Aethetics and Epistemology

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LIFE IN THE POST-MODERN KEY OF C
Art, Aesthetics and Epistemology

Oral Presentation for Philosophy 215
by Brett Clippingdale

DOWNLOAD an audio recording of the presentation (3.5MB, 24kbps)

Items in bold are cues for diagrams or music

PIANO KEYBOARD DIAGRAM, 1 OCTAVE SCALE WITH C TONIC

We don't know anything.

LIGHTS OFF

RAGA 1

In the beginning ... at our beginning, entering the world with a cry, we experience chaos. Out of chaos, our brain notices and establishes patterns. We begin to ascribe meaning to things, attach importance, and develop baby languages to describe them. The words we inherit from our parents reflect the assumptions of their culture, and are then used to describe the world further. Baby reality gives way to established, inherited reality.

LIGHTS ON

In time, language becomes habitual, accepted as the norm; each culture has a different language, and how we see the world is determined by the assumptions within that language.

How do you express the feeling that you have when you feel the presence of your ancestors’ spirits? Stin stinits sas.

SISIWISS

In the ancient NW Coast Samish culture, Stin.stinits.sahs describes that feeling. That’s how men say it; females say Stin stinits saaahs. But in the male/ female dichotomy, we discover that gender, too, is a language, a way of expressing what we understand to be reality, and gender can be very subjective. In the Samish culture, there are 6 genders, or 8 genders, depending on what village you’re in, and it has more to do with a person’s energy than their equipment.

A totally different way of looking at the world, of understanding what is reality. Our culture, and the language which reflects the assumptions of our culture’s world-view, largely determines how each of us see the world.

We define the world with language, but not just languages of words. We have visual languages, visual grammars, which vary among the world’s cultures. In the 16th century, Chinese artists painted very differently than Michelangelo did.

We also have musical languages: do re me fa so la ti do

MAJOR SCALE

What is this? The major scale, perfected by Pythagoras, the language of what music? Western music. Modern western music. Does anyone remember the European scale before the Greeks? No, nobody does. Nobody does.

7 notes. What other notes do we have?

CHROMATIC SCALE

5 more notes, so now we have 12 notes.

But what’s in between these notes? Nothing?

ALBERT KING

The blues note. Stretching the guitar string, stretching the note, one new note, one new journey to a note, gives a whole new way of expressing feeling, a new world of meaning. Are the feelings new? Or were they there all the time?

For a long time, white society hated the blues note, blues music, its whole way of expression. They forgot that note existed, or at best, thought it shouldn’t exist. Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis were dangers to society, because they moved their hips. There’s never been any danger that white people would ever learn how to dance, but they might find out they have a body.

What’s in between the other notes? We can do a lot with 7 or 12 notes, but if that’s all we know, then we’re missing huge spectrums of sound and of feeling. What language ignores, we forget. The notes are just roadmaps through musical sound, they’re not all of music, but we forget that. Language becomes habitual, becomes the norm, and we forget that it is only a road map.

This all goes to the heart of what we think reality is. And we don’t know anything.

When I was 18, I liked to listen to music like this:

MOZART: LAUDATE DOMINUM

Beautiful High art Glorious harmony and melody Beauty. Beauty. Beauty! Pleasing and soothing to the soul.

My roommate liked different music, and we became embroiled in a clash of aesthetics, over what beauty is. Because he listened to music like this:

PHILIP GLASS 1

Yuck! Crap! So jarring and dissonant! Unbelievable garbage!

As it turns out, the composer, Philip Glass, had studied European classical music at Julliard and with many of the greatest 20th century composers, exploring western ideas of beauty, harmony, melody, and scale. While living in Paris, he worked with Ravi Shankar, the best-known performer of the classical music of India, very different from our own.

RAGA 2

After studying the music of India, the Himalaya and North Africa, Glass renounced his earlier music, and began to fuse these exotic aesthetics into his own work, incorporating different ideas of beauty, rhythm, harmony, melody and scale. Indian theory has 22 notes per octave.

ISLAM

The Maqamat system of Arabian music has 24 notes per octave. What’s important is not the number of notes, but the different ways of seeing and expressing reality.

Inspired by the music of these cultures, Philip Glass created music like this:

PHILIP GLASS 2

This was all new, different from anything written before, whether in the West, India or North Africa. New notes, new meter, no longer just ¾, 4/4, 3/8, 6/8 … it’s elastic, stretched, out of time, cannot be written.

7 notes. 12 notes. If all you know is that … how much you know?

WORLD DIAGRAM

Philosophers like Wiggenstein and Godel tried to understand how language frames our world, how it expresses reality, tried to use the language of mathematics to codify the cosmos, to put the world into a BOX, forgetting the box wasn’t real, was just a roadmap; finally, Godel realized that the world … can’t be put in a box.

HOLES IN BOX - STARS OUTSIDE BOX

Because there are always things we miss, things we don’t know about.

All these different ways of looking at the world, which is the right one? Which is the truth? What is the one reality? What is the one reality? Is there only one reality?

Language is our representation of reality. Words, music, notes, line, form, color … but if we twist the language, bend the note, break the line, we have a new language, a new aesthetic, a new understanding of beauty, a new understanding of reality … but it was there all the time. There’s nothing new under the sun.

The obsession of modern artists from European cultures has been the exploration of the aesthetic, to find the meaning behind the form, to turn the line inside out and look to see if anything is there. This is a shamanic, deeply spiritual exploration, because the exploration of aesthetics is the exploration of the gateways to truth, to reality, through the void and beyond.

It can be an ecstatic experience, living outside of social mores. Some people call artists mystic visionaries, because exploring aesthetics pulls apart the accepted mode of thought and being, of our understanding of reality, and reconstructs the world, free from the “tyranny of custom”.

SCHOENBERG, LIGETI -- RAPID FLIPPING THROUGH PRINTS OF MODERN PAINTINGS WITH EVOLVING AESTHETIC

In the 20th century, visual art has reflected other forms of modern art: dissecting or discarding line, form, color, mood, brush gesture, context, until the ultimate exploration of the aesthetic results in its explosion, and finally a joke of popular culture: the blank canvas as a deep aesthetic statement. Not just a popular joke, this actually happened: Robert Rauschenberg’s 1949 show had all white or all black paintings, and in 1974 a blank canvas titled “Nixon’s Mind” sold for over $500,000.

It seemed the endpoint of European aesthetic exploration, deep in intellectual significance but no lasting human meaning, no connection with humanity, even denying the role of the viewer. The same phenomenon occurred in music in 1952 when John Cage’s 4’33” premiered – 4 minutes and 33 seconds … of

SILENCE.

JOHN CAGE

John Cage, largely inspired by Zen Buddhism, later composed music from chaos and chance. But from chaos is born art, anew in a fresh cycle of art and civilization. Which makes this an interesting time in music, and in the world.

20th century Manhattan, which was purchased so many years ago with money and the twisted, lying words of the conquerors, was the center for these changes, ahead of the rest of the world, ahead of the rest of society.

It has been the center of the exploration of the aesthetic, and with the explosion of the aesthetic, comes the eventual explosion of meaning, and of society. In the end of the 20th century, many western artists had found the aesthetic, and the world, to be meaningless.

PHILIP GLASS 3

In June 1999, I walked from my home in Soho to watch my fellow New Yorker, Philip Glass, perform in the World Trade Center plaza, in the shadow of the Twin Towers. A little over two years later, I walked around the ruins of those towers, the twisted wreckage, the destroyed symbols of a mighty nation.

On Sept. 11th, certain individuals deeply committed to seeing the world in a different way, and committed to violently forcing others to see the world in that same way, angry at us for forcing the rest of the world to see reality as we do, exploded the defining aesthetic of American society: money and power.

They exploded buildings that most powerfully and bombastically represented those symbols. In the twisted wreckage, exposed were the nightmares of both our society and of fanaticism everywhere. Twisted language, twisted steel, which was itself just rock that had been super heated and twisted into a form which society found more useful.

Those of us in New York … what we saw was not what you saw on TV. What we felt … was the cry. The cry. But from that cry, and from the chaos we experienced … comes art, in a new cycle.

And all I’m saying is … we don’t know anything. As language becomes habitual, accepted as the norm, our world-view is determined by the assumptions within that language.

But if we trust too much in the language we use, believing our own way of thinking is the best or the only way of thinking, the one true reality, we may find ourselves at a dead end. And what we think is reality…

LIGHTS OFF … may not even exist.

Questions for the class:

If no perceived reality is absolute, are they all necessarily false? Are they useless? Does each reality contain at least some truth? How do we know? Is your understanding of reality absolute? Is it “the truth?” Is it truthful?

What is the purpose of art? Does it have a purpose? Does it depend? If art is subjective, is it necessarily false? Is it useless?

What is art?

What is the religious, or spiritual implication of art? Purpose or reflection of that world-view? What is the nature of inspiration?

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