Articles
ART HISTORY UP TILL TODAY
- - -a point of view
Traditional Art insists upon visible connections to a visible
object. The art piece must, in some detail, resemble the
visible object's appearance; or, the art piece must capture,
suggest, or remind us of the essence or character of the
visible object it is related to. That's enough to mark it
traditional, all other things being unremarkable.
Modern art insists upon its own modification. The art piece
obviously relates to the visible object, but makes changes
in ways that have not any connection or relation to the
visual object.The result is that the subject of the art
piece is not the visual object but the artist, the maker
of the very modifications of Art. Perhaps in the Asia tradition
the subject of the art is a value, or something, in our
western tradition, akin to a value, rather than something
like the intention of the artist.
Post Modern art insists upon being only itself. The art
piece is related to nothing except itself. It is a new object,
created to have an appearance unique to itself. It is, in
itself, a suitable subject to be pictured in what we call
traditional art. Again, the subject of Post Modern Art is
the intentionality of the artist, or is the result of the
artist's own existential moment. The subject is the artist,
and the art piece has become simply an object that resulted.
This new art insists that the human social relations are/is
the one thing that is essential to be a human being. Social
relations predetermine neurological experience (perception,
etc) as we know it, though most people will tell you that
the reverse is closer to the truth.
Consciousness, the self-awareness of all human beings, is
outside of time and outside of individual knowing. All of
the knowable universe, both tangible and ephemeral, includes
all human experience (then, now, forever) and that great
quantity of data is actually one of the smallest parts of
the actual universe. So, according to this, the real of
reality is profoundly unknowable. The art piece is an emblem
of the individual, internal experience of perception. Thus
a voiceless stone can be a soothing sermon, when you wish
it to be. The esthetic is not separable from all experience.
This has not always been the nature of our experience. We
Homo sapiens have changed a lot in the last five thousand
years. Some three or four thousand years ago, more or less,
folks living together in the cruel deserts around the East
Mediterranean gave thought to their inner experience and
their social organization. They found a relation between
the two. They found the idea of responsibility. They discovered
that, whether I like it or not, or whether I agree or not,
as sure as sunshine and gravity, what I do as an individual
changes the lives of other individuals; and I cannot prevent
that. You can see that ethics grew from this. Tribal life
was easier in the more lush and fertile northern Europe.
That started to come to an end when their westward treks
ran out of land on the shores of the Atlantic. They had
to stop and settle down for good-- for the first time.
Up till then, possession was the thing: Achilles wanted
Briseis, right? Cu Chulain wanted the best cut of meat.
Owning was not the issue; having it was. Their historians
had only to recall who slew whom, and sometimes who begat
whom (though I think the begats came a long time after Briseis).
When the tribes settled down, suddenly everybody had to
keep track: which parcel of land, and which improvements,
belonged to whom, and why. Sigrid Undset deals with a lot
of that in "Kristin Lavransdatter." That was Sweden
in 1300 and they were still sorting it out. I put it down
as a discovery not an accomplishment.
In East Europe we tried to ignore private ownership for
about seven recent decades, andlook at the mess the great
U.S.S.R. made doing that.
The discovery that children are not simply small, ineffective
humans; that people, organizations, social groups, all go
through important change; the recognition of the growth
and change of western society; the creation of cities and
new countries; the training and education of adults for
special occupations; the re-establishment of populations
following the centuries of repeated black death plagues
that again and again wiped out much of Europe; all of this
helped bring into our consciousness the idea of systemic
change. This obvious reality, so at odds with official dogmas,
could not be ignored in relatively literate societies.
The beginnings of the natural sciences and the discoveries
of the former cultures of Rome, Greece, Egypt, and the stone
age, brought startling insights about the progressive character
of the human kind.
New knowledge made ignorance important. Dalton wrote on
atomic theory in 1803; molecular rearrangement was demonstrated
in 1828; that the act of making a judgement takes place
inaccessibly and unaccountably in the unconscious part of
us was proved in 1906.
The fairly absolute confidence that uncertainty can be quantified
made pragmatism a reasonable substitute for a number of
older ideas. Some argue that it made philosophy unnecessary.
Causality, determinism and relativity made the nature of
the human experience increasingly a matter of opinion. This
required us to invent information technology.
This technology consisted of public education (from Syms-Eaton
Academy onward), high speed printing, encyclopedias public
libraries, electric communications, statistics, quantum
mechanics, automated data processing, cybernetics, feedback,
and several new mathematics. This technology was the major
achievement of this new period.
With neither a universe nor a deity that seems purposeful,
for sure, reality seems to be some kind of infinite chaos.
Though at first glance this looks like another of Arnold's
ignorant army clashes at night and a universal Murphy's
law, the results as we experience them are not really half
bad. Something really interesting always seems to turn up,
if we keep up the turning. Perhaps the organizing principle
of the universe is an infinitely reaching discontinuity.
I rather prefer that.
Art relates to all this as a product of culture, not the
cause of it (just incase that point of view was not clear).
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