Majorityrights Central > Category: Art & Design

Did I really see that?

I am one who tends to think that concern regarding homosexuality is exaggerated beyond its true importance in WN circles.

Perhaps because I was at one time confronted directly and from a complexity of different angles with the implication to myself, but having no doubt that I wasn’t, and wanting to be unburdened of any accusation’s tedium, I was forced to make efficient intellectual work of putting aside any such accusation, to master the ways in which the issue could be deftly set aside as it is - largely irrelevant.

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by Neil Vodavzny

Re-animating nature is another way of thinking of Whitehead’s conception of more or less “letting it be”. The ancient Greeks may well have thought of nature in a more animated sense than we do. Materials such as limestone and wood have an organic origin, and the sense of inherent dynamism may have come naturally (Greek temples evolved from wooden ones, retaining the organic sense). The Bible alludes to Man being moulded from clay, clay being the raw material for the potter’s wheel.

If nature wasn’t animate, even the greatest artist would be unable to let it be, so that’s probably a traditionalist view of art, ie, studying nature, life-drawing, landscape etc. Since the Renaissance, what seems to have happened is that nature has been corralled by science, so it is no longer the preserve of artists. Modern art is correspondingly thanatopsic, with no understanding of materials or craft, deathlike in its nihilism. Almost all traditionalist contemporary art is popular and commercial, where studying the essentials is a prerequisite. Art as a wordling or narrative form of myth-making is alive and well - in pop-culture.

A near-perfect instance of someone presenting a personal mythology through a mastery of various techniques and intricate craftwork, allied to subconscious or intuitive powers, is Patrick Woodroffe’s Mythopoeikon.  Just how far you can go with an etching is shown in Mickey’s New Home, a self-produced children’s book); depth and stop-out (to bleed the sky), then aquatint applied in graduated tone (creeping bite) mythopoeikon2. You know what they say about etchings, and this plate shows why. As you see from the illo, he’s essentially self-taught. What that means is he learnt a trade, the practical skills and techniques needed to become an artist who uses the subconscious, instinct and feeling. In fact, this applies to others in the field who work “in the school” of .. (comic artist/creator Rob Liefeld is routinely scorned for his naïve style but at least he possesses adequate skills, and the work has a sort of rough honesty).

Known primarily for sci-fi book jackets, here’s a typical multi-media effort, Neq The Sword (Piers Anthony, Transworld) mythopoeikon3.

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Neil Vodavzny

Having conscientiously done preliminary research for this part of The Maze on craftwork, I have to say that both Derek Whitehead and David Hamilton have a tendency to abstraction. Doubtless this goes with the territory, but it isn’t easy to sell such things except to the converted, it can be admitted. Some practical examples help to it make palatable, so I’ll attempt to weave those into the discussion.

Whitehead delves into the interrelation in Greek art of techne, praxis (production), and poiesis (world-founding). The work of art brings into being through a type of facility of production something imbued with the tension of spontaneity

Both the artist’s vision and the activity of production combine in the world-founding. It might not be recognized so much nowadays, but the aim of art is not expression. Up to the late Renaissance, it was more to do with apprenticeship, learning a trade then, after long years of strenuous graft, finally practising the craft and discipline of art-making.

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A-Symmetry as Semiotic of European Evolutionary Advance

Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.

While becoming the first geneticist to popularize Mendelism, William Bateson observed puzzlement in his colleagues over a strange morphological phenomenon in crustaceans.

His colleagues noted that some species of crabs have asymmetrical appendages, one being larger than the other, but when one of the pair was lost, another grew back in mirror image to the other. To this they were disposed to ask, how did the crab gain symmetry?

Through the extended analysis, Bateson hypothesized that his colleagues had been asking the wrong question. They should rather have been asking, “how did the crab lose asymmetry?”

It was in fact, in the course of this very investigation into the biological laws of symmetry that William Bateson first coined the term “genetics.”

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And from this inquiry he established “Bateson’s rule”, which asserts that when an asymmetrical appendage is regrown after loss, the resulting limb will be symmetrical, in mirror image with the other limb.

The rule by itself is not of particular relevance to our concerns for European ontology and nationalism. However, steps taken in ecological and cybernetic analysis and arrival at Bateson’s rule of morphology do have significant implications, suggesting hypotheses for semiotics of ecological (and ontological) correction -  including of human ecology.

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I came upon the work of Frederick Parker-Rhodes in my quest for the ideal computer language, which I have elsewhere on MR discussed in relation to Heidegger’s “as” structure and GW’s ontology project.  Recent work in theoretical physics has provided empirical validation to his “wildly eccentric” views—which managed to provide a priori derivations of the dimensionless scaling constants of physics from his ontology detailed in his book “The Theory of Indistinguishables”.  To be brief, there is his “combinatorial hierarchy” that derives from FRP’s attempt to find the underlying mathematical structure of what he called “wholesight”.

Below the fold is an excerpt from “Wholesight: The Spirit Quest” by Frederick Parker-Rodes…

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by David Hamilton

There is confusion about what art is. The qualities that make something art are intrinsic, not external. It is the artifice, the organising of elements, perspective, choice of colour etc, that make it art. The result is obtained by transforming reality and thus nature through human imagination and emotion and is realised by skill and technique.

The word Beauty (or beautiful) is descriptive if used as an adjective to express the response of the beholder to an object, or if used within a clear context; if used as an abstract noun it is universal, and therefore meaningless.

A significant difference between contemporary art and traditional art is the split between form and meaning. This Cartesian duality is the split between mind and body, subject and form. The split is in all the various forms and styles and substance and meaning, of the respective art forms. In architecture contemporary buildings look like objects they are not which is why they are given comic nicknames - The Gerkhin, The Cheese Grater, or Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral, The Mersey Funnel (aka Liverpool Metropolitcan Cathedral). The form is not related to function - the interior of a modern cathedral could be anywhere.

Traditional art develops within traditional forms and it develops the forms. In his Christian paintings of the fifties Dali adapted forms to his individual vision but they are recognisably traditional forms. Dali was a genius - contemporary artists are not. They need to shock to get recognition. Real Art grows out of tradition and provides sustenance, spiritual or worldly, for people rather than negative emotions like shock or offence that are harmful.

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