide memoir.  To a sculptor learning anatomy good photographs of models are very useful.  One should look at photographs in the same way one looks at nature – to know, understand and love the visible world.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.   KENNETH CLARK

    Although the artist never sees reality, which is transcendent, he can conceive of it.  With his concrete physical and fertile imagination he seeks to render into visual form the products of his imagination.  Symbolist and abstract art reflect just two aspects of this desire to seek beyond nature.
    The characteristic feature of a great artist is imagination.  When one looks at the works of a master, of every age, whatever the genre or style, one is immediately gripped by a sensation of transport – how could he do this?  How could he visualise this? 

Design, which by another name is called drawing is the fount and body of painting and sculpture and architecture and of every other kind of painting and the root of all sciences.  MICHELANGELO.

    Imagination appears to be an accidental gift to those who have not taken the trouble to acquire it.  To be imaginative is to be full of invention and inspiration; it is to be capable of rendering the ineffable and transcendent reality into visual form.  But to have this power does not come about by chance.  It is not an accident that some are more imaginative than others; it is the product of work.

If the artist has not drawn a great deal and studied carefully selected ancient and modern works, he cannot by himself work well from memory or enhance what he copies from life.
   VASARI


    You do not acquire imagination by limping  on the crutches of copying photographs.  It’s impossible.  Imagination begins with seeing and looking.  To acquire imagination we must start by observing nature, and not by copying photographs.  For, as you and I well know...

A man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.  ANDRE BRETON.

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Place two coins at equal distance on a flat surface from your eye and look!
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According to the laws of perspective, the more distant coin will appear to have exactly half the diameter of the nearer coin.  Cameras record images in this way.  However, we see the second coin as much larger, and almost the same size as the first. 
Our unconscious mind knows that the second coin is similar to the first and this knowledge causes us to unconsciously increase the size of the more distant object.  We do not see in perspective.
    Given that nature is what we see, this means that photographs distort nature.  They never represent nature.  This is a literal truth.
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The model is leaning in and so there is a problem of foreshortening.  The camera "knows" nothing of this, and reproduces the image in perspective.  The head is far too large in proportion to the body.  As we are socialized from early childhood to accept photographs as "real" we may not immediately perceive how ludicrous this image is.  But if this were drawn exactly as shown, copied from the photograph, the drawing would look stupid.
Compare the photograph above with the drawing my Michelangelo to the left.  It is immediately obvious that it would never be possible to render the drawing by copying any photograph.  One can only represent nature by drawing from it.
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Students being taught to copy from photographs.

The social interpretation of photographs

Turnbull's study
"Turnbull studied the Bambuti pygmies, who live in the dense rain forests of the Congo, a closed-in world without open spaces.  Turnbull brought a pygmy out to a vast plain where a herd of buffalo were grazing in the distance.  The pygmie said he had never seen one of those insects before; when told they were buffalo, he was offended and Turnbull was accused of insulting his intelligence.  Turnbull drove the jeep towards the buffalo; the pygmy's eyes widened in amazement as he saw the insects 'grow' into buffalo before him.  He concluded that witchcraft was being used to deceive him."  From Gross, Psychology.
Deregowski's study
Deregowski strudied the Me'en tribe of Ethiopia.  A woman was presented with a photograph of a human head in profile.  "She discovered in turn the nose, the mouth, the eye, but where was the other eye?  I tried by turning my profile to explain why she could see only one eye, but she hopped round to my other side to point out that I possessed a second eye which the other lacked."  Quoted in Gross, Psychology.

More images to ponder

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Snap
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Durer
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Goya - Giant
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Jean-Francois Millet: Spring
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Ingres - Louis Francois Bertin
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Painting from photographs
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David - Death of Marat
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The camera cannot see and look as the can the mind. Drawing by Michelangelo.
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Picasso - Peace and Freedom
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Michelangelo - The Dream of Life
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Art and Sculpture in Den Haag

9/12/2012

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Using the street art of Den Haag as an example, I shall explore what contemporary art has to say about man and society.  It is primarily a sociological inquiry upon which I am embarking.
    But rather than starting in the street, let us begin our journey in the Gemeetemuseum, the principal art museum of Den Haag, where the curators have felt the need to add helpful explanations to accompany some of the modern works on display.
    The comment on Bourgeois's Cell XXVI (1) indicates fear as the artist's subject, and we understand immediately that with contemporary art we are in the domain of the twisted and tortured modern psyche.   Nowhere in contemporary art do we escape this theme.  This piece cries out to us, "I am in pain!"
    Naturalism in the representation of the human figure is rejected in favour of primitive elements of distortion.   Imprisonment and torture are metaphors for the contemporary experience of the self.
    Bruce Nauman's Carousel (2) also exemplifies this theme.  The helpful curator comments:
    "This is not a merry kind of carrousel you would find at a funfair.      These leashed animals conjure up associations with a poacher’s         trap.  They are casts of stuffed animals.  So they have no eyes, ears,     claws or hooves – and no genitals.  They evoke an image of                 mutilation.  We simultaneously feel compassion and disgust.              Nauman seeks that contradiction deliberately."
    The key words I extract from this are mutilation and disgust.  Technically, also, these are casts - so the artist does not feel impelled by an inner need to create form independently of what he has already found.  The work hovers precariously between sadism and repulsion.  This piece is appropriately set in front of a Triptych (3) by Francis Bacon (1902 - 1992); it is Bacon's work that pioneered the path towards the free representation of mutilation as a theme.  In an adjoining room we have Berlinde De Bryckere's representation of a mutilated human figure (4) ; in the background there is a bleak landscape by Anselm Keifer  (5) which is reminiscent of the scenes of trench warfare - alternatively, symbolic of death, mutilation and crisis.
    When I visited the Gemeetemuseum there was an exhibition on show dedicated to the theme of love.  If the artists are anything to go by, contemporary man has difficulty dealing with the positive aspects of love, and the exhibition abounded with images of torture and distortion.  Two which I choose to illustrate here are (6) a stuffed cat by Anselm Keifer, and (7) a still from a film that looked, somewhat humorously to be sure, at the modern obsession with vampirism.  At the time I was visiting the museum I was accompanied by an 11 year old boy and a 9 year old girl.  In addition to the many images of self-loathing, coupled to disgust and obsession with nakedness, there were several representations of a phallus on display - one bejeweled.  The curators of the museum charge a modest entry fee to adults, but generously make the museum and its exhibitions free for children.  So we see that children are encouraged from an early age to associate love and the human body with negative emotions; although the obsession with the phallus is arguably neutral in tone, the general impression is one of dissolution and despair.
    Such representations are ubiquitous and wholly unrelieved by anything positive or celebratory, so it is not possible to infer that these are accidental works of possibly mentally disturbed people.  On the contrary these are the creations of normal people.  From these emotional outpourings we may judge that people in the Western world commonly experience a kind of inner crisis in relation to their self-image.
    It is not difficult to see from whence this emotion may have arisen.  Modern philosophy affirms very strongly that we are human meat, soulless mechanisms with fragile egos, metaphorically floating on an ocean of unconscious animal urges.  It is a profoundly disturbing and disgusting image of the self, and one that therefore finds expression in art.  To be sure, these negative images of the self arise against the backdrop of ugly politics and disturbing social history, the mutilation of conflict and war, but there has been no century free of those social aspects, and likewise, no period so preoccupied with such self-loathing.  And if, this analysis is not correct, then what alternative explanation for this social phenomenon that we call contemporary art can be offered? - for the ubiquitous presence of the motif of mutilation cannot be denied.
    Turing now to the sculpture commissioned by the City Council that we find in the streets of Den Haag, let me conduct you down The Kalvermarkt and its connecting Grote Marktstraat.  (The names of the artists are not given on the works, so these must now be unattributed here.)  There is a piece (8) of two struggling male torsos, back to back.  It builds on the figurative tradition, and presents a forceful image of pointless conflict.  It is not a contemporary work; nonetheless, the incipient theme of mutilation is present.
    The city council of Den Haag likes sculpture and has commissioned a lot of it.  There is a good deal of humour present in these works, though of the cynical variety.  Outside the newly erected Bibliotheek there is an amusing piece (9) that I believe is a satire on marriage.  The image reminds me of that brilliant attack on the Victorian institution of marriage The Owl and the Pussycat  by Edward Lear.

            Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
   
            How charmingly sweet you sing!
            O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
   
            But what shall we do for a ring?'
            They sailed away, for a year and a day,
  
              To the land where the Bong-tree grows
            And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
   
            With a ring at the end of his nose,
       
              His nose,
         
            His nose,
                With a ring at the end of his nose.

