The Validity of Post Modern Art Theory: |
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The Conscious vs. the Unconscious Mind |
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George Sakkal August 2008 |
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We
are living through a period in American culture where the status quo regards art
that is visually composed and retinally conceived to be out of date and out of
fashion. We are advised that we
should cease believing that human intuition and the unconscious mind play a
significant role in achieving artistic creativity. We are told that we should no
longer assume that the search for composition as employed in the visual –
retinal method of two dimensional painting is valid. This process where art was
molded, shaped and guided by the eye of the artist to evolve into a finished
piece is methodology that has fallen from grace. Indeed, we are informed that
painting itself, a form of expression dominated by the retina, is passé 1.
We have entered the 21st century with a different outlook regarding
art…one shaped by ideology not methodology. Today
the respected artist is seen as one who conceives of art through his conscious
mind. We are told that creativity derives from ideas and concepts. Marcel
Duchamp, who is regarded as having the greatest influence on the rise of
conceptual art 2, believed the conscious mind offers complete
personal, intellectual and artistic freedom. To think of art consciously,
Duchamp theorized, would set the mind free to act on its own 3. For
Duchamp, art was always an embodiment of the idea coming first 4, not
the visual. Duchamp made a point of criticizing artists who he regarded as
retinal. For example, a “house painter’’ is how he referred to Claude
Monet. One, “…who painted for the pleasure of splashing greens and reds
together” .Duchamp criticized Monet’s work for relying on methodology
indicating it lacked a cerebral, conscious mind quality. He denounced it as
being, “…just purely retinal”
5. There
was a time in the early 20th century when reliance on the use of the
unconscious mind as a creative resource was accepted as being central to human
creative expression. Surrealism, an art movement inspired by the unconscious,
was founded by the French poet Andre Breton. It was influenced by the
psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud which were gaining favor in Europe at
the time. In 1924 Breton published the “Manifesto of Surrealism” that
explained the relationship of art to the human unconscious. Stimulated by the
research and published works of Freud, surrealistic art came to epitomize the
notion that the unconscious mind represented a vast storehouse of repressed
feelings and emotion that when unlocked could give vent to a new form of visual
expression. An interpretation of dreams and automatic word writing techniques
were employed by the surrealists to gain access to the repressed feelings that
they believed resided just below the surface of human consciousness.
Breton believed, the unconscious mind, filled with traditional morality
that imprisoned it in guilt could in the hands of the creative artist expose
human irrationality, and change life for the better. 6 Breton
had a great admiration for Duchamp. He employed his services whenever he could
and sought to solicit his support in his cause. Duchamp however had serious
reservations about art that derived its creativity from the unconscious mind. In
1967, a year after Breton’s death, he would say of Surrealism, “I myself
have never had a part in any such group explorations of unknown lands, due to
that something in my character which prohibits me from exchanging the most
intimate things of my being with anyone else.” 7 At
the time that Duchamp made this pronouncement the unconscious mind was largely
regarded as what Freud had defined it decades earlier to be, a guilt laden
storehouse of repressed experience…a place where we hide our deepest fears 8.
Respectable society had come to believe it best to keep their unconscious
motivations and feelings hidden 9. With repression central to the
basis of accepted understanding, it is no wonder that Duchamp would seek to
distance himself from the unconscious. For Duchamp the passage to creative
freedom was strictly by way of the conscious mind. Duchamp’s
approach, theories and writings that singled out the importance of relying on
the conscious mind for creating art has had a dominant effect on Western culture
in the second half of the 20th century that continues into the
beginning of this, the 21st. The
theory that the human capacity for creating art is best served by a conscious,
conceptual act rather than an intuitive, unconscious one is now a fundamental
postulate accepted by the status quo. Since his death in 1968 Duchamp’s
influence set in motion a series of art movements that include Pop, Minimal,
Conceptual, Performance, Process, Kinetic, Anti-form, and Multimedia art 10.
