After
this comprehensive review of some crucial external elements – from the means by
which a painting is constructed to a sense of its internal devotion to itself –
let us turn to the agency that constitutes its internal cohesion and that
connects painting to an immanent spiritual and ethical space: the space of
man's growth. Not surprisingly, the most appropriate analogies are to be found
in Plato's well-known metaphor of the cave from the 7th book of the Republic,
which speaks about the fundamental transformation of man's spirit from dark to
light. The metaphor is already part of the way we have constructed a
theoretical dualism between the mimetic world of shadows and the implicit
viewer, which through their abstraction and interconnection synthesise exterior
influences and expand awareness.
Plato's
metaphor differentiates between two basic spheres: the world in which we are
trapped as dwellers in a cave, and the ideal world to which we aspire by means
of knowing things as themselves – as pure ideas. In the cave people are
immobile with a fixed view of the wall before them which is the arena where
shadows play, and because the illuminating fire is situated behind their backs
these are shadows produced not only by objects but also by the people
themselves. Were one of the immobilised viewers to catch the echo of someone
passing in the background, then, according to the ancient philosopher, one of
two things might happen: either he would assume that the shadow itself was
talking, or he would pick himself up and stride towards the voice and the
light. In the latter case he would either turn back from the blinding light to
the dim semi-darkness, or he would ignore the pain in his eyes and become
determined to procced. Were he to manage to pass by the artificial light of the
fire and make his way down the passage and out of the cave then, in the
hinterland and surrounded by things that are lit by the real light of the sun,
he would sooner or later find out that everthing he had seen up until that
moment was merely a shadow. Through this testing process he would gradually
come to understand his own reality as well as the profound and original truth
of truth itself. To refuse to accept the reality of shadows, to progress
through awareness and self-knowledge toa direct vision of the thing seen is
equivalent to the process that transforms perception through experience and
creation.
As
both the title and the introductory metaphor show, the performative function of
awareness and perception is not only related to religion and other material
manifestations of what lies beyond. The metaphor of looking and seeing also
pictures the way a painting throws out a bridge for the viewer to cross, and
invites the potential to expand awareness toward vision.
The
more that a painting retreats from a mimetic allusion to the external world,
the more difficult becomes the task that faces the viewer: the more difficult
it becomes to understand the motivation and content of a painting, so the more
the painting is host to a charged inner atmosphere. It becomes more than an
assembly of abstracted information that plays against a familiar external
world, and this is why it becomes vital for the viewer to look inside himself,
and to orientate his perception through a resonance
that leaves nothing to coincidence. It
is an explenential journey through sensibility and perception that ultimately
switches back and has recreated image and association, only this time at a
higher level of awareness.
Gandhi
advised us to make the unnecessary necessary: to find a lack in surplus, or to
find lack and surplus at the same time.
If today the same rule applies, then it allows us to understand better this
permanent desire for selective creation withina super-abundant environment
whose basic dynamic is an archetypal mingling of religious and
socialconstructs. The way an artist weaves his own reality is just an attempt
to situate himself unblinded by the polished armoury ranged about him. It
creates a rational distance from Solomon's mirror-toting warriors and attempts
a clear view of his own lived truth. Such perception creates the chance for an
artist to step closer to a living and purified image, that grows, that expands
awareness and that admits the possibility for spontaneous progress.
The
creative act of painting, however, is not only a journey to the inside but also
a problematisation of reality as a settled form of picturedness. The function
of artistic perception is therefore not just to be in the world and to search
for solutions within one's own inner reality; at the same time it renders
conscious the dialectical weaving together of certain situational and
phenomenal worlds. For this reason it is necessary to disseminate it – to weave
it into the rhetorical fabric of shared discourse – which gives it both an
apparently self-sufficient reality and the chance to be seen. Then, in turn,
this reappearance of a reconstituted and non-ideological discourse can be
questioned again. If the Modernist classic addressed exactly that kind of
question to the future, then today the objection is being raised about its
relevance and the reasons to include it in contemporary discourse.
The
articulationof a certain ideology of image and means whose background derives
from Modernism still makes high claims on theory and its practical application,
but it doesn't survive post-Modern deconstruction except as something stolen
from a museum or a meaningless installation. Neither can it withstand the alibi
of absent values that dominates contemporary culture, and which has recodified
the new in art.
It
is characteristic of every age, but especially so of Modernism, that a critical
and testing relationship to the past is established. It is also characteristic
that freedom is proposed as the only sensible and successful organising
condition, insofar as it remains aware of its limits and that the results of
its action are seen today as affirmative. It is precisely that kind of creative
relationship to the past that establishes a field of potential whereby we may
crossover to new ideal solutions as well as to derive stylistic innovations
which will themselves always be interesting, if fatal. If we dont exclude the
technical and innovative trajectories of Modernism that represent its potential
and, indeed, its only value, we can appreciate a feeling and a grasp of the
Modernist period that certainly appears different today to the way it was seen
in the past.
In
contrast to Modernism, the subsequent post-Modernism espouses nihilistic principles
that attempt a synthesis of everything up to the present, and propose an
intellectual assembly of historical matter that amounts to little more than
straight theft. This is far from a properly testing relationship and is of
doubtful value: it is dominated by arbitray factors like mood, coincidence and
improvisation, and more often than not imposes a passive state of temporal
awareness. It is against the background of this moment in cultural history that
we find ourselves trying to describe a fleeting view of an endless
work-in-progress, rather than discussing painting or sculpture per se. For art and cosmopolitan values
to survive at all depends on the comic figure of the private critic who no
longer looks for the new but sees only what has already been seen as it exists
in his mind, who moves around with the earflaps of his folky Slovene woolly cap
pulled down tight against fresh breezes, and who is a sign of the national
identity of Slovene art. If we dare to escape from this nationalist ethnographic
paradigm we find that there is only one direction to follow: through a
classicality of expression coupled to a creative awareness of it, and through
the rich potential for constructive addition to it that amounts to its true
future.
To
face this double aspect of devotion and dissolution reinvigorates the sense of
a present, historical dualism: painting and sculptureas something that is still
alive from an artistic point of view. If painting, by another name, existed
20,000 years ago to demonstrate man's pure, irrational and incontrovertible
need to express himself and to signify hisexistence, then it seems fair to ask
the question why it is losing its name and significance today. The loss of this
original creative perception can be accounted for from at least two general
perspectives.
First,
in post-industrial socienty the play ofself-determined local interest, and an
increasing deviation into speciallised interest has meant that the border
between public and private life has vanished as much in the reorganisation of
work practises as in the organisation of free time. The direct consequence of
this has been the disengagement of the public from active participation in
external and above all cultural space, and the replacement of this function by
the media, all of which has endangered intimacy. This phenomenon grew out of
the way industrial societies were organised in the 19th century and the
appearance of specialisations which increasingly segmented and partialised the
wholeness of society. The later post-industrial phase which is aggressively
dominated by the capital of information – the media –operates exclusively to
make a profit, and this, coupled with the phenomenon of negative inflation, is
especially bad for culture.
Second,
the consequence of our saturation with data and the endless echo of aggressive
media messages has been to disorientate individually directed interest, and in
the newborn emptiness and absence of quality product in our time a potential
audience canno longer respond with confidence to the quieter, but more
meaningful and truthful multidimensional medium of painting. Rather, it finds
itself perpetually overtaken by the juggernaut of mass communucation. That a
calm awareness is the necessary and perpetual precondition for the further life
of contemporary painting can be clearly understood from the many (dis)tempered
views expressed in this section.
Uros Paternu©Untitled, 2006, Acrylic on cancas (110 x 160 cm)
From Paintings©Uros Paternu
All rights reserved©2014
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