Aesthetics And The Move Towards PPM
Lola Hiroshima
previously posted essay 'On Image Theory', since i feel that a great
many of the positions and insights we are attempting to establish as
markers for PPM can be found in the working programs of contemporary
artists.
To start things off then, i put forward the position that contemporary
art practice bears the hallmarks of threshold PPM.
Briefly, the move from modern art to postmodern art can be
characterized as a recognition of the conceptual capabilities of the
surface, as opposed to it's merely formal capacities.
Modern art collapsed the meaning references of content back into the
formal qualities of the image's surface- line, color, texture, etc.,
and this process culminated with the advent of purely 'abstract'
expressionism, wherein subject matter was entirely superceeded by the
act of creation/construction.
>From this position, the only available direction was to invest art with
the awareness that the conceptual nature of formal abstraction, ie.
painting as an idea about the act of painting, could be applied to any
number of other concerns and perspectives.
This allowed the reintroduction of ostensibly 'representational'
content back into the work, without reverting back to a weakened
position of mere formalism.
Such was the environment under which conceptual art began to flourish,
and that the transition from a modern to a fully postmodern perspective
was made (with its emphasis on multiple readings, and the fracturing of
metanarratives).
Now, it may be said that the programs of postmodern art have reached a
sufficient threshold of complexity, and that they are beginning, of
their own conceptual weight, to collapse into nascent realms of PPM.
What characterizes this shift? Essentially, the awareness that all art
works are fundamentally extensions of their authors, and that the
meanings derived from them must be seen as a sum of negations. By this
i mean simply that as an artist progresses and develops through time,
he leaves behind artifacts of this progression in the form of his works
or series of works. This biological-archeaological function superceeds
any specific conceptual concerns of the work, while at the same time
acting as the ultimate, or 'highest', reading of conceptualism.
Because of this, we can no longer examine an art piece apart from all
the artist's other outputs, with the result being that the meanings
coded into the formal/conceptual structures of the works begin to
negate those of the other works, thus opening up what we have
characterized as the 'gap'.
A PPM artist is one who is aware of this gap, and structures his works
accordingly, in order to amplify it's effect on the viewer.
Granted, most working artists are not yet aware of this sum of
negations, but their practices have absorbed the entire spectrum of
postmodern options, with a tacit and often directly visible
understanding that there is no ultimate conditional meaning, and yet no
lack of meaning either.
So, slowly, art is shifting towards the point where meaning will come
to be seen as that ineffable rift which exists between works.
Coco
PPM art is simply art that PPM people created. This is undeniably true
but sadly, if we know this about every other wave of artistic culture
-- we would know absolutely nothing. Well, not absolutely...
Any attempts to actually know about it will therefore be vastly subject
to trends of creativity and criticism that have just begun to emerge.
Whatever we do and are yet to do will show the basic shape! Still, we
can probably do better than knowing nothing.
Working from our own spontaneous creativity, observations of the
contemporary art scene and its so-called progressives, data about work
by other PPM examples (fully or partially) , neurogenetic intution,
knowledge of basic cultural theory, and meditative reasoning we can
easily do better.
Here are somethings that we know:
On Jan 21, 4:54 am, "Lola Hiroshima" <ambientpersuas...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> I would like to offer this discussion thread as a continuation of my
> previously posted essay 'On Image Theory', since i feel that a great
> many of the positions and insights we are attempting to establish as
> markers for PPM can be found in the working programs of contemporary
> artists.
>
> To start things off then, i put forward the position that contemporary
> art practice bears the hallmarks of threshold PPM.
>
> Briefly, the move from modern art to postmodern art can be
> characterized as a recognition of the conceptual capabilities of the
> surface, as opposed to it's merely formal capacities.
> Modern art collapsed the meaning references of content back into the
> formal qualities of the image's surface- line, color, texture, etc.,
> and this process culminated with the advent of purely 'abstract'
> expressionism, wherein subject matter was entirely superceeded by the
> act of creation/construction.>From this position, the only available direction was to invest art withthe awareness that the conceptual nature of formal abstraction, ie.
