THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL MOVEMENT IN LATE 20TH CENTURY ART:
The Williamsburg Circle
Terrance Lindall
Copyright 2001
Looking at the art world of the 1980’s and ‘90’s, everything seemed to have become very eclectic on the scene. A variety of art forms from realism to the abstract was being produced by the serious and lesser artists alike. It seemed rather a jumble with no clear line that spoke to a true art of the 1980’s.
But in fact what was happening, as happens in any self organizing process, physical or biological, is that as change takes place from one form of order to another, there is a point in the process of change where all order seems to have vanished as the old order falls and a new order is about to appear. Microbiologists see this under the microscope most clearly when they watch a cell divide. So it was with the more clearly defined art of the 60’s and 70’s as it entered a formless chaos of the 80’s bringing forth the new art of the 90’s. And what could this new art be in a world under the geas of computers and the technology of communications and rapid transformation ? It is an art that reflects the late 20th century at the cusp of the millennium, concerned with process, change, thought and communication, an art that examines the territory of creativity, consciousness and language.
The invention of the mathematical language of fractal geometry, which was called forth to describe what appears to be creative processes in nature galvanized many of these artists who were not merely doing, but were thinking as well. Instead of the new art being purely intuitive, it had also an underlying philosophy. If art has meaning, then it is a language. If it is a language, how does it differ from the language patterns we use to communicate on a more practical level through speech, writing, pictograms? Surely art is more than simple symbology directly designating objects or processes (shades of Bertrand Russell), or interrelations. Art also speaks more directly to the senses than mere speech without the "art." Colors and patterns, sounds, stimulate the sensory organs and can stimulate us to feel pleasure, pain, horror, etc. It is the evocation of these sensations conjoined with meaning (or not) that is "art."
Today neither the artist, nor any of us, can go anywhere in this world to be isolated from the deluge of communication which rains in upon him from all directions, from phones, radios, billboards, television. One must have computers and e-mail and cell-phones. One must communicate with landlords, the Internal Revenue Service, receive and send out mail, fill out forms. Communicate, communicate, communicate! The process has become all, and all has become this process. These endless (senseless from a distance) chaotic spontaneous, self organizing and dissolving processes are like the patterns of crowds or the movement of communities of bacteria under the microscope, like the macroscopic rise and fall of empires and economies, or the swirling eddies of colliding star clusters in the galaxy. The artist rises from his work, looks around at the rain of communication which annoys him and recognizes in it the very material for his art: communication, meaning, redundancy, absurdity, as well as the muddy boundaries between orderly and chaotic processes, the beauty and the horror.
Richard Humann’s show at the Ridge Gallery a couple years back was an installation of blocks of cedar with black Morse code blocks set on top. The Morse code or language recites a passage from Shakespeare’s Richard the Second. The substrate of cedar blocks, biomatter, support the meaning of the code, "spiritual/intellectual matter." The cedar blocks show the rings of the tree, the ages of growth, now transformed, squared, shaped into another order, having gone through a process arriving at a new form and purpose. This process of transformation of the tree into something in the mind of the artist is an interesting one and can probably be described by fractal geometry. Some of the cedar blocks are lighter, some darker, reminding one of the binary code (gate open, gate closed) with which the world has devised a new creature called the computer ("what the hammer, what the chain, in what furnace burned thy brain!") which can define all things with a simple system of on or off, zero or one. The world has always been defined as a dualistic one, good & bad, rich or poor, being or nothingness. Our language
reflects this, and through it we can describe and even create all things. But between the places that are right and wrong, up and down, there are always those muddy chaotic places. They seem muddy to us, or are they?
Codex by Richard Humann, Collection WAH Center
In the work of Richard Humann he has discovered something very special to say in art at this point in time. Since the beauty of a work of art is the "elegance of the manner in which an idea is envisioned," I can say that Richard’s works are absolutely beautiful. Richard’s works have a good physical presence. When you enter a gallery space appropriate to his work and hopefully empty of people, the work dominates the eye and mind. What you saw when you entered the Lance Fung gallery recently was an installation of "ultra-blue" blocks occupying the entire gallery. On top of the blocks are a series of Morse code symbols again representing, in this case, David Byrne’s song "Psycho Killer." The substrate of the blue blocks could represent the backdrop of the universe, the "mind of God." The blocks are painted not with a solid blue color, but rather a painterly manner, just suggesting the cool subtle infinite variability in the process of the universal mind which can combine and permute the dots and dashes of the code which becomes "meaning."
