Eva Durant wrote:
Art is the eye of the beholder. Science is not.
Could you give a shread of evidence for your
new-age mumblings about synergic focus?
I did. I.A. Richards book on Practical Criticism a classic in the field. I find the
comment about
new age
in the context of the work that I do "off-putting." Do you mean to do that?
However, if you want
to put
down the New Age people, (of which I am not one) then you must talk also the works of
Neuro-physiologist Carl Pribram who has done much of the seminal research in the brain
including the
works on holographic connections that the local sci-fy shows call holo-suites. The
work on the
limbic
connections to the psychology of the individual was done by Pribram as well as Moshe
Feldenkrais and
has been made practical through the work of Ilana Rubenfeld. All three spent their
time giving
workshops at the Esalen Institute in California, the fountainhead of the New Age.
Their
groundbreaking work has now been made a part of the official canon of psycho-physical
therapy and
brain research, because their work "worked" in the field of "sports medicine" where
the "properties"
were literally worth millions of dollars. Of course it had been working for over 100
years in dance
with injuries and health patterns, but dancers are inexpensive and replaceable in
this society,
athletic property is not.
As for art being in the eye of the beholder. That is not an artistic statement. I
follow the
definitions of
the composer Arnold Schoenberg who taught it to my piano and composition teacher Bela
Rosza. He
said all "Art is a psycho-physical pursuit of values within a medium" (sound,
graphics, movement,
literature, etc.). He also said that good art was not life but like a mirror, must
be both "true,
the best
possible of it's kind (beauty) and be able to be repeated." Is it profound to say
that language is
in the
ear of the hearer or does it make more sense in language and art to say that it is "in
the perception
of
the knower that it becomes art, as does a chair or a nuclear power plant? It is in
the lack of
sophistication about art's premises that we get entangled in such things.
We should realize that it is
a statement about "complexity" an ancient artistic concept about skill and pedagogy,
recently made
popular by the engineers. But even the engineers admit that complexity disappears
when one knows
how to solve the problem. Therefore it becomes art, in the minds of the audience, as
the person
learns
its ways and its integrity(good art) or lack of such (bad art). The Aztecs called it
"carrion art"
because
it's lack of integrity defrauds the people. But this has nothing to do with whether
the art is real
anymore
than a chair is not a chair when confronted by a turtle. The problem here as I see it
is domains of
knowledge in the human existance.
The modern Westerner generally agrees with the following three domains, as a
traditional Cherokee my
table has four legs rather than three, the fourth being spirituality but what follows
is IMO a good
definition
of those three domains from writings of Harry Hillman Chartrand, Chief Economist of
Kultural
Econometrics International. He says that there are:
"three domains of knowledge: the natural science and engineering(NSE); the humanities
and
social sciences(HSS); and, the arts...... NSE is generated by the scientific method
characterized by
replicability and objective testing. It corresponds to primary knowledge of
quantities or
facts.....Progressiveness is vertical, i.e. new knowledge displaces old, and by
intolerance of
difference,
i.e. progress is a process of reducing error, replicability is all."
Chartrand continues: "HSS are concerned with understanding the human world.....For the
humanities.....understanding is all. For the social sciences, .....understanding can
be extended to
control, i.e. social engineering and is concerned with secondary knowledge of
qualities.......(&)
assessment of interactions between natural and human environments.....HSS knowledge is
generated by
'research'....statistics are used in social science,.....a modified scientific method
must be applied
because even basic tenets of the SSs cannot be quantitatively tested......research is
relative to
time and
space,....is not value-free......Progressiveness....is not vertical...New knowledge
does not
necessarily
displace the old......Progress in HSS is characterized by increasing tolerance of
difference, i.e.
all things
being equal, the more one knows of different countries, cultures and peoples, then the
more tolerant
of
differences one becomes."
The third leg of Chartrand's table is art: "if natural science is the study of the
outer, material
world; then
art is the study of the inner, subjective world. (This is a long way from saying
that art is
subjective.
REH) If the sciences involve the search for objective truth, then the arts involve
search for
subjective,
value-laden truth. Scientific knowledge depreciates, while knowledge in the arts
tends to
appreciate
through time. If science uses reductive methods, then art generates aesthetic
knowledge - a gestalt
sense of wholeness or, rightness."
Chartrand concludes with: "Metaphorically, the spiral ladder (of culture) is held
together by
interactions of
the three domains of knowledge. Each plays a role in defining a culture. NSE forms
the hard rungs
of
the ladder permitting reality testing of values and beliefs......the 'how to' change
the material
world. HSS,
on the other hand, tells a culture 'what' is worth doing relative to it's value set.
In this way, HSS constrains NSE. Similarly, art contextualizes NSE and HSS providing
them with
emotional valuation of 'rightness.' " Report The American Arts Industry, Size &
Significance. H.H.
Chartrand. 1992.
So as an artist I just thought I would set the context and the emotional valuation of
rightness for
all of the
above since that is what I am supposed to do.
All images we create with our brains are some form
of reflection/response to the reality around us.
I agree but I would add through the filter of genetics(perceptual talent) and memory.
This is
especially
true of certain images like circles that are impossible to percieve by the human eye
but are built
from
memory with the help of the haptic, kinetic and kinesthetic processes.
Whatever causes our hallucinacuions, magic mushrooms
or sleep deprivations, they are just the same
images we can create while imagining and dreaming.
Well said, like a true scientist, except like those 200,000 UFO sightings in the U.S.
over the last
sixty
years, reality is beginning to crowd objectivity. In fact it is likely that
objectivity itself is a
cultural
combination of factors. I would never say that a truck is to be ignored when standing
in the road,
but the
meaning and significance of that truck is definitely lodged in the memory. But what
about those
visions
of cattle by children on vision quests in the West before they had ever heard of or
seen them? Or
those
monkeys learning to accomplish a task on one island and then the one's next door or
across the globe
learn the same task within the year? With such a primitive knowledge of the way that
information is
carried and so much of it being lodged in culture and other things. We have even
found the NSE world
struggling with the line between thought and matter. In economics we have the same
battle lines be
drawn between Physical and Intellectual Capital. We even hear the same arguments
being made.
Most of the time a total irrecallable shambles,
rarely something our brain manages to reconstruct
as a creative thought.
In art we say "right! the muse is a bitch! But if it doesn’t have integrity with
itself then it
isn't good art and probably isn't art but artifice. "
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
