CCS 2005-2006 Mini-programme 1 DR KEN NEIL PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART

CCS 2005-2006Stages 2 and 3

Philosophy in Modern and Contemporary Art

Lecture Two Monday 10th October

CCS 2005-2006Mini-programme 1 DR KEN NEIL

PHILOSOPHY INMODERN ANDCONTEMPORARY ART

PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF MODERNITY SEEN AND EMBODIED IN ART




TODAY’S FOUR SECTIONS:1. Modern scientistic

progress - traffic lights and the Davey Lamp

2. Modern objects picture a modern worldview Boccioni, Van Gogh.

3. Relativism, Modernism and vectors of alienation

4. Seeing Modernist goals rising above relativist philosophies




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Modernist progress i

•The story goes that traffic lights were first installed in Europe in 1924, for the extremely busy Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.

•Technology came to the rescue of chaos, and the congestion eased.




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In 1812 there was a massive fire-damp explosion in a mine near Sunderland, caused by the ignition of gases underground. 92 lost their lives.

To solve the problem of fire-damp explosions great inventors and scientists were commissioned by industrialists to devise safety apparatus.

And there was urgency, apart from the cost in lives, mines needed to be dug deeper to increase yield.

Modernist progress ii




11815 - George Stephenson had a prototype safety lamp which he successfully tested himself. It became known as the Geordie Lamp.

1816 - Humphrey Davey devised his version. He tested it successfully, and claimed a rich bounty from the competition.

The great progression of modern industry was, then, assisted once more by the ingenuity of scientists and science.

1Davey’s assistant was Michael Faraday - whose observations on Davey’s work have been famously recorded:‘I was witness in our laboratory to the gradual and beautiful development of the train of thought and the experiments which produced the lamp’.




1These two examples demonstrate the positivist logic of Modernist thinking - which is founded in a philosophy of onward social, cultural and industrial movement, and which has science as its cutting edge.

Modernism rumbled forward into the 20thC on the back of the industrial revolution, and found continued legitimation at the vanguard of scientific discoveries - the world was being revealed by science.




1The movement entitled FUTURISM embraced all of this technoscientific belief, and preached a classically Modernist faith which saw art as inevitably linked to speed, industry, the machine and concepts of MULTIPLICITY.

If Potsdamer Platz was an urban symbol of modernism and its multi-directional energy, the Futurist object embodied that energy - it was a Modernist philosophical endeavour of a kind, fuelled by




Umberto Boccioni ‘The City Rises’ 1910




Umberto Boccioni ‘Elasticity’ 1912




Umberto Boccioni ‘Dynamism of Horse and House’ 1915




Umberto Boccioni ‘Fusion of Head and Window’ 1910




2Sculpture should give life to objects be rendering their extension in space palpable, systematic, and plastic, because no one can deny any longer that one object continues at the point another begins, and that everything surrounding our body (bottle, automobile, house, tree, street) intersects it and divides it into sections by forming arabesques of curves and straight lines.From the Futurist Manifesto of Sculpture 1912




2With these manifesto statements Boccioni is effectively applying Einsteinean scientific revelations to the domain of visual arts; new theories in physics devised in the first decade of the 20thC by Einstein and Max Planck described the relativity of space-time, and otherwise challenged Newtonian versions of understanding the properties of our world.

In Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity - he explains that time is not fixed - that it does not flow at a fixed rate.




2Einstein wrote in his Special Theory of Relativity:‘Let us imagine a raven flying through the air in such a manner that its motion, as observed from the embankment, is uniform and in a straight line. If we were to observe the flying raven from the moving railway carriage, we should find that the motion of the raven would be one of different velocity and direction, but that it would still be uniform and in a straight line.’




2In short - Against conventional Newtonian physics - Einstein was declaring that Velocity and Direction were dependent on the framework of the viewer for their determination.So, certainties as given by Newtonian theories were rendered RELATIVE.




3Simultaneous perspectives, vectors of energy - what the Futurists called multiplicity.




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Modern philosophical thinking connected to aspects of multi-perspectival scientistic thinking.

Philosophies of Existentialism were linked in a way to the idea that, at its most basic; the world appears differently (its velocity and its direction) from different vantage points.

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)“I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the other.”




Vincent Van Gogh ‘Self Portrait’ 1889

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Multiplicity and alienation




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Scientistic progress often masks underlying causal factors - or, put another way, whose progress is it?




So - philosophies couched in relativity and relativism, or multiplicity and of alienation, were and are, important aspects of Modernity and of the avant-garde.

These are themes which are familiar to us through Postmodern discourse - but the historical distinction is not clear on these counts, or at least it varies from one vantage point to the next.

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Lastly - whether Postmodern or Modern - relativism might be conquered by art as part of a generally positivist project.

The imaginative discussion about the values of scientific progress and the cost in terms of alienation is embodied in the very making of art one could say.

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CCS 2005-2006 Mini-programme 1 DR KEN NEIL PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART