Category: Meaning

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 11

6/3/2016

The FINAL week --
with summary conclusions for "What is a beautiful thing?" and "Why pursue beauty?" and the meaning of true fulfillment for our leisure time.

   F.   The Definition – What is a Beautiful Thing?

        Just as a thing is interesting when it engages the participation of the intellect, so is beauty its ability to engage us through the senses which, in our present line of interest, is the sense of sight.

        If we have reached agreement on my live demonstrations, two things will have been made clear.

First, we all perceive the music and the screeching the same way once the locations that require action are identified and mended, or you could not have conceded that I had improved anything at all.
Second, to ascertain the sites where correction will be needed is a skill which grows more powerful with practice and experience. It was therefore easier for me to do than it could possibly have been for a layman without training.

           The true action of this skill is to observe our own responses as we behold a visual
            display. It is the ability to look at ourselves while looking at a thing.

   G.   The Purpose – Why Do We Pursue It?

        If we ask what makes a beautiful thing desirable to have, we get invariably the reply: “It pleases.” So it often does, but decidedly not always:

Matthias Grűnewald’s Isenheim Aaltar Crucifixion is a very embodiment of suffering.
And Pucchini’s opera Madama Butterfly ends in tragedy and terrible despair.
Against the backdrop of Germany’s declining fortunes of battle and her shattered cities near the end of World War II, the narrator in Thomas Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus looks upon the parallel devastation of the broken sanity and approaching death of his lifelong friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn.

He relates to us how he felt like one of the condemned souls in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment whom a pair of daemons wrenches downward into the abyss. The figure covers but a single eye while glaring insanely through the other, as though he could not endure and bear to look upon this hell he was nonetheless compelled to see.
The narrator ends these broodings with a prayer of a single sentence: “May God have mercy upon both your souls – my friend, my fatherland!”

             Literature, of all the arts, uses the comprehending intellect as if it were one of our
            senses. For, the reading eye alone would see page by weary page a single basic
            pattern endlessly repeated. But form and composition speak at first to the brain
             itself as if it were purely an organ of reception – a retina and eardrum of the mind.

        What unfolds in all my three examples are terrifying tragedies. To be gratified or well-pleased with them would be indeed satanic pleasure – a diabolical amusement. But, even while the heart is saddened, these works can so utterly engage all our mind and feeling that no foreign desires are able to intrude, and no distractions tarnish, the experience. Thus we learn through them a perfection of fulfillment.

We can otherwise have a perfection of experience without necessarily beholding a perfect work of art.

We are capable of giving this fulfilling beneficence to ourselves from something merely good enough to stimulate us to the mental labor of perfecting inwardly what may inherently be flawed. To do this is to make one’s reception better.
Pictorial composition may deliberately use incompleteness to achieve perfection. We can mentally complete my sphere and cube in the following illustration, though I have rendered them in fragments only.
Experiencing perfection without a perfect work of art also can be base and, at its worst, extremely ugly. Cheap entertainment or cheap reading and, most of all, the deadly plague of psychoactive drugs, furnish a perfection of downward self-fulfillment. While these pleasures last, they constitute perfection for the user, because he is incapable of any wider purposes or wishes.

The Purpose – Why Pursue Beauty?   (cont’d)

        2. But to love and learn about the Arts we have to measure up to them. We have
              the right to assess any work against the artist’s claim – his promise, if you will –
              that he is showing it to us because it will be a first rate thing to see. Yet, as viewers
              we must have good will, seek to un-learn our prejudices, and shed the common
              failing of ill-tempered and pedantic carping. For these will surely shut the doors
              on art.

        Besides good will, and by the instrument and reason of good will, we have to learn to open our eyes and to develop a clear mind, to be – to the best of our ability – a Noble Viewer for the artist’s work.

The Noble Viewer of measureless good will, keen intellect, and clarity of vision, plays his role as an artist’s ideal in the Platonic sense. He may grow to be more real than any living person, because he represents the granting of an ardent wish, as the human being with whom most of all an artist wants to share the best of all his work.
And no actual person may quite equal the hope and the reliable assurance the Noble Viewer can thus carry into the domain of art, who may be quite severely critical, but never uncharitably so. The Noble Viewer is in that sense a reality that we assemble him from real people – not from a single person, but from the best qualities of several.
To attain – even imperfectly—the attributes of our Noble Viewer demands self-control and study, that is, self-expenditure. And gaining so much ground is truly an enrichment. The pursuit of art is always upward self-fulfillment, because it is invariably accompanied by self-enrichment.