I am also reminded of the computer at Harvard called "Big Blue" (a binary monster) which recently defeated the world chess champion Gary Kasparov. The meaning of everything we perceive seems to occur from an act of will through the perfect ideas of potentiality and actuality, yes or no (dot and dash, or off and on). Through these, it seems, all existence and all meaning transpires in the universe. Richard’s work, to my mind, make the grand statement in a bold and rightly grandiose manner, that all meaning is a reflection of combinations and permutations of elegant simplicity the mind of God.
Susan Dionne, a cohort of Richards, looks in her art to the places where the boundaries between the orderly and chaotic lie. She says,"The language which will represent this territory is yet to be invented., but it is prefigured in the works of artists using or observing self-organizing process and systems. These new languages are opposed to perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly. They insist on noise, rejoicing in illegitimate fusion’s, in the collapse of simple dualism’s, their only known quality being the ability to inhabit flatness and
linearity, but roundly. This is not a dream of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia (Donna Haraway, "A cyborg Manifesto")."
Amazingly we see this art movement reflected in Star Trek’s Borgs. They have perfect common understanding, they translate to each other all meaning perfectly, but they have no sense of love or beauty. Is this why our artists rejoice in the babble and the chaos because in the perfect language there would not be beauty or wonder? Are not the artists themselves trying to find eventually a perfect communication of an idea? Is not the theory a self defeating one: that the artist is trying to communicate as perfectly as possible an expression opposed to perfect communication?
But art loves contradictions. This is the process of the dialectic, of thought itself. To find any right answer we pose to ourselves questions that show the contradictions in the untrue. This is embodied in Aristotle’s Book Delta of the Metaphysics, the principle of non-contradiction: effectively that an entity cannot both be and not be in the same way at the same time. Ideas are continually at war with each other in this world, democracy vs. aristocracy, centralized systems or decentralized systems, etc. In the great dialectic there is the destruction of the weak ideas and the rise to power of the strong. It is like the world of nature where the strong survive and the weak perish. Even in the market economy one buys the best product and the lesser product remains unsold and is eventually not made. The very idea that systems and people need not oppose each other and that there will be harmony in nature is absurd. If there is harmony, it is the harmony of process in which things and ideas are created and destroyed, or the harmony that is observed from a distance: the beauty of star systems colliding. At a closer look it is devastatingly violent and frightening. Krishna and Shiva, the gods of creation and destruction, a continual war of creation and destruction, the Great Dialectic. Perhaps the fires of the dialectic wars will burn away the dross to reveal the gold. And the fires themselves have a terrible beauty.
Susan Dionne is interested in the place where no language can describe the process of creation, destruction and change, a place of such unknown mystery between the forces of creation & destruction, and she attempts to express something about it. A wonderful idea really, rather like Satan having been cast into oblivion and trying to build a city to compare with heaven, but based upon principles diametrically opposed to the order of heaven, a city known as "Pandemonium" But what Susan delights in, if she delights in it, is different from the consciously expressed pursuit of science which is to pursue the heavenly virtue of order and find that ultimate "perfect communication" to describe the universe and predict absolutely all events, and also peer into the past to know all things. Look at the poor scientist! Since the ancient Greeks and perhaps before, he has simply tried to unravel one little problem, whether there is such a thing as free will or whether
all things are determined absolutely. Questions, questions. If everything has a cause, then there is no free will and men are not creative thinking beings. Art would then not be a creative process. And as Gallileo and Newton and the chemists, philosophers and mathematicians of the 17th Century and beyond described the macro and micro universe, it was purely a mechanical model, unless one assumed the existence of God as the "ghost in the machine." But as science progressed, and as scientists examined the various levels at which matter exists, they found a level at which matter did not behave in a predictably determined manner. To describe this in the language of mathematics Heisenberg stated his famous "Indeterminacy Principle." This is where Susan Dionne finds some joy one would think. But is this indeterminacy real or merely a lack of proper description and understanding? Is there an order here which humans merely cannot understand. Probably.
Two more artists are Matthew Deleget and Robert Sagerman. Deleget does drawings. To begin, he hovers over the blank paper and prepares his mind. He focuses and envisions (as an example) the warped fabric of space as a map of grids for reference points. Space without reference points is, of course unimaginable, except in the state of meditation where being and nothingness become one. Space, of course, appears to be warped according to the physicists. Matthew Deleget, however is dealing with conceptual space, a classical Kantian world where reason is imposed upon the world giving it order. Putting pen and ink to paper Matthew expresses with elegance what his mind has created. He does this with colors and patterns which suggest the calm elegance of mathematical thought, the unperturbed pure world of essences and closed systems of pure reason, a priori analytic thought...a world unto itself totally unaware of other worlds. To view Matthew’s work is to be drawn into this rarefied beauteous world. The question arises in critical circles: has intelligence replaced beauty? Not here, beauty abounds! Renee’ Dumal wrote of Mount Analogue and Matthew has envisioned it’s peak:"On high, remote in the sky, above and beyond successive circles of increasingly lofty peaks, lies the utmost pinnacle of Mt. Analogue. There, He who sees each thing accomplished in its beginning and in it’s end resides unto himself."
