TRANSTHESIS ENDNOTES
From ART FOR HUMANS WIKI
TRANSTHETIC ENDNOTES
ABOUT
This text was reduced to simple text format and pasted here on 02.04.2010. The text is offered here as raw data.
The original text (Thesis Endnotes) was composed over several months in the spring of 2009. To download the original text in PDF format, click the following link. [1]
To add commentary, notations, etc., go to the ADDENDA AND COMMENTARY page. [2]
My Next Art Production Cycle
I began pre-production on a new series of work called ART IS A SLAVE the day after sending the draft of this essay to Joseph Maciariello. I will submit it to EYEBEAM in New York City. I can see now that the waveform of my pre-thesis and thesis projects commenced the morning of September 11, 2001. It’s been a long pull, and America has changed a lot, since that day.
I can identify with the Japanese artist Hirasawa. Cyanide is not an artist medium. Torture yields bad information and wrong confessions. On the subject of incarceration, I concede the argument to E.V Debs.
The end of innocence of a certain type is the part I get. American contemporary art has yet to digest the experience of 9/11. The compost is being brewed.
It is the Monday after I sent Joe the text. As is usually the case, a new piece of the puzzle arrived via email just in time to be late. Fortunately, because of the additive facet of dimensionist writing, I can refer to it even yet. Bill Ivey, former NEA director will be speaking at the Getty next in June. Bill will be expanding on his book, Arts, Inc. How Greed and Neglect Destroyed Our Cultural Rights. Unfortunately, the local Barnes & Nobles does not have the book in stock. For some reason, in fact, no Big Box retailer in a fifty-mile radius carries it.
My artist friend Danielle Kelly wrote this statement for her project at Henri & Odette Gallery in Las Vegas, home of the American Dream, if you believed Dr. Thompson:
Bouse, Arizona, existing at the 33rd parallel, has by necessity become a site for the realization of a new school for design, craft, and fabrication.
Modeling itself after the female-dominated, century old Bauhaus School, the women of Bouse, Arizona recognize the urgent demand for a resuscitation of the rigor, creativity, and feminine community that steered the School via the hallowed Weaving Workshop.
Bouse House recognizes that it is no longer possible to make Art in the way that we have up to now; scarcity of materials coupled with the collapse of industry and municipal infrastructure necessitates usefulness in form and materials to inspire the spirit and fulfill function. We cannot design new chairs; we must make do with the ones we have. We cannot weave new fabrics; we must re-imagine fabrics we already have.
Our global society must begin to accept the contingencies of its newly nomadic reality. Design, as we have realized it up to now, is useless; there is no commodity. A separation of art and technology is necessary for survival. We will feed from the techno-spirit, recreate it with our hands, and make new a means of physical global connect.
We are pleased to share with you a sampling of the work done up to now as part of the preliminary course of the Bouse House.
Without benefit of industry, civilization must again learn how to make its artists into builders.
Bouse House Elders Bouse, Arizona April, 2019
In her mini-manifesto, Danielle reached nearly opposite very different conclusions, on the subjects of globalism, techne (which she poetically names “techno-spirit”), the collapse of the muni-industrial complex, etc. Her hopeful, sturdy and feminine response is correct, too, by my estimation, in its perception, conception and execution.
This is from an email we exchanged this morning. Danielle is describing the community-building occurring in the context of her “Bouse House” exhibit:
The opening went well and still going-there is a social dimension where every Thursday I go to the gallery and anyone who happens by or wants to can join me in making a wall piece, kind of a community quilt, for the gallery. It will grow over the course of the exhibition. So many people have contributed! Its funny, I think with the economy, stress, etc., people are really attracted to the scenario- Get people's hands busy, they chill and their walls drop, and relaxed engaged conversation ensues. It's really just heart-warming to experience-dorky, but so needed right now. The exhibition is the first phase of the project-I am working on a "Bouse House" yearbook and manual right now. What do the BH workshops produce? Can't wait to figure that out...
On Prior Dimensional Systems Analysis Informing this Essay
A list of projects with some dates:
1. My Family (1964 to present; ongoing) 2. The World (1964 to present; ongoing) 3. America (1964 to present; ongoing) 4. Beckley, WV (1964 to present; ongoing) 5. California (1983 to present; ongoing) 6. Israel (1983 to present; ongoing) 7. New York City (1983 or -84 to present; ongoing) 8. University of Notre Dame (1982-6) 9. The “Art Business” (1983 to present; ongoing) 10. Santa Fe (1986-1997) 11. Native America (1986 to present; ongoing) 12. Scotland (1995 to present; ongoing) 13. Nashville (1997-2003) 14. Yale University (2003 to present; ongoing) 15. Eureka, CA (2004) 16. Austin, TX (2005) 17. Marfa, TX (2006 to present; ongoing) 18. Kauai, HI (2005 to present; ongoing) 19. Las Vegas, NV (2006 to present; ongoing) 20. Los Angeles, CA (2005 to present; ongoing) 21. Claremont Graduate University, CA (2006-9)
The reader may have noted that I (and nobody else, either) am on the list. That’s because, in the case of “I,” I arrived at two realizations:
• “The ‘me’ ‘I’ thought ‘I’ was never even existed.” • “I am not qualified for self-analysis.”
These are fundamental self-abrogations necessary for the reorientation of self to other, in service.
• “Put me in the place, where I can do the most good for the most people.
This is the perceptual/conceptual focusing agent. Bodhicitta is a foundational principle that over thousands of years in transcultural exchanges has been refined to a fine tip, like a Samurai sword, by the multitudes of people who have embraced this ethic as a patterning device for life choices.
From the multi-dimensional, unfathomably innovative and diverse database, the truly remarkable and generally technical and democratic Wikipedia, the bane and savior of Epistemology (as long as the grid sustains):
In Buddhism, bodhicitta[1] (Ch. 菩提心, pudixin, Jp. bodaishin, Tibetan jang chub sem, Mongolian бодь сэтгэл) is the wish to attain complete enlightenment (that is, Buddhahood) in order to be of benefit to all sentient beings trapped in cyclic existence (samsāra) who have not yet reached Buddhahood. One who has bodhicitta as the primary motivation for all of his or her activities is called a bodhisattva.
Through Yoga Asana and study with Tibetan Buddhist monks of renown, I have personal experience with the application of bodhicitta as daily practice. The “Put me” prayer is the best thing I could come up with on my own.
Peter Drucker Was this Close to Dimensional Realisation in his Management Design Concept (If Drucker Had Been Writing “On Man” Instead, I Bet He Would Have Pegged It)
From Management:
No institution can, therefore, exist outside of community and society as the Benedictine monastery, unsuccessfully, tried. Psychologically, geographically, culturally, and socially, institutions must be part of the community.
To discharge its job, to produce economic goods and services, the business enterprise has to have impacts on people, on communities, and on society. It has to have power and authority over people, e.g., employees, whose own ends and purposes are not defined by and within the enterprise. It has to have impact on the community as a neighbor, as the source of jobs and tax revenue, but also of waste products and pollutants. And, increasingly, in our pluralist society of organizations, it has to add to its fundamental concern for the quantities of life, i.e., economic goods and services, concern for the quality of life, that is, for the physical, human, and social environment of modern man and modern community.
This dimension of management is inherent in the work of managers of all institutions. University, hospital, and government agency equally have impacts, equally have responsibilities -- and by and large have been far less aware of them, far less concerned with their human, social, and community responsibilities than business has. Yet, more and more, we look to business management for leadership with regard to the quality of life. Managing social impacts is, therefore, becoming a third major task and a third major dimension of management.
These three tasks always have to be done at the same time and within the same managerial action. It cannot even be said that one task predominates or requires greater skill or competence. True, business performance comes first -- it is the aim of the enterprise and the reason for its existence. But if work and worker are mismanaged there will be no business performance, no matter how good the chief executive may be in managing the business. Economic performance achieved by mismanaging work and workers is illusory and actually destructive of capital even in the fairly short run. Such performance will raise costs to the point where the enterprise ceases to be competitive; it will, by creating class hatred and class warfare, make it impossible in the end for the enterprise to operate at all. And, mismanaging social impacts eventually will destroy society's support for the enterprise and with it the enterprise as well.
Each of these three tasks has a primacy of its own. Managing a business has primacy because the enterprise is an economic institution; but making work productive and workers achieving has importance precisely because society is not an economic institution and looks to management for the realization of basic beliefs and values. Managing the enterprise's social impacts has importance because no organ can survive the body which it serves; and the enterprise is an organ of society and community.
In these areas also, there are neither actions nor results except of the entire business (or university, or hospital, or government agency). There are no "functional" results and no "functional" decisions. There is only business investment and business risk, business profit and business loss, business action or business inaction, business decision and business information. It is not a plant that pollutes; it is Consolidated Edison of New York, the Union Carbide Corporation, the paper industry, or the city's sewers.
Yet, work and effort are always specific. There is tension, therefore, between two realities: that of performance and that of work. To resolve this tension, or at least to make it productive, is the constant managerial task.
The Time Dimension
One complexity is ever-present in every management problem, every decision, every action -- not, properly speaking -- a fourth task of management, and yet an additional dimension: time.
Management always has to consider both the present and the future; both the short run and the long run. A management problem is not solved if immediate profits are purchased by endangering the long-range health, perhaps even the survival, of the company. A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future. The all too common case of the great man in management who produces startling economic results as long as he runs the company but leaves behind nothing but a sinking hulk is an example of irresponsible managerial action and of failure to balance present and future. The immediate economic results are actually fictitious and are achieved by paying out capital. In every case where present and future are not both satisfied, where their requirements are not harmonized, or at least balanced, capital, that is, wealth-producing resource, is endangered, damaged, or destroyed.
Today we are particularly conscious of the time dimension in respect to the long-range impact of short-run economic decisions on the environment and on natural resources. But the same problem of harmonizing today and tomorrow exists in all areas, and especially with respect to people.
The time dimension is inherent in management because management is concerned with decisions for action. And action always aims at results in the future. Anybody whose responsibility it is to act -- rather than to think or to know -- commits himself to the future.
There are two reasons why the time dimension is of particular importance in management's job, and of particular difficulty. In the first place, it is the essence of economic and technological progress that the time span for the fruition and proving out of a decision is steadily lengthening. Edison, in the 1880s, needed two years or so between the start of laboratory work on an idea and the start of pilot-plant operations. Today it may well take Edison's successors fifteen years. A half century ago a new plant was expected to pay for itself in two or three years; today, with capital investment per worker twenty times that of 1900, the payoff period often runs to ten or twelve years. A human organization, such as a sales force or a management group, may take even longer to build and to pay for itself.
The second peculiar characteristic of the time dimension is that management -- almost alone -- has to live always in both present and future.
A military leader, too, knows both times. But traditionally he rarely had to live in both at the same time. During peace he knew no "present"; the present was only a preparation for the future war. During war he knew only the most short-lived "future"; he was concerned with winning the war at hand. Everything else he left to the politicians. That this is no longer true in an era of cold wars, near wars, and police actions may be the single most important reason for the crisis of military leadership and morale that afflicts armed services today. Neither preparation for the future nor winning the war at hand will do any longer; and as a result, the military man has lost his bearings.
But management always must do both. It must keep the enterprise performing in the present -- or else there will be no enterprise capable of performing in the future. And it has to make the enterprise capable of performance, growth, and change in the future. Otherwise it has destroyed capital -- that is, the capacity of resources to produce wealth tomorrow.
The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different. There may be great laws of history, great currents of continuity operating over whole epochs. But within time spans of conscious decision and action -- time spans of years rather than centuries -- in which the managers of any institution operate, the uncertainty of the future is what matters. The long-run continuity is not relevant; and anyhow, it can be discerned only in retrospect and only in contemplation of history, of how it came out.
For the manager the future is discontinuity. And yet the future, however different, can be reached only from the present. The greater the leap into the unknown, the stronger the foundation for the takeoff has to be. The time dimension endows the managerial decision with its special characteristics. It is the act in which the manager integrates present and future.
Administration and Entrepreneurship
There is another dimension to managerial performance. The manager always has to administer. He has to manage and improve what already exists and is already known. But he also has to be an entrepreneur. He has to redirect resources from areas of low or diminishing results to areas of high or increasing results. He has to slough off yesterday and to render obsolete what already exists and is already known. He has to create tomorrow.
Both St. Benedict and Peter Drucker, it seems, were Democracy-averse. Democracy has no managers, in principle. We have trusted, elected servants.
In the performance of dimensional systems analysis, there is a point when the right information begins to “appear,” and the analyst’s task is not so much a function of “digging up” leads and following them to a conclusion, as it is availing the data stream of one’s interest. It’s a Googlesque phenomenon, and describing it that way begs the chicken and egg question.
It is my experience that the question of hierarchies of meaningful sequences is transformed by the rhizome structure of Deleuzian exploration. TRON, a science fiction movie rich in AI and dimensional depiction, links to the epic quest tradition. The new model is more Eastern than Western. It is more Siddhartha than Holy Grail.
I visited the Dennison Library this afternoon and checked out a copy of Bill Ivey’s book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights. As it turns out, Bill is currently the director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, with offices in D.C. and Nashville at Vanderbilt University. From the Curb Center website:
The Vanderbilt Creative Campus initiative seeks to place creativity at the center of campus life – integrating art, media, design and creative expression into the curriculum; transforming campus spaces through public art and performance; connecting faculty and students across disciplines, with a special emphasis on the links between artistic and scientific practice; and building community, both on and off campus, by using art and creativity to animate conversations, reach across cultures, and bring people together around heritage, public service and difficult dialogues.
When I left Nashville in 2002, nothing like the Curb Center existed at Vanderbilt. I approached the then-director of Watkins College of Art and Design to float the notion of a position there. He responded with a terse assurance that without an MFA, I couldn’t be hired there. It was after a yoga class. We were friends. I also spoke with my friend Andy van Roon, who had done yeoman’s work helping develop the infrastructure for a strong film and video production community in Nashville. Andy had been hired as a consultant for building a multidisciplinary apparatus for a small Midwestern Liberal Arts college. At that time, ambitious students were pining for the means to develop trans- skills in creative applications in the nation’s universities, with little success. The vertical hierarchies almost uniformly failed to allow these forward-looking young people to progress dimensionally in the academic framework of most art departments. Although multi-disciplinary programs had existed in Humanities for years, in response to the Black Mountain experiments and the critical discourse contingents, declaring a major still entailed confrontations with turgid policies that ensured mediocre outcomes. The American academy was proving anything but free or effective. Socialized programs in European academies were outperforming us in their commitment to new paradigmatic dimensional methods and the support of artists and collectives in pursuing community-based projects.
The invisible narrative is this: In Nashville, we were competing internationally and winning. The Nashville-based collectives DddD and 01 demonstrated the value of the dimensional approach over a period of several years, ahead of the national curve. At the time we were happy to get local press and recognition. In the end though, for all our work, shared freely with the community for the most part, or at our own expense, it was the organization, the educational institution, that reaps the rewards. Vanderbilt reshuffled its faculty organizational structure to accommodate the new dimensional realism. They will charge students tens of thousands of dollars each year to practice with faculty who have not applied the principles in technical operations themselves, with exceptions.
To sum up my anecdotal synopsis: This is how the Epistemological arts go. The artist(s) who plow(s) the field of the plantation remains studiously unrecognized. The E-nstitution appropriates the technical method. A media industrialist endows the academy. A failed policy wonk/manager is hired to manage the academy. He writes a book to demonstrate he is in actuality a friend of the artist and the arts. The institution uses inspirational platitudes to attract consumers (students). The financial sector reaps the rewards. And nothing changes. The school department bears the name of the industrialist, and gains prestige with the name of the director.
Over time, though, who knows? Underneath the campus, a few floors above the big machine, Chip Cox and I once had our first spine tingling exchanges on the various scientific and aesthetic definitions of 4D. He was a regional director of Internet 2 at the time, I think. The TV News Archive was operational.
It started with the question, “What is art?” and then another, “Who is an artist?” We shared the same hair stylist. After dinner, we made our way down to the lab. We used heaps of the latest AV gear he had lying about to demonstrate concepts. DddD was born a few months later. Art and science, a couple of guys, some tools – our experience is the root of the rhizome and always will be.
My characterization of Curb/Creative Campus and all may be anecdotal. Typically, that would make it plausibly deniable. Fortunately, however, my side of the argument is richly documented, because as an artist in Nashville, I worked as a public citizen, on purpose. I wrote a weekly column. I hosted a weekly art radio program on WRVU, the Vanderbilt radio station. I lobbied forcefully for percent-for-art legislation, and successfully. I exhibited in the city’s museums, galleries, alternative art spaces, performance venues, in private homes, in foundations, in charity events. My work was regularly reviewed. My ideas were discussed and promoted in the public sphere in local media. I confronted business leaders, politicians, private citizens – individuals – with the meaning and value of art, and I insisted on it being incorporated in the collective discourse along with other matters commonly placed in front of culture. The governor of Tennessee appeared on my radio program when he was mayor of Nashville, but I knew him as a private painter. I learned to respect the democratic process, by participating in it. I witnessed how change occurs, and how it is suppressed firsthand. I understand the value of involvement. I learned what political freedom means. I made friends and enemies. I made personal mistakes and public ones. I accepted the challenges as they revealed themselves. It helped that five days each week I trained in Thai Boxing, Ashtanga Yoga, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, with cops, soldiers and the greatest of everyday guys. We walked our talk. Nashville’s a small town. I even know a little bit about Bill Ivey’s private life. So, if I say that the Curb Center’s mission statement looks strangely familiar, and comment on the patterns in that social topology, it is from experience, documented and witnessed, that I speak. I wasn’t idly bragging at the beginning of this essay about uploading my archives for three months prior to executing this text. I was adding proofs to the proofs in the pudding.
Which is a prelude for this bit. What pisses me off about Curb and Bill and Vandy and the same old unregulated top-down crap status quo, is that they managed to take a demonstrable perceptual + conceptual + dimensional production construct, analytics method, etc., and turn it into a high end product for the children of wealthy people, with some diversity quota/financial aid gymnastics “beneficiaries.” DddD, 01 and Art for Humans were not compensated for our contributions to this scheme. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a plantation society. We do the work in the fields; then the Epistemologists harvest the profits, and manage the message. The Lakota call people like that Wasicu. They steal the fat. This is why artists average incomes at 7K per annum. The best illustration is a neighborhood, like Chelsea, or the meatpacking district, more specifically. Now, it’s Dumbo, but it used to be The Village, where Jackson and the New York School would congregate to blow off steam.
Vandy U is a veritable fortress. As an institution, its internal control mechanisms are profound. The design protects the VU Corp. interests and power. It is an extensively managed knowledge container and dispenser. Vanderbilt, commemorating by name the brutal Robber Baron, manages who gets access, why and to what degree. It is a machine created to perpetuate a complexity of instruments, and is functional in a dimensional multi-sector social topology. Vanderbilt is, as the saying goes, many things to many people. It is also many people to many things, just like Dartmouth. As an instrument of Epistemological authority and power, Vanderbilt, with its huge military-industrial-corporate contracts and elite endowments, is fully integrated into the New World Order. It is global minded, and so powerful that it can digest the dimensional aesthetic, reformat it to serve its own interests and gain prestige by its appearance of embracing the so-called “difficult dialogues,” as an apparatus of democratic freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I missed the March 25 deadline for the initial query of interest in the position of development director for the Curb/Creative Campus initiative, by a few weeks. I vaguely remembered the name of the program coordinator with whom I spoke from my years in Nashville. I don’t know whether she recognized my name, when I gave it. When I asked if an extension might be possible, she tersely replied in the negative.
The position is described thus:
Vanderbilt University is seeking an innovative and entrepreneurial tenure-track scholar to help build a new program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership. The program, broadly speaking, is devoted to teaching and scholarship that navigates the increasingly complex set of factors that shape American culture in the twenty-first century: interdependent global markets and cultures; media consolidation; new media; emerging technologies; public policy; intellectual property; and changing demographics.
Research and teaching interests should be connected to one or more of the following areas: the economic, social, political, and cultural impact of new media and communication technology; creative industries and the organization and production of media, art, and entertainment; policy and regulatory issues in art, media, and culture; globalization and culture; and creativity and design in organizations and society.
The successful candidate, who could come from any of a number of disciplines, will be appointed to a home department appropriate to that individual’s scholarship, but will be expected to engage in interdisciplinary teaching and to participate in building a culture of creativity at Vanderbilt University.
Bill Ivey writes (Arts, Inc., pg 9-10):
...But cultural change always exacts a price. The rise of vernacular art made possible by technology enriched America’s expressive life, but the market-driven system producing films, records, and broadcasts evolved with little attention to the way the creation and distribution of art in America linked up to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The problem lay not with these transforming technologies, and certainly not with the blues musicians, movie stars, and vaudevillians who provided early cultural “content.” Instead, the public interest was subverted by the business practices that made up the rules and laid out the playing field for producing and consuming our modern mainstream culture.
The new media required big investments and complex distribution organizations. Inevitably, market forces and corporate practices began to reshape the relationship between audiences and culture. Increasingly, Americans became consumers, rather than makers, of art…
By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped- its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. If we think of expressive life as split between the culture we take in and the culture we create, the commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.
I am writing this passage on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine Massacre, the day when two Hiroshima-of-One teens blasted twelve of their peers into oblivion with small arms. According to a chronicler of the event, one was a psychopath, and the other was a normal teen (Dave Cullen, The Rachel Maddow Show). Media mogul Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest women in the world, whose expression of support for Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, which came at a critical juncture, was said to have influenced the election, decided to cancel a program on Columbine featuring Cullen. According to TMZ:
Today's episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" was supposed to mark the 10-year anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School -- but not anymore.
Oprah just announced on her website she's decided to pull the episode: "I decided to pull the Columbine show today. After reviewing it, I thought it focused too much on the killers. Today, hold a thought for the Columbine community. This is a hard day for them."
This is media management of the highest order. Here’s what Cullen wrote about for Slate and spoke about on Rachel Maddow’s broadcast, and presumably discussed on Oprah, which would have outlined the facts for a vast audience:
Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they (the teenaged mass killers) hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.
Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.
Real Creativity, Real Innovation, Real Effectiveness
America – and it’s impossible for me to speak on this matter as it manifests in other social topologies with the same experiential certainty – is a managed society today. Peter Drucker succeeded. The most managed aspects of the American life are:
• Health • Organizational and individual behavior • Psychology • Occupational behavior • Risk • Commoditization • Time • Assembly • Reproduction and childrearing • Politics • Policing • Domestic behavior • Food • Education • Dreams (aspirations) • Culture • Choice • Finance • Consuming (of goods) • Expression • Science • Transportation and mobility • Communication • Freedom
The list could be easily expanded to add detail and categories. Although a thorough treatment exploring the specificity of management applications in American society is a vast undertaking, and worth undertaking, for the purposes of this paper a brief scan of symptoms is sufficient. Topologically, the American is typically pre-selected (abortion, or denominal eugenics). Birth almost always occurs in a managed hospital or clinic. Although a significant minority of individuals are uninsured (insurance equals risk management, by assessment, for profit), insurance in itself is selective. Children are mandated to undergo processing (for immunization, for example), and although opting out of the process is possible, the ramifications in limiting subsequent choices are serious and far reaching. Education is controlled for age, and options are managed for selection. The more wealth and stability a family possesses, the more options. The American police state - or state police (in the generic sense) – is/are empowered to exert management protocols on nearly every facet of human interaction. From the most minor infraction to the stuff of the Ten Commandments, legislation provides authorities and their enforcers the means to intervene. As a result, as elsewhere noted, America is the most incarcerated people in the free world – an oxymoron, if there ever was one. Incarceration is selective.
The most highly managed aspects of American life are perceptual. Technology has enabled American managers to compile vast data on the inner lives and proclivities of Americans. The telecommunications industry and the US government are essentially unified in their mission to monitor, selectively or generally, the transmissions of information from an individual to another individual or entity by electronic means. Space and time management are aided by advanced and expansive sociological and psychological research, which allows corporations and the various government or private agencies – from the neighborhood association to the NSA – to monitor or determine behavior and create modifications in it. The management of behavior is spread throughout the three Drucker sectors. Morality, independence of thought, and acceptable actions are managed through education and religious instruction, penalties (both social and relational) and selection from sector to sector. Advancement in the social topology is determined.
Because the management structure is top-down, the advancement of an individual through the various stages of power gathering is vertical. An American is encouraged to grow in power, which is defined in terms of breadth of management. The more resources, the more property, including human capital (a euphemism for slavery in a management system), one is authorized to manage, the more powerful one is.
Exceptions to all these management characteristics are possible. They serve a variety of functions. Those who strive to be exceptional are, on the one hand, encouraged to do so. The more exceptional the individual, the more attention from management the exception-striving person derives. Depending on the exception’s motivations, which are evaluated in terms of potential usefulness to the management structure, the better his chances for attainment within the social topology. Additionally, exceptions are valuable in the same way that winners in Las Vegas are valuable. House-beaters prove that success is possible, even when the odds manufacture systemic assurances of near-total losses for the consumer of chance.
Failure is commoditized, as are all aspects of life, thought or expression, wherever and whenever possible. Failure is characterized as both good and bad. It is good failure, if it leads one to make better management-oriented choices in the future. It is bad, if the individual has failed as a result of resistance to management, or some other anti-management conduct. The procedure of failing is selective, as are all the other procedures in the management categories of American life. “Failing up” is the trajectory for pre-selected individuals and groups.
For the most part, the list above is reductive for the description of individual managing practice. The inference is that the individual in the collective is a function of more complex dimensional analysis. The criteria are relative and contingent, but not in the Marxian sense of definition. Power is dimensional, and so is the relationship of the individual and collective. However, dimensional analysis does not stop there. Psychology, or rather, understanding the mind in order to manage its effects, is likewise compartmentalized functionally. A dimensional analysis of America cannot be thorough until the analyst explores freedom, and how it is now managed in America. The US, is after all, “The Home of the Free.” That is the overarching narrative.
Psychology is of paramount value to management, consequently. As an industry, it has advanced into every facet of the three management sectors. Government employs psychologists in a vast array of applications, from advising the torture of prisoners, to supervising the dissembling of families. Perception is a key to management effectiveness. Where management proves ineffectual, perceptual management is applied. Psychology suggests remedies. Psycho-remedies range from drugs to lobotomy or electric shock. As strident officials are fond of saying, “All options are on the table,” or in some cases, the couch. Businessmen use psychology to sell products, evaluate or select human capital, improve performance, develop strategy and improve tactics. Ministers, or managers of spiritual matters, are often now hard to distinguish from psychologists, since both draw from the same well of data and advice. The Catholic Church consults psychologists before performing exorcisms. The priest pedophile is managed with psychological treatment, spiritual advice, physical isolation, and legal protection. At least that was the model for a while.
Financial management is its own discipline, according to its practitioners. The management of personal and collective wealth is monitored and supervised by a professional class that is prone to celebrity in extremity. A good financial manager will be asked to opinionate on all human matters, as though financial appropriation is identical to wisdom. All the categories of management strenuously defend their independence from punitive regulation. Management as an order strives to be accountable only to itself and the selective morality best suited to effectively enhance desired results and satisfy perceived or projected needs. Financiers are in effect, managers of collective and individual behavior, stability, power and prestige. They operate dimensionally. As a sector in society, finance strives to optimize gain from every transaction, selectively, for only a marginal percentage of Americans are positioned so as to benefit from the finance sector’s machinations.
Managing who proffers American noblesse oblige or dictates the terms of the “trickling down” of wealth is a combined management function of government and business sectors. The two sectors in this respect are functionally inseparable. The rotation of managers between the two sectors is systemic, entrenched and consequential in effect. Consultants and lobbyists comprise a special class of management. The Jesuits of old are a proper analog for American consultants. They are brought in to do managerial dirty work. Lobbying as a management function is indicative of access and rewards. The lobbyist manages message and personnel. Both, figuratively, “put out fires.” They manage successes that might undermine management ambitions and failures that might reveal the costs of managerial excess. Mercenary is an adequate descriptive term for lobbyist.
American language in all sectors is managed. Words and phrases are designated as inappropriate, and managers monitor usage as indicators of obeisance. How and why the offending words arrive at their status is secondary to their usefulness for selection. How an individual responds to fluidly strict and casual codes of linguistic exchange determines the individual’s willingness to abide by management priorities. The key effect is both perceptual and conceptual. An individual’s capacity to recognize managerial determination and accept it, and respond through action accordingly, will largely determine the individual’s advancement.
The good manager in each sector must be fluent in the dimensional practice of management. To put it another way, all a manager must do to be a good manager is to accept the top-down topology of managerial practice. Other factors affect an individual’s capacity for overall viability. To be the manager of a major corporation requires of the prospect extreme discipline, adherence, bordering on fanaticism, to the maxims of management, not just in practical terms, or technical effects, but in the rightness of managerial ecology.
A great manager, like Peter Drucker, must be an expert social ecologist. He must display an advanced cognition of management’s necessary interventions in all aspects of the individual and collective topology, and the environments of both. He must also understand the power of time management. The great manager must even practice self-management, a discipline that is now taught in executive management academies. The top manager then becomes a system proof, as well as a system release. If the system is attacked, and accountability is unavoidable, the top manager is made the scapegoat, in order to minimize greater damage to the managerial system. A top manager accepts this as a facet of his job description. The system, whenever possible, seeks to normalize such self-sacrifice for the management collective, by rewarding sacrificial managers with better appointments elsewhere in the management configuration. This is “failing up” in the top ranks, and explains why the CEO feels justified in comparing himself to the martyr in religion.
The American domestic partner (a managerial euphemism) is a home manager. Individuals are encouraged to correlate family life to a managed business arrangement. When negotiations breakdown, mediators can be hired to resolve disputes or improve familial effectiveness. The home itself is intensely managed, from its purchase, to its equipment, to the performance of its human components, mission, values, health, internal discourse and entertainments, diet, consuming patterns, location in government operations, commoditization, risks and protections, and so on. The home profile is a vital determinant in managerial selection in all applications.
Home failure is its own managed industry, or dimensional combination of industries, as diverse as the components that make up the domestic environment. The home is the primary source of revenue for the managed society. As the current economic crisis demonstrates, and as the American narrative goes, the home is the foundation for society. “A man’s home is his castle.” In fact, a man’s home is a key determinant in his caste in the management topology. Nearly every domestic decision is scrutinized as a managerial indicator. Home management is the water cooler discourse of today’s American workplace. While failing up is possible, especially when pre-selection is a factor, domestic stability is a sign to management that the managed individual has prioritized correctly. The managed vocation is operationally paramount.
When a manager is benevolent towards an individual some form of domestic distress, the manager is reinforcing the maxim that management is good for the individual, by knowing when to be good to him. Such oblige is understood, from a management perspective to be quid pro quo, in favor of management. Again, these are House Rules. The exception is permissible on occasion to reinforce the illusion that participation is a function of choice, in this case, as opposed to chance in the case of the casino. Structurally, the schematic is identical. The consumer will almost inevitably lose, eventually.
Managing the individual’s capacity for learning is also vital. This is achieved through a combinative approach. Learning is reliant on proper diet, adequate rest and recovery, integrated and sequential instruction, reinforcement, variation and verification, etc. Learning also must have meaning and value. In America, we can review the symptoms in all these areas ad infinitum. It is the effects that management is concerned with, over time. Management and control are hardly antonyms. Management has attacked public education and unionized teachers for generations, whittling away at the field until it can wrest the primary vehicle of learning from the bottom-up democracy. The tactics are internal and external, applied as constant pressure. Reducing teacher pay and prestige, divesting the self-governing apparatus and replacing it with productivity measures, chipping away at domestic independence and encouraging cognitive retardation: these are only a few policies, practices employed to bankrupt free, unmanaged local education. The most effective approach to debasing public education is to install good managers in power positions within the system. These agents then can campaign for the so-called best practices of management. Meanwhile, in the study hall, a student can buy sugar treats produced by Corporate Multinationals. The student will wear clothes made in China and branded by a Corporate Multinational. The student will watch hours of television produced and distributed by Corporate Multinationals. The student will listen to Corporate Multinational music, while doing his homework. The student will ride to and from school in a vehicle built by a Corporate Multinational. Along the route, the student will be bombarded by advertisements for Corporate Multinationals. The student will go with his family on excursions and entertainments managed by Multinational Corporations (like the theater, the theme park, the professional sports event). The student’s family will shop for the student at the Corporate Multinational mall or Corporate Multinational retailer, which are incrementally distinguishable only, according to their marketable identities and preferred markets, and so on. A student is not taught management. An American student is managed fundamentally. At all times, if management is successful, the student will be aware first of management’s choice for him, and second, if at all, that he has any freedom of choice.
The chemistry of management is as pervasive across sectors as management engineering. This is to say that management fabricates or manages science dimensionally. Managed chemistry is consumed by the individual in pill or edible form, in the bottle or package containing them, in the fuel the truck consumes to transport the commodity to the consumer, in the air that one is forced to breathe, in the water one buys or drinks from the tap. Management relies on engineers to implement the social ecology in concrete form. Science in all its applied fields is managed through the allocation of monies, prestige and appointments. Management is concerned with the results. To that end the management topology in America combines the efforts and powers of all three sectors to generate science that benefits management aims, whenever possible.
When Peter Drucker suggests that climate change and multinational corporations are management’s most pressing future concerns, what he might be encoding is the reality that the success of multinational corporations is not only reliant on the prime causes of climate change, but that management of the science of climate change is a potential opportunity for business. The question of whether climate change is caused chiefly by corporate activities or tri-sector management or corporate management beneficiary (Superclass) is not suggested. Science that indicates a causal connection is everywhere to be refuted or obfuscated or disrupted, until such time that the management society can derive profit from the phenomenon.
As I said above, delving into the particulars of this dimension of Management, its American expression, is fertile territory for exploration. That management is a global phenomenon is a foregone conclusion for its advocates. The realities on the ground, as the euphemism puts it, suggests otherwise, especially now. Any American can ask himself to what extent his life is managed, and the answer will indicate, proportionally, to what extent he is in fact an American.
In broad evaluative terms, a good indicator of the extent to which a modern society is managed is the fertility rate. This is a moderately hopeful sign for Americans, since we are at least still replacing our population. Japan, on the other hand, is not. The European nations are not. The relatively unmanaged populations of other nations are burgeoning, to the great consternation of the Davos Man. Nations or societies that are still controlled by charismatic leaders or alternate governmental models such as theocracies or anti-capitalist forces are fertile, even exponentially so. Maintaining the current nuclear stockpiles is still a hedge against those populations and their leaders, and so the organization of managed society enforces strict selection on the apocalyptic technologies for obliteration of huge populations through conflagration or chemistry.
Freedom for the forces of management, whether freedom exercised by the individual or the global collective, humanity, is a secondary concern. Freedom is even a secondary concern for Davos Man, except when it is his freedom to exercise power that is at stake. What is of primary importance for the Superclass is conservation of the top-down configuration in management, and the bottom-up flow of wealth, power and prestige. This instinct for self-preservation is in direct contraposition to American democracy. Management, as Peter Drucker outlines it, is the applied dimensional science of insuring the conservation of the Superclass as the global ruling construct. It is a design for the transfer of creativity, innovation, and freedom of humankind into the control sphere of a loosely organized band of international nomads and social chameleons, who maintain visibility or invisibility by choice, whenever possible. Great wealth, access and power permit one to manage appearance, the perception of others for oneself.
The most creative act of man and woman is reproducing. What force has management applied to mastering reproduction! Nothing requires more innovation than the raising of a healthy child. What force has management applied to conquering parents and the role of the nurturing society! The leadership of people is its most elevated form of service. What force has management applied to the eradication of leadership, and its replacement with management!
Peter Drucker, for his role in this, is no less a villain than any one can name. A dimensional portrait of Drucker, or any other Management or Epistemological Man could be produced by anyone capable of cutting and pasting in Photoshop. Simply take a JPEG of Gerhard Richter’s Uncle Rudi and paste Drucker’s or the CEO’s face on over the face in the Richter painting. The title will always be, “The Banality of Evil.”
Peter Drucker’s interest in Japan and Japanese art is competitive and comparative. It is a humble proclamation that Drucker managed to produce, or was instrumental in producing, a more pervasive social ecology, a more controlled society, in the West in fifty years, than hundreds of years of collective and individual topological progression yielded in Japan. Peter Drucker, subtly is revealing his pride in his creation. Social Ecology is Drucker’s medium. He is its foremost practitioner. His design orientation is called Management. He is not a technician or laborer, and therefore not an artisan. He is, by his own definition, an Epistemological artist. Since there is no such thing, he is only an Epistemologist. In ancient terms that would qualify Drucker to be a steward for the Superclass, for which his individual topology made him well suited. Being a humble servant, Drucker eschewed such demarcations, preferring the relative ease of an academic’s life in Claremont.
When man is nearly defeated, and his freedoms dispersed or destroyed, and the few reign supreme over the brokenhearted many, the Earth will shake off the tyrant and all but a few of the rest, and start again. Crisis, history has proven repeatedly and in waves, is relative, and dimensional.
As for the Davos Man? It is worth ending with a snapshot of Davos 2009, penned by Daniel Gross for Slate (“Davos Man, Confused”). I will include the account in its entirety.
For centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There's no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.
Ordinarily, Davos is a Great Men kind of place, as the motto of this year's gathering implies: "Shaping the post-crisis world." The people who show up here—political leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, and, above all, businesspeople—have all shown an ability to impose themselves on history. Otherwise, they wouldn't be invited. And yet in the many discussions held here about the recent global financial debacle, the question of human agency is shunted to the side.
At a CNBC event yesterday, groups of 10 to 12 people sat at tables and mooted three questions: Which policy assumption failed? Which regulatory failure proved to be the largest systemic shock? And which market failure proved most damaging? The answers were obvious: poor regulation of the shadow banking system, mispricing of risk, the failure of models. But there was very little talk about the people who helped design and justify the systems, the mispricing, and the models. At one point, someone in the crowd stood up and said: "It's intriguing nobody is to blame. In other industries, there are consequences if you make toxic products that hurt people. Policy makers need to make it clear that there are serious consequences for that type of behavior." Big applause! And yet aside from the odd mention of Alan Greenspan and an oblique reference to Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary who became a senior executive at Citigroup, there was little talk of individual players who had responsibility.
An all-star dinner that included bravura performances from behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (brilliant and charming), historian Niall Ferguson (brilliant and charming), and Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (brilliant and narcissistic) focused on the dramatic events of mid-September 2008. It was off the record, but Taleb asked journalists to please quote him. While not naming names, Taleb had nasty things to say about traders and exulted at the fall of Lehman Bros. But beyond that, the talk was mostly of systems that didn't work and the nameless minions who simply couldn't help themselves. Most of the talk was of the models and the market. And today, at a lunch that was testimony to the transformative power of the individual—it included Great Men Bill Gates, serial entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, the father of micro-lending, who talked about philanthropy and capitalism—Gates stumbled when asked about the failures. "Here we had some severe imbalances that led to, when people finally looked at their savings rate, you got the knock-on effect," he fumfered before mentioning Keynes and Soros. "I don't think we can find the villain and point at him and say, Aha, he did it."
The dismissal of human agency is ironic, but also predictable. Just as financial markets in the United States privatize profits and socialize losses, Davos and other conferences like this privatize success (by chalking it up to individuals) and socialize failure (by blaming it on large systemic problems).
The preferred strategy at Davos is to simply ignore failure. By and large, screw-ups don't make the agenda. It's just not that sort of place. If you screw up, you don't get invited, and you don't show up. This explains why I couldn't see a single economist or official associated with the Bush administration on the roster, and why there are very few American bankers at Davos this year. As John Thain's career at Merrill came to a close, he suffered the ultimate indignity: Bank of America told him it wouldn't be a good idea for him to come to Davos. The only thing worse than being attacked is being ignored. You don't matter anymore. You're not even worth mentioning. As World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab put it: Davos is not a place for "has-beens."
Ultimately, the "blame the system" ethos will undermine the spirit of Davos. The notion that large forces—cheap money, liquidity, mispriced risk, inefficient markets—are responsible for success or failure is an affront to Davos Man, who believes that his prominence is due to merit and hard work.
NOTES; ADDITIONAL COMMENTARIES; UNFINISHED, DISPLACED AND INCONCLUSIVE OR DRAFT ESSAYS
A Dream
In my dream, I visited a gallery. It reminded me of Casa Sin Nombre, a cute little space in Santa Fe, long gone, where I once saw a small exhibit of William Burroughs shot pieces and photos by – was it Ginsburg? I can’t recall. Anyway, the interior was Santa Fe Style with wood floors or Saltillo, vigas and candles.
Then, I stepped through the door to a huge patio restaurant. I was no longer in Santa Fe. I was in LA. The tables had umbrellas. What a celebrity crowd! Jeffrey Vallance was the first one I noticed, and he me at the same time. Other colorful characters nodded or waved as the hostess led me through, and one particularly flamboyant fellow (I think), playfully tried to invite me to join in at the table. I demurred, pleasantly.
On the opposite side of the plaza was a gymnasium for fighters, but after a brief hug of my old Muay Thai guro, I began to train a little on the bags. Shortly later, all the teachers left to conduct a children’s class, leaving the gym empty and the children’s toys lying about. I could hear the peals of joyful play as I left to return to the restaurant. By now I was hungry, but the restaurant was closing. Though they kindly offered to serve me, I declined and moved on, not wishing to keep them after what had obviously been a busy shift.
Past the plaza was a bungalow court. In between the two spaces a major fashion shoot and performance was happening. The models, photographers, directors and audience were animated. The atmosphere and visuals were dazzling. I became subject to the attentions of several of the models, who playfully accosted me. I managed to politely and with the appropriate regrets fend away their advances.
Beyond on the pathway past the Route 66-esque bungalows, small groups sat at tables relaxing. Another photoshoot was going on. It looked to be a feature piece on some actors. I recognized one as the fellow who had portrayed Chuck Barris of Gong Show fame in a movie chronicling Barris’ sideline as a government assassin. We nodded as I passed and he posed.
I returned home to my girlfriend.
On Sentience and Art
Art is a sentience enhancement device (method).
Note: For the purposes of this paper, “sentience” is used to encompass a totality of mechanisms attached to seeing, perceiving and conceiving. Where differentiation expands on understanding, the author will strive to specify terms. Also, where authorial contributions improve clarity, references will be included or attached.
Sentience in All Things
Presuppose the sentience of the orb (Gaia Theory, Japanese animism, other). Presuppose the contingent sentience of all things of the orb.
Lovelock: “Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth."
From Wiki-entry on Autopoiesis:
Autopoiesis literally means "auto (self)-creation" (from the Greek: auto – αυτό for self- and poiesis – ποίησις for creation or production), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78)
[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection. (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 89)
[See below (mushroom); and Question: What is the relationship between linkage and cloning to autopoiesis?]
Analog: In art, the digital file can be reproduced ad infinitum in theory (although in practice this is untrue, given the physical nature of the process; temperature variance, ambient humidity, ink discontinuities among batches, etc., effect output); the same image displayed on a hundred monitors will never be seen exactly the same on any two monitors. What is the resistance or tension between the thought of infinity and the actuality of conditions? Are all the prints of the same artwork? Are they one artwork? Can they be one artwork (whole edition) + one artwork (each print) + an artwork that is both one whole artwork and the several iterations, each independent and related simultaneously? The master print or proof + original plate + additional drawings or plans (text) – are these also art? Ownership and martket definitions have produced a kind of “answer.”
“Sentience” is one definition of perceptual ectology that exists in a dimensional family of terms fundamental to the process of cognitive synthesis, of conception, inherent to technical consideration of creativity. Others include awareness, quality (as qualia), consciousness, intent, sapience; and these awarenesses form the fundamental ectology of human society, but are not limited to the social function of man. Man belongs to the environment as a <specific object>, animated, in sentience, or better, a synthesis of awarenesses.
