Like a divine appointment, we found ourselves nose to nose with a man in a grey parka
embroidered with “Disney Cruises”. He was passing out immigration documents, and coaching foreigners on how to fill out the forms. We guessed he was a lawyer of some kind. There he was, one of the basest creatures on the planet, a European helping to pollute Europe with non-Whites for money. I would have given more thought to merging my fist and his face, but when one is wearing sweat pants and a T-shirt (my pyjamas) and lugging a bag of dirty clothes, forbearance is often the better part of valor.

After a very interesting search we found one of the laundry mats we had identified on the
Internet. Even though the Internet site had said “self serve” and we had bought and brought our own detergent, it was actually a wash-dry-fold place with a price of 10 Euros a load. Sold.

The young lady behind the counter thought that the American notion of a do-it-yourself laundry mat was a joke. In order to pass time while our clothes were washing we walked next door to a working-class bar filled with Greek men, and had coffees and cokes for the two hours we had to wait. We talked and talked about Greece’s problems. We continued to wonder at the sea of foreigners passing by in front of us as we sipped our coffee. Many of them looked like the descendants of the very people my travelling partner’s ancient ancestors had fought in the past so Greece would remain pure and untainted from them, and here they were in “all their glory”, walking and talking, peddling and acting as if though they were the masters of this land, almost saying “we have the final word, we own your lands now”.

My fiery-spirited companion summed up our thought succinctly, ” Many invaders have come to claim our land in the past … many times my ancestors fought them and drove them off the land, and this time is no different … the Greeks once more will write history.

After about two hours we walked back and as we picked up our laundry we engaged the young lady at the laundry mat in a conversation about the economy and all other problems that plague Greece. The young lady told us of her as well as her people’s despair, her economic hardships, her fears of all the immigrants around her neighborhood, crime, theft, robberies … how the people wanted all this to end, and Greece to prosper ... how the politicians always seek help from the bankers and “economic aid packages” instead of developing Greece’s natural resources (like the wealth of oil, gas, and minerals under the control of the national government).

After a stop at the hotel to put on clean duds, we headed to Agios Panteleimon, a hard hit
neighborhood in Athens - a GD stronghold - overrun with immigrants, and as it happens, one of the childhood neighborhoods of my traveling partner. There was a large demonstration by GD here last year, and the graffiti that made international news is still visible on the ground in front of the church. GD has a neighborhood watch in this area. As we walked around a bit, I stop traffic by standing in the middle of the street to let a lady of about eighty years old cross the street at her own pace; pedestrians are like third class citizens here. The moment turns into a conversation between my partner and a different lady of about seventy right on the street corner.

I step about eight meters down the sidewalk to photograph some graffiti, and I notice that the conversation between my companion and the older lady has stopped in an odd way. I walk back to the corner to find a very dark Pakistani-looking man with eyes full of hate staring at the lady of about seventy, less than one meter from her.

He had not seen me, and now that he has, he walks quickly away. The lady says: “we live in fear of these people, you never know when they will have a knife. A lady was killed on this very block by immigrants during a robbery, because she would not give up her purse. There is no hope except Golden Dawn.”

My partner and I look at each other in surprise. In the past GD members and their supporters were like us, hardcore Nationalists. Now here is this - with my entire respect – little old frightened White lady, and she sees GD as the only answer. I wanted to dance a jig. Without a doubt she would be voting for Golden Dawn in the upcoming elections.

In a bit of very good fortune, almost a miracle actually, we ran into our friend George on the street there. We spent some minutes talking on the street with him, as we notice five young Athens Metro policemen walking near us. George says, a little too loudly, “the police are here to make a show before the election of keeping order and arresting illegal immigrants”. One of the police officers upon hearing George’s comment, turns and says: “We are here because we are the police, and we go where we need to go to do our job”. A heated but peaceful exchange between George and the cop follows and after it is all over, I mention that the average police officer is no more informed than the average person, and that when GD takes power in Parliament, the police will take orders from Nationalists the same way that they take orders from traitors now.

In keeping with our plans we headed to Lake Marathon, the Marathon Dam, and the temple Treasure of the Athenians. Lake Marathon is just over the mountains from the city of Marathon and the ancient battle site. When we arrived we found the trail to the temple closed due to a forest fire. As my partner and I had been planning this visit with a religious zeal, we were not about to let a “trail closed” sign stop us. We walked over to the edge of the dam near the spillway, and hopped over. The trip down the trail was arduous, but having the temple all to ourselves was worth all our effort, and more.

After the battle of Marathon, the Athenians built a temple to Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, and placed the city’s treasure in the temple, as an offering to Nemesis to bring about divine retribution on the Persians for the destruction they had caused before they retreated during the first Persian invasion of Greece. The temple we were visiting is a reproduction, but faith obscures such distinctions. After a solemn oath we laid our simple offering of fresh-picked wild flowers at the door of the temple, and asked Nemesis for divine retribution against the enemies of Europe, Greece, the White Race and our Hellenic Heritage.

Those who know me know that I am an atheist, but I do believe that the gods of the ancient European Pantheons were expressions of our inner natures and attributes. As such, I invite all my white brothers and sisters to lay an offering to Nemesis in the sanctity of their own inner most being, and to embrace the warmth of cleansing hatred toward our enemies, in retribution for all the damage they have done.

One particular IPM technique they used to break down our resistance to miscegenation, and I know because I’ve heard it from different white men my age, all my life, is that “being opposed to race-mixing just means you’re jealous of the black man because he’s better at getting the white girls than you.”

Of course this is a much more complicated issue than that, but when these memes are being thrown at you when you are a teenager, you have an instinctual sense that race-mixing is horrifying genocide, but you are supposed to grin and bear it to “prove you are such a tough man that you don’t care, no black man is making you jealous.”

But it is actually much, much deeper than that.  Race-mixing is what is called in teh world of Integrated Pest Management, “mating disruption.”

On farms they do mating disruptions of moths and nematodes, by broadcasting the female pheromone during mating season and so the males cannot find the females.  Another way is the “sterile insect technique.”

The sterile insect technique[1][2] is a method of biological control, whereby overwhelming numbers of sterile insects are released. The released insects are normally male as it is the female that causes the damage, usually by laying eggs in the crop, or, in the case of mosquitoes, taking a bloodmeal from humans. The sterile males compete with the wild males for female insects. If a female mates with a sterile male then it will have no offspring, thus reducing the next generation’s population. Repeated release of insects can eventually wipe out a population, though it is often more useful to consider controlling the population rather than eradicating it.

Mating disruption is very effective in bringing down populations.  It doesn’t require outright killing; it is a “soft” genocide.

Cultural Controls in Integrated Pest managemement entails altering the environment to reduce the fecundity and range of the pest, such as raising crops that the pest does not eat, or helping predators of the pest thrive by making a good environment for predators or even introducing them.

For integrated pest management of White human beings, cultural controls are things like high taxes, forcing white flight, offering welfare to the “pest enemies” (non-white immigrants)

That’s how we must understand what is being done to us.  Whites have been identified as the “key pest species.”  We are targeted.

There is no question that the rulers have figured out about using Integrated Pest Management techniques for human control.  It’s not just about cornfields.

IPM is about thinking about the environment of the “pest” as a whole; what myriad of ways can we degrade the existence of this pest without “spraying” (killing outright) the pest?

The NWO hates humanity as a rule; but we Whites are just #1 on its **** list.  The other races will be next.

I suspect they are committing race genocide against us on purpose to rile us up into an extreme ferocity, to purposely “bring out the werewolf” in us, then they’re going to say, “OK, you’re the good guys now, the bad guys were genociding you, kill them.”

And then of course, the whole thing was a setup, we go werewolf for a few years, they succeed in riling us up and unleashing us to commit a global bloodbath, but then (they hope) they can defeat us in war and then really just openly genocide us, after they “proved” once and for all, what inherent monsters we are.  LOL.

The thing is, if they unleash the White Werewolf, we won’t be as naive as we were in the 1940’s.  We will refuse to fight our white racial family next time around.  Our minds have adapted.

It was insane for our enemies to think that Whites do not Evolve.

The idea that Integrated Pest Management techniques are being used on us is horrifying, but I want to leave you with a note of hope.

When more aggressive techniques like spraying are used, there is often a “resurgence.”

Resurgence

When a pest population comes back with a higher population density than before the application of pesticides.
1. Reduced biological control because the pesticides kill predator organisms that kept the pest in check
2. Reduced competition for food
3. Direct stimulation of the pest—the survivors are more fit—hormesis,
4. Improved plant growth—more food for surviving pests

So in other words, if there’s a mass culling of humans, it may kill the target pests natural enemies in greater numbers than the target pest, and then there is plenty of lebensraum and resources for the surviving targeted pest.

IPM is an imperfect method for managing those living creatures and abiotic factors such as weather which interfere with human activity and crop production.  Billions are spent on problems they can barely control.

Weeds and insects EVOLVE my friends, in real time right before our eyes.  Eventually, commercial agriculture will fail when the aggregate evolution of the pests outstrips the aggregate evolution of the techniques for managing it.

So if IPM works imperfectly on insects, it most certainly works imperfectly on humans.  Particularly when humans become mindweaponized—that is, they become conscious of the IPM techniques being used against them, they talk about these techniques and how to counter them.

Our job is “counter-IPM.”

What is the number one IPM technique against White humans?

Anti-intellectualism.  Idiocracy.  Television—which is, by the way, losing it’s grip on people.

Anti-intellectualism is dying, but a muscular intellectualism has only begun to fill the gap.  However, I believe that it will.  The necessity of survival is going to have a hormetic reaction—it will be a “beneficial stressor.”

How do you counter anti-intellectualism?  Math and science and “tinkering.”

Tinkering is the application of the math and science knowledge to machines and processes and systems.  Henry Ford was the original “tinkerer,” but it is quite common.

The tinkering we will be forced to do will not be about dropping a 350 engine in a Chevy, but rather adapting to living poor.  There’s a very strong mental defense mechanism against the idea that they are poor, but reality is going to overcome this defense mechanism, and people will stop being in denial about being poor.

Impoverishing us is the ultimate IPM technique, or so they think.  Because money is everything to the managers, they think that we’ll be heartbroken and dead without it.  they don’t realize that by depriving us of money, they will force us to have character again.

We will need to be doing car sharing.  Lots of us are unemployed or underemployed.  We could be using spare time between April and October to producing food for ourselves, and the womenfolk processing it in the kitchens.  When we create wealth among ourselves, it is not taxable, it is wholly ours.

Imagine if, in a town of 1000 people, 500 of them spent 10 hours a week between April and October growing and processing food.  Everyone’s got to eat. It’s guaranteed income if only the town can agree on being their own producers, if people will get off their ass and do it.

The supermarkets are a supernormal stimulus that strangles any local farming.  The whole point of supermarkets and the insane abundance was a Cultural Control, to change our behavior and make us dependent on Centralized Food Inc., instead of on our own selves and kin and neighbors.

But I suspect it is all failing now.  Economic growth is gone, people.

We were getting richer.

Now we are getting poorer.

We need to run out ahead of that fact—that we are getting poorer.  We have to make life decisions that allow us to adapt.  If you live close to relatives or friends, and some of your are unemployed, consider doing car sharing.  Consider getting family food production going.

If you are unemployed but have a car, you can be a “gypsy cab” for the people around you who can’t afford cars but can pay you a few bucks for a ride. DO you know beer drinkers or do you drink beer?  You can brew beer from the kits pretty easily, and it ends up being cheaper than buying it at the stores.

Apathy and laziness have been our weakness.  It is the only reason IPM tactics work on us. But as we become truly poor, we will ill afford laziness and apathy any more.

Laziness and apathy is the reason so-called “anti-racism” works.  When laziness and apathy are banished, people will THINK again.  And when they THINK, they will be forced by reality to answer the ultimate question:  Life?  Or death?

The targeted pest must know in its bones that there is no use in crying to the pest managers for mercy, any more than the cattle at the abbatoir can cry for mercy to the meat producers.  The targeted pest must make a choice—die, or EVOLVE.

Their IPM is only as powerful as the weakness of our counter-IPM.

Modern societies are inherently divisive, being both democratic and more highly stratified by interest group (and broader media awareness) than ever before in history. But adding the awful overlay of (totally unnecessary) racial diversity to the mix is surely playing with fire. In 1965, when the treasonous Democrats changed America’s “Whites-Only” immigration laws, the USA was 90% white. There was no need for the change, nor any need at any time (including today) not to have stopped the change. The Democrats paved the way for the dissolution of America, which we have been living through at an intensifying pace ever since. Will America exist in 2050? Almost certainly not - thanks to racial conflicts. 2025? Maybe not. We need to:

1. STOP ALL NONWHITE IMMIGRATION
2. Deport all nonwhite illegal aliens
3. Increase the number of white immigrants
4. Militarily seal the border with Mexico
5. Form white nationalist political, legal, professional and even social organizations to protect our racial interests, and build a new sense of white racial community and racial fellow-feeling
6. Fight continuously all forms of racial integration, especially those legislatively mandated
7. Encourage all whites to arm themselves as heavily as possible
8. Protect the Second Amendment (gun rights), and related “stand your ground” laws, so whites can always protect themselves from minority criminals and terrorists
9. Protect the First Amendment (free speech) from governmental attacks on white racial truth telling via selectively applied “Hate Speech” laws
10. Create a Federal agency tasked with destroying the millions of members of urban (nonwhite) gangs
11. Restore widespread and routine use of capital punishment
12. Grant independence and sever formal ties to Puerto Rico, Guam, and “American” Samoa.

Obviously, these are just starting points to begin the process of ensuring the continued safety and well-being of whites/Americans in what used to be our nation.

All whites need to prepare themselves psychologically (and then physically) for the race war that is likely coming in the 2020s or 2030s. Everything must be done now to increase the chances of eventual white victory and reclamation of the USA for our kind. We are in a “pre-war” stage. Blacks (and, to a lesser extent, other nonwhites) understand this. Only naively liberal (and some ‘conservative’) white buffoons actually believe in the possibility of racial equality and the viability of a multicultural society. Wake up, white men, before it is too late for ourselves, our children and our country.

Visit www.amren.com for the truth about race and America.

We must secure our existence as a people, and a future for White children.

It is not the context of underpasses that makes or unmakes street artist Banksy’s work art or otherwise: it does not have artistic subject matter and is just technique. Artistic subject matter is realised through qualities of artifice and held together by purpose which concentrates the artifice and technique to the goal of producing art.

George Dickie and Arthur Danto held that works of art are objects connected to various social practices. This depends on beauty as some objects like the taps or a motor car can be beautiful but because they have non-artistic functions are not art whereas a painting is. To Dickie art is about being self-assigned but you can put a car anywhere, it is always a car and its function is different from a work of art even if it is beautifully designed. When Artists begin to create they have a purpose and an artistic end in mind and to bring this into being they use appropriate technique. They do not take into account aerodynamics, say, or how fast water pours out or precisely where its trajectory will take it as these are not part of the artistic purpose. They are to engineers and designers of those objects.

This is the institutional theory of art which is a theory about the nature of art that holds that an object can only be art in the context of “the artworld”. Whatever an artworld is.

Danto wrote in:The Artworld: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry-an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world.” That has nothing to do with the work itself but where it is. Art is practice not theory.

Nothing can make Duchamps “readymades” art because they were made for a specific non-artistic purpose. Theory does not change a pile of Brillo cartons in a supermarket into art, yet Danto thought if it was put in a gallery a substantive transformation took place. Andy Warhol’s pretentious Brillo Boxes (a pile of Brillo carton, replicas actually, so they are doubly pretentious) are a pile of Brillo boxes wherever they are put.

Dickie’s institutional theory can be assessed from the definition in Aesthetics: An Introduction: “A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.” On the contrary, what makes something art is the intention of producing art through artifice and technique successfully realised.

Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst have declared works to be art because they say so. They were promoted and financed by Saatchi who first declared their works art but he is not an artist. It is critics and elite art buyers who decide what is art and usually because of its commercial value but that is external to the work, not intrinsic. They are right about the commercial value of objects but not about its classification as art because designating something as art because it has commercial value is to apply external or non intrinsic criteria as the standard of judgement. Some people are supposed to think they are Napoleon or royalty but does that make them so?

This takes us back to Duchamps folly. This argument is that because he placed it in a gallery it became art. To say something like Damian Hirst’s pickled shark is important is pretentious. It is supposed to make us think but by taking the shark out of context (the sea) it is rendered meaningless because it is deprived of its being which is its life, and its function to swim and hunt. It habitat, and how it lives in it, are essential not extraneous. A graffito by Banksy is not decontextualised in this way. It is added to the environment not part of it.

Picasso: “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.” Well, he has dismissed proportion but that is only one part of the whole.

