Absurd and diverting recreations, but are the sketches recreational in the full sense of the word?

Wassily Kandinsky - Above and Left, 1925

  

Here we find Kandinsky moving from his work with abstract representation toward the direction of his later work in what we can properly call "Platonic Geometric Formalism." I don't know if critics write about such stages in Kandinsky's career, but the distinction is useful as we feel our way toward making some intelligent points about the many curious figures in the painting.

Taking the title at face value, there are two “movements” here, as indicated by the arrows: the first moves to the top (i.e. Above), and the second moves to the Left. Interestingly enough, the “action” in the painting rather gravitates toward the upper right, toward the bottom (or below), and toward the field at the painting’s center.  But for the nonce let’s set aside the specificites of the title, if that is psychologically possible.

In the upper right field, there are figures representing a three-dimensional grid in realistic, real-life terms, complete with shadows. We see a “real” three-dimensional object in space, moreover with somewhat (though not excessively) exaggerated perspective; we can’t help but to think this exaggeration is meant to make a point, and this point is made when comparing this grid to complementary images in the lower half of the painting. Perhaps “contrapuntal” is a better word than “complementary,” though suffice it to say that there is evidently a dialogue between the figures.

The figures below in the painting are three narrow bands suggesting (but not representing in perspective) the physical space of physical reality. There are actually two figures here: the paired curving bands in Red (and Black) is the first, and the straight Red band, or ray, is the second. Note these three bands are not realistic but are rather the abstractions of three-dimensional figures. Two of these (in Red) are curving and they are interrupted by Black polygons that are driven, as it were, by the white horizontal bars cutting across the field. The straight Red band represents a projection through three-dimensional space, like a radiating beam of light; observe, however, that the contours are symbolic rather than an attempt to represent perspective with real-world geometric similitude. While the grid in the upper right is a realistic object in perspective, the figures below are abstractions of an object (or objects) and an abstraction of the movements of that object (or those objects); and again underscore that even the matter of perspective is represented in the abstract.

Note that the perspective grid in the upper right is reflected elsewhere in the painting by several similar grids or matrices: 1) the field of irregular rectangles at the center of the painting, 2) the small,  seven-line Brown and Cream rectangle immediately to the right of the central field, and 3) the grid suggested by the Black background and the three White horizontal bars below and to the left of the central field — to which we now turn our attention.

In the center of the painting we find a field of "irregularized" rectangles, which suggests to us a kind of "matrix of conception" — a locus of cognitive action, qualification, computation, judgment, emotional volition, and inspiration — and from this field emanate the painting's other images and figures; and, we could cleverly say, this is the field from which emanate our utterances about the painting. Indeed, these descriptive words are themselves utterances prompted by an accurate and, we should hope, an appropriate, ideal and simple description of what the painting shows.

Above these central rectangles are figures variously suggesting a ship’s masts with pennants flying from these masts, or maybe we see birds' heads.  If they are in fact birds' heads, then we might compare them to the heads of viewers in a gallery having a discussion that follows along with the general contours of the utterances made here by the present writer. Note (and it is hard not to!) that the field behind these birds’ heads is dominated by a sphere — or is it rather a globe hanging in shadowy space, properly complete with a terminator, as if the globe hung in space, a planet hovering in the heavens — the world of the viewers, perhaps?

Now, and with some confidence, we can return to the painting’s title. The upward dynamic (Above) expressed in the title is populated by this heavenly planet (the richly textured world of all viewers) but the arrow itself transcends this field and points to the empty field that, one might suggest, lies outside of the painting. Is this the world of the gallery in which the painting is exhibited? Meanwhile, the eponymous arrow indicating the Left dynamic suggested by Kandinsky's succinct language points to a field just inside the perimeter of the painting. Empty but pregnant with possibility; here at last is where we locate the tension between our attempts to articulate descriptions and the inevitable doubt that suggests our utterances are facile and inappropriate.  Thus we return to the patchwork of “irregularized” rectangles — the “matrix of conception,” as we call it — at the center of the painting, whereupon begins anew the cycles of emotion, reasonably uncomplicated identification, and utterance.

