First published in the International Post-Dogmatist Quarterly – Volume 1 – Issue 1 – 1994

TO BE CONSIDERED:

I. THE DEATH OF THE FINE ARTS

The category of the aesthetic has become anachronistic; the beautiful and the sublime are lost categories in the fine arts, and the artist is no longer concerned with the edification of sensibilities refined in leisure. In the place of genius writhing in passions calculated to strike awe into the hearts of young aristocrats has risen a new tradition destined to outlast all previous epochs, the cool observer blind to the actual world whose interpretive compositions (readings of the world) pose themselves without authority as configurational after the manor of a scientific hypothesis. So now do the muses sing, of the intellectual beauty of technical complexity, of the cold barren forms of an industrial ecology, of wires and pipes which blindly traverse the globe seemingly to never end. Invisible canals of information, data pulsing along the microwave energy highways in the air and space, glass fibers carrying the secret in words set ablaze with lasing electrons, machines whose functions are beyond normal understanding and displace human employment; Impassioned Vision is a pyramid of grids from whose flesh picked skeleton the new consciousness engineers branch out variations in geometric forms and reflectivity.

II. IN DEFENSE OF THE NEW TRADITION

The democratic sensibilities of the artist are forever suspect: art, like sport, is intrinsically competitive, and any undertaking whose objectives rely upon individual skills will be a cynical advocate of collective ideals. Hence the necessity of dissolving art into the elements of which it was compounded, viz. magical technique, craft skill, rhetoric, philosophical scholarship, sexual fashion, etc. and freeing these from their bondage under the sign of Great Art that they may reinfuse themselves back into the population, out of reach of the genius where it may rejoin itself to science. This constitutes the critical phase of a new aesthetic, the identification and analysis of streams which are conjoined in the new tradition. In its destructive phase, a critique of the politics of symbology must be actively advanced. In its constructive phase, a redefinition of the avante-guard must be proposed, and a reconstruction of its objectives effected. The artist may never function as a leader in a democratic society, hence the necessity of defining art as the invention of alternative perspectives, and of its objectives as the occupation of and testing and reporting upon those states.

III. HOLISTIC CRITIQUE AND

THE HOLOGRAPHIC CONSONANCE

The first term is stunted if it is understood wholly negatively, i.e. as the linguistic critique of everything, but may be expanded to include practice of all kinds. Upon the presumption that art is a variety of critical activity, and that artistic statements cannot be simply translated by philosophical or argumentative restatement, we arrive at the conception of a holistic critique in which critical activity is defined across the whole gamut of personal behaviors, and the elements of critique are identified as demonstrative creations; alternative reformulations. The entire body is engaged. The second term tends toward over extension, and the antagonism between the two extremes of critique and harmony may be greatly lessened if by the term holographic is understood only the identity of consciousness and light, leaving open all of the possibilities of negative configuration which critique as demonstration requires.

The ruling signifier of the holographic paradigm is the electromagnetic signalupon which is erected a metaphysics of light within whose perview all theoretical statements in the domain of holography are made. This symbolic framework is given directly by the nature of the medium and the process of the fabrication of holograms. As a result holographic art emulates the structures of consciousness. Whether with a justifiable basis in fact or not, the root metaphor of the holographic paradigm is the equivalence of consciousness and light, where light is understood as an indicator of attention, a medium of cognition, a state of illumination, and as the elemental matter of sentience, (primal matter).

That this conception is a repetition of the error which sought a primary matter from which all substances grew or were compounded, is of course, perfectly obvious, but the usefulness is judged by considerations drawn from the non-scientific syllogisms of literary logic. Like its alchemical counterpart, the holographic thesis is written in the code of political myth, and withstands with indifference any growths or modifications of its specific physical postulates.

FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS:

IV. RECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN

The engineering model of critique/praxis.

A defense of visual certainty

V.IDEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION

The integration of the sciences i.e., Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, etc. and the Political Economy to generate Political Art.

VI. NON-PARTICIPATION

Holographic art as painting with cortical structures and functions. the science of holoconstruction, or mental engineering.

The First Death: the explosion of the unity of the mind, the separation of the components. Distillation, sublimation, the manipulation of the sectors. Sector coordination.

The Second Death: the dissolution of the compensating and coordinating mechanisms. The disappearance of the field of components.

Non-visibility of the processing, direct action.

VII. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE OPERATIONS

Experimental reconfiguration.

Tuning across the spectrum

The unimpeded flow

The tuned configuration

VIII. THE FAILURE OF MODERNISM

The critique of technical rationality

The critique of scientific epistemology

The failure of the International Style

IX. MODERNISM REDEFINED

Poglioli

Postmodern critics

The Modernist Manifestos

The greater historical movements of modernization.

A revisionist interpretation of Modernism