Olga Boznanska -- painter of tomorrows

Here's a link to an essay I wrote for the journal Spectral Lyre:


Olga Boznanska -- painter-of-tomorrows


  
        Portrait of Helena and Wladyslaw Chmielarczyk (1906) detail

Activating the Work of Art

Photo from the art blog of The Guardian 

 

Our gaze must strike the object in such a way that it awakens something within it that springs up to meet the intention....The intensive observer finds that something leaps out at him from the object, enters into him, takes possession of him....This language of the intentionless truth (that is to say, of the object itself) possesses authority....It leaps into existence as the result of an immersion of the object in itself provoked by the external gaze.

          ~ Walter Benjamin


But how does the work of art become suspended in a sleep of latency to begin with? I suggest that the act of creation imparts to the artwork, as if by osmosis, a tendency to sequestration, a tendency similar to the riddling, metaphysical hiddenness of consciousness itself. As such, a work of art opens up a space of self-concealment -- a space parallel, tangent, and complementary to the artist's consciousness. This sideways volume of being involves an aesthetic strangeness that is cut off from the conventional, from normality. The artist's imagination, operating under the influence of eccentric time, infuses the artwork with that eccentric time. The artwork thus exists off-world, so to speak, concealed or suspended in a different dimension. 

But what is involved with the special gaze of Benjamin's "intensive observer?" How does one generate that intensity, so the work of art is awakened from suspended animation? 

I think the special angle of looking has to do with the opposite of a conquering, appropriating, analyzing gaze. The aggressive stare frightens an artwork, keeps it from coming to presence, holds it in a cloistered condition. The more dominating the gaze, the farther the artwork retreats into itself. I'm sure you've read descriptions of artworks written by experts in exhibition catalogs. To me, those sophisticated folks are blinded by their own analytical gazing. The artwork becomes a mirror reflecting conventional attitudes, hand-me-down assessments, and historical fixations. Institutional formalism should, I think, be left at the gallery door before entering; it interferes with the "leap" of an artwork's off-world authority into the observer's consciousness. 

The genuine activating gaze, that intensive seeing must have instead something to do with naivete, with an emptying-out of preconception and knowingness, with a filling-in of tense wonder. That special way of looking then causes the artwork to stir from its metaphysical shadows, to show itself within its eccentric zone of the tangential. 

Benjamin is that "aura" guy. I suspect that the awakening, the activating of an artwork takes place only in the presence of the original. A reproduction is latent with only a semblance of eccentric time, with only an ostensible possibility of engagement. Drained of aura and pulsating presence, the work of art as reproduction can only dimly divulge its secrets to the intensive gaze. 



 

Walter Benjamin, 1892 - 1940

One day, it came to pass...

...that I began to appreciate paintings by the Impressionists. 

About 30 years ago. Half my life ago. I'm sure that others, from a more cultured background, came to those paintings at a much earlier age. I don't think I even knew those paintings existed until I was around 30 years old. Why did it take so long? It's all hazy.

I'm still asking myself the question: "What's the deal with Monet?"

I don't mean: "What can be said about the formal characteristics and rendered effects of his works?" I'm not interested in dry academic commentary on technique and theory of light. 

I'm interested in thinking about Monet's artistic unconscious.  

Impression Sunrise

I think all great artists -- painters, composers, poets -- are fantasists. Their works are much less about documentary compulsions taking place in the real world (landscape, structure, diary) than they are about unconscious retrievals of substance from the far side. That's why great works have an unusual effect on us. Unconscious mood has come to presence in palpable shapes, and we are confronted with objects -- painting, sonata, poem -- that are infused with an otherworldly aspect.

I think Monet did more than accomplish a flecky capturing of natural transience. I think his fracturing of light and mardi grasing of shadow also transported into this world a metaphysical substance from somewhere beyond the waking mind.   

Under the Poplars, Sunlight Effect

With Monet, fantasy -- the extraordinary -- comes to spiritual presence and combines its fibers with those of the ordinary -- the French scene. Like the painter, the composer is also a fracturing artist. The composer disintegrates time, re-imagines it as melody, harmony, and rhythm. Recasts time into new light and shadow, allowing an otherness to leak through. Like the painter and the composer, the poet is also a fracturing artist. The poet opens up language, re-energizes it into metaphor and cadential gesture. Recasts language into new light and shadow, allowing an otherness to leak through.

