I just posted the slide deck on humanities domestication cycles. The deck is located at this URL: lboeckl.net/book/hhdc_files/800×600/hhdc.html
If you have any comments, thoughts or ideas please post them under this post.
Thanks, Leo.
I have found some very interesting websites recently centered around the arts and artists specifically. I have been on the web since the early days of Mozilla and thought I knew what was available out there for artists. I was wrong. Things have changed considerably in the last year or so. They have gotten much better. There are four types of website out there.
The first is technical support and conversation for every kind of artistic topic and problem you can imagine. The site for that is wetcanvas.com. Their forums are nothing short of superb. There is no single place to go to get art information than the forums on Wetcanvas. Since they don’t have any socializing aspect beyond discussions of topics I started a social group for wetcanvas on Facebook.com. If you are a member of wetcanvas and would like to experience extended social aspects then go to this URL and join the group at www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8261452636&ref=mf.
The second and third types of sites are for the discussion of your art works and your ideas. The best site which allows for both the images and descriptions of your art works is the Behance.com network. You can not only post your art works and describe the ideas side by side but you can also join groups which share your same views or interests in the kinds of art you like. You can even find work on the Behance network as well. You can check out my area on Behance here: www.behance.net/lboeckl
There is another variation to the Behance network which I find very interesting. That is the site Myartspace.com. There you can do many of the same things you can do on the Behance network but you can also put your art images together and make a kind of short film with music. I find this interesting to put the art works and music together and very appealing to look at as well. Here are some examples through my projects on Myartspace: www.myartspace.com/artistInfo.do?populatinglist=home&subscriberid=6xd278osz9xlpmx1.
There is an alternative to Behance and Myartspace called Myartinfo.com but I find that they can’t do for you what either Behance or Myartspace does especially well. Further you don’t get a unique URL for your personal space or your projects and so if you are like me, and most other people who have personal websites, there is no way to link to your works directly. If I can’t send someone a simple URL to click on and say check this out, I don’t. I won’t send someone a URL and then 1,000 instructions as to what to click on to get to my stuff. So I like Behance and Myartspace much more than Myartinfo.
The last kind of art site is flickr.com. It is much more bare bones kind of place than the previous examples. There you can only put the images down on the space they provide you and there are no communities as such unlike Myartspace and Behance but it easy to share everything from photos of friends and family to your artworks in this no frills type of website. There are other communities like Youtube which does sharing of video and images as well but for the still images it looks like Flickr is the best for now down in the bare bones category.
The other day a good friend of mine (Mike) sent me a DVD set on the subject of the crises in faith. I have watched 3 of the 4 episodes now and a couple of things has really struck me from the films. The first was just how much I hate politics as the film on that topic struck me as totally off of the mark and reinforced why I for the most part care absolutely less about politics in any form.
The second thing that struck me was the film described that chasing feeling that I experience on occasion and witness others doing at other occasions. What the film was trying to express was that feeling that we many times feel by doing something we are accomplishing something when in fact the activities do not advance anything either personally or for the greater good of civilization. Therefore when you watch someone furiously texting others or mindlessly surfing the web but not saying anything they are in that very modern act of simply chasing what technology allows us to do. However though it may feel personally very gratifying or important it is in reality neither.
As I was watching the film the thought which came into my mind and intersected with their story was if you look at the post modern artists the same can be said of their efforts for the most part. If for example you look at Roy Lichtenstein’s works you can clearly see the parallel. Lichtenstein does not create his own images but instead copies them from comics and modifies them while blowing the images up hundreds of times larger than when they were originally published in the comic books. The act of blowing up the image or even relating a comic book image to a larger issue (he uses many 1960’s US air force jets to stage very vague commentaries on war for instance) is in reality chasing.
If Lichtenstein were not in reality performing post modernist chasing he would be creating his own comic book images and using them in his paintings. The very act of modeling his pictures on found comic book images limits his ability to stage any kind of discussion or to make his own points clearly. Instead like the abstract expressionists and the other pop and op art artists he is simply chasing the act of making of picture and chasing the found images in comic books. If his pictures deliver any message beyond interesting design layout it is somewhat of the cherry on top of the picture instead of the point of the picture.
As I discuss in my book this is in reality meaningless turn that modern and post modernists took was chasing the fork in the road which was a reinforcement of the incorrect leg the art community took. It reinforced the meaningless existential thinking which had surfaced almost at the outset of the industrial revolution. The film referenced this thinking by terming the society humanity attempted to create in the industrial revolution as a Utopian Socialist society. In that society of course God was banned as it was by the French Republic at the start of the industrial revolution and then banned several more times in rolling blackouts during the 20th century by heavy handed socialist and communist regimes.
