Insanity
Is doing the same wrong thing
Over and over again
This is how you know
You are
Insanity
Walk into the trap
Like the gap in the floor
Has never meant
A single prayer
Sent out towards
The monotheistic ear
Each time I think
The peak is near
Each time the cliff
Gives way
And it is just a video game
How many lives do I have?
Instinct is a shoelace
Either tied, knotted, laced, or straight
My feet are in step
And I fall in step
Knowing
Where to
Fall for
Maximum impact
Traverse an unweeded path
Hoping for Kerouac
But wiping with poison oak
That creeps up with tentacles
That wrap around your testicles
And call them to order
Once I pop this pill
I forget about the crash
And once I enter here
I suppose I’ve fully come
Monday, January 25, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
art scene in istanbul
IstanbulThe reputation of Istanbul’s contemporary art scene has been steadily growing in recent years, with the Web site ArtKnowledgeNews.com recently calling it “one of the most innovative in the world.” That reputation is bound to be burnished even more this year, now that Istanbul has been named the 2010 European Capital of Culture (a designation it shares with Essen, Germany, and Pecs, Hungary).
There will be a series of events, gallery shows and stage performances throughout the city to mark the occasion. (A complete list of events can be found at en.istanbul2010.org/index.htm.)
But one of the best ways to get a crash course in what Istanbul’s leading artists are up to right now is to spend some time wandering around the Misir Apartments (311/4 Istiklal Cadessi), right on the busy pedestrian thoroughfare that cuts through the trendy Beygolu neighborhood. Inside this elegant, early-20th-century building are some of the city’s most cutting-edge art venues, like Galerist (www.galerist.com.tr) and Gallerie Nev (www.galerinevistanbul.com)
Afterward, head to the rooftop terrace and have a drink at 360 Istanbul, a stylish bar and restaurant that offers stunning views of the city’s skyline (360istanbul.com). — Stuart Emmrich
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/travel/10places.html?pagewanted=2&em
There will be a series of events, gallery shows and stage performances throughout the city to mark the occasion. (A complete list of events can be found at en.istanbul2010.org/index.htm.)
But one of the best ways to get a crash course in what Istanbul’s leading artists are up to right now is to spend some time wandering around the Misir Apartments (311/4 Istiklal Cadessi), right on the busy pedestrian thoroughfare that cuts through the trendy Beygolu neighborhood. Inside this elegant, early-20th-century building are some of the city’s most cutting-edge art venues, like Galerist (www.galerist.com.tr) and Gallerie Nev (www.galerinevistanbul.com)
Afterward, head to the rooftop terrace and have a drink at 360 Istanbul, a stylish bar and restaurant that offers stunning views of the city’s skyline (360istanbul.com). — Stuart Emmrich
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/travel/10places.html?pagewanted=2&em
Sunday, January 10, 2010
one definition of type
A small block of metal or wood bearing a raised letter or character on the upper end that leaves a printed impression when inked and pressed on paper.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Gorky Exhibit in Philly
From Mimic to Master of Invention
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 22, 2009
PHILADELPHIA — Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century. Skip to next paragraph
Before that he was many other artists. He was Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Miró, André Masson and Roberto Matta, more or less in that order, as he assiduously and almost selflessly emulated a succession of existing personal styles to teach himself how to be a painter.
This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape. Gorky’s protracted apprenticeship was followed by distinctive wonders: the rustling and throbbing landscape in “Water of the Flowery Mill”; the penumbral, narcotized mood piece called “Soft Night”; the meat-colored “Agony,” which suggests a slab of burned flesh and dates from 1947, the year before Gorky died.
What’s surprising about the Philadelphia show, though, is how much it feels of a piece, even if it doesn’t look like it. Stylistically, eclecticism rules as you move from Gorky playing Cézanne, to Gorky doing Cubism, to Gorky the Surrealist. Constant throughout, though, is an impression, as strong and invisible as a force field, of physical and psychic concentration.
It radiates from meticulously drawn, plotted, eraser-smudged and redrawn studies for paintings and from the painted, scraped-down, piled up, scratched-into surfaces of the paintings themselves, which betray revisions made to incorporate new formal and technical information that Gorky gleaned from prowling museums, poring over art magazines and talking with artists.
And much as he was one of the great absorbers in art, Gorky was also one of the great pretenders in life. The two roles, both about survival through invention, are closely related. Just as he changed aesthetic identities, he changed personal histories.
He was born Vosdanik Adoian in Armenia near the Turkish border, probably around 1902; he gave different dates at different times. His father, a trader and carpenter, emigrated to the United States in 1908 to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army, leaving behind a wife, Shushan, and children.
In a 1912 studio photograph a moony, preteenage Gorky poses beside his mother, who is seated and wearing an apronlike gown embroidered with flowers. The portrait was probably made to be sent to America, to remind the absent husband and father that his family was waiting to join him, though for one of them this would prove impossible.
By 1915 the Turkish government initiated what became a systematic genocide of the Armenian population in and near Turkey. Gorky and his family became refugees, often on the move, repeatedly subjected to exposure and food shortages. His mother sickened , and in 1919, at 39, she died of starvation in his arms. A year later he made it to the United States, first staying with his father in New England, but soon striking out on his own. At which point the self-invention began.
He was no longer Armenian. He was now a Russian named Arshile Gorky, a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky. He was a painter; he had, precociously, already studied with Kandinsky and exhibited in Paris. Far from being a shy, bookish, provincial youth, he was a cosmopolite, a bohemian genius prepared to cut a swath through the cultural world of New York, where he settled in 1924.
His story was, of course, full of holes. Did he even know that “Maxim Gorky” was itself a pseudonym for a writer named Alexei Peshkov? It didn’t matter. This was America. You could be what you wanted to be. And what he wanted to be — this is the core of truth in his story — was an artist, even if one very much in the making.
The retrospective, organized by Michael R. Taylor, curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum, scrupulously tracks that making, or self-making. Among the Gorkys in the opening gallery, for example, are a view of Staten Island rooftops rendered à la Cézanne, graphite portraits in the manner of Ingres, and Picassoid deconstructions of a Greenwich Village studio interior.
Certain early pictures, though, fall outside the program of self-training through imitation. In 1926 Gorky began two large paintings based on the 1912 photograph of himself and his mother. He paints the figures essentially as they are in the photo, no distortion, no fooling around. Stylistically, Picasso and Matisse are there as he paints, but they’re also beside point. Gorky doesn’t subject himself to their styles, but uses them to shape a fixed and talismanic memory of his life, his real life.
He isn’t trying to be some other artist. He’s trying to be himself, and at this stage in his career the effort is awkward. Both paintings have clearly been thought and rethought countless times, and with every rethinking seem to have become harder to grasp, less complete. In the end he left them, like the weaving on Penelope’s loom, unfinished, as if waiting for the sitters to return and resume their places.
Although he kept one of these paintings with him all his life, he appears to have stopped work on both around the time of his final stylistic immersion, into Surrealism. This began around 1939, when World War II drove Surrealist artists to New York, among the first to arrive being Matta, from whom Gorky learned to thin his paint to a wash and to loosen up his hand.
The show heavily emphasizes the Surrealist influence on Gorky, on the grounds that it has been underestimated, even denied in the past. But the influence is obvious and acknowledged now, so the issue feels overplayed in the catalog and in a large gallery given over to Gorky’s Surrealist phase.
The mere presence of the great painting titled “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” with its slaughterhouse motifs and air of monstrous jollity, would have clinched the point. But here it has been surrounded by many — and I would say too many —related pictures, all hung against a chocolate-brown band that zigzags over the wall. The idea is to suggest Surrealist zaniness. The effect is to diminish the dynamism of the art and make the wall labels jump out.
With Surrealism, Gorky once more proved himself an ardent student. He examined his model, mastered its particularities, took it in and made something surpassingly personal of it. What that movement gave Gorky was spontaneity, and after decades of discipline he was ready to make optimum use of it, to let art and emotion flow together. In many paintings of the early 1940s they do, and almost for the first time you sense his work relax into joy.
In 1941 he married a woman he adored. In 1943 they had a daughter. His career was going well. He was spending months in the countryside, rediscovering, or imagining, the love he had felt for the farmlands of Armenia as a child. Many of his marvelous abstract landscapes — bathed in autumnal Keatsian mist, their forms as pulpy and sweet as peeled ripe fruit — come from this time.
But emotionally more ambiguous paintings do too. “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” dates to 1944. So does “How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life,” another memory painting, but in this case abstract and chaotic, like a close-up, baby-at-the-breast view of fraying fabric.
In 1946 Gorky’s life started to unraveled with shocking force. His studio burned, with a significant loss of work. He had debilitating, humiliating surgery for rectal cancer and sank into a depression. Over the next year his marriage foundered; his wife had a fling with his mentor-friend Matta. In 1948, after losing the use of his painting arm in a car accident, Gorky hanged himself.
Knowing about this end naturally darkens our view of all that came before, but darkness really was there early with his family’s life as refugees and his mother’s death, and despite the relocations and reinventions, it never withdrew. What kept life manageable was art, and specifically the practice of art, a practice that Gorky turned into an art, a kind of yoga of learning, looking, focusing, doing, redoing, humbly, pridefully, hourly, daily.
Creation was salvation. That sounds romantic, but why put it any other way? Gorky was a Romantic, though that only becomes fully evident in his art at the end. If the Philadelphia show seems to take a long time to get to the end, the great stuff there is worth the wait. And besides, you’re getting some of it all along the way, in art that is all one thing, all one life.
“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” runs through Jan. 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. It then travels to the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 22, 2009
PHILADELPHIA — Two stories are well known about the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky. One is that he came to a terrible end, a suicide in his mid-40s, after a hammering series of catastrophes. The other is that he took a very long time — around 20 years, until he was in his late 30s — to become the artist who painted some of the most magnetic and heart-rending pictures of the 20th century. Skip to next paragraph
Before that he was many other artists. He was Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Miró, André Masson and Roberto Matta, more or less in that order, as he assiduously and almost selflessly emulated a succession of existing personal styles to teach himself how to be a painter.