I now close with two questions: 

First, is the figure in the lower Left the image of a lantern, and does it illuminate the Ocher field and the objects of the painting--an illumination comparing to our self-same illuminating descriptions of the painting, compressed as they are between our utterances and the need to return to the matrix of our cycling conceptions?

Second, is the Sky-Blue field in the lower right quadrant the world outside the painting — or, better, the world outside the gallery — and moreover scattered with sufficient clouds so as to enhance our impression Above and around us of a real world in three dimensions?

Alice and her perceptions

Original book illustration by John Tenniel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country – and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last.

     - Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, Through the Looking Glass

Highbrow Helicopterfest: #2 Hughes XH-17

 

Click HERE for more Highbrow Helicopterfest action.

Paul Klee - Hand Puppets

Grotesque, surreal, comic, menacing, absurd, whimsical...  A farrago of psychological types and emotional aberrancy.

Culture Studies with Yuri Bezmenov, 1984

According to Mr. Bezmenov, the stages in the process of subversion are four:

1. Demoralization

2. Destabilization

3. Crisis

4. Normalization

Raising our eyebrows with ironic bemusement, we might also consider these stages as being part and parcel of a typical advertising campaign selling one innocuous consumer product or another: laundry detergent, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, energy drinks, exercise club memberships, vocational counseling, model trains, cosmetic surgeries, tennis shoes, degrees in basket weaving, tickets to see a charismatic music superstar...

An inquiry into "ethical decline" presents a range of challenging problems. To what degree are Bezmenov's four stages actually resulting from programs advanced by various leaders in education? Too, we are wont to draw distinctions concerning domestic and foreign influence. To what degree is "subversion" advanced by domestic actors, and to what degree is subversion a policy of foreign economic and political forces? Distinctions regarding state vs. private (or corporate) policies also are matters of interest. 

The analyses of these questions suggest advertising, education, social engineering and subversion can overlap. Identifying rubrics to characterize and gauge the overlap can be complicated in a host of ways, of course.

I am not sure where this leaves us; as a matter of historical description, I question where we might find ourselves along the career of decline described by Mr. Bezmenov.  

Here, meanwhile, is related highbrow material worth the attention of those who do not skip it: Fatidic Television. 

Be seeing you.

Soviet tank rams into a building, Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968

Trivia note:

According to a correspondent from Germany, East German troops didn't participate in the "special measures." However, members of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry of State Security) were on the ground supporting with intelligence collection.

The Wizard of Oz accurately described

It has been forty years since I read The Wizard of Oz, but the following discussion matches what I remember.

Regarding a host of issues, the video is most apt, and the allegorical interpretations are sound or otherwise useful.

 

Note: In the novel it is not Glinda but rather her sister (called Locasta or Tattypoo the Good Witch of the North) who meets Dorothy at the beginning of the story and puts Dorothy on her journey down the Yellow Brick Road. As the video explains, in the novel Dorothy meets Glinda the Good Witch of the South near the end of the story. Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the film is a composite character incorporating both Glinda and Locasta from the novel.

Cosmology Unbound and Speculative Endeavors: we have curious data, fascinating mathematical models and impressive computer simulations, but what remain most important (and perhaps most viable) are descriptive examinations, conceptual clarifications and uninhibited analyses of the distinctions among institutional contexts, science, and the language used to describe and conduct that science

When finely conceived commercial art informs other aesthetic parameters, other communities of appreciation, other realms of stimulus and response, and other markets--can other politics be far behind?

 Art by Richard Powers ca 1965-66

NASA Archives: Satellite Images of Earth

NASA Earth Observatory: a project of the EOS Project Science Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Landsat Science: the NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence. Landsat data give us information essential for making informed decisions about Earth’s resources and environment.

NASA Visible Earth: a catalogue of images and animations of our home planet

U.S. Geological Survey LandsatLook: online tool for recent information by address or place name, and to track changes in different light wavelengths

Timeline of the Landsat program, beginning with the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. Landsat Next, consisting of a trio of satellite observatories, is expected to launch in late 2030. As the tenth Landsat mission, it will continue the legacy of the Landsat program. Source: Landsat Science

"The Psychedelic Puppets String Theory Gang and the Cyberdelic Dream Pen"

Highbrow talk about Cicero and the problem of defining the place of law and reason in a Republic

True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.

