RonPrice
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Posts: 53
Location: Launceston
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 Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 2:35 pm Post subject: “This Is Civilisation: Save Our Souls,” Thursday 26/3/09 |
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Forty years on from Kenneth Clark's landmark series Civilisation, art critic Matthew Collings offers his own interpretation of Western art history for a modern audience, at a time where contemporary art and tastes reflect our own lack of belief in anything at all. In each episode, Collings chooses key moments when there was a fundamental shift in attitudes towards, and the objectives of art. From Greek and Roman classicism glorifying man, through to religious art and art as a saviour of the soul, and on to the nihilism of modern art. Last night I watched the 3rd episode about John Ruskin and then I wrote the following.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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There was a strenuous and ceaseless exertion of the intellect in Ruskin’s life. It went on for years, decades, epochs until the last decade of his life when bipolar disorder put an end to the logic and reason of it all. The exercise of reason for Ruskin was largely a pleasurable exercise and it occupied the interstices of his life for the most part quite pleasantly, although that was not always the case. This exercise of the intellect is partly a compensation for the blindness of the heart, its passionate and seemingly insatiable lifeforce where man often explodes in the service of his passions. John Ruskin once wrote, the great writer or poet must combine "two faculties, acuteness of feeling and command of it."
I have certainly had my destructive, irrevocable explosions and, like a chronicler, I go back into the past to put it together again. "Desire,", 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote back in 1875, "is a flame that has reduced to ashes uncounted lifetime harvests of the learned." Accumulated knowledge can not quench this flame. Only the holy spirit or, as Jack McLean puts it, waging a mental jihad can control and guide this desire if it is strong. And waging jihad, mental or otherwise, has never been one of my gifts. The government of the passions seems to be a life-long task which one only partly achieves.-John Ruskin,"The Symbolical Grotesque Theories of Allegory, Artist and Imagination," Ruskin's Poetic Argument, Cornell UP, 1985. |
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