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Thus spake Peter Krämer:

“…donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable…. [I]t’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow? …superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. …the US has a desolate social system and that alone is reason enough that donations are already a part of everyday life there.”

In the midst of all the brouhaha over marriage and its definition(s), few people pause to ask the question that David Harsanyi raises: why should the state be entangled in such matters at all?

Per the New York Times, the word of the day is “pontifical”.  We hereby lay claim to definition #3.

In the first post in this series, I discussed ways in which the space around a single figural sculpture becomes a tacit part of the artwork by virtue of the moving viewer’s interpretive act.  In the second post, I considered how the spatial relationships among multiple figures in a more complex figural sculpture can provide interpretive clues and cues that lead to a rich understanding not only of the fiction’s virtual space, but also of its mental, social, and emotional spaces.

Now I would like to consider immersion, which I will treat as a set of visual, spatial, and kinetic opportunities afforded the viewer of an artwork by virtue of its scale, situation, and referential complexity.  I will offer two examples, one which invites the interpreter to go around and upon and another which invites the interpreter to go within and beneath.

The first of these is the Great Stupa of Borobudur.  The 9th-century Buddhist worshiper approaching a typical stupa might expect from experience to find a large hemispherical or bell-shaped burial mound decorated with a modest array of symbols– abstract, floral, or figural– that stimulate and reinforce his worship by evoking key precepts.  What the reverent seeker would find instead, here in the hills northwest of Yogyakarta, is a semi-structured adventure in which the visitor selects his own path, undertakes various physical and mental challenges, and works his self-tailored way upward toward the climactic encounter where ascent gives way to transcendence.

Great Stupa of Borobodur (Wikimedia Commons)

Borobudur, aerial (Wikimedia Commons)

This man-made mountain (actually an augmented natural hill) consists of concentric rectilinear or circular terraces.  The lowest tier, three platforms making up a base, symbolizes the world of desires, that earthly and immanent realm through which the pilgrim has traveled to arrive at this destination.  The next five tiers represent the world of forms, an abstract and heady domain where concept and percept unite in art and action to induce the purposive wanderer to ponder.  Finally, the top three tiers– scarcely visible from the ground– introduce the worshiper into the world of formlessness, a cityscape of smaller stupas, each inhabited by a statue of the teaching Buddha.  Here, exploration inculcates the worshiper in the way of transcendence.

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In the previous post in this series, I considered how the pose and three-dimensionality of a figural sculpture support its interpretation.  I noted that representational sculptures reside at the intersection of what is actual and what is virtual.  Because it is there and we can regard it in many ways, a statue shows us part of a projected fictional world and implies or suggests even more, unrealized in the sculpture, about that world.  The artist leaves its underdetermined fictional details to the viewer’s imagination.

I described how different vantages on Michelangelo’s David yield somewhat different understandings of the figure, and I explained how Bernini later carried vantage-based variations to an energetic extreme in his own David.  From these observations and others, I drew a conclusion: although we typically think of movies in relation to photography and painting, film (like its cousin, theater) is more akin to sculpture.

Asserting a close kinship among sculpture, theater, and film raises issues of technology, so I would like to recommend a way of thinking about technology and to illustrate how it can inform the interpretation of art.

In 1346, King Edward III Plantagenet crossed the English Channel to assert his claims on France.  After startling victories in Caen and Crécy, he laid siege to Calais.  Caen had fallen in a day; Calais, at the urging of King Philip VI Valois, held out for nearly a year.

Resisting a siege is a nasty business, and under the persuasive weight of disease, starvation, and want, the people of Calais finally decided to negotiate.  Edward offered terms: he would show mercy and not sack the city in exchange for the lives of half a dozen of its most important citizens– an offer generous to the many but harsh to the few.  After months of deprivation, they could scarcely reject the terms. But who would rise to give his life?

