Sight - An Oracular Insight ( A Singapore Art blog)

Bansky is coming to Hong Kong

2008-04-07T11:23:00.004+08:00

Number-Trance-Face in Argentina

2008-04-03T07:24:00.002+08:00

Number Trance Face

Saturday 29th March 2008
O. Fournier Galleries @ Mendoza, Argentina

A major exhibition of paintings by Rajinder Singh about the numerical equivalent of lovely

(12thFeb 2008) The management of O. Fournier Galleries, a premier art gallery in Mendoza Argentina is proud to present Number Trance Face, a long-planned and exciting new exhibition of paintings by international multicultural artist, Rajinder Singh. This is the first time that paintings of this successful and prolific Malaysian artist, who was recently selected as one of 20 emerging artists to represent Asia by a juried competition in Hong Kong, will be shown in Argentina. The grand opening of the exhibition will take place on Saturday the 29th of March at the O. Fournier Galleries at 12 noon. The President and founder of O. Fournier Mendoza, José Manuel Ortega Gil-Fournier will open the exhibition.

Artist Rajinder Singh’s FACES collection was launched in France in June 2007. The large format paintings of women in Rajinder’s life are painted using numbers that represent the numerical equivalent of beauty. “The exhibition will feature paintings of faces of women who have exerted a strong influence in my life. Wife, sister, actresses, radio jock, author etc..what is in their faces that make them such strong women? What is it that they share in the shape of their eyes, their lips, their noses? Each face is painted using only numbers and mathematical equations as I attempt to ask the question: what is the numerical equivalent of lovely?” says Singh.

“My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a sceptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic – in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction. In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour”, continues Singh.

Rajinder invites his audience to view his paintings through a sieve – a sieve made of mathematical objects that pack a substantial amount of information on the way we might view beauty. He invites viewers to engage not analytically, neither synthetically, but in a way that combines both modes and feel/intuit the correspondence in the aesthetics of the combined beauty of my mathematics and the underlying beauty of my faces.

But most of all he wants his audience to evaluate mathematics and its place in our lives. Is mathematics something necessary for life as “art” and not just “fact” and does its value lie in, as Polkinghorne said, as an “abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe”, or is it the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?

Rajinder’s paintings are beautiful paintings of beautiful people about beauty, both physical and mathematical. And perhaps the mathematical equivalent of lovely might even act as the perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to this supreme force of human experience affecting real and lasting transformation in us. Art and maths are but languages through which we attempt to understand that which is ineffable.

About the artist:
Rajinder’s extensive background in Mathematics is the driving force behind his successful art practice. He has been painting all his life. His work has seen considerable exposure worldwide. Rajinder was recently selected as one of 20 emerging artists to represent Asia by a juried competition in Hong Kong. He will be showing in London, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Korea, New York and Argentina in 2008. He lives and works in Singapore.

The nature of intellectual aesthetic experience

2008-02-21T15:11:00.003+08:00

I am a painter with a background in mathematics. I paint what has come to be known as ‘math paintings’. It is one of those unfortunate terms that will dog me forever that say so little about my work. But I do paint with mathematics. I spend months developing complex mathematics related to the subject I choose to paint. I get passionately involved with mathematical definitions, theorems, proofs and numbers that I find exciting and beautiful and that describe a certain aspect of my chosen subject matter e.g. beauty if I am painting faces of women. Once I am done with the research, I use the resultant outpouring of mathematics to paint. I literally paint with mathematics. There is often very little on my canvas that is not painstakingly constructed using layered equations, numbers and symbols.

But why do I do this? I have spent years working with mathematics and I am familiar with the excitement that a good piece of mathematics can generate. There are some proofs and theorems and geometrical objects that I find exceptionally beautiful and I have often experienced a racing of pulse when I stumble upon a great mathematical solution. My reaction to my mathematics is often more intellectual than it is emotional. When I call my mathematics beautiful, I have an aesthetic experience which I choose to call an intellectual aesthetic experience (IAE). An intellectual aesthetic experience is intellectual and is elicited by the mind’s experience of an intellectual object. I paint to construct conduits to tap onto this experience. My paintings and everything that goes into making them are special purpose vessels of the IAE. Does that make any sense?

Why mathematics? Scientific theories can be beautiful. Engineering systems are often referred to as aesthetically pleasing. (Much of what you see in Biennales around the world today appeal chiefly to the IAE, in my opinion). Also, mathematics is not a spectator sport and too many people are turned off by it, thanks largely to our education systems.

To answer this question, I want to spend the rest of this article to talk about the special place that mathematics occupies beside aesthetic experience. First, consider the famous question - “…How are synthetic judgments apriori possible?” which begins Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant proposes that the objective validity of mathematical knowledge rests on the fact that it is based on the apriori forms of our sensibility which condition the possibility of experience. If we have apriori conditions to sensibility, then we have knowledge that is more than just logical. If we say, ‘It is either snowing or not snowing’ we have an analytic proposition. An analytic proposition is about logical relations and not empirical facts. Its truth rests on definition and logic alone. Empirical knowledge on the other hand is synthetic. It tells us more than mere logical relations. For the special case of apriori synthetic knowledge that is independent of experience, we can have knowledge (more than just logic) without experiencing it. Mathematics is this special case of synthetic apriori knowledge. Mathematics, according to Kant is based on the preconditions of experience itself. So, mathematics is closer to the way we experience than we might like to think.

But in the last 200 years, the above apriori synthetic/analytic boundary was challenged by the introduction of non-Euclidean geometry, as well as Turing’s halting and Godel’s incompleteness theorem. With non-Euclidean geometry for instance, apriori synthetic truth is revealed as simply a logical possibility. And if apriori synthetic truths condition the possibility of experience, experience itself becomes malleable. Once we learn the new preconditions, we are free to change the way we experience, altering its very definition. We see here the finitude of Reason, the central theme to Kant’s philosophy. Nature does not speak to Reason. The ‘other’ is mute. Reason is not the mirror reflecting the light of Nature. We know this because it is incompatible with the very essence of empirical science – that we cannot conduct experiments independent of context. The power of human Reason is not in its universality but in articulating its own boundaries against non-Reason. Mathematics is a special form of dialogue between Reason and the ‘other ‘( non-Reason) and Mathematics allows the ‘other’ to reveal its authoring otherness. Mathematics thus becomes a true counterpart to poetry in that both seek ways to transcend the radical finitude of Reason. Aesthetic experience therefore is a constitutive component of human rationality.

I have outlined (too briefly) how mathematics and aesthetic experience might be related. I hope to continue in part II with an in depth discussion on the nature of IAE.

The Aliya and Farouk Collection

2008-01-22T15:24:00.000+08:00

I had my first ever solo exhibition in Malaysia on the 18th of April 2007. A preview of the paintings was held the day before, unannounced -for the select few revered nobles of the art world, the names of whom are mentioned in hushed reverence in galleries around Kuala Lumpur. It was a somber affair in a big airy gallery in the posher parts of Kuala Lumpur, the twin-tower capital city of Malaysia. I sat in my hotel away from the galley in tremulous prayer, not knowing what to expect.

I walked into my gallery the next day greeted by excited chatter. My stars had aligned. There were five paintings with red dots on them. I was overjoyed. And it was no less than Farouk Khan and his wife who had graced my soft opening with their presence and deigned to set their hearts on five of my larger pieces. The Khans are the most prominent collectors in town, as I came to find out. You cannot talk about the Malaysian art-world without referring to Farouk and Aliya who have, according to many accounts, singled-handedly, turned the fortunes of the Malaysian contemporary art scene around in the last few years.

How can two people have such an impact on a whole generation of artists in a country that rivals Indonesia for its output of great works of art? This was all new to me and I got interested. Farouk and Aliya invited me over to their plush home – a home which could put any gallery and any national art museum in South East Asia to shame. I wanted to be one of the first few to get a preview of Farouk’s much talked about but yet unpublished catalogue of his collection – a cool 600 pieces of the very best of Malaysian contemporary art – and to have a chat about The Khan’s stupendous influence in the Malaysian art world.

I am aware of what is going in Indonesia just now. Buying contemporary art is becoming fashionable. A similar sort of transition is taking place in Kuala Lumpur. The works of new contemporary artists all around Malaysia are gaining reputation and the prices are going up. No more are these artists scorned as they were for the past 10 years. No more is their art considered ‘unmarketable’. A quick review of the going ons in the galleries in Kuala Lumpur will highlight this trend. Whole exhibitions are selling out. Collectors are competing for the same few pieces of art long before exhibitions open.

This is very different from only a few years ago. There was a pressure from the Malaysian “old masters” and the curators and critics failed to recognize the changing face of Malaysian art. They hesitated for a long time to acknowledge the powerful phenomenon of contemporary art. Their position as mentors to public taste made them too cautions; their myopia made them cling for the unchanging and safe hold of the old. Farouk and Aliya lament this failed curatorial process as it inhibited the progress of art in the region. Says Farouk, “…. from the time we started collecting art, the emphasis in the Malaysian art scene amongst collectors was more on pioneer era art and heritage art. There was no movement out of this and, we, from the very beginning rejected the stereo type collecting. The more we got into it, the more we felt that that was the thing to do. Most interestingly was the fact that the contemporary art that was available was of the best art of the period. This was largely due to the fact that institution collections were trapped in the pioneer era and the curators of the day were for various reasons rejecting the contemporary art movement. As the institutions were not collecting, most of the corporate collectors who were very predominant in the Malaysian art scene were also therefore not able to follow the art movement and changes that were happening.”

It took the visionary outlook of the Khans to bring contemporary art in Malaysia to its full and true expression. “We actually felt a sense of deep commitment to ensure our collection became an important collection of the period. We became committed to the task of forming a contemporary collection of Malaysian art which was till then fairly non existent. It amazed us that such a great body of work was available for us to pick up at extremely affordable prices. We have always wondered if whether such an opportunity would have lent it self to us in any other country in the world.”

So what has caused this vacuum in the last ten years? Who has been tightening the noose around the life-energies of a whole era? “The state of art in Malaysia was in the doldrums. There were great artists doing great work but it was being unappreciated. We actually credit our collection to what we term the "failed curatorial process" in the country and in the region. Museum curators and art writers were more important than artists. They were obnoxious and arrogant and in our opinion lazy. In the 10 years of collecting Malaysian art it always amazed us that we never ran into the major curators of the day. It was clear to us that those who were spending their own money were in fact more diligent than those spending the public's money. I have never had any qualms about stating very openly that to a very large extent, the institutional collection of Malaysian art in Malaysia and in the region was not representative of the Malaysian art scene. It was a representation of the "failed curatorial process.”.”

I, for one, am glad for the changing landscape of tastes in Malaysia. I am indebted to The Khans especially for their commitment to the new and exciting art of my proud nation. I can understand what it must have been like for them, alone in their pursuits, hard-pressed perhaps at times in justifying their expensive purchases. It could have been but a fancy -an isolated manifestation of anomaly which might never have become a broad popular movement. Today they own the finest collection of Malaysian art anywhere. I am proud to be part of it.

Painting by Numbers - by Ken Feinstein

2008-01-13T23:06:00.000+08:00

( See www.unprimed.com)

What is a digital image? If it is an image created by the manipulation of digits by a program, then Rajinder Singh’s portraits are digital art. The fact that he doesn’t use a computer is irrelevant. An issue for those who need to protect their fiefdom’s. What is happening is a very complex and dense use of numbers and mathematics. How do we use numbers? What does it say? What can it say? What can’t it say?

The theorist Vilem Flusser has written about how the text as image came to a crisis point in the early 20th century.1 The crisis was came about when the written word became incomprehensible. to make his point, he doesn’t go to Joyce or the Surrealists, but to Einstein. E=mc2, a simple statement that means more than it can contain. How do we understand this? e go back to visual images. Images based on concepts, mathematics and technology. What Flusser calls the “technical image”. An not an image of technique, but an image of technology. Singh’s images are images of both technique and technology. They pile numbers upon numbers, until images appear. The text passes through its own crisis of meaning, coming through the other side as pure image. A face, the face of a woman springs out of the numbers. the theoretical comes back to the human. How he got there remains unreadable, but we don’t care. We have arrived with him to a gaze that looks back at us as much as we look at it.

This gaze is made of numbers literally piled on top of each other. Mapping the face as we do a mountain. Singh asked where can we find the emotion in numbers. This is where it is, in the peaks and valleys of the face. The building up of layers of colour tagged to different number sets. These numbers sets could be stock quotes, flight schedules, scores from the Premier League, the seemly disconnected events, which make up our life. And we turn to the face to se the culmination of our life. We “read” a face for this. The cliche goes that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but the face is the map of experience.

Singh began this collection of faces by asking where is the “lovely” in mathematics. Einstein defined the best scientific and mathematical solutions as the simplest and most elegant. The most elegant is an aesthetic judgement. Here is the art in math. We understand, no we expect the aesthetic judgement in art. The aesthetic helps us define the form of the language of art. Like the rules for the construction of a sentence. Math being among other things the language of science. Yet Einstein is defining the scientific by the artistic. Wittgenstein proved that something can not be defined as a subset of itself. So we have to go elsewhere to define what makes the scientific. The amateur violinist Einstein knows that we have to go to an older system to legitimate the scientific system. If the aesthetic can be used to define science and math is its language than the lovely can be found there. Humming through with Pythagorus’ celestial harmonies. We should never forget that math and music are tied so tightly together that it can be hard to untangle them.

The lovely is not found in the numbers themselves, but in how the numbers are used. The place where the digits are used to create meaning. Many philosophers have agreed that meaning is created by the relationship, the give and take of the conversation. This conversation can be between people or a work of art and a viewer, a book and a reader or even a mathematician and an algorithm. The relational is the core of the artistic experience. It is a conversation each side enters into. Jean-Franзios Lyotard sees this as part of game theory2. Emmanuel Levinas finds G-d there3.

Here we are back to the gaze. the work looks at us knowing that we are looking at it. It is a gaze looking for its return. The return is the play of the game. We set the rules and we engage. It is Lyotard’s conversation. It is the relational. An inclusive act. An ethical act. An act which as draws on in to respond, to finish the conversation. Because with out the other of the viewer, it is just a monologue going out to nowhere. The work calls, we respond. It asks, we answer. We may ask of the work and demand an answer back, but we can not do this with out answering first.

Play, playfulness, things we forget to think about with art any more. As statements like this one are written and as theorists become critics, works are discussed very solemnly. Maybe too solemnly. Singh’s paintings are combining two things that are playful in nature algorithms and painting. Algorithms are an important element in game theory. Game theory drives much of the mathematics being developed today. It is used in creating the probabilities used for forecasting the weather, quantum mechanics and managing hedge funds. But at its heart is the concept of play. Flusser talks about play in relation to the use of an apparatus, such as a computer.4 We experiment when we play. We try it one way and then try it another until we like what we get. This is the way we live in our digital world. Every day as we use our computers more and more we are playing more and more. It has become the nature of how we work. It is the nature of how we create work. It is some thing we have learned from art. It is how we can strive to find the lovely in numbers, art or life. Here is where Rajinder Singh finds his worlds coming together.

1 Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.
2 Thebaud, Jean-Loup and Jean-Franзois Lyotard. Just Gaming, University of Minnesota Press, 1985
3 Levinas, Emanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, Continuum Internationa Publishing Group, 2006.
4 Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.

Ken Feinstein is multimedia artist & theorist. Both his written and art works address the relationship of the work of art and the audience. He has been exhibited in museums & galleries in China, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Russia as well as the United States. His last solo show was Let A Thousand Videos Bloom at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York in 2004

He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design, & Media at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. See www.kennethfeinstein.com

A writeup from Adam Gerard, Brand Champion - Tiger Translate

2007-11-26T21:45:00.000+08:00

Following a recent call for submissions of artwork that reached across the Asia Pacific region, Tiger Beer is delighted to announce that new work by Dr Rajinder Singh (Malaysia) has been selected to join the growing, international body of work that makes up Tiger Translate.

Tiger Translate is a platform to support emerging Asian artists from all creative disciplines including painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, animation and music. Now in its third year, Tiger Translate consists of a global series of events and exhibitions held in countries from New Zealand to Singapore, from Thailand to the UK, from Vietnam to Denmark.

Dr Singh’s stunning work was in response to the theme ENERGY. As Tiger Beer embodies the energy, colour and variety of modern Asia, artists were asked to visualize ENERGY in the context of contemporary Asia.

For more information, please visit www.tigertranslate.com

Les Fruits de la Vigne

2007-11-15T22:28:00.000+08:00

I am totally chuffed to be invited as the surprise guest artist at Singapore's grandest affair..see attached leaflet. There will be amazing people there that have made a name for themselves from all over the world. It will be a grand night.
See here

An interview with artist Boo Sze Yang

2007-11-12T19:22:00.000+08:00

Early last month, Utterly Art in Singapore showcased artist Boo Sze Yang's amazing exhibition of paintings in his solo exhibition entitled house of God. Utterly art's bimonthly flyer appeared in my inbox on the 1st of October, announcing: "Explore the majesty of the monumental in Singapore artist Boo Sze Yang's fourth solo exhibition HOUSE OF GOD". I gave the flyer a quick glance and liked the pictures of Boo's paintings so much that I decided I must talk to Boo and soon..Here is an excerpt from my email conversation with the artist.

Currently a full-time lecturer in the Fine Art Degree programme at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Boo holds a Master of Arts in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, the University of the Arts London, UK. He has participated in exhibition nationally and internationally, including the Third ASEAN Traveling Exhibition (1993), Singapore Art (1997), the Asian International Art Exhibition (Japan 1999 / China 2001 / Korea 2002 / Philippines 2005), and Nokia Singapore Art (2001) and held his first overseas solo exhibition in Seoul, Korea in 2005. The underlining philosophy in his work is the notion of identity as a “performative” act, where one is engaged in a constant process of identification, de-identification and re-identification. The act of painting itself is performative. In his paintings, the paint builds and destroys simultaneously, concealing as much as it is revealing.

Boo:"I am not a Christian, but I have always enjoyed visiting cathedrals and churches whenever I travel to Europe. What strikes me most is the tranquility and inner peace I feel when I step into these spaces, bounded by monumental columns and huge arches. The interior is usually dim and lit naturally by rays of lights filtering through the vaults and arched windows. Strangely, the more run-down these cathedrals or churches, the stronger it evokes in me a sense of optimism in life. Maybe ruins are often romanticized to imply decline or decay, but I think the moment we encounter ruins, that is when we may begin to learn to act positively towards life. Man seems to act most spirit courageously and human when tragedy struck such as the Tsunami or the case of 911 in New York."

Boo: "House of God is a series of paintings on places of worship (cathedrals and art museums alike), which are executed in a most unflattering manner – expressive, gestural and chaotic, appearing more like ruins then a glorification. Here, the act of painting is central. It is very much like a sparring session between the artist and the image. The painting process is intensive, spontaneous, precarious and re-active. The rendered images are gestures of fleeting moments of our perception of reality - illusive and constantly changing."

Rajinder: Your choice of subject matter - was there any particular reason you chose to paint the interior of churches? What made you choose the churches you painted?

Boo: I was thinking about how we are never able to escape from the situation of negotiating with power and sometimes inevitably have to submit ourselves to it. Life is always about negotiation. Art provides a means to question and think about issues concerning life, faith and death. I do not subscribe to any religion, but I do feel that religion is important as a guiding light for most people.

Rajinder: Any anecdotes you can share with us trying to get permission to paint churches? What was the response of the crowd around you?

Boo: All the paintings were done in my studio using photographs I took during my trips.

Rajinder: How long were you in Europe? Did you paint the paintings for your HOG exhibition all in the one trip there? Did you paint them from photographs?

Boo: I spent 3 weeks in Barcelona, Toulouse, Nice, Venice, Florence and Rome sometime in August 2004, right after I completed my MA in fine art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Most of the paintings were from photographs taken during this trip, one was taken from my trip to Brussels in 2003.

Rajinder: The underlining philosophy in your work is the notion of identity as a 'performative act'. You suggest that the act of painting itself is performative. Can you explain?

Boo: My earlier works basically tries to deal with the notion of identity – one that is constantly changing rather than being fixed. My approach to painting is also constantly changing, so much so that if I were to put all my paintings (1991-2007) together in a show, it would seem to be painted by 5 different artists. What I was interested was the notion that the personal identity is not something that is natural but one that is learned and acted out by an individual. When I think about painting, what one sees or think he sees on a canvas is never obvious and straight forward, but are interpretations performed by the viewer. A dancer performs on the stage; the painter’s stage is the canvas.

Rajinder: I look at your paintings and I feel myself transported. It seems your paintings demand the viewer's participation, for the viewer and the work to let go of themselves and meet. I am in your painting; in one of your churches and I want to look around the corners; behind the pillars. I want to interact with the work. A relation is established between the work and the viewer. The paintings are created in the exchange – somewhere between the artist, the painting and the viewer. I feel that the artistic process, the 'performance' in your painting plays a role in this exchange. Can you comment?

Boo: I suppose when we encounter an image that is ambiguous or less definite, it starts to demand more attention from the viewer to make sense of what he/she is seeing. The encounter becomes more intense and pleasurable as the viewer become more ‘involved’ in deciphering the image. What I have done is to make “suggestions” and create impressions; the viewer will have to complete the picture.

Rajinder: When I am in a church, a remarkable change takes place in me, however subtle. The cool somber and hauntingly quiet atmosphere of churches invariably forms a connection within me to the deep mystery of life without it taking the form of the frightening unknown. There is of course the knowledge that I am in a holy place, a place of worship for thousands for uncountable years. Looking at your paintings I experience the same quiet serenity. How have you managed this? What is it in the way you have painted your painting in expressive, gestural and chaotic brushworks that captures a moment if not more of lingering spirituality?

Boo: Not too sure how to answer this question but I think what I tried to do is to capture a moment of my experience. To me, that is what a painting can only do. What we see depend a lot of what we know and already experienced. What the painting does was to trigger the viewer’s memories of a particular space. The incompleteness and ambiguous quality of the images in the painting helps to maximize viewer’s participation. In this case, you have made the painting ‘complete’ by performing your role as an active viewer.

Rajinder: "The rendered images are gestures of fleeting moments of our perception of reality - illusive and constantly changing." There is no movement You are painting a 'still' scene. What changes? Are you referring to gradual sense in which we develop a relationship with a space over time?

Boo: Unlike a photograph which is capable of freezing a moment in time, our eyes are constantly mapping out the space we are encountering. Our relationship and experience with the space around us is constantly changing, is actually never still, unlike in a photograph.

Rajinder: Optimism and hope are two adjectives associated with your HOG paintings. Where lies the connection?

Boo: I was speaking about the ruins-like images of the cathedrals which I have painted. To me, the encounter of ruins somehow is capable of triggering the positive spirit in human. Just like whenever disasters such as the Tsunami struck, humanity seems most ubiquitous.

In the making of FACES….

2007-11-07T14:31:00.000+08:00

In June this year, I launched a new collection of paintings in France. It was a terrific opening - a testament perhaps to the love affair that the French have with art. The paintings are now showing in Malaysia and Singapore and, with the help of my wonderful agent, the exhibition will travel to Korea, Shanghai, Hong Kong, India, Argentina and New York over the next year.

I remember well where my journey began with FACES. I was on holiday in New York and I had for the first time in a long while the opportunity once again to immerse myself in the genius of Salman Rushdie. A sentence in his book “Fury” had such an effect on me that I spent the rest of my vacation getting worked up about it. My wife tells me today that I turned into my insufferable introverted self on holiday.

“What is the digital equivalent of lovely, he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it. Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, passes undiminished through the new machines.” I was consumed by Rushdie’s use of the words ‘lovely’ and ‘number fingers’. It sparked off my initial sketches and ideas on the mathematics of beauty

My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a skeptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic – in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour.

When I returned to my studio, I started working on my ideas for a new series of paintings. I knew that beauty is the motivating factor for mathematics. Truth is its goals. Mathematical truths tell us something about our reality. It can tell us something about beauty. How can I garner my experience of beauty and elegance in mathematics to explaining beauty in general? How can I do this thru my paintings?