The Sciences – and here we must include Philosophy among them – are also fulfilling and enriching. But the Fine Arts and the Sciences cannot take one another’s place.

For science when it does not treat reality becomes a kind of science fiction, and Philosophy in this case, an unavailing speculation and subjective brooding.
All the Sciences – to do their proper work – must face man’s needs and problems squarely, as must also the designer of any object of utility, however beautifully made, if his product shall be useful as well as good to see.

The Arts, however, can transport us to another world where our daily troubles matter little, and where we are refreshed as if we went on a vacation.

My painting was able to surpass the actual coffee pot, which cannot surpass itself, and so could not accomplish what the picture did.
Other pictures articulated images of fantasy and rendered my personal responses to literature and life, while my table easel, for example, must interpretively remain mute and forever a mere tool.
My action of setting down the paper snippets showed that a beautiful thing in art is a work capable of engaging fully our sensibilities.

            We consider it worth creating and worth having – not so much because it pleases –
             but because it simultaneously enriches and fulfills and restores our weary spirit,
             in a compact – one almost wants to say “efficient” – form that nothing else can
             quite achieve.
      4. Finally, works of art can give to us this true refreshment and unburdening from
             our common cares in ways no artifact can altogether equal.

   H.   A Change of Pace Rather than Escape

A journey into the world of art is not an escape from reality in the sense of flight, any more than an outing to the Susquehanna means an escape from Lancaster. We want what art can give. And without art – its enriching and restoring powers – the world would be a hellish place.

            We have seen that ugly objects – however functional – can distract the user and
            weaken him in the execution of his tasks. We assume therefore that ugly
            surroundings damage man’s ability to perform his proper work in life. Yet the
            unimaginable hell of a world entirely devoid of art – despite our inner city
            slums – still remains, I hope, mostly outside of human ken. But we are not prevented
            by our dependency on art from also wanting the truth of science and the reality in
            which it operates. We are not put to flight by reality.

      2. The escapes of mindless thrills and pleasures cannot provide this change of pace
            we need for our restoration. For, largely disengaged intellects and sensibilities
            mean a relaxation of no pace at all.The mind-deadening effects of numerous
            television offerings – that is, the resulting sluggishness toward mental action –
            show that downward self-fulfillments as a class, far from giving us refreshment,
            put us beyond the reach of any restoration.

      3. But the Arts demand of us a diligence and an attention that will bring us true
            enrichment instead of a mere land of dreams. For they alter solely the use we make
            of our faculties, and thus sharpen them into alertness, instead of rendering them
            numb.
            Leisure time is time which truly belongs to ourselves, and we should get from it
            all the benefits we may. The Arts are more suitable than almost any other instrument
            for gaining such a purpose.

                                                                                                               Johannes H. von Gumppenberg
                                                                                                                Lancaster, PA October 24, 1995

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 09

5/20/2016

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During the past several weeks, Johannes gave detailed descriptions of Basic Design courses. Here, after some final thoughts, the essay returns to philosophical topics - aesthetics. (NINTH of eleven sections)

      I.   Basic Design within the Foundation Program

        Within the Foundation Program the two semesters of Basic Design are by themselves a compact summary of an artist’s purely visual work of form and color, as opposed to figure or landscape drawing.

        Apart from the special mission of three-dimensional composing, the Surface Designs divide the language of their visual domains very carefully into the parts of art and gradually join them toward a plane of competence where the student will be no longer a beginner.

        To summarize the tasks of a two-semester Basic Design course:

      Basic Design I:

Shape arrangement compositions without color.
The optical behavior of colors and precision training in their use.
Color composition ending with incipient training in careful observation, but starting with no demands concerning shape

Basic Design II:

Freehand Construction of geometric solids.
Volume perception and delineation through geometric sections of the whole.
Composition of volume combinations to articulate spatial advancing and retreating in the action of describing.