Perhaps at night, that fantastical unconscious substance latent on the far side of dreams filters into our dreams, creates that disquieting and wondrous background aura to our dreams. Then in the moody trances of great artists (Monet for this blog post), that fantastical unconscious substance makes its farther way into the created works.

The Artist's House at Argenteuil 

Isn't there an aura of the ideal, of the farfetched, of the fantastic in a Monet canvas? What's deeply ironic about all this is that fantasy just might be the psychosis of the actual Real. The actual Real can't possibly be but is. Might not the impossible-actual be a suitable region for artistic appropriation? 

Whatever the unconscious is, I think it's safe to say that it's connected to, rooted in all the subtle dimensions of being. Our DNA is most likely a mute semiotics, a chemical raconteur of the infinite weird. Monet, I suggest, painted in such a way that the psychosis of the actual peers out at us between painted flecks.

Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge

A great work of art is a palimpsest of the fantastic occurring upon the actual.

Now, don't get me started on Van Gogh, the Post-Impressionist. He did more than unconsciously dream fantastic substance from the far side into this side. He wrenched it from there and exploded it into here, revealed it in all its shocked, hysterical, naked coloration. 

earliest post of the latest year

Artaud's Error

Antonin Artaud's “theater of cruelty” was more theory than theater, more influence than event. It involves the dismal notion that life and being operate according to principles of terror and agony. Behind the curtains of normality (forms of experience metabolized into culture) brood implacable energies that propel stuff through tortures of time, pathologies of space. Hence the new theater – spectacle as stimulation of and participation in brute awareness. Life and art in a frenzied marriage of anti-ecstasy. God not only dead but a dangerous psychopath.

Speaking of influence, Artaud wouldn't have had very much to get himself worked up about if not for Schopenhauer. I find it striking that Kant still reverberates into so-called philosophy – Continental directly, Analytical indirectly – while Schopenhauer's thought echoes through actual philosophy (music, literature, film, poetry – possible venues of extant wonder). So it seems fitting that Artaud would recast Schopenhauer into a form of art – theater. The problem is that both Schopenhauer and Artaud are wrong about aesthetics.

For Schopenhauer, the experience of art is for transient moments of equanimity – a calm distraction from the chronically blistering absurd of undifferentiated noumenal force (whether creator or auditor, a prophylactic zen trance). For Artaud, the experience of art is for mirroring the horror of the situation.

Neither approach to art is artistic. The former is about therapeutic coping, the latter agonistic mimesis.

Yes, life and being tend toward the sucking, stinking maws of pain and death. But human beings happen to be very strange creatures. We are potential transformers of the hopeless macabre into the unsettling beautiful. There is something mystic afoot that contradicts the rotting regions of despair and darkness. Where would we find the deepest impressions of this mystical afootedness? Let's go to Poland!

Frederick Chopin and Karol Szymanowski in music. Bruno Schulz in literature. Wojciech Has in film. Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski in poetry. Why is Poland an incubator of aesthetic transformation? I really don't know. I live in Arkansas.

Chopin's music is pure sublimation. He inhaled the deathly, diseased hours after midnight and turned them into quietly ecstatic melodies, beatified the darkness into pensive waiting:

Szymanowski's own Song of the Night (Symphony No. 3) expresses mysterious fantasy rather than harrowing nausea from the netherfolds of consciousness: 

Schulz's story "Tailor's Dummies" from The Street of Crocodiles is an alchemical working of language and yesterday into an infinite mythology. Via hilarious melancholy and metaphysical stupefaction, the reader is made skeptical of a claim that the world is merely quotidian principles, merely cruel manifestations.



Has's film The Saragossa Manuscript -- a large tale of nested tales -- is also imbued with visionary humor. Life as curvaceous adventure:

Miłosz's poems question the environment of memory to the extent that loss itself is crowned with a halo of spiritual beauty:


Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Szymborska's poems explore the uncanniness of mere presence and the privilege of mere experience:

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:

that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:

in the dead of night

the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:

a small, airy cloud

yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:

an alder tree reflected in the water,

and that it's backwards left to right

and that it grows there, crown down

and never reaches the bottom,

even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:

winds weak to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:

cows are cows.

Second to none:

just this orchard

from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:

scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:

today the sun rose at three-fourteen

and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:

even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,

it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:

the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:

the unthinkable

is thinkable.