After years of agonizing over these questions and with two intervening separate series of paintings entitled ‘Symbiosis’ and ‘source_code’, I started working on ideas stemming from subjective simplicity, fractal geometry and factor analysis to paint my FACES series. The most important idea in FACES is the purest and rarefied thought in the abstraction in relation of relationships that is coded into the mathematics behind faces. These ideas are used to build powerful and compact mathematical objects which embody the beauty in both mathematics and the faces of women I have known in my life. These are then used to construct my FACES series of paintings.

I invite my audience to view my paintings through a sieve – a sieve made of mathematical objects that pack a substantial amount of information on the way we might view beauty. I invite my viewers to engage not analytically, neither synthetically, but in a way that combines both modes and feel/intuit the correspondence in the aesthetics of the combined beauty of my mathematics and the underlying beauty of my faces.

But most of all I want my audience to evaluate mathematics and its place in our lives. Is mathematics something necessary for life as “art” and not just “fact” and does its value lie in, as Polkinghorne said, as an “abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe”, or is it the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?

My paintings are beautiful paintings of beautiful people about beauty, both physical and mathematical. The suffused beauty of my paintings takes precedence over any intellectual legitimacy that I may claim for them. And perhaps the mathematical equivalent of lovely might even act as the perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to this supreme force of human experience affecting real and lasting transformation in us. Art and maths are but languages through which we attempt to understand that which is ineffable.

- Raj (Web: www.unprimed.com
Artblog: http://sightoracle.blogspot.com )

Art world Power List

2007-10-27T07:20:00.000+08:00

Top: Francois Pinault (owner of Christie's)
Sixth: Damien Hirst

See here

Mathematics - most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?

2007-10-26T09:45:00.000+08:00

I found the following ambigram and an inspiring little essay on the equal sign in mathematics by John Langdon. I thought I would share it with you.

MATHEMATICS

Mathematics is a coded language through which we can assure the gods that we are not unaware of what is going on around us. Or it may be the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell seems to have seen these two points of view. He said that mathematics "possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere... yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." He also wrote that math "may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."

We have found about a zillion ways of dressing up the equals sign. You can put x on one side and (-b ± √(b2 - 4ac)) / 2a on the other. You can put E on the left and mc2 on the right, or 1 on one side and 1 on the other. You can add (5 + 5 = 10), subtract (5 - 5 = 0), multiply (5 x 5 = 25), and divide (5 / 5 = 1). Do with numbers what you will, it all comes down to the equal sign. The rest is symmetry.

Did human beings always know that they had the same number of digits (!) on both their right and left hands? I prefer to think that one day, shortly after the dawn of Homo Sapiens, one individual came running back to the cave with that exciting discovery. "How obvious," we think. "E = mc2 !" "How obvious," the gods think.
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," said Hamlet. There is an order to the universe, and starting with the person who discovered the symmetries of the extremities, continuing through the present with formulators of theories about "string," galactic bubbles, DNA, dark matter, chaos, particles, and white holes, we human beings understand some percentage of that order. "Divinity," as Shakespeare wrote the word, with a lower-case d, could be interpreted to mean "divine-ness," not necessarily as "God." And what could be more divine that the fact that sunflowers, Norfolk Island pines, lizards and snowflakes use the same system we do?

The Taoists must have felt that human beings are part of that system. Their observations of nature guided their principles and their approach to life. But their focus was as much on the concept of opposition as on the idea of equality. The Taoists may or may not have been impressed that 5 = 5 or that 2 + 3 = 5. Symbolically speaking, they would likely have focused on the fact that the numbers in question were on opposite sides of the equal sign. Observing the sun and the moon, man and woman, night and day, they concluded that opposites are equal, and in balance.

The graphic inspiration behind the equal sign is not terribly well disguised: two separate elements of identical length in close juxtaposition - two things that are equal. The gods may have been satisfied when we realized that things that appear to be different can actually be the same. We can hope so, as we haven't progressed much beyond that theme.

Every specific proof depends on that symmetry. Every piece of art in some way responds to the concept of repetition and variation. Things are different, yet ultimately the same. Chaos, according to the Bible, is what preceded Creation. What follows is its opposite - order. Is chaos, then, equal to order? Yes, in that they are the two states in which we can imagine the existence of all things. Does order depend on awareness?

In any case, mathematics is our security blanket. As long as we have it, we can feel that our lives make sense - rough-hew them how we may.

MATHEMATICS ambigram and essay, Copyright John Langdon 1992, 1999. All rights reserved. See www.johnlangdon.net

Does beauty play a role in evolution?

2007-10-23T12:08:00.000+08:00

Q:Does beauty play a role in evolution?

When choosing a wife, almost all men prefer beautiful women, and the standards of beauty seem to be universal across races and cultures. So I assume the preference to beautiful women is in our gene. How did we get to this?

A:What an excellent question. Something I have wondered about for many years. The short answer to your question is YES.

Before going further we need to consider what is meant by "beauty". This is always a bit awkward when it comes to modern human beings. But it is this definition that is what you are asking. As you noted, there does seem to be a universal sense of beauty. Ultimately beauty seems to be defined by symmetry.

A useful overview of the issues of female beauty can be found at
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f01/web1/ekanayake.html
This also discusses a little about the waist to hip ratio issue.

But how did we get to this?

There are a couple of theories. One main principle is that a when selecting a mate especially within in human populations one key feature is the ability to nuture and protect the young. The classic example is the waist to hip ratio of a woman probably says something about her ability to carry off-spring.

But with regard to more subtle issues, particularly of facial features, the connection is less clear. One aspect of facial beauty (also of body beauty overall) is symmetry. There is some evidence to suggest that symmetry of body indicates the level of health of the individual. One major health factor for many animals is what the parasite load of an individual is.

A key piece of research related to this can be found by Anders Pape
Møller

"There is considerable evidence for secondary sexual characters in a wide variety of organisms reliably reflecting levels of parasite infections (Møller 1990), and studies of a diverse array of plants and animals show that parasites render their hosts more asymmetric and hence less attractive than unparasitized individuals (Møller 1996). This is also the case in humans: Men throughout the cultures of the
world value female beauty higher than any other attribute, but the importance of beauty is the highest in cultures with serious impact of parasites such as malaria, schistosomiasis and similarly virulent parasites (Gangestad and Buss 1993). "

the orginal source is at
http://www.mindship.org/moller.htm

With regard to the specifics of facial beauty of females ( and possibly males too ) there is an excellent list of scientific papers located at:
http://digilander.libero.it/linguaggiodelcorpo/beauty/

Aspects of facial bone structure also may allow for subconcious measurement of symmetry of a person and be able to get a sense of how healthy they are. There was a series on the BBC about the human face that may provide even more insight and this can be found at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/humanface/index.shtml

However all is not lost. Here is an easy to read article from NewScientist magazine that suggests that being ugly at may be a useful reproductive strategy
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991239

Also from newscientist there is some evidence that beauty wins out over youth in the partner selection game of life
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999940

But in conclusion it is likely that male(or female) perception of female beauty is a result of evolution to suggest something about the overall health of person. Beauty is selected for because it gives the greatest chance of healthy off-spring in the most efficient way.

________________________________________
Q: The answer and comments are very helpful. But they haven't completlely quieted my inquiring mind yet.

I don't how much I should believe the parasite theory. It doesn't sound very convincing.

My biggest question is for woman's facial beauty. It is easier to accept men's preference to women's figure beauty, such as the right waist/hip ratio, because it is biology relevant. But in our time, facial beauty has nothing to do with a woman's ability to bear healthy children.

People mention facial symmetry, but symmetry and beauty are two different things; it may be true that most beautiful faces are symmetric, but only certain symmetric faces are beautiful. It is not hard to find perfectly symmetric but unattractive faces. I think symmetry is just a (overly) simplification of beauty that scientists
make, so they can measure and quantify.

Is it possible that our preference of woman's facial beauty (assuming it is in our gene) is just a fossil feature that was formed during a certain period of evolution but has no biological relavance of the present-day human?

A: Female facial beauty is a very interesting issue.

You are correct, attractivness(or beauty) is not simply dependent on symmetry. There have been various studies that look at skin complexion also. I recall a study once that indicated a preference for certain facial types that females choose which their view of attractive men changes depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle.

