To B-E-B-E-B-E-B-E
by Nathan Bonar
“Life must be understood backwards, but they forget the other proposition: life must be lived forward”
- Søren Kierkegaard
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At the end of creation is the beginning of existence, but it takes struggle and destruction to manufacture a new creation. Much like our mythical creation in Christianity, the nature of origins is directly related to endings. When one considers the genesis of Western culture, one may envision the Gutenberg printing press. This is quite considerably a fact. However, the reasons for which they extol him are slightly off the mark. Yes, Gutenberg is highly fantasized as the glorious creator of the printing press, but he was centuries late to printing if we open our knowledge of history to the East, where countries like Japan, China, and Korea already had a rich history of woodcuts and a mesmerizing print culture.
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What Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468) did for the West was revolutionize Western print culture. Through his divergent and innovative thinking, he was allowed to consider inventions in trades such as winemaking, jewelry, and engraving. In considering such methods of creation, Gutenberg’s invention is only due to previous creations. His resourcefulness paved the way to adapt the process of molding and casting the typesetting from a jeweler’s workshop. Next, his inclusion of the corkscrew for the spindle on top of the coffin and gallows provides a smoother descent to the gallows which more evenly distributes the pressure over the whole page, producing a more legible and evenly pressed page. He used creativity to craft a unique addition to an existing machine. Yes, he did create a moveable type, but for Western culture, Gutenberg gave us the page; he gave us space. The space on the page allows anything to be created, written, lived, or understood, ad infinitum. The author is the god of art, their art, and they create the characters that go on the page, which, in turn, create a world for us when we read it. One might consider all of the wonderful Proustian turnbacks here.
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How else is the author a small god of art? Print culture for Westerners is directly tied to invention. When we want to build a house, we make blueprints on paper: an infinite space that allows us to create with no true consequence: it can be erased, it can be crumpled, it can be ripped, it can be lit on fire and absolved of its sins. One can draw a single person, a whole stadium of people, or the entire world on a piece of paper. This creative space also mimics actual space, where our planet floats, and space is continually expanding just like the number of pages that are written on each year. In space, anything is possible. However, the outcomes depend on the environment of that galaxy or solar system, which creates the planets in that particular orbit, and the environment on the planet creates the landscape, or hellscape, or dreamscape, depending on the qualities within proximity to their nascence and growth.
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Gutenberg’s reusable, individual moveable type allowed an infinite set of possibilities to unfold on the page and flow from the creator-author-god. Just as YHWH spoke the words of creation and created the universe by destroying chaos to do so, it formed the planets, it formed Adam who became the first author-creator-god when he named the animals and created gardening practices. The author-creator-god, then, is able to take the space of language and pages to produce characters, narratives, landscapes, plots, and all the nature of reality within the text and within reality, for instance, Barthes’s “Reality Effect.”
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Let’s take a further look at creations that come from the past which disrupt and end previous thinking: we will begin with Euclidean geometry. Euclid (~300 BCE), the inventor of the foundation of geometry, created his idea for mathematics from nature itself. In Elements, Euclid uses the space available to him to create a collection of definitions, postulates, proofs, and mathematical propositions. Nature was Euclid’s muse, and his inspiration led to foundational mathematics that was then built atop by other mathematicians, inevitably and irrevocably altering Euclid’s original vision: where there is an end of previous Euclidian thought, there is a beginning of a new mathematical principle. This buttress effect is what has created the imaginary house of knowledge that is the inheritance of all successive generations.
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Those inheritors who realize that the beginning of knowledge comes at the end of traditional thinking are the ones Time remembers and whom we study or aspire to be like today. What I mean is, that when we understand how literature interacts with and in our lives, we begin to live within the questioning mode of Socrates (d. 399 BCE): is the unexamined life worth living? And Descartes’s (1596-1650) “cogito, ergo sum” offers us a challenging new perspective on being human. Two monumental phrases that act upon one another in the mind like a ship in a body of water, these two meet in such a way that one is completely dependent on the other. The ocean of previous knowledge is what buoys man’s eternal galleon on the sea of life. The dependence of the boat on the water is like the dependence of the mind on new and curious ideas. Here, a great visual aid is the MC Escher (1898-1972) print from 1938 with fish disappearing into ducks above water.
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One person into whom these two axioms crash, as waves upon a bow, is John Keats (1795-1821) and his “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” A rough-and-tumble boy with a sensitive side, Keats found the fluidity of knowledge and the continued conversation of literature to be overwhelmingly exciting. After a surreal night of reading Chapman’s translation of Homer, Keats’s whole destiny changed. The foundation of literary studies in the West, Homer, beckoned to Keats from beyond; Keats followed. From that night, Keats would go on to write some of the most beautiful verses of the Romantic era. When Keats began to examine life through the characters in his poems, like Prospero or Hyperion, he was able to wrestle with his own selfhood through the previous conversation between English and canon poets. His ship sailed on the sea of poetics and he allowed the breath of the ancients to act upon his sails. Keats was known to allow the moment to gather up and sew it to the page; he embodied true Romantic spirit and sublimity. Other artists besides poets and men of letters have also invoked these principles in their work.
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Artists who create marvelous works that stand the test of time are typically the ones who break from tradition. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) played for high stakes when he stood at the end of the line of tradition and began a new achievement in metallurgic sculpture casting. His “Perseus with the Head of Medusa,” a commission by Cosimo I de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519-1574), was cast as a single piece rather than in sections as tradition warranted. The story goes that Cellini was dying as the statue was being cast, with his bed adjacent to his boiling and clamorous workshop, but upon hearing his assistants’ distress that the bronze was cooling and would not properly disperse through the mold, he launched from his deathbed to throw pewter into the flames which allowed the bronze to flow smoothly (The Life of Benvenuto Cellini : A Florentine Artist. ... Written by Himself in the Tuscan Language, and Translated from the Original by Thomas Nugent ... in Two Volumes). Using this new, peculiar way of casting allowed Cellini to usher in an era of artistic development in metallurgic casting arts–at the end of tradition began a new art.
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Women are no stranger to breaking tradition either. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), moved to England after a historic and catastrophic rape case against her painting tutor. During her time in England, she worked in Charles I’s (1600-1649) court. While there, she painted the historical “Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting.” However, she left out one of the feature characteristics of the figure: her Painting was not wearing a gag. If Painting before Gentileschi wore a gag because it did not speak, then, once Gentileschi removed her gag, Painting’s voice was invoked for future generations. With her curious tilt and inquisitive facial features, Gentileschi’s Painting proposes a new period where the artist and viewer are mutually disorganized by art itself as a mode of thinking and chronicling ideas and culture. At the end of the tradition of voiceless art, Gentileschi’s voiced Painting allegory stamps the way for future feminists to speak their minds, like Wollstonecraft.
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Another to consider is Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). The foremost entomologist of the Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672), she moved to Amsterdam and published a book on the study of insects. The book published in Amsterdam was “The Caterpillar’s Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food” (1679). Her achievement was a monumental move towards a fuller understanding of insects and their life cycles. Until her publication, people believed insects emerged fully formed from the mud out of the ground. She uses her incredibly colorful and detailed illustrations to demonstrate how, in fact, insect life cycles run from caterpillars to chrysalis, to butterflies. Moreover, her book provides information on the plants that these bugs are dependent on to mate and hatch. At the age of 52, Merian embarked on a journey to Suriname, South America. Due to a lack of male escort (a scandalous idea at the time), this unusual trip propelled Merian to international fame for her work while also revolutionizing scientific painting. When an artist finds the proper current on the ocean of knowledge against cultural permission, they can discover new wonders.
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Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) rode his current all the way from a small, abused boy in his brother’s printing shop to becoming a founding father. A Royalist most of his life, while also attempting to be an English gentleman during his decade-long stints in London, Franklin did not appear to be a breaker of tradition. After an embarrassing meeting with English Elites, culminating in a mocking statement about his corduroy jacket, Franklin began a slide toward dissent that led him to France on behalf of America–much to the chagrin of John Adams. While in France, Franklin became resistant to English authority and, upon securing a treaty with a large grant of money for the purpose of the American Revolution, he secured his full break from tradition. As the treaty was signed, he wore the very same corduroy coat that he was derided by the English noble. At the end of a personal tradition as a Royalist was the beginning of a new nation. This new nation was to be, even more so, a break from tradition for it proposed to be a rational nation with the consent of the governed and not beholden to the dogma of a religion. Through a plethora of examples, we have seen tradition break and a new beginning of knowledge commences. One more example is needed to explore the elasticity of this idea for today: our own time of knowledge- and resource scarcity.
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What does mere commentary or an expression of new awareness do to fix a problem? The issue with high art and most political movements is that they fall prey to this issue almost exclusively. When an artist makes a comment through art, in some cases they make substantial choices of medium to carry out their voice. What this does, though, is cause ripple effects. One example is California artist Kara Walker (b. 1969) and her work “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014) with its use of sugar paste and molasses as an art medium. The use of sugar paste as the medium causes a rise in the need for the product, especially in the quantities she’s purchased for this Ozymandias-size statue. Moreover, the use of sugar paste takes this resource from other areas of potential demand, and a demand that is in many cases met through enslaved persons. Why not donate the sugar paste in honor of this idea? The use of natural resources for art mediums when people go hungry is rather egregious and unthinkable. Furthermore, the progression of climate change is altering our ability to grow such natural produce as sugar cane and cacao. When the Earth reaches its new climate, it will be a disaster for humans and our agrarian needs.
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On the other hand, there are artists who see the medium they choose as a protest through the use of recycled or reused materials. The only real action that causes change is protest and violence. The fact of this statement is represented throughout history. If there was ever a treaty signed, there would be dead bodies before it. A true action to bring change is to be like Einstein, who, when asked what he would do with a whole hour to solve a problem, said he would use 55 minutes to define the problem. Here is the next step for our generation: we must define the problems—point blank, then we need to use divergent thinking to discuss new ideas that we can converge to solve our problems. Em-dash supposes a new break from tradition. This is an exclusively graduate-run and graduate-work-filled journal. Our desire is that new ideas will proliferate within these pages and on the space that Gutenberg gave to Western culture: the artistic space on a blank canvas, page, or otherwise. Let this journal assist in navigating the seas of life, and may we find the current of knowledge to propel us. The end of commenting on and presupposing the awareness of an issue, we want to change comes at the end of the ocean of knowledge: where the current pushes us toward a solution which is a new beginning.