Zagajewski's poems are like no other poems being written these days. They are jaw dropping in their subtle spiritization and aesthetization of time and being. This from his book Unseen Hand: Poems:

Improvisation 

You must take up the world’s whole weight 

and make it easier to bear.

Toss it like a knapsack

on your shoulders and set out.

The best time is evening, in spring, when

trees breathe calmly and the night promises

to be fine, elm twigs crackle in the garden.

The whole weight? Blood and ugliness? Can’t be done.

A trace of bitterness will linger on your lips,

and the contagious despair of the old woman

you spotted in the tram.

Why lie? After all rapture

exists only in imagination and leaves quickly.

Improvisation – always just improvisation,

great or small, that’s all we know,

in music, as a jazz trumpet weeps happily

or when you stare at the blank page

or try to outwit 

sorrow by opening a favorite book of poems;

just then the phone usually rings, 

someone asking, would you like to try

the latest model? No thank you.

I prefer the proven brands.

Grayness and monotony remain; grief

the finest elegy can’t heal.

But perhaps there are things hidden from us,

in which sorrow and enthusiasm mix

non-stop, on a daily basis, like the dawn’s birth

above the seashore, no, wait,

like the laughter of those little altar boys

in white vestments, on the corner of St. John and Mark,

remember?

What's disheartening is that today you find music, literature, film, and poetry still under the conscious or unwitting influence of Artaud. Consciousness is considered a curse, life a toxic extract, abjectness the persistent cool. Today, you find music as aggression, literature as smirkingness, film as violence, poetry as abyssal complaint. What's so silly about all this “profound” artistic misery is that it preens with such egoistic gusto. Apparently, you can become famous if your avant-gardism is rebellious, doomy, and pretentious enough. There's something out of kilter about that.

If the world is a cruel and reckless berserking, then it's best not to dwell on that stuff. Better to sublimate and reconfigure. Better to transform our dystopian tears into aesthetic substance. Real art lives and breathes in the quizzical region, in moments that modify the actual into a symbolic otherness – space and time become perplexed rhapsody. Frowning while holding up a theatrical mirror to the vicissitudes of chemical and organic immanence is anti-art; actual art is a gesture toward paradox and transcendence.

Artaud presumed to impose his view of a nihilistic reality on the audience via scene and sound. To shake people awake. That's megolomania and guruism rather than art. Real art suggests and is uncertain. Real art is a transmutation of dark materials into evocative shadows, into substrates of possible light.  

1896 - 1948

on sincerity

The spectrum of human feelings covers a complex range, from the writhing shriek of a sick or injured child to the discombobulation of the amorous to the autumnal melancholy of some old geezer. Many other perturbations, excitations are found along the array of stimulated homo sapiens.

But the transference of emotion to forms of art should involve a movement not simply linear (compulsion, saturation, confession) but also vertical (metaphysics, symbolism, dubiety). 

Big context. Actual peculiar. Deep sincerity.



Bob Dylan - Highlands by perostoppogno


Highlands
Bob Dylan

Well my heart's in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebelles blazing, where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I'm gonna go there when I feel good enough to go

Windows were shakin' all night in my dreams
Everything was exactly the way that it seems
Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page
Same ol' rat race
Life in the same ol' cage.

I don't want nothing from anyone, ain't that much to take
Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me

Well my heart's in the Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I can only get there one step at a time.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone's always yelling turn it down
Feel like I'm drifting
Drifting from scene to scene
I'm wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

Insanity is smashing up against my soul
You can say I was on anything but a roll
If I had a conscience, well I just might blow my top
What would I do with it anyway
Maybe take it to the pawn shop

My heart's in the Highlands at the break of dawn
By the beautiful lake of the Black Swan
Big white clouds, like chariots that swing down low
Well my heart's in the Highlands
Only place left to go

I'm in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I'm just really not sure
Waitress comes over
Nobody in the place but me and her

It must be a holiday, there's nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
She says, "What'll it be?"
I say, "I don't know, you got any soft boiled eggs?"

She looks at me, Says "I'd bring you some
but we're out of 'm, you picked the wrong time to come"
Then she says, "I know you're an artist, draw a picture of me!"
I say, "I would if I could, but,
I don't do sketches from memory."

"Well", she says, "I'm right here in front of you, or haven't you looked?"
I say,"All right, I know, but I don't have my drawing book!"
She gives me a napkin, she says, "you can do it on that"
I say, "Yes I could but,
I don't know where my pencil is at!"

She pulls one out from behind her ear
She says "All right now, go ahead, draw me, I'm standing right here"
I make a few lines, and I show it for her to see
Well she takes a napkin and throws it back
And says "That don't look a thing like me!"

I said, "Oh, kind miss, it most certainly does"
She says, "You must be jokin.'" I say, "I wish I was!"
Then she says, "You don't read women authors, do you?"
Least that's what I think I hear her say,
"Well", I say, "how would you know and what would it matter anyway?"

"Well", she says, "you just don't seem like you do!"
I said, "You're way wrong."
She says, "Which ones have you read then?" I say, "I read Erica Jong!"
She goes away for a minute and I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody's going anywhere

Well my heart's in the Highlands, with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country, far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow
My heart's in the Highlands
Can't see any other way to go

Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I'd trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could

I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog
Talking to myself in a monologue
I think what I need might be a full length leather coat
Somebody just asked me
If I registered to vote

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over, and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away

Well, my heart's in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
But I'm already there in my mind
And that's good enough for now

professional nonsense

I read John Armstrong's article at City Journal titled "What Is Art For?". 

Armstrong completely misses the point of art. His evaluation is astonishing in its aesthetic and spiritual misapprehending.  

"The overarching aim is psychological improvement."

Balderdash and zebra feathers. 

He says that art is for therapy. He says that art is for intellectual and moral guidance. He doesn't seem to understand that art is an eruption of the strange into the quotidian. It's not to make us feel better or be better. It's to make us aesthetically haunted and spiritually odder. It's about existential disorientation.

Armstrong appears to be willfully, even militantly blind to how a work of art is an experience of time turned into the unsettling. A work of art is there to possess us, overwhelm us, make us partly mad. The exact opposite of Armstrong's medicinal criteria of interpretation.

Consider great works of art, from Rembrandt to Corot, from Monet to Van Gogh, from Kandinsky to Yves Tanguy. Do you discover in those works the psychologically edifying? Or do you rather find yourself confronted with the aesthetically mysterious and the spiritually peculiar?

The artist's compulsions and unusual visions are transferred to the viewer's consciousness. We become not better or healed people. We become part of a wondrous Uncanny. We enter into time and space turned into the resonance of a deep and subtle labyrinth, into the allurement of the puzzling and undecipherable. Yes, even Corot's paintings are implicit portals into the aesthetic dæmonic -- realms in which pastoral or urban beauty are complexified with an insinuating spiritual otherness.

Art is because art. It's a corrupter of conventional expectations. It's a palpable form of amnesia, a displacement and temporary forgetting of self. It's far beyond any instrumental categories. It's more like anti-therapy than any kind of psychological enhancement. 

John Armstrong probably got paid actual money to write his article.

the mysterium of aesthetics

 
The good, the true, and the beautiful are, I think, three related or complementary ideas. I further think they are three sides of an aesthetic pyramid. What is the fourth side and what constitutes the bottom, the foundation square?

Might it be that the fourth side represents our struggle with or our probing of the unknown, the mysterious, the numinous? And could the unknown itself be pictured as that bottom, that foundation square upon which all phenomenal experience rests or issues from?

The friction of our experiences brushing up against textures of the unknown can spark off religious belief and philosophical construction. But the deepest, most interesting forms of combustion happen as modes of artistic expression -- painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, stories.

Further down the scale of temperature one finds tepid mentations concerned with politics and science. From an atmosphere of stochastic particles of consciousness in a flurry of heated aesthetic movement, a contrasting torpor of soul makes politics and science -- focused on relational and material quiddity -- shapes of sleepwalking. The obscuring secretions of law and theory lead to spiritual amnesia. With those things, the Real has become so ordinary as to be drained of wonder and the perplexing reverberations of melancholy.

I was led, in part, to this musing after reading about Johann Georg Hamann (1730 - 1788). What an odd duck. 