You also state that " But in our time, facial beauty has nothing to do with a woman's ability to bear healthy children." . It seems that hormone levels have an influence on how subcutaneous fat is distributed in the face.

This idea is discussed in an article by Natalie Angier at
http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~bhoward/bil150/Man_woman.html
Discusses a number of studies in relation to faces including babyfaceness here is a little quote from the article " By the Perrett scenario, social skills like cooperativeness, honesty and gentleness proved generically desirable in the early stages of human evolution. Because such nurturing traits are associated with femaleness and juvenileness, the appeal of the feminine, youthful look became
pansexual, and helped to counter such standard engines of sexual dimorphism as competition between males."

Some typical features are the cheek bones, though it turns out not to be neccessarily bone but rather the distribution of subcutaneuous fat.

Your last comment about 'a fossil feature during a period of evolution' is the key issue. It is possible that these features evolved at a time before language/speech had evolved and provided a means of communicating their health status.

An interesting article by Jürgen Schmidhuber analysed facial beauty using fractal geometry. The abstract states that " They yield a short algorithmic description of all facial characteristics, many of which are compactly encodable with the help of simple feature detectors similar to those observed in mammalian brains. This suggests that a face's beauty correlates with simplicity relative to the subjective
observer's way of encoding it."
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoface/newlocoface.html

So there could well be a gene (or more likely several) in our brain
that sets up a recognition of beauty/attractivness.

There is also a site that does a geometrical analysis of the face at
http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm
That is worth investigating.

I think that you would find these books useful in your investigation of this topic. Summaries and reviews are available from the links provided:

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
by Naomi Wolf
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0385423977/
Argues that standards of beauty are thrust upon society through the media.

Survival of the Prettiest : The Science of Beauty
by Nancy L. Etcoff
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0385478542/
"Survival of the Prettiest argues persuasively that looking good has survival value, and that sensitivity to beauty is a biological adaptation governed by brain circuits shaped by natural selection."

I am currently unable to escape the notion that standards of beauty change over time, which might indicate that, in addition to any evolutionary or genetic basis for beauty, we are conditioned to find certain people beautiful. Also, some people differ in who they deem beautiful, though norms can be documented.

For example, compare voluptuous film stars and "pin-ups" from the first half of the 20th century, to "Twiggy" or Goldie Hawn in the 1960's, to today's Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. The further one travels back in time, the more variety in the standard of beauty one will discover.

Bombshells: Jayne Mansfield
http://www.bombshells.com/jayne/gallery/color/index.shtml

Swingin' Chicks: Twiggy
http://www.swinginchicks.com/twiggy.htm

Sports Illustrated: Heidi Klum
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/2002/swimsuit/gallery/heidi/6.html

Women also prefer handsome men, though this has been downplayed in mainstream culture. My own theory suggests that men don't want to be seen as ornamental and have to measure up to a woman's standards, so he compensates for his looks with money, job, etc.

Women today strive for the "hanger" look that fashion models possess.Men and women alike don't immediately recognize or understand the reason behind the very slim look (especially unnaturally slim or "boyish" hips on a female) comes from the fashion industry itself where women are paid to be walking hangers. Clothing must drape a
certain way, and clothing is the number one priority. Therefore the clothing takes precedence and a designer won't want a woman's natural features such as breasts, hips, etc. "marring" the line a dress would have when on a hanger.

In the survival of the fittest, biology would dictate that men seek women without very slim hips because of their inability to properly carry children. But the media today has heavily influenced society in what it believe is the "right" and "good" way to look. Thus Marilyn Monroe is being called "fat" today (a misnomer when you are comparing a "human female" with a "female hanger")and Courteney Cox (who is
gaunt, drawn and feeble looking) is seen as the embodiment of health and good fortune.

The only other theory I hold is that slim women are seen as weaker by males and thus easier to dominate. Larger, more robust women are seen as "masculine" and therefore a challenge to the fragile male ego. Items such as high heels and corsets were/are also used to keep women subdued. A woman can not outrun an attacker in high heels and heels as well as corsets present harm to the bones, back, legs, and internal
organs.

Beauty still is in the eye of the beholder. I personally don't believe "beauty" is evolutionary but the concept of beauty as maintained and fed by the massive media surely is. If we were looking at things from a survival standpoint, beauty doesn't save your life in and of itself, but a "beautiful" woman would be more protected, such as a fine item or an "ivory box" (to quote from E.M. Forster) would be protected. Thus woman is seen as thing, as ornament, while man continues to be
seen only as instrument.

Women's desires for a Brad Pitt over a Michael Douglas are often ignored, and this we have media rife with images of morbidly obese, old, balding, "ugly" men often paired with slim, young, "beautiful" women.

The question is, why has evolution/men continued to ignore women's desires? And why aren't more attractive men seen from a biological standpoint as having stronger potential children and virility?

Taken from here.

The Function of Beauty

2007-10-22T10:04:00.000+08:00

The Function of Beauty

According to Kant, beauty has no function beyond the pleasure it generates. As much as this view influenced philosophical discourse, it did not satisfy natural scientists and social and cultural researchers.

Beauty and sexual selection.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) sought to answer the question: how has natural beauty been acquired and what is its purpose? He rejects the idea that beauty in nature is a merely arbitrary outcome of physical forces. Darwin believed that the beautiful colors and diversified patterns we see in butterflies, moths, fish, birds, and other creatures must be beneficial in some way. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), he presents the theory that beauty is a result of accumulative sexual selection. Studying mating rituals among various species, Darwin concludes that the animals' splendid decorations, their pomp and display, could not be inconsequential, and that it is impossible to doubt that the female admires the beauty of her male partner. This contrasts with the traditional view expressed by Burke (1767) that beauty is feminine, while the sublime is masculine.

Kant states that only humans are capable of appreciating beauty. Darwin insists that the origin of the ability to notice beauty (and appreciate it as such) is the same for animals and humans. Yet he agrees that humans' perception of beauty is far more complex than that of animals and involves cultural values and traditions. He examined courting customs in different cultures and confirmed that beauty plays an equally central role in choosing mates, in spite of cultural differences.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) concurs with Darwin as to the origin and role of beauty in human life. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud asserts that there is no doubt that beauty originates in sexual feelings, and that all forms of pleasure are related to sexual love. According to Darwin and Freud, the function of beauty is universal, but the variety of its manifestations coheres with cultural relativism. Tattoos serve as a beautifying means in one culture and are condemned in another. The Makalalo women used to pierce their upper lips and place a ring in it. Piercing, until recently regarded as esoteric in Western culture, is now commonplace in Western society. Facial hair (beard or mustache) is thought to enhance masculine beauty in Western culture. While the American Indians considered facial hair vulgar, they appreciated long hair for men. However, the passion for beauty and the readiness to suffer to achieve it are similar in all cultures.

Naomi Wolf, an active feminist, denies that this is true. She rejects the idea that beauty answers genuine, universal needs. Beauty, according to Wolf, is a myth created during the industrial revolution and used ever since by men to manipulate women for their own interest. Beauty, she holds, is not universal and is not a function of evolution. The readiness of women to suffer in order to achieve the false ideal of beauty indicates the dominance of men and confirms male manipulation. Thus, according to Wolf, the female suffering for beauty is not a genuine product of evolutionary forces (1991). Camille Paglia criticizes this kind of feminist approach for concentrating on images of beauty of the last century and for failing to encompass a broad historical view. Paglia places the origin of beauty in ancient Egypt (1991).

In contrast to Wolf's position, Nancy Etcoff argues that beauty is a powerful and genuine element in everyday life. She agrees with Darwin that beauty influences sexual choice, but she goes on to argue that it influences all aspects of life from early childhood on. Beauty is not the result of political or economical manipulation, but rather the other way around: due to its strong impact, beauty is used as a means of achieving political and economic ends. Beauty, according to Etcoff, is not a product of a certain period in history; its origin, rather, lies in human nature itself (1999).

Beauty and art.
Art was traditionally considered a source of beauty; some even argued that natural beauty is subordinated to artistic beauty. Plato, however, separated art and beauty into two independent concepts: real beauty reflects truth, while art is a deceiving imitation of nature. Aristotle, by contrast, held that good art is beautiful and that, therefore, the two are inseparable: a good work of art is a beautiful work. The Aristotelian aesthetic tradition prevailed for centuries, but it was the eighteenth century that gave rise to the idea that creating beauty is the essential purpose of art.

