酷我-北美枫

[星子]

Poetry and Painting

By Paul Hartal



What is poetry? What does it mean to you? Where do your inspirations come from?

Literary tradition describes poetry as an artistic form that conveys meaning through the aesthetic and evocative qualities of language. Poetry pleases, moves, and elevates by word choice and word form, the interaction of style, pattern, sound, image and idea. Great poetry expresses heightened thought, intensified emotion, concentrated observation and soaring imagination. The towering construct of the poetic diction rises as a memorable experience wrapped and ornamented in such artistic devices as simile, metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia and melody.

I read somewhere that poetry is the frame of life. I think it is rather the other way around: Life is the frame of poetry. Let me go even further: Life is identical with poetry. In my vision it certainly extends beyond language.



The word poetry derives from the Greek poesis, which means making and creating. We live in a creative universe. Nature runs on metaphors. It is all full of symbols. From flowers and human anatomy rendered in Fibonacci sequences (made famous in Dan Brown's mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code) to the double helix of the DNA, that endows with a genetic code all living cells to replicate, nature reveals its mathematical organization and metaphors.



The sun is a giant nuclear reactor that converts hydrogen into helium by means of a proton-proton fusion chain reaction, producing cleaner energy than the human fission nuclear plants on earth. The universe is an undecipherable computer of an imaginably colossal cosmos. Through infinite cycles the stars burn throughout its vast space, explode and collapse and rise from their ashes like the legendary phoenix. The universe breathes. It is a living organism.



And the world is a totally pristine verse. It manifests itself not only in the music of the rainbow, the infidelity of the pen or the shadow of onomatopoeia, but in the very identity of reality and poetry. An airplane is a flying poem, the triumph of human imagination and daring defying gravity. The wonder and magic of television involves the incomprehensible fact that we carry all the broadcasted programs within ourselves. They actually go and cross through our body. In the future we might be able to watch these electromagnetic waves as programs without an actual TV set.



Another parallel marvel concerns the astonishing digitization of the human experience. The resulting cyberspace is an enormous ocean of uncanny consciousness interacting with the mysterious wisdom of the seemingly unconscious machine. The origins of the mathematical binary code allowing the computer to operate are attributed to the philosopher Leibniz. According to legend, in the invention of the binary system Leibniz was inspired by the Taoist I Ching: The idea that all things arise from the interaction of opposing qualities of Ying and Yang, light and dark, good and bad, female and male, the dichotomy of this or that. In navigating through the ocean of cyberspace we move between elementary bits and the infinitely complex world of a mysteriously alien form of intelligence.



If you still wonder about the evidence for claiming that the universe is a poet let me say only this: The belief that we are different and separate from our physical environment is an illusion. We are in every respect an integral part of nature. When humans write poetry it is cosmic consciousness in action: The universe writes its poems.



In our compartmentalized culture we separate sharply between disciplines. Accordingly, in the first glance, poetry has nothing to do, for example, with mathematics, physics, biology, or geography. Contemporary scholars stress and highlight the specificities of poetry. They segregate it from music, film, dance, architecture, painting, or even from the novel. Poetry of course is not the only genre which is kept separated from other disciplines. Among other reasons, this seems to be an enduring legacy of Aristotle's credo that one thing cannot be another. Now, Aristotle is one of my favorite philosophers, however, I have a book shelf that humbly contradicts him. For, apart from being the wonderful host of an array of interesting tomes, I also can use the book shelf as an aquarium board, or as a table, or as a chair, as well as other things.



I maintain that all forms of human creativity are poetry. The arts and sciences are semiotic systems, symbolic constructs through which humanity investigates, explores and structures reality. In my view mathematics is a highly imaginative language of abstract metaphors whose protagonists are integers, fractions, fractals, triangles, circles, as well as other invented things. Mind you, numbers-- including zeroes-- usually don't grow on trees. Even the basic concepts of physics, such as space, time, matter and atom are abstract metaphors, imaginative interpretations of the world.



So I believe in the identity of life and poetry. Inspirations in my writing come from a variety of sources. I see the world as a mysterious place, full of magic and wonder. Life is a precious gift, in spite of all its hardships and tragedies. I find inspiration in the excitement and the sorrow of existence, the beauty and ugliness of the world, in grand events and in trivial things. Politics, history, art, science and philosophy can also serve as subject matter for my verse. Some aspects in my oeuvre are influenced by ironic traits and humorous moods. Yet the central focus of my work concerns the realm of relations and emotions, particularly the genre of love poetry. So for my part, the heart of poetry is the poetry of the heart.









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How to write a good poem? What poems you like most? Who is your favorite poet?




How to write a good poem?



I don't believe that there is a truly reliable formula for writing good poems. Education, professional training, literary skills are of course important, but talent cannot be taught. Besides, aesthetic judgment is not universal. People have the right to disagree about the poetic quality of a poem.

What poems you like most?



I prefer short and inspirational works. I enjoy the flight of imagination, finding intriguing ideas expressed in beautiful words, the wealth and bounteousness of language, the rhythm, melody and pattern of stanzas. I like particularly love poems and philosophical ideas expressed in poetic form.

Who is your favorite poet?

It would be unfair to single out one poet out of so many favourites. It is much easier to come up with a favourite quotation: "And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives the airy nothing a local habitation and a name"; Theses, A Midsummer Nights Dream, by William Shakespeare. Among my admired poets are Dante, Heine, Pushkin, William Blake, Matsuo Basho, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Leah Goldberg and Irving Layton. My favourite Chinese poets include Du Fu, Li Po and Wang Wei. Unfortunately (although I try to learn Mandarin), I cannot enjoy them in their original language. My mother tongue is Hungarian. Being exposed in my youth to the emotional excitement, to the rhythm, form and music of the language through the work of such poets as Sandor Petofi, Janos Arany, Endre Ady, Attila Jozsef and Miklos Radnoti, was a remarkable formative experience. I find that history and biographical background are necessary to the understanding of a poetic oeuvre and they enhance its meaning. Petofi's poetry, for example, can be really appreciated only in the light of the "spring of nations", the revolutions of 19th century history. Both Petofi and Radnoti had a mysterious premonition of their fate. They predicted and described their own violent death. Petofi vanished in 1849 on the battle field of Segesvar and Radnoti was murdered by Nazi guards near the village Abda in the end of the Second World death. In 1946 Radnoti's body was exhumed from a mass grave by his lover, soul mate and devoted wife. Love transcends death. In the pocket of the poet's trench coat she found a notebook of his last poems. Written for her, the poet literally was talking to his beloved wife from the grave.



