Aldus sprak....

List of topics I can talk about…..

The ugly in art and image

Beauty

Crisis of beauty in art and imagery

Death in art and image : representations of death

Evil

The impossible in art and literature

The monstruous

Excitement, suspense and human relations : Hitchcock and Hopper

The inhuman in art and culture

The sublime

The abject (Kristeva, Bataille)

Erotism

Georges Bataille

David Lynch : Lost highway, madness and film noir

Transgression (G. Bataille) in culture, art and imagery

Voyeurism in culture, voyeurism and surveillance-society

The look and theatrical staging in western culture : the world as a theatre spectacle

The look and power

The look in western culture : genealogical approach (M. Foucault)

Death and the sacred through a comparative study of 'Death of Marat' (David) and photographs of Che Guevara (Alborta and Korda)

Disgust: In culture, art/aesthetics

Death

Symbols of death : skull, corpse, skeletons, photographs of ancestors

Memento mori and Vanitas : human vulnerability, frailty in art and imagery

Horror

The Corpse as an experience of death and as an element of art and popular culture

Cannibalism : anthropological and philosophical, in popular image (movies)

Violence and art/imagery

Holocaust and representation in art and popular culture

Genocide and art

Death and heroism in art: making sacred

The sacred in art : past and present

Religion and violence

The female nude from Renaissance to impressionism to Madame Edwarda (G. Bataille)

(Re)presentations of the body in art and popular culture

What is an image?

…………

…and a lot of other disturbing and alienating topics from a historical and philosophical point of view.

Can be brought in Dutch, English or French.

If you have a topic in mind that is not in this list but touches on some items in the list….you can always contact me and ask : [email protected]

Alas....poor Yorick

 

 

HAMLET: 

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow 
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath 
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how 
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at 
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know 
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your 
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, 
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one 
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? 
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let 
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must 
come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell 
me one thing. .

The skull and the idea of the frailty of human existence are very old aesthetic motives. Here Shakespeare uses disgust of decay as an aesthetic motive to create a very strong 'vanitas'-scene on stage. The 'vanitas' is a theme that came on very strong from the late Middle Ages all through the Modern Age (especially during the Renaissance and the Baroque era). It uses symbols of frailty, decay and ephemerality to evoke the shortness and vulnerability of human existence and the link between life and death as being two sides of the same coin. This idea of ephemerality and of decay fills us humans with a kind of horror. It is the horror of the loss of all certainty, of all things in the 'now'. It is a shudder that penetrates our 'now' with a promise of future decay. The future breaks in. It violates our 'now' to unbalance all presumed certainty. This unbalancing in the form of the skull confronts us also with the idea of decaying, rotting flesh. At this idea Hamlets gorge rises. This learns us that disgust is not only felt in the presence of decay itself, but it can be invoked by symbols of decay.

Shakespeare invokes the vanity and idleness of human endeavours to embelish their natural look ("Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must 
come; make her laugh at that..") All humans are not only bodily presentations, we are also embodied. We are bodily representations of our 'selves' and try to influence our 'being-in-the-world' as a phenomenon (Heidegger). The strength of the 'vanitas' is that it strikes at our strivings and discloses them as 'vain' attempts in the sight of an eternity of ephemerality.

In this sense the 'vanitas' plays a part comparable to anxiety in existentialist philosophy (Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard). It puts our existence on a halt, makes us stop in our tracks, striking us with a calm shudder. It dissociates our conception of 'being-in-the-world' and grants us a possibility of taking on a more authentic position in existence. It lets the spectator fall into his 'self'. It reveals that every 'being' of men is a 'being-til-death' (Heidegger). A revelation that we try to ignore all to often in our daily 'being-in-the-world', leading in this way inauthentic lives. It is an 'apokalyps' in the true sense of the word (an unveiling). In this sense the 'vanitas' as a 'memento mori' is experienced as a visitor 'from another realm', a future realm in which things will decay, change. It is a future that brings the downfall or collapse of each and every meaning.....absolute horror for our daily lives.

Especially the skull is a very strong symbol of this typical experience. Not only is it a visitor that indicates a future state that we will all suffer sooner or later. It is a depersonalized face. It no longer has anything of the individual it once was. It could be anyone. It is a 'view' that stares us and Hamlet in the face and stirs this calm shudder, dissociates our being. This way it talks to us in a painting, a movie, an image....in any work of art.  It is a 'view' from no-one and from nowhere. This is because it is a 'view without a face'. This kind of view, when we become conscious of it resting on our person, lets us fall into our 'self'. It confronts us with this 'self', its ephemerality, its vulnerability. The same applies for being conscious of being under surveillance by camera for instance. It is the same with 'God's eye view'. When we experience this kind of 'view from nowhere' or 'God's eye view' we are confronted with our own vulnerability, our very 'being-in-the-world'.  Here lies the connection between this kind of aesthetic experience and a sacred experience. This kind of revelation or 'apokalyps' makes a tear or cut into our everyday experience and lets things appear in a different light in a retreating and distancing movement.