This unusually long learning curve in his relatively short life can give a chronological survey of his art, like the magisterial “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an unbalanced shape. Gorky’s protracted apprenticeship was followed by distinctive wonders: the rustling and throbbing landscape in “Water of the Flowery Mill”; the penumbral, narcotized mood piece called “Soft Night”; the meat-colored “Agony,” which suggests a slab of burned flesh and dates from 1947, the year before Gorky died.
What’s surprising about the Philadelphia show, though, is how much it feels of a piece, even if it doesn’t look like it. Stylistically, eclecticism rules as you move from Gorky playing Cézanne, to Gorky doing Cubism, to Gorky the Surrealist. Constant throughout, though, is an impression, as strong and invisible as a force field, of physical and psychic concentration.
It radiates from meticulously drawn, plotted, eraser-smudged and redrawn studies for paintings and from the painted, scraped-down, piled up, scratched-into surfaces of the paintings themselves, which betray revisions made to incorporate new formal and technical information that Gorky gleaned from prowling museums, poring over art magazines and talking with artists.
And much as he was one of the great absorbers in art, Gorky was also one of the great pretenders in life. The two roles, both about survival through invention, are closely related. Just as he changed aesthetic identities, he changed personal histories.
He was born Vosdanik Adoian in Armenia near the Turkish border, probably around 1902; he gave different dates at different times. His father, a trader and carpenter, emigrated to the United States in 1908 to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army, leaving behind a wife, Shushan, and children.
In a 1912 studio photograph a moony, preteenage Gorky poses beside his mother, who is seated and wearing an apronlike gown embroidered with flowers. The portrait was probably made to be sent to America, to remind the absent husband and father that his family was waiting to join him, though for one of them this would prove impossible.
By 1915 the Turkish government initiated what became a systematic genocide of the Armenian population in and near Turkey. Gorky and his family became refugees, often on the move, repeatedly subjected to exposure and food shortages. His mother sickened , and in 1919, at 39, she died of starvation in his arms. A year later he made it to the United States, first staying with his father in New England, but soon striking out on his own. At which point the self-invention began.
He was no longer Armenian. He was now a Russian named Arshile Gorky, a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky. He was a painter; he had, precociously, already studied with Kandinsky and exhibited in Paris. Far from being a shy, bookish, provincial youth, he was a cosmopolite, a bohemian genius prepared to cut a swath through the cultural world of New York, where he settled in 1924.
His story was, of course, full of holes. Did he even know that “Maxim Gorky” was itself a pseudonym for a writer named Alexei Peshkov? It didn’t matter. This was America. You could be what you wanted to be. And what he wanted to be — this is the core of truth in his story — was an artist, even if one very much in the making.
The retrospective, organized by Michael R. Taylor, curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum, scrupulously tracks that making, or self-making. Among the Gorkys in the opening gallery, for example, are a view of Staten Island rooftops rendered à la Cézanne, graphite portraits in the manner of Ingres, and Picassoid deconstructions of a Greenwich Village studio interior.
Certain early pictures, though, fall outside the program of self-training through imitation. In 1926 Gorky began two large paintings based on the 1912 photograph of himself and his mother. He paints the figures essentially as they are in the photo, no distortion, no fooling around. Stylistically, Picasso and Matisse are there as he paints, but they’re also beside point. Gorky doesn’t subject himself to their styles, but uses them to shape a fixed and talismanic memory of his life, his real life.
He isn’t trying to be some other artist. He’s trying to be himself, and at this stage in his career the effort is awkward. Both paintings have clearly been thought and rethought countless times, and with every rethinking seem to have become harder to grasp, less complete. In the end he left them, like the weaving on Penelope’s loom, unfinished, as if waiting for the sitters to return and resume their places.
Although he kept one of these paintings with him all his life, he appears to have stopped work on both around the time of his final stylistic immersion, into Surrealism. This began around 1939, when World War II drove Surrealist artists to New York, among the first to arrive being Matta, from whom Gorky learned to thin his paint to a wash and to loosen up his hand.
The show heavily emphasizes the Surrealist influence on Gorky, on the grounds that it has been underestimated, even denied in the past. But the influence is obvious and acknowledged now, so the issue feels overplayed in the catalog and in a large gallery given over to Gorky’s Surrealist phase.
The mere presence of the great painting titled “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” with its slaughterhouse motifs and air of monstrous jollity, would have clinched the point. But here it has been surrounded by many — and I would say too many —related pictures, all hung against a chocolate-brown band that zigzags over the wall. The idea is to suggest Surrealist zaniness. The effect is to diminish the dynamism of the art and make the wall labels jump out.
With Surrealism, Gorky once more proved himself an ardent student. He examined his model, mastered its particularities, took it in and made something surpassingly personal of it. What that movement gave Gorky was spontaneity, and after decades of discipline he was ready to make optimum use of it, to let art and emotion flow together. In many paintings of the early 1940s they do, and almost for the first time you sense his work relax into joy.
In 1941 he married a woman he adored. In 1943 they had a daughter. His career was going well. He was spending months in the countryside, rediscovering, or imagining, the love he had felt for the farmlands of Armenia as a child. Many of his marvelous abstract landscapes — bathed in autumnal Keatsian mist, their forms as pulpy and sweet as peeled ripe fruit — come from this time.
