Arquivo para a ‘Pintura’ Categoria
For a philosophy of the look
13
Apr
It already exists, I even looked for the roots and couldn’t find it and that’s where
the problem lies, dialoguing with what is present in culture, philosophy and art about what the look is and how it is possible to develop it from there onwards in order to dialogue with contemporary culture.
For example, a good reading of Schiller we have already mentioned this week his “Aesthetic education of man”, in art I did not quote Gustav Klimt on purpose, he has elements of symbolism and all art literature recognizes it, but his “art nouveaux” brings something again (photo of his work the hug).
Edgar Morin, when analyzing “Mass culture of the 20th century”, emphasizes the multiple meanings of modern man: “the language adapted to this anthropos is audiovisual, the language of four instruments: image, musical sound, word, writing. A language that is all the more accessible insofar as it is the polytonic involvement of all languages” (page 45) and thus this look can be both dispersed and integrated, giving this new language a new look.
It is no longer specific to a single medium (sound, image and objects have existed as art since time immemorial), for Morin this is “of the game that lies on the fabric of practical life” (idem) and this symbolism in Klimt is in fact a vision integrated, but not specific to him, I also see it in Kandinsky his works also seem to have music and poetry, even though they are just pictures.
In cinema, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, in one of the paintings of this film Life, integrates painting and cinema by giving movement to Van Gogh’s paintings, thus, more than multimedia, these artistic movements can be called transmedia, due to the fact that they integrate aspects of art .
This re-educates and stimulates the look, but there is the aspect of the possibility of dispersing the look, but nothing can do this more than modern horizontal monomedia and social “media” are not out of it, so the re-education of the look goes through the stimulation of other senses and the spiritual that is not that idealist (see previous post) that are separated.
So, despite being a symbolist, it is fair to think of Klimt as a member of “art nouveaux”, since he helped to create the Secession Movement in Vienna, whose objective was to break the conservative traditions that were rooted in history and create an internationalist and comprehensive vision. of contemporary and timeless artistic genres.
The integration of this vision in new media is the presentation at the historic Atelie des Lumiéres, in Paris, of a transmedia animation of Vang Gogh (foto), which inaugurated a series in 2018 precisely with the work of Gustav Klimt also animated.
For this reason, it is not a synthesis of opposites, but the fusion of artistic horizons in movement, the current crisis is the dualistic vision of the world, of art and of values that are timeless.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX (Twentieth-century mass culture(. trans. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9th. edition. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Forense ed., 1997.
What is beautiful for idealism
12
Apr
We contradicted in the previous post the vision of vision and beauty of
the idealist sense, but Schiller himself is a descendant of this vision, even though he tried to rebuild “the unity of human nature”, in this he is right, he thought of rebuilding in the modern idealist way.
For Hegel, aesthetics, and therefore the Beauty, is the science that deals with the artistic beauty and not the natural beauty, for him the natural beauty is a product of the spirit (Geist), and, because it is a product of the spirit, it participates in the truth and what exists in nature, see that the spirit as well as the idealist “transcendence” is linked to nature and to the human, it is far from the mystical spiritual.
For an internal revolution to idealism, three currents of art are immersed in it: symbolism, classicism and romanticism, for many modern authors, I quote Byung Chul Han, the culture of the smooth, the flat and the “transparent” (glass, glass, etc.) plastics, etc.).
This pseudo-revolution that took place within idealist art is called self-overcoming, a kind of what was called in German idealism the New Hegelians, but it makes an even deeper division in art: painting, music and poetry.
Sculpture is considered a “noble” art, says Hegel: ““Sculpture introduces God himself into the objectivity of the external world; thanks to it, individuality manifests itself externally through its spiritual side” (Hegel, 1996, p. 113), again the exterior is objective, a sculpture and not a Being, the other and with him all his subjectivity.
Symbolism, on the other hand, was the one that “seeks to achieve the union between internal meaning and external form, that classical art achieved this union in the representation of the substantial individuality that addresses our sensibility, and that romantic art, spiritual in essence, surpassed” (Hegel, 1996, p. 340).
Seeing the consequences of this “romantic” thought, Hans-Georg Gadamer will criticize Dilthey’s romantic vision of consciousness, with serious consequences for modern historicism, almost all of which are idealistic and distant from reality, thus creating the “ideal” model for consciousness is for the beautiful and not to transform it as the idealists think to do.
I consider art nouveau, mainly by Antoni Gaudí (in the photo Casa Batlló, in Barcelona) the most faithful expression because it recovers natural elements (light, color, air and nature) without “affections” and traces of symbolism and romanticism, such as for example, present in the “Style Tiffany” in the United States or the “Style Glasgow” in the United Kingdom that has elements, in my view, of symbolism, although also called “art nouveau”.
Returning to the previous post, there is a confusing vision of ethics because it is separated from aesthetics.
Live life
23
Mar
The film Ikiru (1952) by the Japanese Akira Kurosawa translated as Viver, could also have the
translation Vivendo or Viver a Vida, since in writing in idiograms the conjugation of verbs is different, also in the Portuguese language of Portugal the gerund is little used so instead of Vivendo it would be To be living.
Works this week on the issue of death, and the phrase of the philosopher Socrates: “an unexamined life is not worth living” may seem like just an appeal to erudition, but those who watched Kurosawa’s film realize that it is not about that, either. there, the theme is the examination of the life of a “bureaucrat” in the face of the drama of death, by the character Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura).
The elderly bureaucrat discovers that he has stomach cancer and the first impact is that of depression and after examining his life, his relationship with his son and his service, where he had the nickname “Sutanpu” which means stamp, an allusion to the fact what problems were archived.
Thus, the film opposes bureaucratic life, the simple routine of empty lives, to the drama of the imminent death of the old bureaucrat, who, when examining his life, reminds him of ladies who always came to his department to complain about a muddy and dirty street.
The old man decides to take the problem for himself and even the ladies who complained are amazed, he decides to act to turn that dirty place into a park for children, and everyone in the department notices that he starts to revive, changes his hat, changes his face and decides to live life to the end, as Paul Ricoeur also proposes in his book cited this week.
The comments in your section are mean, maybe it’s a young girl, something must have happened in the old man’s life who now seemed like a different person.
The final scenes show him already dead, even the mean comments, and a street guard appears who says he saw that it was very cold and the old man on the swing (photo) in the park that helped to make it, but that he looked so happy, sang such a beautiful song that I didn’t want to disturb him.
When I watched the film in my youth, already a fan of Kurosawa, I went to the film with an expectation that Kurosawa would fail to deal with such a deeply existential theme, the film is ingenious and emotional.
Between the ordinary and the extraordinary
08
Dec
The immense universe and the images and
research that the James Webb telescope is revealing show us more than the greatness of science, how much nature and human knowledge are tiny compared to the organic and mysterious richness of the universe.
These are not discoveries of other planets inhabited by organic beings like ours, but rather the limits of the very laws of physics to the point of questioning what absolute time and space is the greatest revelation of modernity and rationality, which is now changing by the laws of relativity and guided by the more exact notion of what we call eternity.
Also in everyday life there are extraordinary facts, not those proclaimed by soothsayers, false prophets or oracles of a wisdom that is already known to be limited, by the correct view of science itself, uncertainty and error is its safest path, or as Bohr wrote to Einstein : the root of all evil is the human idea that someone holds all the truth.
The Christmas period is for Christians the revelation of a new and extraordinary truth, in the sense that it is beyond all reason and human science, by divine desire God became man, in a Trinitarian relationship, desire of God the Father, conception of Holy Spirit in a virgin (see previous post) and a divine-human God among us enters the story.
The fact is extraordinary because history has changed and will change even more as the space-time dimension in which human life is immersed passes, everyone dies and others are born and a divine truth is revealed through the noosphere, the sphere that mind or spirit inhabits and which no one can deny, because even philosophical and theological errors and conceptions are immersed in it.
The biblical characters, sincere men despite being followers of Jesus, also doubted his conception, his life (walking on the waves of the sea, the multiplication of the loaves, the healing of the man born blind, the resurrection of Lazarus) in all 36 acts extraordinary works, of which 22 are cures, all of this will one day be known to science, it is possible, but they were done before this time, when science was taking its initial steps.
But there are only divine acts, such as crossing the sea on dry foot, seeing Moses’ burning bush, and the greatest of all extraordinary acts, the one that only divine revelation can confirm, and perhaps one day will bring about some phenomenon. extraordinary, the virgin conceived and God came to dwell among us, he too died, but the Christian belief is that he rose and lives in eternal life.
Even the virgin who conceived, the young Mary betrothed to Joseph, who, upon hearing the news announced by an angel, doubts what is happening to herself (Lk 1:29): “Mary was troubled by these words and began to think what the meaning of salvation would be”, so the biblical characters idealized by theologians and pastors, were actually very human and not superstitious (painting of Leonardo da Vinci, around 1472).
It is true that later Mary will sing her Magnificat, knowing that God has made her great, but only after walking kilometers to Cousin Izabel’s house, who also received the grace of remaining a virgin in old age, but in her case there is nothing so extraordinary, they are known cases in the history of women of advanced age who have conceived.
