Bass viol made in Hamburg, Germany in 1726 by Martin Voigt. Ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ebony ribs with ivory stringing. From the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.
(via manoelwilliam)
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.
—William Shakespeare. (1613). Henry VIII.
Woxys. (2008). “Zebra: Perfect Symmetry.”
(via readyorknot)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1878). “The Nymphaeum.”
In this view, beauty resides in the tension between two mental spaces, a presentation and a reference, a tension maintained by the phenomenological impossibility of subordinating one of these to the other. When this conjuncture is obtained, it triggers an acute awareness both of the sensory forms of things and of their emotional meaning—a momentary polarization of attention, a split or crisis that can affect our relations to things, persons, and thoughts very deeply.
In the scope of human evolution, the early cultural presence of artistry in the visual register, and apparently also in the auditory (cf. the early appearance of musical instruments) and the motor registers (dance), may have been of great importance to the emergence of symbolization and abstraction in general. The artistic version of the iconic double-input space network leads our minds toward intentional 2-D graphics as a “scriptural” possibility—that is, the idea of intentionally and systematically producing formal events, thereby calling upon abstract forces to accomplish tasks (cf. spelling and spell-casting) in relation to the idealized referential contents.
If this hypothesis is true, then mental space semantics is an archaic semantic format which gave rise to art—and, through aesthetic semantics, perhaps to primitive mathematics (metrics, numbering, set orderings, classification, calculus) and eventually to verbal language. In the latter, pairings of form and meaning, supported only by a gestural syntax—the “shadow” image of the situational scenario, with its acts, agents, and case morphology constitute grammars and build up of wildly unrealistic, delirious, or poetic utterances as easily as they do concrete accounts of states of affairs.
But if the millennia of human cultural evolution provide the basic temporal perspective necessary to understand what art is about, what would be the role of art history, the historical development of dramatically distinct styles in painting? At a minimum, we will have to consider the dynamic historicity of manners, styles, norms, preferences, and critical discourses intimately related to art, and try to understand their “ontology”: if beauty itself is trans-historical, what is it that makes artists modify their ways of pursuing it?
Brandt, Per Aage (2006). “Form and Meaning in Art,” in Mark Turner, (ed.),
The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Romany WG. (2012). “More Peacock.” Image of the Castello di Sammezzano in Reggello, Tuscany, Italy.
(via mopoki)
Frederic Fontenoy. (1988). “M # 17” from Métamorphose. Slit-scan photographic self-portrait.
Andrei Artemyeff. (n.d.) “Albina.”
Crookhaven. (2007). “The hand that knew too much.” Photograph of statue of Socrates in the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland.
(via destina-terre)
Ernesto Gismondi for Artemide.
A Gonzo Futurist Manifesto
Justin Pickard’s “Gonzo Futurist Manifesto” (PDF) is as fun a read as its title would suggest.
“The gonzo futurist is resilient. She works smart, not hard. She has one eye on the ‘adjacent possible’ (Johnson, 2011), switches codes, and contributes to the commons. She may be privileged, but has no time for competition, alpha male dick-waving, or beggar-thy-neighbour. Her success does not come at your expense.”
Image by Victoria Coles.
Jonathan Kitchen. (n.d.). “Floating.”
(via androphilia)