Coco
Coco
rendered the folk-fantasies, the national icons of both religious and
secular society. They show us the martyr god, the virgin queen, the
hero-king, the wicked and the righteous -- how we would like to be and
how 'they' feel to Us. Society acted out the part of the artists much
more directly than its does today. Nazi Germans were very refined
about restoring this system -- propaganda is the idea of entertainment,
news, extended family and political encouragement. What they aimed for
in their aesthetic life was the same goal as in the rest of life -- all
cultural is continually aimed at the central story and its compelling
images (from noble workers to ancestor spirits to smiling girls on
magazine covers. This is "their" art -- "our" art.
I might characterize their inner life as:
The Cynical Subjectivity
Art is commissioned by social power holders to commemorate something.
Often this is the work of dedicated/unprincipled figure whose task is
to teach "the truth" to the masses. Hire a guy to do a great looking
set of saints and deities on your ceiling. People love that. It will
convince them.
The Object Proof of Technology
Art during this phase was often the focus of the "grassroots" feeling
of being simply, naturally impressed by somethign that "on of us did."
Our team's sports-victory-event feels like artwork to many men.
Chatres Cathedral impresses us about us. The hieroglyphed walls of the
pharaohs. The Sistine Ceiling. Napoleon cross the Delaware... or
whatever all those damned political paintins are all called. A potrait
of the queen, of elvis, of Mary, of Urban Spirit in the downtown core.
I will touch a few more times on the unfolding levels of artistic-theme
culture using this subjective/objective vision.
Coco
Renaissance and talking about in Ancient Rome. Socrates was the first
Most Famous Modernist -- using primitive rational arguments to attain
celebrity-cult status in state of Athens. The prinicles of Modernity
both divide up the old cultulre (into religion, art, science,
morality,etc.) but insert the "deliberate individualists" into all
cultural suburbs.
The knowledge of the individual Subject is core to this event:
The Objective Fact of Subjectivity
He weHere we place all artistic assertions of the tangibility of the
Self, the Individual. From Velasquez's inclusion of himself in Las
Mininas to Jackson Pollock's post-representational assertion: "I am
Nature." The impressions, feelings, attitudes and ideas of the
individual are boldy projected onto the multi-media canvas that
formerly held the group's fantasies.
he Subjective Fact of Objectivity
This movement begins with the distortion that is not a distortion --
the Rennaissance discovery of perspective. The first subjective
domination of the objective occurs when artists begin to "paint it as
they see it." The technique of the vanishing point is already the
projection of the self onto the canvas, the assertion of the inner
view.
Herein we find all the "distortionalist" experiments -- from
Impressionism, Expressionism to
Cubism, Futurism and Dali's famously melted watches. That the external
world is apparently
always and only to a subjective entity, peering through the veil of
their own prejudices and
responses, is the annunciated fact of modernity.
Democracy in art is the capacity of the artist's themselves to vote on
style, content and "realism." Rationality in art is the unwillingness
to ignore the ongoing pattern of the subject's intervention in reality.
What was the next more complex-subtle layer?
Coco
versions) but carried them beyond themselves into murky new territory.
What emerged was:
The Non-Fact of the Subject
You may no longer demand to know what I meant by this poem, by this
painting, by this film. Such queries are tedious and vulgar -- they
fall well below the new threshold. I may not even sign my work. I
certainly don't trust financial success or critical acclaim as goals
or standards for my work. Even to be praised by the avante-garde is
somehow suspicious. I have become hyper-critical and, paradoxically,
less concerned with standards.
There is no "me, the artist" to defend my work -- except ironically or
as propaganda in the ears of bimboes and media. My status as a
discrete entity is called into question. Is there anything in me
except void and fleeting representations downloaded from culture and
environment? All attempts to locate myself end in the same blank
wasteland. I long for something -- but nothing is "it".
The Non-Fact of Objectivity
Here there could be no agreement about "art" any longer. What shall we
put in the museums? We must discuss something! Here is a urinal,
signed by the artist. Here is a burning man on stage, whistling
backwards. Here is a concert of silence. We may as well put slides of
scenes from the X-Files one display in our gallery... after all, it is
apparent that no one can legitimately distinguish what art really is.
