Retreat

Presenting below – some blog-cuttings by SARSPARlllA – a blogger who ‘approaches Borges’ as one of his followers has noted.

Brilliant, thoughtful writing from someone who looks like the contemporary James Cook.  And the entire world seen in fractals – incomprehensible, awe-inspiring, hurtful… A place to run away from – or rather, like in a vertigo trap – to escape to by retreating from…

Woken by five phone calls a night. Panicked, jealous.

The heat so enervating, my toes burned.

‘What do you think of Belen?’ Unable to lie.’It makes my heart hurt.’

Prehistoric turtles with diamond heads. With leaf heads, floating. Ayahuasca. A capuchin tied by the penis.

The attention Is gets, and that I’ve grown too old for; and the pleasant feeling of not resenting it.

The tiny frogs in the rain outside a sushi restaurant.

Slipping through black silt faeces in the floating village,dry season on the orillas of the Itayo river.

Everyone looks like Josue – delicate noses – when the Iquito tribe were wide-nosed.

Wanting desperately to do something to help lift them out of this poverty.

It’s beginning to hurt him more than it’s hurting me.

Partly, that’s because raw terror is making me block all thoughts of future, or of change, out. (it’s a coping mechanism, leave me be).

Partly it’s because running away is always the easier role than being run from.

I can’t help him much with that. He’s the one who made me choose. I could have managed half my life not choosing.

Do you speak ‘Twitter’ ?

What can I say? Blogging is a privilege, but blogging is also a luxury, which few can afford. Blogging means ‘time’ and a ‘longer meaningful statement’ – both goods more pricey than pure gold.

Few years ago, thousands of those caught in the Web for good were thrilled by this very opportunity – to be one’s own publisher and editor. Dozens of hospitable platforms hosted amateur and serious writers, journalists, thinkers who quickly found ingenious devices to gain more and more public, and to make their online hobby profitable or even – a sort of a permanent occupation.

Blogging-world has been, right from its birth, a faithful reflection of the market as it evolves everyday – it’s got its ‘celebrities’ and ‘niche’ authors, its outstanding examples of intellectual ballet and creativity, as well as the pools of pure spam. Blogging has changed the way humans think and express their everyday experience. Blogging was and is all about the challenge, beauty, mystery, wonder, torment and curiosity of living ‘here and now’.

Then something even more groundbreaking has occurred. Social networking services like “Facebook’ (FB) and recently “Twitter” failed to become, as their critics predicted, online hangout places for teens with lots of strong language and weak sense of any significance whatsoever… If any of us has ever dreamed about the supernatural power to know the thoughts of people as they spark – here it goes… Take “Twitter” – one can easily follow a scientist from Washington, a politician from Warsaw, a journalist from London, an unknown brilliant x from y who brights up a day by his ideas… One is able to share all the worthy, meaningful bits and pieces of one’s online and offline experience as it goes with friends and strangers. And this very common, hyper-democratic spirit and habit of free-sharing of one’s humanity – thoughts, emotions, beliefs, tastes, choices is possibly the most important, most positive and amazing aspect of this comparatively new Web development.

Generally, one could write essays and books about these phenomena (and many do). As a member of an art-world I’m simply overwhelmed and enchanted by their potential, especially when considering theoretical and practical benefits that art and artists may gain. If art is all about communication, about projecting our humanity – what happens online now is like a new, never-seen language in making – fractured, grass-rooted, highly experimental code of communication that a man of 21st century chooses to express himself in.

Does contemporary art speak this very language, does it follow closely enough? Or maybe – IT IS the thing per se – from time to time I cannot escape the impression, that by making my own mind a public venue, by contemplating the same condition from a distance thanks to others generosity – I take a part in a deeply artistic experience. What’s the difference after all, for a contemporary of Rembrandt to see his/her world reflected and transformed in his canvases to a point of alchemical strangeness, and – for us right now – to experience the same when literally – ‘reading minds’ of ‘real’ people in a virtual realm; the effect is the same – uncanny illumination of one’s own power and futility – the essence of all art.

