In a period of high definition, photorealism, and postmodern deconstruction the experience of art making, its theory, and its art itself have drifted away from some understandable connection to the process of art creation as a connection to some psychologically deep inspiration. Abstract art as conceived and practiced by Wassily Kandinsky, which included in his later stage beyond representation or abstractions of representation jumbled gatherings of biomorphs with no connection to representation may be compared to the White Shaman rock art (...) panel with its gathering of seemingly abstract geometric images as well as transformed representational imagery, much like the related Fate Bell Shelter rock art and Three Rivers Petroglyphs. Kandinsky would claim his expressed abstractions are prompted by his psyche. The artist or artists of the White Shaman panel of the lower Pecos River operated under transformed consciousness and Shamanism. Kandinsky’s “unconscious, spontaneous expression” and “expression... of inner feeling” may be compared to the probably hallucinogenic connection to the other world in the White Shaman panel. Such connections and abstractions and transformations could be related to the “total theater” of Diaghilev and the contemporary rave dances in which consciousness is heightened by sensory overload. The cybernetic capacity of the computer age has worked in another direction and even “objectified” consciousness itself. (shrink)

Paul Klee’s Ad Parnassum is a summing up of his explorations of new directions in painting, including Cubism, Pointillism, and “pure painting,” and his tenure at the Bauhaus. This large work is a complex composition of abbreviated geometric forms, dominated by a pyramid-shaped structure, color fields, a solid colored sun-like circle, and various substructures and under fields of color. Entirely constructed upon a pattern of white dots of different glazes, this mesmerizing painting creates a scintillating experience through these dots in (...) relation to the color fields. As part of new movements that wished to reexamine the nature of painting itself, and ultimately ideas of time and space, Klee both broke down traditional temporal and spatial treatment in art and illuminated the subjective space of his paintings through color and form. He expanded the new techniques by developing his own ideas of geometric form and color modalities, which are finely expressed in Ad Parnassum. This paper also discusses Klee’s complex incorporation of language elements and the effect of his travels in North Africa. Ultimately, one notices a reckoning of subjectivity and objectivity in all this, with, in this key painting, a highlighting of the relationship between stasis and flux, at its deepest level, releasing an affect of the aesthetic sublime in its viewer. (shrink)

It is the presumptive thesis of William Lyons that an examination of introspection, though more a historical than a current topic in philosophy and psychology, still has much substance for today's scholar. By introspection, he means the direct access to mental knowledge, as it has been written about over the centuries from Augustine to Descartes to the empiricists, and as it has been developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an experimental method in psychology by Wundt, James, (...) and Titchener. Lyons is chiefly concerned with whether introspection exists as a possible form of knowing, not with its applications. Since he finds all past attempts to demonstrate the valid existence of introspection unsatisfactory, he turns to contemporary philosophy and psychology to determine whether, even if they cannot justify introspection, they can shed light on why such a long-running conceptual illusion existed in the past and, in several guises, continues to exist. Here Lyons puts us on contemporary ground with descriptions of brain scanners, Turing machines, computer-program possibilities, behaviorist tactics, and Rylean moves. The first section bears the general title "The Dethronement of Introspection," while the second section, emphasizing the computer models of Daniel Dennett, is titled "The Mechanization of Introspection." But, unhappily, all the contemporary approaches are also judged unsatisfactory in justifying introspection. We are, however, given some hints that the illusion of introspection's existence must rest in our culture's folk psychology, "which has changed little over the last thousand years or more.". (shrink)