This body of “idea” inspired art we have come to collectively define
as “Post Modern”. Post Modern
is an ideologically based, preconceived conceptually, conscious mind driven art
era dramatically distinguished from the former “Modern” methodologically
search based, retinal, unconscious mind driven period 11. Beginning
in 1913 and continuing into the 1920’s Duchamp introduced the concept of
instant art 12. According
to Duchamp by conceptually identifying and signing objects that were already
created for other purposes the artist could establish art instantly. This art of
the “Readymade” became an accepted form of creativity by the 1960’s. The
notion that art could be instantly created by decree would come to have a
significant adverse affect on conventional wisdom that believed that art
followed an evolutionary developmental continuum. If art was everywhere and it
was understood that the artist’s preconceived idea could decide absolutely
what was art, the belief in the developmental evolution of art was at an end. How could art evolve if the act of determining art could
occur instantly by the mere decree of the artist? Another
noteworthy influence of the 1960’s would come from Ad Reinhart’s series of
black blank canvases. With the introduction of this work, Reinhart would seek to
reduce art to its very essence…and by so doing negate everything retinal in
art. Reinhart applied the logic of art’s evolutionary continuum to minimize
over time the visual in his work to absolutely nothing…as his followers would
claim…to bring art to its very end 13. Caught between the
conceptually formed, absolutely determined ‘readymades’ and the nihilistic
notions of the end of developmental art, the theory of Post Modernism would
disparage the evolutionary continuum of art and set a new standard.
Both the avant-garde and the academies would join together to champion,
embrace and steward a Post Modern art theory formed from ideology…as the new
status quo. All
movements, eras and the beliefs upon which they are based, no matter how deeply
entrenched… in time become objects of scrutiny. The discovery of new
knowledge…important findings that are tested and proven to be valid… often
drawn from other areas of learning… when applied to unintended fields… offer
startling insight to challenge accepted rules and standards. Every now and then
when a challenge to the norms of accepted behavior overwhelm the forum of debate
…it sets in motion the forces of revolution where the former order
disintegrates and another rises to replace it. Let
us turn our attention to a time long ago… a time when it is believed that the
unconscious mind first appeared on the evolutionary plane of human development.
Anthropological findings 14 reveal the emergence of the
unconscious mind to have occurred about 200,000 years ago when the specie of
homo erectus evolved to become modern man, the specie of homo sapiens.
For nearly all of the 200,000 years since… evolutionary growth of the
human brain has focused on the development of the unconscious mind…a mind that
over this span of time would vastly increase in complexity and sophistication
and come to significantly influence human behavior. By contrast the emergence of
the conscious mind can be traced to the relatively recent period of Greek
philosophy, less than 3,000 years ago 15. The 3,000 years of
conscious mind development, relatively minuscule, as it is, was not steady
development. For nearly a period of 500 years conscious mind development was
interrupted during the “Dark Ages” when self awareness went into hibernation
16. Perhaps
more striking than the 200,000 years of evolutionary advancement of the
unconscious mind is the development of the human eye which has been experiencing
evolutionary growth for millions of years beginning with the emergence of the
early primates. The development of
the eye evolved to a heightened level of sophistication well in advance of the
development of the unconscious mind. As visual color and stereoscopic, 3-D
vision aptitudes evolved they affected development of the brain enabling it to
sort out increasing volumes of sensory data which in turn played a major role in
stimulating the unconscious mind’s evolutionary development 17. For
over a million years communication was dominated by the visual…you came to
understand your surroundings by visual imaging. By contrast it was relatively
recently …only 45,000 years ago…that speech made its presence 18.
Until then for millions of years prior the eyes and visual imaging were
mankind’s means for understanding the world. It was this long period of
extensive development that has lead to the miraculous sophistication of the
human eye. The
retina of the eye is a masterpiece of enormous complexity. It contains over one
hundred million photoreceptors that enable the transfer within a nano-second of
one high resolution image after another all performed by the human mind working
unconsciously. What we see through our retina involves about one third of the
entire human cerebral cortex… more than a billion nerve cells. We take in
11,000,000 pieces of information per second unconsciously. Our eyes alone
receive and send 10,000,000 signals to our brain each second all performed
unconsciously. By contrast science has determined humans possess a capacity to
process only about 40 pieces of information per second consciously 19.
We
should not be misguided in our understanding of the very important roles played
by the retina of our eye and the unconscious mind of our brain in governing our
lives and our creative capacities. . Freud misunderstood the unconscious mind.
He relegated the unconscious mind to the status of a warehouse of repressed
emotion. In recent years new psychology research reveals an unconscious of a
much greater magnitude…a place where all human emotion, feelings and
impressions reside…recorded from the day of our birth to the present moment.
For purposes of artistic creativity this research reveals that the human
perceptual system operates largely outside of conscious awareness 20.
The vast, storehouse of human experience resides in the unconscious. If we are
to believe that art is the creative manifestation of the human experience, than
maximizing creativity occurs by way of the unconscious mind. Methodology,
assisted by the sophistication of the retina and a visual, unconsciously
functioning perceptivity through compositional search is what provides the means
to access, to interpret and to apply stored human experience…the true pathway
to achieving artistic freedom. In
contrast…new research in the field of human psychology reveals the conscious
mind to be entirely dependent upon the presence of the unconscious mind.
Furthermore, much of what we had assumed we could conceptually envision with the
conscious mind has been determined to be unseeable 21. The
unconscious mind does virtually all the work. Conscious will may be nothing more
than an illusion 22. It is now understood that if one were to rely
conceptually upon the conscious mind to serve as the generator of creative
expression, the relative result would most certainly be drawn from an
infinitesimally minute part of the human creative capacity and thereby reflect
artistic worth accordingly. Art conceptualization demonstrates the micro idea of
intelligence or awareness at its most simplistic level. Rather than brilliance,
the resulting expression borders on the realm of ignorance 23. For
those who espouse the theory of Marcel Duchamp, who insist that by way of the
conscious mind and ideology one can arrive at artistic mental freedom… they
may be best served by what Nietzsche had to say, “…those who plunge nature
into the abyss of annihilation by dent of their knowledge must themselves also
suffer the disintegration of nature” 24. For much too long society
has been made the victim of Post Modern art theory. As a consequence cultural
self awareness over the past several decades has digressed to the extent that it
may have once again slipped backward into hibernation. The
Post Modern art theorizes retinal
conceived art to be dead. It is not that this form of art is dead, rather it is
Post Modern… through its profound flawed understanding of the forces that
govern and shape human behavior and creativity…that has annihilated itself
upon the altar of conceptual conviction. Post
Modern art theory was invalid to begin with. Claude Monet was always right after
all. NOTES 1
Crimp,
Douglas, “The End of Painting”, October,
Vol. 16, Spring 1981, p. 75 2
Tomkins, Calvin, “Duchamp”,
New York:
Henry Holt, 1996, p.12 3
Ibid., p.13 4
Ibid., p.159 5
Goldfarb
Marquis, Alice, “Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare, Boston: MFA
Publications, 2002, p. 277 6
Tomkins, p.
261 7
Ibid.,
p. 267 8
Dickerman,
Leah, “Dada…”, National Gallery of Art:
Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 29 9
Wilson,
Timothy, “Strangers to Ourselves:
Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious”, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 7 10
Tomkins, p.
12 11
Kuspit,
Donald, “The End of Art”, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 97 12
Goldfarb, p.
95 13
Danto,
Arthur, “Ad Reinhart”, The Nation,
Aug/Sep., 1991, p. 240 14
Morwood,
Mike, Sutikna, Thomas and Roberts, Richard, “The People Time Forgot”, National
Geographic, April, 2005, p. 15 Bodmer,
Walter & Mckie, Robin, “The Book of Man”, New York:
Scribner, 1994, p. 154 15
Norretranders,
Tor (translated by Sydenham, Jonathan), “The User Illusions”, New York:
Penguin Putnam, 1998, p. 314 16
Ibid., p.
320 17
Lampon,
Christopher, “New Theories on the Origins of the Human Race”, New York:
Franklin Watts, 1989, p. 70 18
Bodmer, p.
159 19
Wilson, p.
24 20
Ibid., p. 10 21
Ibid., p. 15 22
Ibid., p. 5 23
Norretranders,
p. 133 24 Sarfianski, Rudiger, “Nietzsche”: A Philosophical Biography”, W.W. Norton, 2002, p. 83
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