On August 8 a group of painters organized by Nancy Bea Miller painted on a sunny becalmed summer day on the grounds of Beaver Farm, as a benefit for The Camphill Special School. I had occasion to glimpse, or observe, about half of the participants’ work, and I will note what knowledge I have of their work from the past to frame the discussion.
Stuart Shils’ work has changed over the years from a darker palette and thicker application to his current light-filled and more colorful compositions. He begins with a well prepared gessoed panel attached to a holding tray by what may become the screws that attach it to a floating frame later. The holding tray is placed on the easel, complete with the high panel and four short legs of 2 x 3 glued in the corners of the tray. This arrangement will protect the wet painting, conserve on space during transport, as well as prevent shifting.
Where Mr. Shils’ interest used to be to build a direct painting via the knife and brush, he now thins the paint to reveal the glazing effect of its residue on the panel. Where he can find a cubic structure in the landscape -- like the springhouse in the valley -- he is happy to report that human sculpture (almost a Platonic form since cubism) in the midst of nature’s suffusing green light. Farm reduces to field and the springhouse reduces to a white form, something like a small shrine in Greece. That the light which bathes them melds them together is as significant a claim as a philosophy of human nature that admits we are part of nature. This is a statement about us, and one whose essential optimism also carries a requirement of enlightened responsibility. In other words, unlike the Hudson River School ethos, in which Nature stands undefiled by man, stands at best across the valley from man, we live in nature as participants. This new knowledge is in the work of Stuart Shils. Although the barns and buildings may once have startled, they are mixed into the light of all we see. It is a knowledge in the air, and of our time.
While Shils assembles nature, he wears surgical gloves -- a sign of respect for the modern industrial paints he uses and out of respect for the health of his own body. It is also a vision of another kind of healing -- not to remove, but to bind up some wound of misapprehension we carry about the earth and what we fear we are doing. Just as one can paint the symbiosis of man and nature, one can imagine working with the world and helping it, because of the nature of enlightened human knowledge. That there appears to be a new Romanticism about these beautiful paintings is perhaps no mistake, either. The Romantic Age is hardly over, yet, and it prevails in spite of cynicism, irony and bad taste.
Coming back from the fields Dianne Morrow briefly held up a small panel to Nancy Bea’s query. It was a view of a sharp horizon from the woods -- a horizon with the fields. It had the lush mystery of dark interiors, and that startling light of the sky. Painted with some knife work and confident assertion made Nancy declare it “like a Stuart Shils,” and while a similarity in some of its technique may exist, it was to me a wholly different art. This yearning for the horizon and the imminence of its light-filled sky give remarkable drama to distance. I thought it was a significant personal piece of narrative, as focused as that wonderful Eugene O’Neill play Beyond the Horizon, which deals with the yearnings of the young writer for his art, symbolized by the act of going out into the world, like the adventurous if materialistic brother who returns during the play. Knowing Dianne during our studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I can remember the significance she placed on being a woman in a world only slowly granting her full rights, but in the walk around the farm there was another level of challenge -- moving in a body that has required a series of bone fusions. Yet there she set off to the distant end of the farm, only to paint a distance of about a hundred feet as something nearly oceanic, compacted into a small panel. This, too, is a very moving painting, and one infused with the modern Romantic challenge.
Perhaps it is in the nature of Philadelphia to make us Romantic. Our history as a people was begun here, and its working out has continued to create changes in our own day. Nor is this Romantic idea over -- it will turn and change the future yet again. Call it the Romanticism of Reason and you might divine its character as well as Provenance.
Lynne Campbell made three paintings which demonstrate the presence of man in wire and telephone pole, as seen against the sky or woods. The delicate way the wire takes light into the dark trees was commented on by Michael Bartmann later. These paintings tell the temperature of day and the humidity that warms all things in summer. And then there is the perfect way she can counterpoise a rise in the horizon to a rise of clouds, or place a bird in the 4-square space of sky. To me she is the Agnes Martin of areas and placements -- more an abstract artist of quietly dynamic arrangements. What still life gives, she gives to landscape. In America, this is like giving the Cosmos a still life aspect. It promises that you can see the infinite as a comprehensible thing. Only time, as seen in the flight of a bird, or the floating of clouds, evades us, but that is why painters stop time in the still life and immortalize their comprehension with serenity.
Paul DuSold painted a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, letting the arrangement give its elegant variations of tilting blossoms, until you felt a perfect music had been captured in notes that anyone who sees can read. In an earlier painting he built a tree, again inspiring the ideal tree in us by its avoidance of anything disheveled or compromised. This is a kind of perfection favored by Apollo -- divine order taken directly from the field, and almost unconsciously emphasized through selection and editing to convey the truth of nature revealed by the artist-detective.
Aina Roman took the powerful drawing starts she made and overlaid them with an almost completely obscuring pattern of abstractions, derived from the quilt of fields. There were then three areas of enjambed plowings and an almost industrial charcoal-like landscape along the top, as an encroaching territory. In this perhaps unfinished state the conflict of two industrial processes -- farming and manufacturing -- perhaps collide, or the farm reclaims what it can. The fact we were on an organic farm may have made us all a little more conscious of these matters.
There were paintings of tractors and paintings of barns, of course. Suzy (Suzanne) Schierson painted a vivid tractor in a vertical composition with the red silo. This is a painter of energy, of drama, of (as her website shows) sturm und drang. There is a Munch, late Homer, and occasional Bellow’s hard edge in this dynamic and mythic painter. The Age of Anxiety, as aspect of Romanticism, is not over, yet. Perhaps, in a way, history drives all art periods forward into subsequent chapters. How can we know, for sure? Perhaps because times change and energy, human energy, must create a signal of its particular experience.
Rachel Constantine painted the tractor in a more bucolic mood. Its nature was one with the ground and the ground color. It belonged to the farmland by what it did. This acceptance, almost resignation, is as compelling as any view might be. It shared the spirit of John Ennis’s painting of the springhouse and the springhouse path.
Working art history backward, you might think: Romanticism, how could one return to that after the modern and the post-modern? Romanticism, after all, was what I like to call the third Renaissance. The first Renaissance was Roman Hellenism, the second was what we alone term “The Renaissance,” and the third, this more recent and thoroughly English, French and American renaissance -- the romanticism that rediscovered Greek Art through the Elgin Marbles and translations of the Greek plays.
When we spoke of modernism, we would say Shakespeare was the first modern playwright, or that modernism proceeds after a disproof of Aristotle’s Poetics. So the confidence of modernism seems interspersed with looking back. The past had a glory and craft, fantastical ideas and thoughtful codes. Modernisms themselves will be the subject of later renaissance, and this seems possible when we consider the hinge between Romanticism and what is often thought of as its successor -- surrealism. Max Ernst is welcomed into art at first as a Romantic painter with that small early painting of a bird over a house, but it turns out to already have begun an exploration of spooky moods -- the examination in detail of the sublime. Giorgio De Chirico will invent an entire metaphysics of nostalgia for both far away hometowns and long ago civilization. The same ennui he discovers as a modern mood will be experienced by millions of tourists. It is Romantic in its look backward, and modern in its sense of dislocation. Not speed, but dislocation is the thoroughly modern sensation, but it is the thrill of speed that makes the past that falls away with the wake bearable, or at least speed lets us forget the past and makes us unconscious. Who of the modern Greek poets wrote Crankshaft Odes – a celebration of the workings of a cruise ship or ocean liner as it churns its way forward with a visceral and epic confidence? Again, the Romantic mood of individualism, of heroism, of Ahab against and in and of the Elements, makes us live now as well as join the epic nature of the human story. New starts are part of that epic storyline.
America begins in Romanticism, and American art never quite leaves that first impression behind, partly because the country is itself the experiment of Romantic ideals, but also because it is rich with the two forces that generate the Romantic mood -- a sense of past civilization, and nature red in tooth and claw. It is a restless place of many gathered stories. Its people come here as to the goal of an epic story, either to escape from dangers, or to seek after freedom and those American infinities of dream and space and possibility.
Its modern art perhaps begins with Martin Johnson Heade’s “The Gathering Storm” for its preternatural sensation of the moment before the Civil War, but then it skips over time until the ash-can school of American Impressionists. Next are the Bellows, Guy Pene du Bois, F Scott Fitzgerald (in writing), and Arthur Dove. Then Jackson Pollack and Franz Kline.
While all that goes on, there is a strain of Martin Johnson Heade looking at ancientness and humid tropical paleontology in the images of orchids and hummingbirds. In these and his Florida sunsets are the Edenic milieu of Romanticism, and George Inness is another case -- now conscious of the human hand of civilization (the hand of the Lackawanna Railroad that not only clear cut the view of itself to provide Inness a sight to paint, but which threw the commissioned painting into a junk shop in Mexico, somewhere at the limit of its empire, where he by chance saw it and bought it back at a discount).
The reason I go through this is to reply to those who think art is all progress and forgetting. Art is also a remembering and relearning. What makes art so good and brilliant at certain historical epochs in certain places remains the envy of subsequent eras. We relearn in the fluency of the past some means to acknowledge both our debt to that past, its continuation in our time, and to have the tools for a new modernism. Where, when and why the innovations and subjects that are truly modern occur is the subject of another essay, but one of them is easy to remember and point out in relation to this day of Plein Air painting. It is that modern tubes of paint, industrially produced, made possible, the moment of French Impressionism and the excitement of plein air painting. The total effect of a civilization’s industry and art could combine in different ways through Monet (who found trains and aqueducts equally lovely), Pissarro (who made the life of cities attractive), and Gauguin (who abolished civilization by returning to Eden). In other words, both the modern and the Romantic stem directly from the great period of innovation.
In the end, it is not the innovation, the sense of a modern movement that is important. It is the timeless quality of art which holds the mirror to what we admire and think about; a mirror that shows again the importance of beauty to the work of evolution; a mirror that shows we are a vast world community, visiting itself over time in museums, across cultures, in a loveliness which exceeds the brutality of war, and for which wars have been detoured to preserve those shrines of what we are and come from and aspire to once more. Old art is just as modern as new art.
Fred Danziger was just getting up off the ground where he had been painting, when I came across him. The spot had once held a tree and he was just becoming aware that he had sat in poison ivy. Fred is a conceptual artist and was one from the beginning when it was called painting. Here he had painted a very tiny canvas with a view of a farm, almost tiny enough to require a magnifying glass. This put me in the mind of that tiny painting of Van Eyck’s in the Philadelphia Museum of Art that a guard will occasionally lend you a magnifying glass to examine. Something hidden about the world exists in the miniature; without the aid of a magnifying glass we experience not being able to see everything. Fred Danziger has proceeded through many a time when people were not seeing things in broad daylight and in easy view. His is a philosophical and humorous path. He is the artist who would wake us up.
Let me tell you a story about Garth Herrick: he paints well in a loose and exciting way. When he was a student, he painted visionary things full of unusual color energies and gestural mosaics of paint. His paintings appeared like hallucinations, or a delirium that conspires to form something we recognize. He has since then come to serve the portrait-from-photos market, until, he told me, he had forgotten those early paintings. In place of the paint that conspires an image, he presents reasoned, ordered, photographic facts, but it may be a mistake to so cordon off the artist from the Romanticism of the irrational, the gust of inspiration, the felt image that could not exist for any other reason than to give the unique experience that art safely affords. Instead, his irrationality devotes itself to literal conspiracy theories, and so misplaces the great guide of art, as well as the logos of reason. Would that the one spirit of conjured meanings could return to the easel and the photographic rationalist return to a prosaic estimate of the mundane. I wish his earnest spirit well in any case.
Giovanni Casadei paints the farm field like a field in Italy. The blue trees of distance back up the yellow henhouse. The henhouse looks at us with two square eyes. At this moment I realize that some of his charm is that he weaves the lyricism of his boyhood country into things here. The accent in visual terms is just as original and transporting. We go into things in another person’s experience. It is a metaphor in reverse, and we look at this painter’s works to search for this meaning, enjoying the ultimate impossibility to notice anything more than his enjoyment, his perception, and his charm.
As one artist may suffer from one limitation unconsciously, another may suffer in spite of success. Frances Galante paints so surely and with an openness to how paint assembles and yet reveals its construct, its acting as illusion. Illusion, trusted, is the great magic of art -- the way into the mind’s eye -- and it is the connotation of that illusion that really lets the action of the brush tell us its melody and rhythm about life. Yet that is also the hard thing to talk about. I think it is for that reason that good artists fret and feel humble -- not because they cannot paint, but because the sound system of the left brain cannot reassure them, nor can the left brain easily report what the eye sees and even tells. Best to trust the eye and hand. Best not to correct too much, or perfect things, unless in that perfection the subjective illusion is still allowed to reside.
Michael Bartmann worked in the barn and showed a lattice of roof beams in their woodworking craft. A perfection holding up itself, freed from its task into an appreciation of the thing itself. The barn’s practicality, this painting suggests, is just hiding the art of itself, and by observing how it is holding space, we appreciate the unseen and silent thing that all matter nestles in, without which there would not be space even in the mind, nor a stage for those dreams and illusions by which we study and embrace the place of our being.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The Sleep of Reason and other oracles of art
The sleep of reason was the condition Goya named as beginning the grotesqueries and nightmares he witnessed in his extraordinary book of etchings called Caprices. Even the sardonic use of a lighthearted term shows the nuance of what it means to abdicate thoughtful responsibility. It is also a defensive term to underplay the strength of his indictments via the harrowing journalism of his eye and the wickedly ironic titles of those images. It is not surprising that Goya’s intense realism, his honesty, his risk in speaking out, was rewarded with exile – the one place, short of death, the free artist is allowed to go when taking up a critique of society.
