Mona Lisa Does Not Smile Anymore

Till the other day we thought the age of reason has dawned and all is science and it means certainty and perfect systems. there were two camps one logical, rational, systemic, and predictable and it belonged to science; the other was magical, mysterious, and spiritual, above causes as we understand them, and it belonged to the diminished breed of searchers for truth beyond the phenomenal. they were mystics they were outside the pale of the 'normal'. they talked of visions, they talked of out of body experiences, they talked humanity as a spiritual family, and they talked of love and of sharing. they never talked of certainties they talked of possible universes, they talked of 'arriving' and one such Khalil Gibran says- Say not, I have found the truth, but rather, I have found a truth. Say not, I have found the path of the soul. say rather, I have met the soul walking upon my path. For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals. -- from the Prophet It seems we are less certain of things even under the canopy of science. Is it indecisiveness of Nature or is there something beyond us? Heisenberg the physicist changed the faith in science and its godlike power of absolute determinism. It was this determinism that prided itself being so different from unexplained divinity; all that has changed for good. we are not sure of too many things that we try to understand through science alone. Nietzsche uttered that God is dead and we tried to answer everything through logic and rationality. from the faith driven spirituality of Middle Ages we arrived in machine driven blinding consumerism to create and find meaning of human life and existence. the price we paid is emptiness, existentialist void, stark individualism and loneliness, nightmares, anguish of alienation. Every new ideology and revolution in thoughts needs a time frame to play out till a new thought process and ideology replaces it. there are certain irreversibles in human life namely spirituality and rational-scientific. When the balance between the two is disturbed it causes trouble for the well being of humanity. the eternal duality of matter and spirit is an essential bond for meaning of human life. the concept of Eternal Return is the philosophical kernel of society vacillating away from the balance and its constant return to sanity, order, and human values. but now thanks to Indeterminacy Principle we are finding greater solace that there are phenomena that do not reveal there determinant nature and are affected by chance. the physical world-is it a wave or particle? the only certainty about the material world is its uncertainty. What we regard as chance for us may be part of a higher order. while we talk of Free Will of humans there seems to be a higher controlling order that we at present do not know so well. Uncertainty is the mother of all actions for it increases the curiosity and the hope for a favourable turn of the dice of chance. It is nascent uncertainty in all spheres of life and existence that gives meaning and creativity to human actions. Indeterminism is essential to uncertainty. I remember but not so clearly that Bertrand Russell in introduction to one of his books said something to the effect that we know that all of the things in universe are unknowable to us but even if we reduce the area of ignorance a little it will be good. the unknowns or in other words uncertainty stemming from the unknown is pervasive in human situations and we can not act in the world oblivious to this substantial fact. Human destiny is known plus the unknown. Now as artist we use materials like acrylic paint that are a creation of science, we also know through science the intervention of light on objects and how their appearance undergoes change with changing light and so on. What we know as technical elements in our art is the gift of science. but for art and artists a much greater role is assigned to their creative search which involves a meditated oneness and looking within. in the search of angels and devils, happiness and pain, time and space, yesterdays and tomorrows, self and the world an artist does not need the science and its principles. What is needed is the empathy, the love, the compassion, humility, mystery, awe, joy and the transformation of self to become one with these states of being in creating the work of art. if the artist does not have the fount of existential anguish, pain and suffering he can not arrive at the height of expression. the artist might have had the direct experience of suffering or he may have the inner spiritual empathy to reach the pinnacle of expression. On a visit to Metropole Museum in Lille Franc, I stood for long meditative like Buddha in the room housing Rouault's spiritually vibrant works. I felt a soft angst, a whispering melancholia, a feeling of evening shadows descending in the landscape with pale dying light reminding me to think of 'return' to home. It was a strange feeling, dilating memory, a stage between amnesia and recall, distant, but still near, a place you do not remember but have a nagging feeling that you know it from another time. Art changes us, art imbues us with new visions, and it makes life full of meanings we hitherto did not perceive. Man desires immortality and apart from religion, the other pursuit through which he seeks immortality is art. A world without art would be a very desolate place. All history of mankind Neanderthal to Homo sapiens is of cultural artifacts-the desire to create order and beauty if not parallel at least inspired by nature. Art serves humanity's desire to create and to outlast individual human mortality. Art is a seed that grows into a plant for the future of mankind. Art is an exotic necklace that strings together all vary coloured beads of humanity and makes life more liveable. Oswald Spengler the German thinker developed a theory of art wherein a culture develops and shines through art. He regarded the inner spiritual focus of a creative artist as destiny. He says,.that each culture must necessarily possess its own destiny idea.what is named by us conjecture, accident, Providence or Fate, by classical man Nemesis, Ananke, Tyche, or Fatum, by the Arab Kismet, by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each unique and unreproducible soul-constitution, quite clear to those who share in it, is a rendering. elsewhere Spengler says,Free will is an inner certitude. there is no contradiction between the free will and chance or destiny as part of a higher order of things. Art and culture needs to play a sizable role in all epochs of human development. the present time has reached a cul de sac in creative expression and we need a fresh philosophical and imaginative effort to bring art to a fresh threshold. there have been many art Movements and they reflect the endless search for creative expression by the artists. in each period artists search for a new path to aesthetic Nirvana. Art, for that matter all cultural and aesthetic expressions are supposed to be influenced by the times they are in. but this is true to an extent, for