Friday, May 23, 2014

The double message

Frank Auerbach Self Portrait
sold for £423,700 in 2008
In a letter to The Times in 1971 Frank Auerbach wrote: "Your correspondents tend to write of paintings as objects of financial value or passive beauty. For painters they are source material; they teach and they set standards." And this is much the same thing as T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote - in the September 1919 issue of The Egoist - that the poet "must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past"

Jacob Bronowski, as always, gives the wide-angle view: "The characteristic feature of all human cultures is that they make artifacts and this is really what we mean when we sat that the human mind is creative. The artifacts begin as simple stone tools, some of which are at the least several hundred thousand years old. What characterizes these and later artifacts is the double message that we read in them all., from the first chipped piece of stone: that tells us what they are for and also, at the same time, how they were made. So the artifact is an invention which carries its own blueprint with it - as we look at it, we see forward into its use and backward into its manufacture, and it extends our culture in both senses." - The Visionary Eye, p.65

From the 50s to the 70s Auerbach kept up a weekly habit of visiting The National Gallery and making drawings from paintings. This simple discipline of work, work, work reminds me of Rilke's comments about Rodin; in a letter (10 August 1903) he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé:
"wird es mir offenbar, daß ich ihm, Rodin, folgen muß: nicht in einem bildhauerischen Umgestalten meines Schaffens, aber in der inneren Anordnung des künstlerischen Prozesses; nicht bilden muß ich lernen von ihm, aber tiefes Gesammelstein um des Bildens willen. Arbeiten muß ich lernen, arbeiten, Lou, das fehlt mir so! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - sagte er mir einmal, als ich ihm von den bangen Abgründen sprach, die zwischen meinen guten Tagen aufgetan sind; er konnte es kaum mehr verstehen, er, der ganz Arbeit geworden ist (so sehr, daß alle seine Gebärden schlichte Bewegungen sind, aus dem Handwerk, genommen!)."
"It is becoming apparent that I must follow him, Rodin: not in a sculptural reshaping of my creative work, but in the inner disposition of the artistic process; I must learn from him not how to fashion but deep composure for the sake of fashioning. I must learn to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - he said to me once, when I spoke to him of the frightening abysses that open up between my good days, he could hardly understand it any longer he, who has become all work (so much so that his gestures are homely movements taken from manual work!)"


Tuesday, May 13, 2014

An immediate sense of the general

Ever since I watched The Ascent of Man as a child, and read several of his books while I was (briefly) at university, Jacob Bronowski has been a significant —and, as is often the way, a sometimes unconscious — influence.

In a recent interview I did for Tincture Journal, I responded to a question about the relation between my work with designing computer systems and my poetry-writing by trying to talk about the similarities: "Seeing that two distinct things are in some respect the same is the vital insight of abstraction, which allows you to make metaphors, write reusable software components, devise mathematical theorems, and make scientific breakthroughs. “My love is like a red, red rose” is the same sort of equation as Newton’s realisation that the force that pulls a falling apple is the same force that guides the orbiting moon (that is, the discovery of gravity united the hitherto separate domains of terrestrial and celestial mechanics). Seeing that two distinct things are in some important way the same is the key ability of the human brain, and—in very basic terms—must be what allows us to learn from experience. As no two moments are alike in all details—as Heraclitus said, “No person ever steps in the same river twice”—we need that crucial power of abstraction to be able to see that the current situation is in some way the same as previous remembered experience. We need a fast, reliable memory, and dreams to train the pattern-matching neural networks, to support this essential metaphor-making ability. Mathematics and poetry are the highest expressions of that same basic evolutionarily-determined skill."

Browsing through old books, I realised that Bronowski had put the matter more succinctly, clearly, and deeply in 'The Nature of Art' from his book The Visionary Eye: "There is a common pattern to all knowledge: what we meet is always particular, yet what we learn is always general. In science we reason from particular instances to the general laws that we suppose to lie behind them, and though we do not know how we guess at these laws, we know very well how to test them. But in a poem the specific story and the detailed imagery that carries it create in us an immediate sense of the general. The experience is made large and significant precisely by the small and insignificant touches. Here the particular seems to become general of itself: the detail is its own universal."

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Taking a mechanical turn


Bernard Stiegler in a 2010 article ('The Age of De-proletarianisation') refers to Bartók's 1937 lecture on mechanical music: "At the beginning of the 20th century, perception took a mechanical turn – making it possible, for example, to repeatedly listen to music without knowing how to make music. Bartók drew attention to this in relation to the radio, when he recommended only listening to music while following along visually with the musical score."

Stephen Hough has released a wonderful iPad app where you can do just that: the score is presented as well as three different camera angles filming the performance, and all of these play in sync and of course you can move freely around in the piece with the swipe if a finger. There is also an intriguing piano roll view which shows the notes of the left hand and right hand as little scrolling streaks in different colours.

Bartók was concerned with the body's role in the production of music, and to some extent echoed an aritcle in a special issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch on Music and Machines (October/November 1926) contributed by Hans Heinsheimer, who worked as a music publisher for Universal Edition (where he supported Kurt Weill, Leoš Janáček, and Alban Berg).

Stiegler asserts that "the socialisation of digital technologies, as with every new technology, is initially perceived as a kind of poison (as Plato said about writing, even though it was the basis of law and rational thought)." Perhaps we are too far steeped in the consumerist disenfranchisement from our lives to feel the poison at work: as Stiegler writes elsewhere in the same article ..."a good consumer is both utterly passive and irresponsible" He concludes with an injunction to grasp the digital nettle: "Like writing, and according to Plato’s word, the digital is a pharmakon, that is, at once a poison, a remedy and a scapegoat. Only the digital itself, insofar as it can be a remedy, enables an effective struggle against the poison which it also is"