Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation: Revisiting Plato’s Cave and the Notion of Rasa in the Natyashastra
Christoph Kluetsch
“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter.” Gilles Deleuze – Difference and repetition p. 139
“Minds exist only in relation to other minds.” (Mihai Nadin)
“even those elements designated as „basic“ or „proto-elements“ are not primitive but are, on the contrary, of a complex nature.” (Kandinsky, point… p.31)
“Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar” (Paul Klee)
“the objective is that which has no virtuality” (Deluze, Bergsionism p.41)
“the eye thinks even more than it listens” (D+G Philosophy p. 195)
“This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention.” (Dorothea Olkowski, p.91)
Worldmaking
– Birds
Our animal instincts and our habitudes dominate a large part of our daily life. Our body calls with its needs, society has its expectations, we have our routines. Sometimes we follow an impulse to do something different, we want to escape, look for a change, or surprise, some excitement and fun, or we are just bored or overwhelmed. Then these little impulses bring change, allow us to become different, enable encounters, and create connectivity with the not-so-ordinary. We become being.
But there are other modes of being in the world. Some which are more directed: contemplation, experimentation, creativity, practice, curiosity, passion, and a desire for knowledge and to overcome ignorance. It is an act of ‘worldmaking’, in the sense that we combine different planes of knowledge, being, and activities – like intersecting walls so that they form a house, that we inhabit, that defines an inside and an outside, that allows us to leave (de-territorialize) and come back (re-territorialize). We explore the world from here, our home – standing between earth and heaven – that is not physical but spiritual. We design it and put up art. And that art which we invite into our home is a mirror of the world inside and outside. We can access it through action, meditation, or melancholy.
– Melancholy
…
To art
-Artifacts
But I want to stay focused on worldmaking and its essence of doing art, of what it means to create. Because that act of creation, in a deep sense of worldmaking, is something we seem to have lost. So when we go back into Greek antiquity or the time of Vedanta. We enter a world of magical and mystical thinking that has been touched by the rational mind and deep contemplation.
When we go back in time, to the beginnings of civilization and before, we find artifacts that seem to serve a different purpose. Figurines and drawings on cave walls let us believe that humans 40,000 years ago became aware of themselves, their place in the cosmos, and tried to make sense of it. Entering a cave and painting on the walls the life of animals, with the flickering light of a torch, only from memory and an ecstatic state of mind, shows the desire to deeply connect with a deeper reality. There seems to be the idea that life itself can be captured inside a house that does not serve as a home but as a temple. The figurines worn around the neck or carried as totems or talismans may have served as a physical manifestation of some spiritual energies to which the carrier connects.
What I am trying to get at is that they don’t represent what they resemble. It is not an act of mimesis or copying the outer appearance. The contemplative mind uses the memory of the visual form as a vessel for the underlying forces, energies, principles, gods, life, consciousness… To art is to become and encounter beyond oneself.
– Damian Hirst Skull
Today, when we are drawn instead to technical perfection, when we wonder how the artist achieved a certain effect through light, composition, form, style, genre we are in a textual, a contextual world of cross-references, so-called progress and development. We enter the history of ideas, power, ideology, taste and connoisseurship. We deal with artist egos and art markets, surplus values, fetishes and accumulation.
Today we see sometimes artists who create a spectacle of otherness, a deep wonderland that is fascinating and intriguing for the most different reasons. But that society of the spectacle uses these world simulations as mental tourist destinations for the so-called cultivated mind. And if we feel fancy, we become critical, develop an attitude, and reflect on the state of the world we collectively build. We zoom in and out of politics and ideology, explore sensations of beauty, simulate other ways of being, experiment with identity, and celebrate and dive into the most complex emotions which we can evoke through poetry, performance, and visual and plastic arts.
Interlude with La Monte Yung
– Daniel Spoeri table
There is this deep discomfort with representation I have had since I can remember. As a child, I used to repeat words until they lost their meaning. Butter butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter… Until I lost the reference point, stopped thinking about butter, but then focused on the word, the letters, the sound. They became arbitrary. I focused on what is “represented” in the mind—the image, taste, smell of butter—but there was no butter. So, what is happening here?
– semiotics
Later, I learned there is a sign (symbol), a signified (object, referent), and thought or reference. I was baffled. How is that supposed to work? What else do I have in my mind? And how is that connected to the outside world, and how can I talk about it?
So I focused my studies on two areas: Art and consciousness. Why do we “art”? And how do we “art”? And what is art? When I want to think, I don’t mean that rambling on of more or less clear rational thoughts and images, emotions, and memories, but a clear thinking that is holding world, that you might call vijnana, a thinking that is empty yet apprehensive, that is clear yet stays with the larger picture, a thinking that penetrates the surface without losing sight of it. In short, a thinking that is holding world. That thinking happens; it’s not something that I do. It is within meditation now, and it was for a long time in my life in listening to music.
– La Monte Yung
Listening to music – a deep listening – where the now is constituted by the present hearing of sound, but also by the memory of what has been heard and the anticipation of what is to come—a now that extends into the near past and near future, that synthesizes time and transcends space and self. A moment of deep contemplation, filled with structure, consciousness, presence.
In that space, I like to let my mind and body, my self and my unconscious, enter a deep state of wake-dreaming. That world is a pure and abstract world, it is consciousness sitting on a well-defined structure. If it is a recording, it can be repeated over and over again, yet the experience will never be the same. It is something of the plane of immanence, i.e., on the vastest level of cosmic being that is structured, that becomes consciousness when it runs through my senses.
A musician performs something that has come to them through either a score, an improvisation, intuition, or some practice—whatever it might have been. The artist expresses something through their performance, whether live or recorded. The information, i.e., the sequence of vibrations, reaches someone else, i.e., me. I hear, and my mind and body, my self and my unconscious, my emotions and memories are brought to the surface of consciousness. They flow. And if I let myself be just there, as focused and clear as the moment allows – I become that music.
– play music
The well tuned piano by La Mont Yung is a masterpiece in improvisation. He retuned Bach’s well tempered piano back to its natural harmony and thus brings us closer to the harmonics of Indian Raga music, where the vibration is in the center of Nada Yoga.
The well tempered piano is a compromise in harmonics that negates the pure symmetry and geometry of overtones. To me the well tempered piano is a baroque distorted lie, that illustrated the rational pragmatic mind taking over natural frequencies and subordinates the divine under the mundane. La Monte Yungs performance are liberating the ears, activating pure harmony, and allow us to retune with nature.
So, this is the deepest mystery of representation. What is shared, by whom, with whom, and how? Artists are practicing—becoming an instrument, becoming music, becoming complexity. And the listener explores the encounter, resonates, embodies, and manifests. Nowhere is in the now and here any representation.
– Kandinsky
For Kandinsky art is always spiritual. It starts with a point (bindu) when moved it becomes a line, when the line is moved it becomes a plane. The form vibrate and resonate, they have rhythm
Story telling around a fire in the cave and the moving image
– Anish Kapoor Bean
What we are really dealing with since the beginning of aesthetic theories in antiquity is the art of story telling. How do you tell a good story? And how can you evoke feelings in the listener? How do I most effectively tell a story about love and passion, jealousy and devotion, commitment and freedom? Or how do I tell a story about power and corruption, about abuse and selflessness, about manipulation and heroism? I imaging people sitting around a fire 5000 years ago telling stories and refining them. Each time they become more colorful, more emotional, more engaging. And the audience participates, improving the story, a collective memory is formed a saga is born, the beginning of mythology, religion, collective identity.
These stories will be passed on from generation to generation and distill to its essence of humanness. And there we have the core of aesthetic theories. Telling, refining, listening to stories. Building effects, using tricks and rhetoric, developing tropes and styles.
