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.

Following are press releases describing the upcoming Beuys/Kastner show to be held at: Ico Gallery, 606 West 26th Street, NY, NY 10001,

BEUYS/KASTNER: DISTRACTION 2010

For further information regarding dates and times for the exhibition, please contact Skylor Brummans at Ico Gallery: 1.212.966.3897, or contact David Kastner directly @ www.davidkastner.com

http://worldbookandnews.com/entertainment/art-a-artists/69984-Joseph-Beuys-and-David-Kastner-Distraction-at-Ico-Gallery.html

http://www.dailyfinance.com/article/joseph-beuys-and-david-kastner/1120761/

http://newsblaze.com/story/2010061613040200001.pnw/topstory.html

http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/joseph-beuys-david-kastner-distraction-ico-gallery/

http://www.worldmarketmedia.com/1876/section.aspx/1688026/joseph-beuys-and-david-kastner-distraction-at-ico-gallery

http://www.cnbc.com/id/37738618

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 .

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.

Krishnamurti, The Flame of Attention, Harper & Row, 1984.

p. 15: “Thinking is a process born out of experience and knowledge. Listen to it quietly, see if that is not true, actual; then you discover it for yourself as though the speaker is acting as a mirror in which you see for yourself exactly what is, without distortion; then throw the mirror away or break it up. Thinking starts from experience which becomes knowledge stored up in the cells of the brain as memory; then from memory there is thought and action. Please see this for yourself, do not repeat what I say. This sequence is an actual fact: experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. Then from that action you learn more; so there is a cycle and that is our chain.”

p. 22: “The word ‘discipline’ comes from the word disciple, the disciple whose mind is learning-not from a particular person, a guru, or from a teacher, or preacher, or from books but learning through the observation of his own mind, of his own heart, learning from his own actions. And that learning requires a certain discipline, but not the conformity most disciplines are understood to require. When there is conformity, obedience, and imitation, there is never the act of learning, there is merely following. Discipline implies learning, learning from the very complex mind one has, from the life of daily existence, learning about relationship with each other, so that the mind is always pliable, active.”

OBSERVATION: Neural plasticity: As thinking beings we are always challenged with this process of observing our own thought process. Krishnamurti points out that we must exhibit personal discipline, and personal responsibility for this process of learning, and that we must be careful to not defer this reponsibility to other persons, or materials. Through the proper application of direct processes, we have the capacity to act upon learning, and while some of these processes are automatic and unconscious, others are precisely calculated conscious processes.

Singh, The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy-Dinnaga and Dharmakirti, Munshiram, 1984.

p. 63: ‘Another major ground on which Dharmakirti is ranked as an Idealist is the theory of self-consciousness (svasamvedanavada). It is a fact that Dinnaga and Dharmakirti have expounded the view that every cognition of an object is always self-conscious, or that knowledge has a double aspect, cognition and cognition of cognition, and does not need any other agent (such as a soul) to make its cognition. It is like a light which reveals other objects and at the same time reveals its own existence and so does not require any other light to reveal it. The knowledge of blue and the knowledge that it is blue are not two different things, but two aspects of one process. Dharmakirti elaborates on this in two contexts:
a. while dealing with the four-fold nature of sensation (pratyaksa) and
b. while refuting the Nyaya-Mimamsa theory of a difference betwen a source of valid cognition (pramana) and a result of cognition (pramana-phala).

OBSERVATION: In reading Thomas Aquinas, the reader will encounter the word (aevum), meaning the concept of a soul which has a beginning but no end. Dinnaga and Dharmakirti demonstrate in their argument that the moment of cognition and cognition of cognition are independent of any need to defer to an aspect referenced by Thomas Aquinas, such as a soul. Recent inquiries into quantum physics describe the ability of contemporary mechanics to control single photons. These single photon mechanical systems are utilized in encryption and firewall protection for computer systems. Physicists have recognized that a single photon changes when being observed, demonstrating subtle phenomena, and the elusive nature of any definition of reality in a conventional sense.

INVINCIBLE BOX 2009: MEMORY OF 1963

Past, Present, Future: It all exists. Materials can be organized to contain ideas relevant to history, relevant to contemporary culture, and all related to how human beings think and react to organized stimuli. The language of idea and material is moved from outside oneself, recognized by sensing systems, where data is transferred and processed by the higher functions of the brain. The aesthetic experience takes action, coming alive within the conceptual framework of the participant, connecting neural networks, forming new pathways to the yet unknown.