In seeing, sentience is a function of social ecology encountering stimulus, followed by an individual response. The response is a formulation, motivated by perceptual ectology.
Perceptual ectology is a combinative form, dimensional by implication, compositing:
• An object • Seer • Internalized social topology (in the seer) • An overarching narrative animated by inclusive sentience
Sentience, Divinity and Property (Market Competition)
Science cannot affirm or deny the existence of sentience. Science cannot affirm of deny the existence of divinity. Science is oriented to both awareness and divinity identically.
Note: With regards social topologies, it seems clear that the dimensional set including these components will exhibit tension, if a polar relationship is presumed between the point of sentience and the point of divinity located on a horizontal triangular plane with the object, if the element of private ownership is an extruding factor enforcing competition. If one agent presumes to own the seen thing, especially if the presumption of divinity factors, and a second agent presumes only sentience in the seen thing, within a shared dimensional ectology, the dynamics will entail conflict over appropriation. The first agent presumes usage, whether usage occurs, which may be otherwise characterized as a right to usage, potentially a divine right. The second presumes the entire landscape or set (setting) to be divine, including the object and the seer himself, on relatively (therefore) equal terms. The social topology of Japan reviewed over centuries presents an amalgam of interests in conflict, formatted in an enduring unresolved state. As an example of apparent conformity of principles to presumption, Japan, with its command and control social complex seems to have offered an interesting proof to Drucker’s complex and dimensional model, responsive to Locke and Shinto, capable in socio-ecological terms of converting management or top-down authority with bottom-up compliance, and comforted horizontally by a time-proven proclivity for adaptation of multiple definitions of divinity. Social relations in Japan - complex and formal, but mutable and mitigated by honorable mechanisms or <space/time> for release or temporary suspension of normative intervention – apparently struck Drucker as adequate for the task of both historic conservation and cultural viability in the contemporary milleu.
On Sentience and Divinity in the Social Topology
The existence of sentience and the divine is a proposition within the composition of a social topology. Man acts on his synthetic ectology. Synthetic ectology is harmonized with social topology by numerous means, the most valuable of which is art.
The crafting of a Samurai sword, as we have seen, is the emblematic action of combinative collective-individual | response>expression / animation in Japanese social topology. The dimensional composition includes:
• Shinto • Craft • Science (trial and error) • Observation and organization (management of people, resources, effects and elements to achieve a result) • History • Inferred or possible usage • Market viability • Collective competition and cooperation (as in a guild) • Individual excellence • Lineage • Familial heritage • Cultural relevance • Martial effectiveness • + More
What is the seen thing in this configuration? Is not the procedure an object (It was for NOVA)? The response is embedded throughout the crafting process for the swordmaker. The sword is the expression, but is not the entirety of the procedure expressive of the social topology?
On Sentience as an Infusion of Quality(-ies)
If the Samurai sword possesses “soul” (of Japan, of the swordmaker, of the elements that comprise the making of the sword, and so on), and this “soul” is identified as sentience, does the swordmaker alone bear the responsibility of infusing it into the sword, through the proper management of materials, process, people, etc., involved in the sword’s fabrication? How does swordmaking differentiate from the manufacture of art (painting, sculpture or drawing)?
In terms of sentience, the two expressions are dissimilar not at root, but by degree and in function. A proper comparison requires the recognition of design excellence in the manufacture of the Samurai, as representative of the Japanese social topology.
It is the tip of the Samurai sword (relative to the totality of the sword in its expressive and utile functions) that is comparative to the phenomenon of dimensional art (relative to social topology). Art is the point.
Unscienced Versus Unconditioned
If that any wight ween a thing to be otherwise than it is, it is not only unscience, but it is deceivable opinion. - Chaucer.
Science is but one component in social topology.
In a refined social topography, an <unscienced> individual can still function. In gaming, assigned functions provide the agent with performance expectations and capabilities. In science fiction, the concept of the replicant was introduced by Philip K. Dick and explored by others. These notions have been present in philosophy and literature for centuries in various forms. In science, robotics has successfully obviated human repetitive function in many applications. In economics the concept of labor can sufficiently dehumanize the employee for the purposes of productivity to the extent that employers have felt justified in subjecting their workers to degradations now classified as criminal. The objectification of human beings by other human beings has a long ignominious history. The presence of toplogical conditions conducive to the abstraction of human form in service to idealogy or production is worthy of attention, from a framework of permeable sentience.
Theoretically, imagining the phenomenon of an <unintelligent agent> in a mirror scenario has produced interesting mind problems and science fiction, specifically for the examination of unconditioned response. In philosophy, the presence of impossible-to-resolve elements in such considerations, absent representation, ensure Epistemic uncertainty. The solution is, of course, art, and the Cartesian reductive movie screen of the mind is solved by the reducible form of organic and dynamic symmetry.
<Unscienced> is problematic, because of vagaries in exclusive definitions of science as a procedural discipline. For instance, can we call the adaptation of the indigenous Amazonian tribesman unscientific, if barring outside intervention he can by highly complex evolution through social topology develop a sustainable and productive homeostatic relationship with his demanding ectology? The short answer is “yes.” Is the distinction meaningful? The answers are both “yes” and “no.” If one’s reference is comparative and competitive, involving ownership and market forces, the unscienced tribesman is not only unscientific in his approach to representing reality (also true of art). If the lens through which we observe our tribesman is the “Sentience Lens,” the value of the tribesman’s vast knowledge (especially his applied or survival knowledge, or technical proficiency as achievement of sustainable survival) is high, if not awesome. To recognize the importance of a social topology that indicates reverence for sentience in such an example requires the reformatting of the top-down hierarchies of knowledge-objects. Ultimately, advanced and primitive are definitions that are prone to abuse and misunderstanding.
Ectological Effects
The effects of ectology upon man are the sensory data to which he responds. The heat of fire can attract or repel an individual, based on other conditions.
The Figure on Abstraction
Science is both abstract and representational. Science synthesizes the progressions of data known or knowable to man, through his senses and the machines man creates to analyze data, as sense amplifiers.
Art as a medium for representation solves the issues of homunculi, while preventing an emergence of disciplines focused on fabricated unscienced androids and correlating dehumanization in the social topology. It is interesting to note here the prohibitions against figurative representation in Islamic social topologies and Presbyterian culture.
Sensory Amplification
Thought can act as a sense amplifier. Perception can inflect or distort the sensory data. Art can act as a sense amplifier, especially when it is applied to problems unsolvable by other disciplines. A social topology limited along scientific or religious lines or restrictions is handicapped. In such cases, obvious data and solutions remain for useful purposes invisible.
Opening avenues of investigation by removing prohibitions in perceptual frameworks can produce unexpected positive results.
(Science cannot confirm or deny that the Earth is not a sentient.) <Sentience> in this sense is also related to <awareness>.
(Example)
From The Independent: The largest living organism ever found has been discovered in an ancient American forest. The Armillaria ostoyae, popularly known as the honey mushroom, started from a single spore too small to see without a microscope. It has been spreading its black shoestring filaments, called rhizomorphs, through the forest for an estimated 2,400 years, killing trees as it grows. It now covers 2,200 acres (880 hectares) of the Malheur National Forest, in eastern Oregon. The outline of the giant fungus stretches 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometres) across, and it extends an average of three feet (one metre) into the ground. It covers an area as big as 1,665 football fields. The discovery came after Catherine Parks, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in La Grande, Oregon, in 1998 heard about a big tree die-off from root rot in the forest east of Prairie City. Using aerial photos, Ms Parks staked out an area of dying trees and collected root samples from 112. She identified the fungus through DNA testing. Then, by comparing cultures of the fungus grown from the 112 samples, she determined that 61 were from the same organism, meaning a single fungus had grown bigger than anything anyone had ever described before.
From Tom Volk’s history of the humungous fungus:
One interesting offshoot of these findings of humongous fungi has been a scientific discussion of "what exactly is an organism?" Most people understand the concept of an organism in an animal, which has very carefully defined limits--and most of it is usually visible as it moves around. However, much of a typical plant and most of a typical fungus is not visible to the naked eye. In particular with fungi, the limits of the individual are not clearly defined. The large question was "are these humongous fungi acting as single organisms?" It was well proven that the genetics of various parts of the humongous fungus organism are identical, but can, for example, one part of the organism communicate with other parts of the organism? Do they share physiology? If different parts are growing through different substrates, are they supplying other parts of the fungus with missing nutrients? Several articles began to appear in the scientific literature including Gould (1992) in which he spent a great deal of time discussing populations of asexually reproducing aphids. One letter to the editor by James Bullock of Oxford University (1992) pointed out some larger clones of plants, including an aspen clone (Populus tremuloides) covering 81 hectares and over 10,000 years old. At that time Bullock did not know about the larger A. ostoyae clones.
From Scientific American:
Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well…Ironically, the discovery of such huge fungi specimens rekindled the debate of what constitutes an individual organism. "It's one set of genetically identical cells that are in communication with one another that have a sort of common purpose or at least can coordinate themselves to do something," Volk explains.
Question: Are these fungi aware? Do they communicate?
On Awareness
Awareness is an associative instrument. It may be attuned.
Response may be defined as a transitive action, which may be indicative of, defined as, correlating to awareness, or sentience.
When a Japanese person bows to van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” the topological translation of his action presumes sentience. The Buddhist recognizes sentience as a quality not only present in humans. “I bow to all sentient beings, when I bow before you.” General respect for sentience is acknowledged throughout one’s interactions with another _______________(sentient).
Science can observe response to stimulus. Response is a symptom of animation within an environment. Intention is a function of closed environments prone to adjudication of motivation. Animus is a directionally precipitated force of sentience in an open system.
Animus is rooted conceptually in the question of the initiation and perpetuation of motion (Greek). The precept of free will is the question for a requisite answer for what motivates action. Will is a mind-centric definition of mobility.
The Epistemological and technical begin their divergence here. Animus becomes conjunctive to action. The issue of Free Will is introduced as the precursive element in the assessment of action in the domain of morality and the adjudication of morality in laws, as in malicious intent. Critical discourse is one recent response, and many such dialectic responses are evidenced in the euro-history of will.
Sentience describes motion not in terms of self-propulsion, but in terms of general movement within which self-propulsion is a component factor exhibited by entities that must move to survive. The adjudicant seeks to stop motion. The adjudicant is like a still camera, using light as a reason (means) to stop action.
Movement and sustainability are interwoven, as energy displaced and outcome. Energy can be displaced poorly or well for a good or bad outcome. The motion picture (film) camera is an analog. The action is stopped to assess the outcome. This is the analog for managed life (movement).
From these elements the foundation of dramatic narrative is erected. The dimensional component is encounter, is exchange, is transformation, is resurrection, is reformation, is interruption, is counterforce, and so on. The analog is digital animation with video and still elements. The action becomes data for creative reconfiguration, the analog for applied memory.
Speed and movement are energetic representations of matter. In art they are represented by the blur and other references to focus. Representation is partly a function of triangulation, so the POV or positional origin of observation determines the shape of matter “behind the retina,” its color, density, etc. In other words stasis and speed/movement are collaborative, co-active or linked perceptual elements in a dimensional representation.
Light as Effect
Rembrandt, Picasso and Vermeer illustrate the value of light in compositional realism, within the dimensional array, or vignette. The array may be arranged physically or in the imagination. Sentience is not limited by the site of visualization, or the conditions, if memory can “fill in the blanks.” The negative space of composition is not a function of Epistemic concerns necessarily, although ample evidence has accrued for the use of art media for storytelling. The introduction of dimensional analysis has made push-pull the ordering device of choice in social topology, because of its value as a converter of the closed system into the operationally open system.
Light as an Orientation
Light and dark are not exclusive in terms of sentience.
A dimensional framework optimizes opacity and transparency as compositional components for layering of meaning. Time is a qualifier in such a structure, but without the burden of conclusion. Confusion of ideology is not a function of emotional response, as much as it is an encouragement for creative adaptation and motivation for innovation.
Life is not equal to light and dark equal to death as a rule, for example, in the dimensional topology. Sentience is present in both light and dark, both death and life, as are limitation and freedom (as song). Freedom is an analog for frequency. Reciprocity is an expression of freedom.
In the deepest cave there is life without light. In the darkest depths of the ocean there is enlightened life. In the brightest star there is dead star waiting to manifest. In the best dimensional or sentient composition, there is a potential for either + and + or + neither. When nothing is visible a scene suggests the sonic, a form of frequency. Sound does not exist in a vacuum. Sound bounces off of walls.
In the dimensional framework, then, the new medium is conceived when the conditions in the ectology mute the skillful means of the old medium. The sentience is not formed. It is transformed. The hierarchy is not prohibitively vertical. It is circular and derivative of the base sentient. Water is an analog for adaptation. Water fills the container. “Water finds its own level.”
The nature of light and darkness, the nature of sound, the nature of water, the nature of speed and movement, the nature of position: these are some of the elements to be studied for the improvement of dimensional art practice. The study of these elements also improves sentience.
Light and dark visit the Earth in cycles. Life and death visit the person (and other animated or vital forms) in cycles. Sentience is cyclic and more. The Ouroboros, to the Zen master’s ink circle, the Zero, the hoop, pi, and all in all: Plato understood this:
The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet. (Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett)
On Sentience and Dimensional Art
Sentience is dimensional. Dimensional art is sentient.
To know or perceive (sapere) is separated artificially from feeling (sentire). The topological issue is a reduction of cognition of <sentience> as a limited linguistic formology meant to signify a phenomenal, and shared, sense awareness, reformatting the awareness into manageable and inconclusive elements (in the Western Tradition, at least). The operational consequence of arbitrary reduction as a motivation is the establishment over time of disciplines dedicated to the management of sentience, and the attempted conclusion or control by compartmentalization of the force that animates sentience.
Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. Epistemic thought is without dimension. Art is dimensional. Epistemology is without art, and undimensional. Epistemology is unscience. Dimensional intelligence is sentience.
Equating sentience to emotion or feeling in the European or Western social topology is incorrect. The equation of reason as a preoccupation of man and emotion as a preoccupation of woman are incorrect propositions. Recognizing sentience in both man and woman is a correct proposition. If the fundamental dynamic of reproduction is incorrectly proposed, subsequent propositions will be sure to fail. Selection according to reason without respect for sentience will inevitably produce flawed inference.
First of all, east and west as defining terms on a sphere are absurd. They only work if one is smaller than the horizon.
If the Earth is sentient, and you are sentient, you don’t have to go home. You’re already here.
Science can create or monitor conditions that produce effects. In that aspect, science is a design medium. Management is a design medium. Management and science are identical in their design function. Sentience designs itself, and is design, and is evidenced in design, and created.
Design is a functional medium. Sentience is an infusive element of excellent design. As this statement demonstrates, excellence is a corrolary of sentience.
Social topologies, especially at the tribal level, effect or modify the environment. Collectives are (capable of) sentient (sentience). Individuals are sentient. Modification of the environment can be a function of sentience.
Visual stimuli are <ingested, digested: consumed> like food. Visual stimuli are sustaining of sentience, depending on the diet.
Is your visual diet appetizing? Or do you consume junk food for the eyes?
If contemporary art is like the tip of the Samurai sword, in terms of sentience, what is _____________ (fill in the blank with a name, e.g., Catherine Opie) doing there? Contemporary art is not like the tip of the Samurai sword. A Samurai sword is sentient. Contemporary art is concerned with other things besides sentience. Dimensional art is like the tip of the Samurai sword.
On the Sentient World
In the sentient world, things tell the sentient being what to do with them.
In the sentient world, position is a function not of free will, but of sentience.
In the sentient world, being in the right place at the right time is impossible not to do.
In the sentient world, position is not endowed. Position is accepted, if it is correct.
In the sentient world, determining what is correct and what is incorrect is a form of play. Play is fun. Play is serious. Determining what is correct and what is incorrect is a matter of survival. Practicing survival can be fun, like play, and very serious. Play is dimensional. Games are sentient.
Through art and science, we determine what is correct and what is incorrect.
On Ownership and Sentience
Ownership is the enslavement of sentience.
To be alive is to be sentient. Sentience is life-affirming, life-revealing, life-sustaining, life-enhancing, life-freeing and so on.
Ownership is a denial of life, and therefore sentience. Ownership is the restraint, constraint, and ultimately the destruction of life. In the sentient world, death is a facet of life. The rotting corpse gives life to the carrion-feeders. When the carrion feeders are too well fed and too many, it is the sign of catastrophe.
Under the heading: Where were the Indians in all this?
From Law of Property Rights Protection (Laitos, 5.02):
The simplest definition of property is one which refers to a tangible thing. Such property typically has physical characteristics and dimensions. It would include both natural resources – land, water, trees, minerals, as well as developed resources – houses, cars, diamond rings.
Property may also be present when the thing has no physical existence, but is instead an intangible legal interest.
And (5-4):
Courts and commentators have assumed that the term “property” may have no less than three distinct meanings. First, property may refer to a thing, a parcel of land, a physical object, or an intangible interest. Second, the term “property” could refer to any relationship among persons with regard to the things of the external world. Under this second definition, property would consist of various legal rights in the thing (e.g., the right to possesss it, the right to security in it), or an entitlement to obtain a legal interest in the thing in the first place. Third, property could simply be equivalent to the ownership of a thing, which would carry with it the right to possess and use it to the exclusion of others.
From On Gold Mountain (See, pg. 27):
Back in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase had legally extended the boundary of the United States’ territories to the Rockies in the Northwest. But, boundary or no, trappers and hunters were already penetrating into the area beyond, while along the Pacific Coast, ships actively explored rivers and harbors, seeking places to pick up sea otter pelts to trade with China. The United States wasn’t the only country interested in this land so rich in natural resources. The British also wanted a share, as did the French, Russians, and Spanish. The idea of physical occupation had long been the basis for claims of sovereignty, and here that principle was at work again. Even as Britain’s Hudson Bay Company became increasingly entrenched, American settlers in the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon argued for recognition by the United States government.
[Also ref.: Glencoe and the Indians (Hunter)]
The problem of ownership and seeing: the camera effect; a visual apparatus infected by the concept of private ownership, supported by the legal armature of copyright produces a movement to see-to-own. The aspect of exclusion is present. The aspect of synthesis is diminished, then the potency of engagement. Visual innovation comes to equal <capture>, or owning by seeing first or uniquely through a window. This is the process of automating vision. Automation is not sentience.
The homunculus is a necessary tool for those who imagine the possibility of life without sentience. Among these people, we find the owner.
I would like to share with the reader a wonderful and strange find. It is the short essay at the end of the Linda Goodman book, Love Signs. Goodman’s book brought astrology to the mainstream, and was a mainstay on any New Ager or aging hippie bookshelf. The essay is called, “A Time to Embrace.” It is a defense of the meaning and value of human reproduction. After submerging in the material of this essay for months, I found it to be a lovely tonic.
From Wikipedia/eugenics/Japan (cite numbers not edited and cites not included):
Japan
In the early part of the Shōwa era, Japanese governments executed a eugenic policy to limit the birth of children with "inferior" traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers.[73]
The Race Eugenic Protection Law was submitted from 1934 to 1938 to the Diet. After four amendments, this draft was promulgated as the National Eugenic Law in 1940 by the Konoe government [74]. According to the Eugenic Protection Law (1948), sterilization could be enforced on criminals "with genetic predisposition to commit crime", patients with genetic diseases such as total color-blindness, hemophilia, albinism and ichthyosis, and mental affections such as schizophrenia, manic-depressiveness and epilepsy. [75]. Mental illnesses were added in 1952.
The Leprosy Prevention laws of 1907, 1931 and 1953, the last one only repealed in 1996, permitted the segregation of patients in sanitarium where forced abortions and sterilization were common, even if the laws did not refer to it, and authorized punishmement of patients "disturbing peace" as most Japanese leprologists believed that the body constitution vulnerable to the disease was inheritable. [76] There were a few Japanese leprologists such as Noburo Ogasawara who argued against the "isolation-sterilization policy" but he was denounced as a traitor to the nation at 15th conference of the Japanese Association of Leprology in 1941. [77]
Center staff also attempted to discourage marriage between Japanese women and Korean men who had been recruited from the peninsula as laborers following its annexation by Japan in 1910. In 1942, a survey report argued that "the Korean laborers brought to Japan, where they have established permanent residency, are of the lower classes and therefore of inferior constitution...By fathering children with Japanese women, these men could lower the caliber of the Yamato minzoku." [78]
One of the last eugenic measures of the Shōwa regime was taken by the Higashikuni government. On 19 August 1945, the Home Ministry ordered local government offices to establish a prostitution service for allied soldiers to preserve the "purity" of the "Japanese race". The official declaration stated, "Through the sacrifice of thousands of "Okichis" of the Shōwa era, we shall construct a dike to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future...." [79]
[also ref: Fitzpatrick (2001)]:
Abstract The new genetics is of undoubted importance to the future of welfare reform, but if this influence is not to be dominated by Right-wing values and prescriptions then some alternative conceptions need to be in place. This article begins by criticising the recent intervention by Charles Murray, insisting that Murray opens the door to a laissez faire eugenics. It then proceeds to outline a theory of regulated eugenics, justifying use of the concept ‘eugenics’ along the way, in terms of three elements: a multi-dimensional conception of human nature, differential egalitarianism and the precautionary principle. It then elaborates upon these ideas, and contrasts them with laissez faire eugenics, in a discussion of three areas of direct and immediate relevance to social policy: genetic screening, gene therapy and reproduction.
The fertility curve
In 1979, Drucker discusses the Japanese “learning curve.” He should have been focusing on the country’s fertility curve, which has plummeted since World War 2. Today, Japan has the most rapid and serious ageing problem in the world, due to declining fertility rates, combined with rising longevity (Peng). “There is also the concern that a higher proportion of older workers may result in a loss of vitality for the corporation and nation.” Japan incorporated is demographically coming to resemble the Samurai but little.
