Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade authored the USA’s militaristic programme of “Shock and Awe” as a way of using“spectacular displays of power” to “paralyze” an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy his will to fight.
And yet the shock and awe of artworks only stimulates response (except maybe the case of the red tops. If only the Mail were fully paralyzed for weeks on end by the “spectacular displays” of conceptualism which het them up on such a regular basis. Imagine the history of the twentieth century reformulated so that every time modern art had shocked the world, the right wing response was quantifiabl in a bed count.
Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917
Imagine the power at Mr Duchamp’s finger tips c.1917!). It is the nature of one’s arsenal that dictates perception. Violence begets violence, and a rose is a rose is a rose. Artworks have always had incredible potential for affecting the way of things.
For me, the shock and awe experienced in front of great artworks is a wonderful, mobilizing, empowering force of good. To be overwhelmed by another’s talent is a selfless act, it is a spectacular and egoless admittance of one’s fallibility, a eulogistic clarion call exclaiming humanity’s potential outside of oneself.
Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937
To be angered, to be dumbfounded, to be doubtful, to be refuted. Power might well lie in the communality of awe and respect paid, and the admittance of the imperfection of one’s own convictions.
The National Gallery’s re-cleaning of, and re-finding, of Mr da Vinci’s Virgin on the Rocks might well attest to the importance of challenging conventions.
Leonardo – The Virgin of the Rocks, 1491-1508
At first horrified by the thought of touching this priceless masterpiece, it is only a result of the decision to clean and conserve this masterpiece that its beauty has again been revealed for our eyes. Even a reprinted, pixellated version of the work in a broadsheet left me mesmerized. Awestruck. It felt like an opening into another world; one where the infinity of potential lay in the ambitions of an artist and his vision of the ethereal.
To be paralysed by the actions of an adversary is an act of humiliation. To be paralysed by the endeavour of a peer is an act of humility.
As Ghandi once said, I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.
It is hard to retrace one’s steps if you’ve pulverised the opposition.
I guess being pulverised will inevitably leave open a vacuum for something else to come along and fill the void, repeating the cycle in an infinite loop of creation/destruction/redemption. However, it’s nice to focus on the seperate perspectives of the narrative, saves being a big moody mordid ouroboros – what can I say? I’m a fan of permanent entropy.
But yeah, Da Vinci’s Virgin Of The Rocks is proper boss. He gets two thumbs up and a lindor chocolate for that one.
Didn’t know you had a blog mate, let alone filled it with some really interesting stuff. I’ll do my best to keep up and avoid talking rubbish at you through it.