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THE LIGHT OF GOD
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Our perception of nature is reflected in our art which in turn reinforces our accepted perception.1 Thus as we continue to represent nature in a certain way then that perception is considered to be true. What is subjective becomes accepted as objective. Thus artistic conventions and traditions ‘cultivate’ what is ‘seen’ as ‘truth’. It could be assumed that what goes in my mind re: the conceptual labels that I hold to be valid, significant or important has a direct affect on my visual perception of the world. I walk along the river and can appreciate the elements for what they are: vegetation; water; grass; sun and so forth; relying only on my physical senses to have some sort of emotional response re: ‘enjoying a walk by the river on a sunny day’ or I may involve my intellect - or rather my imagination – to perceive my walk in a different way; e.g. to place what I see in a mythological context e.g. I make reference to the river as a river of the ancient underworld and so forth. I engage my mind to transform within it what I see with my eyes. I see the sun but although I know it is a stellar gaseous furnace I may also choose to see it as an instrument of the Christian God to provide life to His world and to reflect His glory; an internal spiritual response in the twenty-first century but in the fourteenth century this may have been a more common societal vision of the Sun. I may see some validity in this notion and to choose to adopt it for my personal edification although I still also accept the scientific interpretation of what the Sun really is: a ball of flaming gas. Yet the theological interpretation aids my mind to ‘see’ that there are different social, cultural and individual ways by which I can mentally view the world around me. Thus I may choose to see the sun as the ‘light of God’ and also view my surroundings as the pilgrim Dante while on his excursion through the Divine Comedy. Philosophically, I also may agree with
Heraclitus who said:
‘The sun is new every day.’
Also as I walk along the river and appreciate the warmth of the sun on my body I can also consider the popularised remark by Heraclitus which is:
“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”
The river looks the same every day but every day the particular body of water within it is different. Thus the truth before me is of a waterway that is a stable thing but I may also see it as a feature of the natural world that has an ever changing contour and elements. Geography teaches us that the river is in the process of change but in my lifetime the change will be so slight I can live with the absolute idea that the contours of the river will remain static. Nevertheless, each day is new and the light - or lack thereof of it - on the river makes it eternally ‘new’. The basic philosophical precept of Heraclitus
that everything changes and nothing stays still helps me to understand the world around me especially when that change does not seem very apparent; that this ‘truth’ belies the basis of his Logos which deals with the basic ever transforming structure of the whole universe:
‘Everything flows, nothing stands still.’
My acceptance of this remark affects the way I see, even though what I may see makes me realise that this ‘flow’ is invisible on a surface level. Yet, I also accept that what appears solid is actually on a microscopic level a buzzing, fluctuating mass of trillions of atoms which – according to quantum theory - may even be flowing into other micro-dimensions. In much the same way a human being experiences different moods, feelings and emotional states and which affects the personality of that human being – although physically staying the same – nature also presents to us on a daily basis a wide range of ‘presenting’ itself to us from peaceful through to violent. Nature can ‘reflect us’ in much the same way we see ourselves age over time; to ‘erode’ imperceptibly like nature. Nature becomes a metaphor of us; and in that mental identification of nature with us we see another value in choosing to view, study and portray it. Nature can be the entry point into our own minds or even into our souls. Though we accept certain norms or evidence as truth we should be flexible enough to realise that truth can be malleable as we ourselves and nature are also changeable. We exist; nature exists but at different times we may exist differently. To allow ourselves to consider different options - or to censor the opportunity to view the world differently says something about ourselves. Consider what Thomas McEvilley astutely remarks:
‘…John Dewey stressed the aspect of Modernism that is important here: the conviction that with reason, pragmatism, and good will, human communities can identify and solve their problems, ever more perfectly implementing the ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number. History, in this view, is regarded as a process of problem-solving, driven by an inner imperative toward progress. This ideology arose under heavy Greek influence in the 18th century, and gained momentum in the 19th from the irrational extension of Darwinism to cultural as well as biological affairs. The reflection of Social Darwinism in art criticism was the historicist view that at every moment there is an art-historical imperative, an urgent need to "solve" a certain set of aesthetic problems which have been left behind by the last solution to the last problem. This "tradition of the new" has only occurred in