A hose, a television and a pile of magazine clippings -- in the
National Gallery?! Everyone becomes an artist because there is no art.
There is only choice and hobby, experiments in self-expression and
preferences in decoration. Anything which calls into question the
definition of art or the status of perceived reality is now emblematic
-- not of Art, but of "art."
If we are to continue this trend... we must extrapolate foreward,
trying to make the same type of jump we see occuring subjective and
objectivly (within the matrix of intersubjective relations) in all the
other transitions.
Coco
Any organic 'level' acts teleologically on its predecessor. Not in the
manner of inevitable fate, but as the emergent target around which the
chaos of attempt will converge in order to illuminate a higher order
structure.
Here are some of the guesses and naive impressions from the last 100
years.
Zen
Escher - shows context and content already enmeshed
Fractals
Mandala
Integralism grew, in part, from the failures of Transpersonal
Psychology. The main ideological problem was the disconnect arising
when higher spiritual stages from the ancient world were
unceremoniously dumped on the top of the developmental spectrum of
adult psychology. This, in retrospect, was inaccurate in several ways
-- but it did open the ways toward a new cultural platform. Similarly,
we have no strong reason to think emergent art will resemble the zen
garden, the haiku, the tibetan mandala or the cosmic-meditational
poetry of the sufis. Yet the disconnect between today's emergence and
the peak flowerings of artistic work by the "wisest" and "most complex"
of the last few thousand years.
What are the requirements for a PPM art, generally speaking?
Requirements - Use of the 'gap' as a structural force; attempt to
exceed the co-presence of subject-object and content-context,
trans-cultural (properly "human") themes, attempted fusion of
pre-modern, modern and post-modern elements, The mistake that
charactterizes transpersonal psychology was the naive attempt to place
the traditional spiritual attainments atop the hierachy of normative
psycho-physiological development.
All PPM individuals (a bold claim!) have seen the unplanned moments of
"new perfection" in a television commercial, or a cartoon, or in the
deep forest, or in the presence of a secret beauty. They know when it
is being approached in any medium --and it may look about as far from
traditional art (pre-, modern, post-) as they did from each other.
It will also demonstrate a high degree of over-assimiliation in regard
to the characteristics of the previous phase. Therefore -- as was said
in the opening post of this thread -- an excessive embrace of the
unveiled meaninglessness that a given art can see within a particular
configuration renders it into a legimately "transparent" window to the
Divine/Nothing. Decontextualizating what was already decontextualized
is at work. The shell-forms of quasi-art that have haunted the world
in the guess of "contemporary" is not becoming passe. This is a work
of decades, if not centuries.
The evidence of what constitute the New Art must have correlates in the
experience of the artist's biography -- assuming each artifact to be
evidence of a moment's "subjective perfection." It must also have
correlates in the actually types of content, though this will be much
broader than can be presently visualized it will also meet the
need/location set by our old, even simplistic, inner marker for "higher
paradox." And there will correlates in the choice of medium and social
theme. Perhaps PPM art is aimed at technology merely glimpsed at in
the present, or upon such political ecologies as Beginning
Interplanetary Travel.
All these domains will show us the organic growth of the PPM art-plant.
At this time we must forgo the inevitable dissection of PPM into
mutiple phases. Some of
this work has already been done but as yet we are fully justified in
consolidating all P-PPMs within
the category of PPM. My own impression includes neolinguistic and
metalinguistic as falling between
PM and the post-linguistic phases. Simultaneity that exceeds the
relation of content-
context.
Lola Hiroshima
somewhat incoherent- i merely wanted to contribute something new to
the discussion. critiques welcomed. *
THE CONCEPT OF 'SURFACE' IN REGARDS TO PPM ART
I would like to introduce a category distinction in art between what
we will call the physical surface of a work and its conceptual
surface. We will do this in order to make clear the idea that modern
art draws the viewer to the pictoral surface while contemporary art
pushes the viewer beyond the surface. In a sense we can say that the
formal structures of contemporary art negate the work's primary, ie.
physical, surface. They act as a kind of anti-surface. But what is a
surface, why is this distinction necessary, and what implications can
we draw from it?
Firstly, all works of art have both a primary and secondary surface-
that is, a physical form or border, and a conceptual form or border.
In the dialectic between viewer and art, a modern work can be said to
have an almost exact equivalence between its primary and secondary
surface. That is, a viewer's awareness, when engaging a work, will be
led to, and held at, a point synonymous with the primary surface. Put
another way, the formal elements of the work express the conceptual
content as a function of the physical content, such as line, color,
and form.
Even though there is a readable conceptual statement, it barely
extends past the physical (or more accurately formal) surface of the
work. The implication of this is that the meaning of the work is
fully, or almost fully, contained within the means of that work's
expression. This is the most characteristic definition of what
constitutes a piece of modern art. So, if we can say this, then we
must conclude that there is a direct relationship between the surface
of a work and the meaning we can extract from it.
How do we characterize this relationship?
Well, a surface is merely a boundary, but a boundary of what?
Obviously it is not simply the edge of the physical space that an
object takes up, otherwise we would not be able to say that any
particular work has a meaning apart from its material presence. The
fact that we are indeed able to derive additional, and many would
argue 'deeper' meanings in a work, suggests that this boundary might
be more accurately described as the terminal point of the viewer's
awareness.
This is the point after which meaning cannot be generated- the outer
limit at which a work ceases to unveil its connections to deeper
strata of experience and association. The act of looking at a work of
art forms a kind of circuit between itself and the viewer, a feedback
loop between the encoded content of the work (ARTifact) and the
awareness of the viewer. Meaning is the function of the interaction
between these two poles (viewer<---->art). The greater a conceptual
space a work occupies the greater its surface and conversely its
meaning. There are several important equivalences at work here:
surface=meaning, meaning=awareness, surface=awareness. The question
is whether the limit of a viewer's awareness is determined by the work
itself, or by the limitations of the viewer? The answer would seem to
be both, so that a viewer has the potential to expand the conceptual
border, and thusly the meaning of a work, through their own actions,
and conversely, that a work can be arranged or organized in such a way
as to push a viewer's awareness past its previous limitations. Both
of these effects are mediated by associations which resonate between
the formal means of the work and the collective experiences of the
viewer.
Works which function in this capacity can be called Associative Art,
and share a great deal in common with poetry. Indeed, we might
characterize them as forms of purely visual poetry, utilizing
metaphors, similies, and references to encompass vast ares of visual-
mental terrain.
If carried far enough, formally speaking, an associative art work has
the capacity to negate itself by forming a border so fluid and porous
that the primary physical surface of the work is lost. In orther
words, the structure of the work points so far beyond its formal means
that its primary surface breaks down or collapses, leaving the
conceptual shell as a kind of vibrant remnant, drifting ghost-like
through a psychological space, utterly unlocatable as something
concrete.
It is in this way that we can consider PPM art as having no surface,
not because it lacks meaning through the viewer's awareness, but
because it formulates its own collapse through its means. Its surface
IS the viewer's awareness (not simply equivalent to it). Such a work
becomes a functional aspect of the viewer's awareness, contained
within them. The work becomes a kind of effect, an intangible
reproduction of some particular state or act of viewing.
Coco
flowers, the best of whom are on the verge of superseding the kingdom
of flowers and plants - perhaps even the Earth.
All nature is characterized by a quality of patterning, a "flavour" of
pattern which we call the Tao. If we don't know the word Tao... then we
call it "natural, beautiful and complex." Nature is, herself, always
trying to exceed her conditions and establish that strange, exquisite
form of feedback that constitutes the Encounter with Higher Order.
You can recognize Higher Order because it looks like "almost chaos"
and "meditatively beautiful".
Within the last 10,000 years of cultural history - within the cocoon
created when animals start to live inside a realm of simplistic
geometry, linear code, and "dumbed down" messages. This is a
curiously abnormal way of life for bodies, minds, hearts and - dare we
use the word? - souls.