J.   Historical Study

     1. Artists need a grounding in Art History to see how cultural excellence – due to causes
            that fundamentally can never vary – appears in every period and all kinds of places.

Technical knowledge is good – even indispensable – to have for themes involving the especial difficulties technical knowledge must be relied upon to master. Technical knowledge enlarges our range of action rather than improving upon the excellence of our action.

However, excellence in art essentially does not depend on technique, but rather on the just interpretation of a subject combined with genuine achievement in design. Art History does not equal composition as an essential study, but it does help us and is therefore good to have. Other times and other places had not the learning of the modern West and thus not quite its range, but had equal excellence.

     2. Besides needing the History of Art to train their eyes at discerning other workers’ best
             creations – regardless of how unfamiliar may be the face they wear – artists want this study,
             as every man must want the history of his own kind, for the assuring companionship it offers.

For all such learning reveals how others – very much like ourselves – have lived and what they did.

In our calling we may thus share the triumphs and frustrations of our brother artists through the ages and so take our places in a greatly lengthened life made stronger by a little faith in ourselves and a hope we owe to their example.

There is no time for me to treat in our framework any useful portion of the History of Art. But we can deal here with the major steps in the development of Western Writing, whose dual heights of excellence must substitute for the miraculous abundance of the history of art which, alas, at present, poses an unwieldy horn of plenty.

        1. Our Alphabet is the lineal descendant of Phoenician characters, which are thought to go
             back to Egyptian pictographs, or to have been independently contrived in Phoenicia.
           Aleph the bull became Alpha and “A,” Beth – the house, Beta and “B,” Gimel – the camel,
             Gamma and “G,” so that our word “Alphabet” itself is of this North Semitic origin.

        2. Pictographs are unevenly exact sound-alikes. A picture of a deer could do duty for
        addressing some we are fond of, as in “my dear” and, less precisely, a “gull” as in seagull
            might mean a “girl.”

       When Aleph, Beth and Gimel turned into Hellenic Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, their names
       became mere pronunciation keys for the initial sound and the Phoenician meanings
           disappeared. Along the way the pictographs grew simpler and more geometric in design,
        and so became true letters.

       3. Around 200 BC, ill-crafted linear letter skeletons, more of a Latin than of Greek
          appearance, assumed truly geometric character in the centered horizontal bar of “A”
          and the semi-circles of “C, D, S and R.”

            The geometric character since then has been preserved, but was modified correctively to
          give aesthetic satisfaction. These changes produced in A.D. 100 the Monumental
     Stone-Carved Roman Capital, with the thicks and thins, as well as serifs of our present day.

       4. The monumental Roman Capital is the first of two lettering masterpieces we have in
           Western Europe.

It is, however, a letter suitable for carving but cumbersome to write. Only its thicks and thins – the results of preparatory writing with a chisel-form brush – endure, when the chisel-edged nib takes over throughout the whole development of our second alphabet, of the letters we call “small.”
The path was gradual, with beautiful pen-forms on the way. Letter shapes grew rounded, in part longer, and eventually slanted, for rapid writing by the pen. The end-product was the Chancery Hand of the High Renaissance, and marks the second crest of excellence in Western writing:
The whole alphabet went through the paces of my “M” and “F” skeletons, which mark the pathways followed by the pen, without thick and thin resulting from the width of the pen.

        5. I am indebted here a second time to John Howard Benson – who was the greatest writing
             master this country ever had – for my brief history of lettering. In his understanding, Chancery
             Cursive is the finest possible compromise between the needs of the reading eye and our rapidly
             writing hand.

        6. Should we venture, perhaps rashly, to design an alphabet of our own, we must consider this
              historic line in order to remain inside the bounds of legibility.

Yet there is, within those limits, much we can create with the thicks and thins, with clarifying and widened endings modeled by the serif, and with the curving strokes of the rapid, running hand.
The visual correction taught to us by Rome is simply the design of legible, well differentiated, and yet consistent, elements belonging to one family of forms. And, when we go our own way, we should seek to equal that especial excellence instead of copying the Roman shapes.

        If we paint and draw still lifes, landscapes, or the human face and figure and think that lettering can teach us nothing, then we are not true students of the arts we practice. For an excellence a little off-side of our personal striving allows us to dismiss for a while our own designs and can refresh our fatigued and clouded minds, thus crystallizing our judgment and brightening our vision.
        To perceive in other disciplines how he may improve within his own, characterizes the ardent student and true learner.

III   The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing

     A. Two Questions

         You owe this portion of the series to a one-time student who wrote me letters with questions about art to which I replied in essay form. One exchange dealt with the theme: “Why do we make art?” Two questions reside within the one:

First, what is a work of art? Or, better, what, in the realm of art, is a beautiful thing – as opposed to a beautiful face that is a gift of God?
And second, what benefits can a beautiful thing supply that we should feel a powerful compulsion to make a place for it in life?

        Both of these are philosophical concerns, and a philosophic bent of mind will help us to consider them. But philosophic learning all alone cannot succeed, because the task requires also the experience of a working artist.
        Because of this, my discourse will not be exclusively a set of philosophical reflections, nor center only on artistic action. But, giving both their due, we may achieve right understanding and thus reveal most clearly what an artist will find proper and worthwhile to do.

     B. The Meaning of the Term “Art”

        Art is a strange word, not for what it means, but what it fails to mean.

There are three closely related Latin verbs – “aptare, arctare, and artare.” All mean to join together, as does “articulate” in our tongue.
In German, the word “Kunst” is also notable for what it does not mean. It derives from “können,” the German verb for “possibility” – to be able to, or “can.”
If we extract meaning, as best we may, from the Latin and the German, a work of art will be a thing ably joined together. Neither the depth of feeling we experience nor that which we express through art are at all delineated by this definition.

     In the great puzzles of existence, groping in the dark may be common in Philosophy. But otherwise, so much groping in the dark is not altogether usual, because language strives for our understanding, and not to deepen the confusion. For example, “lawnmower” and “dishwasher” proclaim at once what these appliances are and the service they deliver.
         My task is to make as precisely clear what art is and it does for us, as the names lawnmower and dishwasher make clear the function of those objects. To make as clear, however, does not mean to state as briefly. On the contrary, I must, to some degree, become substantially long-winded.

    C. The Claim Implied through Showing Art

There is implied a declaration when works of art go on exhibit. The artist tells the viewer: “This is a beautiful and very valuable thing; and therefore I am sharing it with you. For it is something you truly ought to have.”
From this claim follows a rule an artist breaks only at great cost. His work – for the purpose of being seen – must outstrip reality. A coffee pot, painted just as it appears, is less than the coffee pot we can also use as well as see. Thus, to be genuinely beautiful, a picture must surpass its subject.
We often fail to reach such excellence when we make fervent emotional appeals. Sweetly sensitive or pompously heroic striving – while design and form are weak – cannot justify the response of feeling they demand. It is this kind of sentimental and heroic overloading which produces what Germans have named “Kitsch” and Americans call “Corn.”

But learning that a picture of a coffee pot may be worth painting, and worth seeing, can be a
rich reward.

In the Coffee Pot still life, my patterns based upon the play of light are a specialized abstraction. They are a chosen derivation from my scrutiny of nature, which informs me that all the world consists of fields of color whose tonal values I may reduce to black and white.

Comment:
Has some other discipline offered you insight into the practice or appreciation of visual art?

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The Identity of Meaning - 06

2/20/2016

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We begin this series with the early essay which gives its name to this column - written in 1959. (Final of six sections)

Summation – The Principle of Meaning

     At last, I hope I have been able to clarify some aspects of the principle of meaning.
I have presented my theme by discussing meaning as the content of all identities. I have done this without insistence, beyond illustrative example, upon a specified meaning belonging to a specific thought or object. And I have collected the being of all, however variedly distinguished entities, under one name – meaning – and tried to show what principle rules the nature of all things under this generalization. Here at the end I wish to summarize the conclusions that perhaps have been reached.

     Meaning is the content of being. This content, that has been named “meaning in the absolute,” includes the potential power to contribute its meaning to the content of another being under the term “meaning in the relative,” for which meaning in the absolute is the presupposed condition.