In Königsberg, his translation of Hume made its way into the hands of his acquaintance Kant and inspired the latter's awakening from "dogmatic slumber." Hamann said some interesting things from his own head about language and what is beneath language. I'm especially curious about the linguistic aspects of aesthetics, so Hamann's head must be examined and tapped for any possible profundity. My interest is piqued because I'm infatuated with good poetry -- poems that are implicitly metaphysical, that indirectly probe a possibility of the noumenal, that contain an element of the uncanny, that refelct something of the mysterious within the everyday.

I've been fascinated with the problem of aesthetics for quite some time. I've even tried my hand at impromtu guesses about the nature and significance of aesthetics. But these guesses always have a hollowness about them. Or better to say, they end up being tautological, looping or mirroring back on themselves. I'm still searching for a kind of first principle -- a how come? -- for aesthetics. I tend to suspect that aesthetics is our deepest approach to the unknown ground (or Ab-grund, the abyss behind presence).

Gurdjieff once created a music-and-movement thing titled The Struggle of the Magicians. That's how I see the poems written by great poets -- brilliance or genius grappling with invisible materials, with what must always remain unsaid behind the said. Even the cadence of these poems is a symbolic gesture of strange dance toward the mystic dream of being. Consider the lines of poet Adam Zagajewski, how they move with a pensive and wondering grace, how the unsaid is as important as the pronounced -- the unspoken folded into dynamic figures of speech. 

Metaphor is the aesthetic shadow of the receding, what forever remains on the tip of the tongue. 

Everything profound loves masks.

~ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Schopenhauer said that the noumenal is pure undifferentiated urge and that the phenomenal is its expression as substance in time, space, and causality. According to him, we can't suppose anything about the noumenal, only suspect it as being undifferentiated urge or force. That intuited fact -- the aggression of matter via mindless energy -- leads to human pessimism and spiritual despair. Our only existential relief is to become narcotized and lost from thought while experiencing works of art. 

But prior to Schopenhauer was Hamann. Instead of the noumenal causing bleakness and misery of outlook, it inspired in him an ironic spiritual humor, which later impressed Kierkegaard. He somehow intuited a God within the noumenal. That's interesting. And I can't figure out how he made such a blithe leap. I do know that for myself, an ambivalence is afoot -- I look upon the possible numinous as darkly macabre yet also darkly attractive. An affective leaning toward anything is an aesthetic orientation or disposition. 

What is behind all possible experience in which aspects of the good, the true, and the beautiful might be sourcefully located? That enigma continues to vibrate.

Hamann thought and wrote about how language has its source in the non-linguistic and the non-rational. Language is a form of life and as such doesn't belong to any of its own categories. Hence, language is a mysterium. So is life itself an unthinkable and radically free manifestation. Free from even the idea that it's radically free. The closest to the real of life we come is imagination -- the infinite dark flowing of aesthetic possibility. Can we call that "holy"? Heck if I know.

Regarding Socrates, Hamann said:

But perhaps all history is more mythology than this philosopher thinks, and is, like nature, a book that is sealed, a hidden witness, a riddle which cannot be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason.

According to Hamann, our language -- the spoken life -- is "from the tongue of angels," which eludes exegesis.  Our speaking is always already a translation beyond foundation and into metaphor. Who are the symbolists par excellence? -- the poet, the painter, the composer. Aesthetic beings.

In Keats's "To Autumn," he shows us life and nature, via personification. He knew instinctively that being and beings can't be defined or rationally analyzed. 

It seems like a hundred years ago that I read Robert Pirsig's Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The main thing I remember is his statement that the real (even the pleonasm "ultimate reality") has to do with Quality as such. I'm going to let that sit here for a little while and resonate through your eyeballs:

The abyss of the Real is a question of Quality as such.

Okay. I'm back again. Pirsig's realization nearly drove him crazy. I like the sound of that. Instead of the noumenal being Schopenhauer's undifferentiated, it might be an exact opposite. It might be instead the a priori (primal) reservoir of taste -- a Tao of Savor. From which a gnostic spectrum of discretion is extruded into our phenomenal world. In other words, the Real is an aesthetic ocean, its morphological waves our criteria of judgement and appreciation. At its most heartful depth is purest Quality.

F.W.J. Schelling (1775 - 1854) in his lecture course titled The Philosophy of Art wrote: 

I construe therefore in the philosophy of art not art as art, not as something particular. Rather I construe the universe in the form of art and the philosophy of art is the science of the All in the form or potency of art.

And from his System of Transcendental Idealism:

The fundamental character of the artwork is an unconscious infinity.

