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Stefan Arteni

The East-Central European Cultural Model (a revised and illustrated version of the essay published in www.asymetria.org , 2009-2010)

SolInvictus Press 2009-2010

Orpheus, Roman mosaic and detail, Pergamon museum, Berlin

1560 Europe

1923 Europe

Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 1.Cultural Polyglotism. [February 5, 2009] Motto. Through time's howling clamor a voice of the nothing. Through chattering aeon a wailing of humans. (Lucian Blaga) A limes runs through the middle of Europe, the old Roman limes on the Danube. Charlemagne created a new borderline down the centre of Europe, the Limes Sorabicus, that clearly marked also a cultural border. In the early 1950s, the historian Oskar Halecki sketched a model of Europe, identifying three macro-regions: Western Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe. In Haleckis view, Central Europe consists of two parts West-Central Europe (Germany and Austria) and East-Central Europe (the territories between Germany and Russia). Historically, East-Central Europe includes the group of countries which fell under Soviet domination. East-Central Europe is not a static abstraction. The complex pattern of interaction rises out of the peculiar aspect of limes ethos as the site of continuity of the archaic and of a paradoxical fatalistic optimism, and can provide a picture of comprehensive correspondences in space and time - the multiscale and many-valued chronotope. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, it is a culture or a fate. If it may be said that there is a longing for an escape from the terror of a linear meaningless history for example, after modernitys attempt at memory erasure, Boris Groys proposes erasure of erasure to describe the contemporary global situation - it may also be said that the East-Central European cultural space, the liminal locus where semiospheres come into contact, intersect and overlap, necessarily denotes the potential of possibilities that culture is able to realize by attempting to make sense of the past in the present. Maria Todorova suggests that memory, identity, and historical legacy are the pertinent categories of analysis. Piotr Piotrowsky speaks of the other Europe, while Arpad Szakolczai holds that the area may be viewed as borderlands of Western civilization, as located between the both mythical and very real entities West and East . However, the concept of Borderline is twofold, remarks Alexander W. Belobratow. On the one hand it has a separating function and on the other hand a binding one. Unfortunately, notes Szakolczai, the area has been stuck too long in transitoriness, in a precarious liminal condition. There may be an alternative, non-canonized history of twentieth century culture, a history of periphery input and dispersed diasporas, a history of the

omnipresence of present pasts playfully renegotiated by every new work that is itself informed by what precedes it. One may also underscore the ambivalence of the center and periphery concepts and of the hierarchic differentiation center/periphery. Czeslaw Milosz once remarked: And the intellectual Paris of the 1950s and the 1960s turned with expectation towards the EastIt tells the story of how a center, by losing faith in itself, changes through resignation into a periphery. When one considers culture, it is the intersubjective schemas pertaining to the 'consensual domain' that are relevant. Roy D'Andrade employs the term 'cultural models'. According to D'Andrade, "a cultural model is a cognitive schema that is intersubjectively shared by a social group". A reinterpretation of Michael Kimmel's notion of dynamic switches between culture-embedded ontologies through image-schemata transformations and encompassing cases of partial compatibility, may be horizontally extended to include non-linguistic phenomena. In the case of East-Central Europe, a world constantly wracked by changes that raise again and again the identities dilemma and the threat of oblivion, the cultural Dasein of the individual consists of a positive heterarchy that couples various languages and cultures toward a cooperative survival unity, without giving up the autonomy of parts. Evidently, there are several different cultural logics at work at the same time, involving interaction and conflicting interaction, and, occasionally, the phenomenon of mimetism, understood both in the Girardian sense of mimetic desire, and in the sense the term is used in biology, as a way to trick the environment. It must be borne in mind that, as Caryl Emerson points out, Central and East Europeans (for all their contributions to the avant-garde) have routinely stood up to Western models. (To approach the question of modernisms relationship to tradition, it may be briefly noted here that, paradoxically enough, to transgress is to reaffirm a limit). Emerson argues that exile, displacement, multi-languagedness, heteroglossia, outsideness to oneself and thus a taste for irony constitute the defining coordinates of a unique heritage, a polycentered identity connected to finding themselves always between several cultures and unable to lose themselves in any one of them or, so to speak, "planted in each reality, informed by all, circumscribed by none". What is interesting about multilingualism is the unique state of compound multi-competence postulated by Istvan Kecskes and Tunde Papp, that is a common underlying proficiency and two or more constantly available interacting systems, none of which is the same as the language system of a monolingual. Brian MacWhinney points out that in case of childhood multilingualism, it appears that multiple languages are acquired as separate entities. Ulrike Jessner argues that the increased metalinguistic skills trigger a heightened awareness of the arbitrary aspects of language, of cognitve styles and of syntactic factors. All in all, the dynamic of systems creates new structures and emergent properties within the playfulness and variation of culture-specific metaphoric fields.

Language is a repository of culture. The fact is that, in the age of Empires, cultures located at a crossroads and subjected to repeated colonization and assimilation attempts may feel the need of an encounter with the cultures which exercise widespread influence. Karen Wong remarks that an individual needs to become fluent in the language of knowledge and to acquire the language of the currently predominant culture. The polyglot inhabits someone else's culture, including the culture or cultures. What this helps instigate, and continues to finesse, is a cultural polyglotism. From the beginning, a translocal multi-identiy web and a recursiveness of identity recreation, a being between and astride cultures and moving across languages and cultural contextures set side by side, imply a second-order perspective, an experiential metacultural sensibility. An inner metalanguage, multiple inheritances and multiple codings, are at work. Second-order culture delineations are continuously reconstructed. The new entities produced by the peripatetic impulse open up a situational space which revels in the freedom of a horizonal in-between transcending untranslatable knots. Doris Runey points out that polyglots are "not 'in the world' but rather 'in worlds', dwelling in the liminal space of simultaneous belongingness and non-belongingness.

Theodor Pallady

Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 2.Artistic Polyglotism. [March 8, 2009] Motto. Behold the road inscribed in time, Comes from the dead, drawn does it Seem from song, The heavy cart which in the evening's Dust is groaning, Is brother to an old iconostasis. (Radu Gyr) Itamar Even-Zohar discusses the continuous process of cultural interference: We all tend to attribute much more meaningfulness and expressivity to words in a foreign language than to those of our own. While for a native speaker certain expressions, utterances, and texts are definitely banal, for a non-native speaker they may sound powerful and fresh. This conclusion may be also applied to visual systems: an appropriated repertoire does not necessarily maintain source culture functionsTransfers [of organization, structure, or representation systems] often involve functional shifts. Let us, with the help of an example, demonstrate these statements. It is sufficient to recall a few artists included in the first and in the new cole de Paris: Constantin Brancusi, Louis Marcoussis (Ludwik Kazimierz Wladyslaw Markus), Jules Pascin (Julius Mordecai Pincas), Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Mose Kisling, Ossip Zadkine, Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Stal, Andr Lanskoy, Magdalena Dumitresco-Campigli, Alexandre Istrati, Natalia Dumitresco, Dimitrie Varbanesco. The teaching and theories of Andr Lhote have influenced many East-Central European artists. The transfer of East Asian Calligraphic Art traditions was mediated by the artists of the same cole de Paris, and by Julius Bissier and Hans Hartung of the Gruppe Zen. Many of the artists of the cole de Paris were self-exiles, refugees, expatriates - Mihai I. Spariosu suggests that exile is a ludic-liminal experience. Alan D. DeSantis quotes L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg: for the exile, departure is imposed and return impossible. One may speak of ludic dislocation, or, as Rico Lie says, the concept of displacementis intrinsically linked to migration and diaspora. The artists enumerated above were, obviously, bi- or multi-lingual. Multiliteracy enhances the ability to manipulate language form, including the graphic written form - thinking skills are built on a foundation of concrete learning, which includes experience, visual feedback and motor activities. There is evidence that human cognition is oriented around vision, indicating also that linguistic memory is different from visual memory. Stephen Kosslyn's work on visual memory and visual perception has implicated motor control in visual imagery.