To condemn cruelty in the way Goya does, and aristocratic self-indulgence, is a way to make specific the grand pageant of Christian suffering as a matter in his own time. By contrast, Breughel’s oblique criticism of the depredations of the Counter Reformation in Flanders (The Slaughter of the Innocents) is a more cloaked critique that used a contemporary depiction of ancient martyrs to shame the sadists of his day. Goya’s modernism is in his avoidance of this age old method of creating historical metaphors in painting. Goya depicts the disordered state of his own world.
It may well be that when all are subjective, when all are in the thrall of some cruel insanity of belief-based hatred, that the subjective response is one of reclaiming reason, reclaiming the objective state. Who can see this way, and from what position?
Goya’s privileged position as painter to the King’s court was similar to the access Moliere achieved in the French King’s court of his day. Both men were allowed to grow in their worldly and moral satires, because those kings were themselves enlightened enough to share some of those opinions and allowed themselves to be entertained by others. Similarly, in Breughel’s life, a prince bought most of Breughel’s paintings, enjoying their views of the lives of peasants.
In our later age, as kings and court were closed as offices of patronage, someone like Caspar David Friederich, who celebrated the social revolutions in Europe of 1848, became an outcast. A few years later Edvard Munch was jailed for knowing an important anarchist. These are the steady drumbeat of art as conscience, and society does its best to prefer aesthetics to truth and subjectivity to reason. It is perhaps more interested in applying reason in the aid of subjective states than the other way around. Classicism is a nice example of rational depictions of what are irrational stories. Throughout the Christianization of Classicism, or really the classicization of Medievalism, we still see the artist decrying the destruction of kindness by oppression, and celebrating the victory and hope of the soul. In such storytelling, the good outlive the evil in repute. In that tradition, in my lifetime, a Pope helped undo the cruelty of an oppressive system of government by symbolizing the suffering of God, or the soul’s intention, in society. He suffered both exile and attempted murder. When there was a pause in his exile and he appeared in Poland, the chief of state’s knees shook with fear on meeting the Pope; such is the force of truth and the woken state of reason.
The dogma of Christ is nothing but love and tolerance. The many smaller dogmas by which people conflict themselves violate the example of Christ and the spirit of the greatest Dogma, which is born of the love of mother and child, the love of spouses, the love of lovers. Love is a human knowledge of humanity so extraordinary that it is enshrined in Divinity, which may as well exist, so strong is our feeling for what is true and good in us. The essential friendship of people, which can be destroyed by lies and hatred, is a likewise sacred thing toward which great literature and painting urge the viewer.
The fallen and the risen both know this thing in its true light, or in the shadow from which they envy it. It is as universal a knowledge as many lesser truths like counting and spelling, and so also undergirds religions and the toilings of philosophers, even if their disputations lead to a negation of their original motive.
An artist is the likely liquid of a modern age, able to pass among people without a seeming office or position of power, only a commentator off to one side seeking to please by beauty and truth, and discovering the time living in us. Almost by accident a shock occurs. Like Columbus still, we are shocked by the great distance west to Asia, and shocked by the intervening discovery, not able to recognize what, in fact, we have discovered, nor how to treat the people we encounter.
In the sleep of reason there is enough wrong to supply delusion on a mass scale, but the objective state in our subjective nature reveals enough that is eternal and true to bring us up again, and again, generation after generation.
This is the meaning of culture, its long repetitions, its rediscoveries, its persistence in the face of cruelty.
To condemn cruelty in the way Goya does, and aristocratic self-indulgence, is a way to make specific the grand pageant of Christian suffering as a matter in his own time. By contrast, Breughel’s oblique criticism of the depredations of the Counter Reformation in Flanders (The Slaughter of the Innocents) is a more cloaked critique that used a contemporary depiction of ancient martyrs to shame the sadists of his day. Goya’s modernism is in his avoidance of this age old method of creating historical metaphors in painting. Goya depicts the disordered state of his own world.
It may well be that when all are subjective, when all are in the thrall of some cruel insanity of belief-based hatred, that the subjective response is one of reclaiming reason, reclaiming the objective state. Who can see this way, and from what position?
Goya’s privileged position as painter to the King’s court was similar to the access Moliere achieved in the French King’s court of his day. Both men were allowed to grow in their worldly and moral satires, because those kings were themselves enlightened enough to share some of those opinions and allowed themselves to be entertained by others. Similarly, in Breughel’s life, a prince bought most of Breughel’s paintings, enjoying their views of the lives of peasants.
In our later age, as kings and court were closed as offices of patronage, someone like Caspar David Friederich, who celebrated the social revolutions in Europe of 1848, became an outcast. A few years later Edvard Munch was jailed for knowing an important anarchist. These are the steady drumbeat of art as conscience, and society does its best to prefer aesthetics to truth and subjectivity to reason. It is perhaps more interested in applying reason in the aid of subjective states than the other way around. Classicism is a nice example of rational depictions of what are irrational stories. Throughout the Christianization of Classicism, or really the classicization of Medievalism, we still see the artist decrying the destruction of kindness by oppression, and celebrating the victory and hope of the soul. In such storytelling, the good outlive the evil in repute. In that tradition, in my lifetime, a Pope helped undo the cruelty of an oppressive system of government by symbolizing the suffering of God, or the soul’s intention, in society. He suffered both exile and attempted murder. When there was a pause in his exile and he appeared in Poland, the chief of state’s knees shook with fear on meeting the Pope; such is the force of truth and the woken state of reason.
The dogma of Christ is nothing but love and tolerance. The many smaller dogmas by which people conflict themselves violate the example of Christ and the spirit of the greatest Dogma, which is born of the love of mother and child, the love of spouses, the love of lovers. Love is a human knowledge of humanity so extraordinary that it is enshrined in Divinity, which may as well exist, so strong is our feeling for what is true and good in us. The essential friendship of people, which can be destroyed by lies and hatred, is a likewise sacred thing toward which great literature and painting urge the viewer.
The fallen and the risen both know this thing in its true light, or in the shadow from which they envy it. It is as universal a knowledge as many lesser truths like counting and spelling, and so also undergirds religions and the toilings of philosophers, even if their disputations lead to a negation of their original motive.
An artist is the likely liquid of a modern age, able to pass among people without a seeming office or position of power, only a commentator off to one side seeking to please by beauty and truth, and discovering the time living in us. Almost by accident a shock occurs. Like Columbus still, we are shocked by the great distance west to Asia, and shocked by the intervening discovery, not able to recognize what, in fact, we have discovered, nor how to treat the people we encounter.
In the sleep of reason there is enough wrong to supply delusion on a mass scale, but the objective state in our subjective nature reveals enough that is eternal and true to bring us up again, and again, generation after generation.
This is the meaning of culture, its long repetitions, its rediscoveries, its persistence in the face of cruelty.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The Blue Hour
At Rosenfeld Gallery this month a show of Leslie Fenton’s works of paper, literally torn, wrinkled and opened and dyed and painted and soaked and handled and assembled into beautiful abstract paintings, shows what can be achieved in the inspiration of the imagination working with almost impossible tools.
