The humble cabbage

What the New Atheists Don’t See Theodore Dalrymple
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.

In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.

Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage —or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation. Autumn 2007 Table of Contents

The prophet among men is a notion that has come to us from history

Know more about organic chemistry 13 Oct, 2007, 0500 hrs IST, Uma Nair, TNN Write to Editor

Think of an artist who captures the crux of inharmonious discontent within the struggle of everyday existence, who, in the gist of today’s angst-ridden reality, refracts those images back to us using unpredictable and metaphorical materials. The central message of this array of about 13 sculptural installations by Sumedh Rajendran, which opened at Vadehra Grosvenor in London this week is more about an artist’s ability to think out of the box, throw crass commercialism to the winds and incorporate images or objects cobbled together from popular socio-political culture. The very title of the show, Chemical Smuggle, speaks of life’s cacophony and tells us in cynic retrospect that we must look deep inside and around even if it is somewhat the hardest to reach within. It seems as if Sumedh has devoted a lifetime of his artistic intentions to a certain creative surge that seeks to establish this surface reality, attempting to collect, count and order the ways in which conspicuous consumerism and sycophancy has hit humanity. The titles of his works grab you between your eyes: Civilian Clothes (wood, tin sheet and rexin) with Merito on Blue men is an exemplification of “a virtuoso real,” something beyond real that is patently pathos filled. It is as if the brand Merito stuck all over the tin sheet is art that is inherently interrogatory; it eats through the scheme of things because it is the material with which people in the chawls of Mumbai and the huts of Chennai live. The discarded misprint becomes the object of shelter. The irony is mock heavy. The figure of man with the juxtaposed pig is a carefully constructed hybrid that is also some kind of sarcasm, a satirical slant, which is indeed charged by conflicting notions of high and low lifestyles. “I look at the images or imagery in life always in terms of the human body,” says Sumedh who often uses the animal and man to reflect both exploitation and torture.

“Whether I use the body of an animal or of a human being, I try to interpret and articulate my ideas within its structure. I find a strange interaction between the ‘body’ and architectural elements. I see how a work evolves when one sculpts like an architect, how he or she deals with a body as an architect. In my work Long Subsidies I refer to a jharokha, to the body of a donkey, and even an Islamic element of architecture, and I feel that there are inter-linking elements that run through architecture and the organic body — whether it be of man or animal. So you will find that my sculptures are born out of history and its nuances, the melancholy that comes in is the humanist projection,” says the artist deconstructing his works. Well, this show is also about narrative nests and endless allegory, in which the artist’s comment is an echo of classic Calvino’s quest for truth that resides within. Sin Donor with the steel sheet and leather, is a cerebro-artistic dilemma that with its taut steel sheet disturbs, diffuses and then splinters the mind. It somehow allows you to think but even detracts because it recalls an unsettling of sorts specifically about assumptions, originality and value, class and the exploitation of the differences in creativity. In some ways it makes you think of Maya Angelou’s poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: But a bird that stalks/down his narrow cage/can seldom see through/his bars of rage/his wings are clipped and his feet are tied/so he opens his throat to sing.” The human for Sumedh is like the caged bird, trapped in circumstances. So he uses the boxes — the trunk is a metaphor for the traveling multitudes.

“When I create a work, I place it within the context of my existence and my observation of the common people,” says he. “More than mere representational bodies, my works are specific and the intention is to express ideas. So I cut and mutilate them formally, to extract them from their literal context and place it in the time of my art. The idea of using the galvanized metal sheet is because it is used in coolers; it is a comment on the humid conditions that the people have to face and suffer through be it at home or in a train. That angst and suffering is once again shown in the box which is closed with a clasp, it is the human spirit that is trapped.” Stirred by the notion of paradoxes, Sumedh says that his stimulus is the truth within. An ardent reader of poetry and philosophical verbosity his titles reflect the silent philosophical intellect.

“I like the writings of Foucault and Italo Calvino. These writings pose several questions — about reality and illusion, about sanity and insanity, about conformity and conflict. I thought about the hollowness of generic ideas. Hence, in works like Regime or a Ruler and Civilian Clothes the two images are Messiah like. The prophet among men is a notion that has come to us from history, but in today’s world there is a subversion of sorts,” he says. Regime or a Ruler has this image, which holds a cache of leather. While the hand is that of comfort and reflects the Good Shepherd, it is the synthetic leather held in a manner of curious contradiction that arouses intrigue.

“On its own, leather is an innocent material,” says Sumedh, “but when it is used in this fashion it is ingrained with complexities — it holds social conflicts and contradiction, and is also an expression of it. Leather is an organic substance. When processed, it becomes an inorganic material. The manifestation occurs in its transformation from organic to the inorganic. This transformation is all about orientation and manifestation of power. When a product is imagined through a material, it comes to contain power relationships. Attach it to an animal, it stands low in hierarchy. But when it becomes a product, its status is elevated. The imagination of power is mediated through a very simple material like leather and its seasoning.” Satire becomes the signature staple that runs rampant in the show, appearing on modernist products like synthetic leather, the sheets branded with Merito or Kraft, pointing towards social functioning and arbitrary punch lines. In a sense Sumedh’s artistic career has been a process of self-liberation by expanding upon a satiric mode that he invents for himself. The show coaxes subliminal codes and stereotypes. For all its unpredictable elegance, there is also a spindly open-slotted, endgame air that seems to contradict as well as coalesce. Londoners should react after standing and staring because this is sculpture that is a subtle exegesis of the human character of contemplation. economictimes.indiatimes.com

An organ of trans-sensory perception is needed

The New Eye: Visionary Art and Tradition Erik Davis
This adaptation of my introduction to True Visions (Betty Books, 2006) first appeared in the COSM Journal, issue 4.

The sad truth about descriptive categories like “visionary art” is that they are both useful and lame. Especially in the art world, the language of genres and styles often has more to do with galleries and critics than with making and enjoying art. But reflecting about categories can also be fruitful, because it shapes the context of our seeing—and more importantly, the way we share and talk about our seeing. So here is my seed crystal: visionary art is art that resonates with visionary experiences, those undeniably powerful eruptions of numinous and multidimensional perception that suggest other orders of reality. Certain individuals have a predilection for visionary experiences, but these luminous glimpses bless us all at some point in our lives—sometimes through intentionally induced trance states or psychoactive raptures, and sometimes through the gratuitous grace of deep dreams or the demented funhouse of a quasi-schizophrenic break. But we also understand and experience visionary experience through visionary culture, those artifacts of human culture with its eyes agog.
From the perspective of the mainstream art system, however, visionary art could be seen as an attempt to broaden and extend the notion of the outsider artist—those creative madmen, religious eccentrics, and poor folk considered to be outside the boundaries of conventional art history. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, for example, describes its collection as “art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.” That’s all fine and well, and the museum is cool, but this definition is pretty lacking. By insisting that visionary artists are self-taught, the AVAM implies that visionary art is not found inside the schools, movements, or lineages that compose the dominant flows of art history. It becomes a purely idiosyncratic affair, reduced to the solitary, obsessive individual, a Simon Rodia or a Howard Finster. But many visionary artists—by my definition—are and have been formally educated. More importantly, many visionary artists self-consciously locate their work within a lineage of inspired image-makers that stretches back through generations of Surrealist dreamers, mystic minimalists, and medieval icon painters. Abstract art, the most exalted and intellectualized gesture of the modernist avant-garde, actually emerged from a lotus pond of theosophy, spiritualism, and occult meditation practices.
The historical lineage of visionary artists masks a deeper and more commanding claim that sets the genre apart from the marvelous idiosyncrasies of outsider art. The claim is that the visionary artist gives personal expression to a transpersonal dimension, a cosmic plane that uncovers the nature that lies beyond naturalism, and that reveals, not an individual imagination, but an imaginal world, a mundus imaginalis. Far from being outside, this world lies within. Henry Corbin, the brilliant twentieth century scholar of Sufism, coined the term mundus imaginalis to describe the 'alam al-mithal, the visionary realm where prophetic experience is said to literally take place. It is a realm of the imagination, but a true imagination that has a claim on reality because it mediates between the sensual world and the higher abstract realms of angelic or cosmic intelligences. The mundus imaginalis is a place of encounter and transformation. “Is it possible to see without being in the place where one sees?” asks Corbin, throwing down the gambit of visionary experience. “Theophanic visions, mental visions, ecstatic visions in a state or dream or of waking are in themselves penetrations into the world they see.”
From the perspective of planetary culture, we might broaden Corbin’s definition to include the visionary domains that are associated with cultural traditions and holy paths throughout (and perhaps beyond) human history. The worlds visited by the shaman, the seer, the sibyl, and the prophet are all outposts of the mundus imaginalis. But this imaginal world is also produced through the labor of traditional sacred artists, who have incarnated these visions in the mythic maps, sacred geometries, and iconographies of tribes and cultures the world over. When contemporary visionary artists appropriate and sample aspects of these different cultural traditions, these different domains begin to appear, for all their differences, as a single space of the transpersonal imagination, an immense vibrating network of sacred zones and forms. That’s how the mundus imaginalis grows truly global.
Of course, the meaning and function of visionary art in the traditional cultures of the premodern world is vastly different than contemporary art practices—something the more romantic proponents of today’s visionary art sometimes forget. The “visions” captured in the premodern era are, with some exceptions (Bosch and Hildegard of Bingen come to mind), collective constructs, rendered by artists working anonymously within highly conservative cultural codes, and with little conception of “art” as we know it. Even in the individualistic West, artists were constrained by strict conventions and ecclesiastic expectations. Here the example of the Orthodox icon painter looms large: though the theology of the icon is one of the most powerful and sophisticated models of visionary art the world spirit has yet devised, the artists who crafted these numinous contemplative portals—even geniuses like Andrei Rublev—were deeply ensconced within formal restrictions concerning color, iconography, and technique.
Today’s visionary artist has been released from the strictures of tradition, and must discover her own peculiar perspective on the mundus imaginalis, often drawing inspiration and insight—and frequently cliché—from the store of traditional art. In other words, rather than rely on a specific religious or metaphysical tradition to ground their visions, today’s visionary artist often looks to the cross-cultural lineage of visionary art itself. Texts like Alex Grey’s The Mission of Art and Laurence Caruana’s vital online manifesto have helped define a visionary canon through and beyond western art history. But this canon, which ties together petroglyphs, tangkas, and Salvador Dali, is more than a genealogy, because—and this is the crucial (and heretical) point—visionary art is not a purely historical form. Visionary art insists on a transpersonal, transtemporal field of resonance, an ever-present origin of spiritual connections and hidden harmonies that shape image-making outside of mundane historical time. The visionary artists invokes her own ancestors, who only demand that she discover the way anew.
In his writings, Henry Corbin is at pains to distinguish the “authentic” mundus imaginalis from the muddier waters of the personal unconscious. Corbin wants to divide true imagination from mere fantasy, or, in more modern terms, the Jungian from the Freudian dimensions of dreamspace. Similarly, some old-school proponents of visionary art want to keep the pure sacred geometries free from the sometimes cloying dreck of psychedelic cliché. But one of the most powerful and confounding aspects of modern psychedelic culture is the erasure of such clear distinctions between high and low; instead we find ourselves in a Dionysian conflation and confounding of sacred and profane, where Islamic architecture and aboriginal glyphs encounter the “low-brow” world of comic books, skateboard stickers, concert fliers, and SciFi paperback covers.
Unlike Corbin, the contemporary visionary artist is rarely grounded in solid metaphysical claims based on tradition. Instead they are feeling their way through the dimensions, and they derive authenticity, when they need to, from their own experience. The most audacious claim of visionary art lies beyond genre or technique or school; it lies in the glittering possibility that artists can capture and communicate forms of cosmic consciousness and traces of otherworldly light that have arisen in their own streams of consciousness. Looking at the swirling mythopoetic gumbos of Luke Brown or the blobular frequencies of Vibrata Chromodoris, it is amazing to consider that these works are, in some sense, documents. In this sense, the quest to capture and reflect visionary phenomena might paradoxically be considered a new naturalism. And while it can be reductive and literalistic to spend too much time arguing about whether or not specific works are directly inspired by particularly visionary experiences, it is a vital question nonetheless, because it grounds the artifact in a living process. This biographical dimension deepens the sense of the artist as a mediator, and the artwork as a transmission rather than an object.
Ultimately, the meaning or reality of the visions perceived may be less important than the organ that perceives them. Discussing Moses’ famous theophany, Corbin writes that “the Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice calling him…an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed.” In the visionary encounter, a new eye is born, a synaesthetic vector of sound and light, tuning to new frequencies, drawing patterns out of chaos and apocalyptic madness. As Delvin Solkinson and Eve Bradford wrote in a recent self-published catalog, “Visionary art is evidence of a world that does not yet fully exist; a world that we are calling into being through the very act of creating and participating in the Work.” This is where the vast inheritance of the visionary tradition fuses with the intense and restless self-overcoming of the avant-garde: the imaginal world is still virtual, still ahead.
At her most idealistic, the visionary artist insists on an integral connection between the work of transforming consciousness and the work of fashioning the artifact. For many practitioners and fans, this doubled work restores a healing and even shamanic dimension to art, although the shamanic journeys in question may, in the case Giger or Daniel Oullette, dive into the demonic. But slimy copulating aliens are not the nastiest demons that threaten contemporary visionary artists. The real threats lie with the temptations of kitsch, of complacent self-mythologizing, of the rote clichés and easy iconography of most fantasy illustration and New Age pop. Like a good guru, visionary artists should challenge and baffle as well as encourage and amaze. At the same time, the idea of the solitary artist as a modern shaman is also an old and rather tired story. What authenticates the visionary now may be the meanings that emerge though them, as they circulate through communities of perception. Today’s visionary artist is less important than the visionary culture they seed, an expanding planetary web with art as one of its many nodes.

Donkeys do harbor lice

The creature he drew would have lacked a scale and a context, it might have been a mere grotesque or a fabulous monster from Mandeville's travels. What made the illustrations of microscopic observations so important was the use made of the new knowledge that they incorporated.

This happens to be precisely the point made by Michel Foucault in his book Les Mots et les choses, to which Professor Alpers appeals in her interpretation. He points out that the microscope was used in the seventeenth century to solve problems. Take the example of the Italian physician Francesco Redi who, in his book of 1668 (no. 9.45 in the catalog mentioned above), illustrated among other specimens a louse peculiar to donkeys.

He thus disproved Aristotle's contention that donkeys do not harbor lice, and apparently incurred the wrath of his contemporaries. But what is this slight contribution to knowledge compared with Redi's conclusion, derived from an examination of the reproductive organs of insects and fortified by experiments, that the universal belief in the spontaneous generation of maggots and vermin in carcasses was untenable, and that all these creatures emerged from eggs laid by files?

Here, surely, is a milestone on the road to Pasteur's achievement which could never have come about without the microscope, but never through the microscope alone, or, be it said, through a collection of pictures or specimens, however accurate and however complete. Important as was the art of describing, the art of thinking also needs its defenders.

NYREV, Volume 30, Number 17 · November 10, 1983 Review Mysteries of Dutch Painting By Ernst Gombrich The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century by Svetlana Alpers University of Chicago Press, 273 pp., $37.50 In the challenging book under review Professor Alpers argues convincingly that we are still the heirs of this tradition, which did indeed dominate the teaching of art in the academies of Europe.

Beyond aesthetics to the full extent of aisthesis

Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics Wolfgang Welsch

to the benefit of art analysis too

If art constantly brings into play a whole palette of sorts of perception, then aesthetics too, as the reflexive authority of the aesthetic, obviously has to be in a position to take account of diverse sorts of perception and differing constellations, and to do justice to them. In other words: the perspective of perception - which I take to be essential for art altogether, because artworks are meant to generate perception - favors an aisthesis-focused type of aesthetics even for the purposes of art analysis. For this type is capable of accounting for the whole range of art-stipulated perceptions and therefore allows for a fuller comprehension of art altogether than any traditional, ostensibly art-directed aesthetics did.

Therefore an aesthetics which expands itself beyond aesthetics to the full extent of aisthesis, as advocated in this paper, is necessary not only for the sake of a full grasp of the aesthetic in its contemporary state, but also for the sake of an adequate understanding of art. This could ultimately be the penetrating argument for an aesthetic beyond aesthetics, motivating even the partisans of an art-centered aesthetics to give it a thought or even to switch sides. Home Curriculum vitae Research areas&Current projects Publication List Online Texts&Publication abstracts Department of Philosophy Contact

“Economy of the icon”

Christian Art Goes Back to School by Daniel A. Siedell

I have begun to think seriously about the icon as a place to begin a Christian contribution to contemporary artistic discourse. Nicaea II, the seventh and last (so far) of the so-called ecumenical councils in 787 declared not merely that the veneration of icons was allowed, but they were mandated in order to preserve the hard fought Christological and Trinitarian battles of the previous four centuries. (If you have any doubt about how tenuous and hard fought and far from inevitable those battles were, read John Behr’s two-volume study, The Way to Nicaea (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.)

The thought generated during these four centuries, particularly those of the Eastern Church, and which culminates in the dogmatic affirmation of the robust “economy of the icon,” is fertile ground for reflection on contemporary art. I must also confess a certain weakness for the Russian Slavophile philosophers, Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), and Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), with their evocative (and at times controversial) reflections on Divine Wisdom, “God-manhood,” and “total unity,” which derive from pushing the implications of Nicene Christianity and have been most helpful in reconfiguring ways that contemporary art can be understood. (I am at the moment reading Florensky’s magisterial and mystical The Pillar and Ground of the Truth [1914].)

I am not interested in offering another “Christian perspective” on modern and contemporary art, or offering one that is strictly “confessional,” that is, a perspective that is “Lutheran,” or “Reformed,” or even “Evangelical.” The goal is not, in scholastic fashion, to add another brick or two to a confessional edifice. It is rather to contribute to understanding the development of modern and contemporary art, which I believe can benefit from the language of early Christian thought. This approach affirms as well as challenges aspects of “secular” approaches to modern and contemporary art. Moreover, it also simultaneously extends and critiques various “Christian perspectives” on modern and contemporary art that are operative in (Evangelical) Christian intellectual circles... Posted by geoff holsclaw Permalink Technorati Tags: christian art, contemporary art, theology of art

New works by Sujata Dere

"Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind, the sense of the infinitive is native to it."

These words of Sri Aurobindo are apt to describe the latest event of Brandsmith, a well-known name in the realm of events, promotions, media management & business consulting.

Brandsmith & Nitanjali Art Gallery in association with Alliance Francaise & Chateau Indage recently presented "Black on white" a sense of the infinitive, New works by well known artist Sujata Dere at Galerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Francaise de Delhi. This niche event by Brandsmith saw top corporate honchos, socialites, diplomatic community, media & social activists dressed in black & white, the theme of the evening, coming together to appreciate the new works of the extremely gifted painter Sujata Dere.
Some of the notable people in attendance were His Excellency Carlos A Irigoyen with wife Regina, Rahul Mittra CEO Brandsmith with wife Sarina, former Miss India & social activist Nafisa Ali, Mandira lamba & Ridhi Bhalla from Nitanjali Art Gallery, noted artist Naresh kapuria and RL Bhatia, Chairman Kwality Group.
"This is a unique opportunity for art lovers and we are glad that Brandsmith is presenting this niche art exhibition along with Nitanjali Art Gallery & other partners, ' said Rahul Mittra, CEO Brandsmith, a company that is increasingly becoming a name synonymous with upscale events & campaigns in India & overseas. - End - Log onto www.brandsmithindia.com for more information. Browse all Brandsmith press release » Subscribe to daily press alerts via email » new delhi, Delhi, IND, 2007-09-04 23:31:38 (IndiaPRwire.com)

Eco believes that Maritain is reading more into Thomas than is present in the text

Nichols on Art and Christ » Nichols on Maritain on the Beautiful Published by Cynthia R. Nielsen August 30th, 2007 in Aesthetics, Jacques Maritain, Aidan Nichols

In chapter seven of his book, Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Nichols discusses, among other things, Jacques Maritain’s view of pulchrum (the beautiful). Maritain appeals to St. Thomas’ dictum in which beauty is defined as id quod visum placet. According to Maritain this definition relates to the effect, not the essence, i.e., the beautiful gives joy to the knower. However, as Nichols points out, Maritain is quick to add that the “bestowal of delight in knowing” is a “formal constituent of beauty” (p. 133). Here Maritain and U. Eco part ways, as Eco believes that Maritain is reading more into Thomas than is present in the text. According to Eco, “what Thomas actually says is, ‘people call things beautiful when they give pleasure on sight’. For Eco this is a ‘sociological finding’ with ‘introduces the problem’ rather than solves it” (p. 133). It seems to me the Eco’s point merits further consideration.

This brings us to Maritain’s account of the beautiful as found in Art et scolastique. According to Maritain, “[i]f a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact of being given to its intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful” (p. 36).[1] Here beauty is no doubt connected with the intellect, but following Thomas, beauty delights the mind through the senses. “‘Our [human] art’ works over sensuous matter to bring joy to the spirit. It is in a sense a taste of Paradise, the first Paradise, the Paradise of Eden, because ‘it restores for a moment the simultaneous peace and delectation of the mind and the senses’” (Art et scolastique, p. 37).[2] Notes [1] As cited in Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, p. 134. [2] As cited in Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, p. 134.