Robert Sagerman is a rather unique artist. He is a follower of the Jewish mysticism of the Kabala. Through meditation he builds closed systems analogous to mathematical or logical systems. He exercises all the possibilities within the system he has created until it literally fragments or bursts with the infinitude of ideal possibles. In this he finds revelation and the consciousness is transformed. In his art he applies a thick impasto of oils or acrylic on canvas. He builds the work up slowly as a ritual, methodically and purposely picking up paint with a palette knife and laying it down and pulling it lightly away so the paint stretches out slightly away from the canvas. He applies these paints until he reaches a point where the process of methodical ritual application begins to appear
absurd to him. At that point he stops and the painting is finished. When he releases himself from the ritual of that particular painting he finds that his consciousness has been transformed. The methodical repetitiveness of his process is deliberately absurd, pressing the need to continually derive fresh new hermeneutical understandings of the meaning of this peculiar activity. It is in this that Sagerman continually finds recourse to the methods and metaphors of Kabbalists, insofar as their ever present, ever unreachable subject matter - the numinous - itself recalls his own. While it is the emerging aesthetic of the work in progress that fuels Sagerman’s hermeneutical drive, the aesthetic response, merging with the content itself of his hermeneutical derivations, sustains a consciousness-molding activity.
In the way Sagerman works I find a wonderful parallel to Susan Dionne’s search for those transformational anomalies she calls “Pandemoniums.” For example, when a cell divides it is changing from one orderly system to another orderly system. But there is a point between the changes where there appears to be total disorder. There is no discernible order and yet there must be, since whatever is there, a new order is coming forth from it. That point of apparent confusion or disorder is like Sagerman’s feeling of absurdity of the ritual process in which he is engaged. And out of the observation of "absurdity" out of the "confusion" his consciousness comes to a new order out the one that preceded it before he began the painting. One hears Ludwig Wittgenstein here who saw that all of the discussion in philosophy was ultimately absurd, although it did appear to change the nature of how one perceived the world.
The "art" for both Deleget and Sagerman is as much the "act" of creating it as is the product itself, perhaps more so.
Another remarkable artist/scientist in Williamsburg is Adam Oranchak. A true scion of the new state of the arts, he has invented a new fashion statement: the wearable computer, which appeared on TVs STRANGE UNIVERSE recently. Now our fashions are also binary communication and processing devices! He is in the process of manufacturing them for the market. The first true cyborg is being born in Williamsburg! A man and computer together walking down the street. Adam says "Man has always been a cyborg." And he presented a paper at the Center to prove it! I ask, which is wearing which? Perhaps eventually, the protein part of this duo will wither away over time, leaving nothing but the machine, artificial, but intelligent, able to repair and upgrade itself and exist till the universe winds down, pulls together and explodes once more in the "Big Bang" perpetual motion machine. What Adam is creating can do without the "Eve" and that curious biological mechanism called sex will give way to a more orderly means of reproduction. Will these machines be conscious, though intelligent? Who can tell? What is consciousness...froth on an ocean of protein. Perhaps everything is conscious in some way. Perhaps there is no material world and all is the
nature of thought and perception, "esse est percipi" (George Berkely).
THE NEW LEVEL: Recent serious "emerging" artists like Bruce Pearson or Roxy Paine or their predecessors in the post modern world have worked in epistemological realms on an intuitive or subconscious level. They have great difficulty sometimes in explaining why they are doing what they are doing. Their art is superb, yet for their conscious mind they only intuitively know they have created something important. But, there is a new level among the artists who are now producing the "new." These are artists who are bringing forth the intelligence of the subconscious that creates art and are consciously engaging the formerly hidden reasons for the products of their art. This is not what Pearson and Paine are doing, it is what the newer artists are involved with. Individual artists may have done this before, but it is now becoming a solid movement, it is becoming expansive. These are artists engaging their art with the tool of ritual revelation and pure reason. The precision and delicacy and deliberation and elegance of the new artistic creature, the developed mind with all its subtlety, now rules the domain of the present. This art seems not to be fully embraced by the public art world, for these artists deal in little understood realms of inquirey. However, it is worth the venture to look into their worlds. In fact it is revelationary.
