John Ruskin was not against Turner

Someone recently said:

I came across a biography of Turner today....and it was interesting to discover just how incorrect an impression the above statement gives.

It gives the impression that Ruskin was against Turner. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there wa a great age difference between them and they never became close friends, Ruskin admired Turner and even defended him against his detractors.

It was even thought that Ruskin was *the* person to write his biography after Turner died, but he felt that that should be left to someone else, as he wanted instead to write the critiques of his art work.

The person who said that would not seem to know their art history.

Ok, I found something of further interest:

A quote from John Ruskin's 'Lectures on Art', page 167:

'It is surely a severe lesson to us in this matter (re: his opinion of the superiority of oil painting over water color), that the best works of Turner could not be shown to the public for six months without being destoyed, - and that his most ambitious ones for the most part perished, even before they could be shown.'

I do not know what he could have meant by the six months, but it does not sound like he was in favor of destroying Turner's works....rather that he feared for the safety of these works.

It would seem that not much is known about Turner's philosophy of art, and that could be a very important thing to know with regards to the development of abstract art, whic is a shme for the rest of us.

Hello Tracy,

I admit to being one of those who doesn't know a great deal about Turner's philosophy of art; and like everyone else, I haven't seen thoe supposedly abstract watercolours which were destroyed. But I'd like to put forward the theory that even if Turner had painted watercolours which looked somewhat abstract, that these still could not be counted as forerunners of abstract art.

The development of art is more than merely technical. There are also cultural, religious and philosophical elements to factor in as well. I am proposing here that even if Turner had created an 'abstract' watercolour it really WASN'T an abstract because Turner wasn't part of that stream of artistic thought which brought abstract art into existence. Turner was born far upstream, he mingled with the Romantics and the Neo-Classicists. Admittedly in his time there may have been a glimmering of the 'art for art's sake' credo, but so far as I know it would have been confined to the writings of Theophile Gautier in France. The impact of the Aesthetic doctrine was not really felt in England until the age of Swinburne, Wilde and Whistler. And even when it did beach itself on the shores of Britain, the resemblance between it and the Victorian Classicism of Leighton or Albert Moore bears some consideration. Certainly, Whilster was a good friend of Albert Moore's.

Just to round things up ... that movement in history we choose to call abstract art was the result of more than just a desire to escape references to the human form. It was born from diverse political, cultural, philosophical and historical concerns.

By promoting Turner as the 'Father of Abstract Art' don't you risk removing him from the context of his time, and super-imposing a twentieth century view onto an aesthetic credo which did not even exist then?

I say that if Turner is to be championed as a forerunner of abstract art he would have needed to do more than produce a few vague, indistinct watercolours. We would need to show that his ideas, his beliefs, were in some way sympathetic to those of other abstract artists, and that what he was doing was a DELIBERATE REACTION against the art of his time.

False starts do not count.

Regards,

Iian Neill

Thoughtful words from one who can be so IMMENSELY RUDE.

I would put forth that, in the course of my own research, it is seeming to me that he was not in fact the forerunner, even if he was a very early example. Being first does not necessarily make one the most influential.

Is the execution of art more than merely technical?

You forgot to mention the most vital factor - the spiritual intent, if not the spiritual execution.

I don't believe I really am promoting him as such a thing...merely musing. I agree it did not exist then.

We cannot do that, as not much is known about his rationale for his work.

Hello Tracy,

Well, the execution of art is certainly more than merely MECHANICAL. But then, that could be said of any higher cognitive activity. A mathematician might argue that when he is engaged in formulating a theory he is being more than merely mechanical. Or, to put it in other words, he is doing something more than that which can be reduced into a system and programmed into a machine. Just to shunt off into a sideline for a moment, we briefly touched on the writings of Searle in my philosophy course, with regard to artificial intelligence. Searle believed that no matter how smart contemporary computers might seem, they were merely information processing SYSTEMS. To advance his argument he proposed the idea of the 'Chinese Room', which is simply this. Lock an American who can't speak Chinese into a room, give him a book which translates Chinese symbols into English characters, and when the American has finished 'translating' he will end up knowing as little about real Chinese as when he entered. This is because he is not engaged in any creative or higher cognitive activity - he is merely substiting one symbol (in Chinese) for another (in English). There is no UNDERSTANDING involved.

