BLOG.AZOTHGALLERY.COM: Recent Comments

Comment on CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT JOHNES RUTA’S ESSAY

Paul Szemanczky — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:37:49 GMT

Johnes: Love this one. Am sending it to half a dozen New Age (80-ties) friends in NM and AZ. It's appropro. Fabulously rich and defined in suggestion and peerage.

Comment on Philosophical art review: "The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage)"

Magdalena Mraz — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:53:04 GMT

Hi Johnes,
All the best in the coming year! It certainly started with the great promise of your interesting essay on painting by John Smibert. I believe that your observations of the personalities in his painting and their "enlightened self-interest" is keen and correct (how many times have I heard this fundamentally contradictory phrase defended in my upper east side Unitarian church?) It reminds me of frequently quoted Thomas Jefferson and his peculiar mixture of idealism and pragmatism; perhaps a term "Immaterialism" would fit his philosophy as well as Berkeley's.

To me, the most interesting portraits in this painting are those facing the viewer directly. Intelligent and maternal gaze (with a hint of irony) of Dean's wife seems to belong to a female who represents a good grounding force for her rotund yet "immaterial" husband. The child she is holding suggests a possibility of a fresh start and perhaps an amusement of a future generation viewing the pompous setting.The most captivating, however, is the very direct, piercing glance of an artist himself, reminiscent of an insertion of Diego Velazquez into his painting of the Spanish royal family ('"The Maids of Honor", I think). He appears to see himself at once as a witness, social critic and a detached, somewhat elevated observer. Although in the background and almost added to the picture, he is the one holding the true power, not prominently placed Berkeley. So I believe Smibert managed to mock all the other males in the painting, sharing the ground with the mother and the child instead. Thus he gave himself the best spot and got paid for it too. How is that for an enlightened self-interest, if not entirely "immaterial" philosophically in this case. But at least he is the most unpretentious person in the group. Never under-estimate the power an artist! I am happy (and envious) you are beginning to practice the power of your art of writing again, but it helps to increase my own writing urges too.
Warmly,Magda

Comment on Philosophical art review: "The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage)"

Claudine Burns-Smith — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:40:08 GMT

It's amazing how different interpretations of the same painting can be given, and they are not mutually exclusive. Seeing this painting sent you on a historical philosophical interpretation but here is another one, more psychological:

Dean B. and his family form one group. He is lost in his lofty philosophical and religious ideals and does not know what is going on around him. She is down to earth, busy with real life taking care of a child, and not afraid of honestly looking us in the eye. She looks very centered and confident in who she is. Let the others worry about the spiritual world.

Sitting on the left is Wainwright, the fan, taking down every word the great man utters. But he is just a symbolic presence required as an audience for Berkeley.

The two wigged gentlemen and the other woman are interesting characters. The one on the right has his arm possessively resting on the back of the woman's chair, suggesting he might be the husband. The woman is looking at B.'s wife, probably confiding in her, but is pointing at the other guy. What is so special about him? He is looking down at what you might think is the notebook held by Wainwright but could it be he is actually examining the woman's bosom that she is displaying in his direction so prominently. Is he her lover? Do we have a triangle here?

The last character, actually a self-portrait of the artist, is looking angrily straight at us, seeming to tell us we have no business seeing this scene. We are voyeurs witnessing the secret drama of two dysfunctional families.

Of course there is also the artist's interpretation analyzing colors and composition.

Anybody can make up stories about paintings and I had fun doing this one. I am glad you liked it.
Happy New Year!
Claudine

Comment on ARMISTICE OF "THE GREAT WAR" Nov.11, 1918, 11:00AM.

Bridgette Potter — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:45:00 GMT

This is a informative blog. Continue the great work and information.

Comment on Comments on the Herb Rogoff Lecture and Exhibition

A Artist — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:50:23 GMT

Most excellent review. Maybe best I have seen this year and for a long time to come. Wonderful art to fire the most stubborn imagination even the sluggish. Bravo!

Comment on Thoughts on the Sublime

retirement plan — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:57:06 GMT

Do you mind if I refered your website article on my facebook account?

Comment on "Deer & Other Stories" by Susan Tepper -- BOOK REVIEW by Johnes Ruta

Susan Tepper — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:28:15 GMT

Many thanks to Johnes Ruta for his captivating and indepth review of my book Deer & Other Stories. I wish I could claim that I did travel to India with the Beatles, as Johnes has suggested here. But in fact I have never met the Beatles though I'm a big fan of their music.

Comment on Thoughts on the Sublime

AzothGallery — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:57:11 GMT

Dear Paul,

Thanks for your messages and for your fascinating take on Janice Patten's essay on The Sublime linked from my website !

Your email discussing "The Sublime" has sparked my brain to revisit the ideas and attitudes of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), and his near contemporaries such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and his personal friendship & later philosophical/ political combat with Tom Paine (1737-1809), about whom I've just finished listening to Christopher Hitchen's biography on Paine "The Rights of Man" narrated by Simon Vance. Now I've embarked on more serious research on their connection, and to understand Paine's literary influences.

