Stefan Arteni. The East-Central European Cultural Model 2. Artistic Polyglotism.
Data: Sunday, March 08 @ 18:32:24 CET
Topic: Lecturi critice


Continuăm publicarea eseului lui Stefan Arteni. Prima parte poate fi citită la adresa The East-Central European Cultural Model. Part I. Artistic Polyglotism.
East-Central Europe is not a static abstraction. The complex pattern of interaction rises out of the peculiar aspect of ‘limes’ ethos as the site of continuity of the archaic and of a paradoxical fatalistic optimism, and can provide a picture of comprehensive correspondences in space and time - the multiscale and many-valued chronotope.
Stefan Arteni


Motto.
Behold the road inscribed in time,
Comes from the dead, drawn does it
Seem from song,
The heavy cart which in the evening's
Dust is groaning,
Is brother to an old iconostas.
(Radu Gyr)


Itamar Even-Zohar discusses the continuous process of cultural interference: “We all tend to attribute much more meaningfulness and expressivity to words in a foreign language than to those of our own. While for a native speaker certain expressions, utterances, and texts are definitely ‘banal’, for a non-native speaker they may sound powerful and fresh.” This conclusion may be also applied to visual systems: “…an appropriated repertoire does not necessarily maintain source culture functions…Transfers [of organization, structure, or representation systems] often involve functional shifts.”
Let us, with the help of an example, demonstrate these statements.
It is sufficient to recall a few artists included in the ‘first’ and in the ‘new’ Ecole de Paris: Constantin Brancusi, Louis Marcoussis (Ludwik Kazimierz Wladyslaw Markus), Jules Pascin (Julius Mordecai Pincas), Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Ossip Zadkine, Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Stael, Andre Lanskoy, Magdalena Dumitresco-Campigli, Alexandre Istrati, Natalia Dumitresco, Dimitrie Varbanesco. The teaching and theories of Andre Lhote have influenced many East Central European artists. The transfer of East Asian Calligraphic Art traditions was mediated by the artists of the same Ecole de Paris, and by Julius Bissier and Hans Hartung of the Gruppe Zen. Many of the artists of the Ecole de Paris were self-exiles, refugees, expatriates - Mihai I. Spariosu suggests that exile is a “ludic-liminal experience”. Alan D. DeSantis quotes L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg: “…for the exile, departure is imposed and return impossible”. One may speak of ludic dislocation, or, as Rico Lie says, “the concept of displacement…is intrinsically linked to migration and diaspora”.
The artists enumerated above were, obviously, bi- or multi-lingual. Multiliteracy enhances the ability to manipulate language form, including the graphic written form - thinking skills are built on a foundation of concrete learning, which includes experience, visual feedback and motor activities. There is evidence that human cognition is oriented around vision, indicating also that linguistic memory is different from visual memory. Stephen Kosslyn's work on visual memory and visual perception has implicated motor control in visual imagery.
Danilo Kis indicates that the characteristic shared by East-Central European artists is the “awareness of form…form as possibility of choice, form that is an attempt to locate points of fulcrum like those of Archimedes in the chaos around us”.
"A cybernetic model works by setting up constraints," remarks Ernst von Glasersfeld. Art operates with constraints rather than with efficient causes - it only eliminates what does not fit, and this means learning the viable path. "Forms are created from the concatenation of operations upon themselves and…are…rather indications of processes…The closed loop of perception occurs in the eternity of present individual time," writes Louis H. Kauffman. Thus one may speak of circular operationality, of the recursive self-implication of form, and also of indirect recursion when two or more procedures cyclically call each other. Form implies itself as a meta-distinction, as a form of form. Implicit in this is a de-privileging of logocentrism and metanarratives.
An artist's split between cultures becomes a potential means of deautomatizing worn-out formal devices, a strategy of inserting and asserting, of uprooting and defamiliarizing. Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova suggests that for the border-crosser, “an alien system is ‘empty’ and can be appropriated”. Semiotic empty signs, semiotic manipulations, perceptual, hermeneutic, semiotic strands intersect within the ‘empty’ matrix. Moreover, Czeslaw Milosz insightfully observes: “ ‘To see’ means not only to have before one’s eyes. It may mean also to preserve in memory. ‘To see and to describe’ may also mean to reconstruct in imagination”. One can grasp the stochastic and the necessary within the transformative force of far reaching transcultural processes viewed as hybrid process. There is always an opportunity for cross-code interference, code-switching, discontinuity or pseudomorphosis, and a many-valued approach. The creation of a mixed code will not always follow the rules of either initial code. Culture is complex and dynamic, i.e. constantly subject to change and learning. An ‘overcode’ does not erase earlier or alternate semiotics. For Michel Serres, complexity, and its preference for boundary, expresses an ethos of decentredness and names a wandering through the criss-crossed tapestry of cultural crossroads.
It cannot be stressed too much that indifference to the notion of a telos can be related to the development of a mythico-ritual mode of apprehending and of a ritual orthopraxy - dromena, litterally things performed, which have endured in an a-modern East-Central Europe and are connected with the spirit of play for its own sake. Joseph Needham has beautifully discussed the correlative view prevalent in premodern cultures, that is layered traditions and the dissipative forces involved in transmission. Following Steve Farmer, it is perhaps worth pointing out that correlative perspectives or correlative systems and their self-similar and fractal structures have deep neurobiological roots.
In the final instance, the all-embracing interwoven web of operational cultural dynamics, disseminates over different models a practice simultaneously underpinning and negating human understanding. Eugene Gorny suggests that experiencing is a result of auto-communication - in autocommunication the content of the message is less important than its form and it involves a constant reviewing under a more marked formal organization. “Art as form is the locus where the absolute becomes knowable. This locus, however, does not coincide with the absolute”, writes Antoon Braeckman.

End II part





Acest articol este trimis de Asymetria. Revista de cultura, critica si imaginatie
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