But emotionally more ambiguous paintings do too. “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” dates to 1944. So does “How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life,” another memory painting, but in this case abstract and chaotic, like a close-up, baby-at-the-breast view of fraying fabric.
In 1946 Gorky’s life started to unraveled with shocking force. His studio burned, with a significant loss of work. He had debilitating, humiliating surgery for rectal cancer and sank into a depression. Over the next year his marriage foundered; his wife had a fling with his mentor-friend Matta. In 1948, after losing the use of his painting arm in a car accident, Gorky hanged himself.
Knowing about this end naturally darkens our view of all that came before, but darkness really was there early with his family’s life as refugees and his mother’s death, and despite the relocations and reinventions, it never withdrew. What kept life manageable was art, and specifically the practice of art, a practice that Gorky turned into an art, a kind of yoga of learning, looking, focusing, doing, redoing, humbly, pridefully, hourly, daily.
Creation was salvation. That sounds romantic, but why put it any other way? Gorky was a Romantic, though that only becomes fully evident in his art at the end. If the Philadelphia show seems to take a long time to get to the end, the great stuff there is worth the wait. And besides, you’re getting some of it all along the way, in art that is all one thing, all one life.
“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” runs through Jan. 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. It then travels to the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Hume, Belief
Belief requires that there also be some fact present to the senses or memory, which gives “strength and solidity to the related idea.” In these circumstances, belief is as unavoidable as is the feeling of a passion; it is “a species of natural instinct,” “the necessary result of placing the mind” in this situation.
Belief is “a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit” that results from the manner in which ideas are conceived, and “in their feeling to the mind.” It is “nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain” (EHU, 49). Belief is thus “more an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (T, 183), so that “all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation” (T, 103). This should not be surprising, given that belief is “so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures.” “It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency” than to trust it “to the fallacious deductions of our reason” (EHU, 55). Hume's “sceptical solution” thus gives a descriptive alternative, appropriately “independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding,” to philosophers' attempts to account for our causal “reasonings” by appeal to reason and argument. For the other notions in the definitional circle, “either we have no idea of force or energy, and these words are altogether insignificant, or they can mean nothing but that determination of the thought, acquir'd by habit, to pass from the cause to its usual effect” (T, 657).
Belief is “a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit” that results from the manner in which ideas are conceived, and “in their feeling to the mind.” It is “nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain” (EHU, 49). Belief is thus “more an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures” (T, 183), so that “all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation” (T, 103). This should not be surprising, given that belief is “so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures.” “It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency” than to trust it “to the fallacious deductions of our reason” (EHU, 55). Hume's “sceptical solution” thus gives a descriptive alternative, appropriately “independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding,” to philosophers' attempts to account for our causal “reasonings” by appeal to reason and argument. For the other notions in the definitional circle, “either we have no idea of force or energy, and these words are altogether insignificant, or they can mean nothing but that determination of the thought, acquir'd by habit, to pass from the cause to its usual effect” (T, 657).
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy
First published Wed Jun 28, 2006
Zen aims at a perfection of personhood. To this end, sitting meditation called “za-zen” is employed as a foundational method of prāxis across the different schools of this Buddha-Way, through which the Zen practitioner attempts to embody non-discriminatory wisdom vis-à-vis the meditational experience known as “satori” (enlightenment). A process of discovering wisdom culminates in the experiential dimension in which the equality of thing-events is apprehended in discerning them. The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is seen in its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday “life-world” when associating with one's self, people, and nature. The everyday “life-world” for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety. Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm by practically achieving an holistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with a stillness of mind, a life of tending toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature. For this reason, the Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature. Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one's eyes or under one's foot is no other than an expression of suchness, i.e., it is such that it is showing its primordial mode of being. It also understands a specificity of thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, and vice versa. As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen's achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”).
Zen aims at a perfection of personhood. To this end, sitting meditation called “za-zen” is employed as a foundational method of prāxis across the different schools of this Buddha-Way, through which the Zen practitioner attempts to embody non-discriminatory wisdom vis-à-vis the meditational experience known as “satori” (enlightenment). A process of discovering wisdom culminates in the experiential dimension in which the equality of thing-events is apprehended in discerning them. The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is seen in its contention that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday “life-world” when associating with one's self, people, and nature. The everyday “life-world” for most people is an evanescent transforming stage in which living is consumed, philosophically speaking, by an either-or, ego-logical, dualistic paradigm of thinking with its attendant psychological states such as stress and anxiety. Zen demands an overcoming of this paradigm by practically achieving an holistic perspective in cognition, so that the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with a stillness of mind, a life of tending toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature. For this reason, the Zen practitioner is required to embody freedom expressive of the original human nature. Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one's eyes or under one's foot is no other than an expression of suchness, i.e., it is such that it is showing its primordial mode of being. It also understands a specificity of thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, and vice versa. As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen's achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”).
