“…. Taste is the enemy of creativeness.” ?

[don_e]

<p>"While we are all "bound," we are also all able to assert individuality to different degrees. Except for identical twins, we all have different genotypes (and even twins have different phenotypes), which provides all the tension needed for any debate on nature vs. nurture, individuality vs. the herd."</p>

<p>Aspects of individuality (including "taste") can sometimes be traced to the physical. My individuality in photography is conditioned by neurological or biochemical factors: an inherited reduced sensitivity in the hands and fingers is a determining factor in the cameras I use, for example. My aesthetic sensibility is likely conditioned by how my eyes focus, which, according to the doctors is slower than normal. That may influence my taste, my preference for stillness (I wouldn't make a good sports photographer), and as discussed in the movie and photo thread that got moved to the casual forum, a preference for films that do not employ a lot of jump cuts and the like.</p>

<p>Have you read Dawkin's Extended Phenotype?</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Don...please provide a link or reference for Dawkins. Is he the famed athiest? If so, I should say here that I think the existence or non-existence of deities (other than you and me) is mainly of significance because of the disasters those memes have proven inherently to deliver.</p>

<p>Few would completely reject your physical inheritance line of thinking, but it seems constricted to linear logic, whereas "mind" (call that physical brain function if you wish), seems better understood in highly complex, non-linear terms (more like holography, though that metaphor's dated now).</p>

<p>I think you're laboring to pretend your behavior (photography) is driven more by genetics than by learning, and more by those two factors than by the accumulation/reorganization/exploration/memory-modification/loss that constitutes much of who you "are" in both conscious and less conscious "reality". I don't think that if/when you "let go" you respond merely genetically, but rather from a biological/mind totality, much of which you seem to deny.</p>

[jtk]

<p>...was that perfectly obscure? :-)</p>

[don_e]

<p>"Is he the famed athiest?"</p>

<p>Yep, but this was before his obsession with God, back when he wrote about things he actually had a clue about.</p>

<p>"Few would completely reject your physical inheritance line of thinking, but it seems constricted to linear logic, whereas "mind" (call that physical brain function if you wish), seems better understood in highly complex, non-linear terms (more like holography, though that metaphor's dated now)."</p>

<p>I understand "mind" (thinking space, internal world stage, daydream zone) to be simply language (and by "language" I mean stuff like this that you are reading now). Language is not linear, or, I should say, it builds itself up by metaphor, analogy, similarity, juxtaposition and so on, in a way that is dynamic or organic, not linearly. The aptitude of language to form perfectly constructed sentences and thoughts that are perfectly meaningless in themselves, for example -- how long is a rope? what is the sound of one hand clapping? how high is up? -- is worth keeping in "mind". 'Perfectly meaningless' can extend beyond a simple sentence. It might describe 20 volumes of a lifetime's work, including the correspondence and drafts in the file cabinets of the Uni archive.</p>

<p>"I think you're laboring to pretend your behavior (photography) is driven more by genetics than by learning"</p>

<p>No. It comes quite easily. Learning is all to the good, but it is limited by our individual aptitudes. Give me hyperquick twitch muscles and hand/eye coordination and with practice I'll play baseball like Ruth or draw like Ingres, but without it my practice might yield decent results, but nothing that'll make the record books or the walls of museums. Understanding ourselves includes -- may be mostly -- understanding our selves as physical, mortal, material animals.</p>

<p>What emotions do we write about here that are not descriptions of physical states? What's your gut feeling?</p>

<p>"...was that perfectly obscure? :-)"</p>

<p>Not quite, but a good try 8-)</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Don, I don't accept "language" as the essence of mind. This becomes excessively complicated for P.N...William Kittredge explores it in "The Nature of Generosity" (in which he discusses Noam Chomsky's 1956 thesis about hard-wired language). He also discusses your Dawkins' "memes."</p>

<p>http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Generosity-William-Kittredge/dp/0679437525&ei=xx-XSdyXMpGksQO93IR1&usg=AFQjCNFa0bU-Mv8PxhkgUEuXF6roHqxIlQ</p>

<p>More importantly, Kittredge puts these matters in a larger context...something about the mind of the human animal that probably existed before writing codified language...he uses Lascaux in a context ...Kittredge is a high desert Westerner, knows about the important things...hunting, women, agriculture, "civilization," anthropology, alcohol, literature...</p>

<p>http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en/</p>

<p>This relates to photography in a personal way for me...I first heard of Kittredge because wrote the introduction to one of Tupper Ansel Blake's photo books (his mother knew Ansel Adams...I was invited to hunt ducks on his Klamath Basin marsh cc 1996...the only time I ever shot a duck)</p>

<p>http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Tupper%20Ansel%20Blake&page=1</p>

[don_e]

<p>"More importantly, Kittredge puts these matters in a larger context...something about the mind of the human animal that probably existed before writing codified language...he uses Lascaux in a context ..."</p>

<p>There are unsupported assumptions that language evolved, that once upon a time the species did not have language, but it evolved and one day we had language and began to speak it. The base-assumption is that language is in the main line of our evolution, but evidence about language acquisition does not support that. Instead it seems to be a side-consequence of other developments. No one, not Kittredge, nor you, nor Chomsky, nor Pinker, nor I can say at such a time we were without language and thereafter had it. I may be in a minority of one for thinking language is inconsequential for communication, socialization, or survival.</p>

<p>Set aside speculations about "Lascaux", we can bring it up to today: what do you think is the experience of "mind" of each of us in those several years before we acquire language? And how do you know?</p>

<p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en/" target="_blank"><br /> </a></p>

[don_e]

<p>"whereas "mind" (call that physical brain function if you wish)"</p>

<p>The association of "the mind" with the brain is recent, and I'd guess it becomes a commonplace with the development of medical science and technology. But before then, the brain was not thought of (if it was thought of at all) as being associated with "the mind" (if it was thought of at all). It was common, though, to 'place' "the mind" (or something equivalent) in the heart. I think it was Aristotle who described the brain as an organ to cool the blood; he may have spoken for the opinion of literate Greeks or maybe the commonplace understanding of the times. It is rather odd, though, that the brain was ignored that way throughout history until the past few centuries, considering the complex of sense organs arranged closely around the brain. But there it is. And it is Valentine's Day, when the old understanding of the heart is expressed.</p>

<p>The mind, then, seems to be a movable thing from this or that physical organ. If it is movable then it could be moved outside the body and experienced as external to us as a force and presence emanating from the animate world in a complex of spirits and ghosts.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Don, you asked what I think, and then you asked how I know...probably a conceptual slip....</p>

<p>....I don't claim to "know" anything in the sense that you seem to mean nor (I'll hypothesize). Do you?</p>

<p>Rather than "knowing," I rely on working hypotheses, few of which are conscious : eg gravity is a hypothetical construct based on experience, I respond to "it" in a neuro-muscular way that is often non-conscious. Throw me the ball, I may catch it, but probably not through conscious effort.</p>

<p>My version of Kitteridge's dramatic hypothesis about the earliest Lascaux experience: Powerful (tough, skilled, loud, maybe weird) older men initiated boys into mysteries of hunting, crucial mysteries of life after all, via an genuine "art" display. Art on the cave walls shared experiences of events, dynamics, beast and human behavior, but didn't deliver a word experience (nor does any art, IMO, though "art" tries).</p>

<p>I imagine the Lascaux folks communicated about as effectively as chimpanzees do, more elaborately but not nearly as fluently as a 2 year old modern human...an attenuated language of grunts, yowls, and gestures. Arguably a language, it grew, accumulating "words" to make finer distinctions between grunt experiences, perhaps for the same reason "sportscasters" add words to football. Over millenia it grew into today's human language.</p>

<p>As you may be thinking "Aha, John admits they had language at Lascaux," I'll make one more point: quantity and quality are inter-related, they're not entirely distinct. "More" can be absolutely different than "less," is not always just another point on the same continuum. That physics and quantification describe truth is an amusing, unreliable hypothesis...nobody "knows" more in those disciplines than Paris Hilton knows in hers.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>Correct me if I misunderstand, John; you are disagreeing with me that "the mind" is a construct of language. If it is not, then what is it? Maybe you have made that point, and if so, I have not got it yet. The mind has something to do with creativity and the individual, but for some reason, it doesn't seem sufficient, or accurate, to you, to describe it as a language construct. Why not?</p>