     When man has reached the limit of knowledge accessible to his mind, he can yet relate to the remaining unfathomable existence or void by faith in an omnipotent, infinitely wise and just deity. I believe that, even without a living God, the act of faith would be valid and meaningful – for faith is included in the endowment of our identity.

     And because we desire to know ourselves, we must experience our own power of faith, not necessarily because in faith we believe correctly, but because perceiving ourselves in the act of faith enlarges our self-knowledge.

     To know himself and the role of his entire being, man must use his power to relate. This is absolutely his sovereign possession and, by employing it, he gives evidence of himself to himself. God, however, all-knowing, needs no such demonstration of his creator identity. His self-knowledge of it would be complete without the test of creation.

     In the end I have written this paper as a personal guide in my own endeavor to distinguish and separate meaning from non-meaning, sense from non-sense. The meaning contained in our being, and in other existences, becomes perceivable to us mainly in the relation of ourselves to the environment. In such a manner, the search in these pages may, over the years in a small measure, help to reveal the content of my own identity.

     This seeking, rewarded at best with only partial finding, is the task of our lives. We are committed to it because insight into the nature of our identity from within is the required condition for insightfully relating to the world without. By so seeking we acknowledge ourselves, in the realization that being is the vessel which holds all the meaning we can ever hope to find.

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The Identity of Meaning - 01

2/15/2016

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We begin this series with the early essay which gives its name to this column - written in 1959. (First of six sections)

The Need for Meaning

     In the course of a daily increasing span of life, events and concepts accumulate to reach gradually a degree of confused complication that becomes unmanageable in its ever waxing quantity. The will to search for a basic principle which endows with meaning the enterprise of life, and all that it entails on the human scale, is at once natural and inevitable.

     These pages intend to examine the condition of meaning, in the hope of excavating a foundation upon which we may think and act – not perhaps with certainty but with, however, a resolution wholly unlike the uncommitted indecision that characterizes the waste of futility.

     From the recognition that we are able to discern meaning in nothing which does not in some manner take effect upon us, we obtain a first indication of a feasible direction in which we may pursue our search.

     Thus we have some reason to at least suspect that the particular way in which one thing makes its impact upon another contains what meaning is to be found, not in either one, but in the relation of each to the other. Consequently, we quite reasonably arrive at units of meaning of variable complexity, which must seek escape from futility in borrowing a reason for their existence by relating to yet further units.

     In this process of continuing and enlarging relationships, the point is ultimately reached where this interpenetration of related meanings is contained in one vast system which comprises all available associations and which, now in its turn, must find a source which will contribute meaning. Such a contribution can no longer be contained within the natural world and would have to be the prerogative of an infinite, almighty, and divine existence.

     Meaning, however, on the level of divinity, is totally incomprehensible to the mind of man. And if this investigation is to continue at all, I must assume that meaning in the lives of human beings takes its place in the natural world and may be understood -- within this deliberate reduction to the measure of man – by the natural powers at our disposal.

     If that assumption be a violation of the essential character of meaning, and if I possibly reduce something to my own scale which, in fact, bears no reduction at all, I would yet be forced to take upon myself the risk of committing such an error. For the realization that, without so risking, I should be deprived of my theme altogether, appears to justify that I confine the problem to humanly manageable proportions, because it does exist validly and perceivably in the earthbound environment of humanity.

Relative or Absolute?

     As long as we look upon the substance of meaning as the result of the associations among all things, we find that these relationships will outdistance us to the point where human intelligence can simply not follow. It is hence necessary to at least make the attempt to discover meaning not in the indebtedness of one thing to the other, but in a more sovereign sense which I should like to name “meaning in the absolute.” – The expression “absolute” here is not an identification of divinity. Its intended interpretation is antonymous to the word “relative,” and therefore close to the Latin root “absolutus.”

     For, in spite of the fact that we have observed that experience with meaning tends to be limited to the effects that invade our lives from the outside, or more briefly, tends to be “meaning in the relative,” each of these sources of relating influences does have a character and quality particularly its own. Quite independent from any ties with its partner in relative meaning, it does have identity, and we shall have to ascertain whether this contains such significance in its own right that we obtain indeed meaning in an absolute sense.

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Johannes Writes

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 11

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 09

The Identity of Meaning - 06

The Identity of Meaning - 01

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