Watsuji Tetsuro
Influenced by Heidegger, Watsuji's Climate and Culture is both an appreciation of, and a critique of Heidegger. In particular, Watsuji argues that Heidegger under-emphasizes spatiality, and over-emphasizes temporality. Watsuji contends that had Heidegger equally emphasized spatiality, it would have tied him more firmly to the human world where we interact, both fruitfully and negatively. We are inextricably social, connected in so many ways, and ethics is the study of these social connections and positive ways of interacting.
Human beings have a dual-nature, as individuals, and as member of various social groupings. We face each other in the betweenness between us, where we can either maintain a safe distance, or enter into intimate relationships of worth. Fundamental to positive, intimate relationships is trust, and trustworthiness.
Human beings have a dual-nature, as individuals, and as member of various social groupings. We face each other in the betweenness between us, where we can either maintain a safe distance, or enter into intimate relationships of worth. Fundamental to positive, intimate relationships is trust, and trustworthiness.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC)
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, commonly abbreviated ZFC, is the standard form of axiomatic set theory and as such is the most common foundation of mathematics. It has a single primitive ontological notion, that of a hereditary well-founded set, and a single ontological assumption, namely that all individuals in the universe of discourse are such sets.
ZFC is a one-sorted theory in first-order logic. The signature has equality and a single primitive binary relation, set membership, which is usually denoted ∈. The formula a ∈ b means that the set a is a member of the set b (which is also read, "a is an element of b" or "a is in b").
Most of the ZFC axioms state that particular sets exist. For example, the axiom of pairing says that given any two sets a and b there is a new set {a, b} containing exactly a and b. Other axioms describe properties of set membership. A goal of the ZFC axioms is that each axiom should be true if interpreted as a statement about the collection of all sets in the von Neumann universe (also known as the cumulative hierarchy).
The metamathematics of ZFC has been extensively studied. Landmark results in this area established the independence of the continuum hypothesis from ZFC, and of the axiom of choice from the remaining ZFC axioms.
ZFC is a one-sorted theory in first-order logic. The signature has equality and a single primitive binary relation, set membership, which is usually denoted ∈. The formula a ∈ b means that the set a is a member of the set b (which is also read, "a is an element of b" or "a is in b").
Most of the ZFC axioms state that particular sets exist. For example, the axiom of pairing says that given any two sets a and b there is a new set {a, b} containing exactly a and b. Other axioms describe properties of set membership. A goal of the ZFC axioms is that each axiom should be true if interpreted as a statement about the collection of all sets in the von Neumann universe (also known as the cumulative hierarchy).
The metamathematics of ZFC has been extensively studied. Landmark results in this area established the independence of the continuum hypothesis from ZFC, and of the axiom of choice from the remaining ZFC axioms.
continuum hypothesis, Cantor
In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis (abbreviated CH) is a hypothesis, advanced by Georg Cantor in 1877, about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states:
There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers.
There is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
socrates, glaucon, polemarchus
I - Socrates - Glaucon
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Plato's PhaedoPhilosophy Course: Death Free Yale Video LectureAcademicEarth.org/Philosophy
I WENT down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.
I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession.
SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - GLAUCON - ADEIMANTUS
Polemarchus said to me: I perceive, Socrates, that you and our companion are already on your way to the city.
You are not far wrong, I said.
But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
Of course.
And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are.
May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let us go?
But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?
With horses! I replied: That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one to another during the race?
Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will he celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse.
Glaucon said: I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
Very good, I replied.
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Ads by GoogleAcademic Library OnlineFull-text scholarly books, journals and more at Questia Online Librarywww.Questia.com
Plato's PhaedoPhilosophy Course: Death Free Yale Video LectureAcademicEarth.org/Philosophy
I WENT down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.
I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.
Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession.
SOCRATES - POLEMARCHUS - GLAUCON - ADEIMANTUS
Polemarchus said to me: I perceive, Socrates, that you and our companion are already on your way to the city.
You are not far wrong, I said.
But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
Of course.
And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are.
May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let us go?
But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.
Certainly not, replied Glaucon.
Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.
Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?
With horses! I replied: That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one to another during the race?
Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will he celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse.
Glaucon said: I suppose, since you insist, that we must.
Very good, I replied.
Monday, April 20, 2009
late picasso exhibit
Going All Out, Right to the End
By ROBERTA SMITH
In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.
One of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century, it proves that contrary to decades of received opinion, Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark. For some, his decline began as early as 1914, when he and Braque went their separate ways after inventing Cubism. Others deferred until the arrival of the bourgeois Olga Khokhlova in 1917, or the pliant Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927, or the end of World War II. But the mid-1950s have been generally accepted as the point of no return.
That stance has steadily eroded over the last 25 years, and should finally bite the dust here. The 50 paintings and 49 prints on view demonstrate that in the decade preceding his death in 1973 at 91, Picasso painted, as usual, for his life. But his life was drawing to a close, and pressure was mounting. He diverted it into paintings whose emotional rawness, physical immediacy and often wicked pictorial joyfulness were not quite like anything he had made before. They may not have changed the course of art, but give them time. First they deserve their due.
This is not the first big exhibition of late Picasso. But it may come at an unusually receptive time, when art is wide open, and the understanding of what it takes to be an artist has gotten a bit fuzzy around the edges. Or perhaps this show represents an unusually rigorous sampling of the last decade, having been chosen by John Richardson, Picasso’s formidable biographer, and superbly installed by him in the elegant, austere, sky-lighted galleries in Gagosian’s West 21st Street space in Chelsea.
