酷我-北美枫

[星子]

THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE





An Interview with Paul Hartal



by



Davis Dai



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Poet and Painter Paul Hartal talks about Art and Science, East and West, Lyrical Conceptualism, Cosmos and the power of Love



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1. After reading your poems and enjoy your paintings, I found the philosophy behind your art works is coincident with Chinese Classical Art Theory. In Chinese Culture, there are two core ideas: a. "The Universe and Human Beings are integrated"; b. "There are pictures in poetry and there are poems in pictures". When did you feel that poetry and paintings are interrelated and what inspired you to realize this?



a. The Unity of Man and the Universe



From the dawn of human memory people asked questions about our place in the universe. We are curious about our origins, where do we come from? Who are we? We would like to know what is our relationship to the stars and galaxies, why are we here and what is our significance in the cosmos? What is the meaning of our existence? Where are we going? Although the answers to these questions and other existential dilemmas are shrouded in mystery, we know that humans and the external world are inseparable. Humankind is an intrinsic part of the universe. Our unity with the galaxies can be seen from the fact that we are made of star dust. All the chemical elements that compose our bodies can be found in outer space. About ninety per cent of a newborn's body consists of water, molecules comprising two atoms of hydrogen and an oxygen atom. The main building element of stars is hydrogen. This chemical element fuels the sun and other stars by generating energy through nuclear fusion. Oxygen is created in the universe mainly by exploding stars known as supernovae. Yet water itself is also present out there, in comets and interstellar clouds. Apart from our own planet, which is covered mostly by oceans, water also has been found in the solar system, on the Moon, Mars and Jupiter's moons. Additional chemical elements in the universe, such as carbon and nitrogen, participate in the making of proteins, chains of amino acids that are building blocks of life. They are manufactured by cells according to specific genetic information. All living cells of animals, plants and viruses contain compounds of nitrogen that combine with other elements in building nucleic acids. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is the genetic material of some viruses and plays an important role in the synthesis of proteins. Deoxiribonucleic acid (DNA) is the chief constituent of the chromosomes that carry genetic information in the form of genes. Most of the genes are identical in humans and animals of the higher evolutionary ladder, and many are common to both animals and plants. However, on a primordial plane of the quantum level life and matter are not separated phenomena. They are manifestations of energy and information. The universe itself can be viewed as a gigantic computer. And when the human mind searches the depths of the universe, it is the mind of the universe in search of its inner depths.



b. Pictures in Poetry and Poems in Pictures



As a painter and poet I explore the magic and mystery of the world through image and word. As an artist serving more than one Muse I am eager to translate my sensory experience into a unified field of expression. Western culture compartmentalizes our sensory experiences and the resulting knowledge from it into specialized fields of studies. Art, literature and science are seen as independent and unrelated fields. The 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes contributed a great deal to this posture in developing the doctrine that matter and mind are completelely severed attributes. For my part it was a long journey to discover that things are interlaced, that the phenomena of the world are connected. One of the major influences that helped me to realize the connectivity of painting and literature was concrete poetry, which uses words as graphic medium. The roots of concrete poetry date back to antiquity. In modern art trends, among others, the Dadaists and Futurists experimented with typographical pattern verse, creating pictures out of letters and words. It seems that the proverb, "a picture is worth a thousand words" was coined by Napoleon and was introduced into common English usage through modern advertising in the 1920s. An ancient Chinese saying put this idea in a more accurate way: A picture's meaning can express ten thousand words". This is a very cogent and valid statement, but its opposite is quite true, too: A word's meaning can express a thousand pictures. In communication both pictures and words can play vital roles, reinforcing each other's meaning. Moreover, just as images can represent and depict observable things in a much more accurate manner than sounds and letters, well-chosen words can do a much better job in expressing abstract concepts and ideational notions than pictures. By extension these specificities parallel in a sense the experience of music, which as a particular medium cannot be described accurately neither by words nor by pictures. In any case, historically, the affiliation of seeing and saying, image and word, was known in the West already to the Romans. In Ars Poetica Horace observed that painting and poetry are similar arts: "Ut pictura poesis".





2. As a Western artist, you traveled to the East to research Eastern Arts many times. What are the differences and similarities between them? What is their common value?



Eastern and Western Art: Difference, Similarity and Value



This is an extremely broad and complex theme and I can offer only some sketchy personal thoughts on it. We have to bear in mind that the Eastern and Western hemispheres are neither places of diametrically opposed homogeneous cultures, nor are they unchanging societies. Nevertheless, global polarization into domains of East and West may help us to make some wide and arguable generalizations.



The development of Western art has been fundamentally influenced by Graeco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. The Greek philosophers stressed the importance of knowledge and the desire to understand the world as a human goal. Yet they also taught the centrality of ethical norms in life. Socrates held that it is better to suffer than to do evil and Plato identified the good with truth and beauty. Aristotle's aesthetic theory of art as imitation exerted an enduring infuence on European art. The combination of the imitation theory with the development of perspective in Italy of the 15th century by Brunelleschi, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Alberti and other Renaissance artists enhanced the triumphant rise of painterly realism as the paragon of excellence in art. One day, four centuries later, Henri Fuseli went to see in London an exhibition of his student and friend, John Constable. The landscapes of Constable were rendered in a highly realistic style and Fuseli, a professor of art at the Royal Academy, was so impressed by a rainy scene that he opened his umbrella in front of the painting.



In contrast to Western realism, Chinese artists by and large aimed at expressing ideas rather than imitating the forms of the material world. For example, a silk painting from the Warring States period shows a phoenix defeating a serpent-shaped beast next to a young woman. The intention of the artist in this work was to convey the idea that good overcomes evil. The image corresponds to Taoist notions of art. Artists in this school maintained that the essence of the picture is not in the composition itself because the idea is devoid of form. Although allegorical art has also existed in the West for centuries, Chinese art transcended the realm of symbolism. It has excelled in creating images of the mind, called xieyi, an aesthetic concept that incorporates abstraction, the exclusion of representational content. However, the phenomenon often precedes the terminology, and the Western notion of abstraction entered the Chinese art vocabulary only in the last decades of the twentieth century. While in the West Christianity inspired the arts, in China Buddhism played a major role in their development. Buddhism arrived in China from its birth place in India in the fourth century, continuing its triumphant journey to Japan, Korea as well as other countries. Under the influence of Buddhism thousands of devotees took up painting as a means to gain merit in a future life. Others became patrons of painters and collectors of art works. The Emperor Hui Tsung (1082-1135) of the Sung Dynasty was a painter himself, as well as an art collector and patron of many artists. During the reign of the Sung Dynasty artists placed the emphasis on the spiritual qualities of painting. In accordance with Buddhist and Taoist aesthetic concepts, they cultivated the artistic ability to reveal the inner harmony of man and nature in their work.



As against the Taoist concern of seeking and expressing the accord between humans and nature, the aim of the Confucianists was to develop moral qualities and establish benevolent relations among persons. Accordingly, Confucianists saw the role of artists in the lofty aspiration of advancing moral and social life through their work. Similarly to pre-modern European art, from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) until the end of the Tang Dynasty in the tenth century, the human figure was the dominant subject matter in Chinese painting. It flourished under the influence of Confucian philosophy as an art promoting moral values and harmonious human relations. The Taoist search for grasping the atmosphere and the rhythm of nature as emotional states began in China in the seventh century. The Taoists painted landscapes in the shuimohua style, monochromatic and sparse images. These landscapes often depicted scenery with mountain and water, known as shanshui in Mandarin. One of the best known artist of the Tang period was Wang Wei. Painter, poet, musician statesman and a devout Buddhist, Wang flourished in the eighth century. He composed his landscapes with deceptive simplicity, applying strong brushstrokes, firm lines contrasted with light ink washes in color. His images were clear, stressing rhythm of design, congruity of details and the integrity of nature. During the An Lushan rebellion, Wang was captured by rebel forces and he tried to avoid serving them by pretending to be deaf.



A defining property of Chinese art is the prevalence of calligraphy. Chinese artists create their work applying brush and ink to silk or paper. Chinese painting is often both painting and poetry, the two are fused into one harmonious art. Unlike Western languages, Chinese is ideographic. Commenting on the uniqueness of Chinese art, Picasso once said, "If I were born Chinese, I would not be a painter but a writer. I'd write my pictures". There are many variations of styles in Chinese calligraphy. Yet it is an enduring and beloved art in China, Japan and Korea, which has a continuous history of thousands of years. Unlike in Western countries, in Eastern cultures there is no actual separation between painting an poetry. Painters of the East are often poets themselves and integrate their verse into their calligraphic paintings. Although occasionally Western painters, such as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) and William Blake (1757-1827), are recognized as great poets as well, they are viewed as anomalous exceptions. Moreover, their painting and poetry are severed art forms, regarded as completely different specificities. Besides, Western culture concerns itself with specialization and therefore it tends to dismiss the creative quality and value of pursuing more than one discipline.



Similarly to the East, artists in the West depicted the human figure, the indoor environment and the landscape in their work at various degrees of realistic representation. In the West, the watershed in the history of realism in art occurred with the invention of the camera. The appearance of photography in the 19th century prompted artists to revise their aesthetics. A new art philosophy emerged based on the premise that the goal of painting is not to compete with photography in creating realistic images of the world but rendering reality itself. In other words, the role of the artist is to show what the camera cannot. Thus, artists should express feelings, emotions, dreams, abstract concepts and transcendental phenomena. Western art is experimental in nature and artists compete with each other in the breakup of traditional canons. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the present, a plethora of new movements cropped up in painting, including Impressionism, Fauvism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Abstraction, Expressionism, Op Art, Pop Art, as well as a long list of others. Although tradition in art seems to hold out in the East, Western art has made considerable inroads into Japan and Korea, and its sway is felt in the last decades in China as well.



More than once I have encountered people who think that art is a totally useless thing, an unecessary peculiarity without any real value. I have a very different opinion: I believe that we need art for our survival. Regardless of where we live, art is a necessity for individuals and communities in the East and West alike. Paintings, sculptures and architecture visualize our feelings and thoughts through history, preserving our memories and heritage. Artists create new ideas, communicate values, strengthen and develop communal identity, stimulate the mind and purify the soul. They show us the beauty of the world and the sorrow of existence. They enhance the quality of life and provide antidotes to the corruption of individual and collective consciousness. A good painting not only can enliven a depressively dull environment, but functions as a therapeutic device. Colours are important environmental concomitants. People who live long periods in gray and colourless environments hallucinate colours and become depressed. Humans are symbol making beings. We are also spiritual souls with creative needs to express the inner life of the collective psyche, the connectivity of the unconscious and conscious mind with other people and its unity with the universe. Expressing our individual and collective dreams, fears, desires and aspirations through art can be a liberating and empowering experience. Thus, along with nature, creativity, imagination and knowledge, art is a form of wisdom, an essential tool of homeostasis, which is idispensable for maintaining our well being and health.



3. Art is to reflect human emotions and thoughts, but science is to study the material world. Why are they connected? What force connects them?



The Connectivity of Art and Science



In our fragmented culture art and science are regarded as completely different activities. Many people even believe that they are polarized disciplines. Art and science have nothing to do with each other, they say, because art concerns itself with the subjective realm of emotions, whereas science investigates the world in an objective manner. Now, mind you, while there is some justification of this argument, a thorough look at the relationship of art and science reveals that the dichotomy does not really hold water. Scientists, for example, involve emotional and irrational traits in their work, including curiosity, intuition, surmise, insight and belief. Also, we have to take into consideration that the process through which observed facts are formulated into a hypothesis is an irrational one. It is not amenable to rational planning. The rise of a theory is a creative act that transcends logic and control. Now, let us leave aside the scientist and consider the artist. Mind you, artists on their part apply not only feelings and emotions to their work but also logic and rational thought. Making a good design for a luminously creative composition is a cognitive process involving both inspiration and perspiration. Art in fact is an entirely concrete approach for the exploration of the world because real knowledge can be achieved only by the experience of the senses and art is based on sensorious realization. Analysis of the creative processes of artists and scientists reveals that there is art in science and science in art.



The most precise scientific tool is mathematics. Yet an examination of mathematics shows that, without empirical evidence, it is built on the irrational belief in the existence of statistical averages and hierarchical infinities, as well as on such fundamental inconsistencies as the rule that allows to multiply by zero but forbids to divide by it. In 1931 Kurt Gödel published his famous Incompleteness Theorem that aimed the lens of mathematics at itself. He showed that within the rigid logical system of arithmetics there exist axiomatic statements that can neither be proved nor disproved. Thus, the Incompleteness Theorem undermines the aspirations of science to devise a set of axioms from which all the phenomena of the world can be deduced. A few years prior to the publication of the Incompleteness Theorem, the nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg found that it is impossible to measure simultaneously both the exact position and momentum of subatomic particles. This so called Uncertainty Principle, along with the Incompleteness Theorem, dooms to failure the scientific ideal that strives for the discovery of all the hidden secrets of the cosmos. It suggests that reducing the universe into a simple and ultimate mathematical formula is an impossible dream. In the light of these considerations it appears that the world of the scientist and the mathematician is not closer to reality than that of the artist. The attempt to eliminate subjectivity from the domain of science and mathematics does not make the world more objective. It leads only to a misconstrued model of reality, to an unscientific science. Granted that mathematics is a highly logical discipline, it is still a symbolic universe. It is an invention of the human mind. And the phenomena of the world cannot be reduced to mathematical abstractions, because the whole is more than the sum total of its parts. The cardinal concepts of physics-- matter, energy, space, time and quantity--are not the things in themselves but abstract metaphors. Science and art share much more in common than it would meet the eye at first glance. They are both symbolic and interacting universes through which humanity structures and interprets reality.



Artists, mind you, have made significant contributions through history to the development of science. For example, during the Renaissance, Florentine artists-- such as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca and Uccello-- laid down the foundations for the geometrical system of perspective, the representation of three dimensional space on the two dimensional surface of the picture plane. Leonardo da Vinci-- painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, anatomist, writer and musician--among other things, provided Galileo with arrays of important ideas, including the arithmetical theory of infinity. And here is another case in point: In many respects, especially from a philosophical and psychological point of view, the colour theories of the Romantic poet and painter Wolfgang Johann von Goethe are superior to those of Isaac Newton.



Also, since the late middle ages European artists were trail blazers of optical research. In order to improve the painterly verisimilitude of their compositions, in the 1400s they began to use lenses and mirrors. In the seventeenth century, Velasquez placed sets of mirrors in his studio and studied the effects of light entering dark rooms. Decades before Newton's Opticks appeared in 1704, Vermeer (1632-1675) investigated the properties of light, aiding his eyes and brush strokes with concave mirrors, lenses, and the camera obscura. The latter was a filmless photographic chamber. Furthermore, the case of Adelbert Ames may serve as a noteworthy example from the twentieth century of how artists contribute to the advancement of science. In his efforts to improve his artistic skills as a painter, Ames studied ophthalmology, developed the science of physiological optics at Dartmouth College and discovered in the process an ocular disorder called aniseikonia. So, as we see, science and art cross fertilize each other. Many technological inventions--among them photography, motion pictures, television and computers--grew out from the intricate lattice of collaboration between artists and scientists.



4. The theory that supports your art works is Lyrical Conceptualism. Could you explain the key points of it? What is the significance of this school?



Lyrical Conceptualism : LyCo Art



A new idea on the periodic table of art, Lyrical Conceptualism, or Lyco Art, is a holistic theory of creativity concerned with inclusive culture and the human condition. As a broad theory and practice of creativity, Lyco Art engages the entire scale of formative energies through transformative vision in which aesthetics evolves as ethics.



Lyrical Conceptualism blends the rational with the intuitive and the emotional. In the forefront of its philosophy stands the interlacement of the amorphous and the geometrical, the formless and the literal, the poetic and the exact. The unformed and the structured interact in Dionysian chaos and Aplollonian order, evolving constantly through the dynamic and fluid union of memory, imagination, feeling, and reason. Lyco Art emphasises the interaction of emotion and intellect, where the passion of logic and logic of passion are inexorably interwoven through the voyage of consciousness. It rejects the notion that art is an ivory tower, the credo that art is only for artists. It views art and life as intertwined realities. The criteria for the greatness of art cannot be separated from the constructive participation of the artist in the pursuit of improving the human condition, from the ongoing struggle for human survival. These are imperative moral quests, endowed with harmonies of grace and beauty. Consequently in Lyco Art aesthetics rises as ethics.



The genesis of Lyco Art can be traced back to A Manifesto on Lyrical Conceptualism, which I published in the spring of 1975 in Canada. It appeared shortly after my solo exhibition of paintings at the Galerie Jacquie on Rue Stanley in Montreal. A poetic declaration illustrated with black and white photos of my paintings and collages, the Manifesto stated, among other things, that for the author art is a mode of inquiry and a manner of living. It placed a new element on the periodic table of art, "a painted metaphor; the past machine of a perpetual second, the fossil emotion of an infinite longing, the magic desire evolving on the broken axis of the comressed space, reflected in the form of inner, personal landscapes." It called for turning the force of art into an oasis of redemption creating qualities of environmental enrichment for the sake of protection against the dangers of mass education, pollution and violence, as well as the loss of individual and family territorialism in our mechanical, uniform and overorganized society. It urged artists to use the power of art for the emotional and intellectual development of humanity and for confronting material and spiritual evils. It stated that art is not a medium to transit the visible, but a substance that renders it into visible metaphysics. At the time when the manifesto saw light, Minimalists and Conceptual artists turned their back on traditional painting and sculpture, declaring them obsolete junks. Some of them even demanded the closing of art museums. I regarded this tendency of aesthetic withdrawal as part of the alienation syndrome, the rejection of historical continuity as an integral component of individual and collective identity. In reaction to this, the manifesto proclaimed that we have to "go back to beauty and integrate it with an other eternal need, the perpetual search for meaning and escape from chaos".