If you place your hands on paper and work it by wonderful alterations, a real artist can summon from the scraps something magnificent, delicate, fierce, or watery. Ms. Fenton has made these materials into paintings that reflect the impossibility of their creation by appearing created by time and processes altogether natural and graceful.
A surgeon with the same hands would be highly sought after. This sensitivity to the tissue of sight is practiced on all the pieces in the show, but the one I most prize for its illusion of infinity, and the light of its title is The Blue Hour, a large work that deserves a longer life of exhibition, as might be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Blue Hour is a term for the interval before dawn, when the sky begins to brighten and illuminate the world in a soft blue hue. People rising early would be known to appreciate it, and be familiar with its magic. This painting allows that experience in daylight, and gives forth the same benediction of a kind infinity returning us to earth from sleep and forgetting.
Some have spoken of a morning light in painting. This is an entirely extra territory. With this artist, night, the dark spaces in trees, the color of rock and sand and cloud, make up the world that hasn’t been covered enough. The work is palpable, synesthetic with a new sense, not bas relief, but very much reminding us that something slight and fragile makes up the orchestration of the cosmos.
Until October 4, 2009
Leslie Fenton
Mixed Media on Paper
Rosenfeld Gallery
113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
215 922 1376
If you place your hands on paper and work it by wonderful alterations, a real artist can summon from the scraps something magnificent, delicate, fierce, or watery. Ms. Fenton has made these materials into paintings that reflect the impossibility of their creation by appearing created by time and processes altogether natural and graceful.
A surgeon with the same hands would be highly sought after. This sensitivity to the tissue of sight is practiced on all the pieces in the show, but the one I most prize for its illusion of infinity, and the light of its title is The Blue Hour, a large work that deserves a longer life of exhibition, as might be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Blue Hour is a term for the interval before dawn, when the sky begins to brighten and illuminate the world in a soft blue hue. People rising early would be known to appreciate it, and be familiar with its magic. This painting allows that experience in daylight, and gives forth the same benediction of a kind infinity returning us to earth from sleep and forgetting.
Some have spoken of a morning light in painting. This is an entirely extra territory. With this artist, night, the dark spaces in trees, the color of rock and sand and cloud, make up the world that hasn’t been covered enough. The work is palpable, synesthetic with a new sense, not bas relief, but very much reminding us that something slight and fragile makes up the orchestration of the cosmos.
Until October 4, 2009
Leslie Fenton
Mixed Media on Paper
Rosenfeld Gallery
113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
215 922 1376
Friday, July 10, 2009
Subjective Natures
Artists are understood to practice subjectivity almost as a professional trait. Their vision, their vocabulary, their language are frequent terms used to warn onlookers that what they are coming to see consists of having to practice a sort of translation into the state of mind of the artist. The artist, for his part, has been trying to enter the state of mind of say “nature,” or spiritual truth, or the sublime, or the truth of gesture and action painting.
For the Impressionists, the subjective newness of their art consisted of looking seriously at the modern world as a subject. Their charm was their sense of celebration, via the effects of light on dappled lawns or the dance of light on water, or the very dance of the artist’s brush on canvas. Forms of mental distress were viable means of altering the image, as Van Gogh did, or exile, as Gauguin did, or an evolving abstraction, as Matisse did. The loner could express in a pre-cubist mosaic of colors, as Cezanne did, and the list goes on.
Were these things done before? Certainly Goya took other than what we would call the official line on war in his time, and El Greco found a manner of painting that exaggerated the form for spiritual reasons. Mannerism itself was an altered state of reality, and recognized as such.
It is the moment when a subjective state seems to be the most real take on things that it takes off in popularity. That may not coincide with the date of the innovation, and so the (clearly subjective) history of art that I propose includes a concept of the oh-so-much-more-real. Comparing an Inness to an Albert Pinkham Ryder one has to admit the more real emotional state of delirium on Ryder’s part, and the more real state of rapture on Inness’s part. It is in these ways that we value them most, not in the factuality or primitivism of their means. And it is because we can be objective about the subjective that we understand the equal merits of great artists. Artists are not all doing the same work, although they work in much the same faith to arrive at their different realities of emphasis.
Another way we show we appreciate a great range of subjective states is by the popularity of museums, and the adventure of seeing new art by contemporary artists. Even if befuddled or outraged, the engagement and curiosity of the viewer is a singular force driving the growth of art.
Can art run out of subjective states? My experience as a teacher of art suggests no. I practice a rather Hippocratic method of teaching, in which I work with the tendency of a student and try to help realize in technical matters what the prototype of the artist in the student’s work is showing. I have never seen two people in the same subjective state, although I meet with many in the same literal or objective state. It is the habit of students to attempt an escape from the subjective through an appeal to the literal. If only they could get that right, they tell me, it would really look like the model. If only, if only, and yet, the thing they often see as misshapen is really a form of exaggeration, or a nuance of adjustment that announces very clearly what they are trying to say.
A long struggle ensues during which I try to save the artist while educating the critic in the artist to know what he may treat as correctable error and what he should respect as a subjective truth. It has been a marvel to me that this art instinct resides in almost all people who come to me. It resembles the inner working of life itself, in the way a particular form of life will weave itself from an inner knowledge of its own design, never getting the chance to see itself in the mirror to make adjustments, as it were. The inward way is already well prepared in both the artist and viewer. For whatever reasons of living and experience, for whatever friction between hope and dismay, for whatever ideal the cynic suffers for, or sad reality the dreamer mourns, a person will take up a cause in art as in life and make a semblance of the things that rouse or delight him for their correspondence with his inner truth. That truth, shared by us in our own workings of life and loss, are recognized as the appropriate matter of art. We see in the subjective truth of art that truth we ourselves harbor in tandem with the artist. We say with this that a larger reality tinges all real things with a certain mood, or energy, or tone of color. And it is about that larger reality we all share and all co-create that we are concerned with in the study and making of art. It is for this reason that the literal fails the test of art, though not that of craft. And it is because we recognize that craft is an attempt to remove the subjective that we relegate it to a second place. Craft alone is not beauty, although laudable in its means. The place it takes, although it fought against it, is the industrial prototype. The more perfectly it is made, the more desirable it becomes as an anonymous matter, a fact worthy of reproduction if one could come by the factory to do it. And it is because the great craft object remains aloof from industry that it threatens the mass produced by its uniqueness, and by the eros it creates in the machinery of reproduction to exploit the design so proffered and denied a license to.
It might be thought that design itself is the subjective, and that art and craft are really one, along with the other matters the Bau Haus attempted to unify. This is not so, because design only covers the matters of form as apparent to the eye. The subjective reality of a Ryder, or an Inness, precedes and supercedes design. It works not on the matters of denotation, but through the effects of connotation. If anything, the great paintings denote less by design. Part of their design is in their unfinished state, the unfinished state that emphasizes one dovetail of nature over the others. Were one to look at a wonderful craft piece – say a silver piece by Paul Revere – and a painted version by an artist of that same craft object, one would see the added appeal the painted image has, because of how it imitates, recreates, in fact, the experience of that silver piece, and what it means to the artist. Without the felt addendum of an artist, the craft piece is always complete in itself, available for analysis, appreciation, but exquisitely objective.
