Platonic forms: example I - Machine art MOMA 1934

Philip Johnson with Alfred barr

'When Alfred Barr and I presented Machine Art at The Museum of Modern Art in 1934, we included Plato’s comments from Philebus in the preface to the catalogue. Plato states that the beauty of geometric forms such as the circle and straight line is absolute. And we believed that at the time. Now, I feel differently. Such things are relative. I am a follower of Heraclitus. The only absolute is change itself.'
Note: but how to measure change if nothing is stable?

The website offers to quotes: one from Plato's Philebus and a quote by Corbusier wherein he speaks of a architecture as a language of forms.

'By beauty of shapes I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the beauty of living figures or of pictures, but, to make my point clear, I mean straight lines and circles, and shapes, plane or solid, made from them by lathe, ruler and square. These are not, like other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely'
Plato. Philebus

'L'architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des volumes assemblés sous la lumière. Nos yeux sont faits pour voir les formes sous la lumière; les ombres et les clairs révèlent les formes; les cubes, les cônes, les sphères, les cylindres ou les pyramides sont les grandes formes primaires que la lumière révèle bien; l’image nous en est nette et tangible, sans ambiguïté. C'est pour cela que ce sont de belles formes, les plus belles formes. Tout le monde est d’accord en cela, l’enfant, le sauvage et le métaphysicien. C'est la condition même des arts plastiques.'
Note: the intimate connection of the visible with the 'formes primaires'. The visble is therefore not disconnected with perfection. The Platonic forms are everywhere, not only in some sort of heaven.

Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture

On art: functions. New artworks for a new era

26-12-2008
In Irak: plan to destroy all visual remains of Sadam Hoessein period. Place new artworks there as a symbol fr a new era.

On art: the greeting by Bill Viola, 2

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/13

http://www.sfmoma.org/media/features/viola/OS01.html

Beschrijf proces van understanding: boekje stedelijk geeft een hele andere focus dan tekst hier. Kijk tensltte interview.

This caught my eye immediately. The first contact might be seen as a moment of pure visual beauty. This contact with beauty is considered a very powerful criterium in the appreciation of art, certainly for the less advanced. It's possibly the comment most often given to a work of art, either in appreciation or in disgust. The walls of the museum echo the utterances "This is beautiful. This is ugly" almost as if the works in a museum are nothing more than a binary questionnaire that ask the visitors to choose for either beauty or ugliness. The ubiquitous character of the beautiful/ugly judgement is probaly due to its directness. The judgement feels like a natural reflex, unmediated by thought and knowledge. Beauty suggest therefore to be biologically given and comparable with feelings of pain, hunger and lust. This biological moment of beauty is certainly there but it is just a moment, not the whole story. The same applies to hunger, lust and pain. These impulses leave open how to react, what to do to solve it, how to explore. More than that: the criterium for pure beauty is not particular enough for appreciating art. G.W.F. Hegel rightly points out that we consider things in nature beautiful (trees, the sun, clouds, people). This reaction to beauty might inspire us to praise the inventiveness of God or if we do not believe in a God, we praise Nature (which in the end comes down to the same thing). Although god is often given credit for offeringf the individual artist the inspiration for creating a piece of art, we do consider as an artefact created by human beings. A judgement on a piece of art therefore necessarily entails a judgement on the inventiveness of the creator. Here we enter difficult terrain. The only evidence we have in front of is is the artwork. How to understand the intention of the maker? Should we deduce the intention from the direct presence of the art work in front of us? The same problem applies to the religious question why God created certain things. What's the use of evil people, for instance. The existence of evil makes people question God's sanity and/or talent as creator. We would love to question God about this. The bad thing is that we are given scarce information by God. The bad thing is that the artist and the museum offer us scarce information on the intentions of the artist.


It caught my eye purely by it's beauty. The second step was to look closely. What did i actuallly see and could i by close scrutiny start t understand more about the work of art/the intention of the artist and the reasons why it intrigued me? . Beautiful garments, slow motion. expressions, slow better view, distortion, patience, difficult, wanted to know. What;s the p In any case: aInspired by a painting of the Visitation (1528-29) by the Italian artist Pontormo, The Greeting is a video image sequence involving the interactions between three women that is projected onto a screen mounted to the wall of a dark room. In an industrial urban landscape, two women are engaged in conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of a third woman. The new woman greets the older of the two, apparently her friend, while ignoring the other. She then whispers an urgent message in her friend's ear, further isolating the other woman. With an underlying awkwardness, introductions are made and pleasantries exchanged between the three.

Artist's Proof 2 of edition of 5: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Partial and promised gift of an anonymous donor P.4.95

From an evolutionary perspective it again boils down to the same thing since every thing in nature must be explained in terms of it's survival value. From an economic point of view we ask about the practical use of a thing. Precisely because the artwork seems to refuse to be explained in the above mentioned functional uses, it has a chance to be considered as art and not merely as a thing. This is not to say that art does not serve an economic and/or survival function, but the very nature of art questions

On art: the greeting Bill Viola

Goals of these series of comments on artworks and textworks is to make visible how and why knowledge is essential in understanding and appreciating art. This attempt springs from discontent with current truisms about art and appreciation in general. The basic problem arises from the somehow unquestioned principle of freedom in taste. In Dutch there is the phrase: 'over smaak valt niet te twisten', which translates as 'something as: ' there is no point in discussing taste' exactly because the only standard for the free individual is his own personal norm. Although personal taste is of course of the utmost importance it cannot be the starting point. It presupposes some Cartesian super Ego that is the seat of all knowledge as if everything is already available in the ' Ich'. This is not true. We live in a culture, are made and formed by people around us, through us speak voices from the other. To give an example: a student in my philosophy class questioned if i was not given merely my opinion and i reciprocated: but i have been reading from Plato and i tried to explain you what Plato might have meant, albeit from my point of view adapted to our world by using contemporary examples form tv shows and movies. So is this me speaking or are these voices from the past and the now speaking through me? To me the phrase ' i find', ' i think', 'i appreciate' is always the point during a journey that took note of the journey that brought the 'X' into being (X might be an artwork, a person, a phenomenon). The ' I find' is not the starting point, nor the basis of judgement. Of course it is claimed to be the basis of judgement in our area of freedom of taste but it leads to senseless utterances. I do not deny people's freedom of appreciation but i do insist that we first have to take a journey. To sit still and judge is a pity. Accept the invitation, become knowledgeable, understand the criteria for you judgement, explore the boundaries wherein meaning comes into being.

* Other concerns are to make explicit the criteria wherein meaning can function. Art is an excellent laboratium for this because it functions at the boundaries (and breaks through them) of how we perceive. Reflecting on art is therefore also reflecting on meaning per se.
* This explicitation of criteria is also a critique on contemporary practices of exhibiting art. There seems to be a tendancy to show artworks as if they exist within themselves. They are presented as a substance, a thing that can exist by itself without any need of an other. Therefore in a museumspace the things just hang there on the wall, without context, without explanations, without explication of the goals of the artist. The idea behind this seems to be: a) the artwork speaks for itself because it is self-evident b) The viewer knows the context (how?) and therefore can figure out the complex meaning of the work) c) The viewer has to be totally free in his interpretation. An artwork can be anything according to the freedom of taste. d) Art functions in a domain that is in principle irrational. Therefore any textual attempt to explain destroys the autonomy of the artwork.e) Although context and explanation can enhance to appreciation af an artwork there is still an indestructible core in the work that can be appreciated without any context. This core speaks directly to you (how beautiful). This first encounter may be an invitation to explore more into the artwork after seeing it for the first time. f) There is only one criteria for appreciatiing an artwork namely: do i find it beautiful? What is beautiful is taken as a purely personal taste. Therefore no context is needed.

Main question: What can art make visible? (collect utterances from art critiques, text in museum that supports the artwork)

Sein und Shine, interpreation creates reality instead of the other way around

From: Amadae Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy

'(...)the Cold War struggle was not so much one of enemy pitted against enemy in a ferocious to-the-death struggle as it was a fight over which interpretation of Cold War events would prevail and would serve as the foundation for determing action. Here the drama is recast such that, rather than seeing the United States as a unified actor on a bipolar world stage, it is an internal US struggle among interested parties vying to gain control over defining the Cold War. Those whose interpreation of events were accepted had the power to direct policy. Thus, ironically, the actual Cold War drama lay in the manufacture of the Cold War itself, as policymakers sougt to convince the American nation of its peril and to orchestrate policy reforms in order to stave off the perceived threat.'

Note: the Cold War history provides excellent material for demonstrating the power of imagination and deception to create reality. Reality is manufactured. Reality is not a given. Of course, the policmakers depict threats as real and given, objectively there and explains their policies as a strategy that disarms the threat of its reaility. Amadae shows the amazing history of how American Cold War policy was based on and legitimized on the missile gap with the Soviet Union. This gap never existed! The proof for that was available to policymakers. To make things more complicated: policymakers deny that they lied (which seems the only possible conclusion). Luminaries like Rumsfeld and the Harvard historian (i forgot his name) repeat this line of reasoning in the seventies: although there is no proof that there is a missile gap, that does not mean that the Soviets have less weapons. The Soviets are namely perfectely capable of deceiving us. They probably fabricated weapons that are invisible for our intelligence agencies. The argument of the invisible weapon worked perfect in the Iraqi war as well. The same is true for the threat of invisble terrorist that, because they are invisble, can be everywhere anywhere anytime. The invisible is real.
Note: Part two of the Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis shows us the Rumsfeld epoche in Cold War history. Team B, or how paranoia defines reality. The difficulty is always to determine whether these people are really lying or that they really believe in the reality of their vision. This is the big question in the debat between Reality and Schijn/Schein (what sthe Englsih equivalent to this). Of course the problem of lying and truth is central to the first dialogues of Plato.


Reality must be manufactured.

Sein und Shine, notes on Baudrillard and the gulf war

Form the introduction to 'The Gulf War did noy take place'


1. 'Occasionally, the absurdity of the media’s self-representation as a purveyor of reality and immediacy broke through, in moments such as those when the CNN cameras crossed live to a group of reporters assembled somewhere in the Golf, only to have them confess that they were also sitting around watching CNN in order to find out what was happening. Televison news coverage appeared to have finally caught up with the logic of simulation.'

2. 'In the words of one commentator, for the first time, ‘the power to create a crisis merges with the power to direct the movie about it. Desert storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that made instant history.’

Note:
1. The grand discusion pivots around the question of the existence of an original truth that can subsequently be representated into news (Plato's problem of mimesis). In the classical mimetic perception physical closeness (the reporters) means being close to the original (the reality, so to speak). The reporters account is exactly valued because he is right there right now, seiing it with his own eyes. His reporter skills allow him to capture this original truth in text and image. The reporter is our sixth sense, our extended eyes and ears. The reporter makes it look (through his representation) that we are there on the spot.
This example beautifully problematises the whole relationship between original and representation. The representation (tv) is obviously more real then what the reporters can see with their own eyes. So what is the original? Baudrillard denies the existence of an original. There are only signs (simulacra) that form the hyperreal. The hyperreal infects our perception of reality, as we can conclude from the second quote. The coverage of war is compeletly orchestrated. We see no casualties. Coverage is focused on showing the technological superior weapons. We see our soldiers walking around in determined fashion. The enemy is either a vague rattling of far away guns or subdued prisoners or people that looked relieved now that they don't have to fight anymore. Bombs are depicted as innocent destroyers since their superior technology makes them incapable of destroying anything human; they always hit with precision building and people that represent evil. On top of this, the chronology of war is preented to us by a press officer who chronicles the clean results. Questions are never answered because this wil jeopordize the 'operation' (note the clean medical sound of that: soldiers defecate, take out the malfunctioning without destroying the healthy tissue). Now that reporters take this fabricated account as a the source of news about the war, how are we are going to see the war for what it really is? Isnt this what we see the reality of the war?
* Question: Does Baudrillard think of the hyperreal as a new historical form or is it just a radicalisation of already existing forms?. I would like to argue that the realtion between original and respresentation always has been problematic. There has never been an original not now, not tomorrow, not yesterday. Baudrillards critique on the disneyfication of reality holds true for christification of reality as well.

Related fields of inquiry:
For the representation of war check this beautiful book on painting war.
Pentagon and Hollywood, documentary on how Pentagon finances and controls the Hollywood war movies.
The first great work of European literature is about a war. What does that tell us? Homerus does not make use of Hollywood dichotomy between good and evol. The trojans are as brave and good (or bad) as the Greeks.