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]