Splodgeness Abounds

Commercial galleries need to appeal to a buying public and be more popular than avant garde painters yet they follow the fad of impressionistic landscapes that lose their meaning by technique over imaginative vision: the scene is obscured by splodges of paint! This obtrudes between the scene depicted and the viewer and causes a disjuncture in the meaning. This is technique over intuition; skill over the knack. By contrast the camera can elevate the knack over technique as one makes an artistic judgement on what to photograph. It gives a clear reproduction of the scene not splodgy brush strokes that could be anything from a cloud or wave or a sunbeam to just a slip of the brush. These smears festoon every commercial art gallery in the country. This effect is demonstrated by comparing these with photographs of the same scenes.

Public Art

Fills our ordinary lives with meaning and provides different feelings as they have different purposes.

Trying to shock people is petty and there are many more responses. To shock is a means to the end of making themselves rich because the elites reward these attacks on our Art. It is as though they have a brief to undermine our artistic traditions. They have minor imaginations which cause only one response whereas a work by a major artist like Dali prompts several emotional responses.

A Liverpool pub, The Jacaranda, has a mural in the downstairs bar which John Lennon had a hand in painting when he was an art student, and this creates fascination and joy at the thought of someone so famous being part of it. The painting is well executed but not devoted to a high purpose, but conveys feelings because we know who was involved.

The Peter Kavanagh, also in Liverpool, has a delightful mural based on Dickens characters in the snug-bar. The story is that an artist who was a regular customer in the 1930s could not afford to pay for drinks on account, so he painted the mural. It produces delight and merriment, adds to the pubs character and raises it above the ordinary.

Statues are stylised and used to convey various human qualities. Military heroes say, were shown in proud and honourable poses that suggested authority, fortitude, steadfastness such as Lord Nelson’s famous column in Trafalgar Square. They were cast in forms that conveyed meaning but contemporary public art fails in that elementary intention as the meaning is disjunctured.

I spent a few days in Shrewsbury recently. It has honoured its famous local Charles Darwin by “public art”. But does it succeed in its purpose? One known as Quantum Leap is dissociated meaning as the form is not directly linked to the subject so there is no representation.

The title Quantum Leap actually refers to something in physics not evolutionary biology which was Darwin’s study. It is probably the contemporary informal term for making a major leap forward but applied to something celebrating Darwin confuses rather than elucidates. These contemporary artefacts arouse no curiosity and one does not feel inclined to enquire about them. They cannot be taken seriously as there is no spirit of genius behind them; rather, a commercial motive which are part of contemporary popular fashion and do not gain gravity from tradition. Quantum Leap looks like an armadillo crossed with a pack of cards and seems to be influenced by popular film Jurassic Park rather than Darwin.

The Darwin Gate is three separate structures which unite to create an apparently solid structure. What does it mean? How does the form convey the meaning? The sculpture apparently combines the form of a Saxon helmet with a Norman window inspired by features of St Mary’s Church which Darwin attended as a boy. They claim that as darkness descends defused light shines through the columns suggesting stained glass windows with the tops of the posts resemble ecclesiastical arches. When it unites it resembles the shape of a church window. However, there is no connection with Darwin and the transmission of meaning to the public is split. It is called The Eggbeater.

Even ordinary works can, if in surprising places, prompt a myriad of responses. The Nags Head in Shrewsbury, has an unusual and painting with an obscure origin. It has an unusual context in being on the inside door of a cupboard in a room above the pub. There is a strange atmosphere up there, where the temperature can plummet in seconds. Some think the painting depicts Neptune, others, the Devil. It is thought to be by a prisoner of war during World War II but staff at the local Rowley’s House Museum purvey only a mystic tale but no accurate record. One told me it is of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from an upstairs window. In this legend it is said that the female figure will return if painted over. The painting is not of a woman but there is an ambiguity as the figure has feminine legs which are proportionately long and thick, and a short body. This painting prompts wonder, amusement, mystification, delight.

Rowley’s House museum holds the excellent Morning View of Coalbrookdale by William Williamse. (3) An important function of both painting and photography is to reflection a way of life or, as in this case, a defining historical era. There is too little representation of ways of life in contemporary art and fiction and people need this affirmation of themselves. These engaging paintings convey a powerful impression of the impact of early industrialisation on a still natural landscape. There are many forms of art which convey something important to people and prompt a variety of responses. Shock is just one: it is negative and it is unimportant.