Kant holds that good art is beautiful, although it differs significantly from natural beauty: a good work of art is a beautiful representation. A representation can be beautiful even if its subject matter is not beautiful. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) argues that beauty is the essential feature of art, and natural beauty is a reflection of artistic beauty (Aesthetics, 1835). In this view, beauty reflects intentional creation, not incidental results of blind, natural forces. The poet Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) associates art with freedom and beauty: we arrive at freedom through artistic beauty, since it is a product of intentional, free choice (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795). The comparison between artistic and natural beauty led Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) to the observation that life and nature imitate art far more than art imitates life or nature. Art is the creation of beauty; life and nature constitute its raw materials (The Decay of Lying, 1894). Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) similarly states that the sense of natural beauty is a derivative of artistic beauty. Beauty of nature cannot be explained unless one regards it as the work of a divine creator. Beauty, according to Croce, is a synonym of intuition and expression, and these refer to the artistic form. The content of the work is beautiful only when wrought into form.

Robin G. Collingwood (1889–1943) defines art as an attempt to achieve beauty (Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925). However, his viewpoint did not gain influence in the twentieth century. The prevailing analytical trend preferred, it would seem, clear-cut, definable notions and has not been conducive to the study of the paradoxical nature of beauty, its ambiguous logical status, and the endless disputes over matters of taste. Thus, beauty has been dismissed as a vague and insignificant concept and considered irrelevant to art. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) remarks in this analytical vein that beauty is an odd word that is hardly ever used (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, 1938). John A. Passmore states that there is something suspicious about the notion of beauty, and that artists seem to get along quite well without it. He associates beauty with kitsch and bourgeois art (1954).

The association of beauty with superficiality and tranquil bourgeois life stood in contrast to the revolutionary spirit of modern art and the general atmosphere between the two world wars and after. Detaching beauty from art became common practice. According to Curt J. Ducasse (1881–1969), there is no essential connection between art and beauty. Art is an attempt to express feelings, and artists may intend to create or express ugliness in their work (The Philosophy of Art, 1966). Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) argued that many of the best paintings are, in the most obvious sense, ugly. Beauty, according to Goodman, is a vague and deceptive concept, while art is a kind of language that has no essential bond with beauty (Languages of Art, 1968). The influential and much-discussed institutional definition of art presented by George Dickie (1974) similarly bypasses the notion of beauty.

Mary Mothersill strongly criticizes the wide neglect of beauty and its detachment from art. She argues that the idea of beauty is indispensable and taken for granted in art criticism, because although critics do not explicitly refer to beauty, the idea is implicit in their criticism (1984). Mothersill's analysis of beauty reflects a change in approach. By the turn of the century we witness the growth of a renewed interest in various aspects of beauty. Wilfried Van Damme examines the anthropological perspective of beauty (1996). Eddy M. Zemach defends the objectivity of aesthetic properties and their empirical testability (1997). James Kirwan studies the history of the concept in order to illuminate the experience of beauty (1999). Peg Zeglin Brand examines the role and significance of beauty in social life and in relation to gender (2000). Lorand offers a theory of aesthetic order that revives the connection between beauty and art (2000), and Nick Zangwill rethinks the metaphysics of beauty (2001). These and other contemporary studies confirm that beauty is central to human experience in spite of its neglect in the discourse of the last century. The genuine vitality of beauty is bound to intrigue the reflective mind and inspire further investigations of its nature.

Taken from here

A Case For Beauty

2007-10-22T09:17:00.000+08:00

A Case For Beauty

by Jan Cannon

For some years a discussion has been going on among a number of people interested in ceramics and the visual arts about whether or not pottery should be considered an art, along with the "Fine Arts" of painting and sculpture. Before determining whether or not pottery is capable of artistic expression, we must first know exactly what "art" is. The American Heritage Dictionary defines art as "the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium." Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, recognized the central role of beauty in art when he noted that art's primary function was to ". . . educate the perception of beauty."

Beauty is a quality rarely addressed in contemporary art, although considering artistic works in relation to beauty would lead to a more universal means of appreciation and a more enduring aesthetic. It would also diminish the susceptibility of museums and galleries to fads and the commercially motivated quest for the "new." Some people object to such a criterion on the grounds that it is too subjective, but I argue that any other method of evaluation is too variable and egocentric to be of real value. Beauty, as a manifestation of pure consciousness, synonymous with peace, love and joy, is the true basis of our being and the one constant of our existence.

Difficulties in determining what is genuinely beautiful, or art, arise from the tendency to rely on the intellect. Instead, intuition should be the primary faculty used in creating and appreciating art. The rational faculty, of course, may be appropriately used in making art and I do not mean to imply that intuition is in conflict with reason--just that the rational faculty comes more into play in the expressive, as opposed to the perceptive, aspects of the creative process. Consequently its role is secondary to that of intuition in making and evaluating art. Even though using intuition may be an uncomfortable prospect for many, because it is beyond the proof of the intellect, the creative worker or critic who ignores this faculty does so at the risk of aesthetic irrelevance. Referencing aesthetic creations to an absolute quality such as beauty, using the faculty of intuition, seems a more practicable and reliable method for deepening our understanding of creative works.

Contemporary artists tend to emphasize technique and process, frequently at the expense of beauty. Critics similarly overlook beauty in their attempts to understand and appreciate artistic works. Although considerable skill is employed in the making of much of today's "art," and much energy is spent analyzing it, the undervaluing of beauty renders it ultimately unsatisfying. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay on art:

"The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation, from the work of art, of human character,--a wonderful expression, through stone or canvas or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature."

He observed in the same essay:

"As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire."

Emerson felt that ". . . genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and true." In his view, the traits common to the highest works of art are ". . . that they are universally intelligible, that they restore to us the simplest states of mind, and are religious." In contrast, much contemporary work seems overly narrow and personal, almost algebraic. Values are assigned to symbols and the initiated decode the works and proclaim the experience art. This is not art; it is mathematics without discipline. Others attempt philosophy or social commentary in their work. Such themes are completely inappropriate in art and are better served in other ways, such as by designing or flying space shuttles, writing essays or letters to the editor, or by making financial contributions to worthwhile causes. It is sad that so many people have abandoned beauty for such superficial attempts at intellectual legitimacy or social relevance when beauty, one of the supreme forces of human experience, is so capable of affecting real transformation in the human being and society.

The conceptual approach to art is further limited by its dependence upon narrative. To the degree that a person is engaged by narrative or reasoning in experiencing visual art--whether in trying to answer a question posed by the "artist," or in trying to place the piece in reference to some other piece, or by any other intellectual consideration--to that degree the possibilities for a true artistic experience are limited. True artistic experience takes place prior to intellection.

Pottery's freedom from the necessity of narrative is one of its greatest strengths. It can exist simply as line in relation to line, as texture, as dynamic volume, as color in relation to color; it may even be utilitarian. This, of course, is not to say that anything with an identifiable reference is flawed. Reference to natural imagery, for example, may simply be an excuse for a line or color or texture. An artist, as nature's agent, has a right to these designs and is wise to study them. Artists surrendering to nature will find their work becoming an act of that great original force rather than merely an abstraction of it.

Clay has tremendous potential for artistic expression and is capable of communicating the great aesthetic themes as well as any medium. Minerals made plastic by water and shaped by a human hand, hardened by air and fire, existing in, and at times containing space; that these, the most basic elements of creation, can affect a transcendental experience is truly magical.

We are in the midst of a process that is so much larger than we can imagine. I think, for all of the seeming importance of contemporary art and ceramics, that history will not take notice of much of the work being made now, unfavorably or otherwise; much of it being so profoundly insignificant. That alone which is beautiful will last, its place secure in the stream of thousands of years of culture. May we revel in the perception of that great Beauty from which we have come.

Taken from here

Art, Intuition and understanding.

2007-10-21T14:47:00.000+08:00

Art, Intuition, and "Understanding"
A talk given by John Adams Griefen at the Art Students League, September 1999
Taken from here.

I am pleased to speak here tonight because I've enjoyed teaching here occasionally since 1969 and because I am grateful for the consistency the League offers in the midst of an often depressing and aimless art world.