“Floating Culture” and the Thickness of things…

Check out these two last posts on Henri Art Magazine:

In Hyperaesthetics – 19 sixty he describes our culture – POMO (Postmodernism) of an unacceptable lightness:

We are somnambulists and voyeurs, lost in the hallucinatory world of light-speed and lenses. We are no longer grounded. We float in the digital subjective, our voices not quite our own, because we have merged into the great electronic collective. (…) We lack depth and heft. We are light as a feather on the breeze – a world of Forrest Gumps. (…) We signify rather than converse. We develop games rather than create poetics. We program applications rather than create mythologies. Our vision determines nothing in the free floating vacuum of space.

Hm, interesting… It reminds me about Japanese Ukyio-e – floating world, floating culture from 19th. century, which Hokusai captured in his great woodcuts. That was the world of hedonism, light-weight and extravagance, ‘unbearably light’ as M. Kundera would say. In Hokusai’s ” Great Wave” a disaster strikes dwarfing the frantic efforts of men in boats, who are about to perish. A big metaphor and vision at the same time?

Then, Jerry Saltz is being quoted as commenting on the “Generational: Younger than Jesus” (what an awkward title, after all) exhibition:”These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. I would disagree – that “Man is the measure of all things” – that’s nothing new; in fact, it has been said in 5th B.C. (Protagoras) and has been repeated endlessly in different forms from then till now. But, hardly ever before man was less ‘sublime’, if one takes traditional/dictionary meaning of the word as : elevated, noble, lofty, awe-inspiring, majestic and out-of-this-world… Well, one could agree on the last adjective… Floating in today’s cyber-space, creating avatars and entire parallel worlds/lives online, living in the complex, globalized, absolutely commercialized space – the contemporary man is, indeed, out-of-this-world. But, if the world he inhabits belongs to the ‘sublime’ experience is rather a questionable point…

Another post: Rough Trade – Thick is a logical consequence of the first one. We are too light, our art is too light… Solution? We have to become thicker… Actually, I find it fascinating – this author from another continent, another generation expresses, in slightly different terms, what I defined as: painting independent ‘living organisms’,  rather than just another image/representation. We echo each other intuitions, as if this mood and a need of a change was in the air:

It is not the “fresh air…around the painting” that we need to be looking at. We’ve had fresh air around painting for FAR TOO LONG. We need fecund, thick air in the painting itself. We need to be panting, gasping for air, in front of the painting. And it’s here that we get to the thickness of things. It’s like when one holds a thing in one’s hand – it has heft and weight, volume and form. It has temperature and texture, it asserts its existence. These are exactly the same things that happen when we look at things without the critical play, when we look at things straight away and it should happen when we look at art. We should see the Thickness of things and by seeing it, we should feel it…

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Henri – Mark Stone – is an American painter. To see his personal site click here.

Studying Art (17) – Why do you paint?

I’ve been challenged with this innocent question recently, and though I came up with an immediate answer at that moment ‘of truth’, I still keep pondering over it now, as if looking for a deeper, fuller view…

Why do you paint? Why do I paint?

My photographs say most of what I want to convey, my writing could explain the rest… I enjoy constructing installations, and I’ve got a truly creative time exploring all the new media available… Yet, I’ve been coming back to painting like a prodigal son, despite,  or – perhaps – because of everything, that has been given and taken away from me, due to my pursuit of this particular way… That ‘everything’, which I find almost beyond any description…

I remember being praised for that ‘loyalty’ to the medium, and my answer – quick, almost sub-conscious, was:
- Well, we cannot escape ourselves, can we?…
And then I added:
- In forty years time, I will probably still be painting…

Strange, how sure I was about it at that time, having only few studies in paint executed and still being largely ignorant about the most basic things…

I’m far from crafting any cryptic messages about the mystical connections between a painter and his materials, between his psyche and that angelic ‘monster’ – the painting, which always proves to be stronger than its creator… There is something true about it and those, who paint can grasp it… Yet, there is much more…

Painting has got that power to create, and abolish, entire worlds… just now… And the responsibility for that is a part of an adventure… Just like the all  pain involved into it…

That was my ‘raw’,  intuitive answer to the title-question. I meant by that, that each time I take a paint-loaded brush to live a mark on canvas I’m in a charge of an universe, which is out there, waiting to be created in me, and – through me – in an artwork…

It can take a minute or years; it can cost nothing or life and health; it can result in generation-changing discoveries and it may end up in a private despair only… Yet – there is that creative, never-ending, always profound challenge no other artistic medium, I know, can offer to a searching mind and courageous spirit… The challenge to capture the essence of life and death, humanity and divinity, what has ever existed and what is possible yet…

Painting is my Theory of Everything – it aims at explaining and linking all the matter of my consciousness (and unconscious) into an independent, evocative system – a Cosmos taming and denying Chaos .