How do you view the difference between painting and poetry?


More than five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci entered into a stinging debate with a bunch of pompous poets who degraded painting as a mechanical art. Defending the primacy of art, Leonardo—painter, architect, scientist, and a genius of the high Renaissance--snapped: “If you call painting dumb poetry the painter may call poetry blind painting”. He argued that a good painter can provide a more intelligible and beautiful sense experience than a poet because painting satisfies the eye whereas poetry appeals to the ear and seeing is superior to hearing.

In the 18th century the playwright and philosopher Gotthold Lessing described the intrinsic difference between painting and poetry in terms of the distinction between image and word. He rejected the ancient belief that these two arts are in fact similar, or as the Roman poet Horace put it: Ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry). Lessing also pointed out that the domain of painting is space while the domain of poetry is time.

Translating a poem exactly into another language is quite an impossible task because of the unique nature of every vernacular, their peculiar mannerisms and idioms, their distinct sounds, rhythms, intonations and musicality. Hence reconstructing a verse through painting appears to be even more an inconceivable assignment. Consider, for example, these lines:

“Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day” (Lord Byron, Darkness);

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while pondered, weak and weary” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven);

“‘Sincerity’ graved on your youth” (Amy Lowell, Azure and Gold);

How could a painter depict a morning that brings no day? Or describe as clearly as Poe does a mental and physical state at night? And what is the visual equivalent of “’Sincerity graved on your youth”? These lines undoubtedly demonstrate the distinct nature and shining aloofness of poetry, the versatility and expressive uniqueness of words.

On the other hand, painting as an art form is unique, too. It can portray astonishingly beautiful or ugly people, or show breathtakingly magnificent or depressingly dull landscapes and still lives and other visual phenomena, which defy exact verbal description. Generally speaking, objects of the visual world can be represented in painting more accurately than in words. However, poetry has the upper hand in describing emotional states and mental events. A comparison of these two art forms reveals that in many ways both poetry and painting resist conversion. They mutually defy transference into each other.

Thus, the main underlying difference between painting and poetry stems from their medium specificities. The visible properties of the world comprise the essential subjects of painting. A painting is a frozen picture in time, presented on a two dimensional surface. Poetry on the other hand is a verbal composition, an emotional or mental event moving through linear time. Reading a poem is a linear experience progressing through time. Its length can be measured by the clock. However, the duration of viewing a painting is not a time-determined linear experience.

Painters compose with form and color. They might employ special technical skills and styles to represent visual forms in perspective, special light effects, optical illusions, textured details or other painted features. Although they may have overlapping analogues, these painted visual elements nevertheless are entirely different from the metric lines, rhymes, stanzas, odes and sonnets, or other verbal artistic devices that constitute the arsenal of the poet.

A poem consists of words. A painting on the other hand is a two dimensional image of the three dimensional world. Yet not all paintings fall within this category. Some abstract art might attempt to express in visual language, sensations, feelings, ideas and concepts, or musical qualities. Both poetry and painting are semiotic systems of signs and symbols that communicate messages. They are both concerned with ontological enigmas involving the existential question of how real is real. For example, in poetry the verbal description of a human figure, or a blooming orchard, will conjure up elusive, vaguely defined mental images, vis-à-vis painting wherein these subjects can be expressed with visual clarity.

Unlike in poetry, in painting form is bound up with content. This holds particularly true of abstract art. In abstract art form and content unite and become identical. Ideally, abstraction in art represents nothing, except its own presence. However, humans are symbol makers. All art is conceptual and communicates something. And abstract artists load their compositions with a variety of meanings. One of the great pioneers of the genre, Vassily Kandinsky, for example, wanted to express through abstract painting visual harmonies equivalent to mathematical form and music. Following Kandinsky’s lead, Piet Mondrian developed a rigid vocabulary of flat geometrical grid in primary colors of red, yellow and blue as well as black and white, analogous to musical rhythms. His aim was to create an art that mediates between subject and object, the individual and the universal, the mystical unity between man and cosmos.

Philosophers such as Kant and Schopenhauer devoted a great deal of their time to the problem of differentiating between the world of real existence and its appearance. They made a distinction between the thing in itself, the noumenon, and its perceived appearance through the senses, the phenomenon.

It seems that we cannot authentically know noumena. Instead, we can only interpret and represent them as phenomena, through sense experience and conceptual analysis. We are locked inside our body and so we cannot know really much about the existence of things outside. In fact, we do not know really much even about the inner life of our own body. In any case, to know how a tree or bird experiences the world we should turn into a tree or bird.

I think that even inanimate objects have their own life. They are built from atoms and molecules that attract or repulse one another. They are dynamic systems of living energy endowed with memory. The light knows how to travel in a straight line. A stone looks motionless and lifeless but it is in fact an astonishing arena of dancing particles full of vitality and life celebrating the poetry of nature. It is made of atoms that are highly animated and set into constant motion by ingrained cosmic information manifested in physical forces. It has no blood circulation or nervous system like mammals have. But this does not mean that a stone cannot have a dormant consciousness of its own. Both our own human realm of the conscious and the unconscious are rooted in the world of atoms because, like stones and everything else physical in the universe, we are also made of atoms.

It is possible to argue that on a hierarchical scale of ontological levels, painting is closer to the world of the noumenon, the real thing in itself, than poetry. Accordingly, the proverb that a picture is worth ten thousand words rings with truth. Yet the worth of a picture cannot be measured in words, or in money. The magnificent Biblical frescoes of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, for example, are priceless and ineffable, and so is the timeless play of light in the geometrically organized space of a Vermeer painting,

It also should be noted that the proverb, ‘a picture is worth ten thousand words’, is a reversible adage: For, a word can also worth ten thousand pictures. Words can describe pictures and pictures can illustrate words. They can complement, enhance and synergize each other, but they can never entirely replace each other. Painting is a pictorial and visual medium, poetry is verbal and auditory. How one is supposed to capture on the canvas the sound of “O”, or the sound of a conjugated verb? And then there are feelings, emotions, and sensations, nuances of meaning and abstract concepts. These cannot be expressed by means of figurative realism. Perhaps, a great artist might succeed in expressing them through symbolic compositions, but not without sacrificing clarity. All art forms are metaphorical and ambiguity is built into their fabric and essence.