The artist was particularly inspired by the Kolkata cityscapes. The crumbling walls of buildings and the multitudes of people

Close to Events-Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee

A new book explores the life and works of the late artist, Bikash Bhattacharjee, by noted art critic Manasij Majumder. The late artist stood out among his contemporaries by making hard-edged chiseled realism the core appeal of his canvases when realism or naturalism of every shade was considered a retrograde trend.

At 2007 Saffronart Summer Online Auction, his Oil on canvas ‘King with Flute’ (47” x 47”) went for $87,400 (Rs.3, 496, 000).

The book, titled Close to Events-Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee, also analyses the technical and stylistic development of his art with detailed exposition of some of the themes and subjects in the major series of his paintings. Launching his creative career in the late ’50s, his strengths were his exceptional technical mastery and his power to charge the tangible appearance of the surface with the reality of the depth beneath. He was admired not merely for the near-illusionist evocation of realistic details, but for the obvious or subtle distortions in his imagery as a key to their complex multi-layered meanings.

The artist’s realistic idiom was fascinatingly robust and compulsive, laced with rich irony, strong-veined allegory and lush visual metaphors. His portrait-based images enacted his personal experiences and impressions of the prevailing period with all its dark social and moral tones and textures.

Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee (Pages: 250; Price: Rs. 2000) A detailed documentation of his art and life, the book analyses the techniques and styles through which his art developed. It depicts the artist’s early life in an old North Calcutta locality, the urban social ambience that shaped his creative personality and explores why he chose to remain ‘close to events’ and free from the dominant trends in post-Independence Indian art.

The artist was particularly inspired by the Kolkata cityscapes. The crumbling walls of buildings and the multitudes of people living there figured prominently in his work. His drawings formed a fitting introduction to his paintings, revealing the predilection of the artist for forms: forms that were consist in terms of tone rather than line. His work was a powerful combination of realism and fantasy, where reality and fantasy evaporated and reemerged on the canvas.

The artist created a varied cast of characters in his canvases - old men and women, children, domestic help. The ability to create an authentic milieu as a background to the characters heightens the drama. Female beauty remained a major preoccupation with him. His women subjects were a strange mixture of spirituality and sensuality.

The Author of the book, Manasij Majumder, a well-known name in the field of art writing in India, has to his credit other major titles such as Sakti Burman, Dreamer on the Ark and Art Moves, Works by Sunil Das. He first met Bikash Bhattacharjee in 1979. The writer, reminiscing on the late artist, mentions: He was one-year-old when his father died. He faced immense hardships and was witness to Partition and the pathetic lives of the poor in Kolkata. All his works are extremely metaphorical and allegorical in nature. All his creations were rooted in his experience. He was so overpowered by realism that he couldn't stick to abstraction that he first had attempted in the early 1960s.”

The book is enriched with over 200 photographs, providing an insight into the artist’s oeuvre. There are detailed illustrated explanations on the paintings, contained in the book. The sketches and writing used throughout the book has been taken from the late artist's own notes. Saffronart.com

In our fairy tales the ugly people are those who are cruel and of bad character

VIEW: It undermines media credibility 25 Aug 2007 Make TOI your home page

A picture is worth a thousand words. Images have power of instant recall. Which is why the audio-visual medium, particularly television, is great for promotions, whether of products or personalities. And advertisements are mostly pictorial. However, the news that French President Nicolas Sarkozy's photo-graph was "airbrushed" before being published in the magazine, Paris Match - by electronically erasing love handles or flab from his waist - making the politician look trimmer than he is, comes as a blow to responsible journalism. Any alteration, minor or major, is deliberate distortion of truth. And the media - particularly the print media - are seen as guardians of truth. The printed word carries immense credibility among readers. Doctored pictures being passed off as real insult the intelligence of the reader. An alert blogger exposed a Reuters photograph of a fire in Beirut - caused by air force bombing - as software-doctored, deliberately accentuating the billowing smoke and fire. The blogger pointed out that the dishonest photo-grapher had superimposed twin images of the smoke and buildings to create an impression of density and extreme damage. The picture provoked angry reactions internationally.

Such misrepresentation is not only mischievous; it can be extremely dangerous and could backfire, creating damage and suspicion. Images of models are airbrushed routinely to enhance the quality of advertisements. However, when the same strategy is adopted to add value to the image of politicians, it raises ethical questions: Is it fair for a public figure to project himself as something he is not? Doing so would amount to tricking voters into believing what they see as the truth. It's not just about hiding flab; it is also about projecting the person as being fit and healthy, disciplined and alert, when he is in fact none of these. In any case, it is not the media's job to assist particular politicians look fitter than they are. It is the responsibility of photographers and writers, commentators and analysts to present things as they are rather than distort truth.

COUNTER VIEW: Appearance makes the man 25 Aug 2007

Who doesn't want to look attractive? These days one's appearance and image is everything even if it involves a minor distortion of reality. And, Paris Match's airbrushing of President Nicolas Sarkozy's love handles must be seen in this context. TV channels employ attractive presenters to increase their TRP ratings. Hotels and companies employ good-looking people to sit at their front desks to impress clients. We all know that prospective brides and grooms have for long engaged creative photographers to shoot pictures that would make them look attractive. Photographers digitally touch-up snaps of special occasions, like weddings of their clients to remove blemishes in their appearance. Apart from the yearning to look good oneself, a presentable appearance is vital for public figures like politicians these days. A recent survey by Australian researchers has found that good looks really do matter in politics. Voters link attractiveness to likeability. Appealing appearance, they say, can add an extra 1.5 to 2 per cent to a candidate's vote.

M G Ramachandran and N T Rama Rao exploited the popularity they gained by being attractive movie stars to enter politics. Even after they became career politicians, they continued to groom themselves well. This contributed a great deal in helping them become mass leaders and retain their popularity. It is a human tendency to rate people on their looks, irrespective of their character. We subconsciously link the outer appearances of people to the judgments that we think they would make. Most of our fairy tales revolve around a beautiful princess and her handsome prince. And, invariably, in these tales the ugly people are those who are cruel and of bad character. Clearly, these stories reflect our subconscious preference for the beautiful. The degree of attractiveness impacts all kinds of interpersonal relationships. Those with a good appearance receive sustained attention from others. Which country wouldn't like a hip, good-looking leader, even if it means touching up his or her photos and managing appearances? Make TOI your home page

Sadanga — the texts of Abanindranath and Sri Aurobindo read together illumine one another

From Ajanta to Nandalal Bose

Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Secretariat, Bharat Nivas, Auroville-605101. From the blurb The Hindu Tuesday, Aug 21, 2007

The book showcases the essential continuity of Indian painting by juxtaposing Ajanta and Nandalal Bose to convey the sense of unbroken tradition. The six limbs of painting, “Sadanga”, commented upon by Abanindranath Tagore is reproduced here. This is an ancient “Sastra” defining the principles of painting, an Indian tradition. The book notes that although it is true that the “Sadanga” contains universal principles which neither Leonardo da Vinci nor Poussin would have denied, Tagore, while reaffirming them, places them in the light of the Indian spirit and speaks of them as the guiding lights for an artist viewed as a Yogi.

As Sri Aurobindo said the characteristic of Indian painting and indeed all Indian art “appeals through the physical and the psychical to another spiritual vision from which the artist worked...”, extracts from Sri Aurobindo’s “The Foundations of Indian Culture” follow Sadanga — the texts of Abanindranath and Sri Aurobindo read together illumine one another.