Painting is the projection of my humanity, it’s a story of a human being… No other medium (except maybe music) appears to be so close to the human nervous system – I paint with my nerves, I paint with my blood and cells… I paint as a living being – living organism to create another living organisms – self-sufficient microcosms.

I paint to save and to be saved…

And you – Why do YOU paint?…

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“Fractal Ontology” – Blog on WordPress

Here is the new fantastic blog I’ve just discovered – FRACTAL ONTOLOGY. ‘Powered’ by a formidable erudition and the searching spirit by two young guys: Joseph Weissman and Taylor Adkins.

These two gentlemen – graduates of philosophy, have an ambition to.. and here, if I may dare to give the voice to them:

So, basically, our idea is this: it is possible to plot a complex path, tracing connections through both clinical and critical theory, towards a new kind of science — a de-centered, non-hierarchical science, capable of grasping and bridging the ruptures between cybernetics, language and society.

What we’ve been doing: mapping out connections between psychoanalysis and philosophy to other fields and disciplines, including theoretical biology, cultural studies and artificial intelligence. We also provide notes, outlines, translations and textual analyses of important contemporary theoretical questions, works and writers.

Above that, they use images – photographs, fine art paintings or digital art – in a way, that actually made me think about impossible – that pure art is made purely to… serve other reasons than its own sake – that it exists to illustrate and enhance ideas that science and philosophy convey in words, graphics and numbers; and vice versa – pure art can and should be made to inspire scientific breakthrough-s.

What a boring, small-minded talk after all – to preach self-importance and superiority of lets say – painting or sculpture – in a clear isolation from what may be regarded as its actual ‘womb’ – I mean all the dynamics of a particular TIME, a moment in the TIME – with all the theories (all major and affluent from the fields of philosophy, science, psychology etc), as well as the cultural and political movements influencing an artist with his/her consent or without it…

And what is that ‘fractal ontology’ after all, and how it may be interesting for visual artists? Well, those of you who may miss the points made by Weissman and Adkins or may find them too cryptic, I will try to explain in my next posts (without any promise though)…

Coming back…

Photo by K. Skonieczna

Yep. Want to say ‘sorry’. Please – do accept that…lemon as a gift… and things like that… Don’t know why actually, don’t know what for. Yet – feel it’s a right thing to do.

No, I’m not going to assure you with woolly excuses (‘have been busy’ and stuff like that), instead – I will just do what, I think, you all there expect me to do – I will continue writing and sharing my view on art, my art, myself. After all, our common humanity is all we have, only sometimes we forgot, how important are those little steps: few words each day, one smile, one or two communicated meanings, a value shown and defended…

With me it’s all the same problem – wanting too much of myself, dumping a great deal of everything I’ve managed to achieve, both as an art student and a person shaping her identity…

Chasing the perfection, the excellence, being to impatient to ponder over ‘small things’, silly matters, immature attempts… And to share them? No – I would not put THAT to my curriculum…

Well, it’s an ongoing struggle, yet – I’ve got over that particular difficulty a little… What I’ve realized recently is, that this web-space of mine has become a bit like a public venue, more than just a personal site. In a sense, I let it open to my ‘invisible’ guests to come and visit, both longing and being frighten because of that possibility – to have dozens of eyes focused on my writing. I like to sense this very online ‘creation’ of mine, this blog, having its own life – new visitors coming despite of me abandoning it. I like to feel just like one of you, my readers, co-creating something what asks, what needs to be created or re-created in order to have our life enriched, our spirits ennobled, our hearts warmed and our minds challenged.

What I promise now is that I can’t promise anything. Thanks for you out there for dropping in here and spending your priceless time reading this.

Liminality in Art (1)

This is meant to be an attempt in coining a new term in the Art Theory field.