<p>I think the people of the Dordogne, the people who made the art of the caves had language. The bones say they had the anatomy and a brain capable of language. That's not enough, though. It seems likely they had the necessary social requirements, if the experts' dating is near accurate, because of the long time they were in existence -- both the people and the art -- possibly three or four times as long as human history (which began about 3100bc). Considering the inaccessibility of many of the caves and their chambers, the knowledge of them had to be passed on to the next generation. They seem to have had a social continuity far longer than anything we might hope for today, and can hardly imagine. The Dordogne at that time was a confluence of rivers and lakes south of the ice. It was the focal point of the migration of herds, probably mating or birthing grounds...a rich, well watered, and protected territory until the ice returned about 10000bc. Against this is the continuing low population, and probably very high infant mortality (something of a constant of human society until recently).</p>

<p>"Don, you asked what I think, and then you asked how I know...probably a conceptual slip...."<br /> I asked you "what do you think is the experience of "mind" of each of us in those several years before we acquire language? And how do you know?"</p>

<p> </p>

[major]

<p >“…. Taste is the enemy of creativeness.” ? </p>

<p >No, I think it would be better that people realized that “taste” is subjective and that conformity is the true enemy of creativeness!</p>

<p >This subject seems a little strange to debate here on PN anyway. After all, don’t [we] rate originality as well as aesthetics 1 through 7? </p>

<p >How is it even possible to produce an image that is less than average (4) in originality? </p>

<p >Most people have a hard time accepting the fact that aesthetics and originality are not somehow conjoined together? Don’t follow my meaning? Ask yourself this… When was the last time you rated an image 4 for originality and 7 for aesthetics? Very few people here (PN) are able to move much further than one numerical place apart on two very separate subjects.</p>

<p >Just so you know I have given 3’s for originality. Why…? I suppose because “my hypocrisy knows no bounds”! Or maybe I’m just a conformist like the rest.</p>

[j_sevigny]

<p>One of the reasons I don't participate more in this forum is because every conversation turns entirely semantic. It becomes a self-perpetuating conversation about what words mean and ceases to have anything to do with photography or philosophy. Some of these purely semantic debates are longer than works by some classic philosophers.<br>

@Don E -- The idea that the individual could create autonomously seems to be a development in Romanticism, a part of a reaction to the collapse of 'universal truths' in religion and the hierarchic concept of society and nature, and in tune with the rise of democracy, the republic, the appearance of the bourgeoisie, and the 'rights of man'.<br>

There is absolutely NO evidence for this in art history and it sounds like BS dogma created by Jeffersonians or Blake poetry fanatics. People have been making art for a damned long time and for a far more vast range of motivations than anyone here can imagine. People's motivations for making art have not changed a lot in 10,000 years. If you limit yourself to what you find in your Jansen text, you will inevitable have a warped idea about the history of creation by members of the human race, which extends far beyond publically sponsored work. There is also plenty to suggest that all of our own "autonomous" work will disappear over the years and people will make the same judgement about our own times. <br>

Returning to the matter of taste, the best thing is to take pictures that correspond to your own. Then you'll feel better about yourself and be in a position to defend them. In my case, I like heavy, direct flash. I get hammered over it all the time. I don't care because I like the look of my work.</p>

 

[joe_jackson4]

<p>Is any of the stuff here to your "taste"...?</p>

<p><a href="http://www.cgunit.com/archives.html">http://www.cgunit.com/archives.html</a></p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>wrote j Sevigny: "One of the reasons I don't participate more in this forum is because every conversation turns entirely semantic."</p>

<p>And what is the appropriate kind of conversation in this forum?</p>

<p>wrote j Sevigny: "There is absolutely NO evidence for this in art history and it sounds like BS dogma created by Jeffersonians or Blake poetry fanatics."<br /> "If you limit yourself to what you find in your Jansen text, you will inevitable have a warped idea about the history of creation by members of the human race"</p>

<p>Ah, flaming other participants. Thank you for your contribution. I hope you feel better now and can move on to other forums, one where "semantics" do not toy with your patience and repose.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

- ' See "The Wrestler." ' - I've just seen it in the theater. An overwhelmingly and crazy mixture of raw and tender emotions. Beautiful. And

very Bukowski-esque indeed. Even though I feel words can't really describe or pin down the emotions that where being displayed, strangely as

that may be, as it's mostly through the actual use of words that the emotions are being translated.