Like the retrospective of Piero Manzoni that recently filled Gagosian’s West 24th Street emporium, “Picasso: Mosqueteros” should make any museum glow green with envy. And it looks better than just about any museum could manage. Free of wall texts and free of charge, it assumes that the public knows how to look at art and keeps distractions to a minimum.
As befits its title, the selection abounds with paintings of big-headed musketeers and matadors. Extravagantly clothed and mustachioed, they present an opportunity for excoriating self-portraiture disguised as caricature, while also dueling with past masters like Velázquez, Manet and Rembrandt.
There are thick-limbed figures of several kinds: entangled lovers whose mouths sometimes merge in desperate kisses; female nudes folded this way and that, with boxy feet and pebble-round toes; and a few male nudes that recall Cézanne’s bather in the Museum of Modern Art or the kouroi statues of archaic Greece, here seen in a golden Arcadian light heated to a brash egg-yolk yellow.
In this show the late paintings often have a fierce, antic urgency that recalls “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Their scale and surfaces can be jarring, too close for comfort from any range. The figures have prominent black eyes that resemble those of the demoiselles, as well as of Picasso himself (as Mr. Richardson pointed out in a recent newspaper article). But this late style is softer and more fluid, a combination of painting, drawing and calligraphy that verges on automatism.
It makes as much sense to call it deconstructionist as Expressionist. The images disintegrate and recombine as you look, keeping every particle of paint and every scintilla of gesture in view while often cracking wise. In one of the show’s most haunting images, the terrified, seemingly flayed face of a matador is rendered in offhand smearings of lavender. The bullfighter may be looking at death; the surface laughs in its face.
In his catalog essay Mr. Richardson writes that Picasso said that technique was important, “on condition that one has so much ... that it completely ceases to exist.” But according to a short film playing in a small side gallery, Picasso also said that “unless your picture goes wrong, it will be no good.”
Some of the paintings are thickly built in caroming wet-on-wet strokes and stabs, as if aping the deft flourishes of the old masters. A prime example is the lavish “Portrait of a Man With Sword and Flower,” which reinterprets one of Velázquez’s dwarfs. His comic legs are so splayed that the soles of his nailed boots point in opposite directions; his undulant grisaille face, taut and knowing, has fish-skeleton eyebrows.
Other works are so sketchy as to be more bare canvas than paint. The light-to-heavy range is spelled out across four relatively pale gray and blue paintings on one wall; they offer female nudes, alone or not, and a bust of a beruffled court painter in profile. They culminate in an image of a nude accompanied by a musketeer and, behind them, a large phallic finger that may make you rub your eyes once or twice.
The gallery of etchings makes a perfect foil for the paintings. They show Picasso shaking this alchemical medium to its foundations, often by introducing a lithography crayon, while ransacking history even more actively. The frequently ribald costume dramas or studio scenes (or both) that result are rendered in a manner that can be as dainty and refined as the paintings are not.
Especially telling are two states of an etching at the end of a long wall. They depict an artist gussied up like Rembrandt working from the model; but the main effect is a dense squall of scribbles, spirals and scratches that nearly obliterates them. It is as if the pressure of Picasso’s final years generated its own weather system.
In “The Celestina,” a storyboard mosaic of 66 small impressions on a single, large sheet, Picasso offers a seemingly encyclopedic survey of mark making and printing techniques. Don’t miss the short man — naked, bald and quite Picassoesque — staring out at us from the crowded scene at the center of the bottom row.
Picasso worked in relative isolation during his last decade, but it is hard to believe that a competitive lifer like himself didn’t keep up to some degree. He must have known Dubuffet’s big-headed figures, vigorously scratched in paint, from the late 1940s; the CoBrA group’s colorful figurative shenanigans of the 1950s; or even Jackson Pollock’s last quasi-figurative works.
Closer to home, Picasso’s active involvement with ceramics in the 1950s could have contributed to the shorthand speed of these paintings. Until 1953 he also had direct contact with the art made by Claude and Paloma, his children with Françoise Gilot. And his paintings of them, like those from the ’30s of Maya, his daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, tend to have open, seemingly unfinished surfaces and a monstrous scale that points toward the musketeers.
This show should relieve doubts about the essential role of commercial galleries in a vital art scene. Anything this charged and unforgettable is bound to nourish anyone who sees it, but especially artists, regardless of affiliations of style or medium. It reveals one of their greatest going all out, providing a breathtaking reminder that art can be anything an artist wants it to be, as long as it is driven by inner necessity, ruthless self-scrutiny and a determination to make every attempt not to repeat the past.
In the end, such inoculations are the only real protection against the vicissitudes of opinion. Art that successfully internalizes them will in all likelihood come to be seen as part of its own time and retain a vigor that is capable of inspiring the art of the future. That is the feat of Picasso’s extraordinary final offerings.
“Picasso: Mosqueteros” remains on view through June 6 at the Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, Chelsea; (212) 741-1717, gagosian.com.
By ROBERTA SMITH
In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.
