Limitless Fire

Humans have extraordinary capacity for abstract reasoning. Through the years they have developed religious awareness, spiritual life, and assorted elements of mythological, and metaphysical belief. Additionally, the ability to appreciate aesthetic, moral, and ethical behavior have become part of the human psyche. Through self-conscious discipline humans have been able to harness the will. While it is easy to recognize the genius involved in all of these capabilities, humans also function without conscience, building horror upon horror in the lives of others, and in the natural world.

In aesthetics, artists delve into the mysteries of the human capacity for imagination, intuition, expression; a world of the yet unknown. This is the place where art bridges the instinctual with the conscious. At the instinctual level, the human mind invokes, reacts, and processes ideas in an immediate (pre-conscious) way. Prior to the mechanism of conscious intervention, the instinctual creative mind brings to the surface ideas, organizing thoughts from the many regions of the mind, the intellect, the emotions. These processes of inspiration, intuition, instinct, and imagination, all contribute to the ability to foresee that which is intangible. In bringing forth ideas from these complex regions of the mind and brain, the artist transforms idea into a fashioned, constructed manifestation (the form). The medium takes on the characteristics of that original thought, allowing material to act as a cohesive device, a kind of matrix holding ideas in place.

Aesthetic encounter takes the art further, when a viewer, or participant interacts with the concept using powers of perception to draw the idea into the self, merging mind with mind. As the perceptual mechanism absorbs data, feeding the information to the higher functions of the brain, a new impression forms in the viewers mind, perhaps, nearly identical with the original moment of creation, perhaps different, but at the very least becoming a tool, an experience for new and uncharted mental ideation. Art is the catalyst, the enzyme triggering a cascade of secondary responses in the viewer’s mind. Perhaps this is the greatest function of art, where the mind of the viewer takes on new characteristics, new capacity to learn, understand, and feel, becoming immersed in the aesthetic experience.

Each viewer enters this action of aesthetic encounter with unique criteria; perceiving, processing, and making new the art put in place by the artist. Here we find the power of communication evident in the language of art; the tangible, the unknown, beauty, horror, complexity.

HISTORY OF HISTORY: IDEA IS HISTORY

History (from Greek historia, meaning “inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation”) is the study of the human past. It is a field of research, which uses a narrative to examine and analyze the sequence of events, and it sometimes attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. This discipline of history can be used as an end in itself and as a way of providing “perspective” on the problems of the present.

Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English histoire, historie, from Anglo-French estoire, histoire, from Latin historia, from Greek, inquiry, history, knowing, learned; akin to Greek eidenai to know
1 tale: story
2 a: a chronological record of significant events often including an explanation of their causes
2 b: a treatise presenting systematically related natural phenomena
2 c: an established record
3 branch of knowledge that records and explains past events
4 a: events that form the subject matter of a history
4 b: events of the past
4 c: one that is finished or done for
4 d: previous treatment, handling, or experience

Extant Pronunciation: \_ek-st_nt; ek-_stant, _ek-_\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin exstant-, exstans, present participle of exstare to stand out, be in existence, from ex- + stare to stand
1 archaic: standing out or above
2 a: currently or actually existing 2 b: still existing: not destroyed or lost

Archaeologists to identify and recognize cultural and social customs from ancient historic periods use extant examples.

Scientists use various mechanisms to examine the past, using the geologic record, and the data contained within rock formations to understand forces working at specific times, and geographic regions. Astrophysicists and astronomers use telescopes, spectrometers, and other machines to examine the physical universe. This data allows the scientist to look back through history in order to identify cosmic circumstances, ultimately to know how the universe formed, when things happened, and how the dynamics of celestial mechanics continues in the present, predicting future developments.

Extant artifacts define Art history. These objects and ideas allow us to speculate and re-create a social history of any specific time. It is necessary to clearly understand that art history is an actual history only defined by the continuing presence of the idea. Some cultures maintain an oral tradition carrying significant icons into future generations through the transmission of the word and idea. Many examples exist in the historical record of painting, sculpture, architecture, and print offering a glimpse into what people thought, and in effectively maintaining the idea as a living entity. Ideas are sometimes lost, destroyed, or fail to be cared for. These ideas then depart from the historical record.