Here I ask, is art really creative, with a will that is free to deviate from the principles upon which our universe is founded?? My answer to that is no. We are creatures made of the mud of the universe. We are made to respond to the mud of which we are made. We experience joy and sorrow. We build, we destroy, all based upon principles which fractal geometry purports to describe. We respond to our responses and even respond to that response, ad infinitum. We seek the boundaries of our limits, or we seek the infinite itself, and the infinite itself, contradictorily is a boundary. We call things "freely created" because we do not understand why we do things in an ultimate sense. To create simply means "to happen," it does not mean that it did not happen from constraints of "determinism." Heidegger points out that we walk through life under the aegis of a common acceptance of a common behavior. The weight of common culture in its effect on how we think and do things is difficult to escape. The artist thinks he is being unique in what he does, but he is merely responding to an inexorable "historical will" which sweeps him along in a river of human communality. It seems that when a new art movement appears, it appears everywhere at once, in all media, in painting, literature, theater, even without artists being in contact with one another. Why? Because it a phenomenon of broad expansive changes, not discrete ones. These are the changes that fractal geometry describes. Individuals are not creating, they are merely part of a process of sweeping change. So the artists in the CALCULUS OF TRANSFIGURATION show are responding to, or swept up in, something that is happening to world culture at the millennium. It is a more conscious awareness. It is a growth of the
faculty of inquirey and self analysis. It is remarkable in what this might herald for the next millennium.
We are enmeshed in paradoxes. Even Zeno’s paradox has not been solved. Language itself including the languages of our sciences does not suffice to unravel the mysteries of things. And so the artist rolls back into his chair and laughs at the absurdity and "paints what he sees." He paints or sculpts the chaos of thought and words around him. This is the Epistemological Art Movement. He plays or ponders. And the Zen Master observes the totality of the hum of the hive and the music of galaxies colliding, the oneness of the "chaos." He perceives the perfection of the oneness of the whole as a perfect idea. And that Perfect Idea is the mind of God, WILL that determines history. And the mind of God and the Zen Monk are one. And perhaps there is only the mind of God, and all things are ideas reflected in that mind, no material universe, merely a rolling dream cloud that swirls into order or chaos as in the nature of infinite continual change, perhaps with no purpose, and probably with no end. Leibnitz the inventor of the infinitesimal calculus expressed some such thoughts in his Monadology, that we are all aspects of the mind of God.
In calling this new art an "epistemological" movement, I want to relate it to the history of theories of meaning in philosophy. If people respond to art, then it has meaning. If art has meaning, then it is a language. Therefore, art is a language. A nice syllogism if the assumptions are true. It is true that any other art might be called "epistemological on those grounds." The thing is, those other artists (Bruce Pearson and those before him) do not seem to be so consciously aware that they are dealing with process and communication and their underlying forces as the artists I am looking at. Bruce and his cohorts have felt a stirring in the breeze, have heard some distant thunder or a trumpet sound heralding something beyond the horizon.
Some artists in the past have dealt with communication and commercialism such as Andy Warhol, the "incessant bombardment of advertising and communication" represented by the Campbell soup can. "The oneness and the beauty of chaos " as with Jackson Pollack. The incorporation of the mundane world around us into our art is not new at all and goes back to the Bison painted on the Cave man’s wall. But for the cave man as for us, as artists, it is a magical thing too. Also, the Bison on the wall relates to the Nominal Theory of Meaning: that " a name (image) is a simple symbol directly designating an object which is it’s meaning." This is from Russell and Whitehead’s PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA. The parentheses are mine. Simply stated, art always has had meaning, not always clearly translatable into logical patterns, but we respond to it. But I posit that the art that Richard Humann, Robert Sagerman, Matthew Deleget and Susan Dionne and with many of “movement” seem to show that art is different than what has gone before and
now we are talking about why it is different. It is a communication device that is referencing itself. It is like mirrors being placed facing each other, self-referencing to infinity and creating a great mystery. Never before has art looked at the process of communication and thought with such an analytic prepossession.
Dionne mentions that her art has something to do with "causing to stand," ...the precariousness and contingency of it. Ah, yes, catastrophe theory! Indeed, I call it "process of change" from one order to the next, as with the cell dividing into two or Sagerman’s causing a change in his consciousness. Nothing stands in the world, it is always toppling. Consciousness endlessly transforms. If it did not there would be no consciousness. Transformation is a necessary conditon of consciousness.