democracies; the opposite stance-resistance to change, an attempt to make change appear taboo or unnatural-has characterized cultures with hereditary rulers or self-perpetuating ruling cliques. The most successful instance is ancient Egypt, where, for example, the canons of representation through drawing went unchanged for about two thousand years without solving elementary problems of foreshortening. It is no accident that the form of government did not change in that time either, or that the idea of the Soul-the idea that human nature is, in essence, unchanging-was first (it seems) clearly formulated there. The ideal order of things was affirmed by all this (and an aspect of that order, of course, was class structure).It is important that we realize that our Modernism is not unique. In an earlier instance, in the ancient Greek democracies from about 550 BC till about 350 BC, the tradition of the new was fully in effect in literature, music, and the fine arts, as well as in social and political experimentation. The achievements of the sculptors Pheidias and Polykleitos posed 'the problems for Lysippos and Praxiteles, and so on. Euripides and other poets transformed the inherited metrical system into complex free verse, as happened in late- l9th-century poetry in Europe and America. Timotheus, Euripides' friend, and other composers called the New Musicians, leveled distinctions between modal harmonies with an increasing chromaticism which parallels the breakdown of the key in early Modern music. In theater, the proscenium arch was breached as radically by Aristophanes (who once had the actors throw water and wheat chaff on the audience in the middle of a play) as by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Socialism grew, meanwhile, until in Pericles' Athens the state was the leading employer.Then, as now, Modernism arose in the context of a positivistic democracy carried away by emerging international hegemony to an almost giddy sense of its ability to solve social and cultural problems. Thus, certain of the future, a culture gives away its past. Traditions that developed over centuries or millennia are discarded almost casually on the historicist assumption that something better will inevitably replace them. The intellectual origin of this activity was in the work of the Sophists, who are the first humans on record for stating publicly that convention is not a binding law but a material for us to shape as we want it. For our period, Hume and Voltaire and the other thinkers of the Age of Reason served that function.2
I find it intriguing that the idea of an unchanging Soul found resonance in Ancient Egypt as – correct me if I’m wrong – Plato was influenced by notions of the Soul by the Ancient Egyptians. The remarks about soul are interesting as in the autocratic mind the soul stays static while we may consider it to have a more fluid identity which can reveal to us other spiritual dimensions. Art should ultimately reflect a democracy of the mind and we should be wary if this is not the case; for nature also shows that change is inevitable and we should allow change to occur; that the human mind should not solidify and mentally die. One could consider William Blake’s general preference of the Imagination over Rationalism. So in any case let the light shine whatever be its source.
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1. The following remarks* by Thomas McEvilley in his brilliant book Art & Discontent Theory at the Millennium1 struck a chord:
1. Content that arises from the aspect of the artwork that is understood as representational. This type of content is widely regarded as the least problematical; ironically, this very assumption lies at the heart of a tangled problem. `We tend to feel that representation works by a recognizable element of objective resemblance, yet it seems more accurate to say that what we experience as representation is, like aesthetic taste, a culturally conditioned habit response not involving objective resemblance. In fact, it is difficult if not impossible to say what would constitute objective resemblance. And in reverse, the conviction of objective resemblance habituated in our pictorial tradition seems to exercise control over our perception of nature. The pictorial tradition, presented to us as representation of nature, has remade our perception of nature to conform with the conventions of pictures (as Goodman and others have demonstrated in their critiques of representation and, especially, of the tradition of perspectival drawing). he resemblance we seem to see between pictures d nature does not result from the fact that art imitates nature, but from the fact that our perception of nature imitates our perception of art. Seen thus as it seems we can't think anything that our language can't formulate, so it seems we can't see anything that our pictorial tradition does not include or imply. Representation, then, especially two-dimensional representation, is not an objective imitation, but a conventional symbolic system which varies from culture to culture. What "looks like" nature to an Australian aborigine looks like symbols to us, and vice versa. Virtually every culture has a tradition of representation which it sincerely regards as based on resemblance. Faced with a painting of the Battle of Waterloo, we seem to recognize horses, weapons, warriors, and, so on; what we are in fact recognizing are our conventional ways of representing horses, weapons, warrior's, and so on. The fact that it is specifically the Battle of Waterloo must come from the next level of content.
2. Content arising from verbal supplements supplied by the artist. Duchamp's famous remark that the most important thing about a painting is its title points to a weakness in the "purely optical" theory of art. Artists frequently issue verbal supplements in an attempt to control the interpretation of their works, and even the most optical of critics cannot help but be influenced by them. In reference to the painting of horses, and weapons, and warriors, for example, the title "The Battle of Waterloo" injects in specific content arising not from optical features but from words. Abstract and reductionist art, as much as representational, has been dependent on content supplied in this way. For example, it would be virtually impossible (as Harold Rosenberg once remarked) to distinguish the Minimal from the Sublime without such verbal supplements as Barnett Newman's cabalistic titles, the published interviews with Frank Stella and Donald Judd, and so on. Robert Smithson's essays have controlled the interpretation of his works, as Yves Klein's essays have of his. This quality goes back, really, to the beginnings of art: to Pheidias' identification of a certain nude male sculpture as Zeus rather than, say, Poseidon or Apollo, to the texts accompanying Egyptian tomb paintings, to the shaman's explanatory song in front of his paintings. It is as important today as it ever was.
*These extracts are from an essay ‘Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird’ in the Chapter ON THE MANNER OF ADDRESSING CLOUDS. Pages 70-71.T. McEvilley Art & Discontent. Documentext. McPherson & Company. 1991.
2. Ibid. Pages 95-97. Below is another passage which directly follows on from the text presented above (Pages 97-99):
The innocent confidence that the Modernist imperative requires ended, in the Greek case, with the catastrophic loss first of hegemony, then of self-rule. In the age that followed, called the Alexandrian, the tradition of the new was reversed. The idea of solving (and hence posing) one more formalist problem was no longer inspirational. The inner imperative of Greek art and culture turned toward its past. While it was not possible to regain in all innocence what had been sacrificed to the Modernist impulse, it was possible, through quoting, to enter into a new relationship with it. Theocritus wrote in the dialect of Sappho-which he had never heard; his readers were expected to recognize the allusion as a foundational content in his work. In time, new literary genres arose that featured quoting, like the "Scholars' Conversation," in which learned people play an intricate game of responding quotations and allusions; and the cento, a poem that was made up entirely of lines quoted from other poems. A huge industry arose in copies of great classical statues. A period in which traditions are destroyed is apt to be followed by a period of nostalgic longing for them and attempts to reconstruct them. The guilt of having destroyed them is allayed by incorporating them into the very context of their destruction. It seems clear that we are involved in an experiencc that parallels to some extent that of the Greeks. Similar value judgments have been rendered in both cases. The Alexandrian age is often regarded as one of exhaustion, as a time when Greek culture replayed the elegant achievements of its past, arraying them as a last review of antique riches before giving up the ghost. Post-Modernism, too, has been decried as a failure of nerve, a submission of free will, an abortivc termination of a project that was not yet complete. But what could it mean for a project based on institutionalizing change to be "complete"? The idea that cultural history is inherently dominated by an arc of progress is a form of disguised millennialist historicism which is, really, a superstition. The great superstition of the post-Sophistic Greek culture was its faith in the efficacy of reason as an engineer of social change; in our time this superstitious faith has been redoubled by the religious overtones with which Darwinism has entered-into ideas of social and spiritual advancement. The puritanical urgency of the Modernist imperative was based on hidden residues of mythic structures which still carried with them the intensity of divine promise. Clearly, progress has been expected to produce, in time, a human condition so improved as to be virtually Edenic: a state so good that the idea of further progress becomes inconceivable. One thinks of those prophetic cults that have expected the Millennium (or the Revolution, or the Aquarian Age) to arrive within a few days, years, or decades. In this sense Modernism was yet another disguised form of the Christian prophecy of the End of History (which is striving), and the attainment of a historical Edenic paradise again (as reward for that striving).
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Heraclitus
The above quotes came from the following website where there are many more worthy comments for your consideration:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus
See also:
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/heracli.htm
Which is a lecture on Heraclitus and where his main idea of the Unity of Opposites is considered.
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