If I were to judge like a Pyrrhonian Skeptic while at the same time a Dialectical Materialist the "Objective" Art here based up Pon (Sir) Gurdjieff's own words, even "Real" Art can be collapse-able to Idealism and, at the same movement, is forsaken to even make Plato's Ideal Forms look like standard shapes.
To focus on the blurb before going into the article: of course there are no accidents but there is no determined fate. Things can be necessitated and those we can definitely account for, but how do we account for the unaccountable or at least ones we have yet to account for? We call them contingencies, the play-offs every necessity that matters to its creation. In this way, something is still necessity bound yet doesn't need to be have necessitated from one source nor fully from two sources. In this cheeky account of detailing, the artist who goes drunk but wants to paint themself drunk still has made "real" art just as if the artist were to imagine if they were drunk how they would paint themself. Even the post-modernist artists, the surrealists, abstract-expressionist and those before them.
Yet the real challenge isn't if we can prove that they know why and how they were doing it but the realms of conscious-unconscious activities and if we can make a clear-cut case for when someone was completely unconscious and completely conscious. Because there is no leeway for when the artist can dive into unconsciousness, because that entails not a "real" art piece. No leeway to suggest when an artist unconsciously becomes conscious of what they paint, because that still eliminates them from producing "real" art even if they subvert what they are painting. As we can technically say these are tainted by unconsciousness, so they ought not to be "real" art. But the biggest hypocrisy falls upon the example of "real" art in this category: Ancient Eastern art. As there's ton of ideological things we knew they were conscious off to paint, yet were they unconsciously reproducing society in the art they created or where they independent actors that so happen to form a collective around Neo-Confucian, Buddhist or Tengriist Ideals? This ambiguity cannot be properly resolved and clear-cut in this sense.
But if we were to abandon the conscious-unconscious dichotomy of art production, we are still left with another Subjective-Objective impossibility which cannot be fully delegated to pure Subjectivity or pure Objectivity. And that delegation of which belongs to "real" art is that the author's will can and should only create one impression. Yet impressionability is hard to manage even with individual agents who are spoiled by the biases of their society. What could be "The Mosaic of a Mural of Alexander the Great winning the war against Xerxes" to all Greeco-Roman people would be a great cause of celebration, to Iranian and pro-Iranian people a great cause of distress and to everyone not involved either a good piece depicting a scene of victory that is skewed in making the Greek-Macedonians heroic. Yet Greeco-Roman people can be wholly divided on this plain on impressionability: the military in clear favor, historians giving a slight chuckle on exaggeration, non-combatants at awe and slaves under such giving too wide range of impressions. So the only way for an impression to even be secure is if society where unchanging and collectively the same - of which we are not granted this guarantee from him.
Of which, this "Real" art is so Idealistically bound in the Philosophy of Æsthetics that it makes Plato's Ideal Forms like standard shapes. Of which it might possibly exist, yet of which we will have an impossibility to find in our current state of operations. One which after many exacting order of necessities playing themselves off for which we can see the mystical "Real" Art exacted upon the Ancient Eastern World into a World-wide phenomenon for which it shall be agreed that we can produce "Real" Art in accordance to Pon Gurdjieff's guidelines. Yet given the circumstances even looking into the question of whether the Ancient East can clearly classify for such, it may just be an Ideal for which we can be infinitely ever close to but never reach. Where we needn't debate the impressions but feel secure in the exact meaning of a work. Until that day comes, the World Spirit (Dialectical Idealism) has yet to see this actualized and the material conditions (Dialectical Materialism) has yet to give the ability for artisans to produce consciously their works upon the World.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from: