In my theoretical approach to art, I suggested that we confine the term ‘modern’ to its chronological implications of when something took place, rather than what took place. If we conflate the two, we face a transcultural conundrum when approaching Chinese art because the underlying nature of what took place in the West was fully achieved in China more than a thousand years ago. In its ancient recognition of art as one of our most important languages in evolving consciousness, we are faced with the problem of the millennial ‘modernism’ of Chinese art.

The current confusion in the global art market rests in part on such terminological issues. ‘Modern,’ and ‘abstract’ become weasel-words when applied to Chinese art. But it also rests on a pervasive misunderstanding of the underlying nature and goal of what was recently achieved in the West.

It was unquestionably dazzling, vital and revolutionary. But a revolution is against some perceived tyranny, the overthrowing of which is the goal. If the revolution is successful and its goal achieved, the revolution ends. We shift, in the arts, from the conquest of a new realm of perception and expression, to learning to dwell in it. Because of the near global hegemony of the West at the time, the revolution was taken to be a global one, not only in the West, but by countries influenced by it. It wasn’t. From a trans-cultural perspective, both the revolution and its achievements were culturally local. The confusion arising from assuming that a relative, local revolution exported on the wings of western global power should govern the arts of other cultures also contributed to art-world confusion.

What happened in the West was that, belatedly, art was emancipated to serve as a direct vehicle in the evolution of consciousness, along with religion, philosophy and science rather than being relegated to their service. All of the ‘isms of the revolution were no more than the skirmishes for achieving its goal, all part of the same quest to free art from servitude and allow it infinitely greater efficiency in evolving collective consciousness. By failing to grasp the nature of the tyranny, or understand its underlying aim, the West took the ‘isms for the revolution, missing its point, and perpetuating the surface concerns the revolution itself was challenging.

The servitude to religion and philosophy in traditional western art is obvious, and very similar. Both envisioned art as propaganda, to both illustrate and perpetuate particular ideas about reality. Art was primarily focused on surface meaning. Its servitude to science is less obvious but far more pervasive. In the visual arts, for instance, the rational, reasoning basis for the scientific mind demanded reality in depiction. A horse should be recognizable as a horse; a haystack as a haystack. But the tyranny to be overthrown was not mimesis as such, nor the rejection of explicit surface subject-matter, nor any of the other skirmishes represented by the dizzying progression of ‘isms jostling for prominence by the first half of the twentieth century, it was the emancipation of art to serve, unconstrained, its ultimate master - evolving consciousness.

By failing to recognize the fundamental tyranny it sought to overthrow, confusion in the art-world was compounded by the focus on skirmishes, allowing the conviction that the revolution was ongoing and that surface novelty, whether as means or meaning, were paramount. The idea of permanent revolution, however, apart from being permanently tiring, is an oxymoron with an inevitable paradox at its end: the need to revolt against revolution itself.

We all became so caught up in the excitement of revolution that we failed to recognize either its underlying aim or its conclusion. Taking the skirmishes for the revolution, it seemed that surface novelty ruled, leading to a doomed attempt to perpetuate it indefinitely as the way to continue a revolution that had already achieved its goal by the second half of the twentieth century. Thus initial exploration of new depths of meaning in art ended up linking it again to surface concerns, this time of novelty. The banality this led to is in evidence at every art fair, contributing to art-world confusion.

If we shift to a trans-cultural approach to understanding art - and trans-culturalism in the West while in its infancy and struggling against ingrained conviction, is clearly the future. With a clearer perspective we can see that China reached a similar maturity in whatever was considered art more than two thousand years ago; it was the West that was playing catch-up. With the theory I propose, linking art to its role in evolving consciousness, we can allow human analogy in order to discuss the stages through which art progresses in any culture.

Humans evolve from birth, through infancy, childhood, and adolescence on their way to maturity. With the definition of art expanded to include any creative response to experience, we can see a similar progression in any culture but with significant variations in chronological synchronicity. Creative response to experience is crucial to evolving consciousness, so we should expect parallels between human and artistic evolution since the arts have played so important a role in evolving consciousness. If we accept the arts as primarily a highly efficient means of self-cultivation, we can cut through a lot of the confusion befuddling the global art world today, and do so without negating any of art’s lower-level functions.

We are all familiar with the earlier phases of the evolution of individual human consciousness from infancy to maturity. The concept of sagacity will test our sense of definition a little more, since only once we have arrived at full maturity can we begin to explore it and it involves responding to a degree of experience that lies beyond the realm of definition, but for our purposes it is enough to leave it as a vague final stage and cross that bridge when we come to it individually (see The Rive Reality of Consciousness).

The infantile response to creativity is barely separable from the exploration of the mysterious world the infant suddenly finds itself in. Making noises or markings partly for the joy of it become inseparable from the exploration of new space and potential. This is ongoing, of course, but the exploration of meaning is exponentially augmented by the refinement of means as skill-sets and comprehension grow.

Music was probably the first art-form to be explored. Our ancient ancestors were surrounded by the music of nature, of bird-song and the wind soughing through the pines, the rhythm of falling rain or tumbling brooks. The earliest surviving indications of what appear to be the result of hominid activity even pre-dates Homo-sapiens. Cupules, small inverted dome shapes cut into stones by hammering rock surfaces with other stones, are among the earliest and most plentiful of early, intentional markings, dating back to a time possibly well before 290,000 BCE.¹ A stone sculpture known as the Venus of Tan-Tan is between 300,000 and 500,000 years old.² Surviving small stone carvings and engraved beads can be dated to around 70,000 BCE.³ The dating of various well-known cave paintings, many in Europe, can be taken back to before 64,000 BCE, although earlier dates have been suggested.⁴ For our purposes the history of such artistic endeavor, or even its immediate intent are incidental. The point is that much of the imagery matches that of infants and children. A series of handprints created either by outlining the spread fingers with pigment or dipping them in it, simple geometric forms, stick figures and outlined creatures are all typical of both early art work and children’s art.

At this stage in our analogy between life and art it becomes useful to separate means from meaning. The means are how it was done, what media, what tools and what techniques; the meaning is relates to why it was done, to what envisaged end in the context of its time. We need not delve into the psychology of Neanderthal minds to further the analogy. We can leap forward to the differences between western and Chinese art in a more manageable and more accessible historical timeframe.

In the Introduction I suggested that full maturity in the arts has, as its ultimate goal, its role as an efficient means of self-realizaton, self-cultivation. In China this role was already recognized and knowingly applied by the culturally influential minority more than two thousand years ago. Whatever was considered art in fifth century BCE China, which included music, writing, archery and ritual (but not yet calligraphy that transcended lexical meaning, or painting that transcended a primarily functional role – these two were included beginning about two thousand ago. There was an inevitable interdependence between what was considered art and how it came to function as such. If the influential minority believed archery was a high art, then they focused creative attention on it, both technically and psychologically, honing it to efficient perfection in its designated role.

With the key to efficient refinement of the arts recognized as self-cultivation and, thereby collective cultivation, art became fully recognized as an efficient and comprehensive path to sagacity and the fulfilment of the evolution of consciousness – in China seen generally as uniting the intellect with the trans-intellectual way of knowing (Dao) then integrating the two.

For millennia, the West tended to focus on lower-level roles of art, on its decorative, social, or, particularly, its potential for propaganda of some sort. Focusing on the details at the surface of art obscured its efficiency in its higher roles. Marginalized was its potential for accessing the transcendent way of knowing crucial to the fulfilment of consciousness. By focusing on lower-level aspects of the artistic process, the West was millennially diverted. This is not to say that great art was not produced, of course it was. Artists are artists, and will always rise above such constraints as are imposed and create aesthetic magic, but the constraints do affect overall efficiency. What happened from the mid-nineteenth century into the mid twentieth century was that the artists revolted against the constraints. Traditional ideas about art were overturned as we broke free of centuries of roles and rules that constrained art.