Most artists believe that they are creative intelligences. In that notion there appears to be an assumption of "free will." That the artist may believe that he creates without cause from without is surely an illusion. I say this while I am constrained by the order of cause and effect (historical will). Free will, not to act based upon the materials of which we are made and the past which has shaped us cannot be proven. All the evidence is that cause and effect are total! Sartre thought about the problem of proving free will and developed his proof of it. He said "’angst’ is the proof of free will because unless we have a real choice over the actions we take...to do or not to do...we would not feel anxiety!" A non-sequitor argument to be sure...a French romantic to the heart. The claim to free will is a beautiful idea...froth again on the ocean of process, an illusion.
Poor William James, the philosopher! He thought about free will and determinism and concluded that there was no free will. With that, he folded his hands and stopped doing anything. But as he was vegetating, he had a revelation, and with it came the statement "my first act of free will is to believe in free will!." And forth he went to astound the world with his thinking in philosophy & psychology. We operate by belief systems. This is something that Sagerman expresses in his art. Without belief, everything is absurd!!
As artists, we “wear mankind as our skin.” This is suggested in Heidegger’s thinking. This is what Determinism and Historical Will are all about. We are all interconnected. We are redlections of one another in the social fabric, and there is nothing that is ours alone apart from others. Sagerman says,” ...my ascetic interpretive practice, paradoxically, renders me acutely aware of the very dependence of consciousness itself upon the matrix of a world-ordering hermeneutic generated by the state of being enmeshed in a cultural collectivity. This awareness culminates for me in an experiential recognition that mind itself is insubstantial, an imagined reification, a social construct.” Yes. he intuits the reality of our own nothingness as
the conscious self.
Now allow me to posit the final contradiction that reveals the truth in that dialectic I was talking about: BEING AND NOTHINGNESS ARE THE SAME THING. Both East and West have known this for a long time. SEIN UND GEIST, SEIN UND DASEIN! All thought and existence revolves around these ideas. The gates of the universal computer: on and off, one and zero. And we see it most aptly expressed in the imposing Morse code of Richard Humann’s work. The binary. But the binary, the dualism of the world, is an illusionary idea necessary to the creation of perceptions. In fact, being and nothingness are the same thing! A great mystery! The proof of this comes from analytic philosophy which asks whether "existence" is a predicate! If we think about something that exists and conceptually remove all of the qualities (hardness, redness, etc.) leaving only the quality of "existence," we find that only "nothing" is left! So too the perceiver and the perceived are one. As Hume pointed out, we are merely "bundles of perception"...no perceiver can be proven to exist. If a person in contemplating the perceiver and the perceived, removes , by process of reason, all perceptions, nothing is left; therefore the perceiver (the self) does not exist... the "I" does not exist. We who think that we are free, our freedom is not even "ours" for we do not exist apart from what we perceive. That we use words like "I" is a foolish convenience because we cannot grasp truth, and the convenience of such terms or expressions allows us to communicate. It is like the use of imaginary numbers in mathematics. See, "communication" and it’s contradictions are what this is all about! The solipsist says that "only the ‘I’ exists." I deny him even that!
Ultimately we cannot break out of the dualistic world by which we define all things. Quine, up at Harvard, attempted to invent a new logic circumventing the paradoxes inherent in non-contradiction. Mixed results. And since computer thinking is based upon the binary, the computer probably cannot transcend it’s own makeup. In that sense, the whole is no more than the sum of it’s parts. And fractal geometry suggests the same.
Ultimately, since we are immersed in duality since all our thinking is based upon it, and we cannot escape it’s snares, we are left with what we had in the beginning: blind faith...systems of belief!! Sagerman’s mysticism! There are mysteries we cannot fathom. Our science is the religion of faith in duality and it’s mysteries. The support for this "strange universe" can be attributed to God as Truth, as in Richard Humann’s significantly substantial support for the dots and dashes of the binary (representing the duality which gives meaning to the world)! If we are looking for Truth about these deep mysteries, look to Richard’s work!
Plato, in his Theory of Forms, talked about this world being mere shadows cast by perfect ideas. Perhaps he had the right idea. St. Anselm’s
ontological proof of God, an a priori proof, and thus irrefutable, again talks of perfect ideas. But the proof comes out of the principle of non-contradiction and the inherent flaws of dualism. Ultimately faith may be the only answer!! Faith is a "system of belief."
Sagerman looks at the act of creating art as "being steeped in the process of being in a state of belief." There is something really significant here, and more is discovered at every turn through the eyes of the these artists. The artists here are mystics and ontogologists and epistemologists. All that an ideal artist can be is envisioned here.
