SubscribeSeptember 27th, 2009
Kandinsky, art and perception
In Newsweek (I found it by way of Arts & Letters Daily) there is an article about Kandinsky called Kandinsky’s Influence on Painting is Far-Reaching. It’s a delight. Apart from the author’s insight there are 11 paintings loaded into the presentation. My favourite was Elizabeth Murray’s “Open Drawer.”
What the author (Peter Plagens) says:
July 27th, 2009
Associative meaning: Connotation
Whenever I hear the word “uprightness” or it is triggered by some other means, whether in the swinging stance of a walker, the moment by moment balance in movement or whether by the five pointed star (pentagram) on its “feet”, I get this little packet of resonant feeling. That “resonant feeling” is the signal that the connotations of things, words, activities is active. With language users, things are never simple and words are never conscribed by their denotative meaning. Words like “upright” carry multiple meanings and many of them will not be found at dictionary.com. For me, one of the connotations of “uprightness” has something to do with how human beings first came to walk bipedally.
Things, whether words or symbols, carry a (usually) hidden payload of meaning. The specific content of that “payload” is contingent: what books you read, who you meet, what culture you were born into, what films you see, what languages you have learnt to speak, what accidents occur around you, what superstitions you carry, what your parents told you was true. For example, someone I know says that for her, “uprightness” is mostly to do with morality; the word carries a sense of surety and an image of some human being standing tall in his or her goodness. Not for me. Paradoxically, the word triggers an image of a human male slightly crouched over while another postures, flinging his arms back, expanding his torso, his leg stance wide, exposing his groin to view. For this bit of hilarity, I blame Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.
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July 26th, 2009
The rule of the moving body
The world created by the moving body is one that marks distinctions through interrelating the basic building blocks of simultaneous and consecutive movement, duration and direction of that movement, by referencing all movement to the sense of uprightness of the body’s vertical axis and by reference to a non-visual spatial sense that locates objects by their proximity and reachability. Just like all the other sensory worlds it is a complete world in that the categories will make sense of the world on their own. If a person could not see or hear or utilize any of the other sense, the world would still be perceived as a whole world, one that was translatable—livable—by someone with only this set of categories and the rules they develop.
The world of the moving body, like that of the skin is continuous and immediate, but unlike the skin this is a world of spatial extension. It is a world of here and far. It is a world that has a primitive sense of past and future—cause and effect—since many of the possible movements of the body occur consecutively and need recourse to concepts like “before” and “after” or “this-then.” Like the skin though, this world is complete in itself. It organizes reality as if there were no other. It is this capacity that makes the various selves (both dominate and non-) so fundamentally independent of each other, yet makes the aware-self (which is completely reliant on the non-dominant selves (in-part the senses) for information about the world) such a dependent entity.
With reference to memory and the pattern of neurons which store memory, according to Rita Carter, concepts can be thought of in a similar way. That is, the physical linkages between cells in a neuronal pattern (what Carter calls “unconscious concepts”), which get stronger and stronger with each use or reactivation, when activated to a certain level of energy and “integrated with the general ‘chorus’ of activity in the brain” causes us to become aware of the stored concept—as a concept. In this way the body, which moving through the world, repeats and repeats and repeats general “knowledge” about sequencing, pattern, movement, cause and effect, etc. creates and stores concepts that our aware selves take to be the product of itself thinking and reflecting. But, in fact, they are the body thinking.