Art Piece, Draft Two, Part Two

Art Piece, Draft Two, Part Two

A passenger on one of the first trains in England breathlessly wrote to her mother about what it was like for a human being to move at 35 mph. The English countryside became a blur, moving by too fast for the human eye to focus. Humans had not just conquered nature, they were in a real sense outside of it. They were observers but speed had negated their ability to even see, the one sense that the Western Way was based on.

Near the end of the post-Renaissance/pre-Impressionist art period, and two-thirds the way through the Industrial Revolution itself, technological science gave Western man the camera. Among other things the camera allowed human beings to stop time.

Not since the days when scientists like Leonardo were working on their discoveries in human optics, perspective, and anatomy had a scientific advance had such an effect on Western art. However, the effect was not the result of science and art working synergistically as in the past; like all other areas of human activity, art was changed by science as an external force and that force itself was driven by a methodology that had never been challenged. After the invention of the camera, what was art's brief? It must have seemed to an aspiring artist as if there was nothing left to be done.

Around the time of the invention of the camera, western writers like Dickens ("David Copperfield," 1849-50) and Thoreau ("Walden," 1854) began to challenge the results of the Industrial Revolution. More implicitly than explicitly, science, which created the Industrial Revolution, was questioned also. Description and meaning, previously united and considered inviolate were coming to be seen as distinct.

In 1844 Friedrich Nietzsche was born. He grew up in the industrializing west, the results of which Dickens and Thoreau were challenging, in a time when constants like motion, space, time and mass were being perceived and experienced as less constant by the day.

Nietzsche was fifteen years old in 1859 when Darwin published his "Origin of Species." Like Copernicus and Galileo before him, Darwin was a further challenge to the spiritual heritage of the West. Natural selection not supernatural intention was the explanation. Once again western science had provided an emotionally and spiritually shattering outcome-neutral accounting for.

In the early 1870's art began to reflect the changes that had been occurring in society as a result of science. The Impressionists painted in a "blurry" style, just as the railroads first passengers saw the landscape as it went by. The results of their work and their methodology was a break with the Western Way.

The Impressionists were also experiencing the fall of standards in motion, space, time and mass and were searching for new essences to replace them. They painted light, they turned away from traditional subject matter and painted peasants. They turned from the West entirely and painted peoples and places and in styles of "primitive" societies such as Tahiti.

With standards--truths--falling all around them, the Impressionists looked for and found many truths. They painted themselves, but not as portrait objects. They painted themselves into their art as personal, expressive, emotional beings into and onto the canvass. Brush strokes were no longer to be hidden. They were to be seen and experienced as part of the finished art work.

The Impressionists broke with the Western Way but they did not break with all of humankind's way of painting. Rather, however unconsciously, they were painting with the mindset that Chinese artists had been painting with at least seven centuries before.

Su Shi, an eleventh century poet/painter/statesman, wrote "One can enter a state absolute concentration in which an object is grasped through total identification and then arrive at a fusion of the subject and object--the artist, or viewer and the work of art."

This was a new Western essence however, a new truth and it was personal and emotional, methodologically neutral and outcome-driven. Method and object, description and meaning were being separated in painting too.

The Impressionist painter was not a scientist whose instrument was a brush; he was an autonomous, atomized human being who was fusing his personal spiritual consonance and his art. The scientific dichotomy of observer and observed was broken. The scientific method was broken as an artistic method.

In 1873, as the Impressionists were abandoning the scientific method, challenging its truth and revealing other truths which were emotional, Nietzsche wrote philosophically of the non-objectivity of truth.

Nietzsche challenged the results of science as Dickens and Thoreau had done, he broke with the scientific method as the Impressionists had done but he also challenged--attacked--the ethical and moral foundations of the West. In doing so Nietzsche proposed a reformulation, a reconceptualization of what a human being was.

He argued that the whole of Western civilization had taken a wrong turn at Socrates when it should have taken Homer's road. He wrote as passionately as Van Gogh painted and argued that human essence was in a drunken, half-mad, emotional "Dionysian" state, not the rational, logical "Apollonian" way that the West had adopted instead.

Nietzsche wrote that "[The Dionysian artist] is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator, that '[The Dionysian artist] is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art."

Nietzsche was not only arguing for recasting Western man in Homer's mode rather than the Apollonian way. He was, consciously or not, casting the Western artist precisely in terms of the Chinese and precisely in the terms of the post-Impressionists.

If the essence of humanity was its spirituality, not its intellect, if man could not be reduced to Rene Descartes "brain in a vat," then the rational, scientific outcome-neutral method of science, philosophy and art was "untrue" because that conceptualization of man was untrue.

At a time when nothing looked certain, when everything looked relative not even good and evil could go unquestioned. In 1886 Nietzsche wrote "Beyond Good and Evil." At this same time Paul Cezanne was searching for new truths in mere shapes.

Nietzsche died in 1900, at precisely the historical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution. He, the Impressionists and the post-Impressionists worked and lived in a world that was described by high science according to the model of Isaac Newton. The Newtonian model was both description of the physical world and methodology. Even the truths of Newtonian physics and high science's model were to be challenged, and shortly.

In 1905 Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity, in 1912 his paper on general relativity.

-Benjamin Harris