Human experience divides naturally into two parts. There is our private inner experience, our thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions and beliefs. And then there is the outer world, physical reality and the people and creatures that populate it. Everything that matters and everything meaningful and beautiful happens in the relationship between these two realms.
A computer, that is to say every general purpose computer that has ever been or ever will be built, is a Turing machine. A Turing machine proceeds in a linear fashion. It arrives at the same result whether it is punching holes in a paper tape at a slow crawl, or storing values in electronic registers at a speed that cannot be comprehended except by analogy.
Human thought is entirely different. It is not contained in one’s skull nor in any one moment, and it cannot be understood except by embracing its dimensions in time and space taken together.
The modernist movement, and its subsequent “not with a bang but a whimper” slide into postmodernism, was complex. It may seem strange to think of something that took place over the better part of a century, in the minds of dozens or hundreds of people, as one very long wavelength thought. But a single arc can be traced from Pablo Picasso in 1907 to Andy Warhol in 1962.
The cubists, the first of the modernists, considered Cézanne to be their spiritual father. So did Matisse. Cézanne’s work therefore occupies a pivotal spot — the end of one wave spawning the start of another. His work is crucial to understanding the wholeness of what modernism was about.
What was it about Cézanne’s work that was able to both reach back to the impressionists and forward to the cubists?
Before the impressionists, European art had a strong element of story-telling to it, historical, allegorical, or even, in the case of portraits, biographical. It depended for this on dramatic lighting and a high finish — no remnant of the artist’s touch should distract the viewer from suspending disbelief, as they say in theater arts, and entering past the picture plane into the drama portrayed.
The impressionists were interested in exploring new techniques for capturing fleeting effects of light and color, and not worrying about the story telling illusion freed them up to do it. The vividness of a moment invites the viewer into dimensions of which they might stay unconscious if distracted by drama or narrative. The type of experience that we call an “impression of something” is fed by streams that are sourced on many levels, the realm of poets. The term “impressionism” was originally used by an art critic to mock them as unserious, but the impressionists subsequently embraced it as describing their new dimensions.
Cézanne became friends with the impressionist painter Pissarro, and exhibited at times with the impressionists. But Cézanne, as we said, was recognized by the modernists as something more than an impressionist — strangely, it might seem, for what he left out rather than anything he added to impressionism.
If you leave out any communally understood narrative or drama, and you leave out the lyrical and poetic experience of light and color, what’s left? Quite a lot as it turns out, but all of it very personal and interior, an expression of the artist’s inner life. Cézanne claimed: “Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting.”
The modernist movement could be seen as a race to find out how much could be left out and still be art. Not only ordinary artistic concerns like perspective and light, but balance, harmony, even beauty could be left behind. And finally even the need to be intelligible or any ”thing” at all, as modernism expired into a sense that anything could be art — a total loss of communal meaning.
But surely this nihilism was not where Picasso and Matisse were headed with the powerful and enduring works that they produced. Rather it was that validation of interiority, that sense that the true subject of art was the experience the artist had while creating it, that made them consider Cézanne the spiritual father of modern art.
So they set out to observe themselves seeing, to become trained observers of their own apperception.
Observation is the foundation of both science and art. Artists and scientists work to become trained observers, each in their own realm.
A botanist can glance at a plant and point out all sorts of details about it. To her trained eye those details say clearly what species it is, and the interesting ways in which it varies from other individuals of its type. While to you (if you’re not another botanist) it’s just a weed.
An artist looks at a chair and sees an intricate play of tones and colors reflected from other objects in the room into the shadows on the chair.
To organize our observations to be useful, and to communicate them, we use one of two possible systems. One system we call map making or model making. It involves creating a symbolic representation of reality whose symbols are, in some fashion, in the same relationship as the things being mapped.
So a road map, to pick a familiar example, is a representation of roads and towns on a flat surface, its usefulness being that the shapes representing those roads and towns are drawn so that their lengths, angles and intersections are in proportion to the same lengths, angles and intersections in the territory being represented.
The map is said to have a scale, and if that scale is, say, one inch to the mile, then if we measure ten inches between two towns on the map, we expect the distance between the actual towns to be ten miles, and for the actual towns and the map’s symbols to be in the same angular or directional relationship.
This proportionality or correct ratio between our symbols and the real world is perhaps what we mean when we say that our mental maps are rational. If we achieve a mental map of something that proves to have correct ratios/relationships when compared with that which we are observing via our senses, then we say we have made sense of that thing.
If we blow things out of proportion we have become irrational.
Leaving aside the mystery of the relationship between the mind and the brain, just by what we know scientifically the brain is the consumer and processor of the signals we receive from our sensory apparatus. The eye projects a map of the world we are looking at onto the retina - an image on the retina that is a proportional representation of the scene that we are seeing.
That image, that map of the scene in front of us, is then converted into a pattern of signals in the optic nerve and transmitted to the visual processing systems of the brain. There the signal is reproduced onto a whole repertoire of maps - literally columns of cells, each level of the column receiving the scene and making a new map of some aspect of it. Horizontal and vertical lines in the scene are mapped to maintain orientation. Some maps find and enhance edges. Others keep track of colors, not only their placement in the scene but their relative values.
As the signal continues its journey, maps with higher levels of abstraction are created from the results of this processing, maps of maps. The time dimension comes into play as maps are compared to detect motion. As the eyes move around, maps are created that assemble the relatively small very sharp areas of each primary map into bigger maps of the scene’s details.
The biology of all this makes really fascinating reading. What we “see” is very far removed from the raw signals generated by our eyes. It seems so familiar - I look out the window and see some trees and clouds in the sky. What’s real is that there is some proportionality between what’s going on inside me, and the reality that I can only perceive via those correspondences.