Artists engage the historical record through the creation, capture, and maintenance of ideas. Properly maintained ideas live well into the future as ideas flow through dialogue. The persistence of history is the key element to preserving truly human pursuits. How, who, why, and what ideas are maintained determine the course of human history evidenced by the ideas themselves.

http://www.artandreligion.de/data/index.php?idcatside=35

At the URL listed above Friedhelm Mennekes has collected insights regarding Joseph Beuys, and his work Manresa (Ignatius of Loyola). Mennekes has described the relation between art and religion found not just in the work of Beuys, but in other art as well. In 2002 Mennekes was awarded the Wilhelm-Hausenstein-Medal of the Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts, Munich, “for his outstanding achievement in the field of promoting visual arts“.

Mennekes has been engaged in many discussions with artists through exhibitions and lectures that address this vital relationship of creative expression and experienced religion. These encounters are documented in print in a multitude of catalogue contributions, essays and monographs that discuss individuals such as Donald Baechler, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, James Brown, James Lee Byars, Francis Bacon, Eduardo Chillida, Marlene Dumas, Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, Arnulf Rainer, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Antoni Tàpies, Rosemarie Trockel, and Bill Viola among others. Mennekes poses systematic questions, addressing individual works and also their vital relationship to the broader world of contemporary culture. He seeks structural correspondences and parallels that address our experience of faith and doubts in organized religion, as well as the secular world. Above all, however, he shows through over one hundred interviews with artists that their work is not simply dealing with private convictions of a personal nature, but with large issues that relate to all kinds of people striving to live a meaningful life.

OBSERVATION: It is necessary to understand that art may contain insight and meaning beyond the mundane. Many artists have worked to demonstrate the potential of human thought and action.
The potential (action), that we find in the work of Joseph Beuys, is the path that leads to full participation in the mystery of humanity.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva, New York, 1985.

AK Coomaraswamy (1877-1947)

…..”The question follows: What is the essential element in poetry? According to some authors this consists in style and figures, or in suggestion (vyanjana, to which we shall recur in discussing the varieties of poetry). But the greater writers refute these views and are agreed that the one essential element in poetry is what they term Rasa, or Flavour. With this term, which is the equivalent of Beauty or Aesthetic Emotion in the strict sense of the philosopher, must be considered the derivative adjective rasavant, ‘having rasa’, applied to a work of art, and the derivative substantive rasika, one who enjoys rasa, a connoisseur or lover, and finally rasasvadana, the tasting of rasa, i.e., aesthetic contemplation.

What, then is Beauty, what is rasa, what is it that entitles us to speak of divers works as beautiful or rasavant? What is this sole quality which the most dissimilar works of art possess in common? Let us recall the history of a work of art. There is (1) an asethetic institution on the part of the original artist, –the poet or creator; then (2) the internal expression of this intuition, –the true creation or vision of beauty (3) the indication of this by external signs (language) for the purpose of communication, –the technical activity; and finally (4) the resulting stimulation of the critic or rasika to reproduction of the original intuition, or of some approximation of it.

…The true critic (rasika) perceives the beauty of which the artist has exhibited the signs. It is not necessary that the critic should appreciate the artist’s meaning–every work or art is a kamadhenu, yielding many meanings–for he knows without reasoning whether or not the work is beautiful, before the mind begins to question what it is ‘about’. Hindu writers say that the capacity to feel beauty (to taste rasa) cannot be acquired by study, but is the reward of merit gained in a past life; for many good men and would-be historians of art have never perceived it. The poet is born, not made; but so also is the rasika, whose genius differs in degree, not in kind, from that of the original artist. In western phraseology we should express this by saying that experience can only be bought by experience; opinions must be earned. We gain and feel nothing merely when we take it on authority that any works are beautiful. It is far better to be honest, and to admit that perhaps we cannot see their beauty. A day may come when we shall be better prepared.”

OBSERVATION: Rasa, or flavor represents the essential fluid, energy, dynamic, and mystery that defines art. Necessary aspects of art are found in the artist as generator of the art, and the rasika, the connoisseur or lover of rasa; aesthetic contemplation. It is this mutually symbiotic relationship between artist and participant that maintains the liveliness of the idea; rasa; flavor. Participation is necessary for a successful marriage between intuition, artist, participant, and ultimately the active component: rasasvadana .

Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, Cambridge, 1999.

April 1837: “Can the freedom of the will be proven from self-consciousness?”

page 29: “On the other hand, I cannot omit the difference brought about in motivation by that which distinguishes human consciousness from all animal consciousness. This trait, which is properly expressed by the word reason, consists in a human being not merely capable, like an animal, of an intuitive apprehension of the external world, but also of abstracting universal concepts (notiones universales) from it. To be able to fix and retain these in his sensuous consciousness, he denotes them by words, and then makes innumerable combinations with them. These, like the concepts of which they consist, are of course related always to the world that is known through intuition, yet they properly constitute what we call thinking.”

OBSERVATION: Humans possess a complex ability with language that has developed through years of effort. It is possible for communication to take place using specific language elements (0, 1), and other manifestations such as (a, b, c, etc.). Many other forms exist including languages associated with social and cultural developments. Pictograms, or pictographs represent a further development in the abstract and conceptual universe of language. In these forms ideas are contained using visual elements (art) to illustrate the ideas, and surface for communicating these ideas. Noam Chomsky wrote about phonemes and morphemes which demonstrate important avenues for understanding language.

Recently, linguists, and biologists have shown how animals have highly developed language forms, such as bird or whale song. Additionally, dolphins have clearly demonstrated self-awareness. In this context of contemporary scientific exploration (2010), we must understand that a potential for complex conscious activity is not the exclusive domain of human existence.

Harold Rosenberg, The De-Definition of Art, MacMillan, 1972.

page 223. “The artist today is offered a catalogue of styles and invited to choose. He knows, however, that the latest edition of the style book is already out of date. Everything that has been done in art opens another door, but the door faces a blank wall. To the
artist, once someone else has made a move there is no use repeating it. In effect, therefore, each invention plugs up another avenue in advance. Thus, having cancelled or submerged traditional modes of art, the new has reached the point of cancelling itself. All advanced styles are simultaneously legitimized on the ground that they reflect present realities, and discredited on the ground that they belong to the past.”

OBSERVATION: Since the beginning of the twentieth century many schools and styles of art have appeared in the world. Manifestos have proliferated describing new intentions and directions, with artists hoping to make a mark inviting viewers to ponder ideas in a new light. As remarked by Rosenberg, new insights can be either legitimized or discredited relative to the observer’s position.

The historical sources of art found in new art can provide artists with rich soil for the imagination. While there are times in the history of art when artists have specifically tried to undo previous styles and philosophical directions, there are also times when earlier art has provided fertile ground for the proliferaiton of new ideas, dependent on previous insight. If it were not for Roman sculptors who copied earlier Greek sculpture, we, in the present, would not know, and have access to the iconography of much Greek sculpture. It is only through observing Roman copies of Greek sculpture that we have a historical document (albeit copied) of this earlier Greek period.

The history of art is rich with instances where artists attempt to be the advance guard, sometimes reacting to previous art, and at other times trying to work freely in an effort to open the doors of possibility. Certainly, we can look to mathematics as a correlary, where mathematicians in the contemporary world have benefited from the explorations of earlier minds. Science demonstrates a continuing evolution of knowledge. There was a time when people believed the earth was flat.

Perhaps more than anything it is importnat to recognize the contributions made by artists throughout time, for it is in the world of art where we see many spectacular achievements of the human imagination. Personalities reflect themselves in the art, and it is this demonstration, or concretion of ideas where we as partipants in the esthetic experience benefit from the thoughts, actions, and marks left by artists.

Kubler, The Shape of Time, Yale, 1962.

page 84: “Time has categorical varieties: each gravitational field in the cosmos has a different time varying according to mass. On earth at the same instant of celestial time, no two spots really have the same relation to the sun despite our useful convention of time-zones regulating the regional concordance of clocks. When we define duration by span, the lives of men and the lives of other creatures obey different durations, and the durations of artifacts differ from those of coral reefs or chalk cliffs, by occupying different systems of intervals and periods. The conventions of language nevertheless give us only the solar year and its multiples or divisions to describe all these kinds of duration.

St. Thomas Aquinas speculated in the thirteenth century upon the nature of the time of angels, and, following a neo-Platonist tradition,1 he revived the old notion of the aevum as the duration of human souls and other divine beings. This duration was intermediate beitween time and eternity, having a beginning but no end. The conception is not appropriate for the duration of many kinds of artifacts–so durable that they antedate every living creature on earth, so indestructible that their survivial may, for all we know, ultimately approach infinity.”

1 Duhem, “Le temps selon les philosophes hellenes,” Revue de philosophie (1911).

OBSERVATION: ETERNITY: INFINITY: Pondering the concepts of time and space allow the human imagination to wander through territory well beyond the touch of conventional reality. In considering the idea of aevum, or infinity, it is possible to understand time and space beyond the individual physical presence of the self. Astrophysicists using mathematics, physics, and contemporary technologies explore the possiblity of looking back in time, actually seeing events occurring historically. The ideas of art, imagination, insight, intuition, creativity, and all these things represent clearly point to a potential of the human mind for vast exploration.