Art Before Theory (short summary)

Christoph Kluetsch

This lecture is the final one in my winter series. I have given six lectures so far, and I have been challenging myself throughout. Today, I am taking on my biggest challenge yet. I have been exploring topics that interest me-topics that represent a collision between Western art history, Indian spirituality, and postmodern thinking. I find this intersection to be a fascinating space to operate in. In my previous lectures, I have examined temple architecture, problems of representation, and stylistic comparisons between seemingly unrelated artistic traditions. Today, I will delve into the most challenging topic for me: the idea of art before theory.

This lecture will be somewhat experimental. I will attempt to go before theory while still using theoretical concepts to explore this idea. My perspective on art shifted dramatically after leaving the Western Hemisphere. When I first traveled to India and later to China, I realized that the timeline I had been operating on-along with the concepts I had been learning and teaching-did not align with reality.

To start, I want to discuss a controversial artifact: the Makapansgat Pebble, found in South Africa. This small pebble, only five centimeters in size, was likely transported approximately 50-60 kilometers from its original location around three million years ago. This suggests that it was intentionally moved. At that time, the beings responsible for this action were not what we would call humans. They were conscious beings of some kind, existing long before any conventional human timeline.

What is intriguing about this stone is that it resembles a human face. Archaeologists have studied it and found that some of its markings were intentionally made. The question is: is this an artifact or simply a found object with human-like qualities? This raises a deeper question-what comes first: art or the capacity to perceive something as art? Do we suddenly decide to create art out of an empty space, or must we first be in a certain disposition to recognize something as art? If, three million years ago, there were beings who perceived and valued aesthetics, then the artistic impulse might be inherent in consciousness itself.

A common narrative suggests that prehistoric art was purely utilitarian-used for ritual, worship, or survival rather than for aesthetic appreciation. I would like to challenge this idea. The Western historical perspective often assumes a linear progression of human intellectual and artistic development, from primitive beginnings to increasing complexity. I disagree. The discovery of artifacts from 30,000-40,000 years ago, such as the Chauvet Cave paintings in France, reveals an astonishing level of artistic sophistication. Pablo Picasso, upon seeing the Lascaux cave paintings (dated to 17,000 years ago), famously remarked, "We have learned nothing." He saw no evidence of artistic progress-only continuity.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog explored this idea in his documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreamswhich examines the Chauvet Cave paintings. These paintings are nearly twice as old as those in Lascaux and exhibit an equally high level of skill and artistic expression. Herzog proposes that the human mind, with its ability for aesthetic perception, appeared all at once, rather than developing gradually. This challenges the assumption that consciousness and creativity emerged through a slow evolutionary process.

Traditional historical narratives depict human development in neat, linear timelines-first one stage, then another, leading to progressive improvement. However, these models are based on ideological assumptions about progress. They align with capitalist notions of advancement, which frame history as a constant process of moving forward. This perspective influences how we view art history as well. Alfred Barr's famous diagram of 20th-century avant-garde movements suggests a structured progression: realism leads to impressionism, which leads to cubism, and so on. This model assumes that new artistic movements render previous ones obsolete, but is this truly how art evolves?

Philosopher René Descartes contributed to this way of thinking by developing the Cartesian system-a structured, rational framework for understanding the world. This system relies on representation, where external objects are mapped onto an internal mental model. Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images (featuring the words "This is not a pipe" beneath a painted pipe) plays with this idea, exposing the gap between representation and reality. Language, images, and perception form a complex web of relationships that we may never fully understand.

This brings me to the concept of writing and its impact on human consciousness. Plato's Phaedrus contains a story about the Egyptian god Thoth, who presented the invention of writing to King Thamus. The king rejected it, fearing that writing would weaken memory and disrupt the direct transmission of knowledge. This prediction was remarkably prophetic. Writing enables record-keeping and challenges authority, but it also shifts us from a world of direct experience to a world of textual knowledge. In oral traditions, knowledge is preserved through memory, sound, and direct teaching rather than through written records. Even today, Vedic traditions in India rely on extensive memorization, preserving knowledge in a way that differs fundamentally from text-based learning.

In contrast to textual knowledge, prehistoric art represents a more direct and unmediated form of expression. The handprints found in ancient caves around the world, created by blowing ochre pigment over hands pressed against rock walls, are an early form of artistic expression. These images appear in various cultures across millennia, suggesting a universal human impulse. Their purpose remains speculative-perhaps they served as a mark of presence, a spiritual act, or an attempt to connect with the environment in a personal way.

Similarly, early figurines such as the Venus of Willendorf and the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel suggest complex symbolic thought. The Venus figurine, with exaggerated reproductive features, likely represents fertility and life-giving power. The Lion Man, a humanoid figure with an animal head, implies an early exploration of hybrid identities, myth, and imagination. These artifacts demonstrate that early humans were not merely copying reality but engaging with deep existential questions.

Music also played a significant role in prehistoric culture. A 40,000-year-old pentatonic flute found in Germany suggests that early humans understood musical harmony. The pentatonic scale appears in various cultures and is present in the mathematical ratios of planetary orbits, indicating a deep, perhaps even intuitive, connection between music and the cosmos.

Art, music, and spiritual experience in prehistoric times were not separate disciplines but integrated aspects of human existence. Early cave paintings, sculptures, and musical instruments were not simply tools for survival or representation but ways of engaging with the world on a profound level. They allowed humans to connect with nature, with each other, and with something beyond the material world.

In the modern era, art has become increasingly intellectualized, often reduced to conceptual games and textual discourse. Yet, at its core, art originates from an urge to connect-to align our inner experience with the outer world. This is what I mean by "art before theory." Prehistoric art embodies a direct, unmediated encounter with existence. It speaks to something fundamental in us, something we may have lost in the distractions of contemporary life.

Perhaps the real challenge is to rediscover this connection-to step outside the text, outside the structures of theoretical discourse, and into a more immediate engagement with being. The question remains: how do we move beyond the text while still embracing the knowledge it provides? This is something I continue to explore in my own practice and in my engagement with art history.

Der Beitrag Art Before Theory erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Auro Art World organized a series of 6 lectures at the Centre d'Art multimedia room in Auroville. These lectures, conducted by Dr. Christoph Kluetsch, explore connections between art, philosophy, and spirituality, bridging Eastern and Western traditions to illuminate the enduring questions of existence, consciousness, and creativity. The series is offered on the first Tuesday of every month.