There are instances of people who have been blind since birth, and then have had their sight restored surgically. Their visual apparatus starts working normally, but they still can’t see anything – it’s all just a blur. They haven’t been painstakingly assembling maps of the visual aspects of physical reality since birth, so they have no guide to understand the relationships and meanings of the contrast and colors that they see.
The essence of every kind of map is that it consists of boundaries (one thing is not another) and relationships (everything is connected). The artist Frederick Franck wrote a book called The Zen of Seeing, the main point of which is that we mostly don’t see. We go through the day predicting what we will see based on our maps, and then comparing the information arriving via our senses to those maps. If the fit is good enough we accept that as reality. It takes a particularly artistic kind of effort to really see anything.
Of course, not all of our maps concern visual information. An electronic schematic for example contains symbols which by shared convention represent various electrical qualities and functions. The relationships represented are the way they are wired together, and have nothing to do with their spacial arrangement.
Shared convention is an underrated phenomenon, the real basis of much of our mental world. It’s at the heart of language - we absorb our native language as children by observing how words and phrases are used by the people around us. As any parent learns, children are extremely observant.
The “child’s mind” is sometimes used as a metaphor by teachers of both Zen and of art to evoke the stance of an as yet unbiased, or untrained, observer. As we grow we develop maps of our environment, and then as we enter more formal training we begin to embody the standard maps of various disciplines. We become trained observers - a musician is among other things a trained observer of sound, as a surgeon is a trained observer of touch.
As adults, we all live almost all of our mental life in maps, only noticing the specifics of our sensory input from moment to moment as a navigation of those maps. Any details which don’t correspond to our map are for the most part firmly ignored.
The postmodernists seem to have noticed this, and it bothers them.
Lewis Carroll noticed the same thing almost a century earlier, but he found it funny. From The Hunting of the Snark:
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!"
A map, as we’ve said, consists of boundaries and relationships - it’s meaning is represented and constrained by them. The modernists set out to represent their inner life. But the more exacting the effort became, as they attempted to eliminate the influence of boundaries and relationships between self and other and achieve a pure representation of the inner, a map of the sea without the least vestige of land, the more empty it became, even unto entirely blank black canvases, and beyond into no canvas at all, but just a “concept.”
And yet, how to communicate a pure concept, except by drawings or words? And so we are back to the paradox, the blind alley that modernism ran itself into, that the inner is shaped by the outer, as the outer is shaped by the inner. A pure representation of one’s inner life, unrelated to consensual reality, winds up being — a blank.
As it must be. To paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, if you can say what it is, that’s not it. It can be experienced, and there are rigorous disciplines that can aim you in the right direction. But it can’t be represented, because to represent something is to connect it to the shared/perceived world.
Art, at its finest, can also point the way but you may have to live with a work of art for a time, keep coming back to it, maybe for years. The greatest works of art, music, poetry, may keep unfolding their meaning endlessly, for a lifetime.
And yet — the modernists got turned around until they arrived at a place where, as one art critic put it, “anything and everything goes, so long as it can plausibly be called ironic or discursive.”
They became pathologically detached. Andy Warhol, after being shot and seriously wounded by an acquaintance, had this to say:
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television—you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.
The insightful art critic Suzi Gablik, in an important little book called Has Modernism Failed?, said:
Seductive though it may have seemed to escape from the world into the self, something vital has been lost along with the forsaking of reality. ‘Failure’ is perhaps a very highly charged word — but in ways that are only gradually coming to light, something, it would seem, has miscarried.
The quintessential apex of modernism may not be Andy Warhol, but rather Andy Kaufmann, who while blurring the lines between his life and his performance art, at least preserved a sense of humor about the whole thing. When we lose even that, we are left with the nameless “what came after modernism, ” i.e. postmodernism.
And what can be said about this humorless nameless thing that came after modernism? Probably nothing that hasn’t already been said much better by authoritative and indefatigable satirists like Frederick Crews in Postmodern Pooh. But postmodernism has leaked out of the humanities departments in universities, finding vulnerable hosts in all sorts of places.
Even some physicists, responding to criticism that string theory cannot be experimentally proven or disproven and therefore isn’t science, have taken the stance that experimental proof is not so necessary after all, as long as the theory is self-consistent mathematically. The map does not need any territory.
This has provoked predictable outrage and satire in other more grounded quarters, with the physicist Alan Sokal writing:
Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor.
In Not Even Wrong, the physicist Peter Woit somewhat more calmly writes:
There is a striking analogy between the way superstring theory research is pursued in physics departments and the way postmodern “theory” has been pursued in humanities departments. In both cases, there are practitioners that revel in the difficulty and obscurity of their research, often being overly impressed with themselves because of this. The barriers to understanding that this kind of work entails make it very hard for any outsiders to evaluate what, if anything, has been achieved.
So finally we arrive at the quagmire that our civilization has been stuck in since the 1980’s — is anything art? Is everything art? If it’s fashionable does that make it art? The artist Jesse Epstein coined the term “expensivism” to describe the high fashion art world with its “brand name” artists that has settled in as what is currently thought of as art by the news media.
And finally, art comes to be perfume that can be sprinkled onto any sort of bad smell. From an article in The Art Newspaper, entitled “Siberian city often described as ‘most depressing place to live in the world’ to receive contemporary art museum”:
Polluted rivers; acid rain; poisonous clouds of sulphur: the Russian city of Norilsk, inside the Arctic Circle, is not synonymous with good news stories. The local mining company Norilsk Nickel is largely to blame—its environmental record stinks. But finally there’s some positive news: the nickel and palladium producer is bankrolling what will be the world’s northernmost contemporary art museum.
So what to do when we find ourselves at the end of a blind alley? Clearly there’s only one solution, to turn around and go back to the crossroads and choose a different path.