One of the central themes of Lyrical Conceptualism concerns the relationship of art and science. It maintains that there is art in science and science in art. Science and art are seen as symbolical systems through which humanity structures and interprets reality. The interlacement of the undefined and the exact in the creative process gives rise to an aesthetic theory in which the boundaries between art and science become fuzzy or entirely disappear. In contrast to the traditional belief, Lyrical Conceptualism does not regard emotion and intellect to be at odds with one another. For, passion and excitement can increase reasoning power and generate insights. Lyrical Conceptualism does not polerize science and art. Rather it involves the use of technology by the artist in the creation of beauty, resulting in works that seek to unify science and art, emotion and logic, intelligence and soul. We live in an electronic environment in which science-based technology determines our lifestyle. Consequently, art must concern itself with science and technology. However, science and technology should not be our our masters but servants. The present human condition calls for the rise of a new, inclusive form of culture in which art should play a prominent role. We need the imagination, the intuition, the insight, the lateral reasoning faculty, as well as the human values that are excluded from the rigid methodology of science, but are intrinsic to art. Science, mind you, pretends to be morally neutral and has no built-in ethical norms to protect us from its abusive or inimical applications.



Throughout history art moved between the opposing poles of the rational and the emotional, swinging on a pendulum of the creative process. Thus, the aesthetic styles of the Greco-Roman world and of the Renaissance were basically harmonious, geometrical and conceptual. On the other hand, Gothic and Baroque art were characterized by sinuosity, passion and lyricism. Similarly, in Modern Art, Impressionism, Fauvism, Dada and Surrealism derive mainly from the irrational impulses of the human psyche, whereas movements such as Cubism, De Stijl, Constructivism, or Geometric Abstraction are more related to the rational realm of creativity. Lyco Art as a new trend creates a conscious bridge between the irrational and rational elements of the creative process, moving freely and selectively along the continuum of the passion of logic and the logic of passion, in accordance with the artist's needs and intentions. Far from being an aesthetic strait-jacket, Lyco Art gives the artist thorough creative freedom.



Tearing up the boundaries between different disciplines is part of the Lyrical Conceptualist experience. The idea of experimental art as an interdisciplinary endeavour expanding into science has led to collaborative projects in various fields. One of these involves the connectivity of art to cosmology. The publication of my research findings in journals like Leonardo, Ylem and Pulsar in this area drew the attention of NASA and in 1994 I was invited to exhibit my visionary paintings at the Space Center in Houston. Another field of investigation concerns mathematics. Explorations with fractals and the unifying concept of symmetry, for example, have turned to be especially significant in linking geometry with art. I also collaborated with Indian researchers at Shivaji University in a holistic anthropological study relating communication to rural development in the Raichur district. In additional pursuits I also have ventured into the field of Artificial Intelligence, devising an Aesthetic Cybernetic Test (ACT) for probing through art the cognitive faculties of advanced computers. This sort of work led among other things to collaboration with the renowned writer and IBM computer scientist Clifford Pickover. My ideas on the mystery of time and lyrical conceptualism with examples of drawings can be found in Pickover books on scientific visualization, among them Mazes for the Mind, Chaos in Wonderland and Time.



I am a poet and painter but I don't see these activities as separate pursuits. Western culture is fragmented and in its compartmentalized vision, poetry and painting are completely different art forms. In my vision it is all to the contrary: Poetry and Painting are not separate pursuits but specific expressions flowing from the same fountainhead of creativity. Eastern cultures understand this. Painting and poetry in the Orient are often seen as identical. In my journeys across China, Japan and Korea I was delighted to discover the unity of these arts. Moreover, in April 2004 I exhibited my work at Hanseo University Art Museum in Seoul under the title, Painting and Poetry. In addition to the catalogue published by the university, I also presented a collection of my Love Poems as part of the exhibition. In China, Japan and Korea the unity of painting and poetry are taken for granted. In these cultures calligraphy is an integral part of imagery rendered with skilled brush strokes on silk and paper. In the West, visual verse or concrete poetry emerges as a composite genre, blurring of the boundaries between language and picture. It is an exerimental art form that bridges different disciplines. By making patterns and pictures from words, it mediates between painting and literature. Besides the possibility of creating intellectually stimulating and eye-catching typographical images, concrete poems enhance their meaning by the multi-dimensionality of the composition in which the whole is greater than the sum total of its parts. The earliest known example of a pattern poem is a 23 centuries old piece by the Greek poet Simmias. He produced out of words an egg shaped poem. In the 19th century Lewis Carol in Alice in Wonderland used pictorial typography. In the 20th century Apollinaire and members of Dada and the Futurismo movements as well as others experimented with this genre.



Although Lyco Art is more a formative strategy than a stylistic genre, images associated with this trend can express visually the interaction of the dialectic properties of the poetic and the exact. Paintings, for example, might use coded colours and forms corresponding to feelings and thoughts. Accordingly, warm hues and amorphous shapes might reflect emotional states, whereas cold colors and geometric forms represent logic and reason.



Throughout the years I have shown my ouevre in New York, Montreux, Budapest, Madrid, Tokyo, Seoul and other cities. The first Lyrical Conceptualist show in Europe was held in Paris in the 1978. My paintings were displayed in several galleries in the French capital. They were also included in the 45th exhibition of the Surindependants at the Musee du Luxembourg. I won various awards, among them the Prix de Paris. The critic Roger Delneufcourt for Le Nouveau Journal wrote that as a style the artist's Lyrical Conceptualism is characterized by "partly abstract or geometric forms, sharp colorism and a personal rhythm". In the summer of 1979 Tom Konyves published an article about my work in The Montreal Star. In it he also wrote about the Lyrical Conceptualist Society organizing an International Concrete Poetry exhibition in Montreal. The show was held in December at the Vehicule Living Art Museum and presented on television as well. Among the artists engaged in long discussions of Lyrical Conceptualism were Kara Szathmary of Canada, Billy Curmano of the USA and Balint Szombathy from Hungary. Szombathy also wrote in Hungarian numerous critical articles on Lyco Art for Es, Kritika, Uj Forras, as well as other forums. The Italian critic Barbara Costa of the University of Salerno sees my oeuvre in the context of "Nuova Aeropittura".



I have met and exhibited along with the renowned Korean painter and author Cho Sang-Hyun in Seoul and Montreal. Reviewing in the May 23, 1998, issue of The Korea Herald a joint exhibit of "East meets West" at the Dansung Gallery in Insa-dong, Edward Kim noted that the photo-realism of Cho Sang-hyun and the expressionism of Paul Hartal complement each other. "East meets West is a remarkable synthesis of colors, ideas and styles. While Cho's works look as if they were taken with a camera, Hartal's paintings are amorphous and strange, providing a sharp, but refreshing contrast to Cho's detailed realism". The philosophy behind Cho's work is Blankism, points out Kim: An art based on Confucian and Korean ideals, spiritual and metaphysical space, "a reaction to Westernization and globalization, which leads to a loss of uniqueness and identity". Kim observes that both lyrical conceptualism and blankism, respect the past by blending tradition and innovation. "Lyrical conceptualism challenges the technology-oriented world, which is destroying the environment." The reviewer describes the style of lyrical conceptualism this way: Using powerful, bold chromatic colors in a chaos of amorphous forms, Hartal's art appeals to the intellect, intuition and emotions with geometric elements representing logic, shapeless forms symbolizing the creative process, and warm and cold colors indicating feelings.



According to the New York art critic Elizabeth Exler, "Paul Hartal' documented international repertoire of exhibitions are the proving grounds of his vision". In "Paul Hartal: A Manifesto on Lyrical Conceptualism", published in the magazine Manhattan Arts, November-December 1992, she writes: "This Canadian artist has ushered in a philosophy that proceeds with many layered viewpoints, an elaborate dialogue between paint and concepts". She selects two works of mine for illustration. One of them is the ecological painting Just Trying to Breathe, "a chromatic and powerful tertiumquid between Munch and Hundertwasser. The landscape is cataclysmic, the ghoulish figures haunt the architecture in a circuitous dance. The picture's impact liberates a wealth of psychological responses and environmental concerns. The color is skillfully handled to interpret agitation and apprehension." The other example is Encounters, an oil from the Mind in the Universe series. Although this painting is dissimilar in its color scheme, writes Exler, "its similarity lies in Hartal's consistent approach to individual and public dilemmas. It seems to be a sophisticated puzzle of life, which has been reduced to disorienting planes and contrapposto angles". And she concludes: "This setting of condensed space with the puppet-like figures and heads, is Hartal's plea to, 'humanize the environment' ".



In May 2001 Alisa Barstow reported in the Russian portal Life Style that Elizaveta Berezovskaya exhibits her tapestry in Moscow at the Aidan Gallery. What drew particularly my attention to her work was that Barstow described Berezovskaya as a Cambridge University graduate of art, "influenced by the Moscow school of lyrical conceptualism". The artist based her project, entitled Chronicle, on the ancient Chinese Taoist philosophical notion wherein one follows natural changes as the basic guiding principle on the path to perfection. Space and time, the interaction of man, earth, heaven and fate within the progression of nature provide a complete picture of being and woven into the tapestry of life. Life Style also presents the textile works of Yekaterina Nesterova, another Moscow exponent of lyrical conceptualism.



