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Subject: Re: What planet are you proposing for this experiment?
Author: [EMAIL PROTECTED] at INTERNET-MAIL
Date: 7/27/98 5:46 PM
Eva Durant wrote:
Art is the eye of the beholder. Science is not.
Could you give a shread of evidence for your
new-age mumblings about synergic focus?
I did. I.A. Richards book on Practical Criticism a classic in the field. I fi
nd the comment about
new age
in the context of the work that I do "off-putting." Do you mean to do that? H
owever, if you want
to put
down the New Age people, (of which I am not one) then you must talk also the wor
ks of
Neuro-physiologist Carl Pribram who has done much of the seminal research in the
brain including the
works on holographic connections that the local sci-fy shows call holo-suites.
The work on the
limbic
connections to the psychology of the individual was done by Pribram as well as
Moshe Feldenkrais and
has been made practical through the work of Ilana Rubenfeld. All three spent t
heir time giving
workshops at the Esalen Institute in California, the fountainhead of the New Age
. Their
groundbreaking work has now been made a part of the official canon of psycho-ph
ysical therapy and
brain research, because their work "worked" in the field of "sports medicine" w
here the "properties"
were literally worth millions of dollars. Of course it had been working for ove
r 100 years in dance
with injuries and health patterns, but dancers are inexpensive and replaceable
in this society,
athletic property is not.
As for art being in the eye of the beholder. That is not an artistic statement.
I follow the
definitions of
the composer Arnold Schoenberg who taught it to my piano and composition teacher
Bela Rosza. He
said all "Art is a psycho-physical pursuit of values within a medium" (sound, gr
aphics, movement,
literature, etc.). He also said that good art was not life but like a mirror,
must be both "true,
the best
possible of it's kind (beauty) and be able to be repeated." Is it profound to
say that language is
in the
ear of the hearer or does it make more sense in language and art to say that it
is "in the perception
of
the knower that it becomes art, as does a chair or a nuclear power plant? It
is in the lack of
sophistication about art's premises that we get entangled in such things.
We should realize that it is
a statement about "complexity" an ancient artistic concept about skill and peda
gogy, recently made
popular by the engineers. But even the engineers admit that complexity disappea
rs when one knows
how to solve the problem. Therefore it becomes art, in the minds of the audienc
e, as the person
learns
its ways and its integrity(good art) or lack of such (bad art). The Aztecs cal
led it "carrion art"
because
it's lack of integrity defrauds the people. But this has nothing to do with wh
ether the art is real
anymore
than a chair is not a chair when confronted by a turtle. The problem here as I
see it is domains of
knowledge in the human existance.
The modern Westerner generally agrees with the following three domains, as a tra
ditional Cherokee my
table has four legs rather than three, the fourth being spirituality but what fo
llows is IMO a good
definition
of those three domains from writings of Harry Hillman Chartrand, Chief Economist
of Kultural
Econometrics International. He says that there are:
"three domains of knowledge: the natural science and engineering(NSE); the human
ities and
social sciences(HSS); and, the arts...... NSE is generated by the scientific me
thod characterized by
replicability and objective testing. It corresponds to primary knowledge of qua
ntities or
facts.....Progressiveness is vertical, i.e. new knowledge displaces old, and by
intolerance of
difference,
i.e. progress is a process of reducing error, replicability is all."
Chartrand continues: "HSS are concerned with understanding the human world.....
For the
humanities.....understanding is all. For the social sciences, .....understandi
ng can be extended to
control, i.e. social engineering and is concerned with secondary knowledge of qu
alities.......(&)
assessment of interactions between natural and human environments.....HSS knowle
dge is generated by
'research'....statistics are used in social science,.....a modified scientific m
ethod must be applied
because even basic tenets of the SSs cannot be quantitatively tested......resear
ch is relative to
time and
space,....is not value-free......Progressiveness....is not vertical...New knowle
dge does not
necessarily
displace the old......Progress in HSS is characterized by increasing tolerance o
f difference, i.e.
all things
being equal, the more one knows of different countries, cultures and peoples, th
en the more tolerant
of
differences one becomes."
The third leg of Chartrand's table is art: "if natural science is the study o
f the outer, material
world; then
art is the study of the inner, subjective world. (This is a long way from sayi
ng that art is
subjective.
REH) If the sciences involve the search for objective truth, then the arts in
volve search for
subjective,
value-laden truth. Scientific knowledge depreciates, while knowledge in the ar
ts tends to
appreciate
through time. If science uses reductive methods, then art generates aesthetic
knowledge - a gestalt
sense of wholeness or, rightness."
Chartrand concludes with: "Metaphorically, the spiral ladder (of culture) is hel
d together by
interactions of
the three domains of knowledge. Each plays a role in defining a culture. NSE f
orms the hard rungs
of
the ladder permitting reality testing of values and beliefs......the 'how to' ch
ange the material
world. HSS,
on the other hand, tells a culture 'what' is worth doing relative to it's value
set.
In this way, HSS constrains NSE. Similarly, art contextualizes NSE and HSS provi
ding them with
emotional valuation of 'rightness.' " Report The American Arts Industry, Size
& Significance. H.H.
Chartrand. 1992.
So as an artist I just thought I would set the context and the emotional valuati
on of rightness for
all of the
above since that is what I am supposed to do.
All images we create with our brains are some form
of reflection/response to the reality around us.
I agree but I would add through the filter of genetics(perceptual talent) and me
mory. This is
especially
true of certain images like circles that are impossible to percieve by the human
eye but are built
from
memory with the help of the haptic, kinetic and kinesthetic processes.
Whatever causes our hallucinacuions, magic mushrooms
or sleep deprivations, they are just the same
images we can create while imagining and dreaming.
Well said, like a true scientist, except like those 200,000 UFO sightings in the
U.S. over the last
sixty
years, reality is beginning to crowd objectivity. In fact it is likely that obj
ectivity itself is a
cultural
combination of factors. I would never say that a truck is to be ignored when st
anding in the road,
but the
meaning and significance of that truck is definitely lodged in the memory. But
what about those
visions
of cattle by children on vision quests in the West before they had ever heard of
or seen them? Or
those
monkeys learning to accomplish a task on one island and then the one's next door
or across the globe
learn the same task within the year? With such a primitive knowledge of the wa
y that information is
carried and so much of it being lodged in culture and other things. We have eve
n found the NSE world
struggling with the line between thought and matter. In economics we have the s
ame battle lines be
drawn between Physical and Intellectual Capital. We even hear the same argument
s being made.
Most of the time a total irrecallable shambles,
rarely something our brain manages to reconstruct
as a creative thought.
In art we say "right! the muse is a bitch! But if it doesn�t have integrity wit
h itself then it
isn't good art and probably isn't art but artifice. "
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
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