ART DEFINED
Now before continuing, let me put forth a possible definition of art. Art is something done, an action or a product of man that is not done for the direct survival. It is done to redirect energy flows in the person. First let us make the statement that "brain states" are "mind states." The distinction between mind and body is not valid. That is not to say that only the material world exists. In fact, there is no proof that the material world apart from mind exists at all, rather all we really have evidence of is that there are perceptions. Therefore, mind states and brain states, the perception of either, are perceptions alone, pure and simple. The sensations of the body are also perceptions. All is perception.
Man does things. Whether causality is involved cannot be ascertained. Perceptions change. We believe that some of things we do cause changes in ourselves and the world around us. We build houses to shelter us. We pray to God to deliver us from evil. We create something called art. Art does not give us food or shelter, nor does it protect us from evil. What then is art. Creating art sometimes gives us pleasure, but that is an accidental and not a necessary condition of the creation of art, for sometimes art disturbs. Sometimes art is beautiful, sometimes horrifying and ugly. But it does cause a change in the viewer or creator. What is this change? I believe it is a redirection of "energy flows" in the perceiver. So we create or view art to change energy flows. It changes the way in which we perceive the world. Sagerman is well aware of this use of art, and he controls this in remarkable fashion! In changing energy flows we may in fact come to greater understanding of our condition. Thus Sagerman is working toward revelation in his mystical practice of art. The changing of our consciousness may be useful in the application of our survival skills. So perhaps art, after all, is "useful" and "practical" indeed. But is this an accidental or is it a necessary condition of art? That art redirects energy flows or changes mind states is necessary condition of art, but it’s usefulness in survival is accidental. But do not many things change our energy flows and enlighten us to our condition? Yes, but those events around us which change our perception of our condition are not always directed by us and are not always
radical enough to lift us from the mundane to see beyond the immediate. To see beyond the immediately practical to what is necessary for practical use (survival and procreation) in the future is the domain of science and industry. But to see beyond the immediately practical for the purpose of "practicing the skill of seeing beyond the immediately practical or mundane" is "art." Has intelligence replaced beauty in art? No, beauty is the elegance of the way in which we redirect energy flows or change mind states. Intelligence creates great art, and sometimes great natural "intuition" does. But "intuition" is the subconscious working of intelligence. That a "work" of art is horrifying or ugly has to do with the subject of the art, whereas, the art has to do with the sublime elegance or beauty of the manner in which it is expressed. If it is not expressed well it is not ugly, merely "bad." What is art: the changing of mind states to perceive the world in various new ways with no necessary condition of practical application for procreation or survival.
Now, do science and art relate. Obviously, if one can change one’s perception of the world through art, one can possibly see new applications for science. It would seem that the changing of mind states is a necessary condition for advancing knowledge.
Does art have to be made of material such as sculpture or painting, etc. Does it have to be visual or aural etc. Absolutely not. Since mind states, as well as physical sensations are all perceptions alone, the only necessary condition of art is that a person creates a "mind state," a way of perceiving, for the sole purpose of seeing the world in "new light." One day we will see Sagerman sitting like a monk in a monastery, the "art" occurring merely in his mind as he finds revelation. Art is not necessarily shared, it can be totally private activity of the individual’s mind alone. People do like to share, but this is not a necessary condition of art. If changes in the manner of viewing the world can be made with designer drugs, the designer drug would be a work of art. The future of art, as man moves into the brave new world of the future may be one of art in a virtual reality world through micro computers hard wired to the brain or designer drugs made legal because they cannot be proven harmful to the individual or society. Man can do what he envisions, and we practice envisioning through art. It is useful to practice envisioning. We can perhaps envision the answers to our questions in science more easily because we practice. In this art is indeed practical!
ENERGY AND THE GREAT CRYSTAL RADIO SET IN THE SKY
Mark Cohen, the art critic/philosopher, one of the finest to appear in recent years, asked me what I meant by "energy" in my definition of "art" and how it relates to "energy" in science. First let me say something about
my notions of "God." I do not mean to anthropomorphize when I use this term. It is a great inconceivable mystery which cannot be understood by man because man lives in a world of duality. The only men who transcend duality are those who practice Zen and they come back from nirvana unable to share the experience.
