civilized objects

Two comments of the non-ill-thinker

ill and vegan, it’s just ok
A: As a vegan you ought not to fall ill, because if you do, somebody might blame it on your diet.
B: Really?

money makes the values that represent the values of the human system in a “tangible” or “measurable” way
A: I think the monetary system feeds itself also from the demand / consumption pattern, the willingness of people to buy too much. The crux is, without buying power there won’t be any jobs. So either we buy and have jobs, or … what???
B: Something else is the crux, namely that the entire human system bases or an exploitative enmity towards the rest of nature.

fantasy / perspectives

reality / mutual concern

… these famed masters of art, does their art have to impress me, because their art is praised, priced and preserved by their protegees and the ever so hungry arts-craving-audience?

Since art is separated from any “initialness” in a person, and since the person is in that way only desired as some occurring individual in the vast, unlimited audience, art can just stuff the heads, just like any undesirable human process can.

Every artifact can stuff my head. Can the idiot give (think something) in return? (My picture is painted in black and white. Black is the “I” and white that which stays white or turns gray.)

A reply to a homocentrist minded person … :

No, homocentrism is quite a contrast to humanism. I am a radical vegan Animal Rights and Human Rights advocate. It’s too black and white to say: you have to “kill” plants to eat: cos you don’t have to “kill” plants, you can harvest their veggies. If you are against Animal Rights I can not and do not want to convince you of the idea. Just as little as I don’t want to convince a racist of Human Rights, honestly, you can’t do that. Leave everybody where they are, but talk to those you feel sympathetic to … to their ideas that is.

Have just been reading Hannah Arendt ‘ s study on Totalitarianism, but how she takes the African culture as race in a form „as if” contrastable to other cultures and races, gives me a severe headache. I already swallowed the fact that Arendt is a homocentrist, which many intellectuals are. But I’m disappointed to find out that she has a blind spot with Human Rights as well.

I assume that both of these blind spots or deficits have a graspable reason. The reason for untying culture from what we call „race”, has something to do with the degrading image of countries the West once called „3rd World countries”: These countries were considered to be culturally „less developed” , a formulation which only sought to hide the claim of a higher self-relevance. As if just certain cultures had been the cradles of important cultural heritages.

The other problem, that with homocentrim, has something to do with the perpetual belief in the philosphical, religious and political tradition of denouncing nature: self-autonomy. But however, as far as regards the question of oppresion: the origin of oppression shares an equal source. But not just in totalitarianism though.

The Reconstruction of the colors of ancient greek statues:

Not that I want to seem overcritical, but what I found weird with the reconsruction of the skin color in ancient greek statues, as how it has been carried out by Prof. Brinkmann ( See several images for example here: http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/06/16/gods-in-color-painted-sculpture-of-classical-antiquity/ ) , is that the results seem to extremely pinkish in the lighter tanned figures.

My problems come with wondering how far we should imagine all Greek and Roman sculptures painted in this way. Or whether in the Roman world, at least, we should really be thinking of a more delicate colouring, not a garish smearing. http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/12/were-ancient-st.html

That pink tone of skin does make one think of either antique baby dolls or something “very north-west” European. Even the ancient greeks with a pale tan, probably weren’t so pink. This type of pinkness seems to fit a certian racial classification.

The definition of white people has varied in different time periods and locations. Ancient Greece and Rome used the term white as one description of skin color. Its light appearance was distinguished, for example, in a comparison of white-skinned Persian soldiers from the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops in Xenophon’s Agesilaus. One early use of the term appears in the Amherst Papyri, which were scrolls written in ancient Ptolemaic Greek. It contained the use of black and white in reference to human skin color. In an analysis of the rise of the term, classicist James Dee found that, “the Greeks and Romans do not describe themselves as “white people” —or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves—and we can see that the concept of a distinct ‘white race’ was not present in the ancient world.” Assignment of positive and negative connotations of white and black date to the classical period in a number of European languages, but these differences were not applied to skin color per se.
Religious conversion was described figuratively as a change in skin color.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whites

The New York Times of Sept 26 1887 reports the amazing findings of coloured statues in greece, interestingly though the color of skin isn’t mentioned in the description of the colorings, see (PDF): http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9903EEDC1530E633A25755C2A96F9C94669FD7CF&oref=slogin

And, here are two other comments that raise a valid critique:

It’s reasonable to assume that the painting on the figures was at least as sophisticated as the figures themselves. By the time of the Alexander Sarcophagus the subtlety of the sculpture has far outstripped the colors identified and applied by Brinkmann. This does not mean that Brinkmann has left the path of accurate reconstruction; it may mean that his ultimate goal is impossibly distant. The colors he has identified on later pieces are clearly just underpainting for a far more realistic final finish. This was the process used in Renaissance oil paintings of equivalent visual sophistication. The assumption that the painting was as sophisticated as the figures is an extremely conservative one. The artistic and manual skills required for realistic sculpting are far greater than those required for life-like painting of a finished figure. And the painting task was a relaxed one, far more amenable to messing around until the artist got it right. So painting was easier, less risky and, because of weathering, constantly in demand. It is reasonable to conclude that until sculpting reached its zenith, painting of figures was substantially more sophisticated than the figures themselves. With luck, Brinkmann will eventually find a piece with all the layers intact.

Posted by Gregory Meeker on June 29,2008 07:22AM on http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors.html

glen.h said…on http://badarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/07/adding-color-to-ancient-world.html

Would these reconstructions on show be somewhat misleading about the colouring techniques? I can’t help thinking (with all apologies to the modern painters involved), that the originals may have been more sutble in tone and technique than the ones shown.

I can say something and whatever I wish to. But I can’t find that it’s at all understood, let alone the question of the each relevance for whom … and why what has what relevance to whom ( – “unnaturally”, what would be natural? What serves as a model. How much has supposed arbitrariness in definition of terms, something to do with aspects of communication seen in different sets). Tooled restrictedness in communication, makes me unfree in speech … and in the end renders me stupid anyway. (Why not!) Language is an instrument in human society as a whole, and not so much a means of instant or direct communication. The instrument is an instrument for suppressing other philosophies in being.

FROM A TEXT OF MINE (I HAVE TO RE-EDIT IT):
IRRELEVANCE (PDF) opens in a new window

Hello Friends, we are back again, and here is … :

A poem and linoleum print by Farangis, CLICK TO ENLARGE:

Around where we live people like to fully light their houses with energy saving lamps. In that way they use more energy for illumination purposes than if they used less light-sources with old-fashioned light bulbs. Also I have the vague impression that people don’t take their spent energy-saving light bulbs to the “special trash” place where the bulbs should be properly disposed of or meterials be recycled. Compact fluorescent light bulbs contain mercury and other unwholesome things, see ‘Mercury, the downside of energy-saving bulbs‘, ‘Look Ma! NO MERCURY Energy Saving light bulbs!‘, ‘CFL Bulbs Have One Hitch: Toxic Mercury‘ … .

But, no matter what the source of light is, the bright mystery remains why we reject the “DARK” so much as the side where evil and irrationality reigns and why we prefer the “LIGHT” as the source where all good comes from.

Darkness is the home of inspiration I believe, and fantasy usually accompanies irrationality.

The Night: Information pertaining to the night sky, light pollution and the ecology of the night, Anthony Arrigo
http://the-night.blogspot.com/

The International Dark-Sky Association
http://www.darksky.org/

Starry Night Lights
Enhance The Beauty Of Your Home With Night Sky Friendly Outdoor Lighting
http://www.starrynightlights.com/

Light Pollution – the problem
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~atolea/second/page1.html

LightPollution.org.uk
http://www.lightpollution.org.uk/

Light pollution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution

Poetry, Farangis Yegane:
http://poetry.edition.farangis.de/yhbs/nightblind

I came across an interesting site on ethics, and found an even more interesting point of view expressed on there regarding the question of arts and ethics in a work where the artist had people decide whether they’d want to blend a fish in mixer or not – let him/her alive, here is the highlight quotation:

“Defenders of Evaristti’s work may wish to by-pass such discussion by making the claim that there are no rules for art; that anything done in the name of art is to be allowed (free from the usual critique offered from an ethical position). It seems to me that this is an untenable position – surely there must be limits. As a colleague asked, “what if it was a human baby in the blender?”. Our revulsion to the thought of sacrificing a child for ‘art’ is not based on any belief that it would merely be illegal to do so. The matter goes deeper than this.”

READ FULL ARTICLE: The goldfish is dead, but is it art? by Simon Longstaff

See related info: Angry Vegan (Visual Opinions Workshop).

… I would like her to listen to this song: Never Alone – Barlow Girl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-oxrBtN5MM&feature=channel_page (can’t embed cos messes up markup in xhtml it seems)
Elfriede Jelinek has written a real good text about the Fritzl case: (left navigation: Aktuelles, 2008) Title: “Im Verlassenen”
http://www.elfriedejelinek.com/
I wonder if the Goldfish that were locked in with the Fritzl kids are still alive and if somebody cares about them at all? I see Elisabeth Fritzl as a kid too. It’s so horrible what has happened to her, and I hope she, and the other kids, especially Kerstin, will be ok.

Thanks to Zal and Ross for being on these pictures!

Somebody that I hold dear said to me today: ‘when have you ever done anything for society?’

I don’t do anything for society, if whatever I do would have to be measurable with any financial “advantage” gained thereby.

And, I would be completely ignorant of my social and political environment, if I had to derive my “meaning of life” from some type of luxury (to ignorantly lavish in), at the same time while the source of all evil is exactly that desire. The desire for a luxury which is made up of “the environment is there to be used by me”.

I will add the measurements of these two paitings by me tomorrow or some time later I guess.

What I also want to add, is how much the news of the the young girl who killed herself because of somebody/some people who played an evil hoax on her, really depressed me: POKIN AROUND: A real person, a real death, Steve Pokin stcharlesjournal.stltoday.com, Parents say fake online ‘friend’ led to girl’s suicide, on cnn.com. See also discontent with the myspace community/social network on here MySpace Sucks, moundalexis.com, and something…which seems out of place to bring it up right in this context now, but since I’ve had some overall negative impressions of myspace too, (as what regards the code of aesthetics there with icons and images used by a fraction of people: i.e. displayed brutality and etc.) I feel this link shows in a funny way though, that there is something wrong with myspace on even the less important types of levels, and even those less important levels can be upsetting too: myspacesucks, planetmut.com