                                         Cicero - On the Republic

These stimulating statements are perhaps too worldly insofar as Cicero places reason and natural law over those useful skeptical and apophatic views conducive to a deeper spiritual, and thus more comprehensive, insinuation of happiness and justice throughout the lives of men and women, and so throughout government and the social order. Here we see the case of a philosopher of Skepticism drawing too close to the erroneous pagan convictions we associate with the Stoics. And I think this might be verified by St. Augustine's criticisms of On the Republic;  St. Augustine properly challenges Cicero, observing the book fails to define a Republic.  

Cicero is applying broad brushstrokes that draw our attention to the consideration of what St. Thomas Aquinas calls Natural Theology, which is very well and good. But in order to understand the full range of possibilities for a good (happy) Republic, we must bring into our conversation the consideration of what Aquinas calls Revealed Theology, appropriately centering our considerations at the focus--as upon the microscope stage--of a skeptical-empirical method.

Above, my use of "skeptical" and "apophatic" are necessary approaches for elevating Revealed Theology to the status of an anthropological understanding, which is a discussion that is philosophical rather than an exercise of the mythography and poetry which are the subjects of that inquiry. 

The study of scripture and myth--and importantly the study of the history of our commentary regarding these subjects--define the formulations yielding the "Revealed" understanding that 1) return Cicero to the school of Skepticism, and 2) yield the elusive (but not too elusive) definition of a Republic that St. Augustine calls for. Thus, we seek to include unworldly understanding (and hopefully unworldly solutions) in our essay of very worldly problems.  Here we might imagine Wittgenstein calling for a synoptic examination of unworldly possibilities (and indeed he would call for a long list of such possibilities), framing the language of these possibilities in the human context--in the "stream-of-life." 

Framing his political science and his history as an inquiry into a Revealed and Natural understanding of the world, Locke has some useful things to say about these matters, and he advances many happy suggestions for proceeding in peaceful, inclusive, informed, wise, productive and profitable directions. 

Finally, we would be remiss were we to fail to view these suggestions as matters of aesthetic impression. Thus, I am wont to evoke something of a Japanese manner and call Locke's suggestions "pleasant," moreover encouraging visions of a harmonious community.

Marcus Tullius Cicero 

 

Philippe Halsman & Jean Cocteau - “The Blind Poet believes that he is the Emperor of China” (1949)

Dudley Moore and John Lennon play the avant-garde card for higbrow laughs, 1965

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe, January 19, 1809

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty - Percy Shelley - read by Vincent Price

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

         Floats though unseen among us; visiting

         This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

                It visits with inconstant glance

                Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

                Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

                Like memory of music fled,

                Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate

         With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

         Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

                Ask why the sunlight not for ever

                Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,

                Why fear and dream and death and birth

                Cast on the daylight of this earth

                Such gloom, why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

         To sage or poet these responses given:

         Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavour:

Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever,

                From all we hear and all we see,

                Doubt, chance and mutability.

Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,

                Or music by the night-wind sent

                Through strings of some still instrument,

                Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart

         And come, for some uncertain moments lent.

         Man were immortal and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.

                Thou messenger of sympathies,

                That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;

Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,

                Like darkness to a dying flame!

                Depart not as thy shadow came,

                Depart not—lest the grave should be,

Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

         Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

         And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

                I was not heard; I saw them not;

                When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

                All vital things that wake to bring

                News of birds and blossoming,

                Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

   I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers

         To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?

         With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers

                Of studious zeal or love's delight

                Outwatch'd with me the envious night:

They know that never joy illum'd my brow

                Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free

                This world from its dark slavery,

                That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,

Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene

         When noon is past; there is a harmony

         In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

                Thus let thy power, which like the truth

                Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

                Its calm, to one who worships thee,

                And every form containing thee,

                Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Not exactly keeping with the more knowledgeable and wise understanding that informs the ethos of the Highbrow Commonwealth, but some of the language is interesting. In a reasonable discussion of the poem, it is evident the best strategy should be to enlarge upon Shelley's conceptual errors and misunderstandings, while not neglecting to explore the texture of the involving but also flawed music, which provides matter for much philosophical criticism and appreciation, albeit a very mild appreciation that should properly "pass like clouds in starlight widely spread," indeed.