So, first there was WILL. It came ex nihilo by the mere act of Will. Will and nothingness are the same thing. Will and being are the same. They (it) are the foundations of all that exists. All that exists are perceptions. First, it is the task of the true philosopher to dwell in the realms of perfect ideas and closed a priori systems and for some (especially scientists) to see which systems apply best to our mundane world in helping us understand it by predicting events. Those become "belief systems" or theories of the universe. Now, WILL manifests itself in several ways as categorized by Aristotle in his metaphysics: the potential of the potential, the actuality of the potential, the actuality of the actual, the actuality of the potential, etc. Perceptions which totally compose the world in which we exist are reflections of perfect ideas in the mind of God (WILL). The realm of Perfect ideas is the same as Plato’s FORMS. Forms can also be called "possibilities" or "potentials." When I say "energy" it is the "unified field" of the WILL manifesting itself in the potentialities and actualities of becoming and being. Potentialities are facets in the great Crystal (metaphor) a non-relative point of "beginning" which is the Mind of God (WILL). As potentiality and actuality manifest, the energy of the Will causes a wave (metaphor) at frequencies which are different for each facet of the crystal. This is just like the primitive crystal radio set which, when electricity passes through it, different frequencies of vibration occur on each different facet of the radio Crystal, except the great crystal "in the sky" exists in the realms of pure concept or perfect ideas which is the greater reality. It is a closed system which can be described mathematically. When the will or "energy" manifests itself in the crystal through the pure and perfect ideas of potentiality and actuality, perceptions are manifested. There are an infinite number of possible perceptions, some of which you are perceiving right now!
Now, about free will ( a perception) or causality ( a perception). They are "belief" systems, something Sagerman touches on. One may think from what has been said that WILL causes things or is a "First Mover." A closer approximation would be that perceptions "manifest in the WILL." We have to deal with the realms of perfect ideas and closed systems. These systems may incorporate ideas of free will or causality, but it does not mean they are manifest in any realm of hierarchy above the realm of perception which are a lower level of concept than the realm of Will in and of itself. They are not a necessary condition of WILL. If we muddy the realms of experience of what we perceive with the realms of pure reason, revelation (Zen) and Perfect ideas, we will never arrive at any truth with a capital T. Later we can
invent a clearly reasoned closed system to approximate experience of perceptions and use ideas like "causality,"and this is what happens in science and mathematics. We can use these to alter the way in which we change our perceptions of the world (make things happen). Unfortunately we are not really "altering" anything. It is merely the "appearance of altering" or "causing" which is manifested as perceptions of such in the WILL. By "altering" our perceptions through science and raising our levels of consciousness of the world manifest around us, we can then do (appear to do) things like build rocket ships and atomic bombs. But the realm of the philosophy is the realm of Perfect ideas and closed systems!
Gregory Barsamian’s work deals in perceptions or kinetic illusion. His art states, to my mind, that "The nature of reality is that of perceptions, there is nothing more than that!" If someone wished to be argumentative, one could say, "...yes there is more, id est, the mechanical device behind his work." But I could then reply " but that is a perception also!" Proving a nouemenal reality is impossible. The motion of the mechanism is like the "WILL" taking action upon the potential of the machine to create the actuality of the illusion.
ELEPHANT AND THE BLIND MEN; BLACK BODY RADIATION IN QUANTUM MECHANICS
Max Planck’s early interest in thermodynamics led him to study energy radiation in black bodies which classical theory’s could not account for. It was known at that time that if a body radiated energy at a continuous rate by the classical model, the decay of atoms would occur at a much faster rate than actually happened in observation. So Planck devised the notion of discontinuity of action, which is also called "quantum of action." Planck states that there is a least divisible unit of energy (a quantum) and that radiant energy could only be discharged in units of a "quantum." Neils Bohr postulated subsequently that the atom is susceptible to discrete stationary states but that On the other hand, the atom could effect a transition to another stationary state by emitting one "quanta" of energy as electromagnetic radiation. The classical notions of physics were dependent on the theory of determinism in philosophy (which is the foundation of science). But now discrete events at the atomic level were not at all predictable as discrete events (discontinuity of action). Here we see Dionne’s Pandemonium at work and Robert Sagerman’s absurdity pressing to yield a revelation. To come to a new level of understanding or revelation Max Planck had to devise a new understanding, to reach the "new system of order" for the universe, and in this he created the Quantum Theory!