In the summer of 2001 I received a letter from the art historian A.P. Diatchenko, written also on behalf of L.N. Bakayutova, director of the A.S. Popov Museum in St. Petersburg. They requested permission for translating my treatises from English to Russian. Diatchenko said that the "theatises on the aesthetic interrelation between science and art are characterized by the richness of thought and the daring novelty of approach". He pointed out that the monograph Painted Melodies is of great value for art historians to draw parallels between Wassily Kandinsky's ideas presented in his book, On the Spiritual in Art, and my aesthetic theories.



I published Painted Melodies in 1983 as a companion volume of my my solo show at the J. Yahouda Meir Gallery in Montreal. The central part of the Painted Melodies project involved the revisualization and reconstruction of the art works that inspired Mussorgsky in composing his famous opus, "Pictures at an Exhibition". The paintings that Mussorgsky saw were the works of his artist friend, Victor Hartmann. However, there is no visual record in existence as to what actually Mussorsky saw. Consequently what I did was an imaginary reconstruction of Hartmann's paintings from the music of Mussorgsky.



Balint Szombathy found Painted Melodies praiseworthy and published in Budapest a critical review of it, entitled "Melody and Scene", in the literary journal Es, November 9, 1990. Is it possible--and how-- to depict the melody, that is to say the musical experience in the visual arts?. More precisely: is it possible to draw or to paint a particular opus of music; to transplant a medium that expands in time into a medium that exists in space? How can one represent music in the visual arts? After all, musical communication expresses but does not depict. Unlike Kandinsky, Mondrian and others, I did not want to use the classic analogue of colour and tone. Instead, and in accordance with Wittgenstein's observation that ' form is the possibility of structure', I evolved the investigation to exclusive form definitions. In this interpretation, melody becomes a horizontal arrangement, whereas harmony turns into a vertical one, a set of coordinate-formation. On this structural shell are built the mainly intuitive and arbitrary impressions, as partly figurative and partly abstract visual compositions.



5. Which art works, paintings or poems of yours best present your thoughts?



Painting and Poetry are best understood in the light of each other



There is no singular work of art-- painting or poem-- that I would select as presenting best my thoughts. I view my oeuvre as a unified whole. My painting and poetry are best understood in the light of each other.



6. One of the major themes of your works is love, where does love come from, God or the mysterious universe?



The Redeeming Force of Love



Wearing many colors, love rides many trains. Each love is different. The word has many connotations. Motherly love, for example, is quite different from infatuation and romantic love, and these have very little to do with the love of cinema, baseball or chocolate pudding.



The ancient Greeks distinguished between three types of love: Sexual desire (eros), friendship (philia) and selfess devotion (agape). Plato contemplated love as the will of the imperfect to attain perfection. Stripped from material embodiment and intertwined with grace and radiance, he envisaged love in its absolute condition as the abstract idea of beauty itself. He held that love bridged the material world with the ideal world.



The ancient Romans saw love as basically a two-pronged phenomenon of desire (amor) and care (caritas). In the Middle Ages the poet Dante Alighieri immortalized his love for the beautiful Beatrice. She died young and the poet suffered enormously.In the Divine Comedy, Dante expressed the idea that to suffer because of love paves the way to the renunciation of the self for a loftier value, which transcends the egotism of the individual. Amore for Dante is courtly and mystical. He maintained that the power of love directs the lover to a nobler life. It is also the ultimate force in the universe that moves the sun and the stars. At the end of the epic poem, Dante and Beatrice meet in Paradise. Struck by transcendent radiance, they both stand in rapture at the throne of God. They understand that love for the Creator will consummate human love in the eternal quest for happiness.



We live in a participatory and dynamic universe, which continually evolves. We are created by it, but we also create it. The universe is the greater aspect of the Self, the outer extent of our inner sphere. And it is imbued with love. All its creations are poems of flame and passion, dancing with the the music of love. We are an integral part of the cosmos and our genes form arcane musical compositions. This is not only a poetic idea. Scientific research has found that the genetic information carried by the chain-like molecules of nucleic acids--DNA or RNA--can be transcribed into analogous musical notes. When these are played on the violin and other instruments, they sound as complex, stunning and poignant musical compositions. Thus, the universe has an intrinsic emotional component, which is hidden from us at first glance. However, love is built into the fabric of the cosmos. This is again not merely a metaphysical statement without empirical evidence. Mind you, love is an attractive and binding force that exists even on the atomic and molecular level. Water molecules, for example, are created by the attraction and binding of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.



Love is both an innate faculty and an acquired emotional response: Nature and nurture. We are born for love but we also have to learn it. There are numerous ingredients in love, including respect, care, responsibility. faith, trust, modesty, forgiveness, courage, affection, passion and sacrifice. Life and love are inexorably interwoven. Yet love is not identical with .. This is an important observation, because even the great Freud was slow to realize that neighbourly love was not based on the carnal instinct. His original notion of the libido neglects to take into account that love is a social phenomenon. Consequently, it misrepresents sexual violence as an expression of love. However in reality, rape is never an expression of love. While genuine love always builds, rape always destroys. Rape is never an expression of true love but a horrible crime. It is a selfish act of violence, motivated by a combination of lust and power, in which the perpetrator treats the victim as a soulless object.



. is not even an exclusive strategy of survival and proliferation that nature has invented. The dandelion, for example, has rejected . from its life cycle. It multiplies without fertilization by dispersing its tufted seeds in the wind. Besides, nature features myriad variations of sexual expressions of the life force. Mind you, there is no sharp dividing line between the sexual traits of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Blue-green algae probably had invented . long before animals existed.



What is the origin of love? God or the mysterious universe? In my opinion there are no definite answers to these questions. For my part, God is unknowable. What can we say about God? Is the Divine Creator an infinite and almighty force, a transcendental entity beyond the existence of the physical universe? This is a reasonable possibility but devoid of support with solid empirical evidence. Moreover, it is also possible to contemplate God as a reality that is bigger than us, an entity of infinite attributes, and similarly to Spinoza and Einstein, to identify the Creator with nature and the cosmos. Where does love originate from? From God, or from the mysterious universe? If we accept the concept of the identity of God and the universe, then the answer to this question is that there is no real dilemma here. Nevertheless, these arguments do not imply that God is distant or impersonal. The Postmodern adaptation of the old nihilistic credos regarding the death of God and the careless universe are unappealing and ugly non sequiturs. Atheism is a philosophically untenable posture, because the absense of evidence is not evidence of absence.



It is truely astonishing that, compared to the immensely vast ocean of the unknown, so little human knowledge gives us such tremendous manipulative capacity in transforming our physical environment. At the same time, although I admire the accomplishments of science and technology, I do not believe that in the future these will be able to solve every problem. As a matter of fact I tend to believe that science and technology are perilous forces that endanger our very existence through environmental destruction and uncontrollable weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, if faith can bring salvation to Man, it is not faith in the redeeming power of science and technology. In spite of their greatness and glory, science and technology can improve only the material conditions of our existence.



The notion of redemption by faith leads us to dilemmas about after life, to a transcendental sphere beyond the scope and range of mainstream scientific investigation. However, life happens in space and time, in the sensory sphere of here and now, and this prompts one to wonder whether salvation is possible in this world? My answer to this question is affirmative. Yes, I believe that in this world we can have real salvation and it comes through the redeeming power of true and unconditional love. Humans are capable of affirming their loftiest qualities by selfless devotion, kindness, compassion, care and sacrifice. We are born for love. The meaning of life is intrinsically bound up with it. Love is a wondrous healing force. Studies show that a simple hug is one of the most effective therapies that are available to us. Insufficient affection, the absence of proper emotional bond may lead to severe neuroses and psychoses in the later stages of life. Most humans remain touch-starved throughout their lives. Communication, expressions of affection and tenderness, warmth and care are essential for our physical and emotional well-being, even more important than ..



The new scientific paradigm envisions the cosmos as a quantum universe in which particles are not permanent objects but excited states of the background void. In the quantum universe every part is linked to everything else. In accordance with Einstein's theory of special relativity of 1905, quantum physics supports the theory that subatomic particles can be created out of energy and dissolve back into energy. Subatomic particles are created out of energy fields between the galaxies and in black holes and they are metamorphosed back into energy systems. These particles are rather excited states of the ultimate void of the quantum vacuum. They seem to vibrate like the strings of a violin. These throbbing oscillations occur throughout the universe and they possess musical qualities. They play the music of the spheres. They resonate with harmonious melodies in atoms, molecules and galaxy formations. As the universe dances, they sing the songs of love.



Although intellectually we fail to comprehend the mystery of the universe, in the ecstasy of love, in the return to the primordial state in which man and woman were not separated from each other, body and soul reunite in the embrace and the cosmos reveals its secret in the ineffable. Turning the longing for union into fulfillment, the climax is the greatest physical joy that one can sense in this world. But it incorporates a spiritual experience as well.



We live on a small planet of the universe where life is sustained by the warm rays of the sun. Life and love are inherently connected. Life exists as a result of love, and love exists as a result of life. We are born for love. We come to this world to sing and dance. We are here to experience joy and sadness. Life is not always easy. Nevertheless, it is a precious gift. So let us celebrate life. It is magical and meaningful because we are here to love and to be loved.



