Picturing mind : paradox, indeterminacy and consciousness in art & poetry

369 Pages·2006·3.91 MB·English

by  Danvers

Picturing Mind
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General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster
Picturing Mind
Paradox, Indeterminacy
and Consciousness in
Art & Poetry
JOHN DANVERS
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 90-420-1809-7
ISSN: 1573-2193
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents

Preface 7
Part 1 Introduction – an opening, an entering 11
Part 2 The knowing body: art as an integrative process of
cognition 17
Part 3 Interrogating appearances: being, seeing & showing
37
Part 4 The mutuality of existence: drawing, emptiness &
presence 65
Part 5 Picturing mind – writing being 101
Part 6 The self as open-work: permeability, incompleteness
& revisibility 131
Part 7 Mind, the real & the other 159
Part 8 Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world 191
Part 9 The ! the One & the Many: mysticism, art & poetry 261
Part 10 The discontinuum of consciousness: ambiguity,
indeterminacy & multiplicity 313
Part 11 A leaving, an unending. A folding, an unfolding 345
Bibliography 353
Index 363
*

For Philippa, Joanna, Tom and Jenny

*

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the research committee of the Faculty of Arts,
University of Plymouth, for awarding me a sabbatical semester in
which to do most of the writing of this book, and to colleagues in the
Faculty for their support and comradeship over the years. I’d like to
thank the following journals, publishers and organisations for allow-
ing me to include revised versions of, or extracts from, papers in this
volume: NSEAD & its journal iJADE for most of an essay, The
Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge, (1995)
and for extracts from, Towards a Radical Pedagogy: Provisional
notes on Learning and Teaching in Art & Design (2003); ISSEI for
extracts from book reviews (1998; 2005); and Trentham Books (2004)
for extracts used in Part 6.

I’m also grateful for having participated in the affairs of ISSEI
(International Society for the Study of European Ideas), particularly its
conferences, over many years, and for a stimulating association with
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe, the editor, and other members of the
editorial board of, and contributors to, the internet journal, Conscious-
ness, Literature and the Arts.

Many thanks to Pat and Dave for a few weeks of quiet reflection and
good reading in Pat’s studio in Colorado.

Finally I’d like to thank all those students with whom I’ve explored
many of the ideas in this book. Any merits the book may have are
largely due to countless stimulating interactions with enquiring minds
in seminars over many years. On the other hand the many faults of the
book are entirely my responsibility.
Preface

It might be useful to the reader to know something of the composi-
tional history of this book and to have a brief outline of the main
themes.

A first draft of Part 2 was written back in 1994 and published in 1995.
(Danvers 1995: 289-297) In revising it for this volume I realise that
much of it still seems to be relevant, providing as it does a non-
specialist framework with which to think about perception, the
embodied mind and art as a mode of knowing. At the time, and to
some extent still, there was/is a widespread view that the primary
function of art was/is as a mode of expression, a vehicle for the
display and direct transfer of emotion or feeling from the artist to the
viewer via the art object. This seems to me to be only one side of the
story and needs to be counterbalanced by another narrative articulat-
ing the cognitive function of art - if art is to be taken seriously as a
mode of doing, knowing and being.

Part 3 is based on notes and papers written between 1995 and 2000
when my own art practice was focused on the making of drawings and
paintings that analysed the ways in which we encounter objects as
perceptual and cognitive events. At the time I considered myself as
making a very small contribution to the long history of still-life
painting, a tradition which, in my view, still has much unfinished
business in relation to investigating and celebrating how we engage
with a world that has material physicality at one level and yet is also a
field of immaterial energies at another level.

Part 4 takes a step further some of the ideas and issues arising from
the practice of observational drawing and painting, exploring the ways
in which we exist as interdependent participants in a field of relation-
ships. Buddhist concepts of sunyata, ‘emptiness’, and tathata,
8 Preface
‘suchness’, are discussed in relation to the sceptical dialectics of
Pyrrho and Nagarjuna.

