Unurthed

Three pages from Luigi Serafini‘s undeciphered asemic work, the Codex Seraphinianus (Rizzoli edition).

From chapter three (bipeds). Click for larger version.

From chapter eleven (architecture). Click for larger version.

From chapter two (fauna). Click for larger version.

Two paintings by Aboriginal artists, collected in Wally Caruana’s Aboriginal Art.

Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, and Larry Jungarrayi Spencer, Yanjilypiri Jukurrpa (Star Dreaming), 1985 (f109).

“The Australian deserts appears empty and inhospitable to those who do not know them, but to the Aboriginal groups who inhabit these areas, the lands created by their ancestors and infused with their powers are places rich in spiritual meaning and physical sustenance.

“Geographically, the desert includes mountain ranges and spectacular rock-formations, grassy plains, strands and eucalypt and mulga trees, lakes, salt pans, sandhills, and stretches of stony country occasionally broken by seasonal watercourses and rivers and punctuated by rare permanent rockholes, springs, waterholes and soakages… Across this landscape spreads a web of ancestral paths travelled by the supernatural beings on their epic journeys of creation in the Jukurrpa or Dreaming, linking the topography firmly to the social order of the people” (p97).

“The basic elements of the pictorial art are limited in number but broad in meaning… Characteristic of the range of conventional designs and icons are those denoting place or site, and those indicating paths or movement. Concentric circles may denote a site, a camp, a waterhole or a fire. In ceremony, the concentric circle provides the means for the ancestral power which lies within the earth to surface and go back into the ground. Meandering and straight lines may indicate lightening or water courses, or they may describe the paths of ancestors and supernatural beings. Tracks of animals and humans are also part of the lexicon of desert imagery. U-shapes usually represent settled people or breasts, while arcs may be boomerangs or wind-breaks, and short straight lines or bars are often spears and digging sticks. Fields of dots can indicate sparks, fire, burnt ground, smoke, clouds, rain, and other phenomena.

“The interpretations of these designs are multiple and simultaneous, and depend on the viewer’s ritual knowledge of a site and the associated Dreaming. The meanings are elaborated and enhanced by the various combinations or juxtapositions of designs in the paintings, and also by the social and cultural contexts within which they operate — whether for ceremony or public domain, for instance. The combinations of designs allow for endless depth of meaning, and artists in decribing their work distinguish between those meanings that are indented for public revelations and those which are not, and provide the appropriate level of interpretation” (p98-99).

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Bandicoot Dreaming, 1991 (f98).

“It is by the acquisition of knowledge, not material possessions, that one attains status in Aboriginal culture. Art is an expression of knowledge, and hence a statement of authority. Through the use of ancestrally inherited designs, artists assert their identity, and their rights and responsibilities. They also define the relationships between individuals and groups, and affirm their connections to the land and the Dreaming” (p14-15).

“As a statement of authority, the aesthetic in art is often articulated in terms of ritual knowledge. Through art, individuals express their authority and knowledge of a subject, the land and the Dreaming, and artists will use their authority to introduce change and innovation” (p16).

“In ritual, paintings… are not intended to be static images requiring studied contemplation. Rather, since designs embody the power of supernatural beings, they are intended to be sensed more than viewed” (p59-60).

A 1530 painting by a follower of Massys, appearing in John Armstrong’s Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art.

Armstrong describes: contemplation is the “scrutiny of what is there to be seen. It is, literally, spending time with [an] object — not just time around it or standing before it, but time devoted to looking at it. ‘Contemplation’ has an august history used in Western thought to describe the mind’s approach to God and in Eastern philosophy to characterize the highest state of existence, but it remains — even in more modest uses — an obscure term. What goes on when we contemplate something, what are we actually doing?

“The process of perceptual contemplation of an object has, classically, five aspects:

1. Animadversion: noticing details.
2. Concursus: seeing relations between parts.
3. Hololepsis: seizing the whole as the whole.
4. The lingering caress.
5. Catalepsis: mutual absorption” (p81).

