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Right now I am quite busy writing - one of the outcomes from that work is a text about how far back in time the study of the human body stretches in our western culture - back to ancient Greece. It shows in the sculptures at Akropolis, Athens and reach back into our contemporary art. I will put the text in this blog when I am done with it.
... But I forgot to do so ..., therefore the following text has been delayed a couple of years...
The sculpture you see next to the text stands in "Glyptoteket" in Copenhagen Denmark.
1 143 words / Oktober 18, 2015
Changes made December 3, 2016 are italicized - which can be seen in the text on my site skepnader: https://skepnader.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/kroki-och-modellteckning-ett-2-500-ar-gammalt-grekiskt-kulturarv/
We talked about how to make more sketchers come to the Saturday sessions in figure, gesture and life model drawing, when one of us exclaimed how surprised she was over the Swedes overall descending attitude to art and design, yes on the whole, studies of human expressions as well as the actual expressions themselves shown in paintings, theatre, film, music and so on, are so neglected.
” It is such a difference only between England and Sweden. At the school I went, the teachers in math and art, they were” the Gods”! We students ranked them to be the highest.”
I come to think of the art teacher who had emerged out from the shadows at the school were I last held a class in design. How disregarded and neglected the whole subject of art and design was in my time at school, during the 1960-, 70- and 80. How art, design, painting, yes cultural expressions overall were and still are seen as something superfluous and only in the best of worlds seen as the icing on the cake.
How did this happen and has it always been like this? No, it has not always been like this.
Still we claim our roots to the antique and classic Greek legacy with some pride, and it is within the sciences it mainly is considered to be held and developed. But it is not only the Logic from Aristotle and Plato’s view on how social structure should and could be shaped, organized and executed, the way we got to know them through the Macedonian and Roman inheritors (Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors) and thereafter in Christianity and Islamic philosophy, wherefrom the science of today springs and is shaped; it was also something else, something more, which, due to Roman elitist rule and Christian struggle to be acknowledged as logically defendable, came to be submitted to the shadows or diminished to copying, mimicking and imitating – the creative tools and expressions.
The Greeks where seen as bold of their contemporaries and of the after coming Romans, since they neither were ruled by any god nor any gods, but in a democratic order, it is true that self appointed rulers grasped the power forcefully sometimes, so called tyrannous. Still, the Greeks ruled without gods, deserted solely to themselves and their humanity, successfully. In this lies what is so unique with the greek legacy, an individual freedom to create and express oneself in speech, paintings, drawings, sculpture, writings and so on. There was a point in doing so since what was said or showed could make a difference, contribute to a change of attitudes and social structure. The Greeks fascination over the human body, which is strikingly profound in their art, may be an expression of this attitude and view. Even in their faith and beliefs were a freedom. The Gods of the Greek where not perfect, the stories about them – intertwined with the Greeks own history – was every man’s right to interpret, develop and express in drama, theater, and other forms of art or performance. The concept behind a word like ”heresy” make no sense in such a culture or social structure. A culture and social structure, where every man has the right to express her or his voice of history. Were a different view is considered to be enriching.
In that time, in the shift between an >>oral and literal culture, where the Greek is situated in the antique, the tools that the inventing of the writing make possible to develop, develops in a higher sense, the documentation, the analyse and the formal logic.
The logic of Aristotle and its introduction ”Isagoge”– our legacy, brought to us, westerners, through the Islamic philosophy. Isagoge, an introduction to Aristoteles formal logic made by one of the main personalities of neoplatonism, Plotinus disciple: Porfyrios at the end of the second century A.D., about 500 years after Aristoteles lived. ”Isagoge” constituted a main part in the artes-faculties basic education in all universities in Europe still in the 15th century. Added to that, considerate the fact that Thomas Aquinas used aristotelian logics when merging the by neoplationism dominated western christian teaching with Aristotelian view on nature in his major work ”Summa theologiae”.
But, the tools used in an oral culture is there simultaneously. The memory technics, the rhetoric, the expressions, but all together with these new tools the overall natural and self-explanatory attitude to the creative is still there. Because, creating is what the speaker does when he or she seeks the word aimed to catch the listener in the moment, creating is what the sculptor does when she or he seeks the expression in the posture of the model, creating is what the play writer does when she or he is seeking the best way of showing the dilemma of the drama or the tragedy, creating is also what the philosopher does when (she mostly it was men, it was not a truly democratic society, that is yet to come.) or he ponders over how the structure, the attitudes and the organization of the public rule should or could be shaped, and so on.
Then the speech was not subordinated the writing, the thinking not subordinated already thought thoughts formulated in texts, knowledge not yet reduced to the printed word, as it is today. Today there is an unawareness about the tools of the mind, the tools of the thinking, >>the metonymical transition and the metaphorical condensation.
(See José Luis Ramírez thesis “Om meningens nedkomst” och ”Skapande mening- en begreppsgenealogisk undersökning om rationalitet, vetenskap och planering” (About the ..of the meaning and ” Creating meaning – a genealogical investigation over the concepts of rationality, science and planning”) if you are interested. The thesis is in Swedish only.)
That the study of the body, one’s own reflection over one’s own perception and experience of the body, is the first step in understanding the world, the foundation for creating knowledge, is an insight very few have today. >> a pecha-kucha about figure, gesture drawing
But the sessions in gesture-, figure drawing and life model sketching gives a possibility to this. That it was self-evident and obvious to the ancient Greeks that knowledge was gained in such ways, is not impossible. No matter if so, because when seeing sculptures and paintings made throughout the centuries it is obvious that the human body with its expressions has been studied- at least by artists. Sculptures from 500 B.C in Attica, ornaments on ceramics and pottery, roman copies of Greek sculptures, paintings with motives from the Greeks world of Gods made in more recent centuries by Botticelli, Rafael, Tizian, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Monet, and so on … That it is the Greek legacy that comes back over and over again in renaissance, new renaissance and new classicism is nothing but obvious, or?
Humans urge to create can be suppressed but is not possible to exterminate it, since it is what we all are – living – and therefore creating, even if the awareness about it has diminished.
Today when we attend the Saturday sessions in gesture-, figuredrawing and life modell sketching we can consider that we hold this 2 500 years old legacy at trust.
References:
• Diarmaid MacCulloch ”A History of Christianity” (2009)
• Ingemar Hedenius ”Tro och Vetande” (Belief and Knowing), (1949, nyutgåva 2009)
• Rainer Carls ”Om tro och vetande” (About belief and knowing), (2001)
• Walter J. Ong ”Muntlig och skriftlig kultur” (Orality and Literacy), (1991)
• José Luis Ramírez ”Skapande mening – en begreppsgenealogisk undersökning om rationalitet, vetenskap och planering” (Creating meaning – a genealogical investigation over the concepts of rationality, science and planning), (1995)