Paul Hartal



July 2006



Interview on the occasion of the Invitational Solo Show at Public Board

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The Secret of the Universe , 2006, is copyrighted material. All rights reserved to Davis Dai and Paul Hartal

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THE SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE





An Interview with Paul Hartal



by



Davis Dai



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Poet and Painter Paul Hartal talks about Art and Science, East and West, Lyrical Conceptualism, Cosmos and the power of Love



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1. After reading your poems and enjoy your paintings, I found the philosophy behind your art works is coincident with Chinese Classical Art Theory. In Chinese Culture, there are two core ideas: a. "The Universe and Human Beings are integrated"; b. "There are pictures in poetry and there are poems in pictures". When did you feel that poetry and paintings are interrelated and what inspired you to realize this?



a. The Unity of Man and the Universe



From the dawn of human memory people asked questions about our place in the universe. We are curious about our origins, where do we come from? Who are we? We would like to know what is our relationship to the stars and galaxies, why are we here and what is our significance in the cosmos? What is the meaning of our existence? Where are we going? Although the answers to these questions and other existential dilemmas are shrouded in mystery, we know that humans and the external world are inseparable. Humankind is an intrinsic part of the universe. Our unity with the galaxies can be seen from the fact that we are made of star dust. All the chemical elements that compose our bodies can be found in outer space. About ninety per cent of a newborn's body consists of water, molecules comprising two atoms of hydrogen and an oxygen atom. The main building element of stars is hydrogen. This chemical element fuels the sun and other stars by generating energy through nuclear fusion. Oxygen is created in the universe mainly by exploding stars known as supernovae. Yet water itself is also present out there, in comets and interstellar clouds. Apart from our own planet, which is covered mostly by oceans, water also has been found in the solar system, on the Moon, Mars and Jupiter's moons. Additional chemical elements in the universe, such as carbon and nitrogen, participate in the making of proteins, chains of amino acids that are building blocks of life. They are manufactured by cells according to specific genetic information. All living cells of animals, plants and viruses contain compounds of nitrogen that combine with other elements in building nucleic acids. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is the genetic material of some viruses and plays an important role in the synthesis of proteins. Deoxiribonucleic acid (DNA) is the chief constituent of the chromosomes that carry genetic information in the form of genes. Most of the genes are identical in humans and animals of the higher evolutionary ladder, and many are common to both animals and plants. However, on a primordial plane of the quantum level life and matter are not separated phenomena. They are manifestations of energy and information. The universe itself can be viewed as a gigantic computer. And when the human mind searches the depths of the universe, it is the mind of the universe in search of its inner depths.



b. Pictures in Poetry and Poems in Pictures



As a painter and poet I explore the magic and mystery of the world through image and word. As an artist serving more than one Muse I am eager to translate my sensory experience into a unified field of expression. Western culture compartmentalizes our sensory experiences and the resulting knowledge from it into specialized fields of studies. Art, literature and science are seen as independent and unrelated fields. The 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes contributed a great deal to this posture in developing the doctrine that matter and mind are completelely severed attributes. For my part it was a long journey to discover that things are interlaced, that the phenomena of the world are connected. One of the major influences that helped me to realize the connectivity of painting and literature was concrete poetry, which uses words as graphic medium. The roots of concrete poetry date back to antiquity. In modern art trends, among others, the Dadaists and Futurists experimented with typographical pattern verse, creating pictures out of letters and words. It seems that the proverb, "a picture is worth a thousand words" was coined by Napoleon and was introduced into common English usage through modern advertising in the 1920s. An ancient Chinese saying put this idea in a more accurate way: A picture's meaning can express ten thousand words". This is a very cogent and valid statement, but its opposite is quite true, too: A word's meaning can express a thousand pictures. In communication both pictures and words can play vital roles, reinforcing each other's meaning. Moreover, just as images can represent and depict observable things in a much more accurate manner than sounds and letters, well-chosen words can do a much better job in expressing abstract concepts and ideational notions than pictures. By extension these specificities parallel in a sense the experience of music, which as a particular medium cannot be described accurately neither by words nor by pictures. In any case, historically, the affiliation of seeing and saying, image and word, was known in the West already to the Romans. In Ars Poetica Horace observed that painting and poetry are similar arts: "Ut pictura poesis".





2. As a Western artist, you traveled to the East to research Eastern Arts many times. What are the differences and similarities between them? What is their common value?



Eastern and Western Art: Difference, Similarity and Value



This is an extremely broad and complex theme and I can offer only some sketchy personal thoughts on it. We have to bear in mind that the Eastern and Western hemispheres are neither places of diametrically opposed homogeneous cultures, nor are they unchanging societies. Nevertheless, global polarization into domains of East and West may help us to make some wide and arguable generalizations.



The development of Western art has been fundamentally influenced by Graeco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. The Greek philosophers stressed the importance of knowledge and the desire to understand the world as a human goal. Yet they also taught the centrality of ethical norms in life. Socrates held that it is better to suffer than to do evil and Plato identified the good with truth and beauty. Aristotle's aesthetic theory of art as imitation exerted an enduring infuence on European art. The combination of the imitation theory with the development of perspective in Italy of the 15th century by Brunelleschi, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Alberti and other Renaissance artists enhanced the triumphant rise of painterly realism as the paragon of excellence in art. One day, four centuries later, Henri Fuseli went to see in London an exhibition of his student and friend, John Constable. The landscapes of Constable were rendered in a highly realistic style and Fuseli, a professor of art at the Royal Academy, was so impressed by a rainy scene that he opened his umbrella in front of the painting.



In contrast to Western realism, Chinese artists by and large aimed at expressing ideas rather than imitating the forms of the material world. For example, a silk painting from the Warring States period shows a phoenix defeating a serpent-shaped beast next to a young woman. The intention of the artist in this work was to convey the idea that good overcomes evil. The image corresponds to Taoist notions of art. Artists in this school maintained that the essence of the picture is not in the composition itself because the idea is devoid of form. Although allegorical art has also existed in the West for centuries, Chinese art transcended the realm of symbolism. It has excelled in creating images of the mind, called xieyi, an aesthetic concept that incorporates abstraction, the exclusion of representational content. However, the phenomenon often precedes the terminology, and the Western notion of abstraction entered the Chinese art vocabulary only in the last decades of the twentieth century. While in the West Christianity inspired the arts, in China Buddhism played a major role in their development. Buddhism arrived in China from its birth place in India in the fourth century, continuing its triumphant journey to Japan, Korea as well as other countries. Under the influence of Buddhism thousands of devotees took up painting as a means to gain merit in a future life. Others became patrons of painters and collectors of art works. The Emperor Hui Tsung (1082-1135) of the Sung Dynasty was a painter himself, as well as an art collector and patron of many artists. During the reign of the Sung Dynasty artists placed the emphasis on the spiritual qualities of painting. In accordance with Buddhist and Taoist aesthetic concepts, they cultivated the artistic ability to reveal the inner harmony of man and nature in their work.



As against the Taoist concern of seeking and expressing the accord between humans and nature, the aim of the Confucianists was to develop moral qualities and establish benevolent relations among persons. Accordingly, Confucianists saw the role of artists in the lofty aspiration of advancing moral and social life through their work. Similarly to pre-modern European art, from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) until the end of the Tang Dynasty in the tenth century, the human figure was the dominant subject matter in Chinese painting. It flourished under the influence of Confucian philosophy as an art promoting moral values and harmonious human relations. The Taoist search for grasping the atmosphere and the rhythm of nature as emotional states began in China in the seventh century. The Taoists painted landscapes in the shuimohua style, monochromatic and sparse images. These landscapes often depicted scenery with mountain and water, known as shanshui in Mandarin. One of the best known artist of the Tang period was Wang Wei. Painter, poet, musician statesman and a devout Buddhist, Wang flourished in the eighth century. He composed his landscapes with deceptive simplicity, applying strong brushstrokes, firm lines contrasted with light ink washes in color. His images were clear, stressing rhythm of design, congruity of details and the integrity of nature. During the An Lushan rebellion, Wang was captured by rebel forces and he tried to avoid serving them by pretending to be deaf.



A defining property of Chinese art is the prevalence of calligraphy. Chinese artists create their work applying brush and ink to silk or paper. Chinese painting is often both painting and poetry, the two are fused into one harmonious art. Unlike Western languages, Chinese is ideographic. Commenting on the uniqueness of Chinese art, Picasso once said, "If I were born Chinese, I would not be a painter but a writer. I'd write my pictures". There are many variations of styles in Chinese calligraphy. Yet it is an enduring and beloved art in China, Japan and Korea, which has a continuous history of thousands of years. Unlike in Western countries, in Eastern cultures there is no actual separation between painting an poetry. Painters of the East are often poets themselves and integrate their verse into their calligraphic paintings. Although occasionally Western painters, such as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) and William Blake (1757-1827), are recognized as great poets as well, they are viewed as anomalous exceptions. Moreover, their painting and poetry are severed art forms, regarded as completely different specificities. Besides, Western culture concerns itself with specialization and therefore it tends to dismiss the creative quality and value of pursuing more than one discipline.