One of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century, it proves that contrary to decades of received opinion, Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark. For some, his decline began as early as 1914, when he and Braque went their separate ways after inventing Cubism. Others deferred until the arrival of the bourgeois Olga Khokhlova in 1917, or the pliant Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927, or the end of World War II. But the mid-1950s have been generally accepted as the point of no return.
That stance has steadily eroded over the last 25 years, and should finally bite the dust here. The 50 paintings and 49 prints on view demonstrate that in the decade preceding his death in 1973 at 91, Picasso painted, as usual, for his life. But his life was drawing to a close, and pressure was mounting. He diverted it into paintings whose emotional rawness, physical immediacy and often wicked pictorial joyfulness were not quite like anything he had made before. They may not have changed the course of art, but give them time. First they deserve their due.
This is not the first big exhibition of late Picasso. But it may come at an unusually receptive time, when art is wide open, and the understanding of what it takes to be an artist has gotten a bit fuzzy around the edges. Or perhaps this show represents an unusually rigorous sampling of the last decade, having been chosen by John Richardson, Picasso’s formidable biographer, and superbly installed by him in the elegant, austere, sky-lighted galleries in Gagosian’s West 21st Street space in Chelsea.
Like the retrospective of Piero Manzoni that recently filled Gagosian’s West 24th Street emporium, “Picasso: Mosqueteros” should make any museum glow green with envy. And it looks better than just about any museum could manage. Free of wall texts and free of charge, it assumes that the public knows how to look at art and keeps distractions to a minimum.
As befits its title, the selection abounds with paintings of big-headed musketeers and matadors. Extravagantly clothed and mustachioed, they present an opportunity for excoriating self-portraiture disguised as caricature, while also dueling with past masters like Velázquez, Manet and Rembrandt.
There are thick-limbed figures of several kinds: entangled lovers whose mouths sometimes merge in desperate kisses; female nudes folded this way and that, with boxy feet and pebble-round toes; and a few male nudes that recall Cézanne’s bather in the Museum of Modern Art or the kouroi statues of archaic Greece, here seen in a golden Arcadian light heated to a brash egg-yolk yellow.
In this show the late paintings often have a fierce, antic urgency that recalls “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Their scale and surfaces can be jarring, too close for comfort from any range. The figures have prominent black eyes that resemble those of the demoiselles, as well as of Picasso himself (as Mr. Richardson pointed out in a recent newspaper article). But this late style is softer and more fluid, a combination of painting, drawing and calligraphy that verges on automatism.
It makes as much sense to call it deconstructionist as Expressionist. The images disintegrate and recombine as you look, keeping every particle of paint and every scintilla of gesture in view while often cracking wise. In one of the show’s most haunting images, the terrified, seemingly flayed face of a matador is rendered in offhand smearings of lavender. The bullfighter may be looking at death; the surface laughs in its face.
In his catalog essay Mr. Richardson writes that Picasso said that technique was important, “on condition that one has so much ... that it completely ceases to exist.” But according to a short film playing in a small side gallery, Picasso also said that “unless your picture goes wrong, it will be no good.”
Some of the paintings are thickly built in caroming wet-on-wet strokes and stabs, as if aping the deft flourishes of the old masters. A prime example is the lavish “Portrait of a Man With Sword and Flower,” which reinterprets one of Velázquez’s dwarfs. His comic legs are so splayed that the soles of his nailed boots point in opposite directions; his undulant grisaille face, taut and knowing, has fish-skeleton eyebrows.
Other works are so sketchy as to be more bare canvas than paint. The light-to-heavy range is spelled out across four relatively pale gray and blue paintings on one wall; they offer female nudes, alone or not, and a bust of a beruffled court painter in profile. They culminate in an image of a nude accompanied by a musketeer and, behind them, a large phallic finger that may make you rub your eyes once or twice.
The gallery of etchings makes a perfect foil for the paintings. They show Picasso shaking this alchemical medium to its foundations, often by introducing a lithography crayon, while ransacking history even more actively. The frequently ribald costume dramas or studio scenes (or both) that result are rendered in a manner that can be as dainty and refined as the paintings are not.
Especially telling are two states of an etching at the end of a long wall. They depict an artist gussied up like Rembrandt working from the model; but the main effect is a dense squall of scribbles, spirals and scratches that nearly obliterates them. It is as if the pressure of Picasso’s final years generated its own weather system.
In “The Celestina,” a storyboard mosaic of 66 small impressions on a single, large sheet, Picasso offers a seemingly encyclopedic survey of mark making and printing techniques. Don’t miss the short man — naked, bald and quite Picassoesque — staring out at us from the crowded scene at the center of the bottom row.
Picasso worked in relative isolation during his last decade, but it is hard to believe that a competitive lifer like himself didn’t keep up to some degree. He must have known Dubuffet’s big-headed figures, vigorously scratched in paint, from the late 1940s; the CoBrA group’s colorful figurative shenanigans of the 1950s; or even Jackson Pollock’s last quasi-figurative works.