However, craft pieces are sometimes also considered an art of subjective means. Furniture’s animistic past, silver’s mutability of luster, the quilts of Gees Bend, have language and secrets that fulfill the subjective requirement of art. Should we go back to an earlier definition of art, we would find many activities of people fit under the rubric of art, art as a special knowledge, art as a subjectively discovered means of truth. In its totalities, summed together, these make up a time. If one examines one’s times by a study of contemporary arts, and finds them wanting, one is obligated to set off on the journey of one’s life, to set the objective things right by the subjective truth at one’s disposal. It cannot be that one will be entirely wrong, though he may be considered wrong-headed, literally heading in the wrong direction. But the wrong direction has been proven out before as a right direction, or at least a viable one.
An art creates us, so also we create an art.
For the Impressionists, the subjective newness of their art consisted of looking seriously at the modern world as a subject. Their charm was their sense of celebration, via the effects of light on dappled lawns or the dance of light on water, or the very dance of the artist’s brush on canvas. Forms of mental distress were viable means of altering the image, as Van Gogh did, or exile, as Gauguin did, or an evolving abstraction, as Matisse did. The loner could express in a pre-cubist mosaic of colors, as Cezanne did, and the list goes on.
Were these things done before? Certainly Goya took other than what we would call the official line on war in his time, and El Greco found a manner of painting that exaggerated the form for spiritual reasons. Mannerism itself was an altered state of reality, and recognized as such.
It is the moment when a subjective state seems to be the most real take on things that it takes off in popularity. That may not coincide with the date of the innovation, and so the (clearly subjective) history of art that I propose includes a concept of the oh-so-much-more-real. Comparing an Inness to an Albert Pinkham Ryder one has to admit the more real emotional state of delirium on Ryder’s part, and the more real state of rapture on Inness’s part. It is in these ways that we value them most, not in the factuality or primitivism of their means. And it is because we can be objective about the subjective that we understand the equal merits of great artists. Artists are not all doing the same work, although they work in much the same faith to arrive at their different realities of emphasis.
Another way we show we appreciate a great range of subjective states is by the popularity of museums, and the adventure of seeing new art by contemporary artists. Even if befuddled or outraged, the engagement and curiosity of the viewer is a singular force driving the growth of art.
Can art run out of subjective states? My experience as a teacher of art suggests no. I practice a rather Hippocratic method of teaching, in which I work with the tendency of a student and try to help realize in technical matters what the prototype of the artist in the student’s work is showing. I have never seen two people in the same subjective state, although I meet with many in the same literal or objective state. It is the habit of students to attempt an escape from the subjective through an appeal to the literal. If only they could get that right, they tell me, it would really look like the model. If only, if only, and yet, the thing they often see as misshapen is really a form of exaggeration, or a nuance of adjustment that announces very clearly what they are trying to say.
A long struggle ensues during which I try to save the artist while educating the critic in the artist to know what he may treat as correctable error and what he should respect as a subjective truth. It has been a marvel to me that this art instinct resides in almost all people who come to me. It resembles the inner working of life itself, in the way a particular form of life will weave itself from an inner knowledge of its own design, never getting the chance to see itself in the mirror to make adjustments, as it were. The inward way is already well prepared in both the artist and viewer. For whatever reasons of living and experience, for whatever friction between hope and dismay, for whatever ideal the cynic suffers for, or sad reality the dreamer mourns, a person will take up a cause in art as in life and make a semblance of the things that rouse or delight him for their correspondence with his inner truth. That truth, shared by us in our own workings of life and loss, are recognized as the appropriate matter of art. We see in the subjective truth of art that truth we ourselves harbor in tandem with the artist. We say with this that a larger reality tinges all real things with a certain mood, or energy, or tone of color. And it is about that larger reality we all share and all co-create that we are concerned with in the study and making of art. It is for this reason that the literal fails the test of art, though not that of craft. And it is because we recognize that craft is an attempt to remove the subjective that we relegate it to a second place. Craft alone is not beauty, although laudable in its means. The place it takes, although it fought against it, is the industrial prototype. The more perfectly it is made, the more desirable it becomes as an anonymous matter, a fact worthy of reproduction if one could come by the factory to do it. And it is because the great craft object remains aloof from industry that it threatens the mass produced by its uniqueness, and by the eros it creates in the machinery of reproduction to exploit the design so proffered and denied a license to.
It might be thought that design itself is the subjective, and that art and craft are really one, along with the other matters the Bau Haus attempted to unify. This is not so, because design only covers the matters of form as apparent to the eye. The subjective reality of a Ryder, or an Inness, precedes and supercedes design. It works not on the matters of denotation, but through the effects of connotation. If anything, the great paintings denote less by design. Part of their design is in their unfinished state, the unfinished state that emphasizes one dovetail of nature over the others. Were one to look at a wonderful craft piece – say a silver piece by Paul Revere – and a painted version by an artist of that same craft object, one would see the added appeal the painted image has, because of how it imitates, recreates, in fact, the experience of that silver piece, and what it means to the artist. Without the felt addendum of an artist, the craft piece is always complete in itself, available for analysis, appreciation, but exquisitely objective.
However, craft pieces are sometimes also considered an art of subjective means. Furniture’s animistic past, silver’s mutability of luster, the quilts of Gees Bend, have language and secrets that fulfill the subjective requirement of art. Should we go back to an earlier definition of art, we would find many activities of people fit under the rubric of art, art as a special knowledge, art as a subjectively discovered means of truth. In its totalities, summed together, these make up a time. If one examines one’s times by a study of contemporary arts, and finds them wanting, one is obligated to set off on the journey of one’s life, to set the objective things right by the subjective truth at one’s disposal. It cannot be that one will be entirely wrong, though he may be considered wrong-headed, literally heading in the wrong direction. But the wrong direction has been proven out before as a right direction, or at least a viable one.
An art creates us, so also we create an art.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Lynne Campbell, painter
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Wingohocking (bluejay), 2008, by Lynne CampbellThe art of this painter, with which I have been familiar for many years now, is perhaps hardest to write of, because I have seen all of it, and because I am so close to the artist. I must be careful not to read into the paintings things I know about the painter, and yet, to explain the artist is sometimes a help in appreciating her art.
While still a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lynne began an interest in the square format, not that she hadn’t created in another format, but it was this shape she began to explore as a window. Notice that the equality of the sides is a very even and calming equilibrium between the vertical and horizontal. It resolves at the outset what classical composition must struggle to obtain. Unlike classical composition, which balances horizontal and vertical by increasing the meaning of the vertical, Lynne’s composition begins in a state of harmony. The implied vertical distance, supplied by classical art’s belief in the divine (think of John the Baptist’s finger pointing upward in Leonardo DaVinci’s painting), or in mannerism’s exaggeration of the vertical (as in El Greco’s figures, streaming heavenward), here is made equal to the horizontal. Such paintings could only be created in an age of post enlightenment; it sees into the world according to nature’s equidistance from us.
