MikeAdamsArtist.com Blog

[You may discern that I start out on this post with vim-and-vigor, and get bogged-down with the weight of things that are so profound, trying to sort them out. Let's just say that this is an homage some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. No wonder they wrote long books, trying to unwind complexities, which only a fool would try to summarize. . .Maybe more of a jester than a fool?]
On the reading front, I’m in the middle of John Dewey’s Experience and Nature. I’ve gone on-and-on about his Art As Experience elsewhere in this blog. I assume E&N is one of the books that he’s most famous for, because he radically tears Western philosophy to shreds. He wrote it before Art, and the tone is somewhat strident at points, making Art seem much more gracious. Also, Art is an easier read, but that may be my bias because of the subject. Nonetheless, Experience and Nature is dazzling. The basic premise is that the ancient Greeks elevated the idea of ideas (my awkward phrase) and separated mind from nature because they were, in modern parlance elitist snobs. The ruling classes in their leisure, wanted to legitimize the contemplation of their navels, and did so by elevating “ideas,” as a kind of “pure thought” into the realm of the heavens. They took thought out of the natural system in which it exists, and assumed it was eternal. (I’m poking fun here, at the both the ancients, and Dewey, for whom I have the utmost admiration, but that is the gist of the argument.) Dewey also points out that the Greek conception of reality was based on language. Reality had, or was described to be, a systematic analog to language. Reality had to fit into descriptions. As I understand Dewey’s view, the Greeks knew that language was an abstraction, so, if we talk about a “bed,” it’s a very generic, unspecific bed. It is natural then to see “bed” as a category, a universal, for which there must be an underlying category, a Platonic Form, somewhere, protected from the vicissitudes of change. For Dewey, here’s the rub: things exist in a constant state of change and transformation. That’s reality, not “conceptions of things.” Dewey was a level-headed radical, who I don’t think would ever intend to tear something down, without being able to replace it with something radically level-headed. This “what comes next” is where I am in the book. I think Dewey’s premise is that the power of things comes from our relation as social creature to those things (objects and ideas). And ideas themselves are part of our natural world, because they are thoughts that are thought by natural beings. This is an oversimplification on my part, of course.
The problem is metaphysics. . .
I forgot, in the fog of my exhibition at the Viking Ship Museum, to write a little homage to William Temple’s Mens Creatrix which I finished reading in February. It’s a warm-up to his Nature, Man, and God, which is dazzling. I read online, perhaps in the Stanford Philosophical Encyclopedia, that NM&G was a response to Alfred North Whitehead’s mind numbing (but really cool!) Process and Reality. Whitehead’s book, in turn, is said to be a metaphysical response to Quantum Theory, and in the last chapter, Whitehead, who seemed to avoid the topic for his entire career, discusses the idea of God as a sort of Aristotelian unmoved-mover: a dispassionate kick-starter-of-the-universe (or at least of reality as we know it), who is not really here anymore. Well, to Temple, who was a man-of-the-cloth, this wouldn’t do. Temple, who was nothing if not brilliant, does not approach the argument the way a Fundamentalist would. He doesn’t say “’cause it’s in the Bible!” No. He argues upside-down, backwards, and sideways to methodically posit that our own minds are a reflection of the divine structure of the universe. We couldn’t be what we are without a personal, omniscient God. Although NM&G may be more of a response to Whitehead, whom he does discuss directly, the underlying theme is the same in Mens Creatrix. We are a reflection of a divine creator who is both inside the universe (oh, this is complicated!) in our normal time, but also outside of time. Immanent and transcendent is what that is called, I believe. This idea is sometimes called Panentheism.
Since my book review(s) is (are) spinning out of control, let me just close, because it’s bedtime, by drawing certain parallels between Dewey’s naturalism and Temple’s theism: they are both arguing that the realm of ideas exists within a system that does not segregate ideas from the world. Ideas are inherent in and integral to the universe.
Good night!

I do have a cold, though, and I feel sorry for myself when I’m sick. . .I haven’t been into ceramics studio for a couple of days, but I’m looking forward to seeing my glaze tests! When I left on Friday afternoon, the kiln was still at 270 degrees Celsius, which is too hot to open. (I assume that a sudden temperature change might damage the ceramic pieces inside.) I hadn’t planned to be sick, of course, so that means that a cup that I was working on may be too dry to allow me to put a handle on it. Maybe it doesn’t need a handle? Can I moisten the clay again?
Okay, I wrote that yesterday. . .or the day before. . .
Now I’m alive again! Here’s the stuff from the kiln! There were actually more pieces than this, but you get the idea. Tomorrow, I’ll glaze the sculptural pieces, referring to the glaze samples that were also in the kiln with these cups.

The following is a proposal I wrote for an artist’s residency in the Midwest (USA). It had to be under 1000 characters, hence the brevity. I was also trying to write a kind of introduction, since there was no other written material except for the résumé/CV. I’ve been thinking about how my work in the studio is a result of touching and feeling materials, and I know that it’s difficult for people not to touch things in a gallery. It seems like tactility is such an important aspect of our being, yet we often forbid it. (Merleau-Ponty used the term skin, I think, to express the “interface” we have with the world. How “tactile” he thought this was I don’t know. . .I’m trying to get through the Phenomenology of Perception. . .It’s slow going. . .)

Next week I’m going to begin working in a ceramics studio called liv i leire (“life in clay”) here in Oslo. I took a crash-course in the Seattle-area from Liz Myers at Sugarshak Pottery over the Christmas break, and what struck me was that I didn’t really need to look at the wheel and my hands while doing many of the processes with the spinning clay. I felt it, and if it felt good, and then I looked at the form, it also looked right. Thanks to Bryan Park for introducing me to Craft Theory, which among other things recognizes that making objects links the artist to millennia of makers-of-objects. In other words, one taps into a tradition, whether one is conscious of it or not. And it’s interesting that this is a tradition of touching and responding to materials (and ideas).

Building upon ideas that I am exploring while in Oslo on a Fulbright grant, I would like to create “touchable,” interactive sculptural installations. Most of my work, while inviting, is not “supposed” to be touched. I would like to work with durable materials such as fiberglass window screen, carpeting, stone, ceramics, and wood, and entice the viewer to touch. John Dewey’s Art as Experience posits that art is part of a continuum of experiences, and that we artificially separate “High Art” from “Low Art.” I believe using humble materials and changing the way the viewer interacts with the work of art by making it more intimate, not merely on a visual level, can bridge a gulf between people. I would like to continue to use video elements as both a light-source and image generator, especially live video of the exhibition space itself. Video projections can be both otherworldly and familiar at the same time, so real and yet so ephemeral, creating a meditative “space” for the viewer.

Hmm. I’m a farther along in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, and he’s making more and more claims that the “scientific” method is applicable outside of science. And I’m getting more and more annoyed. Are we going to quantify how peachy Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is, and figure out that it was “good”, because of that particular D-flat in that particular measure? Oy. Seems to me his utopian vision of a better world of the future, with better scientific theories, is quite naive. One can’t have new-and-improved humans if we lose what it is to be human, even if we become better widget makers. It seems that Deutsch is losing track of value, which is intangible, while chasing facts for his utoptia. What seemed to me to be a kind of parallel with Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is ironically just the sort of thing that Rorty is arguing against: that the scientific method is an “end-all” of our problems. I came across something interesting today in Rorty, in which he states (perhaps echoing Hans-Georg Gadamer), that we think we know ourselves better because we know all sort of “objective facts” about our bodies, electrons, and can make zippers, yet delude ourselves into thinking we know who we really are.

Why are landscapes so compelling, both in person, and when represented in art? There are a lot of theories about the power of landscapes, the best of which are those which explore the sublime, I suppose. There’s always an element of “terror” in those theories (I’m thinking of Edmund Burke).
Here’s a still from video that I shot flying over the Canadian arctic (I believe this was just north of Hudson Bay), looking down at the sea-ice. What wonderful patterns. I wonder if some of the power of landscapes comes from how they seem to expand the mind. We are drawn into a spatial realm, something outside of ourselves, something that does not have a specific meaning. A landscape gives us room to think, to reflect.

Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning is the title of Eugene T. Gendlin’s book, which I mentioned in the previous post. It’s an interesting book. Sometimes I feel that Gendlin has lost me (or I’ve lost Gendlin?), but then he pulls it all together. He has a very interesting, sophisticated take on symbols, pointing out, among other things, that they cannot be interpreted in isolation. Divorced from a context they are probably meaningless. What struck me just now (on page 128) is something he writes about relevance, which could also be called context. He states that the relevance of a symbol comes from a person’s past experiences (whether it be three seconds ago, or 23 years). What is significant is that he is talking about personal experiences, not collective ones that we often hear about in psychology. The book was published in 1962, and basically pre-dates the pervasive post-modernist idea that symbols are somehow a collective, cultural phenomenon, as if we share our every thought with the rest of humanity. I suppose I’m sounding like Ayn Rand (whose Fountainhead and Anthem I think are brilliant, even though I don’t share her Libertarian leanings), but I would like to think that all experience is personal experience.
Gendlin’s prose is not exhilarating, but more workmanlike like Rand’s, so I’ll call in a heavy hitter in the bottom of the ninth-inning of my argument: William Temple. Hit it out of the park, Bill!

Every mind is a separate focus of the universe; according to its capacity it apprehends the world about it, and according to its instinct for totality (or will to know) it tries to increase its hold and range together in a united system all that it can experience.

The following is part of an email I sent to my friend Larry Gebhardt. We were moving furniture with John Kihara from my house to other friends’ houses yesterday, in preparation for my departure from Pocatello. We were discussing a wide range of Big Thoughts, like we like to do. I had just listened to the opera version of Dead Man Walking. I’ve never seen the film, although I was somewhat familiar with Sister Helen Prejean’s story. I was entirely discombobulated by the recording, since the story is simultaneous disturbing but also affirming. Larry is interested in how to incorporate spiritual values in organizations, and by this I do not mean mind-control-that-parades-as-religion, but something that gives people a sense of value. . .

Here’s what I wrote to Larry (with a few revisions):

I just came across the following in Eugene T. Gendlin’s Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning:
“We can hold in mind only a few verbal symbols at one time.” Therefore as in Dewey, emotion is the cement that holds ideas together. Gendlin continues, “Only by inwardly ‘pointing’ at such a concrete felt datum can we encompass at once all the meanings and orders we are using simultaneously.” Gendlin means that experiencing is a process that makes meanings; and emotion, or feelings, play a dominant role in the creation of meaning. Our own limited cognitive functioning would seem to be helped, not hindered by emotion. I can’t help but think of our conversation yesterday, because spirituality has a very strong emotional component. I get the sense that Sister Helen Prejean is right, for instance, because her arguments against the death penalty (as I understand them) as being brutal and vengeful, are rational. But, I have a strong emotional upwelling when she talks about everyone belonging to God. That’s how to tie an idea together: rationale and emotion.

I’ve come across a couple of interesting quotes within the last day, and strangely enough, there is a similarity between them; or, at least something is stimulated in my mind, a new train of thought.

The first is from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which was recommended to me by visiting artist Benjamin Gardener:

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times—noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring—belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

The second is from John Dewey’s Art as Experience:

To define the emotional element of esthetic perception merely as the pleasure taken in the act of contemplation, independent of what is excited by the matter contemplated, results, however, in a thoroughly anæmic conception of art.

Dewey is criticizing Kant, since he feels Kant is compartmentalizing experience, and Dewey wants to emphasize that different types of experience are a continuum. Calvino is making a point about transcendence. He knows that the poet must rise above the times, and reject common conceptions of things. Dewey is seeking a rejection of antiquated philosophical ideas. Both are rejecting the status quo, not to elevate art above day-to-day life, but perhaps to question the divisions between art and day-to-day life; and, perhaps, to question our very definitions of art and day-to-day life.
[I'm adding the following a few hours later since I just came across more similarities between Dewey and Calvino.]
Another interesting parallel is that both authors write of a certain kind of distance that the artist keeps between him- or her-self and the subject matter. Oddly, I’d never heard of Diderot’s Paradox, even though I thought I knew quite a bit about Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher. Diderot’s Paradox is that according to Dewey, an actor on the stage cannot be feeling the same emotions that he is depicting. True grief would make him numb and send him from the stage. However, through the filter of his artistry, emotion can be reformed into expression. Calvino retells the tale of Perseus (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), who views the horrible Medusa reflected in his shield so as not to be killed by her gaze. He slays her, and can make use of her terrifying visage against his enemies later on (just by showing her head). He can “repurpose” (as we say today) the darkly terrifying, without succumbing to it. He can transcend it, creating something useful, just like a poet (or the actor in Diderot’s Paradox) gazes into the darkness to find inspiration in order to create something new and meaningful.

Yes, I’m still reading John Dewey’s Art as Experience. I might as well just retype it, since it is endlessly interesting, and my note-taking is voluminous.
Here’s a particularly illuminating quote:

“But one of the functions of art is precisely to sap the moralistic timidity that causes the mind to shy away from some materials and refuse to admit them into the clear and purifying light of perceptive consciousness.”

p 189.
One of Dewey’s overarching themes is that philosophy, and by implication, art theory, is askew because it focuses on grand ideas and grand personages, not ordinary life and ordinary people and their experiences. Ironically, this sounds like he’s advocating for the kind of Social (or Socialist) Realism in art that was common at the time he wrote the book, which both the Nazis and the Soviets doled out. Dewey, no doubt saw through the propagandistic aspect of that kind of art, since it’s not really an art of personal experience, but a political tool.

Wow. I am stunned into (near) silence by John Dewey’s Art as Experience. I introduced the book in my previous post, and I have been slogging through, only because it is so amazingly interesting that I am slowed-down by note-taking! Here is a fantastic quote from page 105:

In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.

This passage comes at the end of chapter in which he pummels theories that posit our relation with a work of art is one of separate “systems” that have a shallow sort of interaction with each other. Dewey’s point is that our relation to a work of art is one of interconnectedness and inseparability.