Faith is believing in the extraordinary, even if you don’t have it, knowing that God’s intervention in history is possible, and what Christmas represents is the great intervention that is the very coming of the God-child.
The palliative society or the absence of pain
13
Apr
Palliative society explains Byung Chul Han has nothing to do with palliative medicine, as the Korean-German philosopher explains: “Thus, every critique of society has to carry out a hermeneutic of pain. If pain is left solely to medicine, we miss its character as a sign” (Han, 2021).
It reminds us of a saying by Ernest Jünger: “Tell your relationship with pain, and I will tell you who you are!”, so a critical society is not possible without a hermeneutics of pain, the relationship with each suffering not only that produced by history, but that which is in the particularity of each Other.
“Survival society completely misses the point of the good life. Enjoyment is also sacrificed to high health for an end in itself” (Han, 2021, p. 34).
He recalls and quotes Agamben in his vision of homo sacer and via naked: “Without resistance, we subject ourselves to the state of exception that reduces life to bare life” (Han, 2021, idem).
In the palliative society “The art of suffering pain is entirely lost to us… Pain is now a meaningless evil that must be fought with painkillers. As a mere bodily affliction, it falls entirely outside the symbolic order” (Han, 2021, p. 41), emphasis added by the author.
So today, pain is removed from any possibility of expression, it is condemned to remain silent, and “the palliative society does not allow to enliven, to verbalize pain into a passion” (p. 14), emphasis added by the author.
Vargas, Cecília (2018) Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience project in one gallery. Curated by Cecilia Vargas, Dickson Center at Waubonsee Community College, June 7-July 10th(foto).
HAN, Byung-Chul. (2021) The palliative society: pain today. trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
The Civilization Crisis
23
Nov
It is not just an idea of the apocalyptic, the pessimistic and the tragedies, dark spirits who do not really reflect on reality, it is those who think humanism, who look to a polarized, fragile and powerless life in the face of a pandemic (see Europa in the previous post) is the crisis of fragility that does not see itself as fragile.
Arrogants, pseudo-sages, and pseudo-prophets are on call, but even an optimist like Edgar Morin bends over when he sees a system that cannot deal with its fundamental problems, it disintegrates, thus began his recent lecture on the metamorphosis of humanity, he told the event : “he becomes even more barbaric”, but remember that this is not the first and probably not the last metamorphosis of humanity, we were at the origin (he said for over 100,000 years) hunters and gatherers.
There was no army, no state or classes, but little by little some groups wanted to dominate others, this happened in India, China and the Middle East, in the Andes where an Inca Empire was organized and in Mexico (where he gave the lecture).
These societies have metamorphosed for better or worse, he has not made a statement about this, but he thinks that a metamorphosis over our nation-states is possible.
It states that it is necessary to have hope, but hope is not certainty, the hope that in the past was a belief now, but if hope exists it is the necessary leaven for great transformations, and it is understood that this is the moment we are living this reality, in a postmodern or post-postmodern world, there is a transformation.
It remains for us to know which one leads us to destruction, and which one is truly the bearer of hope, it doesn’t give great tips, but let’s do an exercise.
The first great destruction is war, with the arsenal of ultra powerful weapons, even interplanetary, there are several objects around the planet, it is necessary to defend peace with the same force that we defend justice, a war would now be a catastrophe.
The second major destruction is social imbalance, insecurity and the lack of a sustainable plan for the use of natural resources, the large meetings only discuss the issue of pollution and deforestation in some regions of the planet, when they should discuss the planet as a All in all, nature shows signs of exhaustion and a greater imbalance in natural forces, of planetary proportions, is expected.
As Edgar Morin says, it is necessary to have hope, we have already gone through other stages of the civilizing process through similar situations, of course the proportion is now planetary.
Edgar Morin – Do esgotamento à metamorfose dos sistemas – YouTube
The cry of the afflicted
04
Nov
In many moments of personal difficulties, world conflicts and natural
tragedies, there is always an apparent cry of despair and pain, but our time is a silent cry for those who lose their reason for living, the pandemic has also caused many anguish, loneliness and despair.
The famous pcitura Norwegian Edvard Munch’s The scream represents an androgynous figure in a moment of deep anguish and despair, with the Oslo fjord at sunset in the background, characterizes well what affliction means in our time, in addition to misery and lack of solidarity , the anguish and anxiety of the figure may be the author’s own, the phrase written at the top of the painting: “it could only have been painted by a madman”, analyzed by the Oslo National Museum concluded that it was the author’s.
The aspect of anxiety would remain veiled, were it not for this analysis, since the author stated on one occasion: “I have suffered a deep feeling of anxiety that I have tried to express in my art”, and this reflects our contemporary fears.
GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) is one of the symptoms of this condition, which can also be bipolar or some other type of lack of control, this type was generically called Neurotic Anxiety, but there are two others: Realistic and Moral.
Realistic anxiety refers to the fear of something existing in the outside world, so a pandemic or a natural catastrophe (hurricane, earthquakes, sudden changes in climate, etc.) is basically a kind of fear of something real happening but that puts us in a different adrenaline.
Moral is the one that refers to the feeling of guilt, which triggers a fear of being punished, and this leads to a situation of conflict in the interior, so the person loses sensitive aspects of their interior: the unconscious threatening to enter the conscious what it means in practice a loss of self-control.
But the afflicted are also the helpless, the abandoned and the rejected by society, the various types of prejudices on which current controversies are born.
In the Christian reading, the text of Matthew (5:4) although some translations put as “afflicted”, the translation we prefer here: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted!”, because beyond the aspect of “sickness “there is structural evil and social evil that push many people into this state, and blaming them just means adding to any kind of “affliction” the neurotic anxiety that is born of a disproportionate sense of guilt, and this is the great kind of current social pressure.
But what would be the comfort the bible speaks of, the comfort of those who believe is that the only evil they should fear is the soul, so contrary to what many moralistic interpretations say, it is a balanced morality and without the exaggeration of guilt that it leads to an inner state without this kind of anxiety.
The intermittents of death
31
Aug
José Saramago (1922-2010), in addition to his famous book
Essay on Blindness, written in 1995 and which later became a film directed by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles and scripted by Don McKellar, wrote many other novels: O memorial do convento (adapted from an opera), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Essay on lucidity, and many others, I highlight here As Intermitências da Morte (2005).
In 1998, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but two works seem prophetic for today: The essay on blindness, which we have already posted, and the Intermitências da Morte.
Skeptical and ironic, Saramago did not fail to notice the dramas of our time, but the unexpected way it ends. Lucidity, I would say using the Heideggerian metaphor that clearing is possible if we penetrate the existential drama of life.
In The Intermittencies of Death, he penetrates into the existential dramas of life, as a religious skeptic, he will also mock the outputs with an answer “from above”, that is, transfer to “another world” our permanently mundane dramas, among them, what it’s life itself.
He says in a passage on page 123: “It is possible that only a painstaking education, one of those that is already becoming rare, along, perhaps, with the more or less superstitious respect that in timid souls the written word usually instills, has led readers, although they were not lacking in reasons to manifest explicit signs of ill contained impatience, not to interrupt what we have been reporting so profusely and to want to be told what it is that, in the meantime, death has been doing since the fatal night when it announced the your return.” (in the photo a picture of Gustav Klimt’s painting).
After inquiring in every book about life, something unusual these days, because all you want is a return to frivolity, the normality of emptiness, the absence of life, consumption and false joys, the author will say in end of the book that death is normality, said like this:
“He stayed in his room all day, had lunch and dinner at the hotel. Watched television until late. Then he got into bed and turned off the light. Didn’t sleep. Death never sleeps.” (Saramago, 2005, p. 189).
And he concludes that his common irony in times when the pandemic was not even dreamed of (his pandemic was The Essay on Blindness), he says about death: “(…) I don’t understand anything, talking to you is the same as having fallen into a labyrinth without doors, Now that’s an excellent definition of life, You’re not life, I’m much less complicated than it, (…)” (Saramago, 2005, p. 198). Oh what a pity, a pity even that Saramago had never believed in a true life, this disbelief is also in all his work, especially “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991), but at least he was not indifferent to the theme, something “bothered him”.
SARAMAGO, José. (2005) The intermittence of death. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Bliss and beatitude
27
Oct
Although the term is associated with Christian holiness, and is also one of its aspects, the term in classical antiquity had a more generic meaning, a permanent state of perfect satisfaction and fullness that only a wise man could achieve, so thought Aristotle, but today it is conditioned only to the religious sense, it is intended here to show that they can be closer than we think.
The religious meaning is also that of happiness, but in the sense of joy of balanced pleasure of the soul, which can only reach those who enjoy the presence of God, that its fullness can be achieved only in eternal life, but does not mean discarding earthly life, 
“I have come that everyone may have life, and life in abundance” (John 10:10), so proclaims the evangelist, but what is different between the two proposals for happiness.
Aristotle in the book “Of the causes” will say that the end of beatitude is relative to its desire, so the ultimate nature of this end moves mainly by desire and this is pleasure, so much so that it absorbs man’s will and reason to the point of make other goods despise.