As the principal work commissioned by a capital city this sculpture, nothing so brilliant in its invention as Lear's poem, is an odd choice.  What really does it say about the contemporary experience of relationship?  It is very cynical.
    That theme of cynicism is reflected in other pieces, not always with such good humour.  One that I shall call Pinocchio (10) pours scorn on the human form; another (11) is a crude and clumsy representation of what I take to be a mother and daughter, scorning that relationship with mutilated arms, disproportionate features and scarred legs.  An image of a middle aged gentleman (12) ridicules vanity, with distorted head and falsely modest downcast eyes.  A Disney like duck-man (13) loudly pokes fun at inanity.  There is a satirical homage (14) to the unknown citizen.  These pieces portray man as shallow, vain, empty and hollow.
    The other theme of the Grote Marktstraat is the phallus; and there are liberal representations of this - in fact, practically every work on display is a phallus.  (15 to 23.)
     What are these artists trying to say to us, or what unconscious forces account for these images?  Is it fertility that we celebrate here?  We are told that the phallus is not a totem (which is an image of a plant or animal emblematic of a social group), but rather a boundary marker.  Perhaps these are unconsciously related to the same forces that lead men to mark territory by graffiti, and also by urinating?   However, please do not misunderstand me - in many ways I like these pieces; but the question as to what forces can account for them remains a valid one, and I am not suggesting that I have closed off all possible theories.  Maybe they represent symbols of the ultimate man, the divine gift of God.
    But that is not likely in the context of a culture that is avowedly atheist and increasingly so.
    Yet another question remains - and that concerns the future.  Now that we have entered a cultural condition in which we (a) don't believe in spirit, (b) do believe that man is meat, and (c) experience our own psyches as disturbed, is there any way out of this morass, if that is what it is?  For these images may sometimes be made in stone, but they are not all that exists, or all that can be said about man and his society.  One thinks, sooner or later, man will grow tired of such representations, just as he has grown tired of everything else.  Perhaps.
    But that way out is not likely to be taken unless there is a spiritual revolution of some kind.  Thus, the two sides of the equation must be addressed - art and philosophy.  For art by itself cannot save itself.  Images of the beauty of man are by themselves powerless to move, when they are addressed to people who are convinced that man is excrement.  It is the excrement, the painting of shit on the wall, that speaks.  But what if that philosophy is just plain wrong?  What if man is not excrement? What if, notwithstanding the fact that man has a material aspect - that he is a body and a machine - man is also something else - something for which, and for want of the better word, can be described as spirit?
    Then the decision of the city of Den Haag to portray so many variations on a single theme will look like just madness.
    It will also look like indoctrination.
   There is nothing unusual or distinctive about the contemporary art in Den Haag - it is the same as the art you will find in every city of the Western world - wherever the contemporary philosophy has penetrated, there you will find it.

_
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(1) Left; Cell XXVI by Louise Bourgoeis. Above, the "helpful" caption explaining its "meaning" from the curators of the Gemmetemuseum.
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(2) Bruce Nauman, Carousel
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(3) Francis Bacon: Triptych
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(4) Berlinde De Bryckere: Into One-Another II to Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the background, (5) Anselm Keifer: The Autumn’s Whisper – for Paul Cohen.
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(6) Bart Jansen: Orvillecopter
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(7) A still from an animation on the theme of vampirism.
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(8) Struggling torsos
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(9) Satire on marriage
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(10) "Pinocchio"
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(11) Mother and daughter
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(12) Dutch gentleman
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(13) Disney like duck-man
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(14) Homage to the Unknown Citizen
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(15) Cage
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(16) Metal dome
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(17) Mystic tower
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(18) Architectural tower
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(19) Mutilated tree trunks
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(20) Mutilated tin man
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(21) Organic fluids
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(22) Bricks with yeast like bud
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(23) Female torso
The Unknown Citizen  by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

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Ignore naturalism at your peril

5/8/2012

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Four phases of development

In the visual arts we can recognise four phases of development:

    1.    The primitive
    2.    The natural
    3.    The expressionist
    4.    The abstract

Of these phases, it is the natural that is most difficult to understand. 
Expressionism

The central premise of expressionism is that emotions do not come in proportion.  Therefore, to express an emotion or emotionally charged idea, some form of deliberate exaggeration of form is possible.  Expressionism of this kind is a highly conscious stage of mental and spiritual development on the part of the artist, and can only be reached through long study of nature.  In sculpture, the exemplar of expressionism is Rodin, though, perhaps surprisingly, Michaelangelo is also an expressionist in this respect.

Abstraction

    The abstract arises from long and patient observation of nature, resulting in a power of the artist to "see into the light of things"  -  to abstract from nature certain forms and patterns.  In sculpture Michaelangelo is an abstract artist.  In painting, an exemplar of abstract art is Vermeer.   Expressionism and abstraction are not mutually exclusive.  Furthermore, the distinction between classical and romantic has nothing to do with it.

The primitive

Art that is primitive is art that is unaware that representation may not be true to nature.  But it is crucially important to understand that there are two aspects to primitive art: the primitive-magical and the primitive-crude.  Art originally arose in relation to the divine.  In its most magical and original conception, there is no idea whatsoever of representation - the work of art is god.  The statue of the goddess is the goddess for she inhabits the material and is identical to it.
    The primitive-magical is laden with emotional power, and modern artists, such as Picasso, have famously delved back into the primitive and magical orgins of art in their attempts to rejuvenate art and consciousness.  Picasso was a natural primitive - a man whose psyche was close to the divine, though in the chthonic sense of the gods of the earth and underworld.  Whenever one encounters an emotion and attempts to represent unwittingly that emotion in form, then one encounters the primtive as magic.  This is a true foundation of all art.
    Modern man is a creature of a peculiar kind of consciousness that has become detatched from his primitive roots of emotion, the divine and magic.  That is to say, the primtive-magic in art cannot be immitated.  One is either brim full of passion, or one is not.  
    There arises in the context of modern consciousness  another kind of primitive art, which is the primitive-crude.  This is an unsophisticated and crude attempt at representation that simply does not consider the possibility that the result may be both passionless and false to nature.  This is the curse of much contemporary art, and precisely that which condemns it to banality.

What is nature?

The question, what is nature?  is too big to be wholly considered here.  However, we can say that nature is not a passive or mechanical representation of what is seen.  That is to say, a photograph is never nature.  This observation immediately condemns attempts at photorealism to the primitive-crude.  Nature arises from seeing, and seeing is active.  Seeing involves interpretation, and is mediated by concepts.  Thus, nature arises from the dual interplay of receiving impressions (the "passive" aspect) and understanding them (the "active" aspect).
    Naturalism involves the deliberate attempt to raise to consciousness the processes of active interpretation that the mind unconsciously imposes on impressions. 
    The artist deliberately looks at his models and attempts to recreate the structural understanding that he finds there.    
    Hence: ignore naturalism at your peril, for no matter how outwardly successful you are your art runs the threat of being condemned to banality; unless you draw on exceptional sources of the primitive as magic, your art will be empty, hollow and just crude.

Academic art

Historically, most art that has been classified as "naturalist" is not naturalist - it is a form of primitive-crude art.  It is precisely this primitive-crude art that has earned naturalism a bad name.  Needless to say the banal copying of photographs that is so much in vogue just now just heaps more undeserved criticism on naturalism, for what most people understand by nature is what they see through their camera lens, and that is precisely what it is not.
    Likewise, the distinction between classical and romantic art is separate from the distinction between primtive and natural.  Classicism involves being passionate about ideals and reason; romanticism involves being highly rational about passion.
    Great art that is not brim full of primitive-magic is natural; where it is expressionist or abstract it builds on the natural, and is not an alternative to it.  Being not natural is simply the same as getting it wrong.
    Being passionate about nature is a vehicle for developing emotional charge - in other words, close attention to nature brings one closer to the primtive magical and in a manner of speaking to god.
    In history artists of great spirit intensely study nature - in so doing they arrive at conclusions and these conclusions often take abstract form.  Subsequently, lesser spirits, instead of studying nature, study those forms, and academic art is born.  Academic art is primitive-crude art that arises in a social context of imitation and is fostered by decadence and the failure of criticism.
    Such is the generally sorry state of the art of our times.

Caveat

In art, as in all things, there are many paths to greatness.  Among these paths there is that which leads from the primitive through naturalism and beyond.  Here  I illustrate specific failures, not general ones.
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Rodin's Iris. This beautiful work of expressionist sculpture is by an artist who profoundly understands nature. The artist has chosen to exaggerate the fluidity of contours in motion rather than simple elongation of limbs.
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Night by Michaelangelo. Through long and patient study of nature the artist has abstracted to elementary volumes, forms and lines. The result is a work charged with emotion. We sense the pattern that lies behind appearences as such.
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The Lacemaker by Johannes Vermeer. The artist has also abstracted to underlying forms. The emotional charge of the work is enhanced by a profound understanding of colour.
Abstract expressionism
Michaelangelo's Night also illustrates the way in which an artist can be simultaneously both abstract and expressionist.  By exaggerating ideal elements of the human head, for example the straight join between forehead and nose which eliminates the "keystone" region there, Michaelangelo expresses his emotional commitment to classicism.
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Female ancestor figure of the Dogon people of Mali. This is an example of the primitive-magic in art.
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Detail from Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
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The statue to the right is an example of the primitive-crude.  Notwithstanding, it is a quaint and charming piece - one of a series decorating the exterior to the Meridien Hotel in Budapest.  Its appeal comes from primitive-magic elements, giving it an emotive aura.  To illustrate the crudity of the piece, consider the way the upper thigh does not join with the hip, the exaggeration of the length of the limbs, the rigidity of the motion and the excessive thickness of the lower limbs.  The artist might object by claiming these are deliberate elements of expressionism; however, that would be false, for the power of the piece would indeed be enhanced if in fact the proportions were all true to nature.  The artist has not reached the naturalist level, and hence cannot find his way into expressionism.  To confirm this, compare the piece with the work of Rodin above.  Yet it has some primitive charm and is not without merit.
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This piece is illustrative of the utterly banal that comes from a "photographic" approach to nature.  It may be found at Vigado ter in Budapest.  Works of these kind now litter our streets, and at Brixton in London, our train platforms too.  They are apparently made to titilate tourists.  It is possible that this particular piece is merely a caste and no modling whatsoever has taken place.  Close examination will show that one of the girls' eyes is significantly lower than the other, a give away sign of a slack approach.  A curious feature of this piece is that while it is lifesize, it seems to be very small.  People naturally project a kind of aura which enlarges them in our imagination, but the insignificance of this piece makes it appear smaller than it really is.  In this way the mind unconsciously passes judgement on it.  This is a feature of all such pieces that seem to fade out of slight, once the gimmick has been assimilated.
Why a photograph is not a representation of nature
This is a topic worthy of many pages.  But the simplest illustration is from a camera.  Hold your camera up to any reasonably distant object.  The image on the camera screen is immediately perceived to be very much smaller than the one presented to your eye.  The mind unconsciously judges an object on the basis of what it knows about it.  It enlarges objects.  The camera "sees" in perspective; the eye-mind does not.  Nature is what is presented to human consciousness, not what is given in three-dimensional projective geometry.  Since the work of the Gestalt psychologists this has been well documented, and there is nothing new in this remark, save that many contemporary artists seem to be ignorant of it.  Art is primarily the business of interpretion, not a passive act but an active one. 
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This piece may be found in Budapest 32-esek ter.  It is a very interesting piece that dominates its environment and is very impressive from afar.  The helmet casts a deep shadow and the motion of throwing seems powerful.  It is a war memorial, and seems overtly miltaristic, though the artist could be praised for an intense faithfulness to the brutal truth of war.  Unfortunately, on closer examination the piece reveals definite flaws in regard to nature.  The figure is stiff and unnatural owing to crude understanding of the relation of limbs to sockets.  It is typical of the majority of "good quality" memorial sculpture - not quite into nature, but not wholly primitive either, and incorporating some primitive-magical elements of charged emotion.
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The Meeting Place by Paul Day.  This work exemplifies the primitive-crude at its most banal.  Its emotive content is negligible.  Anatomically, it is a disaster, as the detail of the female ankle illustrates.  It is all  out of proportion.  The most interesting feature are the heads.  These are in a different style, not photorealist.  The artist endeavours to convey some kind of union by the exaggerated fusion of the noses.  The style is inconsistent, but this is a genuine primitive-magical element.  Overall, the piece falls signficantly short of naturalism, and lies firmly in the domain of the  primitive-crude. 
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It is a physically huge piece, yet fails to impact on its environment.  This is because the mind unconsciously judges it and makes it shrink in the imagination.
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On the Economics of Contemporary Art

3/4/2012

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Since 1945 no modern person could with certainty be included within the top 100 or even 200 of all time great artists.  Lucian Freud, Mark Rothco and Henry Moore are fine artists, all of whom are dead; it would be difficult to say for certain that there were any contemporary living heavyweights equivalent to the like of artists such as Michaelangelo, Goya or Gauguin.
    Why is this?  What is it about contemporary art that fails to produce greatness?
    A partial answer is found in the economics of art.  To be great an artist must live long enough to reach maturity during which time he must be able to eat while producing continuously.  It is not enough to be driven by inner need to express himself and produce, he must be able to feed himself as well.
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Echostains by Lucien Freud
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There is no attempt here to be exhaustive or overtly scholarly. Output and maturity are estimates only.
The gestation period

There are those that believe in  the old soul.  I note that in music and mathematics we witness the phenomenon of the child prodigy.  While every one of these prodigies has some favourable situation – such as parents who nuture the talent of their offspring – there is attraction in the idea that these great figures come into the world bearing with them the fruits of their labours in former lives.  As Wordsworth writes, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." (1)
    Nonetheless, in the case of the visual arts, a glance at the top 100 reveals the startling observation that there are no childhood prodigies.  This reflects the inherent difficulty of the work of the artist who primarily interprets reality as it is presented to his eye and translates this into a two- or three-dimensional structure.  At the same time he works with ideas and emotions in one respect, with such things as texture and colour in another, and in yet another with the sheer physical aspect of art: materials, mediums - the mechanics of producing paintings, sculptures, etchings and so forth. 
    It is simply not possible for a childhood prodigy to learn all these things.  Visual art is difficult – the most difficult thing there is.
    A cursory glance at key artists from among the top 100 indicates: -
● Almost every historically great figure had a great teacher.  The exceptions are Van Gogh and Gauguin, both of who died in obscurity.
● Most great artists do not reach maturity until middle age or later.
● There are arguably no British artists in the top flight.  (And if this is true, then it has definitely not changed with the contemporary period.)
    What we see here is the concept of the gestation period.  In general, it takes a great artist on average about twenty years to mature.
On feeding oneself

 What did these great artists do while reaching their period of maturity?  Answer: in general, they were practising artists.  There are exceptions: Van Gogh was an art dealer, Gauguin was a stock-broker, but generally these great artists during their “infancy” belong to the second or third flight of artists.  They still live by means of their art.
    Historically, artists were able to fund themselves in a number of ways: portraits, reproductions of other works, engravings, illustrations, genre paintings, lesser devotional works, and so on and so forth.  Hence, the profound observation about our contemporary scene: all these “mainstays” of the artist’s economic livelihood have more or less disappeared.
    The Contemporary scene does support artists to a limited extent - though one hardly comparable, for instance, with professional football.  There are three categories: -
● The extremely famous
● The “named” artist.
● The “unnamed” artist.
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Diego Velázquez: Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Teresa of Spain, 1655. This is a later work, but Velázquez also earned a living during his gestation period from portraiture.
    Extremely famous contemporary artists are not great artists in the traditional sense of that term.  The question is whether artists in the other two categories can evolve into great artists, and also, within their own lifetimes, achieve recognition.
    Economically, it has proven impossible for artists in the unnamed category to make the transition.  Let us explain why.