Curiously enough, the term Liminality continues not to be recognised by the modern dictionaries of English; even though numerous (stated below) researchers have been using it in academic papers. It doesn’t exist as an aesthetic concept or any distinguished phenomenon in the contemporary fine art. Yet, what I would like to claim and what is the reason of this article is my knowledge that this very notion has been persistently influencing the way of defining and interpreting art of the last decades at least. Though never or very rarely (in its adjective form of the liminal) applied as such by the art critics and scholars it has been circulating in the air each time the hybridity, borderline qualities, formlessness or intersemiotics of the Postmodernism has been loathed or admired.

From Latin limen meaning threshold ‘liminality’ is an existential (metaphysical) subjective, state and realm of hovering ‘between and betwixt’ of two (or more) different planes, spaces and/or existential qualities. First described in anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner) as a social theory of the liminal states – spaces of a ‘temporary outcast’ when an individual or a group is being placed by the society on its margin in a ritual of purification and/or recognition. It has got also its usage in the contemporary psychology where the liminal means sub- or unconscious state with one’s sense identity being ‘hold’ or dissolved to some extent. In contemporary philosophy J. Derrida  has been called the ‘philosopher of the liminal’ due to his deconstruction attempts of the integral and solid tissue of materiality (more about it in the next parts of this series).

In visual art the ‘threshold’s ‘ aesthetics has been described on the theatre, cinema and performance field (notably S. Zizek, S. Broadhurst) and some curatorial and critical attempts has been made to embrace the liminality of the contemporary artistic expression done by more or less traditional media. Yet, it’s basically the ‘no man’s land’ when painting or sculpture is considered – those realms remain, for the today’s critique and theory (and not surprisingly, by any means) immune to any ‘revolutionary’ ‘new’ aesthetic refurbishment; it became a sort of an ideological cliche – that it’s more convenient to blame painting for its impotency (it’s ‘dead’ anyway, why bother then?…) than to inject any potent conceptual spirit into it by an affirmative reflection.

When J-F. Lyotard has called Postmodernity the nascent state, the state of a permanent ‘becoming’ (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) he basically admitted its innate liminal character; and those artworks that seek to address this condition (both deliberately or not) are probably best recognised for their aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) of incompleteness – sculptures/installations look as if the artist ran out of the materials to finish them to a decent level; paintings seem to be painfully ‘hanged’ by their own guts with indescribable forms, unidentifiable colours and freaky techniques; videos cry out for any structure, even a hint of a narrative. Their ‘becomingness’ is the only existence they know and it comes invariably as disquieting or even disturbing for the audience. No without a reason the primitive societies considered the liminal states as dangerous, unclean (Turner); and those affected were isolated ‘pro publico bono’.

As hazardous and monstrous in moments as the liminality in art (and beyond it) seems to appear it is also probably the only truly creative state, which – if used wisely – can result in some profound discoveries and metamorphoses. This fructile chaos and the storehouse of possibilities (Turner) is a goldsmith’s workshop of the contemporary art; even though some purists rise an alarm that the state of the constant flux and indeterminacy (where ‘everything goes’) will annihilate all the miserable bits of art that left – let’s be positive… Art is best cared for if it’s accepted just as it appears and shapes itself through the mill of the human spirit; even if refuses to ‘become’ and fit any new uniform – so what?… As far as  minds and hearts are enflamed by it, even with a doubt, even with a turmoil – it fulfills its calling of the ‘fifth element’ – the force of life and death, possibility and danger, sanctus and profane…

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In the further studies on Liminality in Art (being a part of my studies on the Contemporary Art) I would bring closer the views of the scholars, philosophers mentioned above, as well as I will try to illustrate the theory with some artworks.

Copyright Issues for bloggers…

Here is few issues to consider for all of us:

(as outlined by Georgia K. Harper, Manager, Intellectual Property Section for the University of Texas System Office of General Counsel):

1) What is the character of the use of my image/text/video?
2) What is the nature of the work to be used – educational/entertaining/’mature’?
3) How much of the work will you use?
4) What effect would this use have on the market?
And my own reflections:

- do you intent to present the image/work in a way it was meant (by its creator/s) to be presented/read?

- why do you use the image/work – is it because you want to illustrate/stress your educational point or due to the pure ‘decoration’ of your site?

- how clearly/fairly  the credits to the authors are displayed?

- have you made an attempt to contact the owner/s, how long are you prepared to wait for the response?

- have you considered your own intellectual property to be shared, how would you inform your readers/viewers about it?