Both Boethius, that the church also beatified him (that is, he proclaimed him happy, blessed and holy), and Aristotle dealt with the theme, and their question is what if pleasure is really the ultimate end of happiness, of beatitude and that it also Tomás de Aquino will argue the contrary.
What Boethius says is that the consequences of pleasures are sad, all those who want to remember their sensualities know it, because, if these could make them happy, there would be no reason why the brutes too would not be considered such, and this is very reminiscent of current cases of abuse and objectionable violence.
For Boethius: “The beatitude is the perfect state of the union of all goods”, and so it seems that through money you can acquire all things, because the Philosopher, in book V of Ethics, says that money was invented for to be the guarantor of everything that man wanted to possess, which today can be translated as money buys everything.
In addition, Boethius also says: “Riches shine more when they are distributed than when they are conserved. For this reason, greed makes men hateful, generosity makes them illustrious ”, and so wealth is not condemned, but its bad distribution.
In the representation above the painting “The cheerful violinist with a glass of wine” (1624) by Gerard van Honthorst (1590-1656).
Between tragedy and idealism
11
Aug
The big theme during the pandemic, which attracts crowds
is happiness, not by chance, since happiness was in everything that is now closed: the mall, the cinema, the houses of orgies and drinking, the simple ecstasy of being in a frenzied crowd for some frivolous reason, after all it is the frivolity that everyone wants to come back, there will be nothing great to penetrate the tragedy of a pandemic, it is necessary to find the culprits and punish them for banishing frivolous life and putting us all in constant tension, in fear and far from simple enjoyment.
Nietzsche wrote about The Birth of Tragedy, and blamed Empedocles for his death, but it was Hölderling who will write about Empedocles’ Death, it was he before Nietzsche who rediscussed the tragedy, and the tragic of the tragedy, in a dialogue with German idealism and that’s when he coined his most famous phrase: “where there is fear there is salvation”, almost in the same vein as Cassius Clay who became Mohammed Ali: “it is the lack of faith that makes people fear challenges”.
The pandemic is none other than the fact of understanding the limits of the human, the persistence of tragedy in our lives and destinies, and the fatality of death, those who never thought of it are those who fear it most now, it is never so close of all, but tragedy is evil, or the false sale of easy happiness, it is in it that the charlatans of philosophy, faith and even science without “label” rely.
The Death of Empedocles, an unfinished play, where Hölderlin worked from 1797 to 1799, in his poetic texts from this period, where he thought about the essence of the tragic is marked by a great antagonism, but above all the unification of antagonism with contradiction, where he makes it clear that the theme should be “the true modern tragedy”, perhaps not during the two tragic wars we face, but now in an endless pandemic.
In his analysis, Empedocles hates civilization, is a mortal enemy of limited human existence, cannot bear to live under time, suffers for not being a god, for not being in close union with the whole, and for a need that stems from his being deeper, I decide to die by throwing myself into the volcano.
He is less of a liar than the real ones of simple formulas for happiness, but tragic that he wants to be a god himself and that he would be more “noble” than to admit a God, killed not by tragedy, but by German idealism, after all from Fichte to Schelling, the great expression that transgresses the limit imposed by Kant on human knowledge, when considering all intuition, that which is sensitive to objects, becomes intellectual intuition and artistic intuition, being able to give an immediate knowledge to the absolute, of possibility revelations that are directed to the whole.
So in the essay “Foundation for Empedocles” says that tragedy is the expression of the “deepest intimate unity” that is exposed by real oppositions, the idea owes not only much to Schelling’s analysis, which defines the Greek tragedy as a reconciling presentation of contradictions of reason, but anticipates the Hegelian view of the tragic poem as a presentation of the “tragedy that the absolute eternally stages with itself”, but the absolute here is vague, ideal. In the “foundation for Empedocles”, Hölderling explains how the harmonious opposition between art and nature takes place, presenting the process by which nature becomes more organic and man, more agorgic, more universal.
The concept of aorgic here is fundamental, and the reading here is by Françoise Dastur “Hölderling, tragedy and modernity” where he defines it as “it is nature without organicity in its infinite uniqueness”.
The organic is the art, which supposes, on the contrary, organization and, therefore, opposition from the parties”.
In the aorgic relationship that can be found the pandemic, the culprit is ultimately the virus, the control of the virus is questionable until you have the vaccine, we were in favor of social isolation and at certain times of #LockDown, however it is in nature devoid of organicity, a virus that until then was foreign to the man who altered it and became hominating, putting the civilizing process in check, and nature seems to fight back what humanity proposed.
Hölderling, Friedrich. (2008) The dead of Empedocles A Mourning-Play. NY: State University of New York.