Danilo Kis indicates that the characteristic shared by East-Central European artists is the awareness of formform as possibility of choice, form that is an attempt to locate points of fulcrum like those of Archimedes in the chaos around us. "A cybernetic model works by setting up constraints," remarks Ernst von Glasersfeld. Art operates with constraints rather than with efficient causes - it only eliminates what does not fit, and this means learning the viable path. "Forms are created from the concatenation of operations upon themselves andarerather indications of processesThe closed loop of perception occurs in the eternity of present individual time," writes Louis H. Kauffman. Thus one may speak of circular operationality, of the recursive self-implication of form, and also of indirect recursion when two or more procedures cyclically call each other. Form implies itself as a meta-distinction, as a form of form. Implicit in this is a de-privileging of logocentrism and metanarratives. An artist's split between cultures becomes a potential means of deautomatizing worn-out formal devices, a strategy of inserting and asserting, of uprooting and defamiliarizing. Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova suggests that for the border-crosser, an alien system is empty and can be appropriated. Semiotic empty signs, semiotic manipulations, perceptual, hermeneutic, semiotic strands intersect within the empty matrix. Moreover, Czeslaw Milosz insightfully observes: To see means not only to have before ones eyes. It may mean also to preserve in memory. To see and to describe may also mean to reconstruct in imagination. One can grasp the stochastic and the necessary within the transformative force of far reaching transcultural processes viewed as hybrid process. There is always an opportunity for cross-code interference, code-switching, discontinuity or pseudomorphosis, and a many-valued approach. The creation of a mixed code will not always follow the rules of either initial code. Culture is complex and dynamic, i.e. constantly subject to change and learning. An overcode does not erase earlier or alternate semiotics. For Michel Serres, complexity, and its preference for boundary, expresses an ethos of decentredness and names a wandering through the criss-crossed tapestry of cultural crossroads. It cannot be stressed too much that indifference to the notion of a telos can be related to the development of a mythico-ritual mode of apprehending and of a ritual orthopraxy - dromena, litterally things performed, which have endured in an a-modern East-Central Europe and are connected with the spirit of play for its own sake. Joseph Needham has beautifully discussed the correlative view prevalent in premodern cultures, that is layered traditions and the dissipative forces involved in transmission. Following Steve Farmer, it is perhaps worth pointing out that correlative perspectives or correlative systems and their self-similar and fractal structures have deep neurobiological roots.

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In the final instance, the all-embracing interwoven web of operational cultural dynamics disseminates over different models a practice simultaneously underpinning and negating human understanding. Eugene Gorny suggests that experiencing is a result of auto-communication - in auto-communication the content of the message is less important than its form and it involves a constant reviewing under a more marked formal organization. Art as form is the locus where the absolute becomes knowable. This locus, however, does not coincide with the absolute, writes Antoon Braeckman.

Theodor Pallady

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Nemesis, Roman goddess of retribution, holding the wheel of fortune, 150 AD

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 3. Intermezzo. The Neo-Orwellian Madness. [April 6, 2009] Motto. Daddy, where there is no morality, there is corruption, and if a society lacks principles, that means it does not have any! (Ion Luca Caragiale)

Stefan Arteni, Digital Composition

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Czesaw Miosz observes: If nihilism, as Nietzsche says, consists in the loss of memory, recovery of memory is a weapon against nihilism. Gerhart Niemeyer has exposed the nihilistic core of Communist ideology found in Marx's assertion that the point is not to understand the world as it is but to change it, by which he meant transforming it into something it is not. Niemeyer says: "Totalitarianism would not be possible in practice if it were not for a long period of intellectual erosion preceding the advent of the activist". He continues: The fruit of Communist rule must be spiritual chaos and progressive barbarization.

The Archipelago of Political Prisons in Communist Romania

Arpad Szakolczai attempts to conceptualize the programme of reflexive historical sociology. He writes: There is, however, an even more important...level of explanation. This concerns the conditions under which the civilising process can turn against itself, where the question is no longer simply a paradoxical compromise between the civilising process and its opposite, the impulses set loose by a previous dissolution of order, but where the fundamental mechanisms of the civilising process are effectively, purposefully and

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explicitly undermined. It is at that level that the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century can be located, with the important caveat that they are very closely related to the...inflections of the civilising process...Once every section of the elite was eliminated, the Communist Party perpetuated the situation by implementing the infamous practice of 'counter-selection'. This implied that positions requiring any degree of leadership at any level of state, society or economy were filled not on the basis of ability but loyalty to the party, controlled by the 'nomenclatura' system...In this, there was an unbroken continuityThe aim remained the same: the prevention of the possibility of the formation of a genuine elite But the production and reproduction of an elite, a pool of individuals who are ready and able to provide leadership, is different from expertise. It is furthermore a social, not an individual phenomenon, and the conditions that existed during the entire life-span of communism were detrimental to the possibility for the emergence of an elite in this sociological sense. What was particularly missing there has been identified as most central for the formation of an elite in a 1942 article by Istvn Bib. According to him, the 'calm and creative' activity of the elite requires two things: the existence of a social consensus behind the elite selection mechanisms and the actual assignment of members of the elite to the proper places in the social structure. Bib furthermore stated that for the successful performance of its tasks the elite has to be self-confident, self-conscious and impartial, without being conceited. In sum, the elite of a society can only perform if it is given stable and calm conditions for its activity, and if its values, its 'chosenness' is generally recognised both by the others and by itselfThe puzzling fact that the collapse of the much-hated communist regime was not much perceived as a break in most countries of the region is due to the fact that it did not end transitoriness, the central characteristic of life under communism, only altered its modality. Abram de Swaan describes the inevitable result: Obviously, what occurs under these conditions is the bureaucratization of barbarism. In the case of Romania, the pre-war elite was deliberately decimated and marxism-leninism. contributed to what can be termed culturecide the attempt to erase and replace the cultural model and the ancient customs and rites. The new or postcommunist overlords have risen from among the old communist cadres -- collectively known as either the nomenclatura, or the new class described by Milovan Djilas, or the communist aristocracy, that is to say the only ones privileged under the communist regime -- mainly due to their advantageous positioning in the old networks and access to resources. They are inescapably linked to structures, networks, thinking, and practices of the past. The process of recruiting real elites, untainted by involvement with the old structures, was gridlocked by the old cadres. Co-option by Western institutions has helped restore the communist aristocracy's past prominence. In the field of culture, we are seeing an exercise in authority-building by an elite consisting of the heirs of the communist new class, mostly saplings grown in the

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tree-nursery for party cadres, the so-called boyars of the mind (Radu Gyr preferred the expression cultural jugglers), an elite bereft of any legitimacy, an elite with a negative image. The postcommunist elites have perpetuated the "they/us" dichotomy. There is an old Romanian proverb that says: The mouth of a sinner tells the truth. It will then suffice to quote a few lines written by Sorin Antohi, one of the boyars of the mind, known now as the pseudo-Doctor (he falsely claimed to hold a Ph.D. in History from the University of Iai) who had also served as an informer for Romania's communist-era Department of State Security. In an article entitled Romanian culture is a fiction, published in Contrafort 3-6 (77-80), March-June 2001, Antohi has jotted down a short note about his fellow neo-culturniks: The cultural eliteultimately a tiny minority, is totally alienated from the society it comes from and which it should help orient itself. From the political and ideological viewpoint, most top cultural and intellectual figures of contemporary Romania have broken their relationship with society (if they ever had any!). Betting immoderately on a sketchy and bovaric westernization, being (like state communism) narcissistic and despising the peoples stirrings and ills, our cultural elitehas failed in its historical mission These are the facts we should reflect on. We should also recall Homi Bhabhas words: Mimicry and masquerade are born from the desire to be equal, accepted and recognized; nevertheless, mimicry does not bring us closer to the essence, it only creates empty masks and meaningless forms of imitation. The world is becoming more uniform and standardized. Demythization has become dehistorization. Specific cultural models are transported directly from one country to another. Transnational neo-leninism appears to have become the globalizing Zeitgeist of the 21st century. The megadreams of situationists and neo-situationists have been transformed into bureaucratic agencies. Never before has the synchronization with one particular cultural pattern been of such global dimensions and so comprehensive. Overload, noise, lack of precision and ignorance, construct their limited and contradictory knowledge under systems of sense that reduce cultural complexity to chiliastic ecstasy. Systematic erasure of all cultural memory is implicit. Leszek Kolakowski had predicted: "The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life." It re-appears, it circles, it re-enters the stage.