Indeed your take on Burke rings true with me -- and while Paine didn't theorize on Art or Aesthetics, his philosophical arguments tested the Whig MP Burke, and eventually showed up the limits of Burke's Empiricism as a follower of
Locke and how knowledge is derived from sense experiences. Both were Quakers, and from early on, Burke was a supporter of the American colonists campaign for independence; in the 1780's Burke became a muckraker against
corruption in the rule of the new colony of India. But when the French Revolution broke out he also vehemently opposed to its overthrow of the monarchy, and fretted that the Jacobin frenzy would spread to England.

I'm not yet clear how much Tom Paine was influenced by Thomas Hobbes and his concept of the Leviathan as an allegorical description of the State as a serpentine organism winding its way through the Labyrinth of rich and poor streets of London, but it is clear that Paine was strongly influenced by Jean-Jaques Rousseau "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains..." -- But as an avid reader Paine would have known that the very concept of the "Social Contract" had been
invented by Hobbes ("Life is short and brutal"). For Burke, Hobbes grasped the positive meaning of the benevolent monarchy. He is known to have detested Rousseau, and believed that England "had already had its Revolution in 1688"

when then Catholic Stuarts were disposed of. From then on, all the King's subjects "knew their proper place in society..... " high or low....

Tom Paine was a free-thinker as a youth in Thetford, England, and attempted to run away to sea at 16 to escape his father's corset-making business. He instead became a customs agent, then a pamphlet-writer for local unionizers. His friendship with a London mathematician and astronomer who was a friend of Ben Franklin led to getting him to Philadelphia in 1774, where he wrote pamphlets for the revolutionary movement, and befriended Lafayette during the war.

After reading Burke's 1770 "Thoughts On the Present Discontent", Paine had sent him his own "Common Sense." Burke responded personally, and on Paine's return to England took him on a tour of the countryside to find a site for Paine's

design for an iron bridge. Paine's friendship with Lafayette concerned Burke about the "spread of the American Revolution" and it's first democratic government back to the Continent and possibly to England. Paine's continuing pamphlets soon

got him in hot water, and the PM William Pitt issued a warrant for his arrest for Seditious Libel. Apparently warned at a party by William Blake that he was about to be arrested and possibly killed, Paine immediately left for Paris to

take up Lafayette's invitation, and soon became involved in the Revolutionary Council where he argued that France, being the first country to abolish monarchy, should also be the first to abolish capital punishment as a holdover of medievalism .... His faction was outvoted and he soon was arrested on the orders of Robespierre.

About the sense of "The Sublime," I concur more with Longinus (it is historically unclear who he was and in what time-period he lived, evidentially 1st or 3rd century) . A new link for Longinus (just added to my "Arts Critiques" page):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longinus_(literature)

The word "sub-limis" itself means "below the Threshold" and for me that has always been experienced as a sense of the awesome-beautiful -- a profound stillness -- or sense that something has entered beneath my conscious "radar" and then powerfully transfixed me in Time.

In this sense, there is the sense of awe, a powerful element not of Fear, as posed by Burke, but of immensity, great or subtle events of Emotion, Love or Compassion, which brings us to tears with the sense of the profound.

In Wordsworth, Jacob Bronowski's brief quote from "Lines Above Tintern Abbey" comes to mind, in the Enlightenment of the experience of the Natural World, witnessing the tremendous power of a water-driven energy canal :

When like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads than one

Who sought the thing he loved. ---- NATURE THEN

TO ME WAS ALL IN ALL. I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding Cataract

Haunted me like a passion.

(I've always remembered this as "All in Awe..."

Or as Blake put it in his own terms:

Energy is Eternal Delight !

I love to discuss philosophy and look forward to working with

you on Jule's Memorial show ... !

Best Regards,

Johnes

Comment on Thoughts on the Sublime

Paul Szemanczky — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:42:56 GMT

I discovered Janice Patten's "Sublime" essay linked from your webpage and want to tell you it is incredible. Edmund Burke comes off dark and brooding, as if he were searching like Hans Gunther for "the Nordic" man, some Aryan strain of perfection.
One of the books left by my late father, Jules Szemanczky (1926-2008), was a 1947 text from the New Haven State Teacher's College, a beautiful, huge volume of English poetry, which must have been one of the courses he took. I was always enchanted by it, especially the Romantics. The Lyrical Ballads (Prelude) of Wordsworth particularly ringed true for the two of us, Dad and myself. Janice Patten's description of the mountains of Langdale Pike as seen by Wordsworth ring true with my actual vision yesterday from 850' feet high on Goat's Peak's watch tower inside Connecticut's Mount Tom State Reservation park.
Dad would have loved Patten's closing: (Wordsworth) "Human sight rises in intensity from memory through salience to the occlusion of the visible. Imagination also rises "like an unfather'd vapour" to target man's fight to remain autonomous and self-reliant.
Our whole society seems to be bending opposite the Wordsworth's treatise towards co-dependence, impersonal social-engineering, and ulterior (state) regulation, all Wordsworthian anathma. I wish Dad could have read Patten's paper, he would have loved it. I gave him oncea condensed text of Schopenhauer's, and in his Marcus Aurelius fashion, he devoured it and found many threads of salvation. Eternal optimist, yet truly Stoic, was he.
Take Care,
Paul