Saint Alkmunds church in Shrewsbury, has a beautiful and moving stained glass in the east window. This is The Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Francis Egington. In this the Virgin Mary at the end of her journey through life and about to ascend to heaven. She is standing on the firm ground of the cross; with the Bible as the word of god for guidance and the sacraments represented by the chalice. The struggles of life are symbolised by thistles on the path. She is looking up in faith at the symbolic crown with her arms outstretched and open to heavenly influence as if she were asking and waiting to be uplifted back to her home in heaven. These were developments by Egington the artist who based the work on The Assumption of Saint Mary by Guido Remi of 1638 which is a more conventional Assumption painting and has Mary being lifted by Cherubim.

As you enter the church you are transfixed and walk towards it in awe looking up. It immediately begins to form an emotional response and the feeling of awe grows as you advance. This is not an intellectual proposition but a deep feeling of transcendent emotions.

This acts like great art, on a deep, unconscious level like an archetype. It opens the imagination transmitting holy or noble feelings in contrast to the degenerate contemporary art which spreads negative and evil thoughts. Old works have a quiet authority and the viewer pauses to contemplate it with respect, as when looking at old gravestones, to recreate the departed. It is a development of traditional form and links us with our roots.

The contemporary age is one of excess of technique. Jeff Robb, who has a permanent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, uses a method of lenticular sheets which are only sold by one firm which is in Switzerland. This is very clever and often fascinating but the subject matter is ordinary - nudes. His art is the cleverness of what he does with the subject but he does not transform the actual subject. Jeff needs specific equipment and ink cartridges to produce his results. Technique is important but should be guided by the vision not for its own sake or it is empty form.

The qualities that qualify a work as art are intrinsic to art in general but Art with a capital “A” has an elevated, sublime, purpose and is only realised by a high quality of conception and execution. A visual object or experience created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art covers various media: painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. The various visual arts exist within a continuum that ranges from prompting deep feeling or transcendent emotion and great skill to reproducing figures or landscape which have a mood and also prompt thought or feelings.

Kimbolton School has murals by Pellegrini. They give a sense of grandeur and seriousness and create a suitable frame of mind for study.

The modern understanding of art derived from Abbe Batteux in the 1740s who regarded the essence as an “imitation of nature” and, principally, that it caused pleasure. They cause various mental states in the beholder. He defined these mental states as pleasure and the experience of beauty. Prior to this, individual modes of art were attached to various sciences like Music to Mathmatics but this is the skill not the purpose. Kant promoted a universal criteria to decide if something was Art. He used a geometric idea of patterns of shapes and lines. In The Critique of Judgement he developed the notion of beauty as the cause of the the mental state. The problem is beauty is so abstract as to mean something different to everyone, though it is a word that describes the individual appreciation of something very pleasing.

English philosopher Michael Oakeshott described two sorts of knowledge:

The first sort of knowledge I will call technical knowledge or knowledge of technique. In every art and science, and in every practical activity, a technique is involved. In many activities this practical knowledge is formulated into rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered, and, as we say, put into practice; but whether or not it is, or has been, precisely formulated, its chief characteristic is that it is susceptible of precise formulation, although special skill and insight.

The second sort of knowledge I will call practical, because it exists only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) can not be formulated in rules ...

In art, this equates to the distinction between natural talent or genius and the skill and technique which realises the vision and meaning. Soccer players show a high degree of skill and to great players it is natural but developed by coaching and practice, but there is no high purpose involved.

Technique or genius; skill or a knack

There is a phenomenon in English art: a seven year-old Kieron Williamson. He has an indefinable knack that is called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one knows instinctively what to put and where. He has natural qualities: perspective, choice of colours. He has them automatically but perspective is a technique for realising the vision and choice of colours is part of the expression of the vision.

This knack is the artistic judgement. It is a non rational process - it is intuition or instinct and it is this that technique realises. In Kieron’s case it was triggered by the Devon and Cornwall landscape and “sprung full-born into life” like Athena from Zeus’s head. It was instantly realised, not slowly educed. (2)

To clarify the working of the two functions of form and content, technique and vision we have a fine example from music. Music was suffering the same culture war as painting and was dominated by atonal styles and was saved from an unexpected quarter. It was a paradox:

What we know as the culture wars and political correctness could not have made progress if it had not been adopted by the popular musicians of the 1960s. The words to The Beatles hit Get Back were developed from a spoof of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. Paul McCartney later turned into a more conventional rock song.