 Further reading: Benjamin Delmotte, Esthétique de l'angoisse. Le Memento mori comme thème esthétique, 2010, Paris.

Podcast over Georges Bataille naar aanleiding van 50ste verjaardag van zijn dood

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: a small trip into iconology

This week me and my eldest daughter visited the new Harry Potter-movie: 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1'. In this movie there was a tale in the tale that sparked my attention.

Three brothers try to cross a river. To cross it safely they build a bridge. Death, who most of the time takes advantage of passengers drowning, is not pleased with this. He appears on the bridge and acts as if he is delighted. He asks the brothers to name a gift and he will provide this to them. The oldest is given a wand that can not be defeated in battle (the elder wand), the second brother asks for a way to bring someone back from the dead. He is given the resurrection stone. The third, more modest brother, just wants to stay out of Death's claws. So he asks for a cloak that makes its wearer invisible. This will help him to hide from Death himself. The story doesn't end well for the two oldest brothers. But the youngest can stay clear of Death until he has reached a fine,old age. Then he reveals himself by handing the cloak to his son and Death finds him. Together these three objects form the 'Deathly Hallows'. The person that possesses them will be the 'Master of Death'.

It really is a nice story that suddenly popped up in this movie (I didn't read the book). But this is not what sparked my attention. The sign of the 'Deathly Hallows' got me thinking of icons in western culture....

The symbol represents the three objects: the wand (vertical line), the resurrection stone (circle) and the cloak of invisibility (triangle). Why these three objects and why these specific abilities? That was the question that came to mind. Now I don't know if the following will make sense and have somewhat the status of an explanation, but I do think that it is not just a wild guess. There may be some truth in it and even some insight in our anthropological situation.

What do these three elements stand for in the story?

The wand represents absolute power

The resurrection stone represents immortality

The cloak represents invisibility and a kind of presence in absence

These three things seem to me attributes of God (omnipotent, immortal and an omnipresent absence).

Now some people may think: "What is he babbling about?" But this symbol (triangle of divinity) has a long history in western culture.

To begin with, it is an equilateral triangle. The kind of the tetraktys of the Greek mathematicians and philosophers. We find traces of its divine nature according to the Greeks in the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato (Timaeus...if I'm not mistaken). According to the Greeks the dimensions of reality could be mirrored in this tetraktys. You need the numbers 1,2,3 and 4 to draw this kind of triangle. But the number one stands for the point, the number two stands for the segment, the number three stand for the mathematical face, the number four indicates the volume. So....every aspect or dimension of reality is represented. This is why the Pythagoreans thought that the sum of all these numbers (1+2+3+4=10) delivered a sacred number that embodied the total harmony of the universe.

But that is not all.....

This tetraktys popped up in christan symbolism as the allseeing eye of God. It became a very popular theme in the 17th and the 18th century. 

It even became the symbol of the enlightened American revolutionary state with the Eye of Providence on top of the pyramid in a equilateral triangle.        

                                                                                    
So when this Harry Potter-movie introduced this symbol...it made sense. Because being godlike is the most exalting dream that humanity caresses. We all want a piece of the godlike status so we can continue this discontinue life that we have to spend separated from others in the constant reminder of the frailty of our human bodies. It goes deep down into the dreams and desires of human nature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel (ed.), Iconoclash - Beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, Karlsruhe & Cambridge, 2002.

 

This book is a most comprehensive anthology about the image wars, as it joins for the first time different cultures from West to East, different epochs from Middle Ages to modernism, different practices from science to art, in the search for an understanding of the nature of the image. This question is more actual than ever, because the question of the image, always answered differently from different political and cultural perspectives, is central in a society built more than ever on visual mediavfor the question: What is reality? Today, in the era of new instruments of image making in art and science, from media to medicine, the functions of the image have changed radically. The name of the multiple transformations of the image in the technical universe of today is called 'crisis of representations'. Iconoclasts and Iconophiles fight on the field of representation, denying or believing in the possibility of representation, in the referential functions of chains of signs. This book offers new insights from new perspectives from the front of the image wars governing the actual world in the field of politics, religion, art and science ....

 (backcover text)