Dear Don,
Let me come in from 'Gilbert and George'. They were friends at St Martins
School of Art in central London. One of the ways that they re-present
their ideas is through what looks like great stained glass windows, the
colours are transluscent and there are black edges to all the major forms,
which are photographic. In one shocking work (readers, put you wings on
your ankles, leave the ground for a moment and 'suspend' your self;-) they
stand full figure and full frontal in suits (they always seem to wear
suits or are naked. - they are always naked under the suits;-) and between
them stands a human size 'faeces'.... It is indeed a shocking image Dwig.
They have a friend and chappion in the form of a Mr Livingstone. He is a
typical Londoner. Our Mayor. He is a man with a conscience. Some people
don't like him. He peels off one of the layers to the semantical nature of
this triple portrait. The meaning behind a meaning. If you will ;-) The
message is that in the third world hundreds of millions of little children
live daily on less calorific energy intake than is in the average faeces,
represented (probably on of their own since they have massive artistic
integrity).
Now this from someone else written while they were a student but would now
be about seventy odd years old..
"What chance is there for us to find some form for our creativity, some
test of our talents, some response to our efforts? Who is there to
encourage, praise, teach? We must plod on, our own worst critics, trying
desperately to find some human contact to whom our work means something
other than a ritual form. We do not merely want the recognition that we
have created something if it communicates nothing. The fact of creation
without its actual acceptance is nothing but the conventionalized crumb
thrown out by the bureaucratic system to the masses who need some solace
or consolation to make up for their prostitution of their individualities
to the group's will. Who wants merely such crumbs or such pats on the head
for feeble efforts to find himself in the social labyrinth. Who is
satisfied with communicating nothing more than form, no content or
meaning. Who is willing to give up the struggle to achieve some kind of
closeness with others when the barrier of routinization and
standardization ever widens the gap between humans. Who is willing to be
merely a position in a system, a role, a status, a function? The greatest
danger of all lies in the fact that we may forget or lose awareness of
what we are trying to communicate. Not merely our actions but our
reactions come under the pressure of convention and ritual and all that is
left of our creative urge and need for expression is the motivational
force, the power, the need, the urge, the energy without any content to
serve as its vehicle. We may struggle to express but there is nothing to
express, there is nothing to communicate to another. Yet we know that
there must be, if the urge is so strong, but that the content has been
obscured, perspective has been lost, and we no longer know what to say or
how to say it. We have lost the connections between feelings and the ways
to express these feelings; our words and gestures are empty forms devoid
of personal content, carriers only of rituals and rules. We turn to other
forms, but we do not know whether we are making contact with another. For
we have lost the power of recognizing meaning just as we have lost the
power to communicate meaning. We struggle mutually to establish contact,
but we talk past each other. Our aims are the same but we have lost the
power to implement them, and perhaps out of this grows the bitter
consequence that we do not even recognize our aims to be the same. And
then the effort to understand another may itself be lost and with it the
chance to make the contact that we long for so desperately. The system
steps in once again to make the personal impersonal and to restrict human
ties to organizational lines. What has happened to sympathy ... the
willingness to assume that another has something to communicate, the power
to create something that is good and useful and personal. Something that
will enable [us] to make contact with him as he really is rather than the
shell which is his position in the system. Where is the patience necessary
to understanding another. Why have we become so asymmetrical... we try to
communicate and want patience and sympathy from another, but we have not
enough ourselves to permit another to express himself. Thus we go about
mutually defeating the very purposes which we are trying so hard to
implement."
What Ken Livinstone notes, in the larger systemic picture is that people
are shocked by the image of the faeces and yet strangely unshocked,
uninsulted by the carnage among the living and dying children. As he
notes, the children we can 'sweep under the carpet;-) '
I wonder, can we?
If you saw in a day what I see in a day...what would change, oh reader?
The 'fine arts' if they are to include Ovid, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, Joyce, Giotto, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Goya, Rembrandt, van Gogh,
Picasso, Donne, Whitman....is an 'open' book.
