Have you ever experienced the numinous?

Spirituality and Religion
Setanta, you'll get no argument from me regarding the pettiness of academia. I worked in a large university for 25 years, and, while I enjoyed my relations with students (undergrads as well) and my research, I found the organizational dynamics to be only a little more enlightened than I experienced in industry.
Keep in mind, however, that my reference to YOUR apparent "epistemological" stance is not a formalistic
ivory tower philosophical effort to pin you to a THEORETICAL box like a butterfly. It is a PRACTICAL effort to make clear the issues we, AND YOU, are dealing with right now.
And yes, Joanne, language is always a problem. We structure our world grammatically and we define it's elements in terms of a complex philological verbal evolution from the first pointings and grunts to the kinds of utterances we are making here. We must remember that our linguistically colored and structured view of the world is OUR creation; it does'nt exist in nature apart from us. There is no longer any doubt of that.

I'll not stick my neck out, and name a name here, but i had an excellent professor of French while i worked and studied at the university. He had published a paper entitled something like Let the Student Do the Talking. In his classroom, he was true to his word. If someone asked a question, he went around a room until another student provided the answer, or a discussion by students revealed the answer. It was not uncommon to leave his classroom after an hour, and not have heardhim utter twenty words altogether. A professor who listens to the students--that was a rarity indeed. His students learned their lessons well, because they quickly became interested in the process, and they learned by understanding, and not by rote.

Sounds like money for old rote to me

I'm going to try to add one of the images from that paper... would make a good avatar, I think...



edit - rats, didn't work

edit2 -- fine. No image. Here's how he ends his paper...

"The model presented here represents a preliminary attempt to express the components of visual perception in terms that can be incorporated in a quantitative model of subjective experience. Many of the aspects of the model, such as the volumetric perception of depth, the boundedness of spatial perception, the rotation of the phenomenal world, amodal perception, and perception outside the visual field, reflect properties of perception that were identified decades ago by the Gestaltist. However these aspects of perception have received little attention in more recent decades. The reason for this oversight is that these properties are not easily expressed in the neural network paradigm that has come to dominate the description of perceptual phenomena in psychology. This has led to a growing gap between models of spatial perception and the subjective experience of the visual world. In 1935 Kurt KOFFKA wrote:

"American psychology all too often makes no attempt to look naively, without bias, at the facts of direct experience, with the result that American experiments quite often are futile. In reality experimenting and observing must go hand in hand. A good description of a phenomenon may by itself rule out a number of theories. ... Without describing the environmental field we should not know what we had to explain." (KOFFKA 1935, p. 73).

"This statement remains as true today as it was six decades ago.

spirituality and religion
Thanks, Piffka. You've done us a service. Navie Realism is clearly not an adequate theoretical model for understanding reality philosophically. But as an artist I am perfectly content to accept as real and adequate my naive perception of, say, a Diebenkorn painting. It depends largely on the dimension of experience. Remember the old zen claim that when one begins the study of zen, a mountain is simply a mountain (e.g., naive realism). Then after some period of zen meditation, a mountain is no longer seen to be simply a mountain. But after considerable, and successful, zen practice a mountain again becomes a mountain (like Diebenkorn's painting), but now it is no longer a truly NAIVE naive realism.

There you go. I love that it becomes a mountain again. A full circle. But don't encourage it... then nobody wants to see it as NOT A MOUNTAIN.

I don't know what a Diebenkorn painting is, but I'll look.

I was thrilled with the idea of the "boundedness of spatial perception" and the image I was trying to bring in showed the odd feeling I've had, that if we could truly see ourselves, we'd be slightly more elongated, and possibly leaning back.

I know absolutely nothing about Diebenkorn but if Robert Hughes says this - he might have some merit. ". . . the Ocean Parks are surely one of the most distinguished meditations on landscape in painting since Monet's waterlilies. The landscape in question is that of the Pacific coast of southern California, seen through the large transom windows of Diebenkorn's studio. High air, planes of sea, and lines of road, fence, pier, and window frame, crystalline light, an encompassing blueness. The paintings are certainly about sensuous pleasure, but qualified and tightened by an acute sense of instability: a San Andreas fault runs, as it were, through the paradise of paint. The syntax of Diebenkorn's work is always explicit, and in its readiness to let the first impulses of thought leave their traces in the finished work, it makes the viewer witness to the process of painting: how this too obtrusive yellow is cut back, leaving its ghost along a charcoal line; how that 45-degree cut is sharpened, then blurred, then hidden by veils of overpainting. To scan the surface of a big Ocean Park is to watch these additions become a kind of transparency, bathing the text in calm, elevated reflection."

spirituality
Yes, Steve, one doesn't want to get stuck in the stage where everything is seen to be without substance, empty (sunyata as they call it). That awareness of the emptyness of all things ( that there is only becoming rather than being, process rather than substance, verbs rather than nouns, like the awareness that the "Mountain" is not really a mountain but a function of the activities of atoms, molecules, brain functions, etc.--and even this is no more real than the "mountain") is a truly liberating feeling. But it is not enough. As I understand it, the best is the third stage where you know the mountain is not a mountain in some absolute sense (naive realism), but it is in a relativistic sense: it's a mountain in a human sense. It is an experience packed with human meaning, perhaps worthy of a haiku poetic description. It is "in your head" not "out there" in some objective world ("in" and "out" are to be taken figuratively). It is your creation, as it is all humans' who experience "mountains."
Steve, I recall Hughes' brief discussion of Diebenkorn in his Nothing If Not Critical. But I do not respond to Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings nearly as much as I do to his earlier works, those of the Berkeley, Urbana and Albuqueque series.

