Author: Walter

Another idea that clarified in the podcast. The concept may not be conscious or articulated, but retrospectively it can be seen as something wanting to be born. Just as I can ask “what does this project want?” what is in it’s conception, we could ask that of anyone’s work. I am not thinking of each painting, but of the project… all those paintings of van Gogh spread around the world, and with a museum of their own… it is a sort of installation, institution.

I liked listening to Edward as this question led him from the lemon through the Zen brush strokes back to the lemon. It is all about a vitality in the stroke… it has either got it or it hasn’t.

The concept here in Thousand Sketches? Exploring the psyche in cyberspace – I found it very liberating to realise that a month or two back. What does it mean more specifically?

Some pointers in these words:

Variety – philogeny – evolution – recapitulation

Autobiography – unconscious

Conversation

Global – local – national

Technology – medium – nature

This is really more show notes for the podcast we did yesterday.

Wikipedia

Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism; phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. Haeckel’s recapitulation theory claims that the development of the individual of every species fully repeats the evolutionary development of that species. Otherwise put, each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history. Haeckel formulated his theory as such: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. This notion later became simply known as recapitulation.

It applies in some cases in biology but I love how it makes sense of something in art. And I feel a licence to recapitulate, which without legitimacy or consciousness I have found a bit depressing.