Blue and white cows floating benignly in placid galaxies of the Milky Way

Home > Journals & Media > Journals > Auroville Today > June-July 2007 Current issue Archive copies Auroville Experience Cosmic cows in Creativity - in conversation with Priya Sundaravalli The exhibition Cosmic Cows in Creativity not only served to buy two much needed cattle grids, but also created awareness about the need for a community studio and cooperation among artists.

Creativity honours its name. Unique to this community are its collective art studio and the Hall of Light. The studio atelier is open to all residents - from professional artists to those who want to explore art material for the first time. One day a week, there is a 'Drawing Experiment' offered, where those who signup, investigate their unique expression through explorations on paper. The Hall of Light, on the other hand, a much larger space, hosts exhibitions as well as serves a wide range of activities: Valeria teaches ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arrangement; there are regular classes in pilates and salsa, and the occasional musical jamborees. Their common denominator: it's all highly creative.
‘The Cosmic Cow' was the most recent art exhibition at the Hall of Light. Its highlight were the paintings of blue and white cows floating benignly in placid galaxies of the Milky Way. They were the work of Audrey, a professional artist from California who joined Auroville in October last year. Works of fellow resident artists, Adil and Marlenka, plus Ingaborg, a Drawing Experiment regular, were also on display.
The objective of the exhibition was to raise money to pay for cow-grids at the community gates. “Creativity needed to keep cows out of its flower beds, but lacked the funds. So we pooled our works and offered it for sale,” Audrey said cheerfully. The exhibition was a success. With the works made deliberately affordable by Auroville standards, almost all creations found a happy home. Now, cows and residents live in peaceful co-existence, separated by sturdy iron grids.
“Why ‘Cosmic Cow'?' I asked Audrey.
“Aerial views of the earth have affected my work for years. Here cows are such a powerful symbol. It was natural for me to want to present them from above. That led me to putting them in the cosmos. I was at that time doing large paintings of galaxies anyway. Also I found a rooftop over the barnyard at Pitchandikulam where I could draw and photograph the backs of cows. It's quite a landscape with their bone structure, massive girth, and all of it supported by those little hooves.”
She went on to say, “It's fascinating to me how the concept of the universe has changed during my lifetime. I was profoundly affected by the landing on the moon and the picture of the Earth rise from there. It was a powerful image, which made us realize that there we were on that beautiful little blue-green ball… While camping in the Sierras, I woke up before dawn one morning and spontaneously said “Here we come, Sun!” My body had realised that it was the earth which was turning around the sun, rather than the sun coming up. This experience made me think I was on the right track; the track of what I am still not sure!” Since then, Audrey has explored the view of the earth from hot-air balloons and small airplanes, making aerial photographs that became raw material for her work.
More art gyms please
Though Creativity's art studio is fulfilling its purpose, Audrey feels that it is limited in space and could serve a larger group. “Using one's hands to make images can be a healing activity, both for the mind and for the body. There is a wrong conception that one has to be an artist to enter a studio. It is for everyone. We've known for centuries that art balances the brain; it helps to articulate, and develop one's being integrally. Time and again, I've witnessed people working out some problem by just doing a drawing or a painting. When they concentrate, go inside, and create from there and not from the mind, something happens. What is expressed is not important - it's the process that matters. And whether it was intended or not, it affects the body favourably, and a balance or resolution is reached.
“Seen from this perspective, I feel Auroville needs to consider its lack of collective art studios or art gyms, as I like to call them. There are several gyms to take care of the body. But where are the spaces to explore and express oneself through images? Such art gyms should be open 24 hours of the day, so that people can come at any time they feel they want to work. It just needs a large and simple space, with plenty of light, good ventilation, ample storage space for inks and material. Anybody should be allowed to come: artists, guests, newcomers, villagers, workers, on a minimum of conditions - quiet respect for the space, the materials, and the fellow workers. Such art gym would also answer to the needs of visiting artists who would like to do creative work in Auroville. Right now, there is no place for them to work or even to meet other artists, and this needs to change.
Changing the artist's attitude
“All over the world we see artists coming together for multi-disciplinary projects. They work together, and sometimes live together forming artists' communities. Why not in Auroville? We artists can pool our resources, so that those who are well-established and sell their works can help those who are not so successful and have to buy their materials from their limited Auroville maintenance - which is almost impossible.”Audrey is sufficiently realistic to doubt that will change fast. “Artists are very much attached to their identity. Those who have worked hard to get a reputation usually don't like to be associated with artists who don't have one.” One of the ways to promote this, she feels, could be to have group shows, something that is already beginning to happen in Auroville. “I have heard of other ideas too, like the new website AurovilleArts.com that will showcase the works of all Auroville artists. Another is the idea for an Auroville art lending library! But most of all, we need a place to work together - to support each other and to learn from one another.”

Nele Martens, Hufreesh Dumasia, Anna Maria, Agnus, and Henk van Putten

Five Auroville Artists at the Cymroza Gallery, Mumbai
by Debashish on Sun 05 Aug 2007 09:35 AM PDT Permanent Link
FIVE AUROVILLE ARTISTS By Debashish Banerji

The group of 5 artists showing together at the Cymroza gallery in Mumbai, seem at first to have little in common. A German, an Italian, a Belgian and an Indian Parsi, four women painters and a Dutch male sculptor, make up the group. What joins them is the fact that they all live and work at Auroville, a spiritual community founded by Mirra Alfassa, also known as the Mother, a collaborator of the modern Indian yogi, Sri Aurobindo. This is, no doubt, a profound source of likeness, a shared inner orientation towards the discovery and expression of spiritual or cosmic realities and coherences or intensities. This, indeed, is evident, in the large generic titles given to the artworks and even the very courage to title abstractions against the grain of most modern and contemporary practice. The question of content in abstraction, or the division into style and content is generally considered problematic or non-significant in modernism- the style is the content, which needs no further reference. Of course, post-modern practice has challenged this modernist purism, and has attempted to return to art its vehicular function as a signifier or metonym for social and psychological experiences and interpretations. From a sealed hermetic testament offered as surface only to an uncomprehending anonymity dehumanized by the global regime of techno-capitalism, there is a shift towards the re-affirmation of art as language, a tool in the salvaging, re-membering or re-creation of shared values and experiences. Participants in a communitarian context of a shared material, social, ideal and dynamic psychological reality and process, the Auroville artists are exemplars of this post-modern practice of the alphabet, vocabulary and grammar of an art culture which inheres in a common universe of perceptions, experiences, orientations and movements.

However, this culture must not be mistaken for an isolated island, nor its art for an internal cult-dialect of prefabricated signifiers. The Auroville artists come from a variety of life-situations and cultures, but they also share the ubiquitous condition of modernity which encircles the earth today with its neo-liberalist homogenization, its conditioning of experience and its flattening and fragmentation of subjectivity and this is what has brought them to Auroville. Their work is marked by a distrust for ideologies, propaganda or advertisational hypnosis and what unites them also is a culture of freedom and personal intuition in the exploration of experiences of subjective universality or non-dual consciousness or perceptions of harmony and beauty behind the bewildering diversity and chaos of appearances. This imparts to their work the freshness of an optimism born of a lived collective culture of progressive experience and it is in this sense that their art becomes a language of shared perceptions far subtler and more primordial than the language of words.