Fourth lecture - Tuesday 7th January 2025 at 5pm

Who in our consciousness experiences sensations? How are sensations synthesized? How do matter, vibration, consciousness, and self connect? And how can we share sensations through art? Sri Aurobindo introduced the uncommon notion of intermiscence at a central point in his interpretation of the Kena Upanishad. This concept invites deeper speculation about the power of art and provides a profound tool to understand postmodern theories like Gilles Deleuze's provocative reinterpretation of the notions of concept, percept, and affect. The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze) is an analysis of the forces in modern painting as an encounter. It will become clear that Aurobindo's interpretation of the Kena Upanishad as a key text of the Vedanta can hold space for one of the most profound rhizomatic postmodern thinkers.

On a deeper level, we want to explore how Aurobindo's idea that sensations can 'operate without bodily organs' relates to Deleuze's notion of body without organs (BwO). Both philosophers point at the forces of consciousness on a plane of immanence.

Transcript:

I think I'm going to start slowly. Hello, welcome. Thank you for coming. I've been doing a lecture series here over the last couple of months. This is, I think, the fourth lecture I'm doing. They're not really related; they're all different topics. One was on temples, one on retinal art, one on apples and mangoes-just topics I find interesting.

It was an eye-opening experience when I discovered the Upanishads. I realized that not only are the Upanishads at least as deep as some of the most profound Western philosophies I've read, but they actually address a lot of questions I had been searching for. One of them was the question, "Who is seeing when seeing?" So I want to explore that a little bit. I will talk a bit about the Kena Upanishad. I'm not teaching it as a philosopher, because I don't have the expertise to go too deeply into it, but I will use it as material. Then I want to contrast it with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a French contemporary thinker who died in the 1990s-probably one of the most prolific postmodern thinkers of the 20th century.

The Laocoön, from around 27 AD, is probably one of the most famous sculptures. Winckelmann wrote about it, and the key phrase associated with it is "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur." The way the bodies are intertwined-how Laocoön is fighting the serpent to protect his sons-really captures so much of the energy and essence that defines us as humans, expressing it in a beautiful way that engages the viewer.

So, when I look at the Kena UpanishadI've highlighted a few things: "What gives sight to the eye and hearing to the ear?" I probably don't need to explain much about this Upanishad to people here, but it makes us aware of how our senses work and what the binding force behind them is. It leads us to meditation and reflection on the relationship of Brahman and Atman. Sri Aurobindo wrote an extraordinary commentary on the Kena Upanishad, which I've read many times. It's incredibly prolific, almost infinitely deep.

Looking at art in the 20th century, we can ask: What is art doing? What does it capture? One example is Vincent van Goghwho painted shoes. Martin Heidegger wrote about those shoes, saying they capture the very essence of "shoeness." He points out how we can see the earth under the soles, how they are worn. Another example is Paul Cézannewho painted apples again and again-there's something significant about painting an apple instead of simply eating it. Plato, in antiquity, famously mistrusted artists, calling them liars: if you paint an apple, you can't eat it, so in a sense you're deceiving people. But Cézanne might be indirectly responding to that by painting dozens of still lifes with apples, to show we can delve into our very own way of seeing and creating art, and reflect on the world.

When I was studying Sri Aurobindo's commentary, I found a few ideas that really shook me awake. For instance, here is one of those insights: if we suppose that physical senses act through a physical body, we can explain physical phenomena that way. Still, that action is only an organization of the inherent functioning of the essential sense.

And I was reading this and thought, "Wow, this is Sri Aurobindo, talking about the Kena Upanishad, essentially discussing a 'body without organs,' which is usually associated with Gilles Deleuze's way of thinking. And here it is!" I wondered what he meant-how one goes to the very essence of sensation and talks about it in a way that allows us to think about a body beyond our ordinary notion of organs.

It's much less common to think of the body in that way. And Deleuze makes a proposal to consider the "body without organs" as something that brings thinking into art. He uses Francis Bacon as an example-a famous British painter known for distorted figures that convey pain and distress, expressing the suffering of the 20th century. But what Deleuze says is that when we look at a painting by Bacon, what we see is the actual sensationnot merely the face or how hair is flying around, but a subtler level-an inner working of the sensation someone in distress might have. It's shown through what he calls the "logic of sensation."

So, taking that term-"logic of sensation"-back into the Upanishads, what happens?

Sri Aurobindo, in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, makes a distinction of five different elements. It's quite a complex idea. I stumbled over the word "intermissence" because I didn't know what it meant. When I looked it up, I saw maybe three books in the world use it. It's a very obscure word, but a valid (though out-of-use) English term.

When Aurobindo discusses sensation in relation to the Kena Upanishad, of course he speaks about the five senses and the five elements, intertwining them. He starts by saying, first, we have rhythmwhich is sound. Secondly, we have intermissence, this "flowing into each other," which is touch. If I touch a surface, then my skin and the surface of the object are flowing into each other to a certain degree-otherwise, I wouldn't be able to touch it. Something stops my body and makes clear there is something else there.

Third is shapewhich relates to sight. Fourth is taste, involving "upflow," or water. Fifth is the discharge or compression of force and movementwhich he relates to smell-atoms evaporating from the object and being received by my nose. Beyond these correlations, there is something deeper, as Aurobindo notes. He's exploring how these senses operate at a profound level.

So again, the correlation is:

• Rhythm = Sound
• Intermissence = Touch
• Shape = Sight
• Button = Upflow/Water
• Compression/Discharge = Smell

I was thinking about what example of 20th-century art could help illustrate this. In 2009, I was at Tate Modern in London for the installation How It Is by Miroslaw Balka. In the Turbine Hall, there was this massive black container, completely dark inside. You walk in, and it's really a journey into yourself. People move slowly. At the end, you turn around, and light pours in. You see everyone coming towards you, slowly, and you see how you yourself must have looked walking in. So there is this interplay between perception and self-awareness.

Sri Aurobindo, in his Kena Upanishad commentary, states that all the senses have a kind of complex unity. They aren't separate compartments-hearing here, seeing there, tasting there, all in isolated boxes within a human being. Instead, it's a complex unity at the core.

So, in a way, seeing is connected to hearing, taste, and touch, and they all operate upon each other. I don't want to go too deeply into modern scientific or philosophical discussions about "What if someone is blind or deaf?"-that might raise interesting questions, but at the core, it's still valid that when we talk about consciousness, when I speak of my experience of the world, these senses flow together. A little like I said before: in Sri Aurobindo's terms, there is rhythm, intermissence, form, the "upgoing force" (related to rasa), and compression of energy. Somehow, these aspects combine.

So, when we ask, "Who is seeing when seeing?" it's really about the consciousness behind everything-whether you call it my consciousness, your consciousness, or Brahman in manifestation. There's a larger consciousness of which we're a part, and we participate in that manifestation, thereby allowing the world to "sense" itself.

Another example is James Turrella famous American light artist. His Roden Crater project has been in the works for decades; only recently have a few people seen it, and I, unfortunately, haven't been there myself. He constructs these spaces that open up to the sky, blurring the boundaries between myself, the space I inhabit, and something deeper-the cosmos, the stars, silence. Some of his installations work on the very fine line of perceiving light in and of itself, dimmed down to such a degree that you just begin to see it. In that process, your mind passes through different levels of being-what some might call the chakras or the seven layers. In Indian thought, we might call them prana, rational mind, vijnana, philosophical view, sat-chit-ananda, and so on. The Upanishad guides us to become aware of these sensory and perceptual layers.

Images are fascinating when you think of them philosophically-not just as representations like a painting of something. Images are also what appear on our retina when we perceive. We have them in memory, in visions. I see you, you see me-we see each other. There is a way to think of images as the fundamental layer of our existence, because all I truly have of the world is my perception of it. I don't directly have "the world" in my mind; I have a sensation of something, and that's an image.

Henri Bergson is a philosopher who was very radical in this regard, and he's one of the very few Western philosophers Sri Aurobindo acknowledged. Bergson essentially says that our consciousness is dealing with images only. Everything is an image-this object, that object, you, me. Even my body is a particular image, because consciousness has direct access only to these images. We don't have direct access to "matter" in our consciousness. Modern science may talk about matter from an analytical perspective, but in our actual conscious experience, there is only this array of images.

These images also extend into our memory. I can tell you what I was doing yesterday; those memories consist of images. Yesterday no longer exists in the present world-it's simply gone-but I have images of it. So, in a very strong phenomenological sense, it's useful to pause and consider that all we have is this interplay of images, here and now.

We can make sense of images in many ways. We can contemplate them, compare them, act upon them, or even run away from them. There's something very particular about the image of my body in relation to all the other images that can act on it. That is an extraordinary observation by Henri BergsonIf you follow the Upanishadic path inward to your own body, you're essentially doing what Bergson describes-treating your body as an image. And the fact that we can act upon other images is found in meditation through the Upanishads, which always point to the force behind everything. Bergson, Deleuze, and others may discuss it differently, but the Upanishads call it Brahman or that deeper principle.

Mark Rothko gives a good example of this in his color-field paintings. One might say if you've seen one Rothko, you've seen them all-two or three rectangular color fields relating to each other. Yet if you visit a large Rothko retrospective, you see dozens of them, and it's mind-blowing. The tension between the colors and the way they float over a background color create a field of sensation. In painterly terms, that field of sensation is close to what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the plane of immanence-the most fundamental layer. You might think of that layer as Brahman in the Advaita sense: "There is only one reality," which unfolds into complexity. That complexity is necessary for anything to be set in motion. Once set in motion, experience becomes possible, and that is how existence gains a sense of itself.

Such unfolding can only happen through time, through duration, through actual movement. People often say Earth is where things "come down" to be worked out-whether you call it divine consciousness, soul, or something else. It must take concrete form in reality to experience itself and evolve. Visually, to me, that's what Rothko's fields suggest.

Now, going to the concept of the body without organs in the sense of immanence: consider this as an illustration-Deleuze doesn't specifically talk about it this way, but it's a helpful image. When Deleuze discusses the plane of immanencehe views it as having a transcendental field where action and becoming are possible-where "sense-creation" can happen. It's not just the material world we walk around in, but a subtler level that allows a different way for things to emerge.

Deleuze often gives the example of an egg: at first, you have yolk and white, which seem like formless mass. Many of us eat this for breakfast without a second thought, but if you let it incubate, there's already a chicken in there, in some virtual sense. That's the "body without organs" concept: the egg already contains the chicken, even if it's not yet realized.

By the same token, my body or your body is a body working with sensations, consciousness, and the analytical mind. We enter the world, connect with each other, speak, form communities, develop institutions, come up with knowledge systems, and create science and art. Through all this, we produce the complexity of modern societies. We reflect on reality in an analytical way, dissecting, reassembling, and building. We invent computers and projectors for gatherings like this. In doing so, we generate new intensities, new connections, new ways of being.

In interacting with these systems-institutions, electoral processes, laws-there emerges something that operates on its own. It can improve our lives or make them worse. But it functions as a body in itself, an agency in our reality that acts like a "body without organs." That's the power of Deleuze and GuattariThey analyze how society works (or doesn't), describing problems as a sickness in that body. Recognizing the sickness is the first step to talking about a cure.

Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of capitalism and schizophrenia basically uses this idea of seeing society as a body that's not functioning properly-one that is "sick." Once you recognize there's something wrong in the complex system, you can talk about how to fix it. But first, you need to understand that it's not simply about you or me making one or two changes.

Moving on to a more primary level with Deleuze, he talks about percepts, affects, and concepts. If we want to understand how these realities connect to our consciousness, we need to recognize these categories. A percept is not just my perception. When I look at this pen, there's a perception of a pen, which means my consciousness is directed toward it, and at the same time, the pen "presents itself" to me. You, looking from another angle, see the other side of it. Deleuze calls that pre-personal "something" a percept-prior to our individual perception, and not simply the object itself.

Deleuze says these percepts are akin to what Bergson might call "images." We could think of them as "inner senses." If you go into the Upanishads, you can go much deeper into this. Essentially, percepts are something we can work with; the realm of art taps into that directly.

Similarly, affects are emotions-fear, joy, love, pain-which occur before I even become consciously aware of them. They're triggered pre-subjectively in my nervous system. So Deleuze's idea is that if we look at the complex interplay between the outside world and my inner being-between my sensations, how my consciousness is composed of images, percepts, and affects-we can then see how these can be reworked or rearranged. This leads to a "logic of sensation," which is an awkward kind of move and not many philosophers do it. Deleuze is in many ways unique; you could even call him a kind of "Advaita philosopher," although he would describe it as "materialist immanence." He's non-committal about whether it's consciousness or matter, saying it's just one plane on which things happen.

Paul Cézanne exemplifies this fragmentation of our perception perfectly. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire about seventy times, breaking the scene into brushstrokes. None of those individual strokes represents anything by itself. Only together do they form what looks like a field, a mountain, trees, houses. But it's not photographic realism. We have to think: How am I assembling these strokes to see the landscape? It's almost a meditative process-a deeply spiritual encounter with reality.

Shifting back to Francis BaconIf we consider percepts, affects, sensations, and distortion, and we look at one of his triptychs, we immediately see a formal, rhythmic structure of three images. It's reminiscent of a traditional Western altarpiece. We might see the same entity repeated, but the body depicted is utterly different from a normal human body-it's reduced or distorted. It seems alive, though not in a straightforward, representational way. I can feel the motion, sense it, and sympathize with the affects it conveys. We see a pre-subjective consciousness of affect rendered visually in these percepts.

Deleuze sometimes draws diagrams to illustrate this. He talks about geological strata-how the Earth has molten magma inside, with layers of stone forming the crust, and tectonic plates shifting to create mountains. Through this folding process, insides and outsides form. Once there is a fold, it can vibrate, leading to dialogue, rhythm, and refrain.

Inside the Earth, you have magma. As the planet cools and solidifies, different layers of stone form. Then there are tectonic movements-continents moving toward or away from each other-creating mountains and folds. Eventually, things fold, and when they fold, you get an inside and an outside; there's some sense of identity forming within that fold.

Once you have that, things can vibrate, get into a dialog, or find a rhythm. For instance, if I knock on a surface, and then you knock in response, those two knocks can start a drum session-there's a shared rhythm. That rhythm creates about, perhaps a territoryan area in which we find ourselves. Often, drum rhythms are used to signal to others that people are present-for invitation, to scare, to attack, or to celebrate. In any case, it defines a territory, and within that territory, social events happen.

This connects to a part of Deleuze's philosophy of art that states art is ultimately an intersection of different planes of knowledge. He describes a plane of immanence, a plane of conceptsand yet another plane. Think of it in terms of wide conceptual planes for thinking about the world. If you intersect them on a very abstract level, you create an inside and an outside-like building a house, in a metaphorical sense. You surround yourself with art, books, ideas, people; you have a belief system and a way of anchoring yourself in reality; you relate to nature in a specific way, eat certain things, care about certain things.

That's how the plane of immanence unfolds in Deleuzian terms. In Upanishadic terms, it might be Brahman bringing itself into existence. It's not an exhaustive interpretation, but it's one way of describing it.

To illustrate this, consider a flock of birds, like the seven sisters or myna birds. There's a rhythm to how they fly around and chatter. They create a territory and invite others in. Sometimes a different bird joins them-sometimes not. They move on, rearrange, and so forth.

Coming toward the end, let's revisit the Kena Upanishad. It doesn't actually start with seeing; it starts with speech: "By whom impelled does this word [speech] arise?" In other words, who is speaking when I am speaking? It's not really "me." We know this idea from the motif of Shiva's drumfrom which syllables and language come-the beginning of the word itself.

Sri Aurobindo, in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, writes:

"Brahman expresses by the word a form of presentation of himself in the objects of sense and consciousness, which constitutes the universe, just as the human word expresses a mental image of those objects."

Here, Brahman focuses on objects through the word, and humans also focus on objects through the word-but obviously they do so in very different ways. Brahman is expressing through sense and consciousness, constituting the universe.

In looking for a Western counterpart, I remembered Eduardo Kac, a South American media artist, and his experimental project called Genesis. He works with E. coli bacteria, splicing in new genetic code-DNA art, in a sense. It's a controversial territory in its own right, but it reflects these questions of creation, expression, and what it means to bring something into being through a "word" or a code.

Eduardo Kac took a sentence from the Bible's Genesis-"Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth"-so when we speak of Genesis, "In the beginning was the word," and at the end of Genesis there's this notion of man's power to dominate the earth. That's a very different understanding of how words can be used. Sri Aurobindo often talks about words as the most powerful means to manifest, to bring something into existence. In spiritual practice, you use words and mantras to transform yourself; the vibration and the sound of words create reality. Brahman forms the world through words.

What I've tried to do here is intersect these profound observations from the Kena Upanishad and Sri Aurobindo's extraordinary interpretation, looking at "Who is sensing when sensing?" and connecting it with postmodern thinking. Both inform each other quite well. It helps me understand what art is ultimately about on a very deep level-art can be transformative. I'm sure most of us have experienced looking at an artwork for hours, not knowing why, but feeling that it did something to us. Our mind goes into that artwork, entering its plane of sensation, that logic of sensation, beyond narrative-beyond, "Oh, this is the artist, that's the subject, here's the story." It's more about really seeing. "Who is seeing when seeing?" is the question. When you engage with an artwork, when you really try to see and observe, that's where transformation can happen.

Any comments or questions about the "body without organs"? It's a concept most famously associated with Gilles Deleuze, the French postmodern philosopher. He borrowed it from Antonin Artaudwho was known in the early 20th century as an actor and theatrical theorist. Artaud wrote about the "theater of cruelty." It was a way of creating a shock, exposing the body to forces that propel us into being affected. Film itself is another way of dealing with percepts that evolve under distress, as in "theater of cruelty." One connects to these forces-there's torture or conflict in a certain place-and it all extends into that early idea of the "body without organs."

Somehow, it all echoes in Sri Aurobindo's analysis of the Kena Upanishad. Don't ask me why-I just found it striking. Deleuze came decades later, and I'm sure Sri Aurobindo wasn't thinking about the theater of cruelty. But there's an eerie overlap.

DISCUSSION:

Audience:

Then there's this other point in the Upanishads about "seeing" or "vision." In English, we say, "I see what you mean." William Blake famously said, "To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower." How do you see the world in a grain of sand? He's not talking about looking through a microscope; he's talking about a different set of eyes. And you have Master Eckhart in the 13th century saying, paraphrased, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me." That's an entirely different kind of relationship.

Yes, exactly.

One more mention: the artist who used brushstrokes to indicate a mountain was Paul Cézanne. You said he painted it 70 times in a meditative process?

Yes, he painted the same mountain-Mont Sainte-Victoire-70 times, possibly from different angles. He lived close to it, would walk around, choose different viewpoints, but essentially kept to the same subject. Over that series, he became more and more abstract. He's considered the father of Cubism-Picasso was heavily influenced by him-one of those breakthrough artists like Kandinsky, only earlier.

Audience Member:
And the artist who makes these deformed images-sometimes it's unpleasant to look at. It provokes something that isn't a happy feeling. It's like the "theater of cruelty." I understand that was the aim: to create that kind of reaction. These works were painted for museums. They could be marketed. In the past century, a lot of modern art leans in that direction: beauty in the traditional sense is often abandoned. There is still a market for it, but it focuses on creating a shock or disturbance. It reflects what the artist sees inside himself.

I watched a documentary about one such artist; his studio was a mess. He was clearly disturbed, but we still place him very high in the art world, even calling him a genius. Over time, I've started to change my taste. One of my favorite artists was Burri-I'm sure you know him, Alberto Burri, the Italian. One of his works was... well, it depicts great pain. It reflects what the world is going through right now. That pain is put onto the canvas.

Of course, people can go watch a Disney movie if they want an escape from the world. This kind of art, however, represents a harsh reality. It provokes a reaction. Maybe it helps us confront the fact that the world is in pain, and it inspires us to change it. After the Enlightenment in the West, the notion arose that spirituality, religion, or any non-scientific thinking should be set aside-that was part of the Enlightenment process. But it's an interesting twist on the word "enlightenment," almost the opposite of what we might mean in a spiritual sense.

Lecturer (responding):
Yes, I think that after the Enlightenment, art did jump on that train: it dove into the ugly, the painful, the disturbing, the unusual, the provocative-anything the rational mind can examine and say, "This is pain, this is perception." And from a modern perspective, originality often became the main criterion: you just have to do something new, whether it's admirable or not. That's the logic many follow, though personally, I don't think that logic applies here.

Audience Member:
What's your point of view on art, then? What's your definition or meaning of art?

Lecturer:
I've had to redefine my view. Part of why I'm doing these lectures is that I'm partly saying goodbye to some of those assumptions. I've been disturbed by this for a decade. Sure, I was initially excited by artists like Francis Baconseeing all that pain. But at a certain point, I realized that if I look at Bacon through Deleuze and through the Kena Upanishad and Sri AurobindoI find something deeper that I want to keep. I don't care about the treadmill of modernity anymore.

It's a personal and sometimes painful process. We also have to recognize that we're unconsciously addicted to certain emotions-sometimes even unpleasant ones. We seek experiences or images, including art, that feed those emotions. So these paintings can be a way people indulge in that.

Another Audience Member:
Regarding astrology and planets: In Sanskrit, the word for "planet" is "graha," meaning "to grasp." The planets themselves do nothing, but they "grasp" your mind and direct your perception or actions, engineering certain experiences for you. From another perspective, in the body, Saturn rules the nervous system, and the nervous system is the foundation of whatever experience you have. The Sun rules the bones, etc. In that sense, you see parallels to the concept of "affect" that we discussed-something preexistent to humans.

Another Audience Member:
From a Western viewpoint, that might be new, but from an Eastern viewpoint, it's familiar. And about the Enlightenment you mentioned: I recently read about a meeting of all the world's religions, including the Dalai Lama and various Christian representatives, and one priest pointed out that the Enlightenment was, in a way, a scientific "proving" of certain constitutions, but we got confused and thought it meant discarding religion altogether. It's a tragic misunderstanding.

Lecturer (concluding):
Yes, indeed-it's a very tragic confusion. Alright, thank you all for coming!

Der Beitrag Who is seeing when seeing erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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)

"Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible" (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 kind. 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 artof 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 sometimes see 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, 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 vijnanaa 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 illustrates the rational pragmatic mind taking over natural frequencies and subordinates the divine under the mundane. La Monte Yung's performances 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 representationThrough 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 - cannot 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 ruins of representation, it fissures, cracks, inconsistencies to let shine though them that what lies 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 year old child? But what we seeing here is a masterpiece of 20th 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 differently 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 be 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 systematic 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 all happens 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 movie 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 negativitythat 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 in 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 Plato's 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.

Retinal Art_final

Der Beitrag Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Der Beitrag 2nd lecture: Irumbai Temple as Yantram (Apparata) erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Dhe Archaeology Department of Tamil Nadu has officially 44,121 Temples in Tamil Nadu counted. With 72,138,958 (2011) that is 1635 inhabitants per temple. Germany has 84,270,625 (2022) inhabitants and 45,600 Catholic and Protestant churches. That makes 1848 inhabitants per church.

However, many estimate that the actual number of temples in Tamil Nadu is much higher (between 200,000 and 300,000). In Germany, on the other hand, all churches have probably been recorded.

The Christian churches concentrate largely on the message of the Bible, and other systems of knowledge are quickly demarcated as conspiracy theories by secret orders such as the Knights Templar. The Hindu temples, on the other hand, are based on the Agama Texts that connect to the sciences, cosmology, the arts, spiritual wisdom, architecture, music, ceremonies, urban planning, economics, yogas, yantra, tantra, mantra...

Temples in India are one of the many keys to thousands of years of knowledge, where it is still not really clear where it came from, because the oldest texts in India, the Rigveda, is not just any textual testimony, but a highly complex system of knowledge of all kinds.

How yantra (the geometric form, which can also be found in temple ground plans), mantra (the spoken/sung text) and tantra (the 'instruction', the teaching) are interwoven can be seen beautifully in the Gayatri Mantra. You can listen to it here: Gayatri Mantra by Manish Vyas

I would like to link the Vāstusāstra here, because it is not easy to find an English translation:

Vastu shastra VL. 1: Hindu Canons of lconography &Paining (76mb, 822 pages)

Viswakarma Vastusastram: A Treatise On Town-planning Etc. 

The standard work of art history on temples in India is here:

Kramrisch, Stella. 1946. The Hindu Temple Vol .I . http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.282158.
Kramrisch, Stella. 1946. The Hindu Temple Vol. 2. http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.40420.

Here from page 32 Vol.1 a diagram of the arrangement of the gods in the temple:

Der Beitrag Tempel in Tamil Nadu: Eine Verbindung zu Jahrtausende altem Wissen und Wissenschaften erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Why do we need a biennial? I have often asked myself this question. I have been to many places with major international cultural events, i.e., before COVID-19, that was. During Lockdown, I co-organized an artist-in-residence program to think about what the implications, threats, and opportunities of COVID-19 are for cultural practitioners. Everything turned out quite differently than we had hoped, the great upheaval failed to materialize, and in a time marked by crises many are now simply trying to return to the status quo. Have we really used the trillions of Euros and Dollars so thoughtlessly and without reflection, only to maintain a system that urgently needs a change?

The concept of biennials or major cultural events was already discredited before COVID-19. They are dominated by the art market and influencer posing. An international chic and hipster community, old intellectual hardliners, head-shaking know-it-alls, and naive do-gooders met there to applaud a powerless self-promotion of artist-curators and gallerist-egos. Many seriously want to show that the world should become better, but with what example do they go ahead?

Kochi-Muziris Biennale

I was at the Kochi Biennale for the first time in 2016, and I already thought that something different was being done here-better-with the heart in the right place and a vision that was oriented towards making a concrete, real difference. There were children's art camps, public events where anyone could and did come, school children and their mothers came from the villages of Kerala, run-down barracks, warehouses, docks were opened so that art students from all parts of India could exhibit there, international artists were invited to see the locations before they conceived their side-specific installations. There were a large number of art educators, many projects were focused on ecology, social impact, critique of the ruling class. Little children, who use their school vacations to look at art, laughingly ask foreigners on the street where they come from, only to ask even more joyfully with great pride and enchanting charm if they like Kerala.

Fort Kochi is a melting pot of India, where spiritual, colonial, indigenous, national, political, cultural influences have converged for centuries. Kochi is an architectural jewel covered with Che Guevara graffiti and communist election posters. Goats and cows walk among the rickshaws, and everything smells of Kerala's spice garden. Fresh fish is sold on the beach, while container ships and military reconnaissance vessels pass in the background. It is a vibrant city.

The fifth edition 2022/23

The 2022 Biennale started with organizational chaos. This is not really surprising in India, but it does show the challenges that Covid left behind. Many buildings stood empty for four years, or were just used for storage, which further reduced the already fragile building technology infrastructure. An incendiary letter on e-flux from participating artists attests to the frustration. Organizing a major international event in India may not be an easy task in itself, but doing so after two years of pandemic is actually impossible. It is all the more surprising that after two weeks of catastrophically communicated delays, the miracle of the Kochi Biennale happened again. Some things are still under construction even three weeks after the official partial opening. But most of it is professionally installed-in warehouses and barracks. The power of many artworks shines through the chaos.

Some large video installations, such as commissioned work by CAMP's "Bombay Tilts Down (2021-2022)" from Mumbai at Aspinwall or Amar Kanwar's "Such a Morning (2017-19)" from Delhi at Anand Warehouse, have transformative power. CAMP uses CCTV Surveillance footage and mixes it with percussive chants about solidarity, oppression, and hope in Mumbai's poorest neighborhoods.

In contrast, Kanwar's work is poetically quiet, a journey into darkness. A mathematics professor, perhaps going blind, prepares for the darkness. What a task for a visual artist - a preparation for a life without sight! This is not only about the existential questions of survival, but about the limits of art, how far does art reach beyond perception? The video installation is extended by an installation of miniprojectors, in which elements of the film are selected and captured in settings. Lined up next to each other, the film thus becomes a linear copresence that allows the visitor to walk around between the images. The visitor is in a place of reverberation, of memory, the images of the film are faded, transformed, surreal.

A general trend is also intensifying here. More and more artists are using the medium of film. Projections and screens are everywhere. Magically disturbing is the installation of Jitish Kallat "Covering Letter" (2012), the work has been seen many times before, but in the south of India it unfolds a completely different power. Ghandi sent a letter to Hitler on July 23, 1939. It was addressed 'Dear friend'. Ghandi emphasized that Hitler was the only person who could prevent the brutality of this war. The letter is projected continuously by Jitish Kallat on a cloud of mist. A touch of history is felt.

Since we are dealing with time media, it is impossible to cope with all of this, and so there is a competition of screens and projection sizes. There are many works on political, ethnic and social conflicts to be seen. Every story would be worth to be retold here. But the narrative medium reaches its limits here. The visitor needs time, but she is rewarded with a variety of perspectives from the point of view of the oppressed. In the age of portable pocket screens, it is appropriate to rely on this medium because our viewing habits are changing, the static image and text without dramaturgical staging are lost in the battle for attention.

It is nice to see that the curator shows great diversity in hanging. Large rooms with picture areas completely without text panels are beneficial - these hang in the hallway of the administrative wing of Aspinwall. The biennial gives the works space, the walls never seem crowded. This invites one to linger.

Art for the mind

Yohei Imamura "tsurugi" (2022) is a highlight in technical mastery. Over two years, Imamura used a silkscreen technique to create a 3D model of a mountain by layering. A video explains the process. The reflective layers are almost as varied as the more than 1000 layers of paint that create the 3D model of the mountain. It starts with the topographic maps, which are themselves a layer of abstraction from reality. I think of Baudriallard's simulacrum, of postmodern concepts of mapping. Imamura traces each elevation plane in order to transfer it individually to a silkscreen plane. This meditative tracing is also a preparation for mountain climbing; knowledge of the terrain is essential for survival.

By reproducing the mountains in 3D through layering, we are reminded of geological processes. It would be interesting to know what are the geological stratifications of the mountain itself, is there any correlation? Probably not. The whole could be created on a 3D printer, but here the inner design principles would be radically different, algorithmic, vector-based, tech-scanned. Criticism of a wide variety of technical media is clearly implied here. And so we find ourselves confronted with an object that combines different levels of representation and abstraction, created through an innovative form of masterful screen printing. Technical reproduction, imagination, construction, the intertwining of space and plane, of creativity and precision meet here.

A radical increase of the conceptual can be found in the works of Iman Issa "Lexicon (2012-19)" questions the relation of language, image, and imagination. The starting point are art-historical descriptions of images that are not shown. Instead, from these textual descriptions, Issa isolates formal elements that can be seen as sculptures next to the descriptions. It is an intellectual game that seems a bit out of place. However, this kind of textual, Western, critical, perhaps based on postcolonialist discourse does not really resonate.

Biennale of the people

This Biennale of the people has a different accent: political, participatory, inviting. This becomes very clear and evident in the works of Marcos Avila-Ferero "Theory of the wild gees, notes on the workers gestures (2019)". Avila-Ferero asked retired Japanese workers to repeat their movements of the work processes in their professional life. We see workers moving air in human chains. The whole thing seems so absurd and senseless, so exposing and inhuman, that the whole exploitation of labor becomes immediately tangible. The technical tracing of the physical motion sequences illustrates how the rationalization of labor uses the human body as a tool. We see how, after decades of routine, the body adapts and deforms to the work processes. Over the duration of the exhibition, dancers will be invited to respond to these work processes. This is exciting to imagine.

The curatorial statement reads, "even the most solitary of journeys is not one of isolation, but drinks deeply from that common wellspring of collective knowledge and ideas." Nowhere is this more evident than in the works of the Student Biennial. You can feel the verve of young artists, the poetry that unfolds in the warehouses from the colonial era. The works of young artists "drink deeply from that common wellspring of collective knowledge and ideas," - they take a big gulp.

This again is not unusual, in fact not that remarkable, because art students all over the world do this. Except in Kochi they are represented at the Biennale, they are visible to an international audience, they are heard, their voice is amplified and sounds in a chorus, they are not alone, they represent a whole generation, the generation to which the future belongs and which is taken away from them by the egoism of the ideals of old white men.

The work of Nilofar Shaikh of VNSGU "Healing Map, Bench" is such an example. A bench, with murals in the background, invites the viewer to confront the issue of violations and to enter into dialogue with the environment.

Dheeraj Jadhav shares his way of seeing with his installation "Planting Conversation", which is strong and compelling.

Nabam Hem, Taba Yaniya and Ejum Riba invite us into the world of the Tani clan with their large installation "Tani Nyia Nyji Muj". It is moving and thought-provoking.

The community art project Bhumi has worked in lockdown with a community in Bangladesh. Local materials and traditions result in a round of figures that exemplify the heart of this biennial. It can be seen on the sidelines of the biennial at the TKM Warehouse.

I always try to spend a few days at a biennial, I find it important to interact with the environment. In Kochi, I drink my chai on the boardwalk and laugh heartily with the people from Kerala, even though we don't have a common linguistic language. The south of India is incredibly hospitable, warm, carried by a spirituality that perceives life in every counterpart. These encounters are the real energy of the Kochi Biennale, without them none of this would be possible here. And I am beginning to understand what it means to truly live differently. It is the nature and the culture, the people and the spirituality, the harmony of the world that can be heard here. It is a radical counter design to the over saturated affluent societies. In the curatorial statement we find: "The human need to think freely without proscription, in spite of, and sometimes because of repression, all point to the way we react to conflict. The only enemy is apathy. That has no name or face, and it lies entwined with its bedfellow-self-censorship."

It is the Biennale of the people.

Further reading:

Der Beitrag Art beyond darkness – Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022/23 erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

A major show of the woks from Amitabh Sengupta is on display at Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. In cooperation with Sarala's Art Center 70 paintings predominantly from the last decade can be seen. For the opening of the exhibition on Dec 16^th 2022 the secretary of Auroville and the director of the Alliance Français lit the candle.

Amitabh Sengupta was born in Calcutta in 1941 and graduated from Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta in 1963. From 1966 to 1969 he received a scholarship for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was witnessing the 68 student revolts. From 1977 until 1981 he joined the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, where he became Head of Creative Arts. He exhibited in India, Nigeria, Europe, and USA and currently lives in Calcutta.

The works by Amitabh Sengupta show a vast spectrum of styles. It is impressive to see how much he engaged with western modernist tradition and yet maintained his roots in Indian traditions. We can see this in the colors, the traces of written words, the iconography. Going through the exhibition there are echoes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Pierre Soulage, Jasper Jones, Paul Klee and many more.

I was wondering about that rich reference and the echoes of western modernity, and found the answer in Amitabh Sengupta's writings. In his 'Memoir of an Artist' from 2014 he makes several times a reference to Rabindranath Tagore, most people will be familiar with his name as the first Nobel Prize winner in India. At the end of the chapter 'Indian Contemporary Art - an alternative modernity' Amitabh Sengupta writes: "In the absence of social dialogue, art is facing another challenge. The priorities of art commerce and global marketing are imposing pressure to remain 'modern' as constant reference to global trends. This was predicted by many, for example, Tagore, expressed admiration about western cultures, at the same time warned against the risk of coercion, which they saw a built-in process in the system." Amitabh Sengupta being part of the Bengal Art school takes Tagore to heart.

Art historical narratives

We can recall Rabindranath's poem Namaskar to Sri Aurobindo published in 1907 as it is well known. Rabindranath admired Sri Aurobindo's fight against colonialism and oppression and supported him during his time in prison. Aurobindo's book Renaissance in India with articles from 1918-21 comes to mind. But while the western eye can learn from Aurobindo how to see Indian Art through the Indian perspective, Rabindranath warns of the power of modernism in the visual arts for Indian Artist.

Here lay the roots of the negotiation between western modernist and Indian culture in the 20th century^th century. We see why the big show of Amitabh Sengupta fits into the Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. His work is informed by these discussions and addresses the struggles which western academic art historian theories have with not western art. Sengupta's oeuvre speaks to the difficulties Indian artists faced during the middle of the 20th century^th century to be seen internationally.

In 2021 Sengupta's "The History of Modernism in India" was published, a 200 pages thick book that celebrates diversity in India and warns of the misconception by the west of a "uniform and monolithic Hindu structure". Chapter 6 deals with Rabindranath Tagore's Dialectics of Art. How should the art of a young nation like India, that also has one of the oldest cultural histories in the world, respond to the dominating western modern concepts? We know that western modernism drew inspiration from its colonial exploitation of the other parts of the world (the prominent examples are Van Gogh, Picasso and Gaugin). That mistake may not be repeated by artists in countries that gained independence through painful paths.

Fluid mixtures

On Dec 20 2022 there was an artist talk planned. Art historian Dr. Ashrafi Bhagat gave an introduction lecture on the relevance of Amitabh Sengupta for the defining decades of the 1960ies in India. Artists had to find their voice, while connecting to the dominant western discourse, maintaining, and developing their own style. It was difficult, as there was criticism from all sides, either it was too western or not western enough, too traditional or not traditional enough, too subjective or not expressive enough... Amitabh Sengupta was an extraordinary productive artist, who masters many techniques like painting, drawing, printing, writing on the highest level. He is rooted in Indian history and its visual language and creates pictorial spaces that contain cultural memories, realistic spacial representation on an abstract plane, juxtaposed with remanences of signs and geometrical forms.

Walking through the exhibition, one sees that the pictorial spaces in his series called 'Pyramids' or 'Inscription' are abstract composition with semiotic echoes, that activates an inner space that is associated with the path of mediation since the Vedic texts. Amitabh Sengupta's art is not explicitly spiritual, but it becomes sensible that the inner experience, the conscious mind, the creative expression, and the pictorial representation are interlinked within his body of work. Amitabh Sengupta however does not shy away from commentary on global issues with his drawing relating to the Covid-19 crises or his paintings relating to topics of urbanization and globalization.

Amitabh Sengupta voice is strong and manifests an intermiscence, i.e. a mixture of sensations, styles, thoughts, signs, space and memory that reminds me of movement of thoughts in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Kena Upanishad. There that strange word of 'intermiscence' appears at a place that explains the creations of rhythms and forms.

For Deleuze art is thought in matter, it is also a territory in which we build our home - literally and metaphorically. The different material elements in Amitabh Sengupta's work, the planes of composition, the connection of signs, the yantras of geometrical shapes, the pictorial space and memory invite the viewer to explore his/her inner space, where one defines home. It doesn't matter from where you come, Amitabh Sengupta's work invites everyone on that journey. Whether this is some sort of 'post-post -ism' is not relevant. That is the power of art that dares to address existential questions.

Further readings:

Der Beitrag „Ausstellung der Werke von Amitabh Sengupta in der Kalakendra Art Gallery, Auroville“ erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

GI have just returned from a devotional meditation. It is the anniversary of Sri Aurobindo. He left his body 72 years ago, as they say here.

I have been thinking and talking a lot about his commentaries on the Kena Upanishad over the last few days. I came across the word 'intermiscence'. It is almost only used by Aurobindo. I asked all the people I met what the word meant. A friend here found a translation into German as 'ineinanderfließen' (it describes the mixing of liquids in German).

This word appears in such a central place in Aurobindo, and it is so unique that my academic mind has become curious. Why such an unusual word in such an important place?

Kena Upanishad

What is it about? In the Kena Upanishad, the central question is who thinks while thinking, who hears while hearing, who sees while seeing... Aurobindo's commentary is a philosophical analysis. He describes a whole philosophical system, a sketch of epistemology, metaphysics, empiricism, philosophy of language, theory of consciousness.

The Upanishads repeatedly deal with the question of who or what we are. Our spirit, our individuality, our soul, what is the world, who created it, how does the cycle of life work. Similar to Deleuze, many things begin with vibration, then comes rhythm and then grouping, differentiation and movement. Strength and finally form emerge through stabilization. This is the secret of creation, the vibration, the elemental force.

In the rational world, this vibration is understood scientifically. In the spiritual world as consciousness, a primordial consciousness - Brahman - that differentiates itself in order to recognize itself. The world exists as a manifestation of this primordial consciousness and everything is ultimately one. Aurobindo's philosophy could be described as an attempt to identify the different levels of this differentiation in the different levels of consciousness: Life force, which we find even in the smallest creatures, various forms of perceptual consciousness and their synthesis, reflective and linguistic consciousness, intuition, cognition. They form different relationships to the world (Aurobindo refers here to vijñāna, prajñāna, saṁjñāna and ājñāna).

How does that which thinks while thinking connect with that which is thought?

A central question is who or what has 'my' consciousness, how it is synthesized and how it relates to the primordial consciousness Brahman.

The paragraph in which the word 'intermiscence' appears describes a deepening of contact. Contact here can be understood as broadly as possible: Contact between energy (rhythm), matter, consciousness, sensory perception etc... The addition of 'intermiscence' to contact describes what we cannot actually understand, i.e. the connection between consciousness and matter. And it makes sense to use a word that is theoretically not preloaded, a fresh word so to speak.

"But this vibration of conscious being is presented to itself by various forms of sense which answer to the successive operations of movement in its assumption of form. For first we have intensity of vibration creating regular rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all creative formation; secondly, contact or intermiscence of the movements of conscious being which constitute the rhythm; thirdly, definition of the grouping of movements which are in contact, their shape; fourthly, the constant welling up of the essential force to support in its continuity the movement that has been thus defined; fifthly, the actual enforcement and compression of the force in its own movement which maintains the form that has been assumed. In Matter these five constituent operations are said by the Sankhyas to represent themselves as five elemental conditions of substance, the etheric, atmospheric, igneous, liquid and solid; and the rhythm of vibration is seen by them as śabda, sound, the basis of hearing, the intermiscence as contact, the basis of touch, the definition as shape, the basis of sight, the upflow of force as rasa, sap, the basis of taste, and the discharge of the atomic compression as gandha, odour, the basis of smell."

This became clearer to me today during my devotional meditation.

OM, peace, peace, peace

If you would like to delve a little deeper into the Kena Upanishad, please refer to this: Sri Aurobindo Vol 18 , p. 58

Der Beitrag Intermiscence – Kena Upanischad erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Et is definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything that is technically feasible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is useful. Now we keep hearing from many quarters that we should concentrate on the small steps ahead of us, that this is the only way we can move forward together. This may be true at times, but it distracts us from the essentials. Where do we actually want to go?

Does it make sense to fly into space and burn up our Earth in the process? Is it really a good idea to jeopardize our extremely complex biodiversity here in order to search for water on a desert planet and think about how we can artificially create the most basic conditions for life there? Why do so many people believe that this makes sense?

Knowledge structures

There are indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years. The wealth of experience grows very slowly and is passed on orally from one generation to the next. This oral tradition is a bottleneck. On the one hand, oral tradition requires narratives. Secondly, the flow of information is limited. Knowledge dies with the bearer of knowledge. Only what is passed on and remembered survives. There is no significant accumulation of knowledge. Outdated knowledge dies out and is replaced by new knowledge. There is a concentration of knowledge and selection.

In 'advanced civilizations', on the other hand, knowledge is archived. Everything is stored in knowledge repositories, such as libraries or networks. It is accessible to many people and allows for extreme specialization. This specialization loses sight of the context. Arbitrary maxims become leitmotifs: Wealth, power, pleasure. Knowledge is instrumentalized to serve these maxims. We call this the freedom of science. Knowledge has been detached from the grand narratives and liberated. We call it secularized or modernized (Galileo).

Now we have this tower of accumulated knowledge. In a Babylonian confusion of languages, we no longer know where we want to go. We are breaking the master narrative and releasing micronarratives. We call this plurality or postmodern (Lyotard).

Much has been written about all of these. We have created a world that is wonderfully complex. There is a dazzling tolerance in many places, our creativity has been unleashed and our minds have been given wings. We have technology that allows us to transform our knowledge, our communication, our bodies, space and time. There is certainly no point in trying to turn back time. Not everything was better in the past.

Biological and mental knowledge repositories

What seems important to me is the direction of view. In the industrialized nations, we focus on technology. What is on the Internet is real. We have long since arrived in the hyperreal (Baudrillard). Only slowly are we (re)recognizing the complexity of biological and mental knowledge repositories. If knowledge is stored in living 'archives', then it is part of life. This does not mean that it is always good, on the contrary, it is probably value-neutral. But it is part of a complex system. However, we should not understand this 'system' in cybernetic terms. The aim is not decoding and imitation or simulation (biomimicry). Rather, the aim should be to reintegrate ourselves, to become part of nature and consciousness again.

I don't think this has to be a step backwards. I just doubt the belief in a technological singularity. The Silicon Valley ideology that the next big step will be to transfer consciousness to a hard disk, to integrate it into the network or hyperreality will really help us. For biological humans, it would be more of a nightmare. The question remains as to why we are striving for this. The dream of immortality is the driving force, in essence the preservation of the self. But it is precisely this illusion that needs to be overcome. If we succeed in doing so, whose part do we want to see ourselves as? Computer processors, nature and/or consciousness?

Der Beitrag An einer Utopie arbeiten erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.