Unskilled beauty or ugly truth? A dialogic study of the indexical line

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Joana P. R. Neves
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Phenomenal World ◽  
Graphic Recording ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Contemporary Artist

A skilled drawing elicits an elevated aesthetic pleasure that we tend to call beauty. However, conceptual approaches to art influenced by science in association with technology subverted the discipline of drawing and notions of skill and beauty by focusing on the phenomenal world, including the human mind, in a more abstract and schematic way through an indexical line. The displacement of skill and beauty through the notion of a ‘truthful’ and perhaps even ethical line may pluralize beauty (the eternal regulator) and disable – literally – traditional notions of what the body can or should do. This study follows dialogically a number of indexical lines, from the art historian Pliny the Elder twenty-one centuries ago, to the deaf contemporary artist Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) whose work explores the notations of sound through drawing, including Etienne-Jules Marey’s (1830–1904) graphic recording machines and Irma Blank’s (b. 1934) conceptual drawn writings.

Embodied Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
pp. 890-910
Author(s):  
Barbara Gail Montero
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Embodied Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Bodily Movements

Although great art frequently revers the body, bodily experience itself is traditionally excluded from the aesthetic realm. This tradition, however, is in tension with the experience of expert dancers who find intense aesthetic pleasure in the experience of their own bodily movements. How to resolve this tension is the goal of this chapter. More specifically, in contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as observers’ embodied aesthetic experience of seeing bodies move.

scholarly journals Truth, body and religion

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarl-Thure Eriksson
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
New Information ◽  
Concept Of Truth ◽  
Stored Information

This paper is based on the words of welcome to the symposium on Religion and the Body on 16 June 2010.  In a religious context ‘truth’ is like a mantra, a certain imperative to believe in sacred things. The concept of truth and falseness arises, when we as humans compare reality, as we experience it through our senses, with the representation we have in our memory, a comparison of new information with stored information. If we look for the truth, we have to search in the human mind. There we will also find religion.

scholarly journals Ecstasy from a physiological point of view

1982 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 74-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaj Björkqvist
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Biological Study ◽  
Physiological Basis ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
Psychosomatic Diseases ◽  
The Brain

The biological study of man is one of today's most rapidly advancing sciences. There is no reason for not utilizing these methodologies of research and the knowledge already gained when studying ecstasy and other similar religious phenomena. Drugs have been used in all parts of the world as an ecstasy technique. Since mental states and physiological correlates always accompany each other, it is obvious that the human mind can be affected by external means, for instance by drugs. But the opposite is also true; mental changes affect the body, as they do in the case of psychosomatic diseases. Ecstasy is often described as an extremely joyful experience; this pleasure must necessarily also have a physiological basis. It is of course too early to say anything for certain, but the discovery of pleasure centres in the brain might offer an explanation. It is not far-fetched to suggest that when a person experiences euphoric ecstasy, it might, in some way or other, be connected with a cerebral pleasure center. Can it be, for example, that religious ecstasy is attained only by some mechanism triggering off changes in the balance of the transmitter substances? Or is it reached only via a change in the hormonal balance, or only by a slowing down of the brain waves, or is a pleasure centre activated? When a person is using an ecstasy technique, he usually does so within a religious tradition. When he reaches an experience, a traditional interpretation of it already exists.

scholarly journals Death as an Aesthetic Experiment

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-104
Author(s):  
Leander Scholz ◽  
◽  
Anatoly Lipov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Medical Procedure ◽  
The Road ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Operating Theatres ◽  
Contemporary Artist ◽  
Funeral Homes ◽  
Ethical Requirement

The more intensely a person thinks about the final nature of life, the more he is bound to a moment in life that is limited in time. Death is a very personal and intimate process, which in most cases is not «beautiful». The reality of death in clinics, intensive care units and operating theatres is, by its human nature, cruel. The body at the «end of the road» is captured by funeral homes. Thus, death today is identical to a long path of suffering. The article is dedicated to the author's reflection on a project by the German artist Gregor Schneider, which caused sensation and fierce reaction in Western art circles and beyond the art scene, creating him a reputation as «the most terrible contemporary artist» who has violated «existing» restrictions that cannot be exceeded if we do not want to question our civilization. The artist's vision is to allow a terminally ill person to die as part of an art project that represents a confrontation with death and that can remove the horror of death. As part of the project, the dying person defines everything in advance. Instead of a mass medical procedure of the same type, death, modeled on the artist's skill, Schneider argues, will create humane places for death and contribute to the creation of a space where people can die with dignity, creating personal protection and ensuring the ethical requirement of free will and self-determination.