McCartney and John Lennon wrote melodies and through harmony revived tonal music. Atonalists were destroying traditional classical music as composers Schoenburg and Stockhausen did with water gurgling down a drain noises. The Beatles natural musical genius was realised through the technique of producer George Martin: The Beatles were raw talent, Martin supplied the form.

McCartney and Lennon upported the New Left and McCartney had a single banned by the BBC for apparently supporting the IRA ; Lennon was figurehead of the New Left-Politically Correct movement, and his records like the album Sometime in New York City promoted it. He donated the proceeds to The Black Panthers and The IRA.

Atonal composers disdained their audiences as bourgeois but Lennon and McCartney brought them together. Martin’s skill at realising their meaning added to the whole and triumphed over the split between form and meaning in contemporary music.

Martin wrote the orchestral arrangements and instrumentation in collaboration with them. It was Martin’s idea to put a string quartet on Yesterday. To demonstrate his point he played it in the style of Bach to show what “voicings” could be used. To realise Penny Lane, McCartney hummed the melody, Martin wrote it in music notation, and David Mason, the classically trained trumpeter played it in a piccolo trumpet solo. Eleanor Rigby was heightened by Martin’s strings-only accompaniment inspired by Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho.

For Strawberry Fields Forever, Martin combined two different takes into one. For I Am the Walrus he provided an original arrangement for brass, violins, cellos, and vocal ensemble. He worked closely with McCartney to develop the orchestral ‘climax’ in A Day In the Life.

The Artistic Subject

When he became a Christian, Salvador Dali found an artistic subject and the inherent spirituality of the subject gave him a fuller, more elevated vision and he painted the masterpieces of the twentieth century. He was a skilled draftsman who developed his skills of realisation by studying Renaissance masters. Much criticism of Dali was because he supported General Franco rather than the Marxism of the orthodox Surrealists and art critics. They were ideologues and like all ideologues expected their members to conform to the manifesto or have their thinking corrected. Breton banned Dali from The Surrealist movement in 1941 and tried to ban his “Sistine Madonna” from the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York in 1960. It is said that Breton a Trotskyist, called Dalí in for questioning on his politics as his political allegiances had changed. After World War II, Dalí became close to General Franc’s movement and issued statements of support. He congratulated Franco for his actions aimed “at clearing Spain of destructive forces” met him personally and painted a portrait of his granddaughter.

His fascination with the hypercube a four-dimensional cube and unfolding of a hypercube is featured in “Corpus Hypercubus” which changes the traditional form but it is still recognisable and we know what it represents. His “Last Supper” and “The Christ of St. John of the Cross” are the masterpieces of the twentieth century. This brings us to the essence of great Art: genius and inspiration.

Contemporary painters and makers of installations show contempt for the audience and do not work for the public good. They seek a response but it is a negative response. They are not geniuses and have to shock to get noticed. In fact they are not really artists - but purveyors of clever tricks without deep meaning. Art is communication but contemporary art fails to communicate because of a disjuncture between subject and beholder, form and purpose.

The indefinable knack is intuitive practice called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one just knows instinctively what to put or where. This knack is the artistic eye, artistic judgement and it is a non rational process - it is intuition or instinct and it is this that trained and developed technique realises.”

John Dryden captures it :“But genius must be born, and never can be taught.” It is the technique that is taught not the genius, which is inborn, as the qualities that make a work art are intrinsic to the work, not external nor contingent on where the work is put.

The difference between nature and art is this. When I point my camera at something that pleases me I first use artistic judgement but I record natural phenomena. If I take a sunset it is reproducing nature and is not art but nature. However, if I then use the zoom function, it has the effect of condensing the distance and thereby magnifying the gold or red which is moving from nature to art because it is introducing a technique to change the reproduction of the natural phenomena and make an artistic end. I recently took several photos of a sunrise in Penzance Bay in Cornwall and sunset at Brighton. There is little technique involved and as long as you point the camera at the right thing you are away. The camera is recording natural phenomena but a meaning is conveyed from photographer to viewer as the scene automatically conveys certain emotions to the viewer. In the above examples it is natural beauty. When you look at a photograph of a landscape a chain of thought is triggered which moves from the inherent emotional state conveyed to personal and often unconscious thoughts and feelings.

A similar process occurs in art as the idea or a scene is transformed through human imagination and emotion till it becomes a work of art: transformed reality.

This article was first published on the website of the Traditional Britain Group.

http://www.magnoliabox.com/art/96482/Morning_view_of_Coalbrookdale_1777