Output

The production of great art requires time.  It takes a gestation period of twenty years to acquire the conceptual and material understanding to produce great art.  However, even once that level has been achieved, great artists can produce on average less than two masterpieces per year.
    An artist in the unnamed category, even if he has a gallery or distribution network, can sell work at about 1,000 euros per piece.  This means that he must produce and sell about 24 pieces per annum in order to stay alive at a modest level, or 12 if he is prepared to sustain a lower level of economic existence.
    Since portraiture has become the domain of photography the moot question is: what can an artist produce that he can sell?  To sell, there must be a market.  So, what is it that people who are prepared to spend 1000 euros on a work of art want?  Answer: decoration.
    Most people nowadays choose an original work of art because they think it matches the colour scheme of the interior design of their living space.
    To sustain any reasonable rate of pay (that is, say, relative to the Greek minimum wage) an artist must produce each work in less than forty hours per piece.  The unscrupulous hone this down to twenty or even ten.
    Perhaps artists in the second category of “named” artists can migrate to the status of great artists?  To explain why not, one would have to look additionally at sociological and ideological forces.  Let us leave that for another occasion, but suffice it to say that: -
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Matching pictures to the decor of the living space.
● Even the named artists face economic pressures that mean they cannot devote half a year to an individual piece.
● They too are selling to a market that is looking for wallpaper.
● They usually supplement their income with teaching or other work which reduces their time for development.
● They work in an ethos that denigrates the acquisition of skill and the importance of direct observation, so they cannot make the transition for the reason that their skills are poor.
● They also develop a personal culture that denigrates skill, observation and intellectualism, so they are short of ideas.
    So the conclusion is that economic forces cause contemporary art to be decadent and spiritually empty.  Furthermore, there is no immediate prospect of any change.

Note
(1)  Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
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Art for Atheists

1/22/2012

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Alain de Botton is the author of Religion for Atheists.  Although he is an atheist, he believes that art has a sacred function, citing in his recent article in The Guardian how Rothko himself declared that he hoped his art would bring a species of salvation, “allowing the viewer a moment of communion around an echo of the suffering of our species”.   De Botton argues that art should not be for art’s sake, that museums should strive to reveal the moral purpose of the art of the past, and he criticises “the modernist idea that art that aims to change or help or console its audience must by definition be bad art.”
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Trinity by Peter Fekete. Oil on panel. 12 ins. X 15 ins.
    De Botton is an exemplar of the enlightened atheist – a contrast to the dogmatic variety of atheist represented by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who can only see science as “fact” (which it never is) and is reluctant to acknowledge any of the profound benefits that centuries of humanist Christian culture have brought to society.
    De Botton’s words strike a resonant chord with me, for I am a religious artist whose impulses border on the didactic, yet I live and work in the age of increasing atheism and secularism.  So I would like to echo De Botton’s wisdom by discussing my most recent painting – entitled Trinity.
    The composition was based on a free style drawing I made, which was not worked directly from models.  My general aim is to recover the Renaissance skill of composing directly from imagination, and to use this power in the context of modernity to provide symbols.  The skill of free drawing enables one to work with archetypes, as these are then able to manifest themselves directly to the imagination.
    The archetype here is that of Mars/Ares, God of War, who here has usurped the position of Christ in the symbol of the Trinity.  Because of the reference to the Trinity in the composition, which emerged unconsciously at first, I decided to embed the image into the mystical throne of God as depicted in the work of Hugo van der Goes, in his Trinity altarpiece.
    The beautiful, mystical ball in the lower left hand corner of van der Goes' work (right)  symbolises Christ's work as Salvator Mundi.  The ball has been picked up by one of the figures in my composition, which has become a symbol for pride and hubris.  
    I am also endeavouring to recover Renaissance techniques – my Trinity is a layered painting – by which I mean that the image is built up of approximately twenty thin layers of paint.  The difficulty that an artist encounters when working in oils is that a single layer lacks body and density.  The Renaissance solution was to build up layer upon layer of paint.  From this the techniques of chiaroscuro (light and dark) and sfumato (light into dark) were developed.
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Hugo van der Goes - Trinity altarpiece
    My current efforts place me somewhat at the beginning of the historical process, somewhere between the Gothic and Early Renaissance.  This works in terms of the symbolism of my painting as well –  for I have transposed Hugo van der Goes gothic image into a modern context.  If there is a didactic element to all of this, then I am unashamed of it.
    Why on Earth should the artist be prohibited from comment on the condition of humanity?   
    The truth is that the artist has always been struggling against academic conformity.  Nearly two centuries of “isms” have resulted in a contemporary art that is utterly devoid of relevance, thoroughly sterile and boring, repetitive, unimaginative, decadent and decayed.   For the atheist too  this bankrupt state of vacancy produced by the pusillanimous is merely sound and fury signifying nothing.
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Gustav Courbet: Burial at Ornans.
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Detail illustrating Courbet's intense perception of character and society.
    A good example of this struggle between the true artist and academia is Gustav Courbet.  He also knew the importance of saying something about the world he lived in.  In 1855, Courbet’s greatest paintings, L’Atelier and Burial at Ornans, were rejected by the Exposition Universelle.  It is hard to appreciate the sensation caused by Burial at Ornans nowadays – but in context it was a profound attack on the complacency of society, and it was on account of its social realism that the painting was felt to be so disturbing.  Academia strove to lock him out, but now both paintings now have pride of place in the Louvre.
    The slogan art for art’s sake is founded on a miserable fallacy.  From whence does imagination spring?  From whence does the artist garner his ideas?  Answer: from life – from observation of the outer and inner worlds – from concerns that are moral.  Not all art is overtly autobiographical, but art is made by people (so far) and therefore cannot be separated from context.  Art always comments on its society.  It is unavoidable.  So what is the comment made by contemporary art?
    The slogan art for art’s sake is simply a device in the hands of the weak minded to conceal the narrowness of their concerns and their lack of interest in their own work.  Contemporary art echoes again and again the slogan: the only thing I care about is myself.
    True artists do not evade the moral implications of living and breathing the same air as the rest of humanity, and this remains the truth whether or not God exists; it is a point on which atheists and theists can unite.   The atheist also has needs that he might not call “spiritual” yet belong to that territory. 
    Thus, let the light shine!  Art for atheists!
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A ballon dog by Jeff de Koons exhibited at Versailles Palace.
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Who is Damien Hirst?