Ahimsa = (Sanskrit); to do no harm
Two Treatises of Government (Locke)
Let it be, that they exposed them; add to it, if you please, for this still greater power, that they begat them for their tables, to fat and eat them: if this proves a right to do so, we may, by the same argument, justify adultery, incest and sodomy, for there are examples of these too, both ancient and modern; sins, which I suppose have their principal aggravation from this, that they cross the main intention of nature, which willeth the increase of mankind, and the continuation of the species in the highest perfection, and the distinction of families, with the security of the marriage-bed, as necessary thereunto.
>
To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss, to set down what I take to be political power; that the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and shew the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a gallery.
Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.
>
A state of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, on one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. (Emphasis, PJM)
Note: The narrative indicates the conflict engendered by the Epistemology of the author. The blatant contradiction of freedom within the set is not remedied with the dominion over the set by “lord and master of them all,” a problem further obfuscated divine and mundane only by capitalization.
On creativity, creative destruction and global birth trends (Questions or Rhetoric)
Does the success of globalism inhibit or otherwise diminish fertility? How?
Abortion and eugenics: are these identical terms, or rather domains in the same field? Do they serve similar functions?
In the sentient world, there is no need for globalism. Globalism is the ambition of those who would own the world. Management is the control of owned things, people, and land. Global management is unnecessary in the sentient world. The sentient world manages itself.
Life does not need managing, when it is sentient. A dimensional painter doesn’t manage a painting, while he’s making it. He’s too engaged in the relationship to resort to control.
Human life is sentience held in trust.
The tonic for ownership is the Trust.
Irony is the expression of the Episteme’s hatred of play. It is ironic that Robber Baron monopolies were called Trusts.
Management is function of fear of risk. The corporation is a fabrication to protect fearful people from risk. A dimensional painter seems fearless of risk, although that is not correct. Fear is natural, a normal part of life. The dimensional painter is busy being sentient while he’s painting. He doesn’t have time to be afraid. This is true of any sentient doing anything worthwhile.
What is a person who has all material needs met a thousand times a thousand times over afraid of? Such a person is only afraid, if his needs are met by the reaping of measure from owned things (people, land). Then he will be afraid someone else will take away from him the things he owns. Ownership is an effort to replace sentience with comfort or power. Sentience is comfort and power (and + or + either + neither). Sentience does not need ownership to exist. Ownership seeks to own what it cannot (or should not). An owner buys a painting to fill the void created by his abandonment or abuse of sentience.
The analog for selling of an owned thing to another owner is prostituting a person.
“Enough” is a form of sentient realization, especially if “enough” is correct. How one finishes a painting is an expression of sentience. For a sentient painter, finishing a painting is like sharing a friend’s death. Knowing where to place a painting’s elements is like setting the table for a dinner with a loved one.
The sentient answer for “no” is time.
“No” is the cause of irony.
On the American Problems of Democracy
All America has to do to clean up her Democracy is replace the system of laws and practices upholding ownership, with a system of laws and practices upholding trusts. Stewardship is the answer for ownership.
On the second point: A sentient America will only permit organizations that enhance and protect sentience.
In both cases, the basic structures, like all structures are permeable and cyclic. The sentience form will modify to adhere to current conditions. This is a symptom of sentience.
On the question of time and current conditions: the most beautiful words in sentient language are (in translation) in perpetuity.
Notes on various elements in the Japanese social topology, and more profiling
Tracing the history of eugenics in Japan is relatively easy, given that more than most societies that have embraced the practice, Japan collectively perhaps did not perceive eugenics as sufficiently antithetical in its topological composition.
In his essay, we see Drucker transposing art on social ecology and the inverse. Japan and Japanese art are portrayed by comparison, in duotones. The author ventures critical deductions on issues aesthetic, to get at social, economic and political meaning. He frames the country’s personality while disclosing to the reader the appeal the work has for him. What might we learn from parsing the two subjects?
In 1979, could Drucker have envisioned the “Lost Decade” of Japan, or the societal disintegration that would attend the productivity boom and rise to power of the financial sector? Could Drucker have envisioned the youth culture of Japan, the anime, the manga, the pervasive electronic society predicted by (Drucker’s friend) Marshall McLuhan and dismissed by Drucker in his essay with a cryptic dualism that has been proved incorrect? The Japanese obsession with electronic gadgets supports McLuhan, not Drucker, but also points to the globalization of wired cultural diversity. Yet, Japan has not produced a culturally emblematic footprint in the binary world. What has texting to do with essence, other than the perceptual and conceptual meeting in the context of a single, immediate GUI housed in a neon pink shell in the blurred by speed hands of a 13 year-old Japanese girl? The content is not distinctively Japanese. We have no Japanese corollary to Tom Cruise or James Dean. What makes the Japanese texter different from the consumer-girl doing the same thing in Iowa, especially if both are raving about the same pop idol’s new hit, which both saw simultaneously, the second it hit the web? What will become of the Japanese identity when productivity and manufacturing costs push the wealth to China? What has McDonald’s done to Japan that China could not? Drucker does not see through his window to tell us about these things.
The subject of a review of Drucker’s catalog essay for Song of the Brush, Japanese Paintings from the Sanso Collection (Rosenfeld, 1979), then, should not be the Japan he envisioned in 1979, necessarily, or the art he critiqued. Art criticism is a mediation of modern art for viewers possessing some measure of freedom to value the work on that basis. The artist whose work is described in Peter’s essay was in no position to respond freely to his environment, to see it and represent it as he see saw fit, than I am to comment on the technical codes he needed and used to run the gauntlet of state control. Not even the shogun was above the protocols of control when these works were produced. It might be better to examine the function of art in a society exhibiting bottom-to-top controls, and why such art appealed to the management guru Peter Drucker, and what might have compelled him to defend such art through the mischaracterization of superimposed and selective social ecologies or unrepresented personal affinities.
An explanation of methodology
Peter Drucker’s essay on Japanese art is not considered to be of any particular importance to the field of art criticism. However, like any single element in a dimensional order, “A View of Japan through Japanese Art” can be used to extrapolate important realities about the order and the things in it, or of it.
Until now, no one has suggested that the oeuvre of Peter Drucker could or should be assessed through the lens of this brief and obscure piece of writing. In a dimensional framework, however, nearly any element in a data set can serve as a point of departure for a thorough and referential examination of the characteristics of a thing.
Dimensional mapping is a function of topology. It is multi-directional and as such relies on a combining of points for reference and perspective. Starting in one place is as valid as starting in another, for all of the points occur in the same field (or environment, or reality, etc.). One starts where one is.
As indicated in the introduction, my material start point was Joseph Maciariello’s opening lecture for The Drucker Difference course, not the Drucker essay on Japanese art. Prior to that I had no direct knowledge of Drucker’s work. What I did not realize then, however, was how pervasive was my environmental exposure to Drucker, for good or ill. I have discussed secondary effects of Drucker elsewhere, and will likely continue to do so, since the effects to which I refer pertain.
On Vision and freedom
We have seen how dimensional realism is essential for social sustainability. We have looked at how dimensionally realistic art functions in furtherance of human survival. Human survival is a condition of seeing, we learned, and art is a vital mechanism for sharing individual vision with the collective. Now we must examine the mechanisms by which shared vision is controlled and to what ends and by what means.
Peter Drucker begins his essay on Japanese art thus: “Japan, as everybody knows, is a country of rigid rules and of individual subordination to a collective will.” In all such monopolies, which we will discuss in terms of Epistemological power over Technical seeing, the function of art is identical: it reinforces the power structure.
Whatever Asian art may have been prior to its exposure to Western influence, by the time Peter Drucker grew interested in Asian (specifically Japanese) art and culture, the Epistemological had attained dominance over the social mechanisms of vision, whatever Drucker’s contentions to the contrary. Japan, after losing the Second World War, facing atomic obliteration, accepted acculturation to the West. The artist of Japan now must tell that story. Elsewhere, I discuss this, using Murakami, Japan’s contemporary art star as the prime example.
If we are to choose survival collectively, we must understand as best we can of what such a choice consists. Building on the conclusions above, we now move on to more complex issues of vision and freedom.
The Imperfect and the Epistemological
The Episteme defines reality as imperfect in order to justify the exertion of control over it.
The Epistemological and the Seer
The Episteme exerts control over the artist (the functional seer) in order to enforce the Epistemological definition of reality as imperfect, rather than dimensional.
The Epistemological and Dimensional Realism
The Episteme attacks or rejects dimensional realism in order to maintain control over the collective, to preserve the domination of the collective by the Epistemological.
The Epistemological and Content
The Episteme controls the interpretation of what is seen by managing content.
Content in art is dimensional representation (reality).
Narrative is waveform representation (dramatic rise and fall). Narrative is a form of illustration. It is the result of sampling movement (4 Dimension) in time space. Waveform movement is a specific form of movement. Waveform improves sustainability across time space (distance).
Epistemological narrative reinforces the Episteme’s claims to power. Usually, this means that the narrative supports the perception that the environment is imperfect.
The Episteme claims that imperfection can be managed.
Epistemological narrative encourages productivity.
Epistemological productivity is the maximization of unsustainable action to the benefit of the controller. Productivity of this kind results from a narrative that is an illusory representation of 4D realism, minus waste.
Epistemological content is coded and exclusive.
The Epistemological and Power
The Episteme desires power over the environment and the collective in order to derive and consolidate individual benefits from the environment and the collective.
The Epistemological and Waste
The Epistemological is inherently 3 Dimensional. When the 3 Dimensional action is not directed by 4 Dimensional realism, the action 3D action will not be sustainable.
Unsustainable action is inherently wasteful.
The Episteme sees accurately (E1).
The Episteme evaluates or interprets accurately (E2).
The Episteme desires what he sees for himself, and uses the mind to control what he sees and desires.
An Epistemological Poem
from seeing accurately, including: the survival value of things in reality, understanding survival value relationships between and among things, inventing mechanisms that produce survival value from things.
How?
1. The Episteme monopolizes vision by controlling seeing primarily from the environment (reality) and, secondarily from the productivity of the collective in relation to the environment.
Seeing and Mediation
The first mediation is the artist’s hand. The eye and hand are both directly connected to the mind of a healthy person. The senses of the person connect him to his environment (reality). In art, the first interpretation is enacted by the hand of the artist.
Another artist job is choosing a good thing to look at, something worthy of sharing (value and meaning).
Distinguishing between seeing and interpreting is important for the collective. Art is a middle step between seeing and interpreting.
A person who believes that a magical force guides his vision is called a visionary, especially if others become convinced that the visionary’s belief is well founded.
In the case of the visionary, it is as if the world assembles itself to make sure that the visionary sees the truth. It is not hard to illustrate the statement that a thin line separates the visionary from the madman. Both combine seeing and interpreting into one dimension of experience.
On the Senses and Regeneration
The conceptual is a secondary matter. Broadly, conceiving is not limited to a sensory reception of an exterior thing. Conceiving entails one’s creating something, related to one’s experience of another thing. The conceptual is generative. It would be optimistic to claim that perceiving is regenerative, but a person who has been deprived of one of his senses might argue differently.
To distinguish as Peter Drucker does, between the perceptual and conceptual as a cultural description for a nation or race of people is ridiculous. All humans with senses perceive. All humans with senses and operational minds conceive. Perception and conception are fundamental to human survival.
In its most basic equation, the process goes like this: A man and woman see each other. They like what they see, get together and make a baby. The human race is regenerated.
On Ecology and Art
The interpretation of the seen thing belongs to separate orders. Drucker’s essay purports to reduce art to an explicatory role in his social ecology. This is one reason his analysis fails. Art refuses such calumny. Perhaps that is too strong a word. Ostensibly, “A View of Japan through Japanese Art” was written to celebrate the exhibit in question.
Drucker deduces Japan’s social ecology from the art in the collection. He claimed to have been more interested in people than numbers. Peter Drucker apparently did not realize that ecology, ownership and art have nothing whatever to do with each other.
Art and society do have something to do with each other, however. What is defined as art is a function of social monopoly, historically. At least, this was true until free speech was conceived.
Peter describes Japan as a “country of rigid rules and of individual subordination to a collective will.” In The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, in the chapter entitled “Censorship Versus Freedom of Expression in the Arts,” (Tun-jen Chiang and Richard S. Posner, page 317) we learn this:
The Tokugawa shogunate, which came to power in 1603, enacted strict censorship laws and exercised considerable control over the production of both woodblock prints and printed books. In Japan during this period the government’s emphasis on education led to a dramatic rise in literacy, but woodblock prints remained a powerful instrument of mass communication that was believed to require rigid state control.
The Neo-Confucian ideology of the shogunate insisted upon a plain, strictly moral lifestyle. Though individual members of the ruling warrior class failed to satisfy these lofty aspirations, it was the self-indulgent consumption of the merchant class, whose economic power was steadily growing, that was seen as a threat to the established order. Tokugawa regulation of woodblock prints kept a watchful eye for political subversion and also censured sexual impropriety and excessive luxury.
What ought to be clear to any student of history is that censorship does not end with the censor’s time in power. The longevity of censorship is remarkable. That Peter Drucker’s first important literary works were censored by the Nazis was for him a source of pride. This is undoubtedly true, in part, because Drucker survived the Nazis, and his ideas subsequently flourished. Peter and his ideology were embraced by the world’s powerful Democracies, and given asylum in the free speech arenas that likewise survived European Fascism, and the Emperor of Japan’s global ambitions.
On Luck, Fortune, Chance and Sentience
In the sentient world, luck, fortune and chance are moot. Sentience is the medium of choice. Color is the expression of choice. When a sentient painter chooses a color, he is demonstrating the nature of choice. Harmonious color is an expression of a phase of sentience. Ugly color is another. Color in commercial design is a function of management.
Jackson Pollack made paintings representing a universe of choices. After he made those paintings, Americans became the best in the world at making millions of colors from which artists (and everyone else) could choose. Jackson made enhanced the sentient world.
Taking the money one owns to the casino and wagering it on chance is the opposite of making a drip painting in New York in the late 40s of the 20th Century.
A Note (of potential interest to historical re-designers)
Interpretation of perception and representation of it are critical and creative responses to the seen thing. In a social setting, obscenity is a function of the command and control structure of the societal monopoly.
Why were the Nazis and the Tokugawa shogunate compelled to stifle specific representations, identifying them as offensive? Both political bodies were dynamic products of their respective societies. Both managed to rule the preponderant majority of their subjects and produce significant cultural legacies.
The Tokugawa dominated Japan for 250 years, until the arrival of colonial European powers. The profile of modern Japan does not exist without the Edo period. Japan’s actions as a warring nation in the 20th Century were predicated by the Tokugawa shogunate. As for the Nazis, although their reign was relatively brief, their impact on the world has been pervasive and profound.
Interestingly, to admire the Nazis sense of style and social achievements is considered obscene. To admire the Tokugawa shogunate, their elaborate fashions and armature, architecture and crafts, their “polarities,” as Drucker characterizes them, is fodder for a polite catalog essay.
An objective viewer might have difficulty discerning the substantive differences between the cultures of Nazi Germany and Edo Japan, the monumental and severe, but heroic, architectures, the preponderantly black and stylish uniforms, the flair for organizationally inspirational graphics, and so on. An objective observer might also ascertain a polar disparity between modern German and Japanese cultures: the Germans have to a great degree disappeared the evidence of their Nazi past; in Japan, the Japanese embrace their Edo past. Drucker’s position spanning both histories chooses to focus aesthetically on an interpretation and representation of the Japanese, with selective fondness. A dimensional comparison of the two cultures would have been nice.
“Yes” is the cause of sarcasm, employed while a sentient speaker is waiting for enough time to pass to change “no” to “yes.” Sometimes sarcasm is wrong, usually when the speaker is smaller than the horizon.
On Sentience and Soul
They are not the same thing. Sentience doesn’t need to be saved. Likewise, the sentient world does not need to be saved. This is only difficult for an Episteme to comprehend.
On Drucker, Prediction, the Dimensional, Reality and Productivity Studies
Peter Drucker is famous for his advances in business management. He coined “social ecology” to describe his medium, and described himself as a conservative, Christian anarchist. Drucker attributed his much-celebrated ability to predict economic trends in terms of vision.
“I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”
The object of sight in Drucker’s cryptic one-liner, one must assume is Reality. The philosophical arguments, such as Descartes’, that thinking is the only true measure of self realization, abrogating the senses as a measure of the real or not real, must be set aside. Drucker is describing a complex form of Epistemological analysis, not the action of peering out a window in his Claremont home.
Sentient vision does not require a window, or a house, owned by the viewer. It only requires a position.
Reality is dimensional.
The dimensional in economics of the early 20th Century focused on manufacturing productivity (Taylor, 1911). In the late 20th Century, the dimensional in economics focused on the Internet. Now, the dimensional in economics focuses on management of organizational behavior. Meanwhile, presently, the sentient world is blurring past into the future. McLuhan was more right than Drucker, but that had nothing to do with electronics.
Artwork to soothe the outraged citizenry
In his essay on Japanese art and Japan, Peter Drucker emphasizes the tensions in that society between the individual and the collective. Seeing is a function of the individual. Managing the responses to reality, perceived by the individual through his senses, is a function of the collective. The social monopoly exerts its power to direct and shape collective perceptions.
Perspective is a function of three dimensions, at least. A three-dimensional object yields a different experience, a different view, depending on where one stands in relation to it. A sculptor uses this knowledge to his advantage. So does an architect, but an architect is not a sculptor. Maya Lin is not a dimensional artist, no matter what the ruling monopoly might assert on her behalf, no matter what she might think about it, no matter that she received an art show at the Corcoran, one of America’s premier galleries.
The artworks she has commissioned to be fabricated do function as art to a degree. They may be enjoyable and tasteful, even conceptually compelling. Her famous Vietnam memorial is a good example. It is a well-designed and conceived list. Maya Lin’s admirers argue that the tears shed by veterans and families at the Wall, as it is called, prove the artistic merit of the work. This is untrue. The grief demonstrated by the people who have made pilgrimage to Washington to mourn their soldier dead has nothing to do with Maya Lin’s design.
Still, people like them for the sentience they do not yet manifest, but which they infer in their lack. It is a blunt tip.
I do not mean to suggest the absence of value in the monument or the experience of those whom it touches. I do not mean to denigrate Maya Lin’s personal prowess or achievements. I do mean to restrict art in terms of free speech.
No doubt this example is as complex a problem as can be offered. It explicitly involves many of the elements associated with free speech and art: text; societal expectations; precedents; racism; militarism; public space; traditional versus new aesthetics; and so on. Many initially vehemently opposed its installation in the nation’s capitol.
The solution is easy to see when the problem is correctly identified. This is a truth that Drucker appreciated, especially when the problem was posed in a closed system. Solutions in closed systems are real only in math, however. Solutions in real closed systems are a function of ownership, of enslavement and not art.
Anything too big to fail is Epistemology. Epistemological art is a zombie, by a zombie-maker, for a zombie-viewer. When a sentient encounters such art, he will use it as an opportunity to play “correct” or “incorrect,” pass it by, or do the sentient what-is-to-do. If it’s time for a sentient to cry at the wall, he will.
Pain is a fact of normal human life. Easy is not. A soft thing with nerve senses that identify pain, surrounded by hard and sharp objects, etc., will come to experience pain, most likely. A sentient person will learn to move with care, a game that is fun.
Question: What if you and your playmates get so good at dodging hard and sharp stuff, when you’re walking, that, in order to make the game more fun, you start throwing hard and sharp things at one another? What if pain makes you forget it was a game to begin with? What if you are children, and your mother is not close by to remind you that you are playing a game with friends?
What if you are a robot and it doesn’t hurt? (What a dumb idea!)
When I was a child, I threw rocks and hit other kids. Sometimes they hit me with rocks. Sometimes my mother stopped our play. Sometimes she wasn’t there. Once, a bunch of us kids had a rock-throwing war in parallel trenches cut for plumbing in what would be the front yard of a home. I remember seeing that brick arcing through the air. I don’t why I didn’t manage to get out of the way. It hit me in the head. I bled profusely. The other kids checked it out and told me the game was over for me that day, that I should go home. I didn’t cry the whole time they inspected the injury, very seriously. Not one of them was over the age of twelve. I think I may have been a little bit in shock. I was shaking and hyperventilating a bit. On the subject of bawling, though, I didn’t even cry as I woozily walked the two or three miles home, wiping the blood on my shirtsleeve until the sleeve was soaked through, a pretty red. When I finally stumbled up the driveway, my mom opened the door, and I burst into tears. At the time, somewhere in the back of my head I wondered why I couldn’t stop crying. I’d walked all that way without crying. Why should I start now and not be able to stop, as my mom held me. I didn’t wonder about qualia. I didn’t wonder why the knock on my head didn’t make green blood pour forth from the wound. I didn’t know why that color, which changes as it dries, is called “red,” or how I was able to “get” that.
The blood on my sleeve was a “brick red.”
Peter Drucker admires Japan’s social balance between the individual’s capacity for “pure enjoyment,” and the “fierce ruthlessness” with which Japan’s corporations battle for supremacy. One wonders what Drucker would have written on the subject, if he had been composing the essay in the 1990’s, while Japan wallowed in economic stagnation, or this year, as the nation struggles to survive the global financial crisis. I recently watched a CNN human-interest piece on a former art dealer, now janitor, who is struggling to rebuild his life, after losing everything to the market’s downturn. The fierce ruthlessness of the corporations robbed him of his pure enjoyments – at least this was the gist of the piece.
The incredible selectivity of Peter, to assert that diversity was a feature of the Edo era, in conjunction with individualism, defies all estimates of freedom. Only one who believes that freedom is a function of organization could so interpret the reality of individual life under the shogunate’s rule. A “flamboyant diversity,” he calls it. “There is nothing comparable in other cultures,” he claims. There is more diversity in a second-rate American collegiate art program than existed at any point in the reign of the Tokugawa. The difference is free speech.
As for sentience, that may be a different story. It could be argued correctly that a Japanese swordmaker is more sentient in his practice of crafting swords than American art students are at making commercially viable art.
