Dick Pountain /Idealog 318/ 08 Jan 2021 10:58
Pictures mean as much to me as music does. I love paintings and used to regularly visit galleries before Covid closed them. The region of Italy where I lived for some years was within 40 miles of half the world’s greatest paintings and the birthplaces of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli. I don’t paint myself, having failed to bond with oils or watercolor, but I do love to play with digital images. (I could never consider writing a novel with pen or manual typewriter, and similarly I can’t imagine painting in any medium that doesn’t have Undo).
For many years I’ve been creating fractal art using two main tools, Sumo Paint and Zen Brush. The latter emulates a Chinese/Japanese style bamboo calligraphy brush that you can use on a tablet with either finger or stylus: the original version was grayscale-only but they’ve recently released Zen Brush 3 which has gorgeous colour and very realistic watercolour effects. I do feebly try to sell work via the Saatchiart website (which has so far failed to make me rich) but at least they cost me very little in either time or money to make. The US abstract expressionist Philip Guston once observed that “The great thing about painting and drawing, as opposed to thinking about it, is the resistance of matter”, but it’s precisely that resistance that makes experimenting with canvas and oil paint so expensive: it confines lesser artists to garrets, and while overcoming that resistance makes a few of them great, I’ll just stick to dabbling on the cheap.
Which brings me neatly back to one of the recurring themes of this column, namely that ’bits aren’t atoms’. I love to remind you that while you can order a pizza from a picture on your screen, you can’t eat the picture. That observation was actually true long before the computer age – you can admire a lobster in a Willem Kalf still life but you can’t eat it, and that painting was made using pigment particles suspended in oil, not bits. Representations of any kind, whether bits, or paint, or words on a page, aren’t the things they represent, even if modern technologies conspire to make us forget that.
I’m a great admirer (wouldn’t say follower because he didn’t want to be followed) of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. He’s not much remembered nowadays, and was never popular in England or the USA where linguistic philosophy still rules.
His major mature work ‘Realms Of Being’ proposed that there are four such realms: Matter, which is all that exists and of which everything is made; Essence which consists of configurations, images and representations of matter; Truth, which contains just that subset of essences that actually correspond to material things; and Spirit, by which he meant the intelligence of living creatures, via which they perceive and process essences. We can never see matter directly, only perceive images of it, and that these images correspond well enough with actual material objects – so we don’t bump into trees or step off cliffs – is thanks to evolution honing our senses to fit our particular niche well enough.
Most important of all, essences can’t do anything, they can’t affect matter directly: there is no magic. There are indeed dreams and imaginary objects, but they can only affect the world of matter if they persuade us to move, to do something. Santayana’s Doctrine Of Essences applies not only to the inedibility of digital pizzas, but to everything we do, and it’s a particularly powerful tool in these times of digital imagery, deepfakes and fake news. For example saying that we are ‘in control of the virus’ doesn’t affect the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 one little bit: only doing stuff, like vaccinating, hand washing, social distancing and mask-wearing can do that. Make America Great Again does nothing to increase the well being of Americans unless accompanied by policies that affect the material world. Sticks And Stones do indeed Break Bones, but words do not (though they can incite people to use baseball bats to accomplish that). A painting can change the world only by inspiring some people to do something, like go on a crusade or resist a dictator.
In his recent book ‘Narrative Economics’ the US economist Robert J. Shiller attempts to apply a similar doctrine to the dismal science. He notices that people’s economic behaviour is not governed solely by self-interest nor by rational choice as current orthodoxies would have it, but by the stories people tell themselves, or are told by their friends or the media, about what is happening in the world and what that might do to their own future prospects. Take hoarding bog-roll for example...
[Dick Pountain is rather sorry that Augmented Reality can’t ever let you Undo the world]
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