Words have an advantage over pictures in their ability to represent a wider scale and range of physiological processes. While due to its medium limits painting primarily explores the visual experience, poetry can describe other sense perceptions as well. Apart from our eyes and ears the world engages us by means of other organs. Thus, special nerve endings in the skin equip us with a sense of touch, oral receptor neurons allow us to have a sense of taste and the olfactory nerves enable us to smell. There are additional senses as well that enable us to perceive our internal environment and external surroundings. They include the sense of self and body awareness, hunger, thirst, pain, temperature, balance and acceleration. In many respects words are more precise and less ambiguous than pictures. Consequently, poetry is more suitable to articulate with clarity non-visual events than painting.

But when it comes to express the majestic beauty of a woman, the stunning colors of flowers or the ophthalmic depth of space in perspective, words fail in comparison to the expressive power of painting. Words can only circumscribe the surrealistic melting watches of Salvador Dali, the bewildering infinite worlds in the visual illusions of M.C. Escher, the intriguing color interactions of Joseph Albers, or the unutterable horrors of war depicted by Goya.

The sensory experience of seeing bright yellow, hearing a loud piano, smelling lavender, or tasting an omelet involves introspectively accessible physical and physiological events. Philosophers call the subjective phenomenal properties of sensations, feelings and mental states that determine the quality of the experience quale. It is quite impossible to communicate qualia verbally. We perceive, for example, an elementary image of a red square on a painting as quale, an irreducible and indescribable sensation.

Analogues, similes and metaphors are an ingrained part and parcel of both poetry and painting. They are in fact ubiquitous even in the physical environment. For example, charcoal, graphite and diamond are metamorphosed variations of the chemical element carbon, allotropic metaphors in the laboratory of nature. Another phenomenon involves the bizarre medical mystery of synesthesia, the involuntary physiological cross-modality of sensory experiences. Some individuals, for instance, might see a rectangle and sense an orange or salty taste, while others smell yellow and purple odors, or hear green wavy symphonies. Although synesthesia is rather rare, voluntary cross-modalities are very common. We often say, for example, “I see your point”, when actually we just hear words. Also, we may characterize a story as “bitter” or “sweet”, or judge a person as “warm” or “cold” on the basis of their voice.

Despite their irreconcilable differences, painting and poetry share many common attributes. Picasso used to say that a painting brings about a horde of destructions. It also applies to poetry because a poem is a horde of destructions, too. Yet what more significantly unites these two different art realms stems from the universal force of the act of creation. All the arts grow out of the same fertile earth of feeling, thought, memory and imagination. All the arts flow from the same fountainhead of poetry.

Beethoven’s ambition was to become a tone-poet. Picasso saw the colors on his palette sleeping words of visual poems. In modern art Chagall epitomizes the painter as poet. His compositions are rich in mythological themes, folk tales immersed in Jewish mysticism. But most of all, his oeuvre speaks of the magic of life and celebrates the joy of love in colorfully painted dreams.

I am a poet and painter. However, I don't see my work in poetry and art as separate pursuits. I serve different muses of the same family. All the arts flow from the same fountainhead of creativity. I find solid support and intense inspiration for the integrated vision of art as a unified whole in the western history of ideas as well as in the orient. In contrast to the compartmentalization of western culture, wherein the division of labor fragments the arts and sciences into conceptually severed specializations, eastern civilizations exude their harmonious unity. In my travels across China, Japan and Korea I was enthralled to see the integral wholeness of painting and poetry. These arts in the Orient are viewed as identical. Imagery rendered with skilled brush strokes on silk and paper is often accompanied with calligraphy resulting in the convergence of art and poetry. The painter is a poet and the poet is a painter.

Serving the Chinese Emperor Wu in the third century, Lu Chi wrote a celebrated Essay in Literature, the Wen Fu. Describing the unity of writing and painting and the unlimited possibilities of art, Lu Chi said: “Everything exists within the tip of a brush”.

Some five hundred years later the Sung Dynasty poet Shu Shi praised Wang Wei—poet, musician and painter—with these words: “In his poetry there is painting and his painting is poetry”. Chinese scholars of the eleventh century of the School of Literati pointed out that poetry is painting without form and painting is poetry with form.

Through five thousand years of continuous civilization, Chinese art has developed a rich language of symbols. By the second century the image of falling leaves, for instance, had become a metaphor for troubled times in which great talent was cast aside and unjustly punished with exile. Magnificent flowers often symbolize beautiful ladies. Rising above a lake they may represent fairies with red hair spins walking above the water and one single lotus flower in the Hua Qing Pool is like the entire world.

In spite of its fragmentary posture western culture has produced great artists excelling in different branches of art. Among painters and poets the oeuvre of such artists as Michelangelo, Goethe, William Blake, Apollinaire and Picasso shows the unity of painting and poetry.

Using the typographical qualities of letters as form offers a cogent mediating way of connecting painting with poetry. I enjoy making visual poems—a genre of concrete poetry—for their playful and aesthetic qualities. They give rise to hybrid compositions in which typographical units and words form particular shapes on a page adding greater meaning to the text and amplifying the statement. The visual design of the concrete poem embodies and extends the message beyond the meaning of its individual ingredients. The emerging piece evolves into a dual composition, both visual and literary. The whole becomes more than the sum total of its parts.

Concrete poetry explores and blurs the boundaries between language and picture. It is an experimental art form that bridges different disciplines. By making patterns and pictures from words, it mediates between painting and literature.

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.

As a movement, concrete poetry emerged in the 1950s. Its leading exponents included the Swiss Eugen Gomringer and the Brazilian Decio Pignatari. The latter was a member in the Noigandres group of poets, founded by Augusto de Campos and his brother Haroldo de Campos. The groups’ 1958 manifesto characterized a concrete poem as an object “in and by itself”. In 1956 an International Concrete Poetry exhibition was held in Sao Paolo. It was inspired by the work of the influential Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Although I like to make concrete poems, most of my work is in traditional poetry and painting. Perhaps, the word ‘traditional’ is not the proper adjective, because my oeuvre involves innovative thrusts and experimental dimensions. Personally, I define myself as a lyrical conceptualist. Lyrical Conceptualism or Lyco Art is a new idea, which I introduced into the periodic table of art in 1975 with a manifesto published in Montreal. Lycoism is concerned with the creative process, cultural transformation and the human condition. It engages the entire scale of formative energies through transformative vision, a voyage of aesthetic consciousness in which passion evolves as logic and logic becomes passion. It expands the boundaries of aesthetics and identifies the meaning of art with its life serving purpose. There are aspects in the subject matter of my paintings and poems that explore connections between art, music, poetry, science and mathematics. The motivating force behind arrays of work stems from the will to probe the riddle of mind and matter, or to delve into the enigmatic world of dreams and the shadows of the unconscious. Through painting and poetry I celebrate the mystery of creation and the miracle of existence.