Threshold

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Castrucci
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....

Human Evolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Complex Systems Theory ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Intelligent Activity

The main events and circumstances of human evolution are considered: classification of hominids, first descriptions, localization, chronology; artifacts characterizing their material and cultural activities; modern reconstruction of lifestyle and resettlement; and modern theories explaining the structural features of hominids and the processes of their occurrence. The manifestations of intelligent activity are discussed, in particular, their dependence from the structure of the body, the size, and complexity of the brain, for which comparisons with various animals are made. Particular attention is paid to unresolved or controversial issues. This material is necessary to assess the possibilities of the self-organization of complex systems theory (second chapter): if it adequately models the characteristics of a human's origin, then it can be used to understand the evolution of human mind and in the subsequent period, up to the current state.

Naturmaß, künstlerisches Maß und die Maßlosigkeit ihrer Anwendung. Simplicia in zwei ‚Tractatus de herbis‘-Handschriften des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91
Author(s):  
Theresa Holler
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
South Italy ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
New Form

AbstractOn the cusp of the 14th century, a new means of visualizing plants arose in the herbal manuscript tradition of South Italy. Unlike the previous medieval tradition’s stylized plant representations or antique manuscripts with their lifelike representations, these new images are characterized by their similarity to nature and pressed herbs. Based on two ‘Tractatus de herbis’ manuscripts, namely the MS lat. 6823 in Paris and the MS Egerton 747 in London, this article examines such a new form of nature as a measurement for art. The images themselves alternate between naturalistic impressions, fantastic creations, and pure aesthetic pleasure for the beholder. Together with the accompanying medical treatise they address the boundaries between measurements and excessiveness pertaining not only to artifice but also the body, which has come out of the balance of the four humors and therefore has lost its right measure.

The Body Identical With the Human Mind

The Monist ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-601
Author(s):  
Douglas Odegard ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body

Somatic Poetry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Uzendoski ◽  
Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Speech ◽  
Ritual Healing ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
A Site

This chapter explores the poetic qualities and nuances of the art of ritual healing, a genre termed as “somatic poetry.” Flowing out from the emphasis of the body as a site of social and cosmological action in the Amazonian world, somatic poetry is multimodal art created by listening, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting of natural subjectivities, not just those emanating from human speech or from the human mind. Somatic poetry involves the creative use of words and music and also plants, animals, and the landscape—entities recognized as having subjectivity and creative powers, powers that are internal rather than external to the art. The chapter provides one example of Amazonian somatic poetry, a healing practice called kushnirina, a medicinal vapor bath designed to cleanse and provide energy for the body. It then comments on Federico Calapucha's manioc story and a shamanic song performed by Lucas Tapuy in 2007. These examples show that somatic poetry is about creating loops of intersecting relationships with different species and unseen subjectivities of the landscape and the spirit world.

Bodily Motions and Religious Feelings

1971 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Gareth B. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Better Than

For when men pray they do with the members of their bodies what befits suppliants—when they bend their knees and stretch out their hands, or even prostrate themselves, and whatever else they do visibly, although their invisible will and the intention of their heart is known to God. Nor does He need these signs for the human mind to be laid bare to Him. But in this way a man excites himself to pray more and to groan more humbly and more fervently. I do not know how it is that, although these motions of the body cannot come to be without a motion of the mind preceding them, when they have been made, visibly and externally, that invisible inner motion which caused them is itself strengthened. And in this manner the disposition of the heart which preceded them in order that they might be made, grows stronger because they are made. Of course if someone is constrained or even bound, so that he cannot do these things with his limbs, it does not follow that, when he is stricken with remorse, the inner man does not pray and prostrate himself before the eyes of God in his most secret chamber.(Augustine: De cura pro mortuis 5.7)One smiles and tells the expert chef how good the sauce béarnaise is, not so much to inform him about the sauce (he knows better than we do how good it is) as to assure him that we are enjoying it and that we appreciate his efforts. But when a man kneels in his pew and repeats a litany of thanksgiving it is not, it seems, that he means to be informing God of anything—not even of his thankfulness. For God, unlike the chef, has no need of information.

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