One thing about creativity, about aesthetic impulse and reception is that it takes place within the infinite freedom of imagination. Maybe the Real -- what brings anything at all to presence -- is also a kind of imagining into the vast "space" of thisness-is-better-than-thatness.  


Wittgenstein said:

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

To which I would add:

That anything is mystical is an aesthetic intuition.

The Birth of the World
Joan Miró, 1925

PS: One cool thing about the topic of aesthetics is that it allows a guy to string a bunch of words together with the mere semblance of having said something coherent or significant. It's like a loose goose dripping with uncatchable cooking oil. 



~ TB, 2013

Balthus

An article about this painter's Symbolist and mystical orientation.

Portrait of Sheila Pickering, 1935

a little something about Scriabin

1872 - 1915

Many folks look askance at the fellow, and some are perplexed by his music. Many consider his compositions to be emotionally plethoric, structurally diffuse, thematically unhinged. Reading his biography by Faubion Bowers (Dover Publications), one is tempted to apply those descriptors to his personality as well. Musically and personally, he was assuredly a weird appearance on planet Earth. 

His childhood was spent among women only, who fussed over him and spoiled him thoroughly. All children, up to a certain age of socialization (an integrating of others' existences), are intensely grounded in ego, in complete self-being. I don't think Scriabin ever managed to fully extricate himself from himself -- he remained a child of sorts all his life. Thus, the world was always an aspect or analog of himself. His ego-infatuation eventually turned into megalomania -- a case in point is his Mysterium.

Many baby-boomers have something in common with Scriabin. Parents tended, in general, to lavish attention and material gestures on us. Hence, the emergence of some neurotic hippies. Many of us became crystallized into shapes of self-being. Socialization was iffy, erratic, ostensible, problematic. Estrangement from others causes an aversion to their consensus, goes-without-saying reality. 

For those who couldn't pull off a convergence with the public world and its "sane" forms of being, despair became an option. Or else we drifted into precincts of otherness as such (the world of infinite imagination).

It's about opening up frontiers of fantasy. Even if the impulse is colored, tainted by a certain decadence of self-absorption. However it gets made, the making of aesthetic objects is an alternative to traditional forms of being, to what convention deposits into the space of collective living. 

I dare say that many of us peculiar baby-boomers who are instinctively oriented to the arts, who have a creative impulse should look upon Scriabin as an example of metaphysical possibility (a kind of exotic, ghostly mentor for painting and poetry). 

I respond not only agreeably but also spiritually to Scriabin's music -- how it tilts toward and expresses another way of being than the conventional.  Scriabin opened up unheard-of aesthetic geography. Those "superfluous" worlds he created in sound have, I think, something in common with that dreaming abyss beneath time and substance. Listening to Scriabin's music has the effect of making the word "reality" (nature and norms) a quite dubious thing.

Man with Cuboid

If I'd been asked to provide a title for this engraving:

Form, Consciousness, and the Tangled Paradox

M.C. Escher

1958. Wood engraving. 64x64 cm

thinking for and being oneself

An intellectual runs the risk of disappearing into his fascination with exemplars of the cultural mosaic -- whether of art, music, literature, film, whatnot.

The quality manifestings of great sensibilities are implicit forms of questioning. One mustn't get so transfixed by and identified with the aesthetic interrogations of reality by others than one forgets to question the questioners, so to speak. One should make the effort to glimpse beyond the fine probings of others.

One should stand just a little outside of outstandingness. 

Quality manifestings of great sensibilities should become the foundation for a possibility of having a unique metaphysical thought, emotion, question.

Occasionally, you come upon an especially peculiar shape of non-questioning -- the intellectual hipster. 

He unwittingly or intentionally has folded himself into an edgy Beat role or style of being. As if life is only This Way of considering it -- an extravagance of phenomena, a spectacle of relations, a peyote immanence. In doing so, he not only blinds himself to unexplored worlds (the non-hipster visions of, say, Bruno Schulz), he also becomes a walking, talking amalgam of the already-thought. Such role playing of radical outlook is, to the outside observer, a wincing-yet-boring contradiction.

In the manner of. 

No, tell me something in the manner of yourself. I'd prefer, occasionally, to not read about your reality as strained through the mesh of others' impressions, others' questions. I'd prefer, occasionally, to read about your unique manifesting under the vast field of impossible stars and paradoxical fate.  