1/11/2012

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    David Hockney, an artist, in his note to his own forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, writes: “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally.”   This prompts the question: who, or what, is Damien Hirst? 
    Many of the works attributed to Damien Hirst are not in fact made by him.  They are made by assistants.  According to his own account, the best of his spot paintings are made by Rachel Howard, and he “couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it.”  The BBC writes that Hirst "employs up to 100 people in a "factory" that works as a production line for his spot paintings."  The platinum and diamond skull, For the Love of God, which was made by the London jeweller Bentley & Skinner, failed to make its reserve price of $50m and was purchased by a consortium including Damien Hirst.  The exhibition of works by his own hand at the Wallace Collection was slated by art critics, including Adrian Searle in The Guardian, who called Hirst’s paintings “amateurish and adolescent”.  Hirst rose to prominence initially as a curator of exhibitions.
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Damien Hirst is not Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo was artist of outstanding phyiscal beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease. He possessed great strength and dexterity; he was a man of regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind; and his name became so famous that not only was he esteemed during his lifetime but his reputation endured and became even greater after his death. - VASARI
    A patron is a person who commissions and supports other artists.  Therefore, Damien Hirst is a patron.
    The importance of patrons in the evolution of art is without question: one only has to think of the contribution made by Ambroise Vollard to the inception of C20th art, and of the Medicis to the Renaissance.  Associated with Vollard are Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso; associated with the Medicis are Massaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo and Leonardo.
    The dialogue between patron and artist has been the inspiration behind art forever.  One expects the artist to be a person of independence and integrity, but every artist knows the joy of working with another mind, the love of developing mutually shared ideas into their physical manifestation.
    
    Hirst describes his own attempts at spot paintings as "shit compared to ... the best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant.”  Hirst’s own eloquent rationale for this practice is that "Art goes on in your head”.  He comes up with the idea of death – passes this inspiration to the artist and purchases the result.  Like a good entrepreneur he is willing to distribute works to other patrons – he is famous for his Warehouse shows.
    It has been said of anyone who writes good sonnets that such a person must not only be in love with another person, but also in love with the sonnet as form.  One distinguishing mark of an artist is his closeness to the physical process of creation.  He or she cannot be separated from the materials or the labour.
    
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The brain reels at the thought that a man could have so much patience. - VASARI also tells us that in Milan Leonardo taught his assistant Salai a great deal about painting, and some of the works which are attributed to Salai were retouched by Leonardo.
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Leonardo was one of the first to illustrate the problems of medicine by the teachings of Galen and to throw true light on anatomy, which up to then had been obscured by the shadows of ignorance. - VASARI
    To be sure, some artists do use assistants, for there are many routine aspects to art that devour time.  Historically, artists manufactured their own paints.  Leonardo, who began his career as pupil to Verrocchio, also employed assistants; yet, though I am reminded of Vasari’s many descriptions of the sheer excellence of Leonardo da Vinci skills, and the claim that Verrocchio gave up painting when he saw his student excel him, it is Vasari’s opening description of Leonardo in his Lives of the Artists that is most moving: -
    “In the normal course of events many men and women are born with various remarkable qualities and talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.”
    Is it possible that Hirst is the only human being to have given his own name to all the works of the artists he himself employed?  But there is another artist of divine origin who has come close.  In The Illiad Homer attributes the shield of Achilles to Hephaestus, the god of smithies.  It is a frequent theme of Homer’s work, for the humble armourers were too modest to take credit for their own divine creations.  
    Hirst is the contemporary Hephaestus and to see a god he merely has to look in the mirror. 
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Leonardo made designs for mills, flying machines, and engines that could be drive by water-power; and as he intended to be a painter by profession he carefully studied drawing from life. - VASARI
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Crossing the Waste Land

