eidolia




I've got some really strong students this semester at Cypress College..
Here are some works by Redeniel Tamano and Justin Lee that they will hopefully sell to me. I'm anticipating that 2007 will be a year of numerous acquisitions here at the small but widely acclaimed De Beaufort Collection. FYI...I'm really into Laissez-Faire aesthetics.

If you have to ask..you'll never know.

Pareidolia: Screaming at the Void


Kicking around the galleries lately I've been seeing alot of faces. Paintings have been staring back at me..following me as I walk around the room. It's spooky. Aside from an eerie humaness, what seems to be operative in all of these pieces is a visual trope in which the parts and the whole of the picture are in a Phyrric contest for dominance that finds no resolution. This reminds me of the frisson between the philosophical concepts of Nominalism and Realism. The doctrine of Nominalism holds that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. This would be contrasted to Philosophical Realism, which holds that when we use descriptive terms such as "green" or "tree," the Forms of those concepts really exist, independently of the world in an abstract realm. The paintings in question refuse to be accepted either as parts or as wholes(named objects.."faces"), but instead vibrate between the two-which curiosly recalls the nature of light, alternately described as a wave or particle..some physicists have even referred to it as a "wavicle". Remeber that Arcimboldo famously made faces out of vegetables, and Dali made skulls out of nudes..both image systems operate on the same principle. Getting back to my point, what's exciting about nominalism and it's relationship to pareidolia (the tendency to see faces in random stimuli), is the illustration of one of the perennial problems of philosophy. For example, I often wonder how "society" can phenomenologically be experienced, if it is nothing more than a loose collection of individuals with various beliefs, attitudes, and values. "America" is just an idea, held in various terms by all those who engage in this peculiarly amorphous concept. Conversely, in crude, literal terms one could point to the geographic border of this country for an answer, but this would be ignoring all of those "Non-Americans" that reside within it's borders and contribute to the operation of the concept of "America". It's a problem in perception that's not going away any time soon, but mostly it illustrates that people see really what they wan't to see...what is convenient to them, and what doesn't contradict with the beliefs that they have curently found truth in.

So you can see the face or you can see it's parts..or hopefully you can see them all at once. By doing so you recognize that no "thing" that one can point to and name in the world can really only be that thing. Nothing can be taken at "face" value (excuse the lame pun). It's better to acknowledge the trap door behind every belief or phenomena that leads to the pre-linguistic nuomena that ultimately is closer to the source of all that is. Buddhists call this shunyata..and we could clumsily translate this as "void"..although the connotation is negative only in verbal form. Looking into random patterns we see faces staring back at us because we are human. This is why the Christian God is an old man with a white beard, and also why teleologists believe that this is all going somehwere. As an artists and thinker, my message becomes more and more clear..to point out that although nature is not a mirror..we are nature..and the universe is us. When you look into the void..the void stares back, and this reminds me of what my friend Steve Canaday usually says about Voids: it's best to confront them head on by raising a knife, screaming at the top of your lungs...and running straight at them.


  • Cauda Draconis


  • Pareidolia (pronounced /pɛɹaɪˈdoliÉ™/ or /pæraɪˈdəʊliÉ™/), first used in 1994 by Steven Goldstein, describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para- – amiss, faulty, wrong – and eidolon – image, the diminutive of eidos – appearance, form.

    As a survival technique, Human beings are "hard-wired" from birth to identify the human face. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility, but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces. Skeptics assert that sightings of religious or iconic figures in everyday objects, such as Marian apparitions, are examples of pareidolia, as are some cases of electronic voice phenomena. The Face on Mars is a phenomenon that succeeded the Martian canals, both eventually attributed to pareidolia, when the "seen" images disappeared in better and more numerous images. Many Canadians thought they saw the face of the Devil in the Queen's hair on a dollar bill in the 1954 series, adapted from a photograph. The bills were not withdrawn from circulation, but the image was altered in its next printing.
  • Fortean Times examples of pareidolia in nature
  • joel morrison, steven gontarski, thomas helbig..


    ...are three sculptors I'm very interested in lately. Thomas Helbig's current show at China Art Objects reminded me of the other two artists. The show felt thin..I'm not a fan of his 2-d work..but his sculpture is great. I thought I was the only type of person who appreciated this variety of grotesque fantasy so it's a pleasure to see it in places other than my own imagination. I think the paintings I made last year are a type of analog to the formal concepts all three of these artists are playing with. It has to do with post-figural mutation. It's like the scene in "Aliens" when Sigourney Weaver discovers all the mutated alien fetuses. Or maybe some kind of curio cabinet in a dark dusty Eastern European museum with a 2 headed cow floating in fromaldahyde..well you get what I mean. Only Morrison and Gontarski are a bit slick..and maybe Helbig's biomorphism has a textural verism that brings it closer to the sickly unsettling organic presence that I'm after.
  • my paintings circa 2006