This encouraged an intellectual approach to art and, in the visual arts, the imposition on a fixed, rigid surface, of pre-conceived compositions were imposed by the intellect. It led to a focus on what was essentially a form of propaganda on behalf of the other main vehicles of evolving consciousness. Art became subservient to religion, philosophy and science. The propaganda for religion is obvious, but is similar to that for philosophy, including political philosophy. They are united in in expressing the ideals and aspirations of western philosophical concepts, glorifying what is deemed important in the culture and, by admonition, identifying what to avoid. The humble still-life exemplifies the philosophical propaganda in endorsing the concept of man’s dominion over all the bounty of the Earth, as decreed in Genesis to a monotheistic West. As an aside, the obvious response to the recent violence against monuments to slave-traders, colonizers and plunderers against our current morality is not to change the monuments, which are art and part of world cultural heritage, if only in a minor way, but to change the narrative. Leave the slave owner standing on a plinth in Swindon, or move it to a museum while it still evokes any level of violent response, but refocus its meaning by adding explanatory text to adjust to modern sensibility – then we might learn something more valuable from it than the benefits of extra-legal vandalism. To argue in favour of destroying ancient art in order to accord with local and eternally evolving sensibility would be to side with the Taliban in the destruction of the monumental Baymian Buddha’s in Afghanistan, where objecting to the religious beliefs they represented at the time, they were dynamited to fragments despite their transcendence of original meaning and elevation to part of global artistic heritage.

But, to return to western art… Hand in hand with this focus on the surface as separate and distinct was a long-standing acceptance that a theory of art could also be separate, and equally self-sufficient. It led to object based aesthetic theory where the process of art was seen as vision, leading through artistic acquired techniques to the finished art object as the end product of art. Which brings us to the far less obvious, but far more pervasive subservience of art to science, which was dominating; it didn’t matter what was being depicted, it demanded a science-based rationality in how it was represented. It had to accord as closely as possible to the reality of the senses. A tree had to look like a tree; a cathedral, like a cathedral. For centuries in the West, aesthetes, connoisseurs, art critics and other members of the art priesthood, convinced themselves that you could judge art quite independently of its overall process. An expert could judge the surface skills in judging appropriateness of subject matter and its symbolism, composition, colour sense, and technique and decide, right there, once and for all, whether or not something was art, and if so, how fine it was. They were quite wrong in theory, but since the art was produced under an inefficient theory, it was workable even if it fails miserably ask a continuing governing approach. The idea remains useful up to a point, but is relative and no longer governs.

Another outcome of the revolution was a shift from a product-based art theory to a process based one. Where the entire process becomes the art, and its end product, once art is linked theoretically to its role in evolving consciousness, becomes more fully evolved consciousness – enlightenment, however one cares to define that and, again, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

The modern western revolution in the arts was fundamentally one against the tyranny of the intellect, against subservience to religion, philosophy and science, against being a servant at the table of the other three main vehicles of evolving consciousness. It was, finally and belatedly, artists in the West revolting against this tyranny and taking their rightful place at the banquet of Meaning rather than hovering in the background to serve the banquet and clear the table. Discarding figurative subject matter and exploring all the inner languages of art, of form, line, colour and texture which, in turn, suddenly revealed underlying languages with vital potential including confidence and sagacity, were not the revolution. It was not a matter of one ism replacing the next in a series of revolutions, these were the skirmishes in the overarching goal of freedom from intellectual tyranny. I use the term ‘intellectual’ not to demean the intellect, without which we would be left, quite literally, meaningless, but because religion, philosophy and science all share the same intellectual means of pondering and expressing meaning and arriving at their beliefs, regardless of whether rationality is placed above faith, or vice versa in order to arrive at such beliefs. I am happy to defend the intellect in its appropriate role as a vital tool, a servant of wisdom and meaning, a valuable means of insight into life, the universe and everything, but will fight intellectual tyranny to the end.

Hugh Moss
At the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat, 20 March 2021