A leader did step up, and then another and another until six had offered themselves: Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d’Aire, Jacques de Wiessant, Pierre de Wiessant, Jean de Fiennes, and Andrieu d’Andres.  Several were among the city’s wealthiest and most influential figures, and all understood in some measure that the privileges of reputation presuppose honor and civic duty. They would pay the price for the survival of Calais.

Dressed in simple robes, draped in nooses, and bearing the keys to the keep and gates– all in accord with Edward’s instructions– they marched forth from their city in the hope that by sacrificing their lives, they would save their people.  (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.  Remember.) Did they hesitate, think twice, reconsider? Did they waver in resolve or press stolidly onward? Were they enraged at the enemy, at humankind, at God? Did faith and faithful action steel them against encroaching fear and doubt?

As a matter of historical record, the six heroes were eventually spared in a display of magnanimity.  However, at the moment when they rose to the occasion and walked off toward the enemy’s camp to face their doom, the six had no reason to suppose their lives were anything but forfeit.  And it is that moment of bittersweet hope and despair that Auguste Rodin chose to depict in his masterful bronze of 1889, The Burghers of Calais.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

This work rather obviously participates in the same multi-perspectival dynamic that gave life to the statues mentioned above. Here, however, two differences appear, one physical and one thematic.  The physical difference is that this is a sculptural group rather than a single figure; the somatic complexity is much richer.  The viewer walking around this sculpture, moving toward it, or drawing away from it, will have the opportunity to notice many more changes in surface, shadow, and shape than even Bernini’s David affords.

The idea of having multiple figures in a sculptural group is no novelty, though Rodin deploys the idea with sophistication.  What is perhaps more novel, or at least more typical of Rodin’s culture and era than of earlier times, is the statue’s exploration of psychology and emotion.  The thematic difference between Rodin’s group and earlier sculptures is that the complexities of pose and spatial extension serve not so much to project an unsculpted fictional world around the figures, but rather to project a plurality of virtual mental worlds within or among the figures.

The statue does not imply or suggest what it might be like to depart besieged Calais and to march toward the encamped English.  Instead, it whispers, declares, and bellows what it might be like to ponder one’s impending death and the seeming pointlessness of so many great, petty, proud, or pious achievements as one now prepares to march toward the moment of capitulation, humiliation, and negation.  Bernini invoked our imagination by showing us body and intentionality; Rodin invokes our imagination and empathy by showing us conflicted or decided minds, stable or wavering intentions, the threshold where prior dreams are dashed and a desperate hope in behalf of others takes their place.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Jacques de Wiessant

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Jean d'Aire

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Andrieu d'Andres

The work invites empathy, analysis, and introspection by presenting unexpected or evocative details and juxtapositions to the exploratory viewer. From one vantage, it appears as if the six, as a cluster, are ambling toward their fate. From another, the group breaks into two as a leader in the front turns to encourage his companions in the back.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

Still another vantage reveals that half of the group is headed in the wrong direction, one clutching his head in despair or disbelief, and two moving as one in rhymed poses as they retreat to his aid or exhortation.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

The more a viewer explores and ponders the information this sculpture offers, the more the physical gives way to the mental. Historical imagination gives way to the presentation of concepts, assertions about human character, portrayals of vulnerability or resilience, considerations of individuality and community, and a host of other themes that speak to what it is to be fragile humans in a fragmented, fractious world.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Pierre de Wiessant

To put it in a more useful way, The Burghers of Calais is a technology that amplifies our powers of inspection, introspection, empathy, and intention by providing a rich occasion for their exercise.

What, after all, is a technology? What is the etymological “logic of art”? As a matter of cultural and linguistic habit, we use the term “technology” to refer to certain classes of gadgets, machinery, or manipulation. Turn to the “tech” section of any newsfeed, and it will be replete with discussions of 4G cell phones or particle accelerators or biomodification. But this way of using the term “technology” elides the point worth emphasizing.