Similarly to the East, artists in the West depicted the human figure, the indoor environment and the landscape in their work at various degrees of realistic representation. In the West, the watershed in the history of realism in art occurred with the invention of the camera. The appearance of photography in the 19th century prompted artists to revise their aesthetics. A new art philosophy emerged based on the premise that the goal of painting is not to compete with photography in creating realistic images of the world but rendering reality itself. In other words, the role of the artist is to show what the camera cannot. Thus, artists should express feelings, emotions, dreams, abstract concepts and transcendental phenomena. Western art is experimental in nature and artists compete with each other in the breakup of traditional canons. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the present, a plethora of new movements cropped up in painting, including Impressionism, Fauvism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Abstraction, Expressionism, Op Art, Pop Art, as well as a long list of others. Although tradition in art seems to hold out in the East, Western art has made considerable inroads into Japan and Korea, and its sway is felt in the last decades in China as well.



More than once I have encountered people who think that art is a totally useless thing, an unecessary peculiarity without any real value. I have a very different opinion: I believe that we need art for our survival. Regardless of where we live, art is a necessity for individuals and communities in the East and West alike. Paintings, sculptures and architecture visualize our feelings and thoughts through history, preserving our memories and heritage. Artists create new ideas, communicate values, strengthen and develop communal identity, stimulate the mind and purify the soul. They show us the beauty of the world and the sorrow of existence. They enhance the quality of life and provide antidotes to the corruption of individual and collective consciousness. A good painting not only can enliven a depressively dull environment, but functions as a therapeutic device. Colours are important environmental concomitants. People who live long periods in gray and colourless environments hallucinate colours and become depressed. Humans are symbol making beings. We are also spiritual souls with creative needs to express the inner life of the collective psyche, the connectivity of the unconscious and conscious mind with other people and its unity with the universe. Expressing our individual and collective dreams, fears, desires and aspirations through art can be a liberating and empowering experience. Thus, along with nature, creativity, imagination and knowledge, art is a form of wisdom, an essential tool of homeostasis, which is idispensable for maintaining our well being and health.



3. Art is to reflect human emotions and thoughts, but science is to study the material world. Why are they connected? What force connects them?



The Connectivity of Art and Science



In our fragmented culture art and science are regarded as completely different activities. Many people even believe that they are polarized disciplines. Art and science have nothing to do with each other, they say, because art concerns itself with the subjective realm of emotions, whereas science investigates the world in an objective manner. Now, mind you, while there is some justification of this argument, a thorough look at the relationship of art and science reveals that the dichotomy does not really hold water. Scientists, for example, involve emotional and irrational traits in their work, including curiosity, intuition, surmise, insight and belief. Also, we have to take into consideration that the process through which observed facts are formulated into a hypothesis is an irrational one. It is not amenable to rational planning. The rise of a theory is a creative act that transcends logic and control. Now, let us leave aside the scientist and consider the artist. Mind you, artists on their part apply not only feelings and emotions to their work but also logic and rational thought. Making a good design for a luminously creative composition is a cognitive process involving both inspiration and perspiration. Art in fact is an entirely concrete approach for the exploration of the world because real knowledge can be achieved only by the experience of the senses and art is based on sensorious realization. Analysis of the creative processes of artists and scientists reveals that there is art in science and science in art.



The most precise scientific tool is mathematics. Yet an examination of mathematics shows that, without empirical evidence, it is built on the irrational belief in the existence of statistical averages and hierarchical infinities, as well as on such fundamental inconsistencies as the rule that allows to multiply by zero but forbids to divide by it. In 1931 Kurt Gödel published his famous Incompleteness Theorem that aimed the lens of mathematics at itself. He showed that within the rigid logical system of arithmetics there exist axiomatic statements that can neither be proved nor disproved. Thus, the Incompleteness Theorem undermines the aspirations of science to devise a set of axioms from which all the phenomena of the world can be deduced. A few years prior to the publication of the Incompleteness Theorem, the nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg found that it is impossible to measure simultaneously both the exact position and momentum of subatomic particles. This so called Uncertainty Principle, along with the Incompleteness Theorem, dooms to failure the scientific ideal that strives for the discovery of all the hidden secrets of the cosmos. It suggests that reducing the universe into a simple and ultimate mathematical formula is an impossible dream. In the light of these considerations it appears that the world of the scientist and the mathematician is not closer to reality than that of the artist. The attempt to eliminate subjectivity from the domain of science and mathematics does not make the world more objective. It leads only to a misconstrued model of reality, to an unscientific science. Granted that mathematics is a highly logical discipline, it is still a symbolic universe. It is an invention of the human mind. And the phenomena of the world cannot be reduced to mathematical abstractions, because the whole is more than the sum total of its parts. The cardinal concepts of physics-- matter, energy, space, time and quantity--are not the things in themselves but abstract metaphors. Science and art share much more in common than it would meet the eye at first glance. They are both symbolic and interacting universes through which humanity structures and interprets reality.



Artists, mind you, have made significant contributions through history to the development of science. For example, during the Renaissance, Florentine artists-- such as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca and Uccello-- laid down the foundations for the geometrical system of perspective, the representation of three dimensional space on the two dimensional surface of the picture plane. Leonardo da Vinci-- painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, anatomist, writer and musician--among other things, provided Galileo with arrays of important ideas, including the arithmetical theory of infinity. And here is another case in point: In many respects, especially from a philosophical and psychological point of view, the colour theories of the Romantic poet and painter Wolfgang Johann von Goethe are superior to those of Isaac Newton.



Also, since the late middle ages European artists were trail blazers of optical research. In order to improve the painterly verisimilitude of their compositions, in the 1400s they began to use lenses and mirrors. In the seventeenth century, Velasquez placed sets of mirrors in his studio and studied the effects of light entering dark rooms. Decades before Newton's Opticks appeared in 1704, Vermeer (1632-1675) investigated the properties of light, aiding his eyes and brush strokes with concave mirrors, lenses, and the camera obscura. The latter was a filmless photographic chamber. Furthermore, the case of Adelbert Ames may serve as a noteworthy example from the twentieth century of how artists contribute to the advancement of science. In his efforts to improve his artistic skills as a painter, Ames studied ophthalmology, developed the science of physiological optics at Dartmouth College and discovered in the process an ocular disorder called aniseikonia. So, as we see, science and art cross fertilize each other. Many technological inventions--among them photography, motion pictures, television and computers--grew out from the intricate lattice of collaboration between artists and scientists.



4. The theory that supports your art works is Lyrical Conceptualism. Could you explain the key points of it? What is the significance of this school?



Lyrical Conceptualism : LyCo Art



A new idea on the periodic table of art, Lyrical Conceptualism, or Lyco Art, is a holistic theory of creativity concerned with inclusive culture and the human condition. As a broad theory and practice of creativity, Lyco Art engages the entire scale of formative energies through transformative vision in which aesthetics evolves as ethics.



Lyrical Conceptualism blends the rational with the intuitive and the emotional. In the forefront of its philosophy stands the interlacement of the amorphous and the geometrical, the formless and the literal, the poetic and the exact. The unformed and the structured interact in Dionysian chaos and Aplollonian order, evolving constantly through the dynamic and fluid union of memory, imagination, feeling, and reason. Lyco Art emphasises the interaction of emotion and intellect, where the passion of logic and logic of passion are inexorably interwoven through the voyage of consciousness. It rejects the notion that art is an ivory tower, the credo that art is only for artists. It views art and life as intertwined realities. The criteria for the greatness of art cannot be separated from the constructive participation of the artist in the pursuit of improving the human condition, from the ongoing struggle for human survival. These are imperative moral quests, endowed with harmonies of grace and beauty. Consequently in Lyco Art aesthetics rises as ethics.



The genesis of Lyco Art can be traced back to A Manifesto on Lyrical Conceptualism, which I published in the spring of 1975 in Canada. It appeared shortly after my solo exhibition of paintings at the Galerie Jacquie on Rue Stanley in Montreal. A poetic declaration illustrated with black and white photos of my paintings and collages, the Manifesto stated, among other things, that for the author art is a mode of inquiry and a manner of living. It placed a new element on the periodic table of art, "a painted metaphor; the past machine of a perpetual second, the fossil emotion of an infinite longing, the magic desire evolving on the broken axis of the comressed space, reflected in the form of inner, personal landscapes." It called for turning the force of art into an oasis of redemption creating qualities of environmental enrichment for the sake of protection against the dangers of mass education, pollution and violence, as well as the loss of individual and family territorialism in our mechanical, uniform and overorganized society. It urged artists to use the power of art for the emotional and intellectual development of humanity and for confronting material and spiritual evils. It stated that art is not a medium to transit the visible, but a substance that renders it into visible metaphysics. At the time when the manifesto saw light, Minimalists and Conceptual artists turned their back on traditional painting and sculpture, declaring them obsolete junks. Some of them even demanded the closing of art museums. I regarded this tendency of aesthetic withdrawal as part of the alienation syndrome, the rejection of historical continuity as an integral component of individual and collective identity. In reaction to this, the manifesto proclaimed that we have to "go back to beauty and integrate it with an other eternal need, the perpetual search for meaning and escape from chaos".