Just as one may identify a common faith in the human ability to experience states of universal consciousness and harmony and a common culture of experimental seeking for these experiences and realizations which bestows meaning and content uniting these artists, one may also identify a shared language in their expression. This is what one might now call the global tradition of modern abstraction. From its foundations in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and other European artists attempting to salvage a universal and non-sectarian spirituality out of the ruins of pre-modern civilization between two world wars, through its phase of bold experimentation and self-confidence in the post-World War II manifestation of American abstract expressionism, abstraction in art has accumulated a repertory of expressive means that marks it as a visual language of the independence of consciousness from national or multi-national or ethnic or sectarian or even human identifications or identity politics. It has received its share of castigation for this – berated for an insensitivity to postcolonial inequalities or international humanist or socialist struggles, equated with the belligerence and arrogant individualism of American modernity, dismissed as domesticated neo-liberal décor, put down as inhuman or anti-human, it continues nevertheless to draw diverse gifted adherents and enrich itself with extensions of its expressive possibilities. In Auroville, it finds a natural crucible for its furtherance through artists attempting to overcome the division between subject and object in the realization of states of non-duality or to disengage identity from its entrapment in forms so as to invoke new potentia of a transcendental creativity, or expressing perceptions of matter as force, idea and quality of consciousness or questioning the limits of the human in its transpersonal stretch towards universality. To the specter of anonymity, dehumanization and homogenization of modern global humanity, these expressions of a social consciousness stretching towards a self-exceeding of our present boundaries and the discovery of powers of universality and harmony in shaping the future, are a welcome alternative, to say the least.

The revision of human subjectivity that could be said to have launched itself as an omni-disciplinary revolution around the turn of the 19th/20th c., found its inspirations in modalities of being and expression rooted in pre-modern and non-western cultures. Modern vehicles for synthetic ideas of world spirituality, such as Theosophy or Neo-Platonism or trans-cultural reconstructions of Vedanta, Daoism or Zen Buddhism, were important acknowledged or unacknowledged sources behind Euro-American abstraction. The independent hierarchic world of Platonic Ideas or the mergence of forms in the formless indivisibility of the Vedantic Brahman or the animistic or occult energy patterns of the consciousness-beings of Theosophy became the legitimate descriptive field of the new art, as proclaimed by its prophets, such as Wassily Kandinsky, in his “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” A variety of creative movements and groupings followed, a seminal one in which Kandinsky himself, along with a number of other innovators of form were involved, being the design and architectural creative community of Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. Bauhaus design veered in a direction which attempted to validate structure, technological precision, simplicity and the high polish or transparency of ultra-modern materiality walking the borderline between form abstraction and functionality in a self-conscious non-ethnic “international style.” It also spawned a new interest in geometric abstraction in painting. All these tendencies were inherited and powerfully reconfigured by American Abstraction in the post-World War II period. The descendents of Abstract Expressionism, such as Action Painting or Color Field or Minimalism, opened up overlapping visual language domains marked by an immediacy of optical experience without idea content, which could only be described in terms of the conditions of their creation – a spontaneous performance of dynamic intuition which sought its prehistory in the art of accident of the color drip ceramics of Tang China or the crazy spontaneity of splashed ink paintings and their calligraphic counterparts or the chromatic intensity or cosmic geometry of Tantric yantras.

In the Auroville artists, we may find a completion of the circle of the forms and languages of abstract experimentation developed in Euro-American modernism through its re-assimilation in new traditions of Asiatic consciousness practice. For example, Nele Martens draws her inspiration from the play of conscious energy in or as form, universally active in nature. Structural modeling through variations of color density combine with controlled or swift rhythmic and textured brush dynamism to convey an impression of archetypal energy-events at the subtle interface between substance and force. While Martens, of German origin, with her early cultural immersion in the work of Bauhaus artists, can be seen furthering the traditions of Kandinsky, Klee and Johannes Itten, she brings to her paintings a color sensitivity and intensity which introduces an element of quality of consciousness missing in her European sources and only beginning to be hinted at in the later American Color Field artists. One may see this most clearly in a painting like Immersion, where the simplicity and contrast of the two-color scheme and the luminosity of pigment project a powerful visual immediacy through which a synaesthetic sixth-sense experiences the consciousness-world of flowers. The bold and expressive structural power of Martens’ work predominates in paintings like “Breakthrough,” while the dream-like monochromatic It Touches My Soul, stands apart for its evocation of interiority. These two paintings may, in fact, be taken together as exemplifying the sunlight and moonlight polarities of Martens’ consciousness explorations. Nele Martens' Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size) www.flickr.com

Another artist relying on intensity of color as a primary qualitative constituent of her work is Hufreesh Dumasia. Dumasia’s canvases present an all-over attention, placing her inheritance closer to the American Abstract Expressionists. But unlike Pollock or de Kooning or their descendents, her centreless expanses radiate an intense exuberance and light, the subtle shades of the qualitative language of an impersonal and transcendental Delight, which as the Upanishads say, is the originating power of all Becoming. But these shades of Delight are not abstractions or even symbols for Dumasia. As in Martens’ case, a direct and mindless optical impression is the carrier of a synaesthetic experience of these universal Delight-states in their cosmic materiality. Dumasia’s layered densities of scattered color-particles and stretches of expanding amorphous shape are subtly organized through underlying rhythmic circularities or sinusoids and impress the viewer as descriptions of archetypical processes and realities at atomic or astrophysical levels of consciousness-matter. Hufreesh Dumasia's Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size) www.flickr.com

Annamaria is a third artist of this group to rely on non-formal elements of abstraction to express herself. Anna Maria, draws her inspiration from an intimate lived relationship with the world of natural contours and vegetation. These forms, looming out of thin evocative patina-washes, are reminiscent of Chinese splashed ink landscapes or other conceptual abstractions of the Chinese literati (wen-ren) painters. She clarifies that she paints out of an inner intuition but it was only after discovering studies of chaos and fractal theory that she consciously sought the capture of similar processes in her work. In this, I feel more confirmed that her inspiration parallels the Daoist ideas of expressive spontaneity arising out of a meditative union with the creative shakti in Nature - giving body to the elemental lines behind natural forms and processes. However, to these microcosmic exercises, color lends a dimension of inner dynamism and drama, as brought out most clearly in a painting like The Invading Light. Annamaria's Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size) www.flickr.com

If the previous three artists depend more on color, line or texture, Belgian painter, Agnus and Dutch sculptor, Henk van Putten put to work a progressive intuition in the expressive power of geometric form. With a predisposition towards the retention of the marks of natural or historical ageing processes in the perpetual recyclings of cultural materials, the marks of the passage of time bearing within them the insignia of imperishable or eternal gestures, Agnus uses the patina settled covers of aged ferrous boxes as the surfaces for her brushed acrylic subtle symbols of the hermetic life of devotion and self-transcendence. These symbols serve as watermarks, burned or etched into the inevitable decay of forms, a reminder of the persistent imperishable in perishable things (nityo’nityanam), formed of the enigmatic language of familiar similitude, yet uniquely distinct in every instance. Agnus' Paintings (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size) www.flickr.com