In my vision paintings and poems are portals of the mind and the soul. Part of our enduring fascination with art involves its intellect enhancing and emotion stirring ability in creating ambiguous but concretely presented images of such elusive phenomena as cognition, spirit and passion. Immersed in the artist’s vision, paintings arrest and frame the unrelenting chaos of the world. They are aesthetic reflections, symbols of inner processes, metaphors of the physical environment, allegories of our existence, creative expressions imbued with the artist’s sense of order and disorder, meaning and desperation, beauty and ugliness.



Painting and poetry invite us to step into a deeper level of reality that lies under the peel of surface appearances. In my vision the creative power of art can play a significant role in ameliorating the human condition, in making the planet a habitable and welcoming environment for ourselves and for future generations. Without concern, responsibility, care, compassion and love we cannot survive.

Lyco Art advances the notion of art as a totality. This means not merely that the scope and range of art in the wider sense extends to every field of human interest but that the creative process of art engages the entire gamut and scale of the artist’s expressive powers. The act of creation may involve every aspect of emotion and reason. All the unconscious and conscious elements on the psychological coordinates of id, ego and superego participate in the process. Body, mind, soul and spirit interact and function in unison.

The inclusive properties inherent in Lyco Art transcend the antagonistic tendencies that characterize the grand movements of Art History. Mind you, throughout the history of ideas, art moved between the opposing poles of the rational and the emotional, swinging on a dynamic pendulum of the creative process between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Thus, the aesthetic styles of the Greco-Roman world and of the Renaissance were basically harmonious, geometrical, and conceptual. Likewise, Gothic and Baroque art were characterized by sinuosity, passion and lyricism. Moreover, Impressionism, Fauvism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as other movements in Modern art, derive a great deal of their energy from the irrational forces of the human psyche, whereas currents such as Cubism, Constructivism, Geometric Abstraction and Op Art are more related to the rational realm of creativity.

As an aesthetic-semantic system blending together poetic, intuitive and cognitive ingredients in the creative process, Lyco Art constructs a conscious bridge between the passion of logic and the logic of passion. The application of the theory of Lycoism to painting and design gives rise to coded expression of colors and forms. For example, warm hues and amorphous shapes may symbolize feelings and emotions, while cold colors and geometric forms may correspond to logic and planning. Lycoism envisions the creative process as an interaction of emotion and intellect.

Traditionally, emotion is regarded as an irrational component that hinders clear thinking. I disagree. Certain emotions can enhance reason. Thus, feelings and excitement are indispensable modules of the act of creation. However, Lycoism is not an aesthetic strait-jacket. It does not impose any formal limitations on artistic freedom. It merely suggests. Similarly to Surrealism, Lyco Art is more an attitude than a style. Some people want complete artistic freedom. They reject every form of Ism. But complete artistic freedom cannot exist. Artists do not work in a vacuum and No-ism is also an Ism.

For my part neither painting nor poetry is an ivory tower. Art is not for its own sake. I believe, for instance, that art must concern itself with science and technology because in our post-industrial society science and technology determine our lifestyle. At the same time, one of the major goals of art is the humanization of the environment and therefore science and technology should not be our masters but our servants. Intuition and imagination play a salient role in both art and science. Transcending the state of existing conditions necessitates innovative leaps into uncharted areas. Consequently the cognitive faculty of creative imagination is more important in advancing the human condition than the inert body of knowledge.

The rise of Conceptual Art in the USA during the 1960s introduced into art an array of revolutionary ideas, spreading rapidly from there to other countries as well. The Conceptualists presented their work in photographs, maps, charts, photocopies, statements, and documents. They explained their thoughts and intentions in a self-referential manner, fusing the role of the artist with the function of the critic. They claimed that the nature of art is conceptual and that the essence of art is the idea. I agreed with the Conceptualists in many respects.

Yet, I rejected their agenda when I realized that for them traditional painting and sculpture were obsolete, intellectually worthless decorations. Their aim was the dematerialization of art, its liberation from aesthetics by eliminating morphology, style, tradition and object. The Conceptualists conceived art as information, language and process. In their frame of mind there was no room or need for the past. They saw art history as a useless subject. The study and analysis of beauty annoyed them. Instead, they looked for science and philosophy as superior models of knowledge and reason that art should emulate.

I see this in a very different manner because science can learn a great deal from art. Ignoring or eliminating the subjective aspects from the fabric of reality, as science does, does not make the world more objective. Consequently science in its present form is unscientific. Moreover, the world of the scientist is not closer to reality than the world of the artist. The credo that science can deliver us ultimate truths is a myth. The evidence for this comes from the scientific method itself. For example, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in mathematics indicate the systemic limits of science. Its intrinsic weakness prevents science from penetrating into the deep fabric of reality.

By and large, the most advanced physical research currently is characterized by the search for a Theory of Everything. Consequently, physics today occurs in a fantasy realm of mathematical abstractions. Without being able to support their work by empirical evidence, physicists pursue infinitesimal strings and membranes vibrating in a hyperspace of ten or more dimensions in imaginary parallel universes.

Lyco Art is not a branch of Conceptual Art. As a matter of fact, in more than one way, I view Lycoism as a theory which is diametrically opposed to Conceptual Art. Unlike Conceptual Art, Lycoism advocates historical continuity. The past is important because our identity is built on memory. Tossing away paintings and sculptures is an act of alienation, a self-destructive assault against our collective memory. We need our cultural heritage for our own survival.

Objects of art are precious treasures impregnated with imagination, beauty and knowledge. They humanize our technological world, enrich our soul and mind. They also protect us against the damage caused by the turbulent intensity of life in the electronic age, against the stressful excesses of our automated society. In contrast to Conceptual Art, Lycoism embraces the search for beauty and meaning as a pivotal motivating impulse of the human experience.

I believe that art and science are symbolic endeavors through which humanity explore, structure and interpret reality. There is art in science and science in art. On the whole, it is true though that compared to the rational and objective methods of science, art offers an irrational and subjective approach. Nevertheless, art is completely concrete, and therefore a significant source of authentic empirical knowledge. In certain respects, this form of concrete knowledge even surpasses the epistemological value of the mathematical abstractions of science because genuine knowledge can be only achieved by the experience of the senses, and art is based on sensory realization.

