The Open

For the Baroque soul:


He adds to creation what He wills.
---Q, 35:1

Every act of perception is the infinite in the finite.

God is a precept, the world is a concept.

All truth lies at the intersection of what is 'given' and the open, tradition (or continuity) and creativity, revelation and history; each person is the insertion of a new perspective into the framework of relations that is the world. Each Revelation is the breaking up of the old world.

Levi-Strauss: series and structure, the mathematical infinite and the absolute. In our cultural attitudes: structural and serial thought; the ancient quarrel: philosophy and poetry (which is "wandering"). The philosophical stance has been the archetypal, natural view since the Middle Ages: the traditional systems of expectations and formation. 'Classical' thought -against the polyvalent and an emphasis on the contingent, temporality, is based on a world defined by gravitation and abstraction; serial thought on a world that is perpetually expanding...


The classical is the definitive, the concluded message; it is the closed-like ordering of thought. The order of the work is the mirror image of an imperial and theocratic society.


Underpinning the poetics of the necessary and the univocal is an ordered cosmos, a hierarchy of essences and laws which each individual must understand in the only possible way, the way determined by the creative 'logos'.


The reception and interpretation is always modified by particular and individual interplay with, and the response to, an 'object' and this brings time and existence to it. Culture, individual tastes, inclinations, and perspectives are a prolongation of the object, an essence, into time. But this is not the same as an "unfinished work", "acts of conscious freedom". The modern is the substitution of Freedom for Truth, the Protestant search for the truth rather than the Catholic possession of it. The open is not the unfolding of a pre-conceived plan and it is not just a question of the number of new dimensions of meaning it throws open: the open belongs to a qualitatively different set of experiences, a different world-view and a different world.



The new perspectives introduce the subjective element but in a specific, predictable, closed way...from the 'outside' as it were. Allegory, for example, is a definite range of rigidly pre-established possibilities just as traditional folk songs are the weaving together of pre-fabricated materials in a number of given ways. Is complete freedom possible ? As finite beings can we even conceive of such a thing and are infinite , undetermined possibilities meaningful unless they exist against a backdrop of what is determined...the 'muddy centre'?



Whether it the classical Renaissance or Byzantium flat, inert space, the Jazz age with its creativity and soaring inventiveness is literally worlds apart from their timeless perspective. [H]ere it is precisely the static and unquestionable definiteness of the classical Renaissance form which is derived; the canons of space extend around a central axis closed in by symmetrical lines and shut angles which cajole the eye towards the centre in such a way as to suggest an "essential" eternity instead of movement . Baroque form is dynamic; an indeterminacy of effect (in its play of solid and void, light and darkness, with its curvature, its broken surfaces, its widely diversified angles of inclination; it conveys the idea of space being progressively dilated. Its search for kinetic excitement and illusionary effect leads to the situation where the plastic mass in the Baroque work of art never allows a privileged, definitive , frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation....(outside the canons of authorized responses. Not to name , but only suggest. The single direction that is dogma, values , is questioned).



An ordered world based on universally acknowledged laws is being replaced by a world of ambiguity", one without 'directional centres' and different "types of ambiguity"...an inexhaustible network of meanings.



The classical perspective: the god of the spectator: the whole world converges on him, the world is detached from him..the brain can isolate a given view, frozen in time; but its experience of the world outside the eye is more like a mosaic than a perspective set up, a mosaic of multiple relationships, none of them wholly fixed. Any sight is a sum of different glimpses..the viewer and the view are part of the same field. Reality, in short, is interaction.
---Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.



The misconception which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
---A.N.Whitehead.



Field of possibilities: not one rigid form of interplay. Devolution of authority, static order, the given, to personal choice. Multiple logics (cause and effect breaks down..dis-orientation, discontinuity, complexity).


In the modern scientific universe as in architecture and in Baroque pictorial production, the various component parts are all endowed with equal value and dignity and the whole construct expands toward a totality which is close to the infinite. It refuses to be hemmed in by any ideal normative conception of the world. It shares in a general urge towards discovery and constantly renewed contact with reality.


The spirit of Baroque: the emancipation from bounds. The background in a picture reveals its kinesis, depth-experience..the horizon is the symbol of the "unlimited space-universe"..where heaven and earth meet, music flows from it. It is the same with the fascination with clouds: the Alpine spirit that desires nothing more than to be alone with endless space, to be alone in Paradise. Personality is a soul left to its own decisions.


With the open the emphasis shifts from the essence to appearance: impression, sensation, "an empiricism which converts the Aristotelian concept of real substances into a series of objective perceptions by the viewer.

The role of the art object is one of potential mystery, to quicken his imagination. The open work offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning , different ways of being understood..a pure expression of personality
---Novalis.


To name an object is to suppress pleasure. It exists in a halo of indifference (aniconism). But the open work is still a work and not just a series of random events or experiences. Reality may be without a teleology, without a pre-determined end. But the aim is to seize the multiplicity of duration-broken up into an infinity of instants-and transform it into the organic wholeness of all synthesis.


Goethe. Often rounded, always open. A broken circle.


The universe does not have a fixed futurity, a [p]redetermined, unalterable order of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for all determined the directions of God's creative activity. In fact, divine knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more than the inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a semblance of unity on things by holding them together, a sort of mirror passively reflecting the details of an already finished structure of things which the finite consciousness reflects in fragments only..the future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole in the whole of God's creative life but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines.
----Allama Iqbal.


The discontinuity of contemporary physics , the victory of nominalism over realism..to be without a definition. Complementarity: different models describe different behaviour. A move away from solidity, habit, regularity and "matter" to events and probabilities and discontinuity ("jumps")


How can anything present itself truly to us since its synthesis is never completed? How could I gain the experience of the world since none of the views or perceptions I have of it can exhaust it and the horizons remain forever open? Open to continual renewal ...a flight from the old , solid, concept of necessity. A centre must emerge, a centre is allowed to emerge.
---Merlau -Ponty.

The open work is still a "work" and not a series of random coagulations or pure improvisation; it is a structural vitality.

The work of art..is a form, namely of movement , that has been concluded; or we can see it as an infinite contained within finiteness..the work therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just "parts" or fragments of it, because each of them containing the totality of the work , and reveals it according to a given perspective. so the variety of performances is founded both in the complex factor of the preformer's individuality and in that of the work to be performed..the infinite points of view of the performers and the infinte aspects of the work interact with eachother , come into juxtaposition and clarify eachother by a reciprocal process, in such a way that a given point of view is capable of revealing the whole work only if it grasps it in the relevant , highly personalised aspect. Analogously, a single aspect of the work can only reveal the totality of the work in a new light if it is prepared to wait for the right point of view capable of grasping and proposing the work in all its vitality.

(Citations from Umberto Eco, The Open Work; Spengler, Decline and Fall, Allama Iqbal, The Reconstruction)