In Part 5 art and poetry are analysed as modes of picturing mind and
writing being, ways of opening and disclosing what it is to be part of
the consciousness of the world. Examples of works by Cy Twombly,
Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage are considered within a frame-
work of the poetics of Philip Whalen and Charles Olson.

Part 6 expands on the idea of art as a way of picturing mind by
analysing Umberto Eco’s proposition of the artwork as “open work”
and Barthes’ theories about “readerly” and “writerly” texts. A theme
of the self as open work is developed as a way of thinking about
different aspects of consciousness, being and becoming. Reference is
made to the work of the artist Helen Chadwick, and to Merleau-
Ponty’s ideas about art as a process of embodiment and participation
in the world. These ideas are discussed in relation to reflections on
incompleteness, openness and revisibility – another thematic strand
that weaves its way throughout the whole book.

In Part 7 notions of otherness and the real are discussed in relation to a
number of examples of artworks and poems by R.S. Thomas, Robin
Blaser, Robert Duncan, Minimalism, Ad Reinhardt and others. The
arts are considered as potential ways of gaining empathic access to
otherness, particularly with a brief reference to Fred Wah’s thinking
about hybridity and colonisation. The idea of nature as other is
explored as an aspect of the thinking of Heidegger and Gary Snyder.

Part 8 explores many different approaches taken by artists and poets to
nature. The arts are considered as a locus of mind-in-the-world - how
we are and where we are as beings sharing a planet with other beings.
Themes of mapping, walking, journeying, emplacement and being-in-
the-world are discussed in relation to a varied array of examples: from
the writers and poets Guy Davenport, Gary Snyder, Kenneth White,
David Abram and Charles Waterton, to the artists Richard Long,
Susan Derges, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Wolseley and others. Ideas
drawn from Goethe, Ruskin and studies of shamanism and Palaeo-
lithic cultures, are used to frame and shed light on the different
examples.
Preface 9

In Part 9 the particular modes of consciousness that have become
known as mysticism are explored in relation to contrasting descriptive
analyses proposed by William James, Bertrand Russell, Thomas
Merton, Heidegger and others. Mysticism is considered as a particu-
larly intense state of awareness and cognition, articulated and realised
in the writings and artefacts produced by artists, poets and mystics
within many cultures. Ideas about unity, unknowing, ineffability,
infinity and the metaphysics of light are discussed in relation to
examples of accounts of mystical experiences within the Christian,
Taoist and Sufi traditions, and in relation to the art and poetry of
Anish Kapoor, James Turrell, Agnes Martin, Jorge Luis Borges,
Kenneth Rexroth and others.

Part 10 continues many of the themes already introduced and consid-
ers these as they are manifested in particular modes of construction
and composition in the visual arts and poetry. Ideas about the discon-
tinuum of consciousness are discussed alongside indeterminacy,
contradiction, perspectivism, revisibility, non-dualism and associative
thinking - as qualities and principles that energise and direct many
forms of practice in the arts. Reference is made to the work of John
Cage, Thomas McEvilley, Anne Carson and Richard Rorty amongst
others.

The final section, Part 11, briefly condenses many of the above
strands of thought into the notion of a contrarium – a clearing in
which apparent contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are held in a
state of indeterminacy and open possibility. A visualisation of the
contrarium is presented in diagrammatic form – a suggestion of what
might be called an aesthetics and poetics of indeterminacy.

NB. An important dimension of the book, almost a contrary text, are the
images and more unusual textual episodes that are presented as a visual
counterpoint to the main body of the text. These showings offer different
perspectives on, and manifestations of, the themes and ideas outlined
above. All the images are made by the author. They have been deliber-
ately left without annotations to emphasise their visuality. As quiet
interruptions to the hum of the text I hope they provide a parallel stream
of openings and clearings - other ways of picturing mind.