Mondrian and Monet flowers in Paris and Notre Dame as Rhizome

My book on Drawing and Painting languishes in virtuality, somewhere on the servers at KDP, although occasionally on my dashboard I see someone scratches at the file to bring it in to actuality but then after a page or two lets it lapse into the mostly unread. Is the unread like the undead when it reverts back to the virtual? Not quite fully alive? I notice that spell check won't let me consider the spelling of virtuality as valid; so I look it up and find it has a rather esoteric philosophic meaning making its way from Duns Scotus to Charles Sanders Pierce, Bergson, Proust and Deleuze, though not in direct order of descent. It seems it has uses in many domains of intellectual pursuit: Virtual Image in Science, Virtual World in Technology, Virtue in etymology and the Possible in Ontology. The most intriguing is the actuality of the Eucharist as truly embodying the blood and body of Christ: (actual vs virtual), which was held as untrue by the Sacramentarians and supported by Luther.

What I can gather from this divagation is that information needs red-blooded humans to make it truly come alive. Like a revolution needs people in the street willing to spill blood to fulfill the words of its goals.

Seeing an art show in a gallery does fit the bill of live human contact activating art. The reality of the white cube, so close to that of a church with believers, will never die (I hope). 

Mondrian

In Paris I saw a show at the Musee Marmottan Monet of the early work of Mondrian that changed my opinion about Piet. If you put his work into the context of those whom he influenced especially post WW11 American artists he comes across as the progenitor of an arid intellectualization of art. Early Stella for example is an hard-nosed Yankee interpretation of Mondrian. If you see the abstraction in the context of his early work, his painting becomes more tentative and probing. The overall mood of many of his landscapes is reminiscent of the  Hudson River School’s use of luminism to evoke the transcendental. Even as he begins to coax an underlying linear visual structure out of these landscapes the moody light of dawn or dusk remains.

Mondrian

Throughout his career he drew flowers belying my understanding that they were limited to the pre-abstraction stage of his career. The petals are soft and pliable and verge in their organicism on the infinite. On the one hand they could be seen as the antidote to his abstraction, on the other hand the abstraction has a lot of that pliability, a gentle push and pull off of the flat surface of the canvas.  Notions of tenderness and delicacy come to the fore.

Mondrian

This reconsideration of the geist of his work helped me reconsider the work of the late Monet on permanent display downstairs from Mondrian. My first response is that he is a better abstract painter than his imitator Guston. And like Mondrian was moved by the organic growth of flowers, although his flowers are more explosive like Dylan Thomas’s green fuse.

Monet

So the role of the flower seems formative in abstraction. At least in Europe.

The plug has been pulled on Notre Dame’s magic. I heard from my sister who spoke with someone involved in funding the repairs that the scaffolding put up for the renovation pre-fire is so completely welded to the stonework that there is a risk of collapse of the building if they are separated. The notion of hierarchy and the blending of heaven and earth embodied in the building have been severed. I am sure anti-hierarchical Bataille would have loved this and Deleuze would encourage leaving it as is or turn it into a structural rhizome as part of the infrastructure of the urban sprawl.

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Response to 'theory and matter' in AIA

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/theory-and-matter/
(with a much appreciated acknowledgement of my role in coining zombie formalism in paragraph 19)


I finally got around to reading the article by Rubinstein. I thought problematic his idea that American artists should take the lead of the French and apply more theory to their work. It could be helpful but there is something anti-American about it. I recall Bataille's observation of swaggering American soldiers in Paris after the war who seemed to embody the immanence of the ideal in the real.http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/02/impossiblity-of-transcendence-in.htm.We don't separate the ideal from the real, so that we can achieve the ideal only through action.

lt has been said that to understand the Deconstructionist mindset you have to understand the context within which it was created.i.e. French culture, which is Cartesian, hierarchical and oriented around the power of the State from Louis XIV to Hollande. It is hard to just break away and live the nomadic lifestyle that Deleuze and Guattari set off against the hierarchical; you are only allowed to intellectually deconstruct it. I remember the shock of leaving the squalor of New York of the Seventies for Paris, where I lived or should I say scrounged for three years, which, although it suffered from the same economic malaise never let it show.The streets were clean, the parks beautifully maintained.The State made sure that the raw energy of economics, as it waned or waxed, did not spoil the transcendent beauty of their city. Maybe we spontaneously deconstruct on a constant basis; there is something nomadic at the heart of the American experience, whereas the French turn nomadism into an intellectual game until everything blows up as in '68 or the French Revolution.