Maya Lin is the cute and cuddly face of today’s Organization Man. She is the epitome of Drucker’s Knowledge Worker. She is a product of the same school that produced George W. Bush, an admirer of Drucker. She is not an artist. Her artwork is derivative in every respect. It mimics the innovations of others, and is innovative only in its obfuscation of correlation to those artworks that have evidenced perception of the highest quality. Its precision is a function of the mechanical, not the humane. The conceptual framework Lin sets forth to defend her output’s artistic integrity and purport her own perceptual strengths, as they are invested in her products, are the stuff of political correctness and the spiritual realm’s lowest common denominators.
It is doubtful, however, that Peter Drucker would have found much in Maya Lin’s work to admire, based on his essay. He preferred to interpret a tradition about which those in his immediate community would know little, and therefore could not dispute Drucker’s interpretations readily. What a man loves is what he loves or hates, not the collective. In a sentient world, the individual and collective both love the same thing: sentience.
Sentience has no parts. It has no more or less.
How an Artist Learned (with Epistemological Certainty) that He Was an Artist in the “Ownership Society”
One night, when I was a student at Notre Dame, my friend Pat and I decided to walk from my apartment a block to the bars for $.25 shots. We drank about $20 worth over the next several hours. The bar managers decided it was time for us to go home.
We walked away from the bar and down the wrong street, if our objective was to reach my apartment. In our drunken state, apparently, we crashed through hedges, etc., until coming to rest in someone’s front yard. I don’t really recall what we talked about, loudly. I do vaguely remember informing Pat that I needed to rest a little.
The next thing I remember, my eyes glimpsing a gorgeous splash of crimson on a fantastic speckled silver background under artificial illumination. I recall vividly thinking, “That is beautiful!” Those weren’t the exact thought-words, but that’s the gist.
So as not to get too poetic about the scene, I’ll disclose to the reader the reality of the circumstances, leaving out some secondary narrative details. The South Bend police had opened my head with a flashlight, my hands were shackled behind my back, and they were smashing my face into the hood of their patrol car. One or both of them was/were shouting at me (obscenities, orders). It was all a-blur.
I know this sounds weird to the non-artist, but all I was interested in that moment was getting another view of that crimson swoosh on silver. I’m not sure when or if I associated that red with my blood, or that silver with the cops’ car.
I just knew that only an artist could respond to a visual stimulus with such myopia. I couldn’t wait to get back to the studio to paint.
Those two city patrolmen were good art teachers that night. Maybe, they were the best I’ve ever had. I guess it depends on your criteria. Intent, too: I don’t imagine they gave a rat’s ass about my evolution as a dimensional artist, that night. I don’t guess their methods would fall into the art teacher best practices category. I suppose it all boils down to being in the right place at the right time to get a good lesson. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” as they say.
On Movements and Deserving
“Abuse” is how Peter Drucker characterizes a comparison on merits of Japanese painting with Western modern art. From Drucker’s perspective, Japanese art outperforms the contemporary Western mode at every turn. The comparison in Drucker’s essay is problematic for many reasons.
First among them is the fact that the term “modern” is not correct. Neither is the term “contemporary.” All art at its conception is contemporary. Because modern and contemporary are essentially interchangeable terms, the structure of Drucker’s advocacy is nearly meaningless. What Peter’s argument reveals is not is an aesthetic evaluation of his subject, a viable comparison. Drucker’s subject is his own Epistemology.
The analog in movies is John Wayne’s acting method. The analog for television is reality TV.
As for Japanese art’s relative advancement, compared to Western art, Peter Drucker elects to omit one of the most glaring failures of the former. Namely, until the second half of the 20th Century, Japanese artists for the most part did not have the representational tools to convey motion with any plastic accuracy. The stylistic medium was almost entirely two-dimensional.
Only after exposure to modern visual art and cinema did the Japanese artist embrace the potential inherent in the Western form to convey that fundamental facet of human experience. Motion, and its representational partnership with time, was in great measure outside the skillset of the Japanese artist (although certainly not beyond his imagination or outside his experience).
Once he was afforded the freedom to explore the paint medium with time and motion as viable, if not essential, characteristics of representation, as a result of cultural exchange with the modern West, the Japanese artist progressed with astounding speed and facility.
Explosive artistic output is likely whenever a society denies perception articulation through cultural media over a period of time, and then for whatever reason, the suppressive force loses its power to contain expression. Enabling sentience yields bountiful productivity, every time.
The Japanese artist had been forced to work within extreme stylistic constraints by a cultural monopoly. One of those restraints reduced movement to a mechanism of the imagination. For the Japanese the representation of movement entailed a secondary experience, presumably an interactive game of viewer participation. The faculties of memory and imagination were employed to animate the artist’s intent and the painting’s narrative.
(Fortunately, given the layered and faceted narrative, sentience was alive and well and living in Japan throughout the era in question. In fact, sentience was alive and well and living in Japan throughout all the eras, and it always will be, even if the word “Japan” becomes extinct. Who’s to say whether what used to be Japan - as the oceans rise up to consume the island, as the polar ice melts to reveal a great burgeoning continent, as the Samurai swords disappear into the floor of the sea - that the sentience invested into those lovely and deadly blades, commingling with the sentience extant in the raw metals and the wood of the blazes that transformed them into agents of graceful violence, won’t still be extant under the rolling waves?)
So, is the stylized frog that Drucker praises a function of repetition, the representation of the frog in the painter’s mind, or do frogs really look like that in Japan? The sentient critic wonders all these things simultaneously.
One genre not mentioned, which I find particularly demonstrative of the argument, is the procession scroll painting. A witness to a Royal or ceremonial Japanese procession would find that a scroll painting memorializing that occurrence would activate his memory of it. Or, if the viewer had been absent for the specific procession represented, he would be able to imagine more or less the substance of it from the pictorial clues provided by the artwork. He might recognize this or that notable person, one supposes in much the same way one assembles a mind movie from a good newspaper story chronicling any social ritual involving celebrities.
The medium of Japanese representation, over centuries, as in any repressed form, eventually evolved into a highly coded system of visual and interpretational constructs for conveying subtle description. Of course, the more familiar the viewer with these codes, the more meaning the artwork conveys. The medium depicts the opacity of the brutally ordered society, as much as it functions artistically. Visual literacy with respect to stimulative codes is essential for proper viewing of Japanese art.
An analog would be Pong.
Drucker’s assertions about artist individuality expressed in Japanese art therefore are superficial. To focus on the relative freedoms afforded children in Japanese society, prior to their inculcation into the historic structural repressions of Japanese adult life, is a romantic trope.
For Drucker to pretend to interpret the feelings of a Japanese artist during the rendering of a highly coded and stylized drawing session that occurred in the distant past is akin to George W. Bush looking deeply into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and suggesting the former could trust the latter, because Bush could magically see into the soul of Putin and discern his trustworthiness in matters of state. To connect the imagined feelings of a Japanese painter to an individual articulation of Beauty is equally problematic.
The codes for Beauty in Japanese art are as rigid and repressive as the codes of dress and behavior for Japanese Geisha and court women. It is therefore especially interesting to read Drucker’s commentary on the various roles women play in modern Japanese society.
Certainly, the cultural mashup (to use the dimensional term) that has caused significant upheaval in Japan’s domestic stability, since the nation’s exposure to Western ways, is nowhere more complex and difficult as it is in the definition of gender. It cannot be argued that contemporary Japanese art, such as it is, does not reflect this social upheaval.
Likewise, codes for beauty, whether natural or feminine, in terms of landscape or societal order, are in a state of radical displacement and reformation. No conclusion can yet be drawn about the future of the society in these areas, other than to say by accepting the chaos of gender identity into the turgid warrior codes of Japanese self-regulation the Japanese have invited a tremendously destabilizing element into their societal form.
Artistic representation of Japanese women, as emblematic of a shared notion of Beauty in the democratic idiom is obviously not similar to the same subject drawn through the lens of the coded forms of the shogunate. Murakami, as the nation’s prime mover in the art world, depicts women as hyper-sexualized adolescent super heroes. It is worth recalling that despite the censorship prevalent during the Tokugawa reign, a vibrant and diverse economy in erotic art existed in Japan. Drucker nowhere acknowledges this.
In short, to suggest that the requirements placed on art in Japanese society are reducible to polarities, tensions or any other dualistic diagnostic is absurd. Perhaps at the height of shogunate power a point existed when an artist would be choosing life or death when he chose a subject or misapplied a coded suggestion. Today, however, Japanese social topology is not only perceptual and conceptual, it is dimensional.
As Drucker wrote, “Society and community must be multi-dimensional; they are environments.” Art today is likewise multi-dimensional, especially in a democratic society. Japanese art is not exceptional in this respect. How the art form arrived at this juncture is very much worthy of consideration, and the art of Japan’s past is certainly worth preserving, as a practical matter. It provides the best content for the art of today.
At seventeen I assembled my first dimensional collective project. “The Pot Luck Players” was theater- and music-centric, or in the current vernacular, performative. We sang songs, scripted short plays and interspersed the lot with comedic interludes and caricatures. The hometown crowds loved it. Our first show was in a Catholic Church basement, for a raucous packed house. What a blast! Our second was in the Women’s Club, across from the building where I was born (once a hospital, now a bank, on the perimeter of what was then Van Meter stadium, where I played football in junior high (at Park Junior High), diagonally adjacent to “the dust bowl,” the glass laden sandlot softball “field” where we practiced or gridiron prowess, at the end of the street of the second part of my childhood. My dad took lots of pictures.
Preservation is a key to sustainability. Unlike Europe’s inclinations to destroy its past every time it reinvents its future, Japan’s relations with its past are relatively healthy, if selective. For instance, Japan insists that the United States apologize for the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but finds it tremendously difficult to acknowledge the horrors Japan inflicted during its occupation of China.
A proper dimensional inquiry would explore how this social imaging issue is echoed in the society’s art. Drucker suggests that an organizational role is one-dimensional, and that the organization is a tool for the multi-dimensional society. Sentient art is not organizational. Any society that forces art and artists to be tools of the society is a brutal, repressive society, and it gets the artists it deserves.
My first solo art endeavor was “Funkshunart.” My friend Anna Nekoranec turned me on to Vogart fabric pens, and I used them to make images on tee shirts (which she showed me how to do). Anna is now a successful venture capitalist and author. Beckley, West Virginia never ceases to amaze me. I owe so much to the people I grew up with!
Long story short (leaving out all the central details of the Funkshunart narrative for another time and text), the biggest collector of Funkshunart gear and whatnot is my college pal Jim Keyes. The Keyes family holds the largest collection of my early work. I gave them many works – in the dozens or hundreds – for safekeeping, in the eventuality of my, what seemed at the time to be, almost certain early demise. Three of the six Keyes boys and Scott O’Grady of Cohasset comprised the band Par 3, and they were my crew. I was the artist contingent. The boys provided me my first major commission, a 24’ x 8’ drop cloth of a canvas, which I painted for their use as a stage backdrop. We did some epic productions, which included Funkshunart clothes, lighting, stage paintings, a guitar, and so on, for Khyber Pass and other NYC and Philly venues.
Anyway, I was catching up with JP the night before last, and he told me a story about Paul, his dad. Mister Keyes was transporting an oilrig across African terrain with the aid of local nomadic people. A blind elephant wandered into the worker’s village. According to Jim, the Africans beat it to death with rocks and sticks, then spent the next three days consuming the elephant in its entirety. Paul’s rig I guess just sat there, until the pachyderm was history.
It turns out that Anna and JP’s parents live in the same little town. Small world!
More about Murakami and the Vagaries of Contemporary Art + Artists (Some comparative thoughts, or a fishing expedition); Weirdness in the Marketplace; Trying on Dung
One wonders what Drucker would have thought of Murakami’s exhibit at MoCA entitled, “©.” A long quote from a New York Times portrait of Takashi Murakami touches on many of the issues described above and below, with respect to Drucker and his misreading of Japanese art:
Anime and manga are inexact copies of Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and other American cartoon characters, modified for Japanese taste and (at the time they were developed) for the limitations of Japanese technology. The Japanese have always had a genius for these adaptations. Murakami is a great admirer of the Kano School, a dynasty of painters who catered to the shoguns for almost four centuries by taking the principles of Chinese art (like prominent brushstrokes and ink monochrome) and Japanizing them. The Kano School centered on the successive generations of the Kano family, supplemented by talented students who were adopted and then allowed to take the Kano name. It is another model for Kaikai Kiki. (Indeed, the phrase kaikai kiki, which means brave, strong and sensitive, was borrowed from a critic in the late 17th century who used it to describe the paintings of Eitoku Kano.) One of Murakami's favorite artworks is a screen depicting an old plum tree that was painted for a temple in Kyoto by Sansetsu Kano in the 17th century and is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In his Superflat essay, Murakami pointed to similarities between the spiky lines in Sansetsu's eccentric masterpiece and the designs of the leading anime artist Yoshinori Kanada. At about the same time, he produced a few paintings of his own in this style. Aside from his appreciation of the work, Murakami admires the way the Kano School perpetuated itself. He would like to start a line of comparable longevity. How did the Kano School survive 300 years or more? he once said to me. Japanese culture doesn't need to create an original something. A school is O.K. A little difference is great. Kakai Kiki School is O.K. -- Mr. and Chiho and Chinatsu.
(from TOKYO SPRING!; The Murakami Method, by Arthur Lubow, Published April 3, 2005)
And now the preceding paragraph:
I could see why Murakami loves Kunikata's art. It reveals the fear and anger that lie just beneath the surface of the kawaii culture -- or, to adopt the metaphor of superflat, the feelings that are embedded right on the surface, for those who look closely and knowledgeably. The manner in which Kunikata's eating obsession seeps into every aspect of her art also reminded me of how, in Murakami's view, the atom-bomb trauma permeates his country's culture. The pictures of Japan's past destruction are transposed into a catastrophic science-fiction future, and the country's childlike relationship to the United States is embraced in a celebration of the kawaii (a word derived from kawaiiso, meaning pitiful or pathetic). A similar thing occurs in another fraught area: sexual relations between young men and women. The otaku portrayals of sexuality -- fixated on compliant, air-brushed schoolgirls -- are divorced from emotional reality, even from physical reality. This neutering of real life was epitomized by the enthusiastic reaction of Japanese children of Murakami's generation to the animated versions of atomic explosions and fire-bombings they watched on TV. One reason these kids cheered the demolition of Tokyo is that it was accomplished by a wizard: the most influential special-effects designer of the day, Eiji Tsuburaya, who learned his craft as a propagandist during World War II, preparing a rousing and convincing recreation of the (unfilmed) Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, Tsuburaya redirected his talents -- and his agents of destruction -- into Godzilla, Ultraman, Rodan and Mothra. The imagery retained its stirring power. The context was secondary.
Obviously, to reduce the faceted realities of Japanese creative production and evolution over the centuries into the present to dualisms, as Peter Drucker attempts to do in “Japan Through the Lens of Japanese Art,” is critically inadequate. The above passages prove that conclusively.
That said, a lot has changed, since 1979. In fact nothing is exactly the same as it was, except maybe sentience, Zero, and cetera. Days are probably like snowflakes, and years even moreso. I suppose not much has changed in that respect, since 35,000 BC, when the prime sentient artists of Chauvet were painting excellent representations of Mastodon hunts. Nor from World War 2, pre-Hiroshima (except everything).
From Rising ’44 (Davies, pg. 198), the story of the Polish resistance:
In the eyes of the Nazi hierarchy, the Underground fighters were mere ‘terrorists’. But as Kutschera had himself remarked: ‘There is no certain defence against people who are eager to sacrifice their own lives.’
A cryptic reduction of the perceptual apparatus in play to polarities, to tensions between points, provides the critic an artificially elevated discursive authority, but does nothing to reveal the truth. To posit truth in art criticism has for a hundred years been undermined by an array of agents, who use culture studies, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, gender issues, politics and other interpretive narrative to deflate a hierarchical structure for the positioning of art in social exchange. I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere (see Appendices).
Seeing art is now subject to new monopolies. Truth is identical to universal reality, although academic truth is another thing altogether. Perceived reality, which is thanks to new media social as well as individual, is now understood to be multi-dimensional. As soon as one realizes that contemporary art exhibits the capacity to represent multi-dimensional perceptual realities, one must realize that command and control monopolies cannot withstand the threats posed by the new social vision. Art is only representative of this development. The evidence is all around us.
Take economics, and management - Drucker’s specialty - as examples. Trends in the continuum of take shape as hybrid disciplines. In organizational behavior, this realization has generated new non-equilibrium forms. Shared Leadership is one such form of dissipative structure. Management’s adaptation to a more diverse, globally networked workspace and marketplace demands business be ever more creative in managerial responses, and faster. Evaluation is key. Organizations can be analyzed by “peering” at them through strategic lenses, cultural lenses, and political lenses to paint a picture of the corporate culture, a necessity in a competitive environment hinging on identity maximization.
The new descriptive language is generated (flat or horizontal, diverse, fast) and is dimensional. It’s all dimensional, man.
No longer does any organization operate independent of other organizations, according to this narrative. And this narrative is expanded to describe the relations of nations in a worldwide context. Talk of global currency resurfaces. Protectionism is the enemy. Getting past no is the goal, in a mission-wellness, newly green, fresh, and creative class world of high-performing Knowledge Workers. Transparency is essential in a twittering world with a non-stop news cycle. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 35,000 times.
From Community Informatics, Shaping Computer-Mediated Social Relations (Keeble and Loader, pg. 290), “Cultivating society’s civic intelligence” (Schuler):
Who – or what – will govern?
If the dire scenarios that Bill Joy describes (or even the less dramatic but no less worrisome environmental catastrophes that atmospheric and other scientists warn us about) have even a minuscule chance of occurring, an urgent need to consider ways to avert them arises. Since ‘solutions’ to these problems are likely to be protracted and multi-pronged, and involve large segments of the citizenry, a correspondingly urgent need to analyse the preconditions underlying the development and successful implementation of these ‘solutions’ also arises. What ‘environments’ – social and technological – would be hospitable to the satisfactory resolving of these problems? If we could imagine humankind finding better responses to our myriad problems old and new, what circumstances and resources need to be in place and what steps could be taken that would support these new responses? These preconditions and steps we can call ‘civic intelligence’ or perhaps a ‘world brain’.
In art, the dissolution of analysis based on top-down or vertical power distribution is essential to the deregulation and decentralization of the field, at any point in history. This is true of Drucker’s Japan, although his Epistemological analysis of Japanese art and society avoids this axiom, which is peculiar given Drucker is as responsible for mainstreaming the neo-vertical polarity as anyone, even as the horizontal domain stretches across the spectrum of society’s lenses and sectors, focus groups and think tanks, video and phone conferences, email blasts, viral, social and instant messaging networks, around the globe. As Drucker related in “Know Your Time”:
Years ago when I first started out as a consultant, I had to learn how to tell a well-managed industrial plant from a poorly-managed one – without any pretense to production knowledge. A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.
Similarly, a well-managed organization is a “dull” organization. The “dramatic” things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday’s mistakes.
What drives Peter Drucker to avoid acknowledging Japan’s oppressive verticality in his essay? One answer might be that the Japanese art Drucker loves belongs to a Japan that is ordered by power. It is a Japan similar in structural analysis to pre-democratic, pre-representational Europe. It is a Japan that can only be romanticized by the instruments of such power, or the beneficiaries.
An analog is the current “Let’s move on” argument against prosecuting Bush administrators who established a policy of torture. Why go through the heroics of “mopping up yesterday’s mistakes”? I suppose this might be viable, if life were a linear function, instead of circular function. I guess it would be the responsible thing to do on the Planet Line, wherever that might be. In this universe, on this planet, which rotates, and is a big, blue ball, that cow won’t fly.
Which doesn’t mean that cattle don’t fly. They fly on airplanes. They fly in The Wizard of Oz, during the tornado sequence. Sure you can build a machine to help a cow fly. All sorts of strange things happen during an upheaval, a cataclysm. Oh, yeah: and cattle fly in the imagination. When they fly in someone’s mind’s eye, that doesn’t make them fly out here. Epistemologists don’t get that. They become movie directors.
In dimensional painting there are are no mistakes, only layers. You keep adding layers until the painting’s done. You gather a better proportion of production knowledge in the process. Do no harm. Ahimsa.
It is no longer politically correct to celebrate European royal dynastic order. God save the King is a distinctly difficult bit of lingo, in the critical discourse arena. So the divine dynasty post-Revolutionary market share is not good right now. Nazism in particular, but also Fascism and Marxism as ancillaries quashed the benevolent dictator idea. Mussolini in particular got a lot of good press just prior to joining the first and to date most effective Axis of Evil. I realize that as the charismatic hero in charge of the nation dream rotates on its axis like an early animation device (or a new one, like Arthur Ganson’s “Machine with Artichoke Petal #1), such as the choreutoscope, the flattened historical image of him does not seem real. That doesn’t mean to say the flattened image won’t pack a wallop. Kara Walker gets a lot of mileage out of caricature cutouts in positive and negative dualistic space. If you boil almost any position down to an either-or proposition, the proposition will be fundamentally flawed. Don’t tell Sean Hannity that. It’s a conservative trope. Aside from the reasons one might enforce a mind-diorama like that on a decision-making process, in a spherical world, that cow won’t fly. Even if you repeat the argument 35,000 times, that cow won’t. The same cannot be said for exotic, non-European dynasties, or their cultural expressions, such as the Tokugawa, or the Kano school, which might just be a marketing issue. One has to create a consumer again for that cow.
If the divine hero-king is to recur, and it likely will give the waveform, he might manifest on a different human stage. Right now he lives primarily in the hearts of young mean. Most grown-ups don’t realize how much is happening on those dadburned computers and game consoles to keep alive the dream of the divine warrior-king. Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, recently passed away and was lovingly mourned by tens of millions, in silent homage mostly. Those funny dice and the expansion of odds and characteristics are working in the favor of the King, and against the Drucker vision of a boring world.
The tension, as everyone has now noticed, is building. Guns are being bought, supplies are being gathered, tribes are being assembled and so on. Lots of conservative Christians have been praying for the Apocalypse every day, every time they think of it. That age-old concern of civilizations is getting widespread support from new news media. The tsunami that swamped Indonesia, killing hundreds of thousands, is still happening on YouTube. I can relive the moment any time I want. If I want to generate some low-guage anxiety and adrenaline activity, I can dial up natural disaster footage and watch it over and over, like a Choreutoscope, as the world spins around. That is, by the way, an example of animated dimensional realism.
Sentient life is never bored.
Drucker’s selective vision in his essay and analysis may not be a measure of perceptual realization. Instead it may be a function of regret, for by all accounts Peter Drucker was a conscientious person. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes:
The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination…when possible futres are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we co no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known.
Decentralization and deregulation, as advocated by Drucker do not serve Democracy, nor do they serve art. Just because these practices of de-defining, decentralizing and deregulating art and society have been embraced by the new global ruling monopolies, does not mean that they are benevolent. Nor does it mean that they serve art or freedom or truth. On the contrary, the fact that these practices have been embraced by the prevailing monopolies should indicate that they have malevolent consequences. Again, the evidence is all around us to see, if we look out the window. More importantly, we can see them if we close our eyes and consider the heart.
On Heart as a Metaphor for Drucker’s Mirror Test
The sentient man doesn’t need a mirror. The manager does. Managing appearance is not sentience. Self-reflection is never as competent as sentient projection.
It is always unfair, in a sense, to presume what was in a person’s heart. Science suggests the heart is an organ to pump blood. In 2009, we have enough evidence to know this to be true, thanks to plentiful advances in medical science. We will posit, for the purposes of poetic clarification, that “considering the heart” is a vernacular term meaning internal review.
Drucker said, “Ethics requires that you ask yourself, what kind of person do I want to see in the morning?” This is the Drucker “Mirror Test.” Art has long attempted to answer that question one painting at a time. The portrait is one answer. The autoportrait is the artist’s answer. The figurative painting is another. The reflective data is dimensional. The figurative painting is one of the most advanced tools ever produced by man for this purpose, which has broad spiritual, metaphysical and ethical implications.
The form is much debased. As a sentience enhancement device, which we can categorize as a form of serious play, dimensional figurative art has been attacked savagely, rigged and misused. This has done nothing ultimately to diminish its inherent value or truthfulness. Sentience will always sustain.
Over the past hundred and twenty years in the West, ironic people have undermined this game, and technologies (like TV) have re-invented or animated it, and clever ad men have found the profit in it. What was lost in the mutation was the spiritual aspect of reflection.
Before the prevalence of photography, available locally through a studio, the painter served as his local mirror tester. Great painters of the human form were considered possessed of a gift that served all men, not just the immediate social topology.
Another mirror test in the arts was sited in the ballet studio. To witness the dancer’s relationship with the mirror-as-teacher is to recognize both the beauty and danger attendant to craft and practice in the continual presence of the objective critique.
How things have changed, since Degas and Goya’s times. The mirror now is the enemy of young girls’ psychology and the conscience of the manager. It is perhaps time to hold the mirror test up to the mirror test.
To understand the mirror is to understand perspective.
Anselm Kiefer is one of the greatest living perspectival artists. Over decades he has explored the dimensional with incredible results. As a post-Bellum German painter, Kiefer has courageously faced the past social topology of Germany and projected a future for the art, and the country. It is a proud achievement, and one that justifies to a great extent the disgraceful Epistemological excesses of the period. Artists are as a rule very generous in that regard.
A recent retrospective of German art at LACMA, a brilliant exhibit, contained some terrific Kiefers, some similarly significant work by Gerhard Richter (equally accomplished in other dimensional aesthetic applications), and a very fine selection of lesser, but powerful representations of Germany’s social topology. The world required Germany to do the mirror test, in the aftermath of two World Wars, and Germany’s artists responded with great courage and conviction, and in many cases masterful craft and heightened sentience.
Concurrently and into 2010, the LA Opera is mounting Wagner’s Ring, and Achim Freyer’s staging is less successful on transitional grounds. Hitler admired Wagner, one of the world’s first and greatest multimedia, multi-disciplinary practitioners of dimensional production. Freyer permits himself to sublimate the accomplishments of Wagner in the name of artistry, and the presumption is incorrect. Yet, in a hundred years, the Freyer Ring will be more understandable.
That Los Angeles is the host for these events is a function of the successful mutation of Druckerian management ideology into the globalist framework. The crucible effect is in full force, and it is a shame that Peter Drucker missed it. This would have been a big help, presumably, in Drucker’s mirror test.
Time – if you believe it – can be managed. Timing is a function of sentience.
The timing of the German arts invasion of LA couldn’t be worse, given the current economic catastrophe. In this case, the failures of globalism couldn’t be more clear. In fact, a dimensional analysis of the situation is illustrative of the crisis generally confronting American social topology today. A more thorough explanation is not possible here, but a summary is relevant.
First, the Ring is the best content choice imaginable for the drama. The narrative is perfect: Love must be abandoned for an individual to attain power over the world, and any who chooses the route of power over or without Love is cursed.
Second, the manmade financial cataclysm environmentally proves the enduring truth of the drama. Other related aspects, pertaining to globalist ambition at the expense of local infrastructure, such as the viability of translation and interpretation as an enforced measure from the top down (the model), reveal systemic flaws in the contemporary arts relation to the unregulated and excessive globalist economy. The costs to people and in treasure are astounding, for a product of marginal local value. The Ring already has a home in Bayreuth. The future of LA Opera is in disarray. In the management class, no one is to blame. As the apologists are fond of saying, failure is a function of “perfect storm” conditions, unforeseeable and beyond the purview of any individual’s job description to account. The untruth of this ambivalence is perilous.
Third, the fractures in the LA, California and US social topologies, along the lines of class are distinctly on view. The racial divisions, the tensions between haves and have-nots, the mandates of conservativism and liberalism: all are unveiled. Hollywood is not coming to the rescue. The unprosecuted managers of the banks, hedge funds, insurers, accounting firms, the politicians, the developers, the financial class – none are racing in to save the show. Eli Broad, that unbearably wealthy beneficiary of the disgraced AIG, is an exception, and what an exception he is. Under the current regime and its recent predecessors, Broad is an international arts mogul, plying his fortune into the strangled art palaces and positioning himself (and his wife) as the arbiter and manager of culture for millions of people. Free market, indeed.
Fourth, the local citizens are hardly represented, if at all, in any of these components of the topological composition of LAO Ring. In metro LA and its environs, a city serving a massively dispersed population of 14 or more millions of souls, not one of the two recent Ring performances sold out the house of a few thousand seats. Could it be any more obvious why this is so?
Forty-seven miles east on the 10 is Claremont, and Drucker’s window. What would the father of modern management have had to say about this? Would he have preferred a kabuki performance to Freyer’s interpretation of the Ring?
From the perspective of the sentient position, The Ring is a great success. It exposes much incorrectness.
Imagine an LA Opera whose grounds and facilities are held in trust. Imagine an LAO free to all; whose life is divorced from the risk and liabilities of the financial class; an entity entrusted by the people, to the people for the people. Imagine a local government only entrusted with the safety of the people and the proper function of the democracy. Imagine an LAO only concerned with opera for LA. Imagine the content such an opera would produce. Imagine an economic setting for this dimensional scenario, not based on ownership, but on trusteeship, or stewardship in perpetuity. Imagine an LA arts topology not beholden to the Eli Broads, but to all the citizens of LA, and to all sentient beings. Imagine the Ring narrative this would engender. These are the bones of a vision.
Then, understand that this dimensional vision of a sentient society is not only attainable, it is an absolute necessity. The cost of creating it is nothing compared to the cost of not creating it.
In Epistemological drama, we are asked to accept the cinema or theater of personal motivation, an internalized projection, as reality. It is defined as “suspension of disbelief.”
In Sentient art there is no drama, and it is not boring. There is only dimensional realism, which is the serious play for survival.
In the reality of Drucker’s management scheme, failure is not an option. It is an inevitability. Management only exists in the company of failure.
Anyone whose chosen field of interest is people, who sees them mostly in the mirror or through a window, really had ought to get out more often. Irish humor is lost on the Germans, especially Freud, who honored the Celts as the only race immune to his harmful mind game.
A therapist of Freudian descent is not a sentient person. He is a fractured mirror and a window looking out at nothing. A Freudian couch is not a place of rest or reflection for the sentient person.
Rumi, the great poet, achieved enlightenment by spinning continuously for thirty-six hours.
With the Beloved's water of life, no illness remains In the Beloved's rose garden of union, no thorn remains. They say there is a window from one heart to another How can there be a window where no wall remains?
From Thief of Sleep, Shiva
Vision does not escape hindsight. They meet in the middle. For the sentient seer the meeting is harmonious. For the manager, the meeting is discordant, or like the shattering of glass.
Dream becomes expectation, and forges forward into future’s memory, and possibly regret. The perspective in three hundred sixty degrees is not reducible to a line.
If one makes something of the dream, then that is the artist’s way. If one by whatever means can force others to materialize someone’s approximate dream, for the benefit of the owner, then that is the manager’s way.
It is the luxury of living long that affords one the long view of dream meeting realization, or lack thereof. It is the luxury of the Episteme to critique the dream of another, and to call that a kind of dream.
Unfortunately, in a human topology not conditioned to prioritize individual dreams with collective reality, undedicated to the satisfaction of both, dischord is a general outcome. It is the religion of American Idol. It is the sadness of having not written the books one should have or wanted to, but instead having spent one’s life in service to a monopology that throws nine people “under the bus” to give one person the spotlight on the stage. It is possible to mix metaphors dimensionally. It is the sadness of offering a remedy to a sick relative, and, when the relative refuses the remedy, having to watch him suffer and die needlessly.
In the sentient world, a person or a collective choose life. In a world of followers, when the leader tells his followers to lead themselves, they are confused and fail.
In the sentient world, there is only attainment. Waste is an inevitable component of the managed world.
For verification, we can look again at The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture for relevant data (especially the model on page 303, and the related discussions). For this author the most compelling argument generated by the cited model is the suggested relationship between mediocrity and monopolistic market power.
How would Drucker critique Murakami’s MoCA exhibit, “©”? Copyright as a defining code for a contemporary art superstar of international stature was, or should have been in the democratic arena, stunningly controversial. To some degree it was. Most critics commented on the Louis Vuitton and Murakami swag stores incorporated into the corpus of the exhibition. However, that commentary could hardly be characterized as negative.
On the contrary, the Murakami show was not only a popular success, at least in LA, but most critics, with a few notable exceptions (the irascible Charlie Finch, for one), celebrated the vision of the Japanese artist. That the exhibit was never examined in the context of MoCA’s imminent downward spiral, along with shows like “WACK!” is indicative of the badly diminished state of public discourse on art and arts management currently.
Most of the criticism appearing in corporate media was more concerned with the reporting of Murakami’s biography and superficial details, such as the logistics of installation and use of materials. The precious print space, rarer with each passing year, was devoted by the art writer elites to soft cover concerns like Murakami’s collaborations with Kanye West and Vuitton, using these crossover elements to reinforce narratives about a new definition for art in the global popular society. Andy Warhol was repeatedly named as a reference.
Anecdote: I ran into Andy Warhol on a Manhattan sidewalk in 1986. I had just written a hateful essay about him for an art history course I audited at Notre Dame. He was windowshopping with a young companion.
) Regarding finish - I’m still three credits shy of an art BA, thanks to that audit. I took the English Major and headed West, taking the contrary route.
When I encountered Andy, I was armed with a Colt Python with a 6” barrel. I think I thought of finishing Valerie Solanas’s job. I was mad at the time. Obviously I restrained myself. It’s a good thing I hadn’t finished the painting I was working on in Jersey City in the Par 3 house on Erie Street.
Still, to paraphrase the Ch’an, If you should meet Andy Warhol on the Road to the West, shoot him.
Compare Murakami’s coverage to the “coverage” of Shepard Fairey. Let’s assemble a dimensional composition with some of the relevant components or data. Fairey recently relocated his Studio One team (commercial, tactical, street and fine art production operations) to a new building at the entrance to Dodger Stadium on Sunset Boulevard in LA. He has been presenting excellent and compelling exhibits in a very well appointed gallery space in the frontage space of the building. Fairey was arrested on his way to his first museum retrospective at Boston’s ICA. Fairey’s incarceration was widely documented.
Compounding the ambivalence of a corporate press to the imprisonment (even if symbolically short, due mostly to Fairey’s ability to hire good attorneys), one of the most powerful news organizations in the world began a systematic tactical campaign to claim ownership, or partial ownership, of the artist’s famous Obama “HOPE” campaign poster – one of which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
The Associated Press engaged the artist in legal correspondence, which compelled Fairey to bring suit in defense of his usage of the original photograph Fairey referenced in his now-famous image. The LA-based Fairey has been forced to embark on a publicity tour to counteract the message distributed by the corporate media giant. His enterprises were interrupted. The photographer who took the picture Fairey appropriated is also involved in the fray. Copyrights and compensation are the ostensible legal issues. Fairey downloaded a low-resolution digital derivative of the original photograph from the web, along with many others. His final image is composed in Fairey’s signature style. He disseminated the landmark poster of then-Senator Obama in support of the Obama campaign, through several distribution channels, not-for-profit. An after-market demand for the prints blossomed almost immediately.
Fairey, for background, is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and an Idyllwild Academy alumnus. His meteoric career was launched by his viral “OBEY” campaign, now internationally famous and influential on an entire generation of visual producers. Fairey’s art is heavily influenced by punk, skater, and surf culture. His aesthetic opposes corporate mind control and perceptual manipulation through visual media. He has managed, throughout a prosperous career spanning the commercial and fine art fields, to maintain a popular connection that is unique. Currently, Fairey’s is a spectacular American success story. His many endeavors complement each other and are successful: the fine art gallery in Los Angeles; a successful ad agency with powerful corporate clients; healthy functional design and artist practices, supported by a distribution network as advanced and diverse in its portfolio of retail and wholesale options as any similar network in the world; and an extremely effective web-based business. He is one of America’s most successful dimensional artists.
Why was he in jail? Defacing property. The authorities imprisoned him, ostensibly to make an example out of Fairey. By comparison, as of this writing, the release of “torture memos” clearly proves that America under George Bush engaged in the abuse of captives by US personnel. To date, no one responsible has been charged with a crime, much less imprisoned. An artist has done more time in jail for illegal street art, than have public officials who perpetrated crimes against humanity.
Fairey’s Obama phenomenon demonstrates how a single, self-sustaining artist can ignite the opportunistic opposition of the global monopoly, through its strategic partners-in-arms. As long as Fairey operated in the creative industry as an unaffiliated, if not advocating player, he received the largesse of the monopoly. When Fairey, by producing an artwork that arguably in real time affected the outcome of a national, and global, political outcome, he became a perceived threat.
To understand the mechanics of retaliation in the global society is not possible through the analytic means of simple causal effect. The forces involved are far too sophisticated to allow that to happen. One must possess a working knowledge of corporate, multinational AI to recognize the patterns.
Plausible deniability is essential to the globalist agent. By agent, I mean any individual or organization that relies on the global economic movement for sustenance.
The agent therefore might be the invisible owner of multinationals. Or the agent might be the worker whose paycheck derives from a multinational. Such a worker, a follower, has been trained to defend his employer (and accepts that paid directive).
The above description is brief, but ample for our purposes. The tactical reality is far more pervasive and complex, by design, than my representation of it, involving language, psychology, media, government, and economy triggers and controls. A shorthand term for the phenomenon might be “hive mind.” It is a defense against accusations of conspiracy from affected stakeholders. It is a defensive measure constructed in response to periods, especially in America, when popular movements forced the democracy to legislate against monopolies.
Hive Mind is the expressive medium of corporate management. Peter Drucker designed hive mind, but he didn’t name it (I did, or perhaps someone else did, and I appropriated it, or it named itself). Drucker just created the homunculus to house hive mind. He did name his golem: he called it The Knowledge Worker.
Today, monopolies operate in plain sight. They select the governmental officials whose jobs entail the regulation of the monopolies. They pay vast sums to elected officials to buy access and protection. They control the media through a variety of means (via the Boards, the shareholder stakes, the regulatory agencies, ownership, advertising dollars, access, etc.).
In short, and I am primarily discussing America here, the ruling monopoly controls the society, and has done so almost uninterrupted, by degree, since the Civil War. The threads that bind America (private property, political conservatism, European Christian values, including the dominion over all things great and small) to the pre-Revolutionary European social topology, are the gridwork of the monopoly.
In the sentient world, there is no monopoly. No artist can monopolize dimensional art. In the sentient art, the grid is not a measuring device for managing the translation of a scene to canvas (capturing). In sentient art, the grid is a field for play.
The clever Epistemologist finds employment where he cannot be made accountable for anything. He has a few people above him, and others below him in the hierarchy, as buffers for averting risk. He does not make anything but ideas, and produces only abstractions. He is paid in abstractions that derive from property and blood. His most precious accomplishment is his devoutness, his most useful tool is superiority, and his persona is humble. People like him consider him at the very least a useful man.
The First-Third Worlds, as they are called, though the terms are in flux at present, may be ranked and reviewed based on their usefulness or potential usefulness to a globalist monopoly, concerned primarily with the workings of the three societal aspects or sectors Drucker defined for them: Government, Business and Social.
Here’s what a globalist nation critique sounds like [from The Next Great Globalization (Mishkin, pg. 125)]:
Today confidence in property rights in Argentina is at a low ebb. Why would domestic residents or foreigners make large investments when they know that their property rights can be violated on a politician’s whim? The current political climate is depressing. The government has been slow to restructure its once proud banking system to get it back on its feet. I see little willingness on the part of Argentina’s politicians to rebuild the institutions that they so blithely destroyed.
Argentina gets a bad ranking. The ranking list changes constantly. It is out of date as soon as it is written. The Epistemological list is like that. It is a hammer and a sickle.
FINISH
To lay the foundation for the finish of this essay, I will begin with several citations that are completely contemporary. They arrived in print (articles drawn from a daily and a quarterly periodical), and via email, as a link to a web source. These citations are meant to demonstrate the absolutely vital role that competent critique plays in furthering the expansion of sentient art in a democracy, in the dimensional form.
I will remind the viewer, that the premise of this essay is that the Drucker essay serving as the point of departure for the dimensional exploration would prove viable. Drucker’s “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” despite its obliqueness to Drucker’s oeuvre, despite its marginal relevance to the field of art criticism, could still lead to a proper dimensional outcome.
Now, let’s discover what is “visible, but not yet seen” in contemporary art.
The Problem
From “MoMA Pushes the Envelope in Works on Paper” (Smith, April 24, 2009, New York Times):
The Museum of Modern Art is deeply divided. It wants run wild and kick up it can’t imagine a world without fences. It wants to open up to new work, young art and diffirent ways of being a museum, but it often ends up doing things halfway, hedging its bets. That way lies mediocrity of a most tortured mode.
The remainder of the article touches on most of the issues in play in the contemporary art market that are symptoms of deregulation, globalist intervention, the durability of art and artists, the lack of critical and curatorial integrity, top-down hierarchy, the confused mandates of the modern museum, and the perils of excess, speed, waste and scrutiny in the dimensional mashup that is current but not acknowledged in perceptual terms as applied methods.
The “Not a Problem” or (On Continued Sentient Progression)
From artcritical.com (April, 2009)
Glenn Goldberg: Welcome at Luise Ross Gallery By Stephanie Buhmann
March 26 – May 23, 2009 511 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues New York City
In an exhibition simply entitled “Welcome,” which features paintings, a wall piece, works on paper, and sculptures from the early 1990s till today, Glenn Goldberg makes a strong case for the whimsical and the poetic. “Watch and live, pay attention, do what you can,” is his personal manifesto (from a statement published by the gallery.) In a time when much of what is exhibited feels generalized, slick, and superficial, Goldberg offers a romantic approach to painting that feels honest and inspired. With a sensitivity that reminds us of Paul Klee, he succeeds in combining playful forms with a tantalizing sensibility for nuances of light and color.
Goldberg’s work has repeatedly been linked to Tantric art, in particular in the way it establishes an analogy between the micro - and macrocosmic. However, the artist gleans from many sources and his works evoke many associations, ranging from Persian miniature paintings, Turkish tile patterns, and children’s book illustrations to works by artists as diverse as Richard Pousette-Dart, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Thomas Noszkowski. There is much variety and it is Goldberg’s strength to remain beyond strict categorization. With confidence, he navigates directions between abstraction and referential drawing, musical rhythm and dreamlike release, monochromatic and highly polychromatic palettes. Most of his imagery is rooted in the organic and yet conglomerates of patterned forms can establish structures that hint at geometric organization.
Meanwhile, there is a striking naivite in Goldberg’s work. It seems to tell of a time detached from worldly concerns which, especially in times like these, betokens escapism. Goldberg’s content feeds into this notion. In some of the works at Luise Ross Gallery, dove-like birds float freely through the compositions. They are delicately rendered, shown upside down, topsy-turvy, in black, white, or grey, their wings always spread as open as flower petals. These mythic creatures are not as much set against painted grounds, as they are ingredients of the overall compositional pattern. They are weaving in- and out of abstract plants, emerging from dark skies, dancing on stringed ropes, and are at ease while shifting through the textured landscapes that surround them. Rather than actual animals, they appear as spirits, who indulge in their freedom. The fragility and innocence in these images can be linked to Picasso’s “Child with a Dove (1901) But there is also a strong sense of comfort here and Goldberg stresses the sentiment by naming his works “Blanket,” “Amidst it All,” and “Bloomer,” for example. As suggested in these titles, “things are kept safe,” “in the center of it all,” and “on the brink of flourish,” as long as they are in the hands of Goldberg. This goes along with Goldberg’s conviction that “art is supposed to take you towards, not away.”
Towards a Solution
From “Art, Code and the Engine of Change” (Hertz, Spring 2009 issue, CAA art journal):
The historian of science and literary critic N. Katherine Hayles argues that computational technology has become so interwoven in our experience as to shift the very concepts by which we array the world, constituting a “regime of computation” that pervades all our communications and by extension our entire culture. If the digital is so pervasive – and not only Hayles’s persuasive text but also the texture of everyday life in our society, critically observed, confirms that it is – then why don’t we see its manifestations and effects everywhere in contemporary visual art? The sturdy avant-garde of the modern era seemed to have an endless appetite for machine aesthetics: witness the cult of speed in Futurism, the industrial forms of Constructivism, the space-time geometry of Cubism, or the absurd antiart machineries of Dada. Is the computer different from other machines? What did artists do with it when it first appeared? Have computer artists made a unique and fruitful contribution to art history? If so, why are they largely absent from standard art histories? Is the computer transforming art just as it has transformed other aspects of the world – invisibly?
