Transcendent Art Part 5

What is transcendent art?

I decided to find some some answers by googling the words and here is what I found today, a Washington Times book review on William De Kooning: The Transcendent Art, Sordid Life told In Telling Detail with this description ....There can hardly be a more treacherous subject for a biographer than the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. At the time of his death in 1997 at the age of 92 he had, at least in America, almost come to equal Picasso in the popular imagination as a kind of art god, a figure of transcendent, history-changing accomplishment.

And a review and memoir in the Times Online in an article called Mark Rothko: 1961, Tranquil, Transcendent. I was 17, had recently run away from home, and would walk each day from the Lyons Corner House in Leadenhall Street, where I washed up and cleared tables, to the slum in Mile End where I slept on a floor. I was anxious, lonely and unsure of myself. And I survived by creating the image of another and less sordid world. This other world was pure, serene, its silence broken only by the footsteps of hidden friends. There was a cool ambient light, and the shadows were soft and still like pools of water.

One day I was walking back from work, my anxieties heightened by a quarrel with another washer-up, and reluctant to go at once to the house in Mile End, where the only company was that of drop-outs. On an impulse I stepped into the Whitechapel Gallery. I found myself at once in that other world of which I had dreamt. I looked around in astonishment at these cool, quiet canvases, many of them recently finished and exuding a sweet smell of linseed oil.

Their close resemblance to each other was not a fault. On the contrary, it enhanced their effect of stillness - like uniformed sentries standing before a shrine. And they spoke of an other-worldly tranquillity; looking into them your eyes met only depth and peace. For an hour I was lost in those paintings, not able to find words for what I saw in them, but experiencing it as a vision of transcendence. I went out into the street refreshed and rejoicing, and would visit the gallery every day until the exhibition closed.........Something in me wants to remain true to my adolescent vision. The beauty I imagined I also saw, and could not have seen without Rothko's aid. But I do not see it today, and wonder how much it was the product of the stress of adolescence, and of the strange, still atmosphere of the Whitechapel Gallery in those days when so few people visited it, and when those few were all in search of redemption from the world outside.

I found a review of several volumes on the life and work of dostoyevsky called Dostoyevsky's Trascendent Art... one of the most determinant aspects of Dostoevsky's character—the indomitability of his will, what he meant when he referred to himself as possessing "the vitality of a cat." There were many grave cuts across his life, but after each crisis and fall he emerged stronger than ever, eager to make a new start, filled with conviction and with faith.

Dostoevsky delivered one of his most astonishing speeches, one that was followed by a half-hour of convulsive applause and cheering. Speaking simply, directly, without dramatic exclamation, he traced Pushkin's career, emphasizing the portrait of the wanderings of the aimless aristocrat Onegin, contrasted with the stalwart moral beauty of Tatyana that was the natural expression of the Russian popular character; then he launched into his conclusion that Pushkin represented the best of the Russian character, open, generous, and now standing ready to provide a new model against the decrepit West, with its stern Roman Catholicism and the analytical skepticism of the Enlightenment. It is only from Russia that a new vision of Christ would come offering a different model for self-sacrifice and subjugation of the ego. Pushkin was a national poet, the voice of the Russian people, and he was universal by these very means. In the very process of the talk, Dostoevsky himself, now clearly Pushkin's heir, had moved from a pan-Slavism to a pan-humanism.

This brings us to one of his most critical and abiding insights—the need for human freedom, which will inform his next two major works and will set him most at odds with the new radical intelligentsia of the 1860s. In what could be identified as his "Dostoevskian" manner, he sees through the most paradoxical and convulsive behavior into its genuine motivations. Thus, a prisoner will work months at good behavior, even amass a sum of money, only to blow it all in an outbreak of drunkenness and brawling, almost certain to receive the punishment of flogging and increased prison time. Dostoevsky does not look upon this as would a bluestocking but sees underneath it an unquenchable desire to be free, to be somebody, to express one's rights as an individual. In The House of the Dead—and the title increasingly becomes ironic—Dostoevsky shows his fascination with the varieties of human existence, with the importance of life itself and hope, and the ways humans will take to express their individuality, their enduring need for freedom.

The Contemporary Arts Institute Houston had an exhibit titled
The Inward Eye:Transcendence in Contemporary Art in 2002, and here is what they had to say Conceived as a kind of contemporary cabinet of wonders, the audience will have the opportunity to encounter these diverse works individually and discover the range of ways in which contemporary art can bring us into closer contact with life's intangibles, inspiring reverie and summoning what French novelist Marcel Proust called our involuntary memory.

What Transcendent things might you learn on a skateboard?

To understand what makes skateboarding so compelling, so fascinating to the maniacal hoodlums that dwell in every neighborhood from the ghettoes to the hills, you must look beneath the surface and recognize the internal processes at work. Kids are not risking their teeth, wrists, testicles and spinal cords jumping down staircases into traffic because they think it will make their friends like them more. They don’t do it because it’s anti-establishment or high-fashion or some kind of career path towards being a video game soda guy with a TV show. There are better ways of social climbing that don’t involve rolling around in gutters bleeding from the palms as calls of “faggot!” come from passing cars. Skateboarding is hotter than hell and the source of so much expression and inspiration and mind-blowing progression because it consumes the participant in the fire of self-transformation. Kids — humans in general — need to grow, and we do it by sparking the creative energy that resides in our bones. Skateboarding, the unencumbered progressive form, is a vital opportunity to learn.

Generally speaking there are four ways to learn: rote (practice, practice, practice), informal (learning from life experience), formal (teachers, schools, educational systems), and non-formal (organized learning that takes place outside of formal learning systems). It is worth noting that play is categorized as an informal learning technique, regarded as advanced behavior seen only in developed vertebrates with the security for leisure time: big cats, orcas, human beings, etc. For the sake of this argument, we’ll use a Wikipedia definition of play: “behavior which has no particular end in itself, but improves performance in similar situations in the future.”

"What transcendent things might you learn on a skateboard? How could this knowledge be applied? Contemplate the following: a skateboarder develops advanced fear management by confronting physical dangers and repeatedly conquering the self-preservation mechanisms of the ego. Skating sharpens physical problem-solving skills: discovering different ways to perceive and navigate obscure geometric spaces, finding efficient lines and opportunities where a lesser adept might see nothing at all. Skateboarders understand gravity and radial acceleration perhaps better than anyone alive. Skateboarders develop balance and awareness. Skateboarding fosters skills of focus, perseverance, independence, patience, visualization, actualization, and commitment. It also worth noting that skating well can improve the ability to shine—that is, to perform unexpected and unprecedented maneuvers, cast in a certain light of style, for others to behold. Skateboarders learn to evolve, and learn to communicate those insights so that others are inspired to evolve as well.

As a successful non-formal learning community, skaters tend to eschew imposed regulations and teaching techniques. Skateboarding is constant independent study, so there is no need for school. How you choose to interact and study and learn the art of skateboarding is up to the individual skater alone. But for the sake of Advanced Standing, where we consider the mind-body continuum as experienced through skateboarding, I would like to address a radical spiritual teaching, a formal learning technique, that might be applicable to the material process of sidewalk surfing: the Buddhist concept of Shoshin—Beginner’s Mind.

Transcendental Art Part 1 and here
Transcendental Art Part 2
Transcendent Art Part 3
Transcendental Art Part 4