– Chauvet cave
Now I see the flickering light of the fire. The group of people sitting around the fire listening to words and firing their imagination. Their shadows are playing on the walls of the cave they are sitting in; and the analytical mind kicks in. What are they actually seeing when they listen? But before going into what the true nature is of that what is seen – sitting across from each other over a fire with a vivid imagination – I want to look at the walls with its images: The shadow play, maybe even using the hands to form animal shadows, or some forms that produce images of vegetation, animals, people, landscapes. And the shadow theater on the wall will become a performance. And while I imagine people sitting around a fire 5000 years ago, imagining a story told by someone and seen on the walls of shadows, the question arises, what is real? Am I real? Is the story I am telling real? Is the story I am hearing real? Where there people 5000 years ago doing what I describe? What is their reality?
…
– Diagram Platos cave and Deleuze
…
In 1907, Henri Bergson criticized the cinematograph in his book Creative Evolution as a device that produces illusions. The sequence of individual frames that creates the illusion of movement, he argued, was ultimately a lie. Plato had similarly argued that painting was a lie, since one cannot eat a painted apple. In 1985, Deleuze „rescued“ cinema from the accusation of being a lie by arguing that, although the criticism was valid, it was short-sighted. The film strip, he claimed, contains more than just individual frames; it is not merely the illusion of movement but pure thought—material philosophy. The élan vital (Bergson’s concept of vital force), which the cinematograph supposedly lacks, is extended through the power of thought. The cuts and collages enable streams of thought that are unique to film. Film, then, is not „truth 24 times per second“ (as Godard claimed) but pure philosophy (collage, montage, time, story, whole, nooshock).
…
Cy Twombly School of Athens
– Mona Lisa
BUT, I was strangely never really interested in story telling. I never considered art works to tell stories. Although most of them do, I am more interested in the formal qualities: line, shape, color, composition. Abstraction, concepts, ideas. Context, subtext, structure. Usages, power, ideology. I always looked at art through my mind and intuition. I never considered that what art represents as its object, purpose or meaning.
I always lived in the ruins of representation: Through representation humans have been building cultures for millennia. Heroic stories, idol worship, representations of power, ideology, ignorance, and a distorted sense of reality that is taken as what it appears to be to the outer senses. Butter, butter, butter, butter… That what lies behind the outer appearance – consciousness and its deep connectivity – can not be represented. If at all, it can be invoked through art, and that invocation has to go beyond the evocation of emotions through story telling. That what matters in the world to life is consciousness and is best apprehended through intuition, contemplation, mediation. And when the world is over populated with sign and symbols, with art and artifacts, than the only way to show us a deeper sense of reality through art is through deconstruction. Deconstruction guides us into the the ruins of representation, it fissures, cracks, inconsistencies to let shine though them that what lays beyond.
– school of athens
Rafael painted in 1510/11 The school of Athens for the Vatican, while Micheal Angelo was painting the bible scenes in the Sistine Chapel.
– school of athens names
In the center we see Plato, the author of the allegory of the cave and by many considered to be one of the greatest philosophers. He is surrounded by other great philosophers of Greek antiquity. They all came out of the cave into the light and have been rediscovered during the renaissance in Europa.
Cy Twombly repainted the school of Athens. He shows us marks and smearing, gestures, energies, movement, color, density, center and periphery, composition and deconstruction.
– Cy Twombyl
We are looking at a painting, filled with signs, it is a broken open, semiotic mess. The signs on the wall, the ruins of representation irritate us, they make us wonder. Couldn’t I do that, or my 5 years old child? But what we seeing here is a masterpiece of 20the century art. It is the hight of complexity and reflection, an endless reference point that ties together the very essence of painting itself and brings us closer to the truth of images, that fact that they don’t represent, or if they do, they do it very different from how we think they do.
So I think from here we can explore the real meaning of evoking emotions.