Finally, the work of Henk van Putten, the only sculptor in the group, draws us further into the pure geometries of form and the properties of material substance with their immediate modern roots in Bauhaus design. The machined purity and perfection of deceptively simple forms, extruded or interlocking curvatures painted in intense primary colors bring to concrete focus a fusion of the worlds of rational order and the spontaneous symbols of earth fertility, while at the same time presenting and resolving the ambiguous relations between inside and outside and stillness and movement. Pythagorean geometry, Platonic Ideas and the perpetual circulations of Tantric meditation machines (yantras) form the archaic presences enlivening and rendering perennial these ultra-modern solids, offering themselves as inexhaustible bodies of contemplation. Henk van Putten's Sculptures (Mouseover image for title; Click to see full size) www.flickr.com

Keywords: Abstraction, JohannesItten, Kandinsky, JacksonPollock, Bauhaus, AbstractArt, Klee, ColorField, WenRen, AbstractExprwessionism, ActionPainting, MarkRothko, SriAurobindo, Spirituality, Culture, Auroville, Art

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center

Spring / Summer 2007, Vol 15, No. 1 Boston University 621 Commonwealth Boston, MA 02215PH: 617-353-6480FAX: 617-353-5905 Contact Arion Advertise With Arion US Bookstores Carrying Arion EDITOR IN CHIEF Herbert Golder

Religion and the Arts in America CAMILLE PAGLIA

But here's the bad news: the avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated two hundred years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It's time to move on.

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts.1 The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.

To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.

Note :1. See Camille Paglia, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious ­Vision in the American 1960 s,” Arion 10.3 (Winter 2003), 57–111.

A lecture delivered on 6 February 2007 as the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College. It was videotaped by C-SPAN and broadcast on its American Perspectives series on 3 March 2007.

Arion is a member of The Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Return to the Homepage 10:58 PM

Paintings by Vishwajyoti Mohrhoff

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Benaras is not merely a geographical space, but it is also a cultural space

Santosh Verma Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, IN

I think my consciousness is constructed by my physical existence in the geographical area of Benaras. And Benaras is not merely a geographical space, but it is also a cultural space where the collective consciousness, within which I could achieve my personal consciousness, is full of abstract ideas generated by many thinkers like Kabir. Perhaps this is the context of my paintings. I leave it to the people to make sense of them. For me, I have done my bit by expressing myself through them. Posted by Santosh at 1:30 AM 0 comments Sunday, July 1, 2007

One who has this refinement will feel incapable of acting in a crude, brutal or vulgar manner

AUROBINDO ASHRAM ON THE ARTS
Jul 4th, 2007 by vivkhemka
A friend called- he mentioned that the Arts (a subject of my previous post) were a central element of the Guru-shishya parampara, a system of schooling prevalent till as late as the last century. Students would be taught by a Guru (teacher), staying at his house, doing all the housework, tending to the fields or other vocation. It was training for life. Sort of Small-Schools-Movement meeting Residential Schools.
Mira Alfassa, one of the founders of Auroville, affectionately called the ‘Mother‘, oversaw the Aurobindo Society’s Education work for a long time. She was a tireless educator, always eager to ensure her schools provided what she called “a vital education” In her book, Mother on Education, she writes about Arts Appreciation:

“Aesthetic sense should be added as early as possible. Aesthetic sense is the capacity to choose & adopt what is beautiful, harmonius, simple, healthy and pure. The child should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love the beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things whether in nature and human creation- one who has this refinement will feel incapable of acting in a crude, brutal or vulgar manner; it will finding expression in his behaviour and protect him from base and perverse movements."

I extend this train of thinking from appreciation to involvement. If a child is involved and then motivated to become engaged in an activity, he will “feel incapable of acting in a crude, brutal or vulgar manner; it will finding expression in his behaviour and protect him from base and perverse movements.” When talking about ‘create discipline’ in schools- what really should be called ‘creating engaging schools’ - this practice can be invaluable.
An aside: if you haven’t heard of Auroville, I recommend reading about it. You can do so here. Described as a place for humanity- of unending education, of constant progress, and youth that never ages, it is really quite remarkable in the quality of life it provides its citizens and in the community-service initiatives it undertakes. After the Asian Tsunami, as a volunteer in Nagappattinam, India’s most affected area, I noticed that Aurovilleans were the most sincere, dedicated and responsive of all the donor and non-governmental agencies assembled.
Posted in Shoulders of Giants, Curriculum 1 Comment

One Response to “AUROBINDO ASHRAM ON THE ARTS”
on 04 Jul 2007 at 10:04 pm1 sushma
It is very interesting to know that people are giving arts a respect that it totally missed 3 decades back . It was a total girly thing and if someone wanted to pursue it then he or she was looked down upon ,and the general idea was that the person concerned was not capable and a duffer .
I wish I could take up this stream and satisfy my hunger for art .I totally agree on the concept of engaging as it leaves no room for indiscipline . On days I have less work at office I become a nusiance to myself but otherwise I am busy and happy .well written !

God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities

Whitehead is very much a Jamesian pragmatist. The pragmatic test for truth is the interest that it sustains; “the primary function of theories is as a lure for feeling, thereby providing immediacy of enjoyment and purpose” (1929/1978, 184). Truth is finally a matter, not of empirical verification, but of “enjoyment and purpose,” or (to use Whitehead’s more frequent term) “satisfaction.” That is why “Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental, notion than Truth” (1933/1967, 265).19

In linking feeling to beauty, rather than subordinating it to truth, Whitehead unites the two senses of the word “aesthetic” that we find in Kant (and in the philosophical tradition more generally). On the one hand, the “Transcendental Aesthetic” has to do with sensation and the forms of sensibility; on the other hand, the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Third Critique has to do with experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. Though Kant himself doesn’t comment upon the disparity between these two senses, other thinkers have found it problematic.

As Deleuze (1990) puts it, “aesthetics suffers from a wrenching duality. On one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience. For these two meanings to be tied together, the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience” (260). For Deleuze, such a transformation is accomplished by certain modernist art practices; in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, among other works, “the conditions of real experience and the structures of the work of art are reunited” (261).20

But Whitehead unites the two senses of aesthetics without privileging modernist aesthetic experimentation in particular. This is because, for Whitehead as for Kant, the question of beauty pertains not just to the creation and reception of works of art, but to sensible experience more generally. The connection, unremarked by Kant, between the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” is that acts of sensible intuition and judgments of beauty alike involve feelings that are receptive and not spontaneous, and for which there can be no adequate concepts. In both cases, there is a certain act of creative construction on the part of the subject; yet this construction is responsive to the given data, and cannot be described as arbitrarily imposed, or as merely subjective. Neither the attribution of time and space to phenomena, nor the attribution of beauty to phenomenal objects, can be justified on cognitive grounds. Yet both these attributions make universalizing claims that have to be taken seriously.

Whitehead emphasizes these continuities between the two senses of aesthetics. He notes that the creation of “subjective form,” as an element in any act of sensible intuition, is already a proto-artistic process, involving as it does the selection, patterning, and intensification of sensory data. There is always already a “definite aesthetic attitude imposed by sense-perception” itself (1933/1967, 216). Even the most utilitarian, result- and action-oriented modes of perception nonetheless remain largely receptive, and thereby involve a certain “affective tone,” and a certain degree of aesthetic contemplation – and, Whitehead adds, “thus art is possible” (216).