I feel that it is important to clear up certain misconceptions about art because I believe that they get in the way of our understanding of art's very fabric and have led to some aberrations in the art of today and the understanding of art in general.

Hearing the following repeated over the years tells me that people have a problem with modern art:

"I don't understand it."
"Can you explain it?" and
"I know you think it is good, but why?"

The problem, of course, is that one cannot understand art, explain art, or say why it is good or bad. Let me repeat: art cannot be "understood". Our familiarity with art can be broadened and enhanced by art history and good writing on esthetics, but this has nothing to do with and bears no relation to direct experience with the work. Art must be experienced intuitively.

It must make one react, because without reaction there is no experience.

When someone says "I don't understand" he or she is either blocking the reaction or just not getting it. People are not used to accepting a powerful intuitive experience per se, but this is the only way to experience art. Esthetic intuition is the way we experience art. It is not rational. It is direct and unedited and personal. Many great works of art have content that can be political and social and have great importance, but these are content, not experience.

When someone asks "Can you explain it?" the answer is no. But just because something cannot be explained does not mean that there is no esthetic value there. If everything was the same quality there would be no art museums, only natural and social history museums.

But, we might ask, how can artistic experience determine qualitative differences if that experience is intuitive and non rational and unproveable? Is some experience "more valid" than other experience? Yes, it seems so. Some people also seem have a natural inclination toward art and taste and look harder and longer and better. At least, this is what history tells us. The long-term consensus of lookers at art, in my experience, have made museum repositories of wonderful things and have excluded the much greater number of lesser things.

I believe art is important to life. Love, kindness, peace and health are more important than art, but art is important. Art can carry over time and space and can unite human feeling across time.

For example, prehistoric cave paintings and early Chinese bronzes.

If we saw a cave artist painting on a building today we would probably put him in jail, but the art he put on the walls and ceilings of his caves comes across to us immediately over tens of thousands of years. It is beautiful and moving beyond whatever cultural significance it may have had in whatever culture the cave man had. It must, because we have little idea what that culture was anyway.

Chinese bronzes also speak powerfully from a culture I know very little about; it is far away in space and time but the bronzes are direct and immediate and need no baggage. It is not from knowledge that we feel the power of this art, it is by way of esthetic experience. There is no need for intellectual understanding.

When people try to "understand" or "have art explained" there is room for a kind of fraud that undermines what art really is there for and what it has for us. If people believe that art can be explained to them they can be talked into anything. Intuition by its very nature has no defense against rational argument. You can use the very same arguments for a good work of art as for a bad work of art. Find an exposition of a work you like and then apply it to a similar work of the same origin that you don't like. The expositions are often equally applicable.

Even good writing about art enhances the art only after you have a free and honest experience of the art. If you don't "get it" don't worry about it. Go look at it again. My friend, the critic Clement Greenberg, gave me but one definite "rule" in the thirty years I knew him: "go look again". I got the idea of "getting it " from him. He said, "If you don't get Shakespeare you don't get English literature".

"Understanding" a work of art is a peculiarly 20th Century problem. In the past the esthetic component of art was taken for granted and experienced without much notice. A painting of a crucifix in the 17th century had a strong religious message and its esthetic experience just happened. But when Varsari and others wrote about art in the Renaissance they wrote about the esthetic quality of the art, not the exposition of the subject matter, and that was what made the difference when choices were made.

Thinking about pure esthetics goes back at least to Immanuel Kant and was talked about by writers like Flaubert in the 19th century. But it was not until the mid twentieth century, largely because of abstraction, that the art world and the public began to be faced with "pure" esthetics -- the "artness" of art. Art writers searched to "understand" and "interpret" art. Abstract art left them empty. Eventually they embraced art they could talk about at the expense of art they couldn't. I'm not saying there isn't good art in any style or ism, but a style is not good because it can be talked about. Too often the talk itself becomes the justification for the art. The public is pleased that it is all being explained to them but they confuse the explanation with the art itself, thereby forcing the art to become an illustration for the explanation.

Meanwhile difficult and unexplainable abstract art and writing about it (not explanations of it) have been historified and locked safely into the past. I am not trying to promote abstract art; what I am talking about applies to all good art. We are lucky enough to be living in a time when we are able to experience all art with new power and direct feeling because of our recent consciousness of direct intuitive experience. This is why I find it so tragic that at a time like this so much of the art world denies the exhilarating direct experience of art in favor of the dull comfort of familiarity, easy explanation and "understanding".

Can it be that the very power of great art makes us retreat from it?

Thank you.

My expressions of interest

2007-10-16T01:29:00.000+08:00

Drove up to the Adelphi building today to an unceremonious handing in of my Expressions of Interest for the Singapore Biennale 2008. It was a necessary effort but altogether futile. A package of dashed hopes left my hand into the keeping of a stone-faced receptionist at the cold, officious, lifeless NAC cubby hole. Agathe's mural cheered me up some. A fellow artist followed me in looking nearly as glum. CK was smilingly pessimistic. His package looked better than mine. Some serious prep must have gone into making it. I wish him luck as I sidled out... wondering.. what would it take?

It would be a wonderful lifeline to any struggling artist. I am sure I need it more than the next artist. Somebody will throw me a bone I am sure. Some body, some day..

Here is my response to WONDER. There is not enough 'WONDER' in it I fear..

A response to the concept of wonder in my art practice.

Let me start by introducing a simple mathematical problem to tell you what I do.

Show that √2 = p/q, where p and q are integers is bizarre or contradictory!

You might look at this problem and engage in mathematical free association and write the following sets of equations:

√2= p/q
√2 = p
p = √2 q
(√2)2 = (p/q)2
2 = p2/q2
p2 = 2q2

If you are involved with this maths, you will get excited about the last equation (in bold). You will experience excitement and pleasure even before you know where it will lead you. You will scarcely look back at any of the other equations or even the original question - even if the next steps turn out to lead nowhere.

There is something about that last equation that seems ‘right’. Mathematicians experience beauty in that last step. The aesthetics of the equation takes hold of the unconscious and brings pleasure and excitement. What is it? Is it its seriousness, its depth, its generality, unexpected or inevitability?

From the last equation it can be easily deduced that p is even and hence q must be even, and the original equation cannot hold without common factors. QED

My art practice is wholly based on the wonder of mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. I hope to tap on this phenomenon to push elegant and powerful mathematics as objects of art. I hope to do this thru my paintings.

I want the secret to be out that the keys to mathematics are beauty and elegance and not dullness and technicality. I believe that one’s intellectual and aesthetics life cannot be complete unless it includes an appreciation of the power and the beauty of mathematics. But more so, I want this appreciation of the power and beauty of mathematics to educate us about beauty in general. In my art, I am committed to elucidating our search for beauty thru the aesthetics I have been party to in mathematics.

To describe the world around me I have the language of mathematics and I have the amazing experience of doing mathematics at a pretty high level where beauty and aesthetics play such an important role. But it is well known that this experience is only available to one who is involved in mathematics. You cannot much appreciate it by viewing equations and proofs. The aesthetics of mathematics is not a spectator sport. This is my challenge.

Also, I am actively working with a slightly altered concept of ‘psychical distance’, introduced by Edward Bullough in 1912 in his influential paper –“Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and Aesthetic Principle”. I use the lessons from this paper in my paintings, drawing my audience using images that bring my audience in close psychical distance to my paintings painted using mathematics that more often than not increases their aesthetic distance. In this way, I ‘trap’ my mathematics-averse audience to experience the wonder and beauty of maths.

Singapore to curate and present art exhibition in Seoul

2007-10-16T01:22:00.000+08:00

I have been getting a bunch of hits from Korea. Here's why...

Singapore has been invited to participate in an exhibition in South Korea.

Called City_net Asia 2007, it will be held at the Seoul Museum of Art from 10 October to 11 November.

Singapore is the first Southeast Asian country that has been invited to curate at the event, and Singapore Art Museum (SAM)’s curator, Ms Joyce Fan, will be in charge.

The works of eight local artists will be featured at the exhibition.

These artists are Tan Kai Syng, Tang Ling Nah, Terence Lin, Jeremy Sharma, Rizman Putra, Vincent Leow, Ye Shufang and Michael Lee.