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Copyright may apply to a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or “works”. Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but these can include poems, theses, plays, other literary works, movies, dances, musical compositions, audio recordings, paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, software, radio and television and broadcasts.

Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed. For example, the copyright to a Mickey Mouse cartoon restricts others from making copies of the cartoon or creating derivative works based on Disney’s particular anthropomorphic mouse, but doesn’t prohibit the creation of other works about anthropomorphic mice in general, so long as they’re different enough to not be judged copies of Disney’s. In many jurisdictions, copyright law makes exceptions to these restrictions when the work is copied for the purpose of commentary or other related uses (See Fair Use, Fair Dealing). Meanwhile, other laws may impose additional restrictions that copyright does not — such as trademarks and patents.

Copyright laws are standardized somewhat through international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as the European Union or World Trade Organization require their member states to comply with them.

Text in italics reprinted from (emphasis mine):

wikipedia

The IQ test… (Whilt 11)

Attention:

The original post has been deleted.

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Well, what I have done was to participate in one of those frivolous IQ tests available in an abundance on the Web, than – being over-enjoyed with the results (haven’t you known, that you are a genius, after all – now everything is clear…) then (goodness gracious…) I have put the outcome on this blog, in this very section – what have I learned today (whilt)?…

Pardon me, that was pathetic – even done for fun – and this is, what I have really learned today – that you need to be highly critical about everything what you are about to publish, that the responsibility for your text/work online should be not less stressed and imposed than your taking charge for all your activities in the ‘real life’.

I have never removed a post yet… have you? Do you consider your published posts to be ‘set in stone’ – or maybe, you would rather come back to them to verify issues once firmly stated, and – to modify/delete if needed? How about the ethics – we share/borrow/lend/use each other property crossing the boundaries which would be much more difficult to cross in the ‘real life’. Can it be named as clearly ethically ‘wrong’ or ‘ok’ – if our intentions are those of the self- and the public education and promoting the values/thoughts we believe in – all without any financial profits?

I keep pondering over these issues. I feel bad and ‘right’ at the same time illustrating my post with an image/video of an artwork, that doesn’t belong to me. What, if the artist doesn’t wishes it; yet – how to reach him/her – that would make the blogging morbidly time-consuming (I have tried, of course) and free of any fun; just completely devoid of that very characteristic intuitive spirit of improvisation, which makes writing/reading blogs so rewarding. To cease to write about and to display art? Who, on Earth, would like to be confined to his/her productions only? I would rather prefer  to enrage or to disgust all the guardians of the web-ethics…

Well, have I passed my IQ test? What is all about, after all – to label my mental ability with the number assigned by a computer after some mathematical calculations? That in itself is insulting…

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Metamorphoses, little changes, make-up…

As my loyal readers have probably noticed, this site is undergoing little changes, metamorphoses, make-up – however you can put it.

These activities are basically inspired by my new ‘more commercial approach’ (read my latest post about it) towards art in general and this blogging in particular. I’ve just become aware that this art-devoted blog has no ‘art’ or ‘blog’ word in its name, and that I mention the subject only vaguely on the ‘mother-page’. Consequently, most of my readers keep ‘bumping’ into this site by an accident, lured by images or ‘names’, catch-phrases (not always art-related) that I’ve used. Well, cannot be otherwise – can it? Who, after all, would associate “Terra Incognita” with ‘art’, ‘art studying’, ‘art reflection’ etc.? And why it took me so long to get it???

I write for people, who would appreciate fully the issues being addressed here. And I need them, their critique and opinions to develop. That’s why I put “ART NEWS” subtitle to the mother “TERRA INCOGNITA” name. The “News” is a powerful catch-word – it belongs to the most popular tags in the WordPress  – blog-world (beside LIFE, POLITICS and others), and generally – searching engine-wise. It corresponds well with the design of my page (I chose it among others due to it simple, newspaper-like appeal) and, hopefully, it will motivate me to keep my writing fresh, concise, animated, revealing – just like the good news are.

I’m going also to change my image-header (I intend it to be like a ‘logo’ for my latest artwork, therefore – adequate changes will be adopted). What will not change? – well TERRA INCOGNITA and its main author – Katarzyna Skonieczna will, hopefully, stay the same, in its general policies and the ethos that animates them…

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