Within this dubious realm there are still many attempts to resume the
Natural Ration - attempts call, variously - science, religion and
art. In all cases it must consist of an attempt to reconcile the
configuration of nearby material substances with the inherent
navigational urge toward biophililc computational patterning
thresholds.
The surface, or screen, upon which the artistic attempt is straining
to project itself is the same one that the Orchid uses. It is
Nietzsche's "Will to Power" and Socrates' "The Beautiful." And we all
know that if Nietzsche agrees with Socrates it must be really true.
Nietzsche hated that guy!
No - I give N. more credit with compassion than that. His project was
Sainthood. I have no problem conferring it upon him. And I'll lick
any manjack that disagrees!
Thank God I know that that sounds a little Gay.
A rare enough commodity, these days...
The recent cultural habits of painting, photography and film-making
use an unusually flat surface as their physical medium of
presentation. This inclines metaphors like "screen" or "surface" that
a dirt tree or a dendritic tree would take exception with. So this
surface - a lovely word - is dispersed through the universe like a
fine mist: surface potential nourishing mist for the face of dry old
matter.
The artistic structuring of phantasy in the human mind is a set of
"upgraded" thoughts that try to escape from being facts and rise
toward the Natural Ration. This gives them their peculiarly
distorted, yet fundamental, quality in the psyche. The field of life
- the orgonotic potential - provides the screen upon which these
phantasies are projected. It is also the screen of Art and of Love
and of Feasting... all the sensual pleasures of being.
This surface is not flat and certainly not neutral. It conforms to
the endlessly complex fractal organization principles of Great Nature
herself. It also brings with it the typical quality that one
experiences when face to face with a gorgeous Slipper Orchid.
It is the in-between of everywhere.
If we say that Art has two surfaces - one material and one "subjective-
conceptual" - then both these surface will transmit the same
teleological bias to everything appearing on those surfaces. Patterns
can be judged by approximation to the quality of the all-pervasive bio-
field. The longer, in general, is the life of an ARTifact , the more
it will have survived the estimating process.
A woMan looks at paint on a canvas. Here - not flat but close enough
- she observes paint smeared onto a canvas. The surface of the object
is cognized - a point where information is reflected toward the
intelligence. The (info)physical surface has some degree of success
in matching the Natural Ration. This is its quality as Art.
Configurations of substance that get close to the perfection-level of
healthy Nature are good works of Art.
The second screen, that of meaning, is the pattern of mental
stimulation correlated, through the brain systems, with the material
configuration. This can also be more or less aligned with the
directional telos of the universe's "magnetic" field.
This second screen is more apparent in recent art than in centuries
gone by. The presentation of "subjectivity" in the context of art led
the recognition of the artwork as an intervening surface. Much in
that way that seeing your own reflection alerts you to the existence
of a mirror. When the principle of subjectivity is associated with
the art... then it implies an intervening medium.
Post-modern has been a haphazard set of attempts to deal with the
presence of the "intervening medium." Retro Styles, Art as Hobby, Art
Therapy, Art Marketing, Blurring the Definition, etc. are attempts to
assimilate the surface.
The constantly glimpsed fact is that of an Other beyond the surface -
in some other dimension, neither forward to the object or back into
the viewer. It occupies the space that God occupies in good
cathedrals and the place that ambiguous women occupy in good
portraits.
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope!
The Other lies beyind (beyond, behind) the reflection of Self - which
tips you off to the 'surface' in the first place.
For tomorrow's art to succeed, it must revitalize the Natural Ration
in both the viewer's consciousness and the artist's creation. Thus a
cultural revival is called for. To solve for the revealed surface is
part of a general revivification of the cultural-historical cocoon by
technically encoding principles for shifting any context toward the
"docking frequency" of universal communion.
Art that succeeds the surface and attains "life," can build new
cultural energy. Healthily-minded citizens require re-naturalized
awareness in order to comprehend this energy, to feed on it
psychically and add intelligence to the process.
Evolutionary selection in favour of Peak Experiences is among many
trends associate with the teleological, qualitativist (TQ, like
McKenna) emergence of PPM principles.