“Contemplation — in its initial aspect of animadversion — is time spent noticing details; that is, the process of becoming visually aware of parts of the picture which our habitual rapid scanning tends to gloss over. This is a process which sometimes requires conscious effort, we feel we are literally turning our attention on to different parts of the canvas and saying to ourselves: Well now, what is actually there?” (p83).

Follower of Massys, St Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, circa 1530 (p85).

“Concursus… involves seeing together many individual elements of the picture. Its pay-off comes in an enrichment of visual significance, of meaning. Scrutiny of a work of art frequently involves a rhythm of attention to individual parts and to the relations between those parts. This rhythm is required by art and it is also native to the perceiving mind. In fact we can see here how works of art respect and play up to the natural character of exploratory and synthetic attention; it is a native resource of the mind which we can bring into active, and developed, service in the engagement with works of art and which artists usually presuppose we will bring into service” (p91).

“The ambition of concursive attention — the ambition of drawing things together and seeing them in relation to each other —  naturally expands to incorporate more and more elements of the work; its logical maximum reveals a further aspect of contemplation” (p91): hololepsis. “Hololepsis yields an archetype of completeness and coherent explanation — thus responding to two of the great aims of mental activity. The contemplation of art of this kind and in this way can satisfy yearnings which the world generally frustrates. The world frequently springs the unexpected and sprawls in seemingly meaningless disorder. The prestige of systems of total explanation — religious, scientific, historical, philosophic — indicates a general need to grasp the world as a coherent whole in the face of its apparent confusion. A work of hololeptic art has the advantage over some of these systems in that its coherence does not rest upon falsehood; it has the advantage over others that what it offers is visible and palpable rather than abstract. Yes, of course, the price a work of art pays for this is that its completeness is bounded by its own small physical extent. It answers a yearning, but only in a restricted area. Hololeptic contemplation, thus, links the experience of art to the wider demands of reflective life and suggests how, to a certain kind of person, the experience of art could be of prime private importance” (p95).

“When we keep our [hololeptic] attention fixed upon an object which attracts us [a lingering caress], two things tend to happen: we get absorbed in the object and the object gets absorbed into us [catalepsis]… The quality and virtue of contemplation may depend… upon what it is we are giving ourselves over to. We can visually contemplate anything which we can see; but do some objects reward this kind of attention more than others? The belief that it makes a difference what you contemplate relies upon the assumption that what you contemplate gets inside you; contemplation is the spiritual analogue of eating” (p99-100).

Speaking of modrons, a duodrone drawing by Tony Diterlizzi, reprinted in Dragon magazine (April 2007, #354).

Reminisces Diterlizzi: “If you’ve had a chance to see the Planescape books (especially the early ones from ’94), you’ll see something amazing that happened in RPGs: a new philosophy on how gaming booklets could be presented. It wasn’t just my art — it was the awesome concepts and story hooks, and the (then) state-of-the-art graphic design and production that made these gaming supplements stand out. It was about a great group of people who were really excited about creating something new and imaginative for gamers who were tired of the usual hack-n-slash dungeon crawl. And I was honored to be a part of it.

“I did so much art back in those days. I don’t own much of it anymore, I sold most of it off to my loyal fans over the years at various cons. But there are a few gems that I still treasure and have to this day, and among those are my drawings of the modrons.

“I remember designer Zeb Cook phoning me up while I was working on the campaign setting to tell me that they were toying with the idea of re-introducing the modrons via Planescape. My response was, ‘Those weird little circle and square guys from Monster Manual II?’

“He replied, ‘Those would be the ones,’ and encouraged me to revisit the concept behind them. I did, and knew right away that they HAD to be in Planescape” (p41).

“Anyways, I moved on from gaming to pursue my dream of creating fantastic tales for children, and did my last fully illustrated Planescape book, The Planewalker’s Handbook, in my New York City studio in 1996. Of course, there was a modron in it.

“The rethinking of how a hackneyed or contrived character looks was a very big lesson for me. That type of thinking is what ultimately fueled the designs of the faeries, trolls, and goblins that inhabit all of The Spiderwick Chronicles books that I did later on with author Holly Black…” (p42).

Another drawing by Ardizzone, this from his 1957 Tim All Alone.

Having found his mother at last, “Tim told her all about his adventures” (p43).

The flames were tremendous (p43).

One more Qadri, this from his collection of paintings and poems, THE DOT and the dots.

Invocation -76. Click for larger version.

Writes Qadri:

“to find
some meaning in life
is to give one to it
and find,
that it is meaningless.”

Speaking again of shocks, two ink & dye works by tantric artist Sohan Qadri, cataloged in Seeker: The Art of Sohan Qadri. 

Pranayama, 2002, p101. Click for larger version.

Comments Donald Kuspit, “The ecstatic moment of full consciousness of the metaphysical truth about existence is a moment of aesthetic shock: concretizing the metaphysical truth [of the doctrine of Sunyata], Qadri’s icons give us an aesthetic shock. ‘The Pali word samvega is often used to denote the shock or wonder that may be felt when the perception of a work of art becomes a serious experience,’ Ananda Coomaraswamy writes. The perception of a work of art becomes a serious experience when it stirs ‘the will or mind’ to ‘consideration of the Eight Emotional Themes (birth, old age, sickness, death, and suffering arising in four other ways),’ and, ‘in the resulting state of distress, then gladdens it by the recollection of the Buddha, the Eternal Law… when it is in need of such gladdening’. Thus meditation on Qadri’s icons is therapeutic. The tensions in them — between contrasting colors, lines, and rhythms as well as light and dark — evoke our inner conflicts and distress even as their aesthetic resolution gladdens us, finally raising our spirits” (p14).

Purusha, 1999, p82. Click for larger version.

“Thus aesthetic shock is two-sided: it subverts ordinary consciousness by exposing the conflicts hidden by it even as it signals the extraordinary consciousness that resolves them. Qadri’s icons are as divided against themselves — fault lines run through some of them — as they are unified. They shock us into awareness of the eternal law stated in the doctrine of Sunyata. Meditation is not some mindless act of egoistic communion with oneself, but upsets one’s sense of selfhood, however, ultimately calming and enlightening by reason of its revelation of the eternal law. But the way to Buddha-like calm is through aesthetic delight, as Qadri’s icons show” (p14-15).

A drawing by Edward Ardizzone from his 1953 Tim in Danger.

“It was a lovely day when Tim, Charlotte and Ginger were playing on the beach. The sky was blue, the sea was blue, and the white yachts were sailing in the bay.

“But something was wrong with Ginger. He would mope.

“Charlotte thought that he was remembering the time when he was a ship’s boy and was pining for a life at sea once more. She was right, for early the next morning, when Tim woke up, he found Ginger’s bed empty and a note from Ginger on it to say that he had run away” (p1-2).

Fed up / have run away to see (p3).

A sketch by Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Arthur Conan Doyle) from a diary he kept while interned at the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum (1889).

The man to whom life is full of seriousness — he is a cleaner at Sunnyside who does his Work earnestly (p20).

Another scroll reproduced in Ethiopian Magic Scrolls.

“This image is recognizably a development of the eight-pointed star [c.f. previous post]. Here the image tends towards formal perfection. A double movement animates it: expansion following the four vertical and horizontal arms and the angel’s heads, and penetration following the four diagonal points. We have noted… that the former are the directions of the Cross (i.e., of a body with outstretched arms), and the latter direction of the penetrating gaze. The black lobate curve articulates this double movement here, so that it appears to begin from a circular form. The eyes of the central face are placed on the transversal axis. If we consider the genesis of this picture through related motifs, we will note that what have become here the radiating points of the central face were originally part of the angel’s clothing. They have been separated from the collar and shifted toward the center, for purely formal reasons.

“The Virgin’s Prayer at Bartos says: ‘Come, you four angels who hold up the four corners of the world and who are called Fertiyal, Ferfay, Fumael and Fananyal’. The winged faces are the angels of the four directions. Who are they guarding? The hidden face of the divine? The owner of the scroll? Satan in prison? All of these explanations are current among dabtaras who make such pictures” (p118).