BEAUTY: THREE VIEWS

Hegel:

“Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts, and fine art is frequently the key — with many nations there is no other — to the understanding of their wisdom and their religion.” [1]

Abhinavagupta:

“For Abhinavagupta, in other words, art, the spirituality path and the divine reality were clearly one and the same. In the mind of Abhinavagupta, this cosmos is God’s artistic creation, a creation within which every smallest unit of that creation itself embodies and reflects the divine Artist which is its origin. For this reason, artistic expression — be it poetry, drama, music painting or any other artistic medium — is just as capable of bringing about spiritual realization as yogic practice. For Abhinavagupta, the artist is a yogin and the yogin is an artist. The ultimate artistic expression is life itself which presents the opportunity for the attainment of spiritual realization, an event which empowers the individual to recognize his or her own identity as non-distinct from the identity of that ultimate Artist who is the source and very body of creation itself.” [2]

Herbert V. Guenther:

“Insight into life and Being ultimately springs from creative, and by implication, artistic imagination. Therefore, the fine arts not only can give us knowledge, but also, through their influence on our lives, give form to our emotive experiences. The close relationship between Tantrism and the fine arts underlines the importance of learning to see reality as a symbol of life and feeling, not as a sign that points to something other than itself. The meaning of life is in living it.” [3]

[1]   Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet, ed. and intro. Michael Inwood (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1993), p. 9.

[2]   Dr. Jeffrey S. Lidke, A Thousand Years of Abhinavagupta, Sutra Journal, January, 2016. [ONLINE HERE]

[3]   Herbert V. Guenther, The Tantric View of Life, Shambhala Publications, Boulder & London, 1976, p. 147.

IMAGE: Cover of a Shakta Manuscript with Uma-Maheshvara

FROM GORKY TO GUSTON

8^th August 2012

Frankly, having long admired the paintings of Philip Guston, I  did not know much about the evolution of his Art.  These two Documentaries are a useful start:

Philip Guston: A Life Lived (MBP, 1981) [HERE]

Philip Guston, Odd Man Out (BBC4 arts documentary, 2004) [HERE]

And attached here:

Craig Burnett, Philip Guston. The Studio, Afterall Books (One work), 2014.

Naturally there is a mass of critical material on Guston,  but these are a few samples. 

GORKY

Just Finished ‘My Apprenticeship’ by Maxim Gorky, which is the middle part of a Trilogy of his life. I was delighted to see that the complete Trilogy was filmed and is available on the Mosfilm site – so I will watch those soon.  Of course, in Russian, with subtitles.   The visuals are superb and the director Mark Donskoy captures an almost Caravaggio version of Russia in the 19^th century (example above).

But I like this quote, where he berates the Saturnine aspects of the human psyche, the inability to move from fixed and entrenched positions.  Love S.

“Later, after I had met many such people among the intelligentsia, as well as among simple folk, I realized that their persistence was nothing more than the passivity of people who had nowhere to go beyond the point already reached, and who, indeed, had no desire to go further, caught as they were in a tangle of obsolete words and outworn conceptions. Their will had become enervated and incapable of developing toward the future and had they been suddenly emancipated; they would have rolled mechanically downhill like a stone on a mountainside. They were kept imprisoned in a graveyard of dead ideas by the lifeless force of backward- lookings and by a morbid love of suffering and persecution. Once deprived of the opportunity to suffer, they would be drained of all substance, and vanish like clouds on a fresh, windy, day.

The faith for which they sacrificed themselves so eagerly and with such false pride, was unquestionably a firm faith, but it resembled old garments, so caked with dust and dirt as to be inaccessible to the ravages of time. Their thoughts and feelings had grown used to being tightly encased in prejudices and dogmas, and the fact that they became deformed and earth-bound did not disturb them in the least.

   This faith-by-habit is one of the most vicious and regrettable phenomena of our life. Within the bounds of such faith, as in the shadow of a stone wall, anything that is new grows slowly twisted and anaemic. Too few rays of love penetrate that dark faith, and too many of vengeance, malice, and envy, blood-brothers to hate. The light of such faith is merely the phosphorescent glow of decay.”

THE TRILOGY ONLINE HERE:

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938)

On His Own (1939)

My Universities (1939)