First some wise words coming from Susan Sontag, taken from her book
Against interpretation (1966).
"Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings." It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world!" As if there were any other.)
The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have." Ok, as you may have guessed i'm not into art interpretation. When i write about 'Kandinsky's dub teachings' it's about an imaginary clash between abstract painting and dub music looking mostly at Kandinsky's theories and techniques, not the deeper meaning of certain paintings and so on.
It's impossible to exactly define what 'abstract painting' is so let's just say that a purely abstract painting does
not have a landscape or a portrait on it. It's about something a bit more.. abstract. In itself abstraction is not a goal (because it's just a vague and slippery concept). It's more interesting to look at
varying degrees of abstraction. Take for example this spot in the Brazilian jungle.
Obviously this photo is not the real thing. It's 'just' a photo and in many ways it's an abstraction. For one thing the exact spot where this picture was taken is now completely different. In that sense the photo isn't very realistic but it's not abstract enough to qualify as abstract art.
Here are some more abstract jungle scenes...
Rousseau - Equatorial Jungle
Kandinsky - Composition No. 7 It's the same thing in music and especially in dub. Before the invention of speakers and amplifiers all music was about singing and playing instruments (some people would call that 'real' music). Then electric amplification of sound was introduced and people started to listen to the vibrating diaphragm of a speaker. And with studio techniques progressing (cut & paste, artificial reverb etc.) the music itself also became more abstract.
Right now many young producers have never played a 'real' instrument yet. A laptop containing digital synths, drumloops, fx etc. is all it takes. That's very abstract in the sense that it's totally unlike playing an old out of tune acoustic guitar.
I think producers who work with mouse clicks and buttons only and never play 'real' instruments are missing something but i wouldn't say that abstract sounds coming from a laptop are 'better' or 'worse' because with new techniques
it's all about how you use them.
Reading about Kandinsky and his theories of art you inevitably notice a few themes that keep coming back in different phrasing. Of course Kandinsky was going for abstraction, but he didn't want mere 'decoration'. He wanted to create/construct lively pieces that surface from deep within. Something he called
'inner necessity' or intuition.
His whole life Kandinsky was especially interested in Chinese art and culture. This made me think that his main themes are all more or less reflected in the Taoist yin/yang contrast between the spontaneous (nature) and the artificial (the world of man). In a broad sense Kandinsky's core theories are efforts to understand how the tensions caused by this polarity can be used in art. Laptop producers might want to
check it out some time ;-)
Among the painters of the 20th century Kandinsky is seen as an 'important' philosopher (whatever that may mean). He was always doing research in a scientific way, reading, writing and teaching about practical stuff like the chemistry of paint, cognitive psychology (color perception etc.) but also about philosophy, history, religion, new physics theories and so on. This really reminds me of
dub scientists like the
Mad Professor and
Lee Perry and it also reminds me of 'geeky & spiritual' producers like
RZA from Wu-Tang Clan.
One thing Kandinsky really disliked was a purely rational (positivist) view of science. He would always stress the importance of chance and intuition, both in science and in art. But how does this work in practice? How does a painter work by intuition? I don't know, it's probably very different for each individual artist but although it's impossible to capture the essence of intuition in a few words, it's still very interesting to explore the hidden capacities of the human mind.
Dream telepathy is a fascinating example. I like
this article by Montague Ullman. He did some very interesting research on transmission of images via dreams and he even used paintings as target material :-) If you like this kind of stuff you might also be interested in a book by Robert Aziz called
The Syndetic Paradigm (don't let the unattractive title fool you).
"The world is full of resonances. It constitutes a cosmos of things exerting a spiritual action. The dead matter is a living spirit."Wassily Kandinsky