I was listening to a holy man speak about 'information' and 'knowledge',
not connected with any special ;-)forum, just speaking to a few million
peoples;-)..open to whoever might be there. " Information becomes
knowledge when the 'first person' reveals something of himself to the
'second person'." In this way, love, is the deepest fount of knowledge
pro-creation ;-) IMHO Rosch is not original when she writes that, "Our
sciences need to be performed with the mind of wisdom." (Scharmer and
Rosch 2000) It is unimaginable for me to think that the ten thousand or
more years of 'fine-art' has lived without almost entirely expressing the
'mind of wisdom'.
There is a deep human link between the worthless (prima materia) and the
most prized 'gold', or deep 'lapis lazuli' of a more 'rooted' wisdom. Part
of wisdom is to know which masters to follow in the creative arts. I see
you have at least one you follow close. My personal sense is that he
follows another, as close as his-self, more closely, in whom he confides
his 'informationings'.
Bohm and others before and after have spoken of an interface;-) ....maybe
you can just recall an image entitled Mixing Fileds Outfoldenmentality
created literally within a de Lange mail? Point is, Bohm knew he could
think at a level that make inside is outside and outside is
inside.(Dostoevsky said that...see;-) so that Bohm (who was prepared to
engage living artists as well as dead ones;-) knew that his entire body
was capable of thinking. (Imagine applying that doing of knowing and
knowing of doing to a living orgnaization;-)...When Bohm spoke with
Einstein about this he noted that Einstein used to make mirco body
movements to educe thinking ;-) ...if you get close to me you will notice
I often 'hum' unmelodic tunes at an almost sub audial level...and my feet
move around a lot when I write...for some, sometimes for me... when I
write and reads they text lifts off the page, or conversely disappears,
completely collapses from view. Colours and forms can do the same, come
and go. Some call this a form of numinousity, (huge grin at the typo). A
new word Don?
Goethe said all this much better;-)
"The light calls forth an organ that is akin to itslef, the eye forms
itself by the light for the light, so that the inner light can meet the
external light." (Farbenlebre, Didcatic Part. Introduction)
In the next ten years I predict about twenty five billions dollars will be
spent by organisations (sic) on n various forms of 'tomfoolery' (see Bosch
on the blind leading the blind and note above all, beyond the crassness of
it, the compassion of the artistry)...under the names of Complexity
Management, Knowledge Management Version 2.0, Complex KM Simplified for
those with less time....Complex KM Simplified for those with the Knowledge
that time does not exist;-)
and so it will go on. While it goes on the twenty five million children
will have died.
Here is some wisdom from Maturana. Well, whichever is the case, love is
the cure as it opens out intelligence for reflection and gives us the
possibility to choose, and as we choose in awareness of our human
condition, love becomes our basic reference, because the biology of love
is still out ultimate ground and source of recovery in any distress
through our realizations as human beings."
KM experts, LO experts, Complexity experts, guru or knot;-) what does your
intelligence tell you about the measure of 25 millions souls per annum.
Why do we get worked up about people losing jobs with secure societies
when the very world is falling apart around our very knees?
While I was writing this I was not painting..or was I?
Love
Andrew
> Andrew writes in LO29661:
> > Don, I think you are perhaps in your 'conducting a dialogue with the
> > future' making a very pro--found;-) statement. That would require some
> > profound capacity of imagination, would it knot ...?
>
> Or the ability to "cast a wide net" in thinking about self as located in
> space(s) and time. (Or is that perhaps just imagination? Hmmm, knotty
> thoughts... 8^)
>
> > If I said that, the future has already begun the whispering...would that
> > surpise you Don? For example, artists in the seventies were sending out
> > post cards among small networks to which each in turn;-) would amend
> > creatively, new art emerges, all is changed nothing diminished...(Flexus,
> > On Kawara, Gilbert & George)...If you take a deeper look at impressionism
> > as a response to technological changes you will see that, generally, in
> > 'presencing' paradigm shifts, this place is, about, one hundred and
> > twenty years short of complementary fine art learning.
>
> Which to me is a major reason that you're so valuable to this list, as an
> umlomo to the rich learnings of fine art(s).
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