One of the central themes of Lyrical Conceptualism concerns the relationship of art and science. It maintains that there is art in science and science in art. Science and art are seen as symbolical systems through which humanity structures and interprets reality. The interlacement of the undefined and the exact in the creative process gives rise to an aesthetic theory in which the boundaries between art and science become fuzzy or entirely disappear. In contrast to the traditional belief, Lyrical Conceptualism does not regard emotion and intellect to be at odds with one another. For, passion and excitement can increase reasoning power and generate insights. Lyrical Conceptualism does not polerize science and art. Rather it involves the use of technology by the artist in the creation of beauty, resulting in works that seek to unify science and art, emotion and logic, intelligence and soul. We live in an electronic environment in which science-based technology determines our lifestyle. Consequently, art must concern itself with science and technology. However, science and technology should not be our our masters but servants. The present human condition calls for the rise of a new, inclusive form of culture in which art should play a prominent role. We need the imagination, the intuition, the insight, the lateral reasoning faculty, as well as the human values that are excluded from the rigid methodology of science, but are intrinsic to art. Science, mind you, pretends to be morally neutral and has no built-in ethical norms to protect us from its abusive or inimical applications.



Throughout history art moved between the opposing poles of the rational and the emotional, swinging on a pendulum of the creative process. Thus, the aesthetic styles of the Greco-Roman world and of the Renaissance were basically harmonious, geometrical and conceptual. On the other hand, Gothic and Baroque art were characterized by sinuosity, passion and lyricism. Similarly, in Modern Art, Impressionism, Fauvism, Dada and Surrealism derive mainly from the irrational impulses of the human psyche, whereas movements such as Cubism, De Stijl, Constructivism, or Geometric Abstraction are more related to the rational realm of creativity. Lyco Art as a new trend creates a conscious bridge between the irrational and rational elements of the creative process, moving freely and selectively along the continuum of the passion of logic and the logic of passion, in accordance with the artist's needs and intentions. Far from being an aesthetic strait-jacket, Lyco Art gives the artist thorough creative freedom.



Tearing up the boundaries between different disciplines is part of the Lyrical Conceptualist experience. The idea of experimental art as an interdisciplinary endeavour expanding into science has led to collaborative projects in various fields. One of these involves the connectivity of art to cosmology. The publication of my research findings in journals like Leonardo, Ylem and Pulsar in this area drew the attention of NASA and in 1994 I was invited to exhibit my visionary paintings at the Space Center in Houston. Another field of investigation concerns mathematics. Explorations with fractals and the unifying concept of symmetry, for example, have turned to be especially significant in linking geometry with art. I also collaborated with Indian researchers at Shivaji University in a holistic anthropological study relating communication to rural development in the Raichur district. In additional pursuits I also have ventured into the field of Artificial Intelligence, devising an Aesthetic Cybernetic Test (ACT) for probing through art the cognitive faculties of advanced computers. This sort of work led among other things to collaboration with the renowned writer and IBM computer scientist Clifford Pickover. My ideas on the mystery of time and lyrical conceptualism with examples of drawings can be found in Pickover books on scientific visualization, among them Mazes for the Mind, Chaos in Wonderland and Time.



I am a poet and painter but I don't see these activities as separate pursuits. Western culture is fragmented and in its compartmentalized vision, poetry and painting are completely different art forms. In my vision it is all to the contrary: Poetry and Painting are not separate pursuits but specific expressions flowing from the same fountainhead of creativity. Eastern cultures understand this. Painting and poetry in the Orient are often seen as identical. In my journeys across China, Japan and Korea I was delighted to discover the unity of these arts. Moreover, in April 2004 I exhibited my work at Hanseo University Art Museum in Seoul under the title, Painting and Poetry. In addition to the catalogue published by the university, I also presented a collection of my Love Poems as part of the exhibition. In China, Japan and Korea the unity of painting and poetry are taken for granted. In these cultures calligraphy is an integral part of imagery rendered with skilled brush strokes on silk and paper. In the West, visual verse or concrete poetry emerges as a composite genre, blurring of the boundaries between language and picture. It is an exerimental art form that bridges different disciplines. By making patterns and pictures from words, it mediates between painting and literature. Besides the possibility of creating intellectually stimulating and eye-catching typographical images, concrete poems enhance their meaning by the multi-dimensionality of the composition in which the whole is greater than the sum total of its parts. The earliest known example of a pattern poem is a 23 centuries old piece by the Greek poet Simmias. He produced out of words an egg shaped poem. In the 19th century Lewis Carol in Alice in Wonderland used pictorial typography. In the 20th century Apollinaire and members of Dada and the Futurismo movements as well as others experimented with this genre.



Although Lyco Art is more a formative strategy than a stylistic genre, images associated with this trend can express visually the interaction of the dialectic properties of the poetic and the exact. Paintings, for example, might use coded colours and forms corresponding to feelings and thoughts. Accordingly, warm hues and amorphous shapes might reflect emotional states, whereas cold colors and geometric forms represent logic and reason.



Throughout the years I have shown my ouevre in New York, Montreux, Budapest, Madrid, Tokyo, Seoul and other cities. The first Lyrical Conceptualist show in Europe was held in Paris in the 1978. My paintings were displayed in several galleries in the French capital. They were also included in the 45th exhibition of the Surindependants at the Musee du Luxembourg. I won various awards, among them the Prix de Paris. The critic Roger Delneufcourt for Le Nouveau Journal wrote that as a style the artist's Lyrical Conceptualism is characterized by "partly abstract or geometric forms, sharp colorism and a personal rhythm". In the summer of 1979 Tom Konyves published an article about my work in The Montreal Star. In it he also wrote about the Lyrical Conceptualist Society organizing an International Concrete Poetry exhibition in Montreal. The show was held in December at the Vehicule Living Art Museum and presented on television as well. Among the artists engaged in long discussions of Lyrical Conceptualism were Kara Szathmary of Canada, Billy Curmano of the USA and Balint Szombathy from Hungary. Szombathy also wrote in Hungarian numerous critical articles on Lyco Art for Es, Kritika, Uj Forras, as well as other forums. The Italian critic Barbara Costa of the University of Salerno sees my oeuvre in the context of "Nuova Aeropittura".



I have met and exhibited along with the renowned Korean painter and author Cho Sang-Hyun in Seoul and Montreal. Reviewing in the May 23, 1998, issue of The Korea Herald a joint exhibit of "East meets West" at the Dansung Gallery in Insa-dong, Edward Kim noted that the photo-realism of Cho Sang-hyun and the expressionism of Paul Hartal complement each other. "East meets West is a remarkable synthesis of colors, ideas and styles. While Cho's works look as if they were taken with a camera, Hartal's paintings are amorphous and strange, providing a sharp, but refreshing contrast to Cho's detailed realism". The philosophy behind Cho's work is Blankism, points out Kim: An art based on Confucian and Korean ideals, spiritual and metaphysical space, "a reaction to Westernization and globalization, which leads to a loss of uniqueness and identity". Kim observes that both lyrical conceptualism and blankism, respect the past by blending tradition and innovation. "Lyrical conceptualism challenges the technology-oriented world, which is destroying the environment." The reviewer describes the style of lyrical conceptualism this way: Using powerful, bold chromatic colors in a chaos of amorphous forms, Hartal's art appeals to the intellect, intuition and emotions with geometric elements representing logic, shapeless forms symbolizing the creative process, and warm and cold colors indicating feelings.



According to the New York art critic Elizabeth Exler, "Paul Hartal' documented international repertoire of exhibitions are the proving grounds of his vision". In "Paul Hartal: A Manifesto on Lyrical Conceptualism", published in the magazine Manhattan Arts, November-December 1992, she writes: "This Canadian artist has ushered in a philosophy that proceeds with many layered viewpoints, an elaborate dialogue between paint and concepts". She selects two works of mine for illustration. One of them is the ecological painting Just Trying to Breathe, "a chromatic and powerful tertiumquid between Munch and Hundertwasser. The landscape is cataclysmic, the ghoulish figures haunt the architecture in a circuitous dance. The picture's impact liberates a wealth of psychological responses and environmental concerns. The color is skillfully handled to interpret agitation and apprehension." The other example is Encounters, an oil from the Mind in the Universe series. Although this painting is dissimilar in its color scheme, writes Exler, "its similarity lies in Hartal's consistent approach to individual and public dilemmas. It seems to be a sophisticated puzzle of life, which has been reduced to disorienting planes and contrapposto angles". And she concludes: "This setting of condensed space with the puppet-like figures and heads, is Hartal's plea to, 'humanize the environment' ".



In May 2001 Alisa Barstow reported in the Russian portal Life Style that Elizaveta Berezovskaya exhibits her tapestry in Moscow at the Aidan Gallery. What drew particularly my attention to her work was that Barstow described Berezovskaya as a Cambridge University graduate of art, "influenced by the Moscow school of lyrical conceptualism". The artist based her project, entitled Chronicle, on the ancient Chinese Taoist philosophical notion wherein one follows natural changes as the basic guiding principle on the path to perfection. Space and time, the interaction of man, earth, heaven and fate within the progression of nature provide a complete picture of being and woven into the tapestry of life. Life Style also presents the textile works of Yekaterina Nesterova, another Moscow exponent of lyrical conceptualism.