While still a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lynne began an interest in the square format, not that she hadn’t created in another format, but it was this shape she began to explore as a window. Notice that the equality of the sides is a very even and calming equilibrium between the vertical and horizontal. It resolves at the outset what classical composition must struggle to obtain. Unlike classical composition, which balances horizontal and vertical by increasing the meaning of the vertical, Lynne’s composition begins in a state of harmony. The implied vertical distance, supplied by classical art’s belief in the divine (think of John the Baptist’s finger pointing upward in Leonardo DaVinci’s painting), or in mannerism’s exaggeration of the vertical (as in El Greco’s figures, streaming heavenward), here is made equal to the horizontal. Such paintings could only be created in an age of post enlightenment; it sees into the world according to nature’s equidistance from us.
Sighting (silently), 1993, by Lynne Campbell
In her early paintings in this format, Lynne Campbell used the occurrence of manmade structures in the natural or wild landscape as evidence of the mathematical sublime – a term De Chirico used to describe the metaphysical effect of certain large manmade structures in the world and in his paintings. Whatever marks time, or endures time, would give him that effect, thus the clock’s presiding over statues or classical ruins, with a train crossing the horizon far off. Time and timelessness keep track of each other, emphasize each other, in those paintings.
untitled, 1995, by Lynne Campbell
Entry, 1996, by Lynne Campbell
For Lynne Campbell, who especially loved De Chirico’s paintings then, the mathematical sublime was visible in oil tanks, or water towers. The water towers became an important motif, after the interest in oil tanks seen in refineries. These early compositions had high horizons, and the sources of oil and water seemed to require that. They were studies of the earth as a source of one or another elemental fluid.
Return, 1997, by Lynne CampbellWith the water towers, an eventual shift took place, and the horizon moved to the bottom of the composition. Water’s other source, the divinity of air and weather, became acknowledged, and it is about that time that she and I became bird watchers. With that interest a new motif became her obsession, the sighting of a bird.
And now I will explain how like Agnes Martin these square, abstracted skies, become. They contain the slenderest piece of horizon. There is the equilibrium of the format, and then there is the placement of the bird in that context. The way the space is divided, the way the line of flight enters, or predicts its passage, all balance in a remarkable way. The object of each of these compositions, whether they include energy or the stasis of humidity, is an extraordinary serenity.
And now I will explain how like Agnes Martin these square, abstracted skies, become. They contain the slenderest piece of horizon. There is the equilibrium of the format, and then there is the placement of the bird in that context. The way the space is divided, the way the line of flight enters, or predicts its passage, all balance in a remarkable way. The object of each of these compositions, whether they include energy or the stasis of humidity, is an extraordinary serenity.
Late, 2004, by Lynne CampbellThe serenity of nature is not what she implies in these paintings, but the serenity of the onlooker. She is showing a certain viewpoint, in which we are at the moment between dwelling on a sky-filled landscape and noticing a passing bird. The sense of the cosmos, of the allness of the sky has us absorbed, and the bird noticed is placed in an incredible fit within the viewer’s universe. It is not locked-in so much as released-into. The environment and the inhabitant are as one, imbued with the spirit of each other. It is in this way that the older classical vertical direction has been made imminent. One can see spirit right there before oneself. Centuries of science and understanding have brought us to the potency of the present. These are paintings possible after Emily Dickenson, and after the general awakening about the fragility of the environment. They are a discovery coincident with that which holds that life evolves from its surroundings, that context matters, and that passage moves through the creating air of our life.
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Wingohocking (goldfinch), 2008, by Lynne CampbellObservations like these are timeless because we can understand they were always true, even if they now seem recently new, beginning the wave of the present age. While in the city, the birds were part of the urban environment, passing over rooftops with the complete ease of belonging. Now, though still in the city, they constitute a series named for a street that in Lenape means “a good place to plant.”
Edward Sozanski has termed them visual haiku, admitting their spare means and profound effect. As poetry does, they awaken us to a sense of being, and a state of awakened bliss. Though many are summer or winter visions, they grant that first truth of seeing the spirit of life, the spirit most of us assume each spring when we wake up to the sky and the weather in a state of bliss. If a Buddha were to come as the face of nature, he would make us compassionate in the way these paintings of our nature make us feel.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Fidelity
The thought that now begins to occupy me concerns the question of how art advertises life here and now. Because our culture has met up with nihilism again in an old form—the form of religious renunciation of life and its happiness—there is a need to revisit the meaning of religion.
Religious narratives of history and being seem to follow the Romantic notion of a lost Eden of Joy, which reappears after death. This literal interpretation is a mistaken hope. What seems more likely is that human perception begins in a form of bliss, matures into a drama of conflicts and ends in an armistice of hope. All of these can be seen as worthwhile stages of life, and it is the celebration of this life to which they add their intimations of immortality. Eden and Heaven are here and now. One can live in them or Hell, as the Buddhist reminds us. And it is in the conscious choice to live fulfilled lives of civilization, cultivation and enjoyment that make immortality present. The ancient Greeks would even consider such people to have become like gods, implying by that the notion of true living.
It is in this sense of art as an advertisement for life that we can make sense of all the partial efforts of consumer advertising, of pop art and op art and expressionism, of abstraction, surrealism and realism, of impressionism or the Baroque or the Renaissance. What the consumer is always being promised—taste, beauty, style, wit—are tools for the ages-old consolations and celebrations of life. Except as they promise to substitute buying for living, they contribute to the herd instinct which is looking for something called happiness. Be it found at the remove of a vacation purchased via Southwest Air or at a restaurant table for two at an expensive venue, it finally comes to the thing for which art has always been creating access—from cuisine to couture to truth and beauty. Art is a means to bring us close to life, but life is in the living of it. Henry Miller essentially said the same. Living and happiness are what the fuss is all about, even to the point that a person can find happiness in truth or the beauty of difficult things.
Experience in art is also less material, by the very nature of art’s simulacrum, by its reduction or abstraction of the world into a two-dimensional vision prepared for the cave of the retina and the deeper cave of consciousness, itself. This has some effect in making art nearer to spiritual ideals, and less the material world it reflects or uses. Because it operates on our sensation so directly, it is tantamount to thoughts and dreams. These are the fields of immortal reflections, the constancy of principles, the repeatable experiment. We hold truth to be self-evident, so also art. It is there or not. We may hold the higher consciousness of ourselves and the world in our hands and not perceive it in a contemporary artwork. It may be there or we may mistake it to be there. Later in life we may understand it all as what our time needed to see. It is a message from the light of day—a Platonic ideal of the Mediterranean climate. The shared vision, the shared meal, the climate whose temperature and pleasure makes people feel intimate with themselves, each other, the day itself, the sun. All of this keeps calling us to live as best we can in the interval allowed us on earth.