Absence of Truth
– Descartes
When we are freed from the shackles and leave Platos cave, we see the light, the truth, the real of ideas, the essence of existence, pure and bright, good and complex. We enter a realm where we don’t let ourselves deceived by shadows, neither by objects, but see the ideas themselves. The world of idealism. But this world always seams to be the world of the mind, of rationality. That world is accessible to us says Plato, it is truth, it is a deeper reality. It is eternal and we, with our souls, are part of that world.
This reality however is of matter, in which we sit, it is less, inferior, deception – it is bad. Art is part of the matter reality. It is bad, Plato doen/sn’t like it.
– Rasa
I want to try to look at the shastra and how they are embedded in a larger framework. The Rishis, who are considered to be some special beings, had seen truth and passed it onto the world through the Vedas. An early systematical summary of their teachings is found in the Vedanta, where the Upanishads give the foundation for how to understand the body, the outer and inner senses, the different layers of consciousness, realms of truth, knowledge and ignorance. They talk about rituals, language, gods, teachings, paths, the structure of consciousness, meditation, OM. They talk little about art, rather are their focused on how Atman, Brahman, Purusha and Praktri are intertwined, how they are the same, and how we can be everything, and everything is me. From that point of view it is understandable that to see truth doesn’t need to go through a medium like art. It happens all in pure consciousness already.
Evoking Emotions
What I find intriguing about aesthetic theories that are based on the notion of rasa is there intersubjectivity. Artforms are tools of communication between the artist, the audience and the divine. The goal is to evoke aesthetic emotions through forms. But of course under these forms are experiences of the divine. These experiences of Śṛṅgāra (Love, Delight), Hāsya (Laughter, Mirth), Karuṇa (Compassion, Pathos), Raudra (Anger, Fury), Vīra (Heroism, Courage), Bhayānaka (Fear, Terror), Bībhatsa (Disgust, Aversion), Adbhuta (Wonder, Amazement) ,Śānta (Peace, Tranquility).
We are back to story telling, yet the stories are not deceptive representations of an idealistic realm, they are rather a manifestation of direct divine experience. The story itself is just a vehicle to evoke those emotions. Truth may be reached through collective divine experience.
Rasa and cinematography
Rasa is only existing as an aesthetic emotion, I don’t love while watching a performance, but can experience love through a performance, I am not disgusted through a performance, but feel disgust through a performance. I am wondering if this can be compared to film theories, where we talk about suspension of disbelieve. When watching a film I pretend that what I see is real, although I know that I am sitting watching moving images.
The viewer of a performance understands a double negativity, that the performer is not the person he/she performs, and also that the performer is not the person he/she is in real life. The performer is an embodiment of something that is not representing anyone particular. The performer evokes an emotion, a character, that is not bound to anything physical, or referential. It is the pure emotion, a pure character to which the viewer connects.
Walter Benjamin, in the Artwork in the time of mechanical reproduction, focuses on exactly that point. Loosing its aura that traditional art form is not deprived of its glory but set free in the technical image of film, where the act of acting is even freed from the actor.
We see these technical images in a cinema that resemble almost exactly Platos cave, and the circle closes.
-Rousseau
I would like to propose a provocative and maybe even extreme hypothesis: Maybe the Western creative mind is guided by melancholia and its black bile – though sad self-reflection and reasoning. While the Indian mind is guided by bliss and the search for inner light. And maybe that explains why the Western mind, 2,000 years later during the time of Enlightenment, thinks of enlightenment as the torch of light of the rational mind, as it is shown in the Pantheon in Paris at Rousseau’s grave, and why the Indian mind seeks enlightenment only within oneself. Finding the light within means connecting to the source and opening a realm of knowledge that does not deny rationality but also does not restrict itself to it.
– Bwo
So to close, I want to introduce the concept of the BwO. The BwO is not a literal body but a conceptual space or state of being. It refers to a body or system stripped of its predetermined roles, functions, and hierarchies—an undifferentiated field of potential. It’s a way of thinking about becoming, flux, and creativity beyond fixed identities or functions.an undifferentiated field of potential.