[fate_faith_change_chains]

....as it's mostly through the actual use of words > ( in speech and in thought )....

[major]

<p>

<p>Where would art be or anything else in the world for that matter? If not for the pseudo intellectual blathering of the critic. Someone who would guide us in all things and could even determine the worthiness of our very thoughts.</p>

</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>An observation . . .</p>

<p>Back on February 9th, I thought we were approaching something very important. It tied much of the abstract thinking going on with John's very personal experience as a photographer (a place seemingly where these forums could be of most benefit).</p>

<p>"I'm drawn to the awkward, feel guilty about the easy . . . having failed to stop and meet three people in wheelchairs . . . my alibi for not doing that was that they were "human interest" stories, not my thing, not to my 'taste' la-de-da."</p>

<p>The reason I brought up my father with multiple sclerosis and his sense of humor about it was to suggest that John could change the paradigm (creativity?) by his approach to the photographs. Can we resignify a subject matter we have baggage about?</p>

<p>Yes, people in wheelchairs are too often dismissed as "human interest" stories and often exploited by snappers looking for quick and cheap pathos. But, we can also get lost in <i>judging</i> and <i>seeking justification</i> for our photos that will cripple us (pun intended). Did John let this "taste la-de-da" thing get in the way of his attraction to these people and some good photographs?</p>

<p>Anyway, John never responded about my dad, significance, etc. and instead since then the discussion has moved pretty completely into theory. Lascaux and the history of communication has replaced John's personal struggle with taste and baggage, with judgment and justification, and the practical applications these have to our photography. That is causing some of the frustration among people reading here.</p>

<p>Several months ago, my dad and I went to visit one of his oldest best friends and I didn't want to "intrude" on their very personal and extraordinarily moving time together with my camera. I blew it. I have great memories of the scene and the day . . . and no photos. The irony is, they both would have been so proud of those photos!</p>

[don_e]

<p>I agree, Fred, there has been a digression -- or "a move to theory", however it begins strongly on-topic with my questioning Art X on his distinction that "taste" is socially determined or "bound", but creativity is qualitatively different being unbound or autonomous. It seems at least as on-topic, or moreso, than your discussion with John about his "very personal experience as a photographer". </p>

<p>It is possible for a forum thread to have multiple discussions within it that are diverse, yet on-topic; they are not all digressions. I'm in no hurry. We aren't attempting to reach a conclusion and an answer regarding the Subject. At least I am not. The streams of discourse can converge, given interest and effort.</p>

<p>I understand you are interested in your stream-of-discourse with John, and I'll step aside from John's and mine to free him up to concentrate on a response to you, if he chooses.</p>

<p><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=4174229"></a></p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I was making an observation, not an admonition.</p>

<p>I certainly don't mind going off topic. I do it often enough. For me, there are rarely off topics.</p>

<p>Some forums have more background noise than others, which is different from going off topic. I think this forum has been particularly productive, in many ways.</p>

<p>By asserting my hope that John continues the discussion I referenced, I was not suggesting that you discontinue yours. Most of us can concentrate on 3 or 4 strands at a time, if we so choose.</p>

[jtk]

<p>Fred, you aske about my experience, then added something about yours. I didn't respond. Later, you elaborated on yours and, I think, came to the same disjoint that I came to...but from a different angle.<br>

Don, I don't think mind implies language, which is an organized construct of words and symbols. The evidence at Lascaux suggess capability for language, as you pointed out, and it shows moving (to me) images that seem wordless. I don't doubt that there were a few words, perhaps dozens, but depictions of animals don't constitute words or language...IMO.<br>

Further, for the same reason Shakespeare is said to have invented English (by being so widely published and performed in the merged dialect he selected), I think quantity of words and word concepts constitute language, not the mere existence of a few words and concepts. Words alone don't do it and a few crude assemblies don't: "dead buffalo with spear" is not the seed of a language IMO (but it might become a pictogram in a few hundred centuries)...and it's clear that language structure isn't genetic, despite the preferences of an arguably-fascistic scholar in 1952. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>"Fred, you aske about my experience, then added something about yours. I didn't respond. Later, you elaborated on yours and, I think, came to the same disjoint that I came to...but from a different angle."</p>