Kiefer and Celan

  Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

by artist Anselm Kiefer

This painting's title, translated as "your ashen hair Shulamith," not only refers to a line from Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge," but also graphically incorporates that line onto the canvas. 

Or as Andréa Lauterwein says in her review of the book Anselm Kiefer / Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory:

Yet those words are not simply self-contained on the canvas, they are not just repeated in another context, nor are they merely mentioned, for they now participate in the life of the canvas: the dark letters are one with the lines of black paint, white paint and charcoal that thickly cross the canvas. Kiefer is showing how the reality of the Shoah manifests itself to him, and is using Celan's disclosure of the Shoah in "Todesfuge" as an exemplary manifestation of the same grim reality, one that has allowed him to make the Shoah manifest in his own way.

Here's another book:

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, 

Specularity and the Visual Arts

amazon.com

Here's part of that book's text online:

Google Books

the artist Nadya Rusheva

She was born in Mongolia (1952) and died in Moscow (1969). Here are some links:

wiki

gallery

"Nadya Rusheva: Sighs on Paper, Breathing Lines"

Pictures

something in the Russian language

Rusheva is most famous for her illustrations of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Her illustrations of Margarita are said to bear a strong resemblance to Bulgakov's wife, whom Rusheva never met. Yelena Bulgakova later said, "I wish I knew this amazing and subtle creature, Nadya Rusheva."

 

"the indescribably fateful thing"

In 1901, Hugo von Hofmannsthal went to an exhibition of Van Gogh paintings:

At first sight they seemed to me harsh and disturbing, quite raw, quite odd, I had first to adjust in order to see the first ones as pictures, as a unity—then, however, then I saw them all as such, each one, and all together, and Nature in them, and the human spiritual power that Nature had formed, and tree and bush and field and slope, and something further, something behind what was painted, the essential thing, the indescribably fateful thing—, I saw the whole, so that I lost the sense of myself in these images, and came back powerfully and was lost again.

concerning Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy (1900 – 1955) was a Surrealist. He is my favorite artist from the Modernist era. When the term “Surrealism” is mentioned, most people think of wild juxtapositions of familiar objects, whether animate or inanimate. Tanguy is subtler, much more enigmatic. His canvases teem with objects, but those things have only a passing resemblance to known forms. Those equivocal thingy forms are more like reified fragments of mental or spiritual intuition. And the “landscapes” in which they are placed are less like space-time milieus than volumes of void, theaters of dream.

I think Tanguy was obsessed with painting the symbolic modes and contents of the hippocampus. He was about going down, via intuition, into the primal and nether zones of consciousness. And then painted what he found or imagined there.

These intuited objects and visionary "spaces" are not representations of phenomena and perception. Rather, Tanguy's ambiguous shapes within uncertain environments are images of human organic/mental strangeness, symbols of deep interior happening. They are suggestions in paint of the noumenal that lurks behind phenomena and behind perception. So I detect two kinds of duality or parallelism -- the apparent and the unknowable; consciousness and materiality. You can feel that along the edge of his bizarre "shores" meeting the metaphysical plasma of his "seas."

It's more than surrealism. This is an audacious science of mental objects and spiritual conditions. Yves Tanguy opened up environments of the silent elemental.

I Await You

The Entomologist's Dream

Edmund Dulac, 1909

"Out and About in New York City"

That's the name of Regina Walker's new cool website.

There are things about NYC that I would be pleased to learn and know about. This site will be a guide for me into aspects of the city's soul. I'll be pleased to receive impressions through Regina's sensibility.

Soren Emil Carlsen -- painter

Soren Emil Carlsen (1853 - 1932). He emigrated to the US from Denmark. He's been called the American Chardin. In 1917, Duncan Phillips said this:

I know that Carlsen's only philosophic intention is to paint beautiful, pleasurable pictures. And yet it always seems to me that he is trying to find a formal symbolical expression for the thought that nature exerts an influence curiously hypnotic.

On the Lagoon, Venice (1910)

I appreciate it when an artist paints water as if it's light-blue mystic plasma. That really pleases me. A half-ton of stuff instantly lifts off me when I see such water.

Still Life with Self Portrait Reflection (1931)

Sometimes, I like to stare at black glazed jugs and white ceramic bowls.