Closer to home, Picasso’s active involvement with ceramics in the 1950s could have contributed to the shorthand speed of these paintings. Until 1953 he also had direct contact with the art made by Claude and Paloma, his children with Françoise Gilot. And his paintings of them, like those from the ’30s of Maya, his daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, tend to have open, seemingly unfinished surfaces and a monstrous scale that points toward the musketeers.
This show should relieve doubts about the essential role of commercial galleries in a vital art scene. Anything this charged and unforgettable is bound to nourish anyone who sees it, but especially artists, regardless of affiliations of style or medium. It reveals one of their greatest going all out, providing a breathtaking reminder that art can be anything an artist wants it to be, as long as it is driven by inner necessity, ruthless self-scrutiny and a determination to make every attempt not to repeat the past.
In the end, such inoculations are the only real protection against the vicissitudes of opinion. Art that successfully internalizes them will in all likelihood come to be seen as part of its own time and retain a vigor that is capable of inspiring the art of the future. That is the feat of Picasso’s extraordinary final offerings.
“Picasso: Mosqueteros” remains on view through June 6 at the Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, Chelsea; (212) 741-1717, gagosian.com.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Hegel's Aesthetics
The principal aim of art is not, therefore, to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom—images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art's purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art's sake, but for beauty's sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Let there be by Jimmy Chen
There is an overpass above the highway. There is a barbed-wire fence that prevents pedestrians from jumping off the overpass. There are electrical wires above the overpass, conducting electricity from one side of the freeway to the other.
There is a bird that flies into a wire and falls onto the barbed-wire fence and dies. It stays there for days, dead. It rains, it pours. The sun, it shines. The bird is still there. The cars rush ahead below, driven by nervous people with unclear goals.
There is a large building on one side of the overpass. There is a two bedroom condominium inside. There is a man lying down on a futon after work, eating a tangerine and listening to this ceiling. There is an obese woman walking around loudly in her condominium. Her floor is the man's ceiling. There is no humor in this world.
There is saxophone in a studio. A man with excessively curly hair is playing the saxophone while being recorded. The notes that come out of the saxophone, and their relationships to each other, can be described by the word ‘horrible.’ He is famous. His music is horrible. His name is Kenny G.
There is a woman at work. There are two speakers. There is a CD drive. There is a play button. The woman at work has pushed the play button and Kenny G—or at least the digital semblance of his once manifest presence—plays horrible music. There is a stop button. It will not be pushed.
There is a man at work. He sits next to the woman who plays Kenny G all day. He is irritated because his job ‘sucks’, a word used to describe an abstract yet distinctly relevant negative feeling one has about the existence of an object, including persons, and the object’s relation to other objects.
There is a God. He creates light and sound. Everyone concentrates on the light and forgets about the sound, though there are sounds everywhere; the cars under the overpass, the obese footsteps above the ceiling, and the horrible music inside the speakers.
There is a man at work. There is a man at home. There is a man who can’t sleep in his bed. There is a man who can’t stay awake at work. There are dichotomies. There is the global economy. There is the falling American dollar. There is a mortgage. There is unemployment. There is welfare. There is homelessness. There is death. There is a man at work.
There is an overpass above the highway. There is a barbed-wire fence that prevents a man from jumping off the overpass on his way home from work. There is a dead bird hanging upside down from the barbed-wire fence. There is a man who stops to look at the bird. There is a sky happening behind all of this. It makes no sound.
There is a bird that flies into a wire and falls onto the barbed-wire fence and dies. It stays there for days, dead. It rains, it pours. The sun, it shines. The bird is still there. The cars rush ahead below, driven by nervous people with unclear goals.
There is a large building on one side of the overpass. There is a two bedroom condominium inside. There is a man lying down on a futon after work, eating a tangerine and listening to this ceiling. There is an obese woman walking around loudly in her condominium. Her floor is the man's ceiling. There is no humor in this world.
There is saxophone in a studio. A man with excessively curly hair is playing the saxophone while being recorded. The notes that come out of the saxophone, and their relationships to each other, can be described by the word ‘horrible.’ He is famous. His music is horrible. His name is Kenny G.
There is a woman at work. There are two speakers. There is a CD drive. There is a play button. The woman at work has pushed the play button and Kenny G—or at least the digital semblance of his once manifest presence—plays horrible music. There is a stop button. It will not be pushed.
There is a man at work. He sits next to the woman who plays Kenny G all day. He is irritated because his job ‘sucks’, a word used to describe an abstract yet distinctly relevant negative feeling one has about the existence of an object, including persons, and the object’s relation to other objects.
There is a God. He creates light and sound. Everyone concentrates on the light and forgets about the sound, though there are sounds everywhere; the cars under the overpass, the obese footsteps above the ceiling, and the horrible music inside the speakers.
There is a man at work. There is a man at home. There is a man who can’t sleep in his bed. There is a man who can’t stay awake at work. There are dichotomies. There is the global economy. There is the falling American dollar. There is a mortgage. There is unemployment. There is welfare. There is homelessness. There is death. There is a man at work.
There is an overpass above the highway. There is a barbed-wire fence that prevents a man from jumping off the overpass on his way home from work. There is a dead bird hanging upside down from the barbed-wire fence. There is a man who stops to look at the bird. There is a sky happening behind all of this. It makes no sound.
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