In the process of feeling, “any part of experience can be beautiful,” and “any system of things which in any wide sense is beautiful is to that extent justified in its existence” (265). Though it falls to Whitehead to make these immanent connections explicit, they are already there, implicitly, in Kant’s own accounts of sensible reception and aesthetic judgment. It is only Kant’s privileging of cognition over affect that leads to the “wrenching duality” deplored by Deleuze.

If “the basis of experience is emotional,” then the culmination of experience – what Whitehead likes to call its “satisfaction”21 – can only be aesthetic. This is the reason for Whitehead’s outrageously hyperbolic claim that “the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (1933/1967, 265). Whitehead defines Beauty as “the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience”; it is the “Harmony” of “patterned contrasts” in the subjective form of any such occasion. The purpose of such “patterned contrasts” is to increase, as much as possible, the experience’s “intensity of feeling” (252). Such a buildingup of intensity through contrast is the basic principle of Whitehead’s aesthetics, applying to all entities in the universe.

At the low end of the scale, even the most rudimentary “pulses of emotion” (like the vibrations of subatomic particles) exhibit a “primitive provision of width for contrast” (1929/1978, 163). And at the highest end, even God is basically an aesthete. “God is indifferent alike to preservation and to novelty,” Whitehead says. “God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities” (105). Whitehead’s overall principle of “creative advance,” his “Category of the Ultimate” underlying all being (21), has nothing to do with Victorian notions of moral and political improvement, nor with the capitalist ideal of endless accumulation. Creative advance is rather an intensive, qualitative, and aesthetic drive for “depth of satisfaction” (93, 110). Emotions are intensified, and experiences made richer, when incompatibilities, instead of being excluded (negatively prehended), are transformed into contrasts that can be positively integrated within a greater “complexity of order” (100).

But this process is not a tranquil or banally positive one, and Whitehead certainly does not regard “order” as an intrinsic good. The “patterned contrasts” must not be too tastefully arranged. Creative advance is stifled by any sort of static perfection. It demands, rather, the impetus for renewal that comes from “the emotional experience of aesthetic destruction” (1933/1967, 256-257). Whitehead always reminds us that “it is the business of the future to be dangerous” (1925/1967, 207); his aesthetics of feeling is both an expression of this danger, and the best means we have for coming to grips with it. Steven Shaviro shaviro@shaviro.com The Pinocchio Theory

19 It is important to point out, once again, that this means “not a relativity of truth, but, on thecontrary, a truth of the relative.” James’ and Whitehead’s pragmatism is not a slipshod relativism, but rather a claim about the situatedness of truth. A truth that is not “important,” or not strongly felt, does not thereby cease to be true; and a false proposition doesn’t become true, merely byvirtue of being invested with intense feeling or great aesthetic appeal. An unimportant truth isjust that: unimportant. But it may become important, if it is invested by feeling. And when afalse proposition operates effectively as a “lure,” so that it is invested with great feeling, one resultmay be the arousal of an “appetition” that works towards changing the world in order to make theproposition true. This is the very basis of change and Creative Advance: the “realization of whatis not and may be” (1929/1978, 32).

20 Elsewhere, Deleuze (1994) states the same point slightly differently. Aesthetics is “dividedinto two irreducible domains: that of the theory of the sensible which captures only the real’sconformity with possible experience; and that of the theory of the beautiful, which deals with thereality of the real insofar as it is thought. Everything changes once we determine the conditionsof real experience, which are not larger than the conditioned and which differ in kind from thecategories: the two senses of the aesthetic become one, to the point where the being of the sensiblereveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation”(68). Here, the emphasis is less on specific modernist art practices than on the way in which philosophicalconstructivism converts Kant’s transcendental conditions of possibility into generativeconditions of actualization.

21 Whitehead uses “satisfaction” as a technical term. He defines it as the “final unity” of any actual occasion or experience, “the culmination of the concrescence into a completely determinate matter of fact” (1929/1978, 212). “Satisfaction” evidently does not mean that an experience has turned out happily, or favorably, or unfrustratingly; but just that the process of experiencing has terminated, and now only subsists as a “stubborn fact,” or a “datum,” for other experiences to prehend in their own turns. In the present context, the crucial point is that the same movement that transforms an affective encounter into an objectively cognizable state of affairs also, and simultaneously, offers up that state of affairs as an object for aesthetic contemplation.

Interactive art is art whose state of rest must be disturbed before it can become art at all

Feelings Are Always Local (Paperback) by Arjun Appadurai (Author), Joke Brouwer (Author), Mike Davis (Author), Alexander Galloway (Author), Tijs Goldschmidt (Author), Christopher Kelty (Author), Karim Nader (Author), Loretta Napoleoni (Author), Christa Sommerer (Author), Gijs van Oenen (Author), Arjen Mulder (Author) Amazon.com Editorial Reviews

Book Description: Interactive art organizes itself as an open system: it preserves its coherence by exchanging matter, energy, and information with the environment. In that manner, interactive art is art whose state of rest must be disturbed before it can become art at all. Yet, it is precisely this instability makes it ever more complex. Feelings are Always Local is published on the occasion of DEAF04, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, which focuses on interactivity as open system and interactivity in open systems. It features projects with a social and political slant, as well as projects that have a technological or biological character. Included as well are essays, interviews, and projects by DEAF04 international theorists and artists. Amazon.com

An inner power of discrimination

All artistic work in order to be perfect must indeed have in the very act of creation the guidance of an inner power of discrimination constantly selecting and rejecting in accordance with a principle of truth and beauty which remains always faithful to a harmony, a proportion, an intimate relation of the forms to the idea; there is at the same time an exact fidelity of the idea to the spirit, nature and inner body of the thing of beauty which has been revealed to the soul and the mind, its svarupa and svabhiiva.

Therefore this discriminating inner sense rejects all that is foreign, superfluous, otiose, all that is a mere diversion distractive and deformative, excessive or defective, while it selects and finds sovereignly all that can bring out the full truth, the utter beauty, the inmost power. But this discrimination is not that of the critical intellect, nor is the harmony, proportion, relation it observes that which can be fixed by any set law of the critical reason; it exists in the very nature and truth of the thing itself, the creation itself, in its secret inner law of beauty and harmony which can be seized by vision, not by intellectual analysis.

The discrimination which works in the creator is therefore not an intellectual self-criticism or an obedience to rules imposed on him from outside by any intellectual canons, but itself creative, intuitive, a part of the vision, involved in and inseparable from the act of creation. It comes as part of that influx of power and light from above which by its divine enthusiasm lifts the faculties into their intense suprarational working.

When it fails, when it is betrayed by the lower executive instruments rational or infrarational, - and this happens when these cease to be passive and insist on obtruding their own demands or vagaries, - the work is flawed and a subsequent act of self-criticism becomes necessary. But in correcting his work the artist who attempts to do it by rule and intellectual process, uses a false or at any rate an inferior method and cannot do his best. He ought rather to call to his aid the intuitive critical vision and embody it in a fresh act of inspired creation or re-creation after bringing himself back by its means into harmony with the light and law of his original creative initiation. The critical intellect has no direct or independent part in the means of the inspired creator of beauty...Page - 131

For the conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and intelligent understandiJ1g of it, -these things are only a preliminary clarifying of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful, - but by an exaltation of the soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation.

Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities.

For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence. Page-127, Document: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > Social And Political Thought Volume-15 > The Suprarational Beauty