For the poet and dreamer Paris is seductive with its overlay of history and hedonism. I remember the poet Ralph from Nebraska whom I met at the Chez Michel in Montmartre, whose owner, a retired actor wore a Stetson hat. Ralph conjured up ghosts of Paris past wherever he wandered. It were as though he needed a lifetime to recover from the pragmatic plains of the Midwest. Was it any different for Henry Miller who left the raw utilitarian life of Brooklyn or Thomas Merton who yearned for a sweetness that he seemed to recall from his youth in France? He thought it embodied in the well-behaved school children dressed in uniforms. So different from the French youth of the banlieues of today saturated in American hip-hop culture.

Impossiblity of transcendence in American Art

I remember an artist, who had recently lost his wife to cancer,  telling me of his inquiry into what various religions had to say about the afterlife. All I remember is what he had to say about the Mormons, for whom heaven is just like the world we live in on earth,  just permanent.When you die, you will be greeted by all your dead kin and I assume go on pretty much as you did here, but, forever, as one big happy family. Such a belief doesn't make the real inferior to the ideal, but in a strangely counter-intuitive fashion reinforces the validity of the here and now. It is as though the higher realm of heaven gives its divine seal of approval to life on earth. I wonder if this belief is quintessentially American. I read recently in the diary of Bataille, where he described the arrival of the American soldiers in Paris at the end of WW11, and how with their swagger seemed to epitomize a certain immanence of the ideal in the real. Americans don't struggle to transcend the real but are masters of manipulating it and reinforcing it. It explains the predominance of Pragmatism in American philosophy.There are problems to be solved and social injustices to be abolished. Pragmatism  dominates the airways: on cable TV with their shows on loggers,truckers, fisherman. There is no time for meditating on the meaning of the universe when you got a lien on your equipment and have to produce to make the payments. The strangeness of existence, the why and wherefore of our individual life is not an issue, except as raw survival.  I think the sitcoms we see today and those of the past show American Families shoehorned into a kind of eternal present and through the magic of film are eternally young in the endless reruns,(is that the Mormon heaven on earth?) until you see somewhere that the actors have died of drug overdoses or god forbid die of old age.Whether the family is traditional or not,  the story is the same old notion of trying to get along despite one's differences.

Richard Rorty, an American Pragmatist philosopher, is sympathetic to deep thinkers who problematize everything as long as they don't get in the way of the liberal agenda of according  more and more rights to more and more social subsets. We have to be above all good citizens. Strange thoughts of our origins and destinies are to be kept to yourselves. He sees them as intriguing mental exercises, which when applied to society, result in the violence of German and Japanese politics between and during the two World Wars. The Nazi's fell under the spell of Nietzsche and the Overman and the Japanese fell under the spell of Zen. On the one hand you had the will to power and on the other the will to nothingness. On the one hand you had the Holocaust, on the other Kamakazi pilots. A nuanced study of Nietzsche's thought and Zen Buddhism find that both belief systems can be interpreted to be heuristic attempts to control excesses of self-assertion, that Nietzsche thought the German's prone to, and infatuation with the void, which Zen tries to disabuse its adherents of. Because they put the region of that struggle within the individual's consciousness and not in the self as part of a community, makes them susceptible to thymotic excess. No more drama of the saints trying to be at one with God. No more struggles with right or wrong within the soul; the battles are all societal. Heidegger deconstructs consciousness as too wrapped up in Christian theology and wants through Dasein to place it back in the world. Our sitcoms do the same as they disabuse us of any notion of individual superiority to the group.The dads are all either castrated clodhoppers or bigoted buffoons.

I have been reading a book by Malcolm Bull. Never heard of him until I stumbled across his book on Nietzsche at Barnes and Noble. Browsing in bookstores will soon be a thing of the past,alas!!
He seems to be a student of Deleuze and  contemporary social theory. He quotes on several occasions  Kojeve, the famous interpreter of Hegel, who was responsible for introducing Sartre to the work of Hegel and Heidegger, an enounter which generated Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". Kojeve sees humanity in the modern world as  resembling more and more a herd. Unlike Nietzsche, who was horrified by this process toward a mass culture, Kojeve embraced it as inevitable, beneficial and sees it as a sort of negative transcendence. We would now transcend our humanity by becoming more animal. Malcolm Bull says:"Becoming animal is becoming modern, perhaps as Kojeve suggests the future of modernity".  Kojeve imagines  this new humanity(if "human" would even apply any more to this new species)would "perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas." No more solo parts.No more tension between the hero and the chorus. Maybe we will all look like "Swamp People" who in the latest ad are made to resemble their prey.By the way, Kojeve is one of the fathers of the European Common Market.

Not a very pretty picture:the Mormon happy family as sclerosis of the ideal in the real and on the other hand an animalization of the race which is masked as humanism. All that science does with its logos is to provide a rationale for this herding of the species.It makes it more reasonable.

see my essay on Heide Hatry