We might, for the sake of novelty, apply this concept to art. The mechanics of art execution range from the holding of a pencil and brush, right up to the laws of perspective, colour theory, sculptural drawing (bringing out the form), composition, and so on. Now, part of the drive of academies has been to reduce as much of the intuitive aspect of art into systematized blocks of knowledge; i.e., manuals on painting, theory books, etc. The question is: How perfect can our intellectualisation of a fundamentally intuitive process be? How far can we go in reducing what seems to be a sub-conscious process into a clearly defined number of steps?

Most of the good artists I've read about would agree that theory can only take you so far. The mechanics of art can be written about - systematized - but no real art can be produced until the mechanical knowledge has been fully absorbed and digested by the subconscious, and has become a natural means of expression.

This isn't as mystical an idea as it may at first seem. Whenever we are in the process of learning something new; whether it be playing the piano, learning to touch type or to play touch football, we are engaged in learning certain rules. Depending on the difficulty of the activity, the time we need to spend mastering it will vary. Since touch typing is a fundamentally straightforward process, it doesn't take as long to learn as, say, playing the piano. Similarly with painting and sculpture, we have to undergo a period of apprenticeship in which our conscious mind is absorbed in assimilating as many rules as it can, and converting these into subconscious processes. The fact that I have been typing at the keyboard since I was a child means that I do not have to spend time hunting for each letter as I type. All I need to do is 'think' what I want recorded and, lo and behold, my fingers make the appropriate movements. With something as complex as painting, the process is inevitably more involved and drawn out, but the principle is the same.

But what is certain is this - it is that the process goes much faster if the conscious mind is fully concentrated. That is to say you won't learn the piano very quickly by watching television at the same time, or reading a newspaper. When you apply conscious energy to the task, the complex system of rules is more quickly automatized by the subconscious. The writer Colin Wilson, appropriately enough, calls that part of the mind which automatizes 'the robot'. Unlike the robots of B- grade science fiction films, this robot we have is multi-talented and capable of learning. If a task is repeated enough times and with sufficient mental alertness, the robot can memorize what needs to be done and efficiently automatize it for future use.

So, coming back to your insightful question, 'is the execution of art merely technical', then it would be true to say of the great artists that, 'No, it is not merely technical. And this because there mere technique has already been automatized by our built-in robot, leaving our conscious mind - or the superconscious mind, if you prefer - at liberty to tackle more demanding issues.'

I'm afraid that what this means is that you can't cheat technique. There is no way out of working through the apprenticeship; whether it be the apprenticeship to touch type, to play the piano, or to become an artist.

It's not so much that I forgot to mention it as I am really not certain how to go about discussing it on this group. There is no such thing as a common spiritual baseline anymore. We all have different views on what the highest values are. Speaking personally, I do not believe that the modernists, the abstract artists, etc., were any MORE spiritual than any of the artists before them. But then, we should have to debate the point of the meaning of spirituality. Is it high-mindedness, seriousness, selflessness, the rejecting of the world? How can we make the judgement that Gustave Moreau, say, is a more spiritual artist than Gustave Courbet? Or Pollock more spiritual than Moreau?

Regards,

Iian Neill.

If you can say what this vital factor means, that is. The danger is that it is a circular definition. What is art? -> It is that which is produced with spiritual intent -> How do we know something has been produced with spiritual intent -> Because it is art.

A while ago, I spent a long time trying to find out exactly what the difference was between something being 'spiritual' and it being 'good', 'nice', 'beautiful', 'aesthetically pleasing' or some other slightly better defined catagory. I didn't find many people had a very coherent idea of what 'spiritual' meant at all. In fact, as far as I could establish it, the more people used the word, the less they understood it, and the other way round.

Well, this is quite a contentious point! I have been engaged in a lenthy debate on the subject in uk.philosophy.misc recently. I don't think it is at all obvious that there is good evidence, philosophical or otherwise, that there is any human activity that can't be programmed into a machine.

Yes, this point about semantics is well understood. However, it is rather behind the times. Computers have been able to provide new proofs in mathematics that human beings have not - not just the big number crunching ones either. This is a good point. I think very different from the point about computers and the reduction of human brains to them.

Simply put, if you think about what you are doing when you ride a bicycle, you fall off. Here you have a different problem. The meaning of 'real' as in 'real art'. Somebody might, say, go all the way to becoming a good watercolourist, lets say a universally acknowledged one. Are you really saying that he is still not a good artist because he has not mastered oil painting?

Absolutely! Recent research proves that practice is far more important than talent or instruction in producing excellence in virtually any

Hello Peter,

To be fair I should have qualified my statement in this way: '.... he is doing something more than that which can, AT PRESENT, be reduced into a system and programmed into a machine.' Personally, I do not know enough about the mechanics or either human or artificial intelligence to be able to set sharp boundaries between either. Indeed, David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence, the programme that gained much notoriety by 'composing' a symphony in the style of Mozart, as well as works in the style of other composers; yes, there have been massives strides in systematizing basic compositional rules into the format of a computer programme. Of course ... a computer programme is merely an automaton which executes a number of set instructions. It is interesting to speculate that a human being, following a similar programme, would be able himself to do the same task, albeit much slower. But then, the point is that humans DO the same thing on a subconscious level. Despite the relative success of EMI, there still remain vast tracts of human consciousness to systematize. Is the fact that a painting or sculpting robot still eludes us a sign that the endeavour is impossible, or merely of extraordinary complexity.

I guess we'll never know until someone builds one!

Here's another way of looking at it, Peter. The writers of books on aesthetics, treatises, manuals on art, etc., were really programmers writing code for human beings to execute.

Now that's an interesting concept ....

I would dearly love to hear an explanation for this. Why is it that when the conscious mind butts in when its not wanted, disaster inevitably results?

By 'real art' I mean art that is more than 'paint by numbers'. Art that has a connexion to a more complex, rich, three-dimensional reality than is available in the slavish adherence to a scheme or programme. After all, academies are criticized precisely because of their 'coldness', their excessive 'cerebrality', their ignorance of the sensual laws that govern art.

There is perhaps a case to be made that art is at its best when the senses are perfectly wedded to the intellect. To give a concrete example, let's contrast (generally speaking) modern prose with antique prose. Antique prose draws its roots from the oral tradition. Its works were meant to be recited, acted or sung. Modern literature is written with the aid of typewriters and computers and is distributed over an exclusively printed medium. Is it possible that some of the aenemic qualities of mediocre modern literature are a result of writers of average talent abandoning the voice as an instrument, and relying on the mental impression of the spoken word?

Consider the very real difference. When you speak something aloud, you have only a certain amount of physical energy to put into the delivery. The very process of sounding out vowels, consonants, word-groups and so on, tends to shape the form of your speech into something natural. The same analogy can be made to music. There are some pieces that are written FOR the piano and sound natural to its range and capabilities; and there are other works that are transcribed for it and which somehow lack the true 'pianistic' feel.

In the modern age, where we rely more on the typewriter and word- processor than the autodidact or an eagerly-listening audience, we have the temptation to let our mental narrative run away with itself. We are not constrained by the limits of the vocal equipment. We don't need to take breaths in thought. We stumble less upon certain words that do not agree well with our voices. In short, we are progressively losing touch with some of our sensual equipment. The natural result for the mediocre writer is a certain inflatedness to his work, a lack of focus and economy of expression, the combination of harsh-sounding words out of their proper relation. (I see the plank of wood in my own eye, so don't worry! ...)

So it might be said that 'real writing' was forged when the senses (the ear and the vocal equipment) were married to the intellect (the thought itself) and found expression through speech and its symbolic form, literature.

Dare we stretch this analogy into the fine arts ... ? Will it snap back like an over-strained rubber band? The 'real art' that I hinted at above might very well be that art that successfully marries the intellect (the systematized body of rules, methods, etc.) to a more intuitive, organic sensibility (the senses). After all, we perceive art through our senses. Computers do not have the same sort of senses as us. They haven't evolved theirs over a billion years in the rat marathon. Their senses are crude approximations we've developed to give them some semblance of sentience. The challenge of the architects of artificial intelligence is to unwind the threads knitted together in a billion years of evolution, and see whether they can't make a new quilt out of the same bindings.

No, that's not what I am saying. Personally, I believe that an artist - in a pinch - need only be a great draughstman to be worthy of being ranked with the greats. For draughstmanship is the common link between all of the fine arts, both plastic and painterly.

And the persistence to practise can trace itself back to the initial will of the student, coupled with his sense of purpose. If his sense of purpose is defocused, vague or defeatist, then he will lack the drive to practise. If he has the purpose but not the will, he also lacks the drive to practise and the endurance to bear failure. But this doesn't directly bear on our discussion.

Yes, I heard about this some years ago as well. Apparently a music teacher in the United States had helped prepare his choir for an interstate competition in this way. He instructed them to go home every night (always a good thing) and to visualize themselves singing in front of the audience and judges at the competition. They had two or three weeks to practise this, and when the time for the competition arrived, they had so strengthened their confidence and self-image that they took away first prize.

I have even heard that you can physically build muscle tissue by imagining that you're exercising. Now THAT'S counter-intuitive.

Well, what you say is true up to a point. You don't need to be able to read sheet music in order to improvise or to play someone else's music BY EAR. But if you are really serious about getting to the heart of the composer's intentions, then you really need to study the score. No one performance is going to satisfy all discriminating critics of music, so no one performance can ever be ultimately definitive. The only definitive source is the score. If your aim is to become a classical musician, being without the ability to score-read is a distinct handicape. (Yet there were great pianists who were poor sight readers. Joseph Hoffman, pupil of the great Anton Rubinstein, was a notoriously bad sight reader. Yet he was able to play a sonata by Nikolai Medtner after only three or four hearings of the composer's performance.)

They don't need the technique for what they want to do. And that's valid so far as it goes. But ask such a pianist to perform Alkan's Piano Concerto and be prepared to ask for your money back.

Well, I'm not confident that I can add anything ground-shaking or even particularly original to a topic which has been thrashed so soundly to death by professional philosophers ... but I am game if you are.

Well, I'm not about lay out in black and white my ten spiritual commandments because, to be honest, I haven't consciously formulated them. What I can do is articulate my beliefs in the language of other writers who have influenced my thinking and perhaps diverge from there. So, coming back to the question of 'What is spirituality' ... I believe that it is the reverrance and service to an idea that is greater than the individual ego can conceive of. To be spiritual is to be taken out from the world of self-pity, of self-glorification, of self- despisement .. in a word, to be taken away from that self that we have constructed in order to be a sane and reasonable member of society. I don't believe that this self-image is constructed entirely premeditatively, but it is subject to an implicit kind of will that determines whether or not we choose to accept a particular valuation of who we are. The mechanisms that determine the formation of this self- image have been exhaustively studied; stimulus, response, conditioning, etc. But what I am primarily coming to believe is that the defining characteristic of the modern self-image is cowardice and conformity. Our ancestors risked - and lost - their lives in building a civilisation where before there only roamed wild beast. And what do we have to show for this civilization but for a terminal sense of boredom and futility, expressed, concentrated and glorified in certain philosophies and works of art. We are a people who fear danger and risk. We do not live on the edge. We do not walk in the shadow of death. And the price we pay for our precarious certainty is that dreaded French word ... ennui. I believe that not only is it desirable to escape from the self (the self-image), but that it is our duty, and that it is only when we are not morbidly preoccupied with ourselves that we approach anything like spirituality. I believe that spirituality is really a misleading term, and that a better one for artists would be 'impersonality'. I believe that the true Michelangelo, the true Titian, are to be found in their paintings and not in their lives, because in their art they were most realized as human beings. They had attained the peak their consciousness could ascend to. I believe that we accept a lower water level of consciousness as being the norm, and we are immensely suspicious of anyone who operates at a higher level because we inevitably feel guilty about our lost potential. To round it all up .. I believe that the artist is most spiritual when he is most impersonal. When he has outgrown the immature compulsion to 'express himself' all over his work, to, in effect, wear his heart on his sleeve. Toward this end I am all far any art that emphasises the dignity of craft and craftsmanship and which places the painting above the personality.

Sorry, Peter, but you asked for it!

What you say would be true if we judged an artist by his life. I tend to do it the other way around. I judge an artist's character - his stature - by his art. For his art represents the highest that his consciousness can attain. I ask myself - what is he using his art for, and what is it that he talks about? Is he obsessed with himself, with his worries, his grievances, his pains. Or does he boldly leave his personality behind and construct something objectively beautiful? I believe that the immature artist expresses, and that the mature one constructs.

Best regards,

Here we go. Abstract art got is 'reason for being' from artists heavily influenced by occult (perhaps pseudo-occult) writings of the late 19th century, most notably those of Helen Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, which was just another cult, with watered-down inforamtion as their basis.

They were trying to depict a mystical state of consciousness. The type achieved when one has reached a certain level of development, and/or have developed what is known as 'clairvoyant vision', something which no materialistic reductionist woiuld give credence to.

To depict that, they felt they needed to completely leave out any remmnants of the physical realm.

My point of contention is that most of these people were not really mystics (meaning: people who actually take up a spiritual practice, with the intention of achieving spiritual development), rather they were spiritual enthusiasts....they just played around with the ideas.

I think that's a pretty clear-cut definition. Works for me.

On Tue, 20 Jun 2000 13:29:16 GMT, Peter H.M. Brooks

Spirituality is heightened awareness...the degree of awareness depends on one's progress, or rather the stage of awareness one is at. There is the awareness of the person at work who has to focus himself on the work at hand, necessarily limited (as one example of limited awareness), and at the other exteme is the awareness of the fully enlightened, which is different not only in terms of amount, but in nature as well. Of course spiritual development tends to lift one out of self-pity, self-glorification, etc. That is just the way it works. It is not a passive process. One has to do something to get oneself there. When you say reverence and service to an idea that is greater than the individual ego can concieve of, it seems you are describing the same thing people the world over have described as something else, in a much more traditional way - but I say that *something* is not external, it is not internal, it is both.

My own view of it is more shamanic. Everyone must pull themselves up spiritually, by their own bootstraps. Also, my appproach is more non-personal than impersonal, meaning not denying the self or ego, but going beyond it. and at the same time knowing that the self or ego is the bedrock for the going beyond.

Speak for yourself!

What civilization are you referring to? The United States? Western Civilization? It seems to me that much of the population on earth really is living on the edge. The ecology is too. Wildlife lives on the edge every minute of every day - the edge of exctinction. Anyone who does not see that would really seem to have isolated himself in his own little rich enclave, without looking at the world around him. And perhaps that is the crux of that particular little viewpoint.

perhaps it was in their art that they could express their realization to others, not in their art that they found their their realization. I believe that art can indeed take us out of ourselves, can put us in touch with a part of ourselves that we wouldn't ordinarily have access to..but I have always believed that art, by itself, can only take one so far. It takes something more, like a regular, and real, meditation practice (for example) to reach higher levels of awareness. I see it this way...the art is the vehicle for expression, for those with that inclination, but only on a minor level is it the means to heightened awareness. Many, in fact most that do, reach these heightened levels of awareness without being artists. The heightened awareness does not depend upon the art, It is the other way around.

It is certainly possible to reach those states and then use that heightened awareness in art, to express it to others, or just simply to express.

I think that if one fully enlightened person, only one, had come out of that milleau....one person also with real artistic ability and a balanced personality...someone not overly enamored of the 'siddhis' nor in denial, (becaue they really are not the most important thing), the artists of the abstract might just have rocked the world. But it didn't happen that way. I really think if they had actully understood more about what they were symbolizing, their perception of it would have been different as well.

That seems a rather twisted way to interpret it. You idealize being impersonal as a practice in everyday life as a way of doing honor to the concept of going beyond the self. One has nothing to do with the other.

When he has outgrown the immature

I don't agree with that.. There is so much more that any person's consciousness can attain.

I ask myself - what is he using his art for,

How about both....I recently wrote a poem to my sick dog who died. It was far more consoling to be able to write something that I knew was art, than just the simple fact of expressing. By far.