I explore this as well in the book by walking through the historical sequences which in reality were reactions to the previous agricultural age definitions and constructs not resonating with the people anymore and the overreaction of the institutional religions to this trend which produced the backlash we saw in the industrial revolution. Unfortunately the artist community, particularly during the 20th century, chased the reaction instead of the cause of the problem. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t propose we dispose of what has already been established as the art history of the 20th century. Instead I simply provide an explanation how most post modernists painted themselves into corners they couldn’t get out of because of the intense lack of meaning in their art works.
However in future the term: post (post) modern is going to be discarded because of the pointless value of the art work. The 21st century will feature new age modern which will revel in images fraught with both meaning and possibility. Further because of the aesthetic which was created during the 20th century during the experiments of materials, the new age moderns have an almost endless array for both style and medium to portray the meaning and the possibilities. I don’t think a school like this exists today because of the scorn which the 20th century heaped upon any artist who attempted serious meaning in their works.
I think that the old post modern paradigm is finally in process of falling on its own weight and faulty logic. Were you to review the last schools which gained any mass at all during the post modern age you will see that for 40 years nothing has come in their wake to replace them. Before this schools appeared in almost 10 year cycles as each succeeding group or generation rushed to super cede the previous group(s). After 40 years it is clear that the old rules and attitudes were neither correct nor healthy. They have suffocated creativity and growth for the succeeding artists. Just when it has become painfully obvious that what we face is the extinction of the oldest manner in which humans have expressed their ideas (think all the way back to the cave paintings 30,000+ years ago) the world will either accept the denouement or will rage back against the aging and accepted norms.
I am hopeful that the latter will be true as I think it is much too early to relinquish our oldest method of human expression. Before we are sure that every potential has been aired we should err on side of caution and continue to explore the medium and the messages. I am confident that there have been many avenues missed in our rush to create an art history founded upon the meaningless application of materials instead of new materials and constructs exploring the every human or universal potential. Therefore I doubt there is a single school which calls itself new age modern and yet when I venture into the current gallery world I see more and more examples of it.
The artists may not know that their explorations of self and environment are the new beginnings for modern art but then who knew that the Renaissance was the beginning of the end for meaning in western art. When the artists supplanted images of the after life and potential gods for revelry and individual portraits the die was in fact already cast. This die as I have said was the drive towards meaninglessness and the absurd of putting human beings at the very center of reason and sentient existence. I think we have now gone far enough down this fruitless path. It is time for some individual in the art world, be it critic, museum director or patron to throw open the doors to this new thinking which is begging to fill the in the eddies of the void. It simply takes someone or a group of people to have the courage to say enough with the old bankrupt ways. Let’s try something else . . . Let’s look at what the new generation of artists is bringing us . . . and let’s light the mournful candles in memory of the artists whose creative lives were destroyed and shouted down by the tyranny of the legacy from the 20th century thinking. In other words let’s quit wasting time and get this party started . . .
Well for better or worse I have finished writing the book and sent it to the editors. Hopefully they can take my clumsy words and make the ideas more readable!
I was stunned a week or so ago when Carlota Perez the world famous macro economist kindly allowed me to reprint two of her charts/figures from her 2003 book inside of my book. She is of course the person who refined Kondratiev long waves in her book: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. I have spent all of my available time rewriting my own book because now when I explain K-waves I have the visual required to drive the points home. Without the permission was like trying to explain algebra without using math, just words. She closed her note to me by saying that the book sounded interesting and would like a copy once the book is published. I would of course be nothing less than honored to send her a copy of my book. As you can tell since my last back procedure the news has been only very very good!
I added the DNA results to my family tree for the families migrations prior to 20,000 years ago this weekend. The national geographic genographic project is now offering inclusion of the DNA into their database which if it people actually subscribe to will change the whole way genealogy is done in future. I included my families DNA into the database. I have no idea if it will produce any results for the family tree but but perhaps it may help my descendants in future.
I posted the summary for chapter one. It was the hardest summary to write because of the new science which is involved in explaining the worldview for the hunter-gatherers from the perspective of today.
I struggled for a week but on Friday night I cracked the code and decided on the two things which had been killing me in writing up the preface for the book. The first was the tone and the second was in devising an approach for the description which made the material easier to understand. I think I have done with my “guides” approach. I have also come to the conclusion as what the book should be titled. My favorite is currently, drum roll please: An Essay on Human Domestication Cycles. Instead of going for snappy I chose to call it exactly what the book is. Who knows might change my mind in an hour but for now it is the front runner. Mother’s day 2007.
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