<p>Yes. That must be it.</p>

[don_e]

<p>John, I haven't been very clear, it is obvious. I'll try to clear up a few things, then move on.</p>

<p>I don't think the cave paintings mean the creators of them had language. I think they had language because 1) the bones say they had dropped larynxes and that their brains had the same language and speech centers as do we, but this is not enough evidence for language, 2) is needed: social organization and continuity over time. Language acquisition is not something that happens to an individual infant like growning teeth does. Language acquisition occurs in a specific social matrix or it does not happen. Language is socially bound. Also, language is not vocabulary or words, even things like "dead buffalo with spear" (although, the "with" implies language, but anyway...). Language is not words or assemblies of words, but grammar and syntax. Words are just sounds, whatever referents may be associated to them</p>

<p>You often refer to Zen; iirc, Zen meditation focuses on quieting the mind. I haven't read Suzuki or Watts in ages, but I think that is referred to as stopping the chatter, the internal dialogue of the mind by not becoming attached to the mind's discoursing, just noting its occurence, but letting it go, being unattached. If there is such a thing as creativity unbounded by the social, it cannot come from this mind becuase that mind is a construct of language which is totally a social construct and totally bound. Perhaps "construct of language" is too odd. You might prefer the mind is the container of language or the content of the mind is language. Not the same, but close enough for horseshoes.</p>

<p>"...an arguably-fascistic scholar in 1952."</p>

<p>I'll add that to J's "Jensen text" on my "I don't know what that means (and probably don't want to know about)" list.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Don, the 1952 comment was a throw-away, dumb...sorry.</p>

<p>Your zen depiction is standard and OK, but it describes a second-hand goal rather than the practice, which is central and by definition doesn't entail striving. My understanding is that a practitioner abandons the goal and just walks the walk (so to speak..although some zen poet monks are more walkers than sitters :-)</p>

<p>I stumbled across Alan Watts on TV (KQED, the nation's first PBS station) as a kid, late fifties, suffering acne and chattering mind. I was taken by his humor and seriousness...simply hearing how others suffered chatter was curative. Later I saw a great Suzuki Roshi moment... a weather balloon that was being bounced around, came down on top of him at a Quicksilver Messenger Service performance (dual fund raiser for Tassajara Zen Center and Sonny Barger: California Hall, lights by Bill Hamm). He grinned and leaped up at it.</p>

<p>"Dead buffalo with spear" was meant to limn an image. The image is on the wall, the words, which fall short (are not the art), are here, not on the wall.</p>

<p>Yes, language is inherently social. Baboons and Canadians both have societies, but the latter have more hockey announcers: Perhaps from that we can infer something about Canadian larynxes. Eh?</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>I remember Watts from the radio back then -- Sunday mornings, I recall; maybe it was on KQED, or KMPX. Did you see the Ice Age Art exhibit in 1979 at the California Academy of Sciences? I still have the booklet.</p>

<p>What about the creativity of the individual that is not socially conditioned? Does it exist? If it does, the possibility I can come up with is that it is nurtured by the first, pre-language, years of life and perhaps also inter-uterine life. During that timeframe we are exposed to the world without the mediation of the experience, language, and recollected memory of the conscious mind, and are helpless to manage our own survival. We are laid bare, a bundle of responses to incomprehensible stimuli. Each of us, as we were then, is not available to our conscious recall; it lives on, though, in dreams and nightmares. We can approach that time only obliquely through language, by metaphor and analogy -- to that time when we lived in both Heaven and Hell.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>I think you heard KPFA, Berkeley... he's still broadcast on a station in Santa Fe (I think). His son's selling the old tapes, thousands of talks. Watts is perfect for the right person at the right time, was for me in high school. He was said to die happily in Marin County somewhere...smoking, drinking and womanizing. What could be better? (not fully rhetorical)</p>

<p>Don, I think some of your words overpower your poetry...and you're closer to poet than I am. "Creativity," for example. To me it's a nearly worthless bleat, to you it seems a phenomenon. Earlier I mentioned art, as I understand it, speculating that its power in those French caves came before language (unlike "art"). I think it still exists here and there, not necessarily among "artists," perhaps more among photographers. <em></em></p>