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The iterative power of the computer stems from its power of representation. Digitization transforms continuous analogue values into discontinuous digital values – ones and zeroes. This subtle but profound consequences. Computation extends the possibilities of art as a formal language. Though regarding art as a language can be problematic, it is very much in keeping with modernist projects, going back at least to Vasily Kandinsky’s Point and line to Plane. In this key text of twentieth-century art, Kandinsky drew on musical theory to develop an analogous theory of abstract visual form. In a digital representation, if an element can be encoded, it can be repeated, varied, grouped with other elements, and transformed. The ancient practices of permutation, combination, and variation, associated with imagery of creative power, mystical insight, and revelation from historical times, can be fully explored on the computer for the very reasons that fractal geometry and deterministic chaos can be fully elaborated only on a computer, though their initial discovery also antedates it: the power of iteration that a computer unleashes, sweft and tireless, delivers in minutes or days what a human being could not in a lifetime. The plotter drawings Large Landscape: Ochre and Black by Charles Jeffries Bangert and Collette Stuebe Bangert and Loque Noire by Jean-Pierre Hebert reveal an exactitude and tireless repetition that would be hard for a human being to match, yet they are naturalistic, not geometric, recalling grass or water. Both depend on subtle variations in the repetition of lines. A curved line could be regarded as their fundamental linguistic element, but it is an element in an asesthetic language spoken by the artist rather than in a computer language “spoken” by a machine.
Some of the earliest computer art operates with geometric transformations in scale, rotation, reflection, shearing, warping, or more exotic functions. Sine Curve Man by Charles Csuri (American, born 1922) with James Shaffer, and Gravel Stones by George Nees (German, born 1926) are good examples. Nees presents the “randomly organized decay of a composition of small squares or stones,” applying “slowly growing dislocation and a similar growing angle of rotation.” Csuri and Shaffer produced their work by superimposing many images of a digitized drawing displaced by sine waves. Though Sine Curve Man began as a graphics experiment, with time it has become an emblem of the transformation of humans by computers. As often happens with art, meaning accrues beyond the artist’s intention. In Gravel Stones a gradient of increasing randomness, not unlike color or value gradients in traditional media, signals the capacity of computation to manipulate structural qualities of visual elements in highly controlled ways. The level of abstraction necessary to encode the image brings visual art closer than ever to musical composition.
In the algorithmic technique of recursion, the results of transformation are passed back to the transformation, which then passes the transformed results back to itself again, and so forth. When one sees the same pattern or operation functioning at different scales (“fractal self-similarity” is the mathematical term), it is very likely that recursion is involved, as in Slickrock III by Ken Musgrove (American, born 1955) and Antisana II by Pascal Dombis (French, born 1965). The “dimples” that carve out Musgrave’s rock landscape are all similar, though different in size, as are the broken ellipses in Antisana II. While some recursive techniques produce regular geometric images, they are often use to model natural phenomena – Musgrave designs software to model whole worlds entirely defined by algorithmic functions. Recursion can be used to model not just the geography of entire worlds but also large-scale dynamic processes that might take place within such geographies. Computer models of evolution use recursive operations on randomly altered generations of data that represent organisms. In his 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter argues that consciousness itself can be modeled as a recursive dynamic system. Metaphorically it makes sense: early video art used recursion (video feedback) to explore the implications of “seeing yourself seeing yourself.”
Some systems of algorithims can change over time and operate with minimal intervention once they are set in motion. These are variously referred to as dynamic systems, generative systems, agents, or expert systems, depending on different factors in their programming. Dynamic systems can reveal emergent forms – entities that are not apparent in the rules of the system but arise as a result of their interactions. Peter Beyls (Belgium, born 1950) and Harold Cohen (American, born England, 1928) both developed early systems that modeled knowledge about the act of drawing. Their programs could operate with a loarge degree of autonomy to make unique drawings. As Cohen developed algorithmic methods for describing cognitive aspects of drawing and knowledge about drawing, plants, people, or other objects, he created a computational engine, AARON, that has evolved over many years as the primary source of his art. Fractals, dynamicsystems, deterministic chaos, generative systems, and autonomous agents provide us with new metaphors and mapping for a wide range of processes in human society and in the natural world – indeed, they merge these artificially separated realms by modeling both with the same processes. They go well beyond the mathematics that Kandinsky evoked for the “future of artistic harmony,” capable of expression “in terms irregular rather than regular.”
Iteration and recursion both depend on the capacity of the computer to transform selcted blocks of data and are a result of this ower of representation: a graphical display maps data that may have no actual visual content onto spatial dimensions, colors, textures, icons, and other graphical elements so that we can understand the data better. Shoefield by Sonya Rapoport (American, born 1923) represents physical and emotional data about people’s shoes gathered at a “shoe-in” in a series of graphs, including a force-field map graphing the similarity of responses as magnetic domains. This work of alienated science plays with and subtly undermines scientific representations of knowledge.
The cut-and-paste aesthetics of mash-up and digital collage are also results of the computer’s power of representation. Many artists use algorithmic techniques to select images from a database or from the internet and then assemble them into new compositions. For example, Jason Salavon’s series The Grand Unification Theory arranges every second of an entire film into a dense grid of small images classified by luminosity. Because encoding into binary bits makes all media interchangeable, numeric values that represent an image may also be used to represent an audio signal, or vice versa – a technique known as transcoding, popular in VJ and DJ performances. Similarly, values that encode shape or color may be reused to encode position in space or may be fed into the settings for an operation that deforms curves in a random but controllable manner. Roman Verostko (American, born 1929) created an artist’s book, Derivation of the Laws of the Symbols of Logic from the Laws of the Operations of the Human Mind (1990), in which the parameters that determine a randomly generated, large-scale brushstroke are passed to another method that determines the locations and densities of small’scale lines on a facing page. Each book has a unique front- and end-piece, although the underlying code is the same. Kandinsky, in Point and Line to Plane, describes how visual attributes of a line or shape can act contrapunctally, in parallel or contrary motion. Transcoding in computational media develops this idea further, over multiple sensory modalities and levels of granularity.
For some artists, new forms derived by computation appear as elements in a modern Wunderkammer, marvels brought into the realm of human understanding, as in Manfred Mohr’s taxonomies of transformed cubes or in the visionary landscapes of David Em (American, born 1952). Melding influences as diverse as Cubism and contemporary physics, Tony Robbin (American, born 1943) creates two- and three- dimensional representations of four-dimensional space. Verostko mines the work of the mathematicians George Boole and Alan Turing to pose questions on the limits of logic and decidability. Such works hint at the possibility of a digital sublime, an algorithmic re-creation of the marvelous. Unlike the computer-generated carags and mists of Hollywood fantasy (the digital sublime verging on kitsch), these images do not attempt to re-create Romantic Einfuhlung by posing pictorial conventions as a shorthand for emotions; rather, they charge the gap between concept and realization with the potentioal for insight. In this way they may more authentically engae the spirit of the Romantics, who compared the bold inquiry of science into the laws of nature to the insight of the poet nto the spiritual unity of nature. Hans Dehlinger’s Kosovo: War Refugees Counting Table (1999) binds a much darker meaning tho the iterative power of the computer. Over three panels, thousands of almost imperceptibly different pen strokes count reguees in the Kosovo conflict. In an age when simulation does not merely mediate reality but overtakes it, we must avail ourselves of simulation to comprehend the scope of tragedy.
>>>
The historical record suggests several responses to the question posed early in this essay as to why computer art has not had a significant presence in the art world. With their lack of formal training in the arts, most pioneers of computer art qualified as outsider artists, with all the barriers to acceptance the label suggests. Their work also presented scientific and mathematical concepts that were difficult for art historians, curators, and critics to understand, especially given the paucity of art-historical discourse on the relationship of art, technology, and science. Early computer art was mostly exhibited at technical and scientific conferences, or in technical and scholarly journals, where its conceptual framework was readily understood. When formally trained artists began using new media, they were interested in alternative venues – not just conferences and media festivals, but the emerging internet, which could serve as medium, means of distribution, and marketplace. Museums and galleries are still scrambling to adapt to online culture, where a new generation of artists has taken up residence. Many authors have already discussed the difficultires of marketing computer and new media art, typically comparing its situation to that once occupied by photography. Rejection of work created by nonartistis, the development of the medium in venues outside the art word, and the difficulty of marketing the objects produced explain much of the art world’s resistance to computer art. In the United States, reaction to the war in Vietnam also led to a forceful rejection of technology by many artists, critics, and curators,. Underlying all of these issues is the art world’s lack of control of outsider artists, outsider concepts, outsider venues, and outsider technology. Ultimately, as the writer and new-media artist Carol Gigliotti explains, “The digital realm has accomplished the breaking up of the aesthetic canon through its ability to create, reproduce, and distribute, outside the economic circles on which the art world is based.” If the digtal realm has been instrumental in deconstructing the authority of high art, it is not surprising that when museums first began to show digital work, it was usually by an artist already recognized in the art world, thus reestablishing legitimacy and control. Though the art world has not yet fully accepted computer art, at least there are signs that curiosity and cultural ferment (and self-interest) are overcoming its resistance. Imaging by Numbers and other recent exhibitions of digital art by mainstream institutions mark hopeful moments, when artists, engineers, and scientists who have labored outside the mainstream may be recognized for their artistic achievements and enter into the historically recorded discourse of culture. Indeed, it may matter less that computer art be recognized as a singular contribution to art history than that it connects neglected but significant aristic practices to contemporary visual culture and society, and opens the way for a long-overdue discussion of the intersections of art, technology, and science.
If it is certain that computer art must be exposed to the same critiques that shaped contemporary art, it is also clear that it has its own body of theory and shear of formal strategies to contribute. Early computer art borrowed its formal lexicon from science. Pioneering artists decoupled the forms of sceience and mathematics from their contexts and opened them to processes where could be mapped onto new meanings. They borrowed concepts from contemporary art and recast them as code. As virtual art or information art, or whatever term of art applies, computer-generated art continues to evolve but now can draw on a history and tradition of its own. Given the scope of change computational technology has wrought by distributing and decentering economy, culture and personal consciousness, the forms and concepts of computer art seem poised to acquire increasing depth and significance as representations of human experience. Virtual art offers the potential for new formal and symbolic explorations, a freshening wind after the doldrums attendant on the demise of the avant-garde. It leads to new concepts of authorship and participation, particularly when it is opened to interactivity. Most of all, it has something relevant to say about our own lives, when computation has worked its way into popular consciousness as a new paradigm, wherein the universe, the body, and the mind no longer function as clockwork but as computers. Alienated science informs popular imagination. Cultural narratives of technology offer both digital utopias and are amenable to computer representations. The confluence of computer art with the mainstram could hardly be more timely – it offers not radical confrontation, but the opportunity for new discourse and enthusiasm.
Obviously, the computer is not the moron that Peter Drucker concluded it to be. The truth is Peter Drucker missed this critical development in art, a truly global phenomenon of tremendous importance to every sector of the social ecology. He must have been too busy looking out his window or at ancient Japanese art to notice. Drucker should have been looking at the screen of his computer monitor (I don’t know if Peter used a computer – PJM).
The computer is a sentience enhancement device.
Understanding why Murakami passes the acid test for the globalist social elite and Fairey lands in a Boston jail is critical to understanding the invisible subject of Drucker’s essay. That is, what is the last obstacle to the World Capitol relocating to, say, Davos (that might be too obvious), or Salzburg?
At first read, this might seem a mad proposition. In light of recent events, especially the G20 Summit, perhaps the notion appears less radical. To view the lens through the rearview mirror of Peter Drucker’s trajectory, his career and the evolution of his ideology, reinforces the suggestion substantially. To introduce the trajectory of the contemporary art world over the period coinciding with Drucker’s rise to prominence suggests an even stronger correlation and ratification.
I would suggest that what the tensions and polarities Drucker frames in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” especially those between the poles of individual and collective, are simply the expression of a civilization that is subject to socio-political and economic monopoly over centuries. The juxtaposed cases of Murakami and Fairey point to the tensions and polarities extant in the new globalist monopoly.
Another pair of cases, one culled from the “outer” art world, the other from the “inner” art world, by way of anecdote, might prove helpful here. First, we will look at the “outer” art world.
Great controversy surrounded the exhibit “Sensation,” mounted first by the Royal Academy of Art in London. The show featured most prominently the Young British Artists (YBA), largely the creation as a “movement” or “school” by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. “Sensation travelled to Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, and most famously to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Saatchi and his brother (Saatchi & Saatchi) built a massive fortune, by, among other enterprises, producing ad campaigns that furthered or promoted the radical restructuring of British society by Margaret Thatcher. The “Sensation” story is some important ways the Saatchi story.
Charles Saatchi shifted his primary interests from commercial art in the subsequent post-trickle-down-boom bust to fine art, riding a wave of economic investment in contemporary art that yielded mega-stars like Damien Hirst, who at present is the wealthiest and probably most savvy © artist in the world. Saatchi championed (and in some cases destroyed) many other YBAs, including Gillian Wearing, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Marcus Harvey. His practice of buying artist work in lots and at later dates arbitrarily divesting his collection of work by the truckload earned him a very mixed reputation among artists, critics, dealers and other collectors. The practice could be, in terms of an artist’s economic viability, tantamount to a “hit job.”
Saatchi has been characterized variously as a genius, a crass commercial opportunist, a destroyer of culture and taste. What is clear is that Saatchi has managed, through economic strong-arm tactics and clever manipulation of the market and public perception, to establish a position of power in the international art business.
Today, his galleries and internet-based operations are among the most influential and innovative in the world, in Druckerian terms. “Sensation” cemented his status as a prime mover. The exhibit was scandalous from the outset, as was Saatchi’s relentless promotion of previously unknown and typically ambitious young academic artists, collected and advanced by Saatchi, it seemed, on the basis of their ability to shock and repulse normative, popular aesthetic sensibilities. Whether by content or contingency, the YBAs elicited or provoked reactionary responses from many directions, some based on social offence, others on offence rooted in traditional ideals attached to art (art as a spiritual, philosophical or humanistic vehicle).
Saatchi, however, leveraged the public and collegial outrage, to the envious chagrin of his competitors, into a successful campaign propped by free speech advocates and the patronage of the global elites, many of them newly wealthy as a result of widespread economic deregulation. To characterize the Saatchi and “Sensation” phenomenon as a function of deregulation of the art world would be correct.
One of the artists in “Sensation” was Chris Ofili. Ofili’s work depicting the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung provoked the ire of New York politician Rudy Giuliani. At the time, Giuliani, a Catholic and mayor of the city, threatened to de-fund the Brooklyn museum for hosting “Sensation.” The institution chose to show the artworks, including Ofili’s, deemed offensive by Giuliani and others, including Catholic Church officials. Giuliani, in the fray, was quoted, "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion." Some of the city’s most powerful religious leaders who lobbied for sanctions or to prevent the display of the YBA art did so to no avail.
The exhibit went on amidst the controversy, drawing massive crowds and support from across the cultural spectrum. The event became a touchstone for the conservative movement in the US, providing substantial fodder for the campaign of George W. Bush for President. Ofili’s artwork was defaced during the exhibit, which was in large measure funded by Saatchi (at least $160,000) and indirectly involved Christie’s auction house, a market partner of Saatchi’s, in what clearly were commercial conflicts of interest for a publicly supported cultural institution. “Sensation,” which had been slated to finish its world tour at the National Gallery of Australia, was cancelled after Brooklyn. The director of the National Gallery of Australia cited the conflicts in the States as prime reasons for the cancellation of the show in his venue.
The second case is anecdotal. During a stint as an art handler in 2005 or -6 in Los Angeles, I was assigned to a client for collection maintenance and installation. The job site was the client’s $50 Million estate in Beverly Hills. The owner, a media executive, had decorated his property with an extensive art collection, mostly comprised of pieces by modern masters, but also including more traditional works. The collection, although no totals were discussed, was certainly worth tens of Millions.
The property manager, who supervised our work, noticed that my coworker and I were playing a game of “name the artist” as we made our way through the massive compound. He joined in, and the game evolved into an exercise in stumping the art handler. Our guide was surprised that between the two of us, we were able to identify all of the pieces he pointed to. Upping the ante, the property manager paused in front of a de Kooning.
He asked us what we thought those “little black things” embedded in the painting surface might be. Neither of us ventured a guess. “Rat poop,” he informed us. The property manager went on to describe how the Getty appraiser hired to review the collection had instructed the owner and house staff to under no circumstances attempt to clean the scat off the artwork, which he valued at $35,000,000. The appraiser claimed that the rat dung spoke to the authenticity of the work, since it had accumulated while the painting dried on the floor of the artist’s studio in New York. Removing the rat dung, of which there were four pellets, would devalue the artwork, therefore, by as much as a third. The math should indicate to the reader the value, in the converse, of each piece of rodent excrement. Each pellet is worth about $3,000,000.
Compare this case to Ofili’s. Drucker might color the comparison in terms of tension, a function of polarities. I would call the reader’s attention to the fact that the Brooklyn Museum “Sensation” case solidified Giuliani’s profile for the American cultural Right. Giuliani’s performance during the 9/11 crisis in conjunction with his portfolio of conservative bona fide, including his reputation as a culture warrior, nearly propelled him to the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008. Certainly, his adamant opposition to Ofili’s artwork in particular and the “cultural elite” who promote and defend such art in, has elevated Giuliani’s stature in the National socio-political discourse among social conservatives and Christian voters. To suggest that the improvement in Giuliani’s economic fortunes has risen with the tide of his conservative political ascent does not mean the link between the two trajectories is causal, nor does it disprove it.
The two cases above reveal much about the art monopoly and the global monopoly it serves and represents. The functions of the cultural monopoly are subtly revealed by the strange tensions and polarities described. These cases also reveal a great deal about how the art world has changed, since the Second World War. The timeline is concurrent with Peter Drucker’s career.
From a sentient or dimensional art perspective, there is a complex distinction between the de Kooning and Ofili animal waste. One can learn much about many aspects of social topology, individual sentience, and collective response, not to mention valuation and economic or racial relativity, by comparing the respective works, the artist biographies and embedded cultures they represent.
From a structural perspective, there is almost no difference between the two. From an Epistemological perspective, it’s the difference between night and day, and a thousand years of social ecology.
> The Artists
Willem de Kooning was one of the celebrated New York school of Abstract Expressionists. He was European-born (Rotterdam, 1904) and –educated. His training included an early apprenticeship in commercial art, and attendance at the Academie Voor Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschapen (1916-1924), now known as the Willem de Kooning Acadamy; he also studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the van Schelling School of Design in Antwerp. He immigrated to the US in the interwar period. Working illegally for a time in New York, de Kooning eventually integrated in the artist society of the city and was a beneficiary of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project in 1935. From thereon, de Kooning was self-supporting as an artist. He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1962, more than a decade after executing his famous “Women” paintings, and establishing himself as one of the most important painters of the era. Two years after becoming a citizen of the US, de Kooning was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Chris Ofili was born in Manchester, England (1968) and attended the following institutions: Thameside College of Technology, London (1987-88); Chelsea School of Art, London (1988-91); Hochschule der Kunst, Berlin (1992); and the Royal College of Art, London (1991-93). About his use of elephant dung:
Ofili first discovered his focal attraction while on a British Council traveling scholarship to Zimbabwe in 1992 (in an exasperated attempt to express the intensity of his experiences, he'd thrown a lump of.dried dung onto a canvas, and liked the result), so there's a ready-made back-to-Africa-and-into-identity myth that has now become indelibly attached to his work. - ArtForum, September, 1997, by Louisa Buck
Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize in 1998. He has had many gallery and museum exhibits, since.
> Notations
Both men were the beneficiaries of articulated educational systems and governmental support at critical junctures in their respective artistic evolutions. De Kooning’s training was classical and commercial. Ofili’s was modern and culture-sensitive, though no less commercial. Both ostensibly rejected or rebelled against the predominant culture to produce a signature figurative style. Each artist’s most famous work depicted female form in an expressive, peculiar figurative representation. Both became rich and famous within the context of a liberal democracy. If one views art through a linear progressive lens, Ofili is the artistic descendent of de Kooning, the original “Action Painter.” Both owe their technical innovative basis to Jackson Pollack. Both de Kooning and Ofili are the beneficiaries of fortuitously-timed transnational upward economic migration.
> Dimensional Analysis of the Art
>>> (Inconclusive)
In the broader narrative of this essay, both de Kooning and Ofili represent a lineage, which also contains Glenn Goldberg, Jackson Pollack and hundreds or thousands of others cited herein and elsewhere in great abundance in my past texts (including myself). This lineage also contains Peter Drucker. These are all people who came to know freedom of expression through American democracy, either directly or indirectly.
As for the short list of painters above, they derive from Pollack. Jerry Saltz wrote this review of the 2006 Guggenheim exhibit of Pollack’s paintings on paper:
Pollock stretched the diverse strands of Cubism and Surrealism beyond recognition. He pulled apart the Mexican muralists, pulled in the dribbling techniques of Navajo sand painting and gave various ersatz mystical tendencies of his day an unprecedented optical force and psychic coherence. "He broke the ice," as de Kooning so generously put it. By 1950, at the height of his powers, there is nothing old left in Pollock’s art, except maybe paint and canvas. By way of comparison, when the 25-year-old Picasso made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he initially thought it might be a "bad painting." When the 35-year-old Pollock finished Lucifer in 1947 he had to ask his wife, painter Lee Krasner, "Is this a painting?" Lucifer is a green, black and pearly discharge, a phosphorescent radioactive snapshot of what America looked, felt and sounded like in 1947.
From Gardner’s Art through the Ages:
Pollack explained, “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting.
Which, from a sentient perspective begs the question, Did Jackson Pollack’s breakthrough open the perceptual doors, not just to painters on an innovative or technical level, but to the possibility for sentient expansion that took form in the personal computer? Would the PC have come to exist without Jackson Pollack’s contributions to the social topology? Would the production of the PC been possible without the Management ideology of Peter Drucker? Would any of these radical advances been possible in a system where perceptual evolution and the movement of people didn’t exist? Could any of these advances have occurred prior to World War 2? Would the entry of the United States into the Second World War occurred absent Pearl Harbor, and is it possible to imagine the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, without first coming to terms with Japan’s social topography, as evidenced in the samples Peter Drucker wrote about? Finally, would Jackson Pollack be possible, absent Pearl Harbor, or the explosive trajectory of cultural exchange it represents?
Who knows?
Amplifications on the Global Art Market
The global art market is a greedy moron.
For amplification, I will refer the reader to Appendix 1, a thing.net blogpost by Joseph Nechvatal in response to a Jerry Saltz essay, “Seeing Dollar Signs,” published in artnet just before the art market balloon deflated in 2007. According to Wikipedia, Nechvatal “is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.”
Below is the rest of Joseph Nechvatal’s Wiki-bio, for several reasons, which I hope to make clear. The most pertinent is to raise the question, “Why was Peter Drucker prone to focus on ancient Japanese Art for aesthetic pleasure, and not on the dynamic artistic developments driven by American contemporary artists?”
Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago. He studied fine art and philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Cornell University and Columbia University, where he studied with Arthur Danto while serving as the archivist to the minimalist composer La Monte Young. From 1979, he exhibited his work in New York City, primarily at the Brooke Alexander Gallery and Universal Concepts Unlimited. He has also solo exhibited in Paris, Chicago, Cologne, Los Angeles, Aalst, Belgium, Youngstown, Senouillac, Lund and Munich.
His work in the early 1980s chiefly consisted of postminimalist gray graphite drawings that were often photomechanically enlarged.[1] During that period he was associated with the artist group Colab and helped establish the non-profit cultural space ABC No Rio. In 1983 he co-founded the avant-garde electronic art music audio project Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine.[2] In 1984, Nechvatal began work on an opera called XS: The Opera Opus (1984-6) with the no wave musical composer Rhys Chatham.[3]
He began using computers to make "paintings" in 1986 and later, in his signature work, began to employ computer viruses. These "collaborations" with viral systems positioned his work as an early contribution to what is increasingly referred to as a post-human aesthetic. [4]
From 1991–1993 he was artist-in-residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier in Arbois, France and at the Saline Royale/Ledoux Foundation's computer lab. There he worked on The Computer Virus Project, which was an artistic experiment with computer viruses and computer animation. [5] He exhibited at Documenta 8 in 1987.
In 1999 Nechvatal obtained his Ph.D. in the philosophy of art and new technology concerning immersive virtual reality at Roy Ascott's Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, UK (now the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth). There he developed his concept of viractualism, a conceptual art idea that strives "to create an interface between the biological and the technological."[6] According to Nechvatal, this is a new topological space.
In 2002 he extended his experimentation into viral artificial life through a collaboration with the programmer Stephane Sikora of music2eye in a work called the Computer Virus Project II, [7] inspired by the a-life work of John Horton Conway (particularly Conway's Game of Life), by the general cellular automata work of John von Neumann, by the genetic programming algorithms of John Koza and the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger.
In 2005 he exhibited Computer Virus Project II works (digital paintings, digital prints, a digital audio installation and two live electronic virus-attack art installations) in a solo show called cOntaminatiOns at Château de Linardié in Senouillac, France. In 2006 Nechvatal received a retrospective exhibition entitled Contaminations at the Butler Institute of American Art's Beecher Center for Arts and Technology.
Dr. Nechvatal has also contributed to digital audio work with his noise music viral symphOny, a collaborative sound symphony created by using his computer virus software at the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University.
Nechvatal teaches art theories of immersive virtual reality and the viractual at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA) and at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Nechvatal’s artistic interests and career as a creative and education professional originate in America’s Midwest. He has over several decades integrated emerging electronic technologies into what is basically a very traditional academic art practice. Nechvatal, one would think, epitomizes Drucker’s notion of the Knowledge Worker in the field of contemporary art.
Nechvatal’s commentary on Jerry Saltz’s essay is an excellent summation of developments in the field, and the former’s bio should be convincing to the reader that the concerns are those of a legitimate professional, an insider, a stakeholder, a productive and acclaimed innovator. Nechvatal’s grasp of the issues is broad and deep. The informal quality of his communication is appropriate for the web medium, which one can argue affirmatively, is integral to Nechvatal’s general skill set, and appropriate for the era. His credentials, as it were, are in order. He writes:
For many, the art market is a communal version of the Primal Scene—a sexed-up site that offers a peek into the bedroom of the creative act. Art advisers and collectors now treat art fairs and auctions like Warhol's Factory: Places to flaunt junkie-like behavior while hoping one's creative potential might bloom. In this global circus, mega-collectors like Charles Saatchi and Francois Pinault are the art world's P.T. Barnums: showmen who have become part of the show—moguls who understand that the market is a medium that can be manipulated.
Once upon a time, the market and the scene (clubiness, chicanery, and profligacy notwithstanding) were joined and reflected social, political, and sexual change. Now the market is only in service of itself. The market is a perfect storm of hocus-pocus, spin, and speculation, a combination slave market, trading floor, disco, theater, and brothel where an insular ever-growing caste enacts rituals in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight.
Is the art market making us stupid? Or are we making it stupid? Consider the lame-brained claim made by Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer, who recently effused "The best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart." This is exactly wrong. The market isn't "smart;" it's like a camera—so dumb it'll believe anything you put in front of it. Essentially, the art market is a self-replicating organism that, when it tracks one artist's work selling well, craves more work by the same artist. Although everyone says the market is "about quality," the market merely assigns values, fetishizes desire, charts hits, and creates ambience. These days the market is also too good to be true.
Still, the slap-happy assertions keep coming. Last season, Amy Cappellazzo, international co-head of Christie's post-war and contemporary art, crowed that auction houses were "the big-box retailers putting the mom-and-pops out of business." Then she gushed of her clients, "After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?" After wondering, "What's a G5 jet?", you may well ask how the current super-heated art market is changing the ways we see and think about art.
The market is now so pervasive that it is simply a condition —as much a part of the art world as galleries and museums. Even if you're not making money—as is the case with most of us— that's your relationship to the market. To say you won't participate in the market is like saying you refuse to breathe the air because it's polluted.
The current market feeds the bullshit machine, provides cover for a lot of vacuous behavior, revs us up while wearing us down, breeds complacency, and is so invasive that it forces artists to regularly consider issues of celebrity, status, and money in their studios. Yet, it also allows more artists to make more money without having to work full-time soul-crushing jobs and provides most of us with what Mel Brooks called "our phony-baloney jobs." Last December, more than 400 New York art dealers representing more than 5,000 artists paid for booths in one art fair or another in Miami to participate in this market. Everyone is trying the best they can. For critics to demonize the entire art world, then, as somehow unethical and crass seems self-righteous, cynical, and hypocritical.
The Jerry Saltz article to which he’s responding > (see Appendices)
Vehicles
The vehicles for disseminating artwork in the global economy have never been more plentiful, or complex. Spectacular technological innovation has transformed bidding at an auction, for example, into a potently international process happening in real time.
Reproduction technology advances have dramatically redefined the distribution patterns for images. Downloads enable viral dissemination of relevant and timely visuals. The recent case of Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama “Hope” poster demonstrates the dichotomy: a prized fine art edition item on the one hand, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, and a largely unregulated and ubiquitous popular culture viral brand on the other. I have written about this extensively elsewhere, but for the purposes of this paper would suggest that the continuing legal issues surrounding Fairey’s production of what is possibly the most recognizable political portrait of all time (competitors include Che, Mao, and the US Presidents appearing on our currency) are directly informative on the topic of social topology versus ecology/economics/globalism.
No one can legitimately argue that the means of artistic production have never been more broadly accessible, and the means of distributing art have never been more diverse. Nonetheless, one hardly ever hears discussion either inside the art industry or in popular discourse about the concentration of market power, and its stranglehold on content.
A recent panel discussion in New York (the “Intelligence Squared US” series at Rockefeller University, February 2009, covered in ArtForum’s blog “Scene & Herd”) sought to address the issue of art industry regulation, and the state of the art regarding ethics.
New York is still the center for the art market. The preponderance of art stars live there or exhibit at top New York galleries and in the museums, and their careers are made there. The blogosphere, and web-based content are vastly outpacing the traditional art critical media, as is true in all fields of published media. For now, though, the “legitimate” art press is still located in New York.
IQ Squared US occurred at an historically charged moment, in the city most directly impacted by the financial sector’s crash. As a result, the Rockefeller University panel was scrutinized by the fine arts field, which was looking for presumptive leadership. The audience at a CAA conference panel on art criticism, which I attended the following week in LA, engaged in a discussion of the New York panel results.
One of the panelists, art critic Jerry Saltz, known amongst art media elites as a great friend of the artist, argued stringently and with some concern against any regulation of the art business. “I think you have to just let the art world be what it is,” Saltz said. “Yeah, it’s unethical, but no more than you are.”
Some other highlights:
(Senior dealer Richard) Feigen, up first, argued that the art market is relatively unethical because it lacks regulation and offers buyers little protection. He got particularly fired up over “chandelier bidding” (the auction-house practice of making fake bids in order to stimulate competition), perhaps in part because he’d been called “a horse’s butt” for suggesting that eliminating the practice would take the drama out of sales. Slamming the strategy as inherently deceptive, he concluded that the auctioneer’s role has become dangerously ambiguous. (Painter Chuck) Close, speaking next, attempted to redirect the debate by arguing that the value of art is not determined by money at all (a point that earned him a ripple of applause) and that the ethics of its marketing were therefore somewhat moot. Even if its financial value can be manipulated, he argued, its long-term significance comes from artists rather than buyers and sellers. (British gallerist Michael) Hue-Williams, just off the last plane from a snowbound Heathrow, steered things back to the nitty-gritty with a recollection of having been stiffed on a potential big-deal purchase in his early days. He added that the art market lacks transparency—pointing to the creation of auction rings aimed at boosting prices—and has no barriers to entry. (“To become an art dealer, you need to have a pulse.”) (Christie’s deputy chair Amy) Cappellazzo countered this with a theory (borrowed, characteristically, from economics) that the commonly agreed-on preciousness of art ensures that behavior around it is generally ethical. Next to the podium, (“supercollector” Adam) Lindemann, a self-described “consumptaholic,” began with a meandering comparison with the legal constraints on medical advertising, wondering why dealers aren’t subject to the same limitations as doctors if they really are more public servants than businesspeople. Pointing out that the art market depends on a type of dealing that might be considered “insider” in another field, he concluded, confusingly, “The whole system is ripe for anything to happen, and that’s the beauty of art and the art market.”
The decentralized and deregulated global art market has outsourced talent and production, gutted the art world’s “middle management,” produced an international financial infrastructure, focused wealth at the top, reduced labor costs, while encouraging a gutted labor market, and so on. In other words, the art market looks exactly like the global economy on a macro scale.
In his essay, Drucker peers out the rearview mirror to look through the lens of his own social topology, superimposed on which is Drucker’s social ecology. As we have seen, Peter Drucker evidently was projecting a view that he had determined to be good and meaningful that no longer exists, if it ever did.
The value of Drucker’s vision of Japan is what it tells us about Drucker. An ancillary finding might be this corrolary: It is not the reality that exists on either side and in front of us all, that an Epistemological projectionist throws. It is the movie starring the homunculus who lives behind the projectionist’s retina that we see.
Room for Expansion
For an expansion of the scope of narrative to address the global nature of artistic production possible now, one can look at the latest issue of THE Magazine Los Angeles (April 2009), as it relates to our subject for clarification.
In the Editor’s Notes, celebrated critic Peter Frank defines Western art thus:
“Still, it’s all art, i.e., stuff produced in the context of what we know as artistic discourse. That’s the Western definition, at any rate.”
Peter Frank is no less wrong than Peter Drucker, but for nearly opposite reasons. Frank continues:
“It’s not all good, not by a long shot; it’s not all important; it’s not all substantive; it’s not all worthwhile. But, for better or worse, it’s all art.”
What Peter Frank describes is not just the de-definition of art (see Harold Rosenberg’s seminal text from 1983). He is describing the de-regulation of art in a global context. On a College Art Association panel on the state of art criticism (February 2009), Frank pithily declared, “The art world is founded on conflicts of interest.”
One might ask then, in the manner of Drucker, what is the mission of art criticism? Who is its consumer, and what satisfaction is that consumer seeking?
It is up to us, who sustain the social topology, to define art criticism, to engage in it, to regulate its practice, to enforce its sentience, to insist that its prime focus be freedom. This task is dimensional.
>>>
On the cover of the April issue of THE is a reproduction of a detail of a painting by Moira Hahn, an LA-based artist exhibiting recent work at Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City. She has appropriated the Japanese style and learned the techniques of Japanese painting.
>>> (Unfinished)
Matthiasson & Reischauer
Peter Drucker’s acumen, for assembling cogent models for managing organizations in the social, business or government sectors, is a function of knowledge of history, monitoring developments in the present and over time, practical experience, and discipline, among other things. In other words, Drucker’s expertise is a function of all-at-onceness, or dimensional thought.
In the Japan essay, Peter cites American Edwin O. Reischauer, “the former American ambassador to Japan and foremost authority on Japanese history and society,” and interprets Reischauer’s analysis of Japanese society to mean that Japan is “perceptual rather than conceptual,” when Reischauer claims that “Japan has never produced a great or original thinker of the first rank.”
I would interject here: The Japanese are, however, greatly and fundamentally sentient, as a people, and a people who make beautiful sentient things.
This is the essay’s critical moment, as it moves to a conclusion. As previously noted, Drucker is confusing the facets of seeing and doing. Perceiving, to capture something entirely, in the 20th Century is the job of the camera.
The Japanese, with all due politeness, are not the world champions in the perceiver category. The Inuit are. John Matthiasson, in his book Living on the Land, posits that this is probably an effect of the Inuit’s “long experience as hunters, and a couple of centuries of contact with puzzling and often frustrating outsiders” (Page 30).
What Western man perfected over 35 centuries, the Inuits perfected in less than two, adapting overnight to a new form of art that contained no requirements for Inuit stylizations. The Japanese have only learned that lesson, since World War II.
The caves of Chauvet demonstrate best in the Western history of art, the connection between vision, hunting and representation, especially of animals. This is a comparative subject that Drucker raises in his essay.
George Stubbs, one of the European artists Peter cites, dismissively, was the subject of a recent Getty survey exhibit. The comparison is unfair, as would be mine, if I were to suggest that Stubb’s often-bizarre art bestiary could well withstand immediate juxtaposition with a contemporary Inuit representational sculpture, or even an interpretive one.
Stubbs was born a Liverpudlian, the son of a leather and hide merchant in the early 1700’s. He learned to paint horses by dissecting them. In other words, Stubb’s accomplishments as an artist arose from the study of dead things. His paintings reanimated them. Of course the artwork is as anesthetic as a lab, when compared to the sculpture or rendering of a tribal hunter.
I would suggest that Stubb’s process is similar to Drucker’s, in methodology. Dissection of a thing to learn about a thing is a prototypically European behavior. It is a foundation of modern medicine and science, as well as economics and other soft sciences like anthropology. Drucker’s social ecology relies on dead data, as much as it does on anything. It is the heart of society examined with a scalpel.
Further, I would suggest that we posit that Drucker on some level, at the time of the Japan essay’s composition, was striving to free himself from the constraints of “creative destruction,” hence his affection for the foreign approach of the Japanese artist. If Peter Drucker was any sort of hunter, he was a hunter of social solutions to the question of spiritual liberation, or at least personal freedom. This is sentience of the highest order.
Whether such a quarry is collectively obtainable is not clear, and certainly there is no one means that has satisfactorily been decided upon by all the world’s great thinkers to ensure freedom’s attainment for an individual within the organizational framework. Yet, the sentient man must make the attempt, for nothing else in the sentient world is more important – not art, not money, not power, not prestige, not history; nothing.
Drucker refers to Daruma, the founder of Ch’an Buddhism, which later was transformed by the Japanese into Zen. To compare Japanese Daruma paintings to the paintings by individual Western painters is to make the worst sort of interpretive mistake. We have explained the why of it.
Daruma paintings in the Japanese idiom have nothing to do with Egon Schiele, for instance. Schiele was not elaborating on any stylistic theme. He was fomenting a hybrid vehicle for emotional intensity coupled with a unique visual language incorporating the figure.
From a sentient perspective though Daruma and Schiele have everything to with each other (and with Drucker). All share sentience. The differences among the three pertain mainly to medium. Daruma’s were diversely spiritual and martial. Schiele was an artist. Drucker was an author, academic and commentator. Each medium is hugely important in social topology. Should they be talking about each other? Only Drucker had that option.
The artists of Europe Drucker points to all were engaged in the radical reassignment of the parameters of art in the West, utilizing whatever stylistic mechanism afforded them the strongest results. Picasso, for instance, refused any allegiance to any stylization or craft orientation, when it might interfere with his artistic evolution. Artistic evolution, in one aspect, is no different than martial evolution. The Spartan shield and short sword versus the Japanese Samurai sword: What is the point, beyond Epistemology, of comparing the two? In a dimensional analysis, it is a point of departure.
Drucker’s comparison of Expressionism of the West to anything in Japanese social topology is only relevant as a metric of shared sentience. The two classifications objectively do not culturally span, until very recently, but even then their coexistence manifests not in the ways Drucker suggests.
Let us visit upon the similarities, superficial though they may be. Speaking of Japanese and Western painting, the shared components of the two types of expression are paint and brush, substrate, plus the artists’ applied senses, craft or “hand,” and the awareness of their respective or prospective patrons: in other words, the most generic elements of art-making. Structurally these components relate. They hardly do, beyond Greek formalism. A Japanese calligraphic brush is not an Italian or Austrian painter’s brush from the 1800s. Then there is sentience.
Picasso, Klimt and Monet were not illustrating the cultural narrative handed to them by an authority, as much as they were fixing new stylizations to relatively common experiences. The landscape, the cityscape, the historical picture, the still life, the nude, and the portrait: these are in no way new forms for European artists, when the 1880’s arrive. Of the three, Picasso was an aesthetic Hiroshima-of-One. He blew the whole canon up, much the way Pollack would do a few decades later. Without Picasso, there is no Pollack. We could go on and on. The game is called, “Talk about art and artists (stream of sentience).”
Over the past 1000 years consumer profiles of art consumers, however, has changed enormously. It is interesting that Drucker, who famously demonstrated the capacity for industrial historical analysis, selectively discusses the profile of the Asian form of consumer, and fails to similarly address the ancient and dynamic linear thread of Western art’s economic and stylistic development, which is evidenced at least from the 13th Century. Drucker fails to examine the fascinating rise and fall of artist guilds in Europe, for instance, over the several centuries of the Renaissance, a transnational phenomenon exhibiting tremendous periods of innovation and entrepreneurial initiative.
We only have so much time.
Roots
In the century and a quarter that produced Picasso, Monet and Klimt, the European monarchies and aristocracy no longer exclusively determined the success of an individual artist. The emergent merchant class bought more art and fueled diversification of media in Europe than the crown and aristocracy. The “art and wonder cabinet” was the entertainment center of the era. While Europe’s cathedral altars were being adorned with precious metals from the mines of Peru in the preceeding period, and the armadas of Spain, France and England engaged in great seaborne conflagrations, the European middle class was engaged in an altogether new form of shared creative activity. Part science, part entertainment, part social aesthetic discourse, the private collection of exotic artifacts was replacing the tasteful art of the courts.
Peter Drucker as a youth witnessed firsthand the informal concourse of the new social order, as well as the great dissolutions of monarchical power in Europe. The First World War culminated a trajectory commenced in America and France, which the Second World War cemented. These events defined Drucker, his allegiances and direction, and provided the historical platform for his social ecology. On the distant shores of his America, Drucker was to confront firsthand the established mechanism for democratic free speech. From afar Democracy had sculpted Peter’s intellect, and the nation that embraced free speech first would provide Drucker safe haven from charismatic despots and repressive regimes. Fear of nuclear apocalypse aside, the next decades of Peter Drucker’s life would be dedicated to seeing the not-yet-visible through a window in a home in Claremont.
This is a romantic narrative. In a sentient world, it is somewhat correct.
O Austria!
Over the two or three centuries of European colonial conquest, the collections of traders expanded and diversified enormously, while those of the royalty acquired the patina of the historical. The accumulation of gold and silver through genocidal colonial practices in the New World and elsewhere re-centered the politics and entirely reformatted the economies of European kingdoms.
As Fin de Siecle Vienna was producing Schiele and Klimt, and other artistic luminaries of the generation were gaining fame in Paris and elsewhere, Peter Drucker was growing up as the beneficiary of unprecedented European cultural freedom in one of its most enlightened cities. He left Austria for Germany in the inter-war period to pursue his fortunes, only to be confronted by the rise to power of the Nazis.
Maybe Drucker’s personal history, relative to the tumultuous history to which he was witness, shaped his biases. This is only conjecture. That Vienna and the Austrian merchant or middle class experience over the span of a few decades formed Drucker, Freud and Hitler is a premise.
How differently each of these men interpreted the world in which he lived! Each had ideas about art, too. Regarding Hitler, one would only wish he had succeed as a painter. A more sentient medium might have mollified his potential for creative destruction. This is probably wishful thinking, as they say.
The social topology for the perceptual formation of Hitler, Freud and Drucker included Marxism, and American Democracy, and Capitalism, and a million other components. Each of these men shared one thing: sentience, or at least the potential for sentience. Making beautiful things is the one topological element they did not share.
As alluded to above, Peter Drucker said, “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”
He also penned this gem: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.“
fin
CODA
THIS ESSAY WAS PERFORMED ON DEADLINE AS PRODUCTION-PROOF (A/P PJM)