The small body of Diebenkorn work available online is augmented by descriptions, e.g.

"Superficially this composition presents one green and one blue vertical panel surmounted by a horizontal yellow bar at the upper margin. However the composition is vitalized by the violet meander and the contrapuntal linear elements along the right edge."

<shudder> This is possibly my least favorite writing, a description of an abstract painting that is not there. The viewing of art, even iconic art, has not yet provided me with a numinous feeling. The closest I came was possibly seeing Ernst Do you believe Diebenkorn is expressing a different experience of reality? Possibly a numinous one?

spirituality
Piffka, I lost my response to your last statement (what's the clipboard thing about; I used it but could'nt retrieve my response by means of it). In brief, I stated that abstract artists do not AS A RULE express realities (that's an exaggeration of the psychoanalytically oriented abstract expressionists: expressing unconscous realities). I think, rather, that abstract artists CREATE realities. Their objects of art ARE realities, not ABOUT realties.
Also, your right about the monstrosity of describing a work of art to someone who either has not seen it or is not looking at it while hearing/reading the description.

I mis read something about iconic art. No doubt it has merit, but I think an awful lot of modern art could come under the category ironic art.

Hmmm. Create reality? Possibly some artists do. Having seen the excellent Gerhard Richter show in Chicago and read what he was saying, I'd have to report his abstractions are linked to reality, at least if one goes by the little he says about it. Possibly you don't consider him an abstract expressionist. It is my belief from speaking to my artist friends that they develop "a problem" in their head and then use their art to solve it. It could be a problem such as, how do I make this canvas look like a tree... it could be to show a feeling.

I've thought of this. I never get numinous feelings from art. Actually I came close, looking at Richter's painting of the two lit candles. I thought they were real and had another of his colored mirrors behind when I first walked up. That moment when I realized he'd tricked me was a point I will remember a while.

Anyway, from music, yes. Art, no. Even when I'm creating my own things, I have a joy of creativity, but not a connection with the numinous.

spirituality
Piffka, by "creating reality" I mean something more prosaic; it's simply the images made by the artists, images that did not exist prior to the creative act. I am thinking of abstract art mainly, artistic images that are not ABOUT scenes in nature, only about themselves, patterns of line, shapes, colors, textures, etc. They exist in their own right and need not refer to something else. I, like most abstract artists, grind my teeth when someone looking at an abstract painting (mine or another's) and asks "what is it [an image of]." By the way, these images, these Objects of Art are to me often close to the "sacred" since they are done for their own sake (they have intrinsic value), not for any extrinsic value, like money. If they sell, fine. But to create a successful object of art that does not sell (it fails in the profane dimension), is still a sacred object/event. I may have said something like this earlier. I only repeat it here to justify my talking about art in a forum on spirituality and religion.

Heehee, Steve -- Ironic Art. Well, I must admit that I lose interest with a lot of that. I tend to love the oldest art in a museum, not the most recent. I am also interested in beautiful shapes and colors, but I want mathematical principles that tease my eyes or intellectual symbols that tease my brain. I am willing to accept another's version of reality. And I adore the idea of sacred objects.

I don't like it when an artist (and I don't think many do this) starts throwing expensive paint onto a canvas, frequently on the floor, and then mixes it around until something forms.

A sacred object (historically and traditionally) is made with real emotion geared towards a focus point. It doesn't have to be large. In fact, most often they are small, witness the carvings of Venus of Willendorf and others like that, the Russian home icons, or feather offerings of the SW Indians. With the collection of each feather, at the winding of each round of string.... a prayer is made, an emotion is felt, and/or the solution to a problem is attempted.

JL, can you tell these questioners (through your gritted teeth!) "Why," if not "What"?

spirituality
Piffka, there is no possibility of "explaining" one's work to a person who is not prepared to appreciate what you are trying to do. That's why I really paint for myself AND OTHER ARTISTS. Only they have the preparation to get into one's abstracts--with a kind of cultivated power of empathy. For others I come as close as possible by labeling abstract paintings as "visual music." That usually pacifies them.

"Numinous" is a new word for me. Having visited most of the world's famous art galleries and museums, I must admit to being an art freak. We also own art works, some originals, some limited editions, and some unlimited. I have purchased many art works in foreign countries - where the prices are much more reasonable than the US. We have a three bedroom, two bath, home, and most of the walls are covered with art works. Many are Asian themes, both Japanese and Chinese. Others are scenic, cultural, and/or historical. One of my favorite art gallery is the National Gallery in London. When I'm there, I always visit more than once. One of my favorite at the National Gallery is Renoir's painting called the "Umbrellas." I also fell in love with Russian art when I visited Russia in July 2000, and visited the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. I was also able to visit the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and saw van Gogh's "Memory of the Garden at Etten." If any of you are interested, I can post some photos of Russian paintings on my photo share web site. c.i.

OF course, I'd be happy to see these. I think I was at your website a while ago, but you'll have to remind us with the link.

Well, finally got my Russia photos uploaded! Anybody interested in seeing some good Russian and van Gogh paintings, please visit:
<<www.photoisland.com>>. I.D. is <<imposter222>>, and password is <<russia>>. It gives you access to all my photos. Please feel free to visit them all, and would appreciate your comments. c.i.

Just had a chance for a brief look at the Russian paintings and thought I'd come back to say your instructions worked fine! I'll go back later for a longer tour. Very interesting combinations, CI. I like them, particularly your photo of the church... those people with the umbrellas really give it something special, I think. That's a new Van Gogh for me, too. Filled with symbolism, no doubt, which I'd need to have deciphered for me!

The waterlily on your welcome page is a lovely shot!