  • Steven Gontarski

  • Thomas Helbig

  • Dennis Hollingsworth

    Dennis Hollingsworth
    Web 2.0 is an exciting place. A number of artists are taking the reins and creating their own dialogues..I suspect that this trend will continue as the spotlight becomes more and more diffuse. It's funny how young artists are so impressionable..well at least I can speak for myself. It comes as a fantastic revelation when one realizes that ideas flow through many channels..not just sanctioned bureaucratic administrative entities. There is no such thing as "authority" in art. "Prestige" is a chimera that exists only in the imagination of consumers. It occupies the microscopic space between greed and fear. In reality there are only ideas and images..and the opportunity to participate in their negotiation and production. I feel like that's a big part of my project here in cyberworld..and I'd say Dennis us up to roughly the same thing. Hopefully the list will continue to grow...
  • Dennis Hollingsworth
  • U.G. Krishnamurti- The Anti-Guru



    There are 2 "Krishnamurti's"..U.G and Jiddu. U.G. is the flipside of Jiddu, and pretty much reminds me of Schopenhauer. He's extremely critical of Jiddu's belief that consciousness can be mutated and that human beings are capable of altering society into a better system. The thing to do is accept the limitations of humaness..like the limitations of mortality. I wonder if this is a more accurate, if seemingly darker, understanding of the human animal. If you do not see death as a collapse or tragic loss..then you can take the good with the bad. Society must be violent in order to continue. Conflict is a "necessary" evil. The problem is that dogmatists will apply and misrepresent this seemingly realist approach in order to justify all sorts of self serving systems such as Objectivism or even the politics of American Neo-Conservatives. If it remains purely theoretical and bereft of praxis I think it works just fine..but what good is a theory that cannot be applied?
  • more video at Professor Jacques
  • Eris

    la vie est un jeu



    "I can only conclude that I am indeed like a visitor from
    non-Euclidean dimensions whose outlines are perplexing to
    the Euclidean inhabitants of various dogmatic Flatlands. Or
    else, Lichtenstein was right when he said a book "is a
    mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out."
    Of course, we are living in curved space (as noted by
    Einstein); that should warn us that Euclidean metaphors are
    always misleading. Science has also discovered that the
    Universe can count above two, which should make us leery of
    either/or choices. There are eight--count 'em,
    eight--theories or models in quantum mechanics, all of which
    use the same equations but have radically different
    philosophical meanings; physicists have accepted the
    multi-model approach (or "model agnosticism") for over 60
    years now. In modern mathematics and logic, in addition to
    the two-valued (yes/no) logic of Aristotle and Boole, there
    are several three-valued logics (e.g. the yes, no and maybe
    Quantum Logic of von Neumann; the yes, no and po of
    psychologist Edward de Bono; etc.), at least one four-valued
    logic (the true, false, indeterminate and meaningless of
    Rapoport), and an infinite-valued logic (Korzybski). I
    myself have presented a multi-valued logic in my
    neuroscience seminars; the bare bones of this system will be
    found in my book, _The New Inquisition_. Two-valued
    Euclidean choices--left or right of an imaginary line--do
    not seem very "real" to me, in comparison to the versatility
    of modem science and mathematics. "
    Robert Anton Wilson

    protrude, flow

    Extreme Instability




    Awe inspiring and sublime photos of super-cell storms across the midwest by a guy named "Mike". Remind me of John Martin paintings..but without the cowering biblical figures and crumbling cities..
  • Extreme Instability
  • Alan Watts- Time-part 1

    Aurel Schmidt


    This might be the strongest show I've seen in Chinatown for quite a while. Arcimboldo meets Peres Projects...so a little bit Heavy Metal..but still seems better than most of the ultra-laborious drawing art that's flooded the scene lately.
  • Aurel Schmidt at tinyvices

  • Peres Projects press release
  • J. Krishnamurti


    "Obviously what causes war is the desire for power, position, prestige, money; also the disease called nationalism, the worship of a flag; and the disease of organized religion, the worship of a dogma. All these are the causes of war; if you as an individual belong to any of the organized religions, if you are greedy for power, if you are envious, you are bound to produce a society which will result in destruction. So again it depends upon you and not on the leaders – not on so-called statesmen and all the rest of them. It depends upon you and me but we do not seem to realize that. If once we really felt the responsibility of our own actions, how quickly we could bring to an end all these wars, this appalling misery! But you see, we are indifferent. We have three meals a day, we have our jobs, we have our bank account, big or little, and we say, 'For God’s sake, don’t disturb us, leave us alone'."
  • Krishnamurti

  • video at Professor Jacques
  • Surprising Progress


    ..but still very rough and a long way from done.
    But the colors are looking good.
    I'm not sure what those ghost orbs are...

    Robert Anton Wilson 1932-2007

    Balance


    In the fear that this blog may have become overwhelmingly dark and opressive as of late...I decided that I needed to balance things out. I think I'm fascinated with mortality and death because it reminds me of the lightness of being. The two concepts are metaphysically contingent on each other. The Apocalypse becomes a cartoon if one isn't careful.
  • cuteness
  • Time is a continuous stream..

    ..there is no such thing as a "year".

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