12/30/2011

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Nicholas Socrates is an ex-pupil of mine from my days as a teacher and headmaster in Jersey, Channel Islands.  It is a pleasure, therefore, to be asked by Nic to write a Preface to his poetic collection of spiritually uplifting sayings, The Englightenment.  Nic's book may be found at www.enlightenment.socratesbooks.com 
Nic is also an artist, working in the tradition of abstract expressionism.  His paintings and drawings may be seen at: -
www.nicksocrates.com 
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Nicholas Socrates
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One of Nic's paintings

Preface to The Enlightenment by Nicholas Socrates

The Enlightenment is a collection of aphorisms written by the author in the course of his own quest for purity and perfection.  To understand this work, it is necessary to acknowledge the common cultural context of our modern consciousness.  This is aptly expressed by Anelia Jaffé, who in the following quotation is discussing the significance of the work of Carl Gustav Jung: -

    Dr. Jung also came to realize that this strange and mysterious phenomenon of the death of God is a psychic fact of our time.  In 1937 he wrote: “I know – and here I am expressing what countless other people know – that the present time is the time of God’s disappearance and death.” [Quoted from Amelia Jaffé’s essay Symbolism in the Visual Arts fromMan and his Symbols.]

The death of god, which was famously announced by Friedrick Nietzsche, through his alter-ego Zarathustra, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, encapsulates in a single symbol the psychic background to Nicholas Socrates’s work.  This coheres with our common experience of modernity, which is one of spiritual emptiness, neurosis and alienation.
    In opposition to this the reader will quickly learn on opening any page of this work that Nicholas Socrates is a firm believer in God: -

    Very receptive to meditation and prayer,
    Live in the world of thought,
    Live in the realm of God.                                                                        [ 56.  As It Is

     In The Enlightenment we experience not one, but two “voices” – and these are both choral.  The first voice is that of the questers singing to their own selves on the difficult journey across what T. S. Eliot has called The Waste Land.  This is the voice that we hear when we first read this work.

    Find your own way through,
    Work out your own salvation with diligence.                               [  28.  Work Out Your Own Way with Diligence

Here we encounter the choral aspect of this voice; it is an amalgamation of voices derived partially from the spiritual works that the author has drawn upon from, and partly from the author’s receptive interpretation of those readings.  The phrase, “work out your own salvation with diligence” is the voice of the Buddha, quoted from the Dharmapada.
    The second choral voice is suppressed in this work, and we do not hear it directly – its existence is implied by the first chorus with its repeated calls to faith: -

    We have the intellectual capacity, the strength and the stamina to
    seek the spiritual path,
    And stick with it.
    Have faith in the teachings,
    Inspiring us to improve without wasting a moment.                [ 63.  The Path

     The second voice is that of doubt – it comprises the myriad of sceptical and cynical cavillers who criticise the promise of salvation of the first choral voice and who worship their own egos under the pretext of rationality.  To understand this work, we must grasp it as a dialogue, and that the implied second voice occupies the dominant position within our modern culture, to which the protest of the first voice is directed.  
    Over the course of this work, the first voice gains the upper hand – working through its own words of spiritual comfort it nurtures itself through receptivity, exchange and dialogue: -

    A journey is unfolding,
    Within us.                                                                                                  [ 2. An Enlightened Society

    A foundation for spiritual recovery must be laid in earthly rootedness: -
    Anchored into the center of the Earth,
    Allow your heart to open.                                                                [ 70.  Glorious Visions

This refers us to modesty.  The call to the work of self-salvation and to purification of spirit is celebrated on every page of this work.  For example: -

    Contemplate life through the eyes of purity,
    Everywhere you look you see beauty.                                        [ 15.  Paradigm Shifting Insights

    Success must come gently,
    With great effort, no stress, no obsession.                                [ 46. Only One Eternal Moment

Progressing through this work we are gradually encouraged to reject the so-called underlying “psychic fact of our time”: -
    
    There are no longer any gods whom we can invoke to help us.  The great religions of the world suffer from increasing anaemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, and mountains, and from animals, and the god-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious.  There we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of our past.  Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion. [C. G. Jung in Man and his Symbols.]

    Here that goddess Reason is triumphantly overthrown, and the tragic illusion broken, for there is no anaemia here and the helpful numina manifest themselves in words of encouragement.  Neitzsche’s words are revealed to be relative, not absolute; and as in every religion and epoch, God renews himself.  Reading this work I am encouraged to say, God is not dead, he was merely sleeping.  Ours is the age of rebirth.

                                                                                                                                                Peter Fekete
                                                                                                                                                London, December 2011

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    Peter Paul Fekete

    Philosophy, Art, Love and Mathematics

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