I prefer to emphasize that technology always stands in a certain relation to the people who use it: technology is anything that amplifies what the human body can already do. A club amplifies the ability to punch. A gun amplifies the ability to throw. A telephone amplifies the ability to shout. A motor vehicle amplifies the ability to run. Clothing amplifies the protective and insulating qualities of skin. Architecture, oddly enough, is large, static, communal clothing. Telecast media amplify vision or audition. The hard drive and RAM of a computer amplify the ability to remember and to calculate. And so on.

Any technology may be understood this way, and therefore anything that acts as a force multiplier on what humans in general can already do may be construed as a technology. What’s more (and setting aside the mind/body problem), technologies may amplify not only the physical but also the mental. Formal logic is a conceptual technology that amplifies the ability to think systematically, to argue cogently, and to relate premises to inferences in a way that yields foreseeable material results from abstract plans. Language, one might say, is a distributive technology that amplifies the ability to define and organize human experience by engaging and uniting many people in ordered pursuit of those tasks.

So then, what of art? The fictional projection of possible worlds in text, paint, stone, metal, or light is a material technology that amplifies our ability to entertain and evaluate conditional counterfactuals. This, of course, is just a jargon-laden way of saying that representational books, movies, and art propose imaginary scenarios– in some respects like the actual world and in some respects different– and thereby provide a means for us to safely explore alternate paths of choice and action without the burden of non-fictional consequences. Vicarious experience, fantasy, imagination, escape– these are the crux, but they’re complex notions best left for another post.

The key point is that we use technologies such as chiseling and bronze casting to make artworks, but an artwork is itself a technology by means of which we do something else. (Of course, it is a staple of aesthetics and art theory that a work becomes “art” at precisely the point where we abandon any notion of its utility. For reasons best deferred, I find that understanding of art inadequate, a historical curiosity of that stream of modernism that has its source in the Enlightenment.) But if the key question is how we are using art, then it is always already the case that the maker and the consumer of art are both embroiled in the creation and valuation of its meanings: active in some ways and passive in others, now resolute and now conflicted, egoistic but altruistic, insular or communal, in a grand negotiation of the terms of surrender and victory.

And if the consumer is always already as much a factor as the producer, then it just won’t do to maintain that art is something that artists do for (or to) willing but passive recipients. It’s not a question of whether the audience actively contributes to the art it finds enriching, but of how much, how well, and how.

Poor Agostino di Duccio.  He had learned his craft under the most innovative and imaginatively expressive sculptural master of the quattrocento, Donatello.  But Agostino could not have been happy on the mountain in Carrara as he oversaw the quarrying of a shallow, broad block of marble some eighteen feet long.  Over the course of his career, Agostino had taken to bas-relief work of the sort one finds on the façade of a church or a palazzo.  He had created grand works in terra cotta, too, but clay is a thing far different from stone.

Nevertheless, here he was, perhaps because the elders in Florence had decided to make good on a fifty year old plan to erect a huge statue of Donatello’s making on a buttress of the cathedral.  Then in his late 70s, Donatello was no longer in a position to give more than nominal attention to such a project.  To Agostino fell the labor.

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Ilya Somin gets to the heart of the matter:

The sole evidence the prison officials have submitted on this point [the connection between D&D and gangs] is the affidavit of Captain Muraski, the gang specialist.  Muraski testified that Waupun’s prohibition on role-playing and fantasy games was intended to serve two purposes. The first aim Muraski cited was the maintenance of prison security. He explained that the policy was intended to promote prison security because cooperative games can mimic the organization of gangs and lead to the actual development thereof. Muraski elaborated that during D&D games, one player is denoted the “Dungeon Master.” The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang.

Ahem.  Apologies to Sondheim….

Dear NPC Muraski
You gotta understand,
It’s just our daily maskey,
No need to bust a gland.
Our DM tokes a stogie,
His house rules are in vogue.
Drizzt Do’Urden! Natcherly we’re rogues!

Gee, Captain Muraski, we’re very upset;
We haven’t tried the 4th edition starter kit yet!
We ain’t no gang members,
We’re headed true north,
Gather the party, venture forth!