Paul Hartal



Montreal, October 2007
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[[ANNA]]

Poetry and Painting

By Paul Hartal



What is poetry? What does it mean to you? Where do your inspirations come from?

Literary tradition describes poetry as an artistic form that conveys meaning through the aesthetic and evocative qualities of language. Poetry pleases, moves, and elevates by word choice and word form, the interaction of style, pattern, sound, image and idea. Great poetry expresses heightened thought, intensified emotion, concentrated observation and soaring imagination. The towering construct of the poetic diction rises as a memorable experience wrapped and ornamented in such artistic devices as simile, metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia and melody.

I read somewhere that poetry is the frame of life. I think it is rather the other way around: Life is the frame of poetry. Let me go even further: Life is identical with poetry. In my vision it certainly extends beyond language.



The word poetry derives from the Greek poesis, which means making and creating. We live in a creative universe. Nature runs on metaphors. It is all full of symbols. From flowers and human anatomy rendered in Fibonacci sequences (made famous in Dan Brown's mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code) to the double helix of the DNA, that endows with a genetic code all living cells to replicate, nature reveals its mathematical organization and metaphors.



The sun is a giant nuclear reactor that converts hydrogen into helium by means of a proton-proton fusion chain reaction, producing cleaner energy than the human fission nuclear plants on earth. The universe is an undecipherable computer of an imaginably colossal cosmos. Through infinite cycles the stars burn throughout its vast space, explode and collapse and rise from their ashes like the legendary phoenix. The universe breathes. It is a living organism.



And the world is a totally pristine verse. It manifests itself not only in the music of the rainbow, the infidelity of the pen or the shadow of onomatopoeia, but in the very identity of reality and poetry. An airplane is a flying poem, the triumph of human imagination and daring defying gravity. The wonder and magic of television involves the incomprehensible fact that we carry all the broadcasted programs within ourselves. They actually go and cross through our body. In the future we might be able to watch these electromagnetic waves as programs without an actual TV set.



Another parallel marvel concerns the astonishing digitization of the human experience. The resulting cyberspace is an enormous ocean of uncanny consciousness interacting with the mysterious wisdom of the seemingly unconscious machine. The origins of the mathematical binary code allowing the computer to operate are attributed to the philosopher Leibniz. According to legend, in the invention of the binary system Leibniz was inspired by the Taoist I Ching: The idea that all things arise from the interaction of opposing qualities of Ying and Yang, light and dark, good and bad, female and male, the dichotomy of this or that. In navigating through the ocean of cyberspace we move between elementary bits and the infinitely complex world of a mysteriously alien form of intelligence.



If you still wonder about the evidence for claiming that the universe is a poet let me say only this: The belief that we are different and separate from our physical environment is an illusion. We are in every respect an integral part of nature. When humans write poetry it is cosmic consciousness in action: The universe writes its poems.



In our compartmentalized culture we separate sharply between disciplines. Accordingly, in the first glance, poetry has nothing to do, for example, with mathematics, physics, biology, or geography. Contemporary scholars stress and highlight the specificities of poetry. They segregate it from music, film, dance, architecture, painting, or even from the novel. Poetry of course is not the only genre which is kept separated from other disciplines. Among other reasons, this seems to be an enduring legacy of Aristotle's credo that one thing cannot be another. Now, Aristotle is one of my favorite philosophers, however, I have a book shelf that humbly contradicts him. For, apart from being the wonderful host of an array of interesting tomes, I also can use the book shelf as an aquarium board, or as a table, or as a chair, as well as other things.



I maintain that all forms of human creativity are poetry. The arts and sciences are semiotic systems, symbolic constructs through which humanity investigates, explores and structures reality. In my view mathematics is a highly imaginative language of abstract metaphors whose protagonists are integers, fractions, fractals, triangles, circles, as well as other invented things. Mind you, numbers-- including zeroes-- usually don't grow on trees. Even the basic concepts of physics, such as space, time, matter and atom are abstract metaphors, imaginative interpretations of the world.



So I believe in the identity of life and poetry. Inspirations in my writing come from a variety of sources. I see the world as a mysterious place, full of magic and wonder. Life is a precious gift, in spite of all its hardships and tragedies. I find inspiration in the excitement and the sorrow of existence, the beauty and ugliness of the world, in grand events and in trivial things. Politics, history, art, science and philosophy can also serve as subject matter for my verse. Some aspects in my oeuvre are influenced by ironic traits and humorous moods. Yet the central focus of my work concerns the realm of relations and emotions, particularly the genre of love poetry. So for my part, the heart of poetry is the poetry of the heart.









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How to write a good poem? What poems you like most? Who is your favorite poet?




How to write a good poem?



I don't believe that there is a truly reliable formula for writing good poems. Education, professional training, literary skills are of course important, but talent cannot be taught. Besides, aesthetic judgment is not universal. People have the right to disagree about the poetic quality of a poem.

What poems you like most?



I prefer short and inspirational works. I enjoy the flight of imagination, finding intriguing ideas expressed in beautiful words, the wealth and bounteousness of language, the rhythm, melody and pattern of stanzas. I like particularly love poems and philosophical ideas expressed in poetic form.

Who is your favorite poet?

It would be unfair to single out one poet out of so many favourites. It is much easier to come up with a favourite quotation: "And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives the airy nothing a local habitation and a name"; Theses, A Midsummer Nights Dream, by William Shakespeare. Among my admired poets are Dante, Heine, Pushkin, William Blake, Matsuo Basho, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Leah Goldberg and Irving Layton. My favourite Chinese poets include Du Fu, Li Po and Wang Wei. Unfortunately (although I try to learn Mandarin), I cannot enjoy them in their original language. My mother tongue is Hungarian. Being exposed in my youth to the emotional excitement, to the rhythm, form and music of the language through the work of such poets as Sandor Petofi, Janos Arany, Endre Ady, Attila Jozsef and Miklos Radnoti, was a remarkable formative experience. I find that history and biographical background are necessary to the understanding of a poetic oeuvre and they enhance its meaning. Petofi's poetry, for example, can be really appreciated only in the light of the "spring of nations", the revolutions of 19th century history. Both Petofi and Radnoti had a mysterious premonition of their fate. They predicted and described their own violent death. Petofi vanished in 1849 on the battle field of Segesvar and Radnoti was murdered by Nazi guards near the village Abda in the end of the Second World death. In 1946 Radnoti's body was exhumed from a mass grave by his lover, soul mate and devoted wife. Love transcends death. In the pocket of the poet's trench coat she found a notebook of his last poems. Written for her, the poet literally was talking to his beloved wife from the grave.