there is also in art that is eternal and outside of time. I present here a fresh journey I undertake in art that is based on the philosophy of inner consciousness, chance and humanity. I call it Chance-Consciousness Art or CHANCON Art. The process of creative expression is quite involved and complicated. there are several factors that affect artists in different ways. there is no monotheism in art. the Painting or for that matter any form of art is not a physical automatism-you eat and then next morning you expel without choice. the preliminary to this kind of art creation is to change the way of seeing, feeling rather way of being. Artist depends on inner as well as the outer, on his feelings and on what he perceives, on fixity and on flux, on experience and on vision. In early 90's I painted Lost Hope that was based on the Holocaust. I did not use emotional element in the painting. I used a broken brush and filled a crimson grey sky with darkness and the ground ochre grey with a suggestive meta-hole in earth and a queue of verticals running across the canvas from one side to another unaware of the doom awaiting them. This was my depiction of the Holocaust. My indirect memory can not substitute the direct memory of sufferers. Art has another purpose-to effectively convey and to preserve memory as a repository for future society. History is without the play of feeling but art uses emotions more directly and on account of its 'openness' offers greater freedom to viewers to reach the memory and the art work in their own personalised way. Societal or civilization memory is a social collective and has to be preserved and transmitted to successive generations as history and art so that humanity uses this capital of memories to built edifices for future. What enters inside us in an artistic form is more durable and affective than the bare reading of history unsupported by emotive pain and suffering that comes even with indirect memory. the history has a habit of fading and the facts become distant as they do not generate emotions and attachment whereas art using memory brings greater immediacy and involvement of the viewers and response touching on strong emotions. The world is strewn with memories from individual-personal, individual-collective and collective. Any type of memory can enter the creative space-it is artist's choice. but there are memories that are traumatic as well individual collective. These memories haunt more than an innocent memory of a sun set with girl friend or the first kiss. the collective traumatic memories generate pain, anguish, helplessness, guilt and a crisis of the personality as also a moral dilemma about righteousness, God and the human nature. The function of memory is to recreate what has gone by through the eyes of the participant or through the feelings of indirect receiver of memory. the creation of art on the foundation of memory will depend on the nature of memory retained by the artist. Marcel Proust's novel in Search of Lost Time is about involuntary memory awakened through sensory in this case through the aroma of Madeleine dipped in tea. Time is great enemy of memory because it sides by another enemy of memory - forgetfulness. in painting involuntary memory plays no small role either and can lead you back to time past that has turned blank of its own volition. When an artist paints, small strips of memory may flow back. Also of interest is the connection of the painting with the viewers. Viewers may discover suddenly lost pieces of memory have been rejuvenated courtesy the painting. I was in Budapest for an exhibition and art camp during which time an exhibition of the paintings of Marc Chagall depicting Jewish life and customs from his village was opened in Jewish Museum of Budapest. When I saw a village scene and a donkey, in a flash I remembered a little filly my grandmother had bought for me that I used to ride. This memory had erased itself but Chagall's painting and the simple village atmosphere it depicted brought back a sliver from nowhere. Involuntary memory is of importance in life and in art for it consoles us that we are the same person in continuity over time. I know of other instances where involuntary memory was awakened for viewer of a work of art. Normal flow of memory in normal times is used by artists variously to express joy, pain, nostalgia, void, missing, love, freedom, innocence and a variety of other feelings. while living and working in different parts of Europe I have a store of memories about persons, affections, places, landscapes, events, and much more. I did a painting called Memories of Europe and in this work I transform memory pieces as a collage of movement across time and space. I use memory of landscapes, and of cuisine, language, aroma, a touch, a smile, a dance, a drink, a ribald joke, customs, festivals, by using in the painting visit cards, letters, picture postcards, bus, train, museum tickets, currency coins, coat buttons, restaurant napkins, coasters etc. What is of interest to artists and psychologists is that why one piece of memory rejuvenates and resurrects rather than another? Interestingly artwork itself is an emblem of human memory, and is used in creating art, and is part of a system of recall or search for past. My work Lost Hope drew on history, literature and the places and was affected by Schindler's List. Thus memory of art enters subsequent works of art and can in time be transformed into myth. the use of mythology in religious, national, racial and group discourses has evidence from earliest times. It is not the truth or its denial that is the important function of art or mythology, both provide societies with means to integrate ethos and to build up cultural artifacts that create identity for them. Art per se provides us with immediate and direct knowledge which can act on us without the intervention of the rational and logical. to weigh, to judge and to decide all these activities take more time and effort and the very nature of the rational does not evoke a non-mediated response. Our knowledge and judgment pass through a funnel only then we decide. Myth transformed in art has a permanent stay whereas history overtime gathers dust or is transformed according to the intentions of rulers or interested groups. the power of art is not in truth for in a world of flux there is no truth; it is from myth that art gets its emotional strength. The history of all religious art and here I speak with greater felicity about Hindu temple art is founded on faith that has roots and acceptance in myths. It is the belief that is paramount in creative efforts of artist. while to a rational Western man Hanuman is a 'monkey god' but for the artists who carved exquisite figures in stone in temples he is god. All the great Indian temple sculptures were the product of 'belief' and not a rational negation of the myths contained therein. Great art results not from 'facts' or history but from myths that subsume the two. Article is based on excerpts from the book 'Mona Lisa does not smile any more'  by Viktor vijay Kumar   fleshlight coupons /p> [l]