Religious narratives of history and being seem to follow the Romantic notion of a lost Eden of Joy, which reappears after death. This literal interpretation is a mistaken hope. What seems more likely is that human perception begins in a form of bliss, matures into a drama of conflicts and ends in an armistice of hope. All of these can be seen as worthwhile stages of life, and it is the celebration of this life to which they add their intimations of immortality. Eden and Heaven are here and now. One can live in them or Hell, as the Buddhist reminds us. And it is in the conscious choice to live fulfilled lives of civilization, cultivation and enjoyment that make immortality present. The ancient Greeks would even consider such people to have become like gods, implying by that the notion of true living.
It is in this sense of art as an advertisement for life that we can make sense of all the partial efforts of consumer advertising, of pop art and op art and expressionism, of abstraction, surrealism and realism, of impressionism or the Baroque or the Renaissance. What the consumer is always being promised—taste, beauty, style, wit—are tools for the ages-old consolations and celebrations of life. Except as they promise to substitute buying for living, they contribute to the herd instinct which is looking for something called happiness. Be it found at the remove of a vacation purchased via Southwest Air or at a restaurant table for two at an expensive venue, it finally comes to the thing for which art has always been creating access—from cuisine to couture to truth and beauty. Art is a means to bring us close to life, but life is in the living of it. Henry Miller essentially said the same. Living and happiness are what the fuss is all about, even to the point that a person can find happiness in truth or the beauty of difficult things.
Experience in art is also less material, by the very nature of art’s simulacrum, by its reduction or abstraction of the world into a two-dimensional vision prepared for the cave of the retina and the deeper cave of consciousness, itself. This has some effect in making art nearer to spiritual ideals, and less the material world it reflects or uses. Because it operates on our sensation so directly, it is tantamount to thoughts and dreams. These are the fields of immortal reflections, the constancy of principles, the repeatable experiment. We hold truth to be self-evident, so also art. It is there or not. We may hold the higher consciousness of ourselves and the world in our hands and not perceive it in a contemporary artwork. It may be there or we may mistake it to be there. Later in life we may understand it all as what our time needed to see. It is a message from the light of day—a Platonic ideal of the Mediterranean climate. The shared vision, the shared meal, the climate whose temperature and pleasure makes people feel intimate with themselves, each other, the day itself, the sun. All of this keeps calling us to live as best we can in the interval allowed us on earth.
Elementary Particles
“Honey, I shrunk the universe,” I could have said to my wife after writing a previous blog entry here (The Fallibility of Perception). I treat my physics speculations as light humor, because my experience in science was brief and long ago. I once studied astronomy with a real hope of a life in that science, but somehow was lured into art.
By coincidence, some aspects of art and science – perhaps the most interesting to us as people – are similar. Both arise out of an interest to describe the universe to ourselves and each other. While a description may satisfy me alone, it cannot be acceptable to others if it seems inconsistent with reality or is disprovable by previously ascertained knowledge.
In painting, if the artist neglects the volume of space in which the still life resides, there is a flatness to the painting which lacks the compelling authority of, say, a Paul Chardin, or a Cezanne still life. We are thus familiar in art with the inference of reality. After all, we can see by inspection that the canvas is a flat surface. But stepping back we experience depth in the best paintings. How have we inferred this illusion? It is by the artist’s knowledge of how the eye reads reality. To test this, you can view a good painting with one eye only, and still experience depth. Do this in looking at the world and the world will go flat.
In science, there are many cases in which our unaided senses cannot make the correct inference about the universe. Without a prism, we cannot know light is made of colors, although long ago people attempted to deduce this knowledge from the appearance of rainbows.
Back to the artist. If the artist combines all the colors in paint, he does not get white light. How come? And so much for artists having anything to say about science, you may add.
But it is in the nature of inference that science and art are kindred spirits. Science proposes a model, with an experiment as demonstration, and invites the public to its carnival tent for the entertainment of understanding the magician that is nature.
Similarly, the artist shows a concept of the world – admittedly one immediately accessible to the eyes – and says, come in and be dazzled by nature. The audience, always on a quest for entertainment and knowledge, is happy to be awoken by science or art to a sense of its world.
The audience has seen apples before, of course, but Cezanne’s apples wake them to the notion of admiration, even love, of apples. The audience has seen the moon before, but after Newton they think of gravity and the tides and the nature of orbital motion. They can envision a human being in orbit around the earth and they can infer the nature of the earth’s travel during a year.
In this sense art is specific and science leads to generalization. The audience of a month is enjoying a rather abstract reality. But what is not abstract about a painting? Only because we wish to enjoy illusion and because we wish to enjoy understanding, do we succumb to art and science.
Now it is the question of perception that I raised before on this blog, which is the bedrock of both science and art, and which also gives rise to the nature of inference and illusion. In science, perception is aided by experimental instruments (the prism, the Geiger counter), whereas in art it is still the eye itself, once our primary instrument of science. It is the eye that still attempts to imagine concepts like the particle-wave of physics, and the nuclear structure of atoms. It infers these matters by its power of illusion only, because we are assured these elementary particles are not objectively visible – even though vision itself operates on account of the autonomous properties of light.
Where science would like to boil things down to a simple explanation, art accepts many explanations, and the notion of local conditions and nuances of perception. (Think of Monet’s haystacks paintings in their many different lights, or the many views of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cezanne.) And yet science gets more complicated the longer it studies the world. The very concept of an elementary particle, which began long ago in Greek philosophy, has devolved by experiments into a plethora of elementary particles. And it is due to this multitude of elementary particles that the very philosophy of an elementary particle stands to be undone.
Not only is the elementary particle a quaint notion by now, the single universe is much in doubt, as well. Once, not so long ago, we had the single sun, the single galaxy, the only solar system, the only earth. Science, by its dogged scrutiny, approaches the perception art has long enjoyed – that the universe is not simplified, it can only be elaborated.
The turn in science was not entirely necessary. The photon is considered one of the early elementary particles. After centuries of thought and analysis, science conceded to a sort of binary description of the photon – that particle which conveys a quantum of light, and which is also a wave. Try constructing or imagining an irreducible element (a point) as a wave. Or, try imagining a wave as a single particle. It does not work in our normal way of thinking, but we infer it as a reality, the way we infer love in a Watteau painting – because we see the players in a love story.
It is in accepting the description of the photon that physics was on the right path, and in ascribing more and more elements to individual characteristics that it lost its powers of description. It is as though physics has gone ahead and decoupled the photon. Ie., in this experiment we show the wave decay and give off a particle, in the next, the particle decays and gives off a frequency of light energy.
Besides the likelihood that there is no ultimate particle, there is the likelihood that there is an elementary particle – already known – that can change identities under differing conditions.
Take as a metaphor people. If a human being speaks Russian, and another speaks Chinese, does an extraterrestrial scientist classify them as two distinct species? Then if the Russian immigrated to China, and after some years spoke Chinese, would he have had added to him the C-particle of Chinese and lost the R-particle of Russian? We here know that he was a person in both cases, and that that was his elementary identity, not to be confused with his language behavior, important though that is.
What I am trying to describe is a Universe that, even in its most basic sense, demonstrates behavior that is individualistic. True, it can be predicted by polls and quantum dynamics, but so can the likelihood that a Russian will try to learn Chinese while living in China. Being and context may be maintaining freedom and limits across the entire spectrum of existence, not only in the field of human action, or human thought.
I am free to think this blog. It is limited to what survives the test of reality. But where reality remains in a fluid state of description we may need to think fresh thoughts. The artist tries the world on through his particular lense. We grow to consider that particular sensibility as one we can share. The way of seeing is also a way of feeling and a way of conceiving the relationship between the human being and the world. That it is subjective makes it no less true.
It is possible the electron, the photon, the proton, each has a subjective relationship – subject to the contingencies of its existence – the way a bee moves to the next flower suggested by the breeze, or in opposition to it. We should not expect we are made of rocks, nor that matter is inanimate. Even rock has a fluid past, and nothing about the Universe seems inanimate to an artist. To an artist the moon and earth and sun are dancers, family members, even gods – but certainly not inanimate matter.
Spirit is in the very fiber of being. Freedom is the elementary particle. Art exists to celebrate this, and science to discover it.
By coincidence, some aspects of art and science – perhaps the most interesting to us as people – are similar. Both arise out of an interest to describe the universe to ourselves and each other. While a description may satisfy me alone, it cannot be acceptable to others if it seems inconsistent with reality or is disprovable by previously ascertained knowledge.
In painting, if the artist neglects the volume of space in which the still life resides, there is a flatness to the painting which lacks the compelling authority of, say, a Paul Chardin, or a Cezanne still life. We are thus familiar in art with the inference of reality. After all, we can see by inspection that the canvas is a flat surface. But stepping back we experience depth in the best paintings. How have we inferred this illusion? It is by the artist’s knowledge of how the eye reads reality. To test this, you can view a good painting with one eye only, and still experience depth. Do this in looking at the world and the world will go flat.
In science, there are many cases in which our unaided senses cannot make the correct inference about the universe. Without a prism, we cannot know light is made of colors, although long ago people attempted to deduce this knowledge from the appearance of rainbows.
Back to the artist. If the artist combines all the colors in paint, he does not get white light. How come? And so much for artists having anything to say about science, you may add.
But it is in the nature of inference that science and art are kindred spirits. Science proposes a model, with an experiment as demonstration, and invites the public to its carnival tent for the entertainment of understanding the magician that is nature.
Similarly, the artist shows a concept of the world – admittedly one immediately accessible to the eyes – and says, come in and be dazzled by nature. The audience, always on a quest for entertainment and knowledge, is happy to be awoken by science or art to a sense of its world.
The audience has seen apples before, of course, but Cezanne’s apples wake them to the notion of admiration, even love, of apples. The audience has seen the moon before, but after Newton they think of gravity and the tides and the nature of orbital motion. They can envision a human being in orbit around the earth and they can infer the nature of the earth’s travel during a year.
In this sense art is specific and science leads to generalization. The audience of a month is enjoying a rather abstract reality. But what is not abstract about a painting? Only because we wish to enjoy illusion and because we wish to enjoy understanding, do we succumb to art and science.
Now it is the question of perception that I raised before on this blog, which is the bedrock of both science and art, and which also gives rise to the nature of inference and illusion. In science, perception is aided by experimental instruments (the prism, the Geiger counter), whereas in art it is still the eye itself, once our primary instrument of science. It is the eye that still attempts to imagine concepts like the particle-wave of physics, and the nuclear structure of atoms. It infers these matters by its power of illusion only, because we are assured these elementary particles are not objectively visible – even though vision itself operates on account of the autonomous properties of light.
Where science would like to boil things down to a simple explanation, art accepts many explanations, and the notion of local conditions and nuances of perception. (Think of Monet’s haystacks paintings in their many different lights, or the many views of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cezanne.) And yet science gets more complicated the longer it studies the world. The very concept of an elementary particle, which began long ago in Greek philosophy, has devolved by experiments into a plethora of elementary particles. And it is due to this multitude of elementary particles that the very philosophy of an elementary particle stands to be undone.
Not only is the elementary particle a quaint notion by now, the single universe is much in doubt, as well. Once, not so long ago, we had the single sun, the single galaxy, the only solar system, the only earth. Science, by its dogged scrutiny, approaches the perception art has long enjoyed – that the universe is not simplified, it can only be elaborated.
The turn in science was not entirely necessary. The photon is considered one of the early elementary particles. After centuries of thought and analysis, science conceded to a sort of binary description of the photon – that particle which conveys a quantum of light, and which is also a wave. Try constructing or imagining an irreducible element (a point) as a wave. Or, try imagining a wave as a single particle. It does not work in our normal way of thinking, but we infer it as a reality, the way we infer love in a Watteau painting – because we see the players in a love story.
It is in accepting the description of the photon that physics was on the right path, and in ascribing more and more elements to individual characteristics that it lost its powers of description. It is as though physics has gone ahead and decoupled the photon. Ie., in this experiment we show the wave decay and give off a particle, in the next, the particle decays and gives off a frequency of light energy.
Besides the likelihood that there is no ultimate particle, there is the likelihood that there is an elementary particle – already known – that can change identities under differing conditions.
Take as a metaphor people. If a human being speaks Russian, and another speaks Chinese, does an extraterrestrial scientist classify them as two distinct species? Then if the Russian immigrated to China, and after some years spoke Chinese, would he have had added to him the C-particle of Chinese and lost the R-particle of Russian? We here know that he was a person in both cases, and that that was his elementary identity, not to be confused with his language behavior, important though that is.
What I am trying to describe is a Universe that, even in its most basic sense, demonstrates behavior that is individualistic. True, it can be predicted by polls and quantum dynamics, but so can the likelihood that a Russian will try to learn Chinese while living in China. Being and context may be maintaining freedom and limits across the entire spectrum of existence, not only in the field of human action, or human thought.
I am free to think this blog. It is limited to what survives the test of reality. But where reality remains in a fluid state of description we may need to think fresh thoughts. The artist tries the world on through his particular lense. We grow to consider that particular sensibility as one we can share. The way of seeing is also a way of feeling and a way of conceiving the relationship between the human being and the world. That it is subjective makes it no less true.
It is possible the electron, the photon, the proton, each has a subjective relationship – subject to the contingencies of its existence – the way a bee moves to the next flower suggested by the breeze, or in opposition to it. We should not expect we are made of rocks, nor that matter is inanimate. Even rock has a fluid past, and nothing about the Universe seems inanimate to an artist. To an artist the moon and earth and sun are dancers, family members, even gods – but certainly not inanimate matter.
Spirit is in the very fiber of being. Freedom is the elementary particle. Art exists to celebrate this, and science to discover it.
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