In the summer of 2001 I received a letter from the art historian A.P. Diatchenko, written also on behalf of L.N. Bakayutova, director of the A.S. Popov Museum in St. Petersburg. They requested permission for translating my treatises from English to Russian. Diatchenko said that the "theatises on the aesthetic interrelation between science and art are characterized by the richness of thought and the daring novelty of approach". He pointed out that the monograph Painted Melodies is of great value for art historians to draw parallels between Wassily Kandinsky's ideas presented in his book, On the Spiritual in Art, and my aesthetic theories.



I published Painted Melodies in 1983 as a companion volume of my my solo show at the J. Yahouda Meir Gallery in Montreal. The central part of the Painted Melodies project involved the revisualization and reconstruction of the art works that inspired Mussorgsky in composing his famous opus, "Pictures at an Exhibition". The paintings that Mussorgsky saw were the works of his artist friend, Victor Hartmann. However, there is no visual record in existence as to what actually Mussorsky saw. Consequently what I did was an imaginary reconstruction of Hartmann's paintings from the music of Mussorgsky.



Balint Szombathy found Painted Melodies praiseworthy and published in Budapest a critical review of it, entitled "Melody and Scene", in the literary journal Es, November 9, 1990. Is it possible--and how-- to depict the melody, that is to say the musical experience in the visual arts?. More precisely: is it possible to draw or to paint a particular opus of music; to transplant a medium that expands in time into a medium that exists in space? How can one represent music in the visual arts? After all, musical communication expresses but does not depict. Unlike Kandinsky, Mondrian and others, I did not want to use the classic analogue of colour and tone. Instead, and in accordance with Wittgenstein's observation that ' form is the possibility of structure', I evolved the investigation to exclusive form definitions. In this interpretation, melody becomes a horizontal arrangement, whereas harmony turns into a vertical one, a set of coordinate-formation. On this structural shell are built the mainly intuitive and arbitrary impressions, as partly figurative and partly abstract visual compositions.



5. Which art works, paintings or poems of yours best present your thoughts?



Painting and Poetry are best understood in the light of each other



There is no singular work of art-- painting or poem-- that I would select as presenting best my thoughts. I view my oeuvre as a unified whole. My painting and poetry are best understood in the light of each other.



6. One of the major themes of your works is love, where does love come from, God or the mysterious universe?



The Redeeming Force of Love



Wearing many colors, love rides many trains. Each love is different. The word has many connotations. Motherly love, for example, is quite different from infatuation and romantic love, and these have very little to do with the love of cinema, baseball or chocolate pudding.



The ancient Greeks distinguished between three types of love: Sexual desire (eros), friendship (philia) and selfess devotion (agape). Plato contemplated love as the will of the imperfect to attain perfection. Stripped from material embodiment and intertwined with grace and radiance, he envisaged love in its absolute condition as the abstract idea of beauty itself. He held that love bridged the material world with the ideal world.



The ancient Romans saw love as basically a two-pronged phenomenon of desire (amor) and care (caritas). In the Middle Ages the poet Dante Alighieri immortalized his love for the beautiful Beatrice. She died young and the poet suffered enormously.In the Divine Comedy, Dante expressed the idea that to suffer because of love paves the way to the renunciation of the self for a loftier value, which transcends the egotism of the individual. Amore for Dante is courtly and mystical. He maintained that the power of love directs the lover to a nobler life. It is also the ultimate force in the universe that moves the sun and the stars. At the end of the epic poem, Dante and Beatrice meet in Paradise. Struck by transcendent radiance, they both stand in rapture at the throne of God. They understand that love for the Creator will consummate human love in the eternal quest for happiness.



We live in a participatory and dynamic universe, which continually evolves. We are created by it, but we also create it. The universe is the greater aspect of the Self, the outer extent of our inner sphere. And it is imbued with love. All its creations are poems of flame and passion, dancing with the the music of love. We are an integral part of the cosmos and our genes form arcane musical compositions. This is not only a poetic idea. Scientific research has found that the genetic information carried by the chain-like molecules of nucleic acids--DNA or RNA--can be transcribed into analogous musical notes. When these are played on the violin and other instruments, they sound as complex, stunning and poignant musical compositions. Thus, the universe has an intrinsic emotional component, which is hidden from us at first glance. However, love is built into the fabric of the cosmos. This is again not merely a metaphysical statement without empirical evidence. Mind you, love is an attractive and binding force that exists even on the atomic and molecular level. Water molecules, for example, are created by the attraction and binding of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.



Love is both an innate faculty and an acquired emotional response: Nature and nurture. We are born for love but we also have to learn it. There are numerous ingredients in love, including respect, care, responsibility. faith, trust, modesty, forgiveness, courage, affection, passion and sacrifice. Life and love are inexorably interwoven. Yet love is not identical with .. This is an important observation, because even the great Freud was slow to realize that neighbourly love was not based on the carnal instinct. His original notion of the libido neglects to take into account that love is a social phenomenon. Consequently, it misrepresents sexual violence as an expression of love. However in reality, rape is never an expression of love. While genuine love always builds, rape always destroys. Rape is never an expression of true love but a horrible crime. It is a selfish act of violence, motivated by a combination of lust and power, in which the perpetrator treats the victim as a soulless object.



. is not even an exclusive strategy of survival and proliferation that nature has invented. The dandelion, for example, has rejected . from its life cycle. It multiplies without fertilization by dispersing its tufted seeds in the wind. Besides, nature features myriad variations of sexual expressions of the life force. Mind you, there is no sharp dividing line between the sexual traits of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Blue-green algae probably had invented . long before animals existed.



What is the origin of love? God or the mysterious universe? In my opinion there are no definite answers to these questions. For my part, God is unknowable. What can we say about God? Is the Divine Creator an infinite and almighty force, a transcendental entity beyond the existence of the physical universe? This is a reasonable possibility but devoid of support with solid empirical evidence. Moreover, it is also possible to contemplate God as a reality that is bigger than us, an entity of infinite attributes, and similarly to Spinoza and Einstein, to identify the Creator with nature and the cosmos. Where does love originate from? From God, or from the mysterious universe? If we accept the concept of the identity of God and the universe, then the answer to this question is that there is no real dilemma here. Nevertheless, these arguments do not imply that God is distant or impersonal. The Postmodern adaptation of the old nihilistic credos regarding the death of God and the careless universe are unappealing and ugly non sequiturs. Atheism is a philosophically untenable posture, because the absense of evidence is not evidence of absence.



It is truely astonishing that, compared to the immensely vast ocean of the unknown, so little human knowledge gives us such tremendous manipulative capacity in transforming our physical environment. At the same time, although I admire the accomplishments of science and technology, I do not believe that in the future these will be able to solve every problem. As a matter of fact I tend to believe that science and technology are perilous forces that endanger our very existence through environmental destruction and uncontrollable weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, if faith can bring salvation to Man, it is not faith in the redeeming power of science and technology. In spite of their greatness and glory, science and technology can improve only the material conditions of our existence.



The notion of redemption by faith leads us to dilemmas about after life, to a transcendental sphere beyond the scope and range of mainstream scientific investigation. However, life happens in space and time, in the sensory sphere of here and now, and this prompts one to wonder whether salvation is possible in this world? My answer to this question is affirmative. Yes, I believe that in this world we can have real salvation and it comes through the redeeming power of true and unconditional love. Humans are capable of affirming their loftiest qualities by selfless devotion, kindness, compassion, care and sacrifice. We are born for love. The meaning of life is intrinsically bound up with it. Love is a wondrous healing force. Studies show that a simple hug is one of the most effective therapies that are available to us. Insufficient affection, the absence of proper emotional bond may lead to severe neuroses and psychoses in the later stages of life. Most humans remain touch-starved throughout their lives. Communication, expressions of affection and tenderness, warmth and care are essential for our physical and emotional well-being, even more important than ..



The new scientific paradigm envisions the cosmos as a quantum universe in which particles are not permanent objects but excited states of the background void. In the quantum universe every part is linked to everything else. In accordance with Einstein's theory of special relativity of 1905, quantum physics supports the theory that subatomic particles can be created out of energy and dissolve back into energy. Subatomic particles are created out of energy fields between the galaxies and in black holes and they are metamorphosed back into energy systems. These particles are rather excited states of the ultimate void of the quantum vacuum. They seem to vibrate like the strings of a violin. These throbbing oscillations occur throughout the universe and they possess musical qualities. They play the music of the spheres. They resonate with harmonious melodies in atoms, molecules and galaxy formations. As the universe dances, they sing the songs of love.



Although intellectually we fail to comprehend the mystery of the universe, in the ecstasy of love, in the return to the primordial state in which man and woman were not separated from each other, body and soul reunite in the embrace and the cosmos reveals its secret in the ineffable. Turning the longing for union into fulfillment, the climax is the greatest physical joy that one can sense in this world. But it incorporates a spiritual experience as well.



We live on a small planet of the universe where life is sustained by the warm rays of the sun. Life and love are inherently connected. Life exists as a result of love, and love exists as a result of life. We are born for love. We come to this world to sing and dance. We are here to experience joy and sadness. Life is not always easy. Nevertheless, it is a precious gift. So let us celebrate life. It is magical and meaningful because we are here to love and to be loved.



Paul Hartal



July 2006



Interview on the occasion of the Invitational Solo Show at Public Board

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The Secret of the Universe , 2006, is copyrighted material. All rights reserved to Davis Dai and Paul Hartal

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