A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Original book illustration by John Leech
As Christmas looms large once again (and how often have we come across that trope, or something like it?), our thoughts turn, or return, or are perhaps manipulated towards similar tropes, clichés, and themes of a 'seasonal' type. One of these is Charles Dickens's short story about a miserly recluse who...
WEATHER
J. M. W. Turner. Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. 1842
A cold rain starting
And no hat -
So?
- Matsuo Bashō
As we approach midwinter, and in this part of the world the nights grow longer and colder, it is not hard to imagine why ancient cultures celebrated the darkest time of the year, and the turn...
IMMORTALITY
William Blake. Death’s Door, 1793.
(...) And thence retire me to my Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave.1
As I grow older, there can be little doubt that death occupies my thoughts more than it used to. Keeping pace with me in my journey through life is my mortality, the thought of my death. To be sure, the...
MARKETING THE UNMARKETABLE
The ‘Art Market’ is now a familiar term to most people, and means something quite different from simply the buying and selling of works of art, and the efforts of professional artists to earn a living. Artists nowadays - albeit very few of them - have the chance to become media celebrities: and if you ask the layman which artists she is most familiar...
ART: THE IDEAL EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE OF A SCOTTISH ART SCHOOL
The drawing and music, or the graphic and auditory arts, represent the culmination, the idealisation, the highest point of refinement of all the work carried on. - John Dewey
In a series of lectures, compiled and printed in book form in 1900 as The School and Society, the educationalist and philosopher John Dewey makes this reference to the...
HANG-IN-THERE: ARRANGING ART FOR POSTMODERNITY
(...) the kind of eccentric wisdom I am trying to conjure up for our postmodern times, which turns on a plurality of little truths. - John Caputo 1
Order and chaos are two opposing, or we might say, complementary forces at work in nature. These forces are evident in the apparent randomness of life, and in its overall but more subtly...
UTOPIA
(...) there is yet a time of rest in store for the world ...
I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.
- William Morris: “News from Nowhere"
The idea of a perfect place is, of course, nothing...
HALCYON DAYS II: A MIDWINTER TALE
There are other places, which also are the world’s end (...)
- T. S. Eliot
In modern usage, the phrase ‘halcyon days’ connotes nostalgia for lost youth, or a time - usually past - when we, or the people, societies, or nations of whom we speak, enjoyed comparative...
HALCYON DAYS
The following is the catalogue introduction for an exhibition of paintings by Wei Li Zhu, at the Rendezvous Gallery, Aberdeen, entitled “Halcyon Days”.
There is a time in life when we first become aware of our individuality as a human being, of our becoming a mature adult, a person, an independent entity in the wide world. We are young...
IN TIME
... yet the words sufficed to compel the recognition they preceded. - T. S. Eliot
Aletheia (ἀλήθεια): Greek - un-forgetting of truth.1
We were born, we live, and we shall perish: this observation should be sufficient to evidence the significance of time, to us and to everything around us. Soon we - and eventually everything...
PLAY AND TRUTH
My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.
- Gadamer1
There have been several conferences in recent years concerning art and philosophy, that have attempted to define both a new philosophy and a new direction for art. Exhibitions have resulted,...
THRESHOLDS
The work of art transforms our fleeting experience into the stable and lasting form of an independent and internally coherent creation. It does so in such a way that we go beyond ourselves by penetrating deeper into the work.
- Gadamer1
When we look at an artwork, we immediately adopt an attitude quite distinct from the normal, everyday...
THE WAY IT IS
The art of earlier ages only comes down to us filtered through time and transmitted through a tradition that both preserves it and transforms it in a living way. - Gadamer 1
In the previous two articles we touched briefly - regarding the paintings of Vermeer - upon the way in which the work of a particular artist can be overlooked for...
SEEING AND BELIEVING
Aesthetic - concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty: from Greek aisthētikos, from aisthēta ‘perceptible things’, from aisthanomai ‘perceive’. 1
(...) when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light. 2
The painting "Girl Asleep at a Table" by Jan Vermeer was completed during a transitional, and possibly...
A QUESTION OF BALANCE
Man is a great and wonderful miracle (...) a seeming interval between time and eternity ...
- Thomas Traherne
Baruch Spinoza was a lens-grinder and optical instrument-maker, in Holland. He made fine lenses - a brand new technology in his time - which were used for various purposes. These included mirrors, telescopes, and, perhaps...
DREAM AND SEMBLANCE: THE PLAYER AND THE PLAYED
(...) there is a dream dreaming us. - African Bushman1
Remember the things thou hast seen. Truly thou knowest what they have seemed, what they have meant to thee! Remember also the things thou shalt yet see. Truth is all in all; and the truth of things lies, at once hid and revealed, in their seeming. - George MacDonald2
SPEECH AND FREEDOM: ART AND TRANSCENDENCE
(...) man is first of all a creature who speaks: it is essentially as a speaking being that he discovers his equality with all other human beings.1
- Jacques Rancière
There is, it seems, at the present time, a great war in progress - not between states, or political ideologies, or races, or religious factions. And...
IMAGINATION AND FANTASY: A TALE OF TWO R(r)’s
The river grew lovelier and lovelier, until I knew that never before had I seen real water. Nothing in this world is more than like it.1
- George MacDonald
My thesis here is that imagination is paramount in achieving happiness. Let us say, as a tentative proposition, that there are two ‘realities’: one spelled with a small ‘r’,...
TALENT
One law for the lion and ox is oppression.
- William Blake
When we speak of equality, we have to know whether we are speaking of a human concept, or a gift of Nature. Revolutions have turned upon equality; wars have been fought either on it's behalf or against...
‘THICK’ ART
For artworks it is incumbent to grasp the universal - which dictates the nexus of the existing and is hidden by the existing - in the particular (...)
- T. W. Adorno
It would...
TECHNOLOGY, ART, AND ETHICS
One understands that the very progress of technology -- and here I am taking up a commonplace -- which relates everyone in the world to everyone else, is inseparable from a necessity which leaves all men anonymous.
- Emmanuel Levinas
The “aura”,1 as we have seen in the previous article, gives us the inevitable and cumulative ‘more’...
ORIGINALITY AND CREATIVITY
Walter Benjamins’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is perhaps less of a definitive or prescriptive attempt to resolve the problem of originality in art, than a musing upon the possible ramifications of technology for the idea of the artwork, from the viewpoint of the strolling observer, the “flâneur”, in the genre of...
OF SPECIOUS ORIGIN
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
The idea of an origin - of a precise beginning, once and for all time – is an idea that is very difficult to shake off. It has been said that a cat...
SPEAKING: ONCE, TWICE, OR NOT AT ALL
Zen Buddhism is as famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for its use of enigmatic language to convey a simple but profound truth as it is for its seemingly odd practices of spiritual discipline and meditation. I was reminded of this a few days ago when an associate told me that “trying to explain [Zen] is as pointless as trying to...
SPIRITUAL(ITY)
I was involved recently in an interesting discussion on the use of the word ‘spiritual’ in relation to describing works of art. This is a word which has a special - or particular - meaning for me, as I suspect it does for everyone, positively or negatively. And there lies the nub of the question, really. How can we be sure that the meaning of any...