Venture forth!

Venture forth! Venture forth!
Ere we venture forth!
We must gather all, then venture forth!

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
The warden ain’t a fan.
Despite his high speed broadband,
He won’t hook up our lan.
We just use pen and paper,
So whatcha gonna ban?
Creepin’ kobolds!  That’s a bogus plan!

Captain Muraski, you’re nerfed in the brain;
This boy don’t lead a gang, he runs a fictive campaign!
His imagination, it oughta be curbed.
He’s dramaturgically disturbed!

We’re disturbed, we’re disturbed,
Roll to save or curb!
But there’s still no need to be perturbed!

My cellmate is barbaric,
My friend’s a mage arcane.
We’d better bring a cleric,
The new guy is insane.
That lifer is a ranger,
For thieves you won’t look hard,
And on death row I hear there’s a bard!

Capped Captain Muraski,
You’ve gotta admit,
You didn’t roll your twenty for a critical hit.
You’re some expert witness, no wonder you’re pimped.
Too bad your theory’s fully gimped!

Fully gimped, fully gimped,
They can’t say you skimped,
But your testimony’s badly gimped!

Gee, Captain Muraski,
No need to be lame,
It’s not a mimicked gang,
It’s just a role-playing game.
Hey, Captain Muraski,
Would you like a clue?
Gee, Captain Muraski,
Pike you!

Via Bruce Schneier, a good description of a common fallacy:

Imagine you’ve invented a machine to detect terrorists. It’s good, about 90% accurate.

…you receive urgent information … that a potential attacker is in the building. Security teams seal every exit and all 3,000 people inside are rounded up to be tested.

The first 30 pass. Then, dramatically, a man … fails. Police pounce, guns point.

How sure are you that this person is a terrorist?

A. 90%
B. 10%
C. 0.3%

Looking for old service records?  At last, those British mustering rolls are online… for military service between 1369 and 1453.

Glad you didn’t break that ankle. Here, lemme break that back:

A plucky Eagle Scout who probably should get his own episode on the Discovery Channel’s “Survivorman” instead has been hit with a $25,234 rescue bill – after he lasted three days in wintry conditions with an injured ankle on Mount Washington.

The law in New Hampshire provides that the state may bill for the cost of a rescue if the person rescued was negligent.  Scott Mason knew that he had twisted his ankle a bit, but he also knew he had good training.  He knew he was leaving the trail he had intended to take, but he also thought he was taking a shortcut.

It’s not immediately obvious to me that a reasonable person would always turn back under these conditions, especially if the sprain seemed minor and the way forward seemed navigable.  But that’s not how Maj. Tim Acerno sees it.  He oversees revenue enhancement law enforcement for Fish and Game, who have given Mason “30 days to cough up the cash”:

Mason was negligent in continuing up the mountain with an injury and veering off the marked path, Acerno said. Negligence, he said, is based on judging what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

“When I twist my ankle, I turn around and come down. He kept going up,” Acerno said.

On that judgment hinges a $25k fine, due in a month from a kid who managed to save his own bacon after getting lost in the woods of New Hampshire.  It’s not as if this Eagle Scout was a high-handed, fist-shaking loner setting out to survive on random roots and unrefined idealism.   He just got lost.

And why’s the fee so high?

Mason’s rescue was particularly expensive because the helicopters the state typically used were unavailable, and a helicopter from Maine had to be brought in, Acerno said.

Clearly, it’s Mason’s fault that Acerno’s pool of whirlybirds isn’t big enough.  Maybe the $25,000.00 can serve as down payment on another one.

Well, Rebecca Ritzel at WaPo has an idea:

the problem with playing polo in Wales is that if you whack the ball once, it rolls straight down a mountain and into a hedgerow, never to be seen again. Except maybe by a sheep….

Here’s the first thing you need to know about riding holidays in Wales: They are not, like polo, just for the rich and famous. Once you are in the United Kingdom, staying at a horse farm is an affordable way to get out and see the countryside.

A weekend of riding that includes meals and lodging == thirty dozen clams.  What better way to lament our economically downcast state than to pitch everything aside and ride wildly over the rolling green?

In his op-ed on Monday, David Brooks revisited the father of our country and paid wistful attention to the mythic figure’s concern for dignity.

When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior….”   They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously….  In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero.

What kind of hero was Washington?  Brooks adopts the words of a historian:

[Washington] “was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

To be a political or military hero, one need only win; to be a moral hero, one must seem worthy of the victory.  By 1796, largely thanks to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, the French neo-classical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon had captured this dignity in stone:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolflawlibrary/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Houdon, George Washington, Virginia State Capitol, 1796

Here the gentleman farmer and surveyor, the commander and citizen, stands erect with chin up and rests his left arm on a fasces, a symbol of the Roman republic.  Washington’s sword-bearing hand now guides a cane.  His weapon, the sheathed sword of state, hangs opposite on the symbolic post.  One can well envision this Washington declining to become emperor, as the story goes, and choosing instead to step down after his second term for the sake of this nascent democracy.

The conventional wisdom about George Washington is that he was all three: a great general, a beloved statesman, and a prudent, self-governing man.  Nowadays, we still have victorious generals and accomplished politicians.  But dignity, the quality that demonstrates wise self-regulation, has vanished from the scene:

…the dignity code itself has been completely obliterated. The rules that guided Washington and generations of people after him are simply gone.

Brooks mentions a few politicians who have become all too familiar to us in ways George Washington never was.  He has a point; it is difficult to think of any figure in the public square who maintains that sort of dignity and commands that sort of respect.  To find a suitable analog, we have to turn to contemporary fiction.  Science fiction.  Interlarded with heavy doses of science fantasy.

We have to turn to Admiral Adama from Battlestar Galactica.  As the BattlestarWiki explains:

Adama has the rare combination of qualities that make up a good leader: insight, the ability to naturally command respect, a common touch that enables him to relate to the enlisted personnel under his command as well as his officers, intuition, intelligence, a strong belief in his own abilities, and the ability to take the advice of others. These qualities are reflected in the fact that personnel of all ranks aboard Galactica hold him in high regard….

Sure, Adama has his issues.  However, he keeps them in his quarters and always presents a dignified face to his people.  He believes that they deserve nothing less than a steady hand at the helm.  And sure, there are those in his fictional world who question Adama.  There are even some who rebel against him.  But most are fiercely loyal to him.  Even some sleeper agents planted in his crew by the enemy find his character so compelling that they choose to stand with him, come what may.  This loyalty attaches neither to Adama’s military victories nor his political maneuvers, but to his virtue.  One close colleague explains the allegiance of Adama’s people this way: “They’re doing it for the old man!”

When it comes time to stir up dissent, Adama’s insidious adversary, the community organizer Tom Zarek, compares Adama’s return to that of a Greek god: “Zeus has returned to Olympus.”  The comparison is cynical.  The gods are capricious, mad with power, and all too human; their dignity is a sham.  Of course, in the world of Battlestar Galactica, most humans believe in these gods.  The humans are hellenistic polytheists, while the robots and cyborgs are monotheists– an intriguing domain for thematic development in the series.  So when Zarek compares Adama to Zeus, neither man believes in Zeus but both understand that most of Adama’s followers do.  Aiming to offend, Zarek implies that Adama is imperial rather than democratic, the de facto god of his people.

Here, the comparison between perceptions of the real George Washington and projections of the fictional William Adama becomes strained.  For it was quite reasonable to present the founding fathers of the United States by way of Roman republican iconography that reinforces our most cherished political values, representative government and the rule of law.  Right?  But no crackpot would ever, ever compare Washington to Zeus.  Certainly not in earnest.  Certainly not in the form of a gigantic, fantastically expensive, state-commissioned sculpture intended for display in the nation’s most hallowed halls.  Right?  RIGHT?!

