Re:<documenta X><blast>aesthetics-ethics
Jaakko Hucklebee (jessec@zipnet.net)
Sat, 26 Jul 1997 17:58:06 -0400
Perhaps I'm duplicating rather than corroborating the services of
literary criticism, but
I'd like to coin two phrases to be of use in favor of a greater visual
ethics.
First: proximity transparency. I'll define this as the failure to see
that which is right in front of your nose. (I'll not go into the
indeterminancy between the predictable quanta) Transparency
is a problem all who possess knowledge have when they wrongly assume
everyone knows what
they know. Their knowledge is transparent to them, they can't see that
students don't know
what they are talking about. Thus the transparency always needs to be
exposed, brought to light,
revealed by asking questionable things. The act of questioning being the
ethical act.
Second: external preclusion. This is the well know phenomena of not
being able to see the
outside of the house while inside, of not being able to see the global
environment while on
the earth, of not being able to determine the form of the universe while
inside of it. The ethical
imperative of external preclusion is to strive to push it further off by
including more into the
world which we can see. To see all life as sacred in many forms rather
than only a small group is an expanding of that which is externally
precluded from vision, as is space exploration. A greater vision, not
censorship, is offered by an aesthetic of visual ethics which seeks to
see more rather than less.
Consider pornography, for example. The proximity transparency hides an
understanding of the
natural affection which may be going on, and the external preclusion
prevents an assessment of this as a possible obsession. We may need to
question the normal, slavish, human sexual services provided to the
rich, and we may need some more revealing images of loving, erotic
touching to help us experience. It can be vitally important to see it
all, to know more about this. Intolerance is not wisdom when the
student is learning the ability to see such differences. And we are all
art students in this respect, this visual respect of trying to see
things intelligently, humanely, and
as they often too horridly happen in the world. And who are the people
against vision? The
ethical? I doubt it. The guilty? The history of humanity says yes, the
scum hide in a pretense
of intolerance.
--
?_