How do you view the difference between painting and poetry?


More than five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci entered into a stinging debate with a bunch of pompous poets who degraded painting as a mechanical art. Defending the primacy of art, Leonardo—painter, architect, scientist, and a genius of the high Renaissance--snapped: “If you call painting dumb poetry the painter may call poetry blind painting”. He argued that a good painter can provide a more intelligible and beautiful sense experience than a poet because painting satisfies the eye whereas poetry appeals to the ear and seeing is superior to hearing.

In the 18th century the playwright and philosopher Gotthold Lessing described the intrinsic difference between painting and poetry in terms of the distinction between image and word. He rejected the ancient belief that these two arts are in fact similar, or as the Roman poet Horace put it: Ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry). Lessing also pointed out that the domain of painting is space while the domain of poetry is time.

Translating a poem exactly into another language is quite an impossible task because of the unique nature of every vernacular, their peculiar mannerisms and idioms, their distinct sounds, rhythms, intonations and musicality. Hence reconstructing a verse through painting appears to be even more an inconceivable assignment. Consider, for example, these lines:

“Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day” (Lord Byron, Darkness);

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while pondered, weak and weary” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven);

“‘Sincerity’ graved on your youth” (Amy Lowell, Azure and Gold);

How could a painter depict a morning that brings no day? Or describe as clearly as Poe does a mental and physical state at night? And what is the visual equivalent of “’Sincerity graved on your youth”? These lines undoubtedly demonstrate the distinct nature and shining aloofness of poetry, the versatility and expressive uniqueness of words.

On the other hand, painting as an art form is unique, too. It can portray astonishingly beautiful or ugly people, or show breathtakingly magnificent or depressingly dull landscapes and still lives and other visual phenomena, which defy exact verbal description. Generally speaking, objects of the visual world can be represented in painting more accurately than in words. However, poetry has the upper hand in describing emotional states and mental events. A comparison of these two art forms reveals that in many ways both poetry and painting resist conversion. They mutually defy transference into each other.

Thus, the main underlying difference between painting and poetry stems from their medium specificities. The visible properties of the world comprise the essential subjects of painting. A painting is a frozen picture in time, presented on a two dimensional surface. Poetry on the other hand is a verbal composition, an emotional or mental event moving through linear time. Reading a poem is a linear experience progressing through time. Its length can be measured by the clock. However, the duration of viewing a painting is not a time-determined linear experience.

Painters compose with form and color. They might employ special technical skills and styles to represent visual forms in perspective, special light effects, optical illusions, textured details or other painted features. Although they may have overlapping analogues, these painted visual elements nevertheless are entirely different from the metric lines, rhymes, stanzas, odes and sonnets, or other verbal artistic devices that constitute the arsenal of the poet.

A poem consists of words. A painting on the other hand is a two dimensional image of the three dimensional world. Yet not all paintings fall within this category. Some abstract art might attempt to express in visual language, sensations, feelings, ideas and concepts, or musical qualities. Both poetry and painting are semiotic systems of signs and symbols that communicate messages. They are both concerned with ontological enigmas involving the existential question of how real is real. For example, in poetry the verbal description of a human figure, or a blooming orchard, will conjure up elusive, vaguely defined mental images, vis-à-vis painting wherein these subjects can be expressed with visual clarity.

Unlike in poetry, in painting form is bound up with content. This holds particularly true of abstract art. In abstract art form and content unite and become identical. Ideally, abstraction in art represents nothing, except its own presence. However, humans are symbol makers. All art is conceptual and communicates something. And abstract artists load their compositions with a variety of meanings. One of the great pioneers of the genre, Vassily Kandinsky, for example, wanted to express through abstract painting visual harmonies equivalent to mathematical form and music. Following Kandinsky’s lead, Piet Mondrian developed a rigid vocabulary of flat geometrical grid in primary colors of red, yellow and blue as well as black and white, analogous to musical rhythms. His aim was to create an art that mediates between subject and object, the individual and the universal, the mystical unity between man and cosmos.

Philosophers such as Kant and Schopenhauer devoted a great deal of their time to the problem of differentiating between the world of real existence and its appearance. They made a distinction between the thing in itself, the noumenon, and its perceived appearance through the senses, the phenomenon.

It seems that we cannot authentically know noumena. Instead, we can only interpret and represent them as phenomena, through sense experience and conceptual analysis. We are locked inside our body and so we cannot know really much about the existence of things outside. In fact, we do not know really much even about the inner life of our own body. In any case, to know how a tree or bird experiences the world we should turn into a tree or bird.

I think that even inanimate objects have their own life. They are built from atoms and molecules that attract or repulse one another. They are dynamic systems of living energy endowed with memory. The light knows how to travel in a straight line. A stone looks motionless and lifeless but it is in fact an astonishing arena of dancing particles full of vitality and life celebrating the poetry of nature. It is made of atoms that are highly animated and set into constant motion by ingrained cosmic information manifested in physical forces. It has no blood circulation or nervous system like mammals have. But this does not mean that a stone cannot have a dormant consciousness of its own. Both our own human realm of the conscious and the unconscious are rooted in the world of atoms because, like stones and everything else physical in the universe, we are also made of atoms.

It is possible to argue that on a hierarchical scale of ontological levels, painting is closer to the world of the noumenon, the real thing in itself, than poetry. Accordingly, the proverb that a picture is worth ten thousand words rings with truth. Yet the worth of a picture cannot be measured in words, or in money. The magnificent Biblical frescoes of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, for example, are priceless and ineffable, and so is the timeless play of light in the geometrically organized space of a Vermeer painting,

It also should be noted that the proverb, ‘a picture is worth ten thousand words’, is a reversible adage: For, a word can also worth ten thousand pictures. Words can describe pictures and pictures can illustrate words. They can complement, enhance and synergize each other, but they can never entirely replace each other. Painting is a pictorial and visual medium, poetry is verbal and auditory. How one is supposed to capture on the canvas the sound of “O”, or the sound of a conjugated verb? And then there are feelings, emotions, and sensations, nuances of meaning and abstract concepts. These cannot be expressed by means of figurative realism. Perhaps, a great artist might succeed in expressing them through symbolic compositions, but not without sacrificing clarity. All art forms are metaphorical and ambiguity is built into their fabric and essence.

Words have an advantage over pictures in their ability to represent a wider scale and range of physiological processes. While due to its medium limits painting primarily explores the visual experience, poetry can describe other sense perceptions as well. Apart from our eyes and ears the world engages us by means of other organs. Thus, special nerve endings in the skin equip us with a sense of touch, oral receptor neurons allow us to have a sense of taste and the olfactory nerves enable us to smell. There are additional senses as well that enable us to perceive our internal environment and external surroundings. They include the sense of self and body awareness, hunger, thirst, pain, temperature, balance and acceleration. In many respects words are more precise and less ambiguous than pictures. Consequently, poetry is more suitable to articulate with clarity non-visual events than painting.

But when it comes to express the majestic beauty of a woman, the stunning colors of flowers or the ophthalmic depth of space in perspective, words fail in comparison to the expressive power of painting. Words can only circumscribe the surrealistic melting watches of Salvador Dali, the bewildering infinite worlds in the visual illusions of M.C. Escher, the intriguing color interactions of Joseph Albers, or the unutterable horrors of war depicted by Goya.

The sensory experience of seeing bright yellow, hearing a loud piano, smelling lavender, or tasting an omelet involves introspectively accessible physical and physiological events. Philosophers call the subjective phenomenal properties of sensations, feelings and mental states that determine the quality of the experience quale. It is quite impossible to communicate qualia verbally. We perceive, for example, an elementary image of a red square on a painting as quale, an irreducible and indescribable sensation.

Analogues, similes and metaphors are an ingrained part and parcel of both poetry and painting. They are in fact ubiquitous even in the physical environment. For example, charcoal, graphite and diamond are metamorphosed variations of the chemical element carbon, allotropic metaphors in the laboratory of nature. Another phenomenon involves the bizarre medical mystery of synesthesia, the involuntary physiological cross-modality of sensory experiences. Some individuals, for instance, might see a rectangle and sense an orange or salty taste, while others smell yellow and purple odors, or hear green wavy symphonies. Although synesthesia is rather rare, voluntary cross-modalities are very common. We often say, for example, “I see your point”, when actually we just hear words. Also, we may characterize a story as “bitter” or “sweet”, or judge a person as “warm” or “cold” on the basis of their voice.

Despite their irreconcilable differences, painting and poetry share many common attributes. Picasso used to say that a painting brings about a horde of destructions. It also applies to poetry because a poem is a horde of destructions, too. Yet what more significantly unites these two different art realms stems from the universal force of the act of creation. All the arts grow out of the same fertile earth of feeling, thought, memory and imagination. All the arts flow from the same fountainhead of poetry.

Beethoven’s ambition was to become a tone-poet. Picasso saw the colors on his palette sleeping words of visual poems. In modern art Chagall epitomizes the painter as poet. His compositions are rich in mythological themes, folk tales immersed in Jewish mysticism. But most of all, his oeuvre speaks of the magic of life and celebrates the joy of love in colorfully painted dreams.

I am a poet and painter. However, I don't see my work in poetry and art as separate pursuits. I serve different muses of the same family. All the arts flow from the same fountainhead of creativity. I find solid support and intense inspiration for the integrated vision of art as a unified whole in the western history of ideas as well as in the orient. In contrast to the compartmentalization of western culture, wherein the division of labor fragments the arts and sciences into conceptually severed specializations, eastern civilizations exude their harmonious unity. In my travels across China, Japan and Korea I was enthralled to see the integral wholeness of painting and poetry. These arts in the Orient are viewed as identical. Imagery rendered with skilled brush strokes on silk and paper is often accompanied with calligraphy resulting in the convergence of art and poetry. The painter is a poet and the poet is a painter.

Serving the Chinese Emperor Wu in the third century, Lu Chi wrote a celebrated Essay in Literature, the Wen Fu. Describing the unity of writing and painting and the unlimited possibilities of art, Lu Chi said: “Everything exists within the tip of a brush”.

Some five hundred years later the Sung Dynasty poet Shu Shi praised Wang Wei—poet, musician and painter—with these words: “In his poetry there is painting and his painting is poetry”. Chinese scholars of the eleventh century of the School of Literati pointed out that poetry is painting without form and painting is poetry with form.

Through five thousand years of continuous civilization, Chinese art has developed a rich language of symbols. By the second century the image of falling leaves, for instance, had become a metaphor for troubled times in which great talent was cast aside and unjustly punished with exile. Magnificent flowers often symbolize beautiful ladies. Rising above a lake they may represent fairies with red hair spins walking above the water and one single lotus flower in the Hua Qing Pool is like the entire world.

In spite of its fragmentary posture western culture has produced great artists excelling in different branches of art. Among painters and poets the oeuvre of such artists as Michelangelo, Goethe, William Blake, Apollinaire and Picasso shows the unity of painting and poetry.

Using the typographical qualities of letters as form offers a cogent mediating way of connecting painting with poetry. I enjoy making visual poems—a genre of concrete poetry—for their playful and aesthetic qualities. They give rise to hybrid compositions in which typographical units and words form particular shapes on a page adding greater meaning to the text and amplifying the statement. The visual design of the concrete poem embodies and extends the message beyond the meaning of its individual ingredients. The emerging piece evolves into a dual composition, both visual and literary. The whole becomes more than the sum total of its parts.

Concrete poetry explores and blurs the boundaries between language and picture. It is an experimental art form that bridges different disciplines. By making patterns and pictures from words, it mediates between painting and literature.

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.

As a movement, concrete poetry emerged in the 1950s. Its leading exponents included the Swiss Eugen Gomringer and the Brazilian Decio Pignatari. The latter was a member in the Noigandres group of poets, founded by Augusto de Campos and his brother Haroldo de Campos. The groups’ 1958 manifesto characterized a concrete poem as an object “in and by itself”. In 1956 an International Concrete Poetry exhibition was held in Sao Paolo. It was inspired by the work of the influential Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Although I like to make concrete poems, most of my work is in traditional poetry and painting. Perhaps, the word ‘traditional’ is not the proper adjective, because my oeuvre involves innovative thrusts and experimental dimensions. Personally, I define myself as a lyrical conceptualist. Lyrical Conceptualism or Lyco Art is a new idea, which I introduced into the periodic table of art in 1975 with a manifesto published in Montreal. Lycoism is concerned with the creative process, cultural transformation and the human condition. It engages the entire scale of formative energies through transformative vision, a voyage of aesthetic consciousness in which passion evolves as logic and logic becomes passion. It expands the boundaries of aesthetics and identifies the meaning of art with its life serving purpose. There are aspects in the subject matter of my paintings and poems that explore connections between art, music, poetry, science and mathematics. The motivating force behind arrays of work stems from the will to probe the riddle of mind and matter, or to delve into the enigmatic world of dreams and the shadows of the unconscious. Through painting and poetry I celebrate the mystery of creation and the miracle of existence.

In my vision paintings and poems are portals of the mind and the soul. Part of our enduring fascination with art involves its intellect enhancing and emotion stirring ability in creating ambiguous but concretely presented images of such elusive phenomena as cognition, spirit and passion. Immersed in the artist’s vision, paintings arrest and frame the unrelenting chaos of the world. They are aesthetic reflections, symbols of inner processes, metaphors of the physical environment, allegories of our existence, creative expressions imbued with the artist’s sense of order and disorder, meaning and desperation, beauty and ugliness.



Painting and poetry invite us to step into a deeper level of reality that lies under the peel of surface appearances. In my vision the creative power of art can play a significant role in ameliorating the human condition, in making the planet a habitable and welcoming environment for ourselves and for future generations. Without concern, responsibility, care, compassion and love we cannot survive.

Lyco Art advances the notion of art as a totality. This means not merely that the scope and range of art in the wider sense extends to every field of human interest but that the creative process of art engages the entire gamut and scale of the artist’s expressive powers. The act of creation may involve every aspect of emotion and reason. All the unconscious and conscious elements on the psychological coordinates of id, ego and superego participate in the process. Body, mind, soul and spirit interact and function in unison.

The inclusive properties inherent in Lyco Art transcend the antagonistic tendencies that characterize the grand movements of Art History. Mind you, throughout the history of ideas, art moved between the opposing poles of the rational and the emotional, swinging on a dynamic pendulum of the creative process between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Thus, the aesthetic styles of the Greco-Roman world and of the Renaissance were basically harmonious, geometrical, and conceptual. Likewise, Gothic and Baroque art were characterized by sinuosity, passion and lyricism. Moreover, Impressionism, Fauvism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as other movements in Modern art, derive a great deal of their energy from the irrational forces of the human psyche, whereas currents such as Cubism, Constructivism, Geometric Abstraction and Op Art are more related to the rational realm of creativity.

As an aesthetic-semantic system blending together poetic, intuitive and cognitive ingredients in the creative process, Lyco Art constructs a conscious bridge between the passion of logic and the logic of passion. The application of the theory of Lycoism to painting and design gives rise to coded expression of colors and forms. For example, warm hues and amorphous shapes may symbolize feelings and emotions, while cold colors and geometric forms may correspond to logic and planning. Lycoism envisions the creative process as an interaction of emotion and intellect.

Traditionally, emotion is regarded as an irrational component that hinders clear thinking. I disagree. Certain emotions can enhance reason. Thus, feelings and excitement are indispensable modules of the act of creation. However, Lycoism is not an aesthetic strait-jacket. It does not impose any formal limitations on artistic freedom. It merely suggests. Similarly to Surrealism, Lyco Art is more an attitude than a style. Some people want complete artistic freedom. They reject every form of Ism. But complete artistic freedom cannot exist. Artists do not work in a vacuum and No-ism is also an Ism.

For my part neither painting nor poetry is an ivory tower. Art is not for its own sake. I believe, for instance, that art must concern itself with science and technology because in our post-industrial society science and technology determine our lifestyle. At the same time, one of the major goals of art is the humanization of the environment and therefore science and technology should not be our masters but our servants. Intuition and imagination play a salient role in both art and science. Transcending the state of existing conditions necessitates innovative leaps into uncharted areas. Consequently the cognitive faculty of creative imagination is more important in advancing the human condition than the inert body of knowledge.

The rise of Conceptual Art in the USA during the 1960s introduced into art an array of revolutionary ideas, spreading rapidly from there to other countries as well. The Conceptualists presented their work in photographs, maps, charts, photocopies, statements, and documents. They explained their thoughts and intentions in a self-referential manner, fusing the role of the artist with the function of the critic. They claimed that the nature of art is conceptual and that the essence of art is the idea. I agreed with the Conceptualists in many respects.

Yet, I rejected their agenda when I realized that for them traditional painting and sculpture were obsolete, intellectually worthless decorations. Their aim was the dematerialization of art, its liberation from aesthetics by eliminating morphology, style, tradition and object. The Conceptualists conceived art as information, language and process. In their frame of mind there was no room or need for the past. They saw art history as a useless subject. The study and analysis of beauty annoyed them. Instead, they looked for science and philosophy as superior models of knowledge and reason that art should emulate.

I see this in a very different manner because science can learn a great deal from art. Ignoring or eliminating the subjective aspects from the fabric of reality, as science does, does not make the world more objective. Consequently science in its present form is unscientific. Moreover, the world of the scientist is not closer to reality than the world of the artist. The credo that science can deliver us ultimate truths is a myth. The evidence for this comes from the scientific method itself. For example, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in mathematics indicate the systemic limits of science. Its intrinsic weakness prevents science from penetrating into the deep fabric of reality.

By and large, the most advanced physical research currently is characterized by the search for a Theory of Everything. Consequently, physics today occurs in a fantasy realm of mathematical abstractions. Without being able to support their work by empirical evidence, physicists pursue infinitesimal strings and membranes vibrating in a hyperspace of ten or more dimensions in imaginary parallel universes.

Lyco Art is not a branch of Conceptual Art. As a matter of fact, in more than one way, I view Lycoism as a theory which is diametrically opposed to Conceptual Art. Unlike Conceptual Art, Lycoism advocates historical continuity. The past is important because our identity is built on memory. Tossing away paintings and sculptures is an act of alienation, a self-destructive assault against our collective memory. We need our cultural heritage for our own survival.

Objects of art are precious treasures impregnated with imagination, beauty and knowledge. They humanize our technological world, enrich our soul and mind. They also protect us against the damage caused by the turbulent intensity of life in the electronic age, against the stressful excesses of our automated society. In contrast to Conceptual Art, Lycoism embraces the search for beauty and meaning as a pivotal motivating impulse of the human experience.

I believe that art and science are symbolic endeavors through which humanity explore, structure and interpret reality. There is art in science and science in art. On the whole, it is true though that compared to the rational and objective methods of science, art offers an irrational and subjective approach. Nevertheless, art is completely concrete, and therefore a significant source of authentic empirical knowledge. In certain respects, this form of concrete knowledge even surpasses the epistemological value of the mathematical abstractions of science because genuine knowledge can be only achieved by the experience of the senses, and art is based on sensory realization.

Paul Hartal



Montreal, October 2007
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revised.

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