Their works will focus on the theme of ’DomestiCity’, showing how art is created within Singapore’s urban spaces.

The project will feature the works of a total of 60 artists from SAM, South Korea’s Seoul Museum of Art, China’s Guangdong Art Museum and Japan’s Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.

Taken from here

'Wonder' as a theme for Singapore Biennale 2008

2007-10-15T10:05:00.000+08:00

Wonder is the theme for SB2008.

Its conceptual scope issues a challenge to the contemporary world, a world that no longer questions choices, nor allows for things and events to awe us. Through contemporary art, Wonder calls on us to question and be curious; to reach beyond the
surface, surpassing the apparent and to allow ourselves be surprised, awed, tantalised and challenged. All of which is an aperture to the World.

There are many issues that challenge our world today. The second Singapore Biennale
proposes other possible ways of seeing and arriving at truths and answers, resolutions and compromises, and even the creation of new questions, to the challenges presented to and by humanity. It seeks to revolt against our belief and trust in theories, logic, science and technology, politics and economy that consciously regulate the world we live in. Criticism, skepticism and doubt exist on the flipside of creative thinking, which brings about a different kind wonderment of
and to the world.

To wonder is a process of questioning, feeling or thinking about something. It is about looking at things with fresh eyes and from different perspectives. The site of a creative critical spirit, it operates either as a means to an end or as a sense generated when we encounter an object,subject, thing, event, site, or experience. Embedded in the production and thinking of much of contemporary art is this creative critical spirit. It challenges what we know and seeks to encourage us to think about our now, our pasts, and our futures. To wonder and question is thus a critical comment on the first edition’s theme, Belief, which at the same time contextualises it.

“With Wonder, we want audiences to question the world around us, to inspire them to have a healthy skepticism about what we know and believe, to be surprised and move them towards a new revelation or understanding of our world. We aim to provide a commentary on the identity of individuals in a multi-cultural world, recognise the dignity of individual human beings and their communities and make reference to the fact that different cultural viewpoints are varied and valid. We want audiences to be involved in the experience and creation of artworks through greater interaction during the next Biennale, resulting in greater development of understanding
and critical thought regarding the events of the world.” says Fumio Nanjo, artistic director of SB2008.

SB2008 aims to make people aware of this sense of wonderment and their capacity for it, as contemporary art brings about moments of surprise, enchantments, shifts in perspectives, new experiences and ultimately, enrichment.

A major part of the Biennale programming involves cultivating a deeper public engagement with contemporary arts. This will be conducted through the Encounters series of talks, workshops and events. These regular dialogue sessions provide a discursive platform for Singaporeans to voice issues and concerns pertinent to our society and contemporary art. In addition, a series of education projects focusing on primary and secondary school children will accompany the Biennale. This programme will also include a number of artist residencies and workshops.

SB2008 promises to be refreshing and surprising for audiences. Together with the two curators, Nanjo will be researching on artists and art practices from various parts of the world with a special focus on Asia and its region; further establishing Singapore as the hotbed for research, documentation and presentation of Asian contemporary artforms. They will provide for accessibility of programming to multiple levels of audiences – local, regional and international and pay special attention to outreach and education, allowing for a deeper engagement with contemporary art by the people of Singapore.

Singapore Biennale 2008
Curatorial Statement

Context
The Singapore Biennale 2008 (SB2008) succeeds the successful first version of the Singapore Biennale, entitled “Belief” in 2006 by developing, expanding and reflecting on the inaugural Singapore biennale of international contemporary art.
The artistic director, together with the curatorial team, has decided on the theme “Wonder” for SB2008. It performs as a critical commentary to the first edition, as well as introduces a critical stance with regard to events in the world.

Definition and General Focus
“Wonder” is a feeling of surprise and admiration caused by something beautiful, unexpected or unfamiliar” and as a verb, it is not only to” feel curious” or “desire to know”, but also to “feel doubt.” – Concise Oxford Dictionary, 11th Edition, pp 1658, 1859

The notions of wonder have developed historically. The Latin word mirari means to wonder or marvel at, while miraculum was used in the Latin translation of the Greek New Testament to indicate “anything wonderful, beyond human power, and deviating from the common action of nature, a supernatural event.” (“Miracle”, Encyclopedia Brittannica).

Due to the natural sciences,this mystical or faith-induced idea of wonder became more metaphysical, and another derivation came about: admirari (and then admiration). (Condensed from: A Philosophy of Wonder,Howard Parsons, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, V30, N1 (Sep 1969)).

Following the direction taken by the sciences, Aristotle declares the beginning of philosophy is wonder) and specula (speculation) being drawn from wonder. The creation of much of contemporary art takes its cue from these two bodies of thought. The bodies of thought: being that of faith and science, the opposites. Philosophy is considered a science.

Wonder issues a challenge to the contemporary world that neither questions choices
intelligently nor allows for things and events to awe us. Hence the scope for this exhibition: That Wonder, through contemporary art, would call us to question and be curious; to let ourselves be surprised, awed, tantalized, challenged. A moving on from Belief at SB2008.

Wonderment of the World and Role of Art
Much of modern life, the failure of modernism/modernity, all seem pre-designed to foreclose the possibility of wonder, of newness, of surprise, of the sublime, the unexpected, and useless beauty. The world of today is conflicted; with accidents and catastrophes, wars and natural disasters. Much has been caused by humanity: the imposition of worldviews (ideas or power),abuse of technology, uncontrollable natural phenomena.

We seek to create a self-reflexive check on our responsibility as human beings living among other human beings by respecting differing visions of the world and its events. For the development of this self-reflexive criticality we have to open and stimulate avenues for discussion and dialogue, regarding all issues relevant to humanity at large, opening eyes and minds.

Through this expansive gesture, we arrive at the many issues that challenge our world
presently; SB2008 proposes other ways of arriving at truths and answers, resolutions and compromises, even the creation of new questions to the challenges presented by the world. Helene Cixous writes that “going from illusion to illusion, one also comes to understand the world.” SB2008 seeks to revolt against theories, logic, science and technology, politics and economy that consciously regulate the contemporary world. Criticism, skepticism and doubt exist on the flipside of creative thinking, which brings about a different kind wonderment of and to the world. And if we go via Cixous, from illusion to illusion, we can seek to understand the world using wonder, as both process and result.

To wonder is a process of questioning, feeling or thinking about something. It is the site of creative critical spirit. It operates either as a means to an end or as a sense generated when we encounter an object, subject, thing, event, site, or experience. Embedded in the production and thinking of much of contemporary art is this creative critical spirit (which we view as wonder). It challenges what we know. It seeks to encourage us to think about our now, our pasts, and our futures by presenting other possible viewpoints. Belief, the theme of Singapore’s inaugural
biennale, is by definition, a fixed viewpoint. To wonder and question is thus a critical comment on Belief and by shifting one’s perspective on Belief, contextualizes it as well.

In spite of its problems the world still contains much beauty and possibilities. A sense of wonder therefore produces a positive awareness of our world with the constant questioning and reinterpretation of the reality that surrounds us.
SB2008 aims to make people aware of this sense of “wonder” and their capacity for it, as they engage with the artwork as apertures to the world, bringing about moments of surprise, enchantments, shifts in perspectives, new experiences and ultimately, enrichment.

120 - A Theatreworks production by Ong Keng Sen

2007-10-12T14:42:00.000+08:00

I am going to this tomorrow. I can't wait.

The invite ( the tel no doesnt work!?):

Dear Friends,

Hello..greetings from Theatreworks!

I hope to see as many of you at our new production, 120 by Ong Keng Sen at the National Museum. We had good coverage in Straits Times Life! yesterday. This morning, TODAY, ran an article on the journalist's personal experience on one of the 120 tours. I attached a pdf of the article that appeared this morning. The journalist enjoyed the performance and encouraged his readers to spend more than one night at the museum.

So do come by and book your tickets soon. As it stands this Friday morning, we are more than 82 percent sold for both performances.

Performances are on 13 and 14 October 2007 at the National Museum. Be at the museum by 7.30pm where we begin to assign audiences to the tours.

You can do your online booking on www.nationalmuseum.org.sg or ring :
6332-3659.

Looking forward to having you with us this weekend!

warm regards,

Tay Tong