We notice that in measuring large numbers of events one could use the
mathematics of probability to predict outcome. This is how scientists work in chemistry in theories of gases: One cannot predict the course of a single molecule in a gaseous body (but possibly could if we could, god-like, watch each molecule in the gaseous body, by classical physics), but one can predict the overall behavior of the gaseous body containing these molecules given the thermal and other factors. Classical physics which claims that the action of any molecule can be absolutely determined if one could measure the velocity and position was discounted. Finally Heisenberg arrived at the conclusive idea that indeed there was a level of matter at which causality did not function at all (absolute discontinuity). So we had two models for scientists to work with: One said that at one level events can be predicted for discrete bodies, and at another level they cannot. Now either general laws work at all levels or they do not. To say that there are general principles that are not general is a contradiction. So Neils Bohr devised the idea of complimetarism, a duality of general principles which solved the problem: Both ideas are necessary in accurately describing the evidence of observation: the domains of validity of each model is subject to a reciprocal limitation that prevents contradiction! In reaction to the probabilistic interpretations of quantum theory Albert Einstein spat out " I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe!" Actually that is an interesting statement, because the mathematics of probability were developed principally by a fellow named Cardano, the gambling scholar, for whom the game of "cards" is named. The confused and disoriented scientific community has never been the same since. Now light was both a particle and a wave, and gravitation was an aspect of the geometry of space. Einstein himself, by the way, gave credit for much of his thinking to that hard boiled empiricist David Hume, whom I often rely upon myself in proving that perceptions are all that we can rely upon. Einstein agreed, but still thought as if there were a material apart from perception that we were indeed investigating, perhaps his greatest mistake. Einstein knew intuitively that all of the mathematics that described observations of the physical universe had to be unified or made equivalent. That is the famous unified field theory.
At the instant the universe happened in the big bang, everything was one thing.
From that anomalous event duality was born, matter and antimatter and all potentiality and actuality and the permutations and combinations. After Einstein comes Bohm, who again tries to save modern physics from ruin by going right back to determinism. He proposes not a universe in which both determinism and indeterminism operate as compliments. He says that we have to suppose a sub-basement to the world be low the quantum level, where events occur that cause quanta to behave in an unpredictable way as discrete events but predictable in groups under probabilistic description. Where can we find these events that Bohm is talking about. He says probably in the domain of very high energies and of very short distances. And this ladies and gentlemen is where we are today. Looking for events in higher and higher energies at shorter and shorter distances, as would be found at the very beginning of the universe in the big bang. For physicists working in the realms of the sub-atomic, things are becoming more and more ephemeral. Notions of "particles" and "waves" have moved to notions of "events." The strange universe is like the proverbial elephant that a bunch of blind men (scientists) have stumbled on. One feels the side and says it’s a wall. One feels the trunk and calls it a snake. Now if you think that among men that in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king, just remember the O’Henry story about the valley of the blind. The people there thought his eyes were tumors and drove him to his death! If you think that scientists, even great ones are great thinkers, just read Schrodingers "HYPOTHESIS OF THE REAL WORLD" as he struggles with the illusive "Mind/Body" problem. Throughout the history of philosophy, science and mathematics, each great thinker has stumbled on an aspect of the elephant and spoken a truth: Parmenides was right, there is really only one "real" thing: "WILL." The rest is the illusion (perceptions or ideas generated from wills "action"). All is born out of the infinite pandemonium of the actions of the potential and actual of the WILL. But it has the firmness of operating by what appear to be universal principles of cause and effect working on something which most scientists and ordinary people believe to exist behind the perceptions (solid matter). That is just a belief system that helps us "understand" or operate in our lives, although our activities are merely a manifestation of something other than our small pigmy, totally illusive "will.". Science has never really proven that there is any "material" reality, all they seem to be finding is that what we observe is made up of "events and perceptions" and they are trying to find and describe an order to them with mathematics (language). And some artists are examining the meaning and nature of the language of mathematics which is derived from language and logic. Hegel was right, there is an historical will. Hume was right, we only know of perceptions. So they are all pieces of the GREAT THING (WILL). And where does art come in? It is practicing of the redirection of the energies that form perceptions. But it is not a creative process. It has been determined from the first instant of time in the unfolding of the Historical Will of the mind of God of which we are merely an extension or "aspect." It is an
infinite expansion of potentiality and actuality. And like Matthew Deleget, GOD (WILL), a point of nothingness from which all comes, hovers over the realms of possibility, and on the tabula rasa of our universe imposes order on the ideas (perceptions) generated by the action of possibility becoming actuality.
P.S. I call the artists & thinkers who have been engaged in this discussion “The Williamsburg Circle,” referring, of course to the “Vienna Circle” of analytic philosophers of the early 20th Century. These artists, writers and thinkers continue to meet to talk and visit each others shows. Currently Robert Sagerman’s work can be seen at Margaret Thatcher Projects 529 W. 20, 9th floor, New York, New York, ending January 12, 2002.