Not so:

The plot thickens, but I need a drink.  Let’s continue in a separate post.

In the gossip-driven feeding frenzy that keeps alive the tawdry tale of rising and declining wannabe John Edwards (now with video), the New York Daily News wins quip of the day :

Hunter had been hired by the Edwards campaign to videotape the candidate’s movements, but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform.

The commodification of sexual scandal is nothing new, of course, and in times like these more than ever the media are motivated to regard as “news” whatever will maximize sales.  Thus, there’s a regrettable tendency to spew rather than eschew.

What’s cheapened in yellowing press, beyond the players’ tattered reputations, is a factor arguably worth conserving: the vitality of sexual allusion as a literary device.

For some of their puissance, these worthy tropes depend on indirection– a wink, a nod, a knowing glance.  But in a cultural milieu where everyone seems to say entirely too much altogether, and where even the king is in the altogether, it’s hard for prose to play allusively without seeming turgid.

So it goes, too, with visual and spatial art.  Around 1920, that brash jokester Duchamp tagged a mustachioed Mona with a vulgar schoolyard pun.

Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1919 and then on and on.

(For the Gallically disinclined: reading the letters aloud in French makes one say “Elle a chaud au cul” — an observation unsuited to polite company.  French lends itself to this sort of pun, as a legion of Speak-and-Spell-wielding youth will testify.)

On a mission to shock the bourgeoisie, Duchamp kicked off a new wave in the longtime cheapening of time-honored bawd.  Just prior to this, but almost entirely without force in Duchamp’s proto-postmodern context, was the sexual allusiveness of Degas:

Degas, Dancers at the Bar, 1900, Phillips Collection

So frequent were his graphical forays into the world of dance that a representation by Degas of some ballerina stretching thus, or adjusting her slipper, or otherwise assuming a complex or lyrical stance seems straightforwardly representational.  Similarly simple seem the shiny statuettes (by the seashore):

Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot, ca. 1900, Metropolitan Museum

We’re in territory not far from Duchamp but several steps removed from the schoolyard.  In French, the expression “prendre son pied” (to take one’s foot) means “to experience pleasure” and has the specifically sexual connotation of orgasm.  This erotic idiom is often used figuratively nowadays to express with hyperbole any sort of pleasure at all– Q: “Did you like the new Star Trek movie?”  A: “Ah oui, j’ai pris mon pied!”.  (This is similar to the cavalier way English speakers toss around the suffix “-gasm”, as in “Geekgasm“.)

By way of this idiom, Degas invests some, and therefore all, of his graphical and plastic dancers with another layer of allusion to intensify the already erotic connotations of classical dance.  The indirection is not subtle, but it is somewhat less obvious and grating than “LHOOQ” since the foot-touching gesture makes literal sense on its own terms within the theatrical context: sometimes, a touching of the foot is just a touching of the foot.

This brings us, of course, to pirates.  How did it come to pass that “to take one’s foot” became an idiom for orgasm?  Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system.  When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole.  The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty.  No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate’s pleasure.  Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone’s pleasure in anything, and eventually ended up a punchline in Amélie.  And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in our mother tongue suffered under the weight of too popular a press.  We’ve seen enough; it’s time to close your eyes and think of English.

So let’s insist that the media fanning the torrid flames of political passion and self-immolation avert their gaze from gossip.  Let’s demand actual journalistic attention to news worthy of the name, even if the purveyors of parley have to trim their sales.

Eventually, you have to put your foot down.

via Instapundit, Roger Pilon proclaims that “In its opinion today in Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court came down solidly for upholding the equal protection of the law.”

That’s a puzzling thing to say in view of the fact that SCOTUS decided the case on statutory grounds (as Kennedy’s decision makes clear) and punts on the Equal Protection question (as Scalia laments in his concurrence).

Don’t epitomize till you’ve read the dang file!