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Stefan Arteni, Digital Composition

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Dominique Noguez, Lenine Dada, Le Dilettante, 2007

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 4.The Avantgarde and Marxism. [April 6, 2009] Motto. Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born. (Tristan Tzara) Chronologically and axiologically, Europe is firstly...the Europe of ascetic-noble personalism. The left is too young to claim any great achievement. It has not yet built anything lasting, it opposes the Gulag to the cathedrals, and party activists to monarchs, writes Mircea Platon. Platon speaks, of course, about the Europe of nations, a Europe that, kidnapped, displaced, and brainwashed, nevertheless insists on defending its identity. Milan Kundera has defined national identity in this way: "The identity of a people and of a civilisation is reflected in what has been created by the mind - in what is known as 'culture.' If this identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows correspondingly more intense, more important, until cultural life itself becomes the living value around which all people rally." Once our historical past and our culture, that which gives our present actions and reality meaning (by being a part of the transcendent/eternal) has been deconstructed - seen to be totally false and oppressive - there is nothing left to hold society together. Breaking the continuity with the past, wanting to begin again, is a lowering of man and a plagiarism of the orangutan, writes Jose Ortega y Gasset. The sociological ground of the term avantgarde is military and political, as Armin Koehler has pointed out. It has nothing to do with art praxis. It is a matter of context-shift, or, as Boris Groys says, of an exchange between the spheres of the valued and the valueless, a kind of Nietzschean de- or re-valuation of values. It operates under the spell of a Marxist obsession. Josef Maria Bochenski characterized Marxism as a dogmatic system that is only postulated and believed, an atheistic catechism. The marxist cultural revolution was not only directed at psychological and physical annihilation and suppression, but comprised the element of memoricide. Memoricide is the destruction of collective consciousness and memory. The modern utopian and dystopian relationship, the attempt at memoricide or erasure, is followed, according to Stjepan G. Mestrovic, by the confluence of postmodernism and postcommunism. The recent revisionist reconsidering of Socialist Realism and of the art of the Zhdanov era may be evaluated in the context of post-orthodox marxian tendencies and the attempts to rescue a marxist view of history. Mikhail Epstein recalls Jean Baudrillards concept of simulation as one of the definitions of postmodernism: Models of reality replace reality itself. Hence Epstein concludes that Socialist Realism, the simulative reality of a culture, was truly postmodernist avant la lettre. Tuomas Nevanlinna remarks that Socialist Realism aimed to realize the avantgarde utopia by using the methods of traditional art. Rene Girards mimetic desire theory, when applied to Socialist

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Realisms appropriation of nineteenth century official Academic styles, may suggest a relation between noticing ones own insufficiency and an economy of revenge. What is the historical avant-garde? Let us return to a workable definition and to its original use within the Marxist school of thought. Marek Kwiek points out that the clich of the intellectual as legislator and interpreter or of the philosopherprophet, the pathos of a providential history of redemption, have been displaced towards the art system. The fallaciousness of this idea is less surprising than its prevalence. The art object itself plays only an incidental role. Instead of sign processes as memory processes, there is a fallacious abstraction conducive to aesthetic negativity that creates a self-perpetuating conflict. Dada hoped to destroy traditional values in culture, aesthetics, and art. In his Lenine dada, ditions Le Dilettante, 2007, Dominique Noguez asks the question: could Lenin have been Dada incarnate? Tzara's manuscript "ARC" appears covered with the handwriting of Lenin. Soviet Utopia was born in the smoke rising from the funeral pyre of a Russian Empire which had been systematically deconstructed by Lenin and his confrres and followers. In other words, the century of avantgardes aimed at turning aesthetics into surrogate of politics, thus paving the way for the genocidal communist Gesamtkunstwerk fuelled by an absolute hatred of anything traditional. From the beginning, the aim of radical artistic avantgardes has consisted in nothing else but the elevation of the artwork to a life-style and possibly the lifestyle of the entire societyFrom the start, this project is totalising or, if one wishes to say so, totalitaryModern totalitarianism is only the radical materialization of this aim, writes Boris Groys. Gene Ray [ www.linksnet.de ] proposes a similar description: Drawing on nowclassic Frankfurt School critiques of artistic autonomy, I will sketch the outlines of the capitalist art system, including its ideology of the artist and its institutions and social functions. This will make it possible to recognize three possible models for critical and radical cultural practice: critically affirmative art, avant-garde practices, and nomadic practicesgroups and networks of Futurists, Dada, Russian Cubo-Futurists, Constructivists, Suprematists, and Surrealists. With the exception of the Italian Futurists, who notoriously became involved with fascist politics, the other groupings of the historical avant-gardes were made up of radical leftists who, anarchist or marxist in orientation, can credibly be described as anti-capitalist.. [A more careful and accurate reconstruction of the Futurist movements and of their adherence to the logicality of two ideologies is needed. Margherita Sarfatti, "la donna del Duce" (Mussolinis mistress), arts redactor for Popolo d'Italia, the Duces confidante and biographer, played an important role in the invention of fascism, and later created the Novecento movement, a movement which adopted an entirely original interpretation of the grand Italian pictorial tradition (Mario Sironis Manifesto of Mural Painting, 1933, prepared the terrain for a revival of mural decoration), advocated technical accomplishment and promoted a boldly

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modernist design and architecture, revealing thus the relationship between Fascism and modernism. (Saviona Mane, The Jewish Mother of Fascism, August 7, 2006, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/735492.html ) Many futurists went on to become the leading artists of Novecento. The Strapaese group founded by Giorgio Morandi and joined by Soffici, Rosai and Carr, also advocated a return to tradition. On the other hand, Russian futurists created a movement called com-futurism (communist-futurism). Most of them, including Maiakovsky, the bard of the new Soviet regime who wrote the famous verse: "Lenin lives, lived and will live", will join Lenins bolsheviks and the ideology of proletarian internationalism. Beginning in Cracow in 1917, Polish Formists aimed to create a national version of modernism. Formists frequently painted religious themes. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz wrote: "We live in a frightful epoch...[a] horrible, painful, insane monstrosity that is passed off as being the evolution of social progress." A similar movement existed in Croatia. Both movements drew on all formal systems and experiments, including folk art, cubism and futurism, and called for a spiritual rejuvenation of Europe (Timothy O. Benson, editor, Central European AvantGardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930, MIT Press, 2002). East-Central European nations were trying to reaffirm their identity and their national traditions by contesting a single, monolithic modernism. The internationalist avantgarde would have rejected these ideas as reactionary.] In his Theory of the Avantgarde,1974, Peter Buerger, a disciple of the marxist Frankfurt School, indicates that, when defining an avantgarde, the question is of revolutionizing life, not of creating forms that are destined to become the object of aesthetic contemplation. Peter Buerger describes the art of the avantgarde, the categories of non-art, anti-art, and a-art, as the destruction of arts tradition. He writes: The avantgardistes proposed the sublation or artublation in the Hegelian sense of the term: art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form.. it is... the attempt to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art...Only an art the contents of whose individual works is wholly distinct from the (bad) praxis of the existing society can be the center that can be the starting point for the organization of a new life praxis. The affiliation with communism of many dadaists and surrealists is well known, Dan C.Mihailescu calls them cominterns toys. We will mention only a few names: Victor Brauner (agent of the comintern), Jules Perahim (zhdanovist satrap), Gherasim Luca (Gilles Deleuzes favourite; in 1967 Gherasim Luca wrote on the mural Cuba Collectiva dedicated to Fidel Castro: La posie sans langue, la rvolution sans personne, lamour sans fin.). Many prophets of utopia and internationalist Tendenzkunst (art engag) willingly implemented the proletcult doctrine and the bolshevik policy of desecration and destruction they were seeing the promised land, they were proclaiming the primordiality of

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politically correct content and, consequently, novelty was guaranteed by the new content. A recent exhibition dedicated to Italian art of the 20th century closed with the section Tabula Rasa devoted to three artists of the post-war period who intended to reactivate the spirit of the avantgarde: Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni. Tabula Rasa signifies an attempt at creation ex nihilo. It is a messianism without the Messiah whose outcome has been described by Mircea Platon: the hideousness of a wasteland. (The Novecento. Abstraction. Italian art of the 20th century, 5 February 2005 24 April 2005, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, http://english.mart.trento.it/context_mostre_mondo.jsp?ID_LINK=346&area=62& page=2 ) Western-style stylization of the avantgarde as paradigm has turned into a sort of retroutopianism. The use of the term as a marketing tool has become widespread. Methodologically, we should acknowledge the importance of ideology, distinguishing the avantgarde from movements seeking only innovative formalization systems strictly speaking, neither Brancusi, nor Pallady may be described as belonging to the avantgarde. The merciless demythization of the past is part and parcel of the new and decidedly trendy academic discourse but no demythization of marxism is taking place. There is need for a demythization of the avantgarde.

Marcel Janco, Masque (Portrait de Tzara), 1919

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Gino Severini, 1927

Gino Severini, 1929

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Massimo Campigli, 1927

Massimo Campigli, 1950

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Mario Sironi, 1926-1927

Mario Sironi, 1936

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Mario Sironi, 1940

Mario Sironi, 1940s

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Giorgio Morandi, 1941

Giorgio Morandi, 1961

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Matila Costiesco Ghyka

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 5. The Way is The Quest. [April 6, 2009] Motto. Future time and yesteryear Are two sides of the same leaf, Sees in ending the beginning He who knows the learners way. (Mihai Eminescu) Barry Smith points to a certain comparative advantage possessed by smaller countries in those fields not requiring significant expenditures, such as mathematics, or in those fields where the issue of the native language is of secondary importance, such as the visual arts. This advantage can be carried over also to other spheres, such as philosophy, cultural anthropology and cultural semiotics. The Pole Roman Ingarden, the Czech Jan Patocka, the Romanians Matila Costiesco Ghyka, Lucian Blaga and Petru Ursache, the BessarabianRomanian Andrei Vartic, the Estonian Yuri Lotman, are but a few examples demonstrating how rigorous seekers for truth are always part and parcel of world culture. Today, the attempt to synchronize Romanian culture with the Western one, a process imposed by an establishment insulated from a local tradition it never understood and which it disparages, means acceptance of and synchronization with the prevailing neo-leninist melting pot model. However, there has long been and there still is a viable alternative model which has shown concern for cultural diversity, a model which aims at integrating [cultural] particularities as differences, in a culture of difference, as Ovidiu Hurduzeu has written, namely the poly-contextural matrix discussed in previous papers, the transclassic operational interplay of a heterarchy of coexisting cultural domains and of a simultaneous plurality of interwoven recursive and permutative diversities. Matila Costiesco Ghyka is the forerunner, especially when it comes to investigating the Golden Mean, one of the most important members of the Metallic Means Family. This requires a generalization of the concept of symmetry. The modern concept of symmetry is connected with Felix Kleins group theory. Kleins discoveries and his idea of symmetry can now be visualized by using computer graphics: the beautiful constructions teetering on the brink of chaos reflect the ancient Buddhist metaphor of Indra's net. It was about these subjects that Matila Ghyka wrote. We should note that we may think of visual apprehension as an extension in many ways of Kleins group theory: object recognition and categorization can be described in terms of geometrical transformations, and will suggest a transformational framework, based on Kleins hierarchy of geometrical

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transformation groups... this transformational framework can be extended to pictorial space Klein proposed a common framework which integrates different geometries into one general framework: His Erlangen Program defines a nested hierarchy of transformation groups, in which a geometry is defined relative to specific transformation groups. Geometrical properties and objects are not absolute, but relative to transformation groups The hierarchy of transformations of Felix Kleins Erlangen Program provides an integrative framework for the study of visual perception, as well as for the history of art. (Markus Graf, Form and Space in Perception and Art, Presented at: The Depictive Space of Perception. A Conference on Visual Thought, Mitteleuropa Foundation, 2004) The generalized concept of symmetry covers perspective: In the perspective of artists we find a combination of the symmetry transformations affine projection and similitude. (Gyorgy Darvas, Perspective as a Symmetry Transformation, http://www.springerlink.com/content/y581153456207m64/fulltext.pdf ) As research has demonstrated, geometric grids drawn within the golden and root phi rectangles may create perspective space: It seems that Brunelleschis experiences with measurements and surveying while in Rome...put him in an ideal situation to conceive of the process of perspective drawing; but even with this in mind, I must also remain open to the possibilities that geometry (and geometric construction), by its nature, was also a catalyst for the new way of thinking and seeing...I believe it is important to look at the process of grid making as possibly a key element in the development of perspective systems. (Mark A. Reynolds, Perspectiva Geometrica, http://www.springerlink.com/content/h94w3683n8624758/fulltext.pdf ) An aristocratic English family, the Sitwells, had bought the ancient Montegufoni castle situated in the centre of Tuscany. In 1922, Gino Severini was asked to decorate a room with frescos. Severini employed combinations of the phi [Golden Mean] theme as well as the root 4 theme. His composition schema for a 1937 mosaic in Alessandrias Postal Palace was based on the phi theme. Le Corbusiers Modulor is probably the best known design based on the Golden Mean, in celebration of which Le Corbusier created his 1955 portfolio entitled Pome de LAngle Droit. "Beauty is fitness expressed.," said Ghyca. "Inspiration, even passion is indeed necessary for creative art, but the knowledge of the Science of Space, of the Theory of Proportions, far from narrowing the creative power of the artist, opens for him an infinite variety of choices within the realm of symphonic composition." Originality, therefore, does not suggest the modern notion of an erasure of tradition as a breakthrough, but rather the sense of utilizing the highest potential of a millennial legacy of traditioning which has recourse to preformulated, prefabricated building blocks as it relies, on the one hand, on recurring patterns

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within a creative-formulaic continuum and, on the other hand, on the paradoxical combination of contingency and necessity. Let us attentively listen to Constantin Brancusis words: I walk the questing path. We all find ourselves at the end of a great age. And it is necessary to go back to the beginning of all things; and to find again all that has been lostSimplicity is solved complexityBy means of art, you will be disjoined from yourself. Measure and the golden number will bring you closer to the absoluteArt may redeem the world. Mathematicians have continued to build on the firm foundation established by Ghyka, providing a synthesis between Chaos Theory (Complexity), Fractal Geometry, and the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is more than just a device used by artists: This ratio acts as an optimised probability operator, (a differential equation like an oscillating binary switch), whenever we observe the quasi-periodic evolution of a dynamical systemThe Golden Mean then, is an archetypal fractal in that it preserves its relationship with itselfIt is analogia exemplified (Nigel Reading, Dynamical Symmetries: Autopoietic Architecture, http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Starship/9201/phimega/phimega.html ) Because of the simplicity of this family of quadratic equations, the Mettalic Means find various applications in science and in discovering the roads that lead to chaos: Some of the relatives of the Golden Mean have been used by physicists in their latest researches trying to analyze the behavior of non-linear dynamical systems in going from periodicity to quasi-periodicity The members of the MMF [Mettalic Means Family] are intrinsically related with the onset from a periodic dynamics to a quasi-periodic dynamics, with the transition from order to chaos and with time irreversibility, as proved by Ilya Prigogine and M. S. El Naschie. (Vera W. de Spinadel, The Family of Metallic Means, www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/vismath/spinadel/index.html ; see also Vera W. de Spinadel, From the Golden Mean to Chaos, 1998, Editorial Nueva Librera, Buenos Aires, Argentina.) Ghykas work is fundamental to an understanding of symbolic dynamics: each system of proportions gives rise to a sequence of 1's and 0's referred to in the study of dynamical systems as symbolic dynamics. Proportional systems based on phi, root 2, and root 3 were the principal systems used to create the buildings and designs of antiquity Root 2 and root 3 geometries also have connections to the symmetry groups of the plane (Jay Kappraff, Systems of Proportion in Design and Architecture and Their Relationship to Dynamical Systems Theory, http://members.tripod.com/vismath/kappraff/kap1.htm ) Louis H. Kauffman develops a context for self-referential forms. He summarizes one of his articles thus: This paper develops a context for the well-known Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...) in terms of self-referential forms and a basis for mathematics in terms of distinctions that is harmonious with

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G. Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form and Heinz von Foerster's notion of an eigenform. The paper begins with a new characterization of the infinite decomposition of a rectangle into squares that is characteristic of the golden rectangle. The paper discusses key reentry forms that include the Fibonacci form, and the paper ends with a discussion of the structure of the Fibonacci anyons a bit of mathematical physics that relates to the quantum theory of the self-interaction of the marked state of a distinction. (Louis H. Kauffman, Fibonacci Form and Beyond, Forma, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 315-334, 2004) Let us recall Constantin Brancusi. Let us hark back to his saying: with my newness, I hail from something ancient Brancusi said he was searching for the fundational core, the noema. [The original text was temelia temeiului, noima; the Romanian noima derives from the Greek noema.] Noema is the self-referentially achieved mental schema of a system. Theoria, Greek for contemplation, tied to hesychasm and theosis, meant initially a pilgrimage, a circular journey to new and more comprehensive insight into ones rootedness. T.S.Elliot wrote: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Art is nothing but humanized science. Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in the phrase: To create a harmony. Gino Severini

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Juan Gris

Juan Gris

Juan Gris

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Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon

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Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon

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Ottone Rosai

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Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni

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Trtria tablets, National Transylvanian History Museum, Cluj-Napoca (http://www.europeanvirtualmuseum.net )

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 6. Once Upon a Time. [April 6, 2009] Motto. With gods about I've roamed, solely menwards back to come. (Ion Pillat) Lucian Blaga once said: culture is not a luxury that humans may concede to themselves as an embellishment, a luxury which may or may not exist, culture is the result of a complementary outpouring from the specificity of human existence as such, an existence within mystery and toward revelation. Both writing and painting have been connected to divination and the deciphering of marks, the form of signs, the participation in or association with mystery. Setsuzan Tanaka Sensei describes the art of calligraphy thus: The Gods speak through the brush strokes drawn by the artist. The sanskrit alphabet is called devanagari which literally means 'cities of the gods.' Giorgio Morandi affirms: Galileo remarked: the true book of philosophy, the book of nature, is written with characters different from our alphabet. These characters are: triangles, squares, circles, spheres, pyramids, cones and other geometric figures. I feel that Galileos thinking is alive The ritual is an actual standing and living within art, a participation in it, and at the same time an active partaking in maintaining the process. Alexei Jawlenski once said that the artistic praxis becomes ritual and the painting itself becomes prayer. Andrei Vartic has coined the term Homo Geometricus to describe the anonymous creators of ancient ritual graphic notation systems used as sacred palaeoinformatics in pre-Indo-European Old Europe: The large Cucuteni pots, superbly painted with geometrically written philosophical or artistic poems, or the many faceless figurines incised with geometric signs, all found in Cucuteniera huts, represent the highest level reached by a civilization before the appearance of official Sumerian writing about 3200 BC. The Cucuteni miracle was based on a millenary knowledge of geometric signssigns which continue to protect mans life even now, within the web of the information revolutionA careful investigation of thousands of paleolithic and neolithic incised markings shows that in South-Eastern Europe, Homo Geometricus used a perfect alphabet for communicating and storing information vital for his beingnessthe inhabitants of Old Europe had knowledge of symmetry, were talking about Heaven and Earth, about Soul an Spirit, about the necessary balance of action and reaction (Andrei Vartic, O Istorie Geometrica a Lui Homo Sapiens, http://www.scribd.com/doc/8266233/O-Istorie-Geometric-A-a-Lui-Homo-SapiensAndrei-Vartic )

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Parallel yet independent research pursued by Western cognitive archaeologists, linguists and neurophysiologists recently confirmed Vartics findings. Recursive compositional constructs, patterned incisions and scratchings [grammata] that branched both into painting and writing, constitute a compelling indication of the need for a combinatorial (syntactic) structure: As a perceptual phenomenon art is, then, an attempt to render permanent and tangible that which was formally intangible and fleeting, the seeking of order in the midst of disorder, the expression of the sense of pattern, harmony and symmetry synthesised from the immediate, ambient confusionSymbolic representation, as a means of preserving, spreading and manipulating information, provided a powerful way of increasing the capacity of the brain, disengaged from the usual evolutionary constraints the extrapolation must be that culture is not so much a sophisticated embodiment of evolutionary imperatives, but a realisation of the diversity due to the increased ability to process information in abstract ways. (Derek Hodgson, Art, Perception and Information Processing: An Evolutionary Perspective, http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/cognit/web/index.html ) In a culture immanent interactional context graphic notation conventions are culturally evolved higher order cognitions: symbolism based on iconicity is cognitively much more rudimentary than a symbolism requiring the link between referent and referrer to be negotiated culturally. (R.Bednarik, Neurophysiology and Paleoart, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/rbednarik6.pdf ); There seem to be no examples of representational art without an accompanying geometric tradition in indigenous groups, yet we often find geometric tradition without representational art (Derek Hodgson, Understanding the Origins of Paleoart: the Neurovisual Resonance Theory and Brain Functioning, http://www.paleoanthro.org/journal/content/PA20060054.pdf ) The high-context nature of ancient society allows individuals to use inferences and indirect references. A viewer may require little more than reminders to recall, as much has been absorbed through osmosis in the culture: In entirely nonfigurative arts as well as those that use highly stylized versions of iconicity it is impossible to know the referrer, unless one has direct access to the cultural conventions in question. Moreover, in the last-named art form, concepts or ideas involving no figuratively definable referents can readily be depicted. It is therefore clearly the most sophisticated art genre, and can communicate unlimited numbers of ideas, in rather the same way as written characters.(R.Bednarik, Towards a Theory of Cognitive Origins, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/rbednarik7.pdf ) Sign systems are used for mnemo-techical purposes: The intentions of those who created writing systems did not primarily lie in the exact rendering of speech sounds but in the fixation of ideas and information of which messages were composed. This intentional fixation of information for reuse bears all the

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characteristics of what we understand as writing, regardless of the missing connection with languageIn this pattern, an idea is visually associated with a sign of writing via its representational form (that may be identified with a certain object) or in the case of an abstract sign via its conventional use (Harald Haarmann, The Danube Script and other Ancient Writing Systems: A Typology of Distinctive Features, The Journal of Archaeomythology, Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2008) Graphic notations were not meant to stand alone, they were intended as a support for memory and ritual demonstration. From the very beginning, the signs used in Old European writing seem to have been associated withcosmology, philosophy, magic, ritual, divination, shamanism and healingAll life was lived in a magical cosmologyThe script would be a shamanic tool with magical overtonesit was a tool for communicating with the gods. (Roger Calverley, The Primal Runes. Archetypes of Invocation and Empowerment, http://books.google.com/books?id=z8p4O6ynhzMC&pg=PR3&lpg=PP1&ots=dcU l_QfIgi&dq=roger+calverley+the+primal+runes&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html ) Ritualization increases impact through the use of repetition, high intensity, strong contrasts, alerting signals, and stereotypy in basic units. James W.Carey writes: Ritualization sees the original or highest manifestation of communicationin the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action. Ritual is communication in a mythic tongue, the expression of a universe of experience, compressed into an economy of symbols overloaded into archetype. Ritual is the performance that binds (religare) the individual and the specific to the universal and archetypal. This model has its origins in the research intooral-formulaic high-context cultures of presence vested in repetition and ritual. From a contemporary perspective, this is a technique of cyclical rejuvenation, which, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, literally burns memory into humans, remarks Hartmut Winkler. Marcel Griaule speaks of 'graphic facts' constituting a shared repository of materialized memory. The function of the concrete mark is conceived by Simon Battestini in an experiential ritual context, ritual being viewed as a crucial process in the texture of memory storing and communicative cultural behavior. Roger Schank introduces the notions of dynamic memory framework and Memory Organization Packet theory, that is continuously refined experience-based memory schemata. Elaborate but thrifty graphic formulaic symbolic clusters of notation and their metrical rhythmic systems are trans-linguistic. Graphical processing re-makes, re-creates, re-members the system each time it is actualized. The shaman-artist is a thoughtful guardian of lore. Old Europe was a cultural multiplex which emphasized continuity. Later traditions carry the memory of that ancient legacy. Some markings and the knowledge they embodied remained in use and were remembered down the centuries (Andrei Vartic, Complexul monastic rupestru de la ipova, uria templu solar i

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observator astronomic al antichitii, Presented at: Simpozionul tiinific Cucuteni 5000, Universitatea Tehnic din Republica Moldova, Chiinu, 3-4 octombrie, 2007). Deep-rooted cultural and mythic patterns persisted. Craft specialization and elaborate rituals survived as substratum features. How do we use the language of tradition to address the present? Note: The term Danube script is synonymous with the earlier term Old European script and refers to markings found on artifacts excavated in south-east European archaeological sites. The best known culture groups are Vina (between the 6th millennium and the 3rd millennium BC) and Cucuteni (or Cucuteni-Trypillia; between ca. 5500 BC and 2750 BC).

Marco Merlinis map showing the area where the Danube script was used ( http://www.prehistory.it/ftp/tartaria_tablets/merlinitartaria.htm )

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Mother Goddess painted on Cucuteni ceramic vessel, Piatra Neam Museum

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Troi (the Romanian roadside cross)

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 7. An Apologia For The Mioritic Semiosphere. [January 7, 2010] Motto. From the very moment his humanness was declared, the human being amply surmised that the present-at-hand was neither his place, nor his aim, nor the nest of his calling (Lucian Blaga) Oh, Full-Of-Mercy, Thou, the one who Out of two carps and five rolled breads Fashioned a mountain high of victuals To satiate destitute crowds, Repeat, You Good One, Thine miracle And feed thousands of hungry mouths, Then kindly prayer mine do hearken: Give me a basketful of crumbs! (Nichifor Crainic) One of the fundamental insights that has been leading Lucian Blagas thought is the concept of Mioritic Space. The expression refers to the folk poem Mioritza. Blaga coined this metaphoric yet infinitely synthetic expression in the 1930s to encapsulate his philosophy of culture. Unfortunately, Blaga's philosophy has never received much attention while, over the years, the often-abused word mioritic has come to have pejorative connotations. We will set out to reclaim and vindicate the concept of Mioritic Space. Below is a selection of brief excerpts from Lucian Blagas 1936 The Mioritic Space. Says Blaga: Let us listen.to one of our doinasit is not difficult to fathom a very particular horizon opening up in the background of the doina. This horizon is the plai [hillside, pastureland]. Plai, that is to say, a lofty open plane, on a green mountain slope, flowing slowly toward the valleya specific horizon: a high, rhythmic and undefined horizon formed by hill and valleyLet us call this matrix-space, high and vaguely undulated, carrying the specific accents of a certain feeling of fate: the mioritic space a sketchy space articulated by lines and accents, somewhat schematically structured, located in any case beyond the contingencies of immediate nature... In his Horizon and Style, written in the 1930s, Lucian Blaga construes the paradoxical topology of the mioritic space as the problematic of endlessness: The man of the mioritic space has the feeling of a seemingly permanent, wavy, going onward, of an undulated infinitude. The man of the mioritic space senses fate as an endless, monotonously iterated, ascending and descending.

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In the 1984 essay entitled On the semiosphere, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, founder of the Estonian Tartu school of cultural semiotics, introduced the all-embracing term semiosphere, which he defined as the space of culture, an abstract space which is a conglomerate of boundaries defining everchanging internal and external spaces, a space where the local and socio-cultural segments intersect and overlap within the semiospheric wholeness. John Hartley comments that there is more than one level at which one might identify a semiosphere - at the level of a single national or linguistic culture, for instance, or of a larger unity such as the West, right up to the species; we might similarly characterize the semiosphere of a particular historical period. Yuri Lotman asserts that the borderis the territory of accelerated semiotic processes, which are always occurring at the periphery of the cultural space. Peripheries are the most dynamic parts of the semiospheres. At the same time, centre and periphery are positions which are open to fluidity. The communist experiment may be epitomized in the ambition to attempt a global reconfiguration of the human condition. Lotman was active during the heydays of Soviet communism. He aptly underscored the existence within the totalitarian marxist-leninist oikoumene of a permanent form of 'bipolar asymmetry' of 'them' and 'us' (them versus us) which consists of the separation of the hegemonic centre, with its official grip, and periphery (concepts like periphery and border are not only spatial indicators, they include also constructed peripheries and borders; in other words they include all those excluded, marginalized and pushed to the periphery, all those on the proscription lists, the banished, the outcasts, the refugees and the exiles, in short, the concepts listed above may become allegories of subversion). Cultural difference means variety in the reception and appropriation of modernity. When center and periphery have little in common, the center, real or symbolic, strives to extend its norms over the whole semiosphere: an imported, externally imposed program tries to subdue every part of the system, confining its opposite in the field of the inexistent and incorrect. Such a take-over is not just a seizure of the present, it is a seizure of cultural memory (the Egyptologist Jan Assmann speaks of cultural memory as a connective structure founding group identity through ritual and a textual coherence). Striving toward globalization obviously coincides with an attempt to homogenize and level differences. The disappearance of traditions is akin to Yuri Lotmans idea of the semiosphere stripped of its creative diversity. The sought-for global village has been described long ago by Nichifor Crainic: The sense of the global village consists in the exhaustion of all cultural possibilities, in the barrenness, in the physical barrenness even, of human beings left without a metaphysics: the profligate materialism and all ethic and aesthetic isms, up to washed-out internationalism.

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The semiosphere concept is now widely known and has become a universal instrument of description of any culture. It closely resembles the model proposed by Lucian Blaga. We will therefore update our terminology. Henceforth we shall speak of a mioritic semiosphere. We now go back to the beginning and look again at Blagas The Mioritic Space: it also explains the existence of small ethnic and/or cultural and/or religious enclaves, extraneous semiospheric fragments located within the boundaries of a semiosphere: sometimes there may be a contradiction between the structure of the spatial horizon of the unconscious and the configurative structure of the landscape in which we liveoften, cultures or souls with radically different spatial horizons may coexist in the same landscape. Consequently, a number of disparate discourses may coexist while the particular fragments may evolve in a nonsynchronic way. Romanesque and Gothic enclaves were present within the mioritic semiosphere. Constantin Brancusis art may be regarded as a mioritic fragment, although he created most of his works in Paris. In fact, Brancusi once said: with my newness, I hail from something ancient The lands of East-Central Europe always functioned as a cultural crossroads. Crossroads, once considered to be the most magical places, may undoubtedly become infernal liminal zones. Such has been the semiospheric experience of the Romanians who always found themselves on the boundaries of two or more cultures. The mioritic semiosphere with its multiple inner centers and the boundaries that specify its regions (subsemiospheres) has been characterized by Blaga as a model of borderland (marchland) situation [ situaie hotarnic: the Romanian word hotar means both edge, boundary, and area, territory, as in township area ]. It is also the locus of intersection of borderlands of larger historical semiospheres, the borderlands of the Greco-Roman and of the Orthodox-Byzantine worlds, the borderland of Islam, the borderland of the West and the borderland of the Eastern steppes. It is the space of mythologically oriented, archaic consciousness. The mioritic semiosphere may also be described as a multimtemporal, polychronic web, a mixed ensemble of times contemporary only in their assemblage, thus reinforcing the palimpsestic metaphor. The borderland or marchland is a region which both separates and unites. It maintains the semiophere in a state of creative ferment as a border zone experiential site of coupling and mixing cultures and transcending untranslatability. "The boundary is a zone of semiotic polyglotism", writes Jola kulj. She continues: "Selfhood is not inevitably sameness". In his seminal 1998 Ethnoaesthetics, Petru Ursache writes: The periphery has always been a stable and creative force in Romanian beingness, it has never been a destructive or nomadic force like in other cultures. In the section directly preceding the lines quoted above, Ursache has commented on the ballad of master Manole, the builder of Aromanian origin

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(in other words, belonging to the southernmost area of Romanianness) and on the ritual foundation act that enables the construction of a church, a center or an axis mundi, namely the church at Curtea de Arges (the actual church is located in the heartland of Wallachia). All sacred places, all ritually founded shrines, constitute centers of the world. The idea of axis mundi is thematized by Ursache in a later writing: ...what Eliade called Centre...does not simply hint to one or more fixed points...but to an infinity. For it is known that genezic matter is charged with limitless potentialities. Anywhere, in any small village, on any cosmic meridian, an axis, a temple may be constructed... (Petru Ursache, Timp si ne-timp, Memoria Ethnologica, Anul VII 2007, nr. 24-25). In a private communication dated December 1, 2009, Petru Ursache asserts : Blaga and Eliade carriers of the dacian-mioritic matrix are our precursors. In Hindu mythology, the heaven of Indra contains a net of pearls. Each pearl is reflected in its neighbor so that the whole universe is mirrored in each pearl including the reflections of all the reflections, so that each pearl has a sequence of nested reflections (Felix Klein started with infinitely repeated reflections and was led to forms which are the chaotic images of symmetry). Such appears to be the mioritic semiosphere: it is an infinite game of centres and peripheries, an intricate kaleidoscope of reflections. Petru Ursaches Ethnoaesthetics also deals with the truths that ground folk axiology and with the rhetoric of visualization as an earmark of mioritic tradition: In its theoretical-imaginal constructions, tradition has operated with the concepts of truth, goodness, beauty, faith ...traditional poetic texts, especially myth and legend which are the most philosophical ones, operate with concepts-image. (It may be worth mentioning here that Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have pointed out the role played by dynamic cognitive constructs known as pre-conceptual image schemata, structural or topological schemata of forms and forces that arise from embodied experience. Schemata are suitable to provide metaphorical scaffolding. Lakoff offers evidence that different cultures structure the world in different ways). Petru Ursaches aim in his startling and beautiful 2006 Ethnosofy, is to make us understand the necessity of folk epistemology as a way of comprehending our own nature. The book seeks to investigate native categories and principles and is rich in anthropological insights, but it also may be read and re-read as a story of the origins of mioritic self-consciousness. At the very outset, Ursache proposes his thesis that the Carpathic peasant used to say to preserve our being, either in a religious sense or in a historical-ethnographic sense.

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He then sets his analysis amidst a discussion of paremiology. To quote Ursache: ...this miniature philosophy of the fragment which is called paremiologydoes not impose models which will bring about an uniformization of thought. It prefers the regime of variation. The forms of meditation are verified in socio-human contexts, and these are in a permanent dynamic flow paremiology ensures a reflexive support for the entirety of religious behaviour, a necessary harmony between immediate spiritualized experience and responsible meditation, under the protection of divine thought. Ursache leads us through a maze, back to the wellsprings of culture: ...the riddle...puts us in touch with the technique of pre-forming and forming (not of formulation) of the notion...[the Latin word notionem was coined by Cicero as loan-translation of Greek ennoia, act of thinking] The saying was a dictum, a prestigious logos, foundation of order and culture. Such is the tale of a culture. Whoever enters the story shares the story, for it is the first major step into the world of folk wisdom, the world of archetypal lore and of its careful guardians. In his Ethnosofy, Petru Ursache recalls the legacy embodied in a timeless mythical Thracian figure: This first age of the One Logos, supreme and full of authority, was safeguarded as a remembrance in the legend of Orpheus. Notes: (1) In Ethnoaesthetics, Petru Ursache gives an account of the distinctive features of Mioritza: In its historical evolution, Mioritza appears as a system of integrated and transparent textsa poem characterized by a paradoxical and impossible combination of genresMioritza is a masterpiece which outlines, in sensuous and dramatic images, an epic vision of an existence marked by fateFrom a literary and musical viewpoint, Miorita has been concretized in more than 1200 variants known over the entire carpatho-danubian and dniestro-pontic area. (2) The doina also is discussed by Petru Ursache in his Ethnoaesthetics: Let us recall what B.P.Hasdeu has said about the originary sense of the word doina, which in the beginning signified not only a song [a heroic song, according to D.Cantemir], but also a sacred law.

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Old St Nicholas church, Rnov, 14th century

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Bogdana monastery, St Nicholas church built in the 14th century

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Drago Coman zographer, Arbore monastery, Beheading of St John the Baptist church, 16th century

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Drago Coman zographer, Arbore monastery, Beheading of St John the Baptist church, 16th century

Zographer Toma from Suceava and his team, Dormition church, Humor monastery, 16th century

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Zographer Toma from Suceava and his team, Dormition church, Humor monastery, 16th century

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Probota monastery, St Nicholas church, 16th century

Sofronie and Ion zographers, Sucevia monastery, Resurrection church, 16th century

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Sima zographer, reverse painting on glass, 1861

Icon, reverse painting on glass, 19th century

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Icon, reverse painting on glass, 19th century

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Petru Ursache, Ethoaesthetics, 1998

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Petru Ursache, Ethnosofy, 2006

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Folk rug, 19th century

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 8 . The Mind Map. [January 7, 2010] Motto. A stylistic matrix cooperates in defining a People as much as blood or language. It may thrive or decline, but when it is extinguished, the People also has been wiped out. (Lucian Blaga) Overwhelmed by the deep thirst for perfect forms (Mihai Eminescu) The question is, what kind of reality does man possess? How is cultural knowledge organized within and between human minds? As a theory of knowledge, the notion of a mind map has a long background in the history of modern philosophy. One of the first proponents was Giambattista Vico who wrote: Man, having within himself an imagined World of lines and numbers, operates in it with abstractions, just as God, in the universe, did with reality. The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in a paper that Alfred Korzybski read at the 1931 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans. Lucian Blagas thought does move along these same lines, coalescing in the concept of stylistic matrix. In the mid-1930s he wrote Horizon and Style and Genesis of the Metaphor and the Sense of Culture. Below are excerpts from Horizon and Style. We have chosen these passages because they provide the context for findings which later researchers will deepen and expatiate upon. Says Blaga: The phenomenon of style, seedling with saps as weighty as blood, has its roots planted in nests located beyond light. Style comes forth, it is true, in connection with mans conscious concerns, but the forms it takes are only very slightly connected with the order of conscious purposes. An inceptive tree, with roots in another homeland, style draws its nourishment from over there, incontrollable and owing no tithe. Style comes into being unintended, unknown, it partially enters the light cone of consciousness, as a message from the empire of above-light, or as a magic creature from the great and dark saga of telluric life Such a constellation of factors, of a considerable innermost resonance, may establish itself in the human unconscious, gaining here the function of a determinative manifold. The stylistic structure of an individuals or of a collectivitys creations, will bear the seal of such an unconscious manifold. In order to characterize such a manifold, we propose to employ the term stylistic matrix... For by means of the unconscious horizons and of the stylistic matrix we find ourselves anchored, in an undreamt-of measure, into an anonymous life.

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The passage below has been selected from Blagas Genesis of the Metaphor and the Sense of Culture: ".For reasons of cosmic balance, and maybe in order for man to be maintained in an unending creative state, in any case to the advantage of existence and man, he was refused, through the agency of a transcendent censorship imposed structurally to knowledge, the possibility of positively and absolutely containing the world's mysteries As long as we consider the intellectual categories (the idea of substance, of causality, etc.) to be moments and structures imposed to the human spirit, due to a transcendent censorship, we think we are entitled to make the statement that abyssal, stylistic categories may also be considered integrant moments of a transcendent control. The stylistic matrix, the abyssal categories, are transcendent halts No doubt Blaga is right to claim that Dinge an Sich or things-in- themselves are inaccessible to direct inquiry. In the excerpts above we can see how in just a few broad strokes Blaga gets from the scarcely fathomable mystery of a culture-specific living map to the recursive dynamic of cultural memory, from the acquisition and validation of knowledge to outlining a philosophy of culture, and how he seeks to integrate into a single framework anthropology and epistemology, a new epistemology, consonant with developments which will occur elsewhere, many years later. Many readers will recall that in the first part of this essay we mentioned Roy DAndrade. Roy Goodwin D'Andrade, one of the founders of the subdiscipline of cognitive anthropology, proposes a succinct description: a cultural model scenario is defined by a cognitive schema that is intersubjectively shared by a social group. A cognitive schema is a conceptual structure which makes the identification of objects and events possible. Schemas form the reality-defining system of the human and provide information about what states of the world can be and should be pursued, writes DAndrade in his 1992 Schemas and Motivations. In his 1987 A folk model of the mind, he asserts: schema is an interpretation which is frequent, well organized, memorable, which can be made from minimal clues .This model can be called a folk model both because it is a statement of the common sense understandings that people use in ordinary life and because it contrasts with various specialized and scientific models . As Michael Kimmel underscores, "every cognitive cultural template is chosen against a ground of other possibilities." Within the aggregate of the ideas that grew together after World War II, constructivism (not to be confused with the artistic movement known as constructivist) and cybernetics became the unifying master notions, especially the transdisciplinary framework of second-order cybernetics. Simply put, second-order cybernetics includes the observer in the process observed. Constructivism, the cornerstone of second-order cybernetics, entails the idea that there is no objective representation of the real world, that it is impossible to tell to

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what degree knowledge reflects an ontological reality: the mind cannot mirror reality. There is only a viable relation between ontological reality and the/an/our constructed model of reality. Ernst von Glasersfeld writes: "Knowledge does not reflect an objective, ontological reality but exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our experienceTo the constructivist, concepts, models, theories, and so on are viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they were created". Regarding the culture-specific mind map, Humberto Maturana argues that this knowledge generation based on an autopoietic model is constructed within the consensual domain of a self-organizing networked social system: "...the participants of a consensual domain of interactions operate in their consensual behaviour making consensual distinctions of their consensual distinctions, in a process that recursively makes a consensual action a consensual token for a consensual distinction that it obscures." Maturana underscores the recursive dynamic of cultural memory: In recursion, something new arises. In sum, the mind map is brought forth by computing a reality which can secure its own paradoxical dynamic stability-change. "Cultures, semantic, epistemological communities, serve as pools of distinctionsand any of these is highly normatively orientedAs in visual perception where we cannot evade the blindspot of seeing, our social construction of meaningful environments is dominated by the blindspot of our cultural distinctions writes S. J. Schmidt. He continues: Signs do not refer to objects in reality but to our interpreted activities in culture, that is to communicationThe reference problem isa problem of semiotic materialversus the collective knowledge concerning the handling and interpretation of semiotic operations. In a private communication dated December 1, 2009, Petru Ursache remarks: The mentioned researchers are our companions in the realm of similar ideas. They are gathered together on the scholarly plane of semiotics. We, on the other hand, probe also the way of religiousness, for our being is more lyrical and contemplative. First of all, art making should be thought of as enstasis, for, as Mircea Eliade once said, originally, all art was sacred. The two Latin words formosus and forma (form, mold, shape) are etymollogicaly related. This also occurs in a few languages of Latin origin: Italian (formoso), Spanish (hermoso) and Romanian (frumos). In his Ethnosofy, Petru Ursache highlights this very fact: in [the] Romanian [language], the Beautiful is a concept of form. Ursache continues by stating that art becomes a re-enactment of, a return to the time of origins: His art...is an actualization of Genesis. God made the world only once and then rested peacefully; the human being has adopted both the model

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and the lesson within the ritual tempos of work and has added something of his own. In his Ethnoaesthetics, Ursache describes artistic proficiency as a gift: The expressions I say, I make, I paint, have meanings different from those mentioned in dictionaries, they speak of craft as a gift bestowed on the one who invents a song, the model of a building, the image on an icon He continues, underscoring the fact that only through kenosis is one able to feel the peak experiences of art: the singers wandering through villageshad to swear an oath binding them forever to song and poverty. This is a kenotic self-sacrifice, by means of which the genius is united with the saint A few pages later, Ursache states that the structure of symbols is grounded in ontic immediacy: Besides the fact that he never coveted somebody elses land, the Romanian transformed his own territory into a philosophical and existential category (the stylistic matrix), and essentialized it though symbols with an ontic value. Cybernetics has circularity, circular interlocking, recursiveness, as its central concern, though as Gregory Bateson pointed out, circularity does not mean a precise circle in which events repeat themselves in the same circular path. This important theme is discussed in Bateson's concept of aesthetics. In his writing unique in modern scholarship - aesthetic unity, incorporating a sense of the sacred, lies at the interface between the named (the maps) [our means of describing the world arises out of notions of difference (or what G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form calls distinction and indication),] and the unnamed (territory). Aesthetics is the unifying glimpse that makes us aware of the unity not able to be described in prose or prosaic consciousness. The sacred is the integrated fabric of mental processes that envelops all our lives.' The sacred implies tacit recognition that there are gaps; that the maps that we create will never provide a complete description of the territory. The essence of communication lies in the relationship between perceptual redundancy (which creates pattern{s}), metaphor, which cognitively links levels, and the sacred which lies at the interface of map and territory. Thus the sacred implies tacit recognition of an immanent aesthetic unity derived through current practices which embody patterns of relationsAesthetic wholes derive from the pattern which connects.Redundancy is a vital clue to patterning [- the patterns that connect and their recursive nature -]; it involves convention, habit, repetition and practice. [Kathy M'Closkey, Towards an Understanding of Navajo Aesthetics, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/SEED/Vol4-1/M'Closkey.htm ] Through the idea of distinctions one sees how the outwardly figurative work actually proceeds on two different levels at once, explicitly on the embedded level of a demonstrative iconography proclaiming its progression, and then within

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the actual material stratum, where one finds the concrete realm of marks and surfaces that traverse this progression, restoring its deeper sense in a succession of apparently disordered (or differently ordered) color and texture areas. The movement of drawing distinctions, then, as a key to viewing the work, is not somewhere behind the image. It takes shape, rather, as something manifest, visible, quite literally as the form of form. Configuration moments, color moments, and finally figural moments, are bound by internal axiological relations. There is a logic of distinctions, for distinctions amount to a certain way of thinking, an experience of life that carries a subterranean socio-cultural context, perceptual and cognitive sets, frames of reference and selection. In his Horizon and Syle, Blaga affirms: Nisus formativus is the appetite for form, the invincible need to stamp on all things lying in the area of human enactment, on all things which are in touch with our formative virtues, the need, we say, to stamp on all things within our imaginary horizon forms articulated in the spirit of an insistent consistency... In The Mioritic Space, Blaga explains the essence of the mioritic stylistic matrix. He writes: The appetite for form appears...as an orientation toward geometric and elemental forms...all is achieved with an astonishing sense for nuance...The rest is fate... ...Romanian folk art excels...through a conspicuous stylistic consistency through measure and rhythm manifest in the distribution of motifsThe void is not sensedas a shortcomingbut as a necessary medium for the articulation of a rhythm In his ornamental art, the Romanian villager went for a recti-linear geometrism Our tradition is our stylistic matrixA separation from it would signify apostasy The thirst quenching jug will always be adorned with an ageless design, and the wall, no matter how desolate because of misfortune, will always carry an icon. In the same book, Blaga also deals with the appropriation of empty signs: Borrowed motifs lose their initial purpose, gaining in Romanian productions a new function. An alien sign system is empty, it can be viewed as just a formalization system and it can be appropriated. The sign as form becomes progressively cut off from its origin, it may be integrated in a different whole as an empty sign. A practical way of describing the actual realization of the artwork is to borrow the terms applied to G. Spencer-Browns Calculus of Distinctions (Distinctions Ontology), a non-numerical mathematics of form. One may speak about the void and the distinctions in the void, a process that seems closely akin to Matisses description of the actual act of drawing. The design of such an art-view must be recursive, it must be able to return to where it started and re-plobematize its starting point. It all gets even more visual with Louis Kauffman: In all cases, the

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mark stands for a distinction, but just how that distinction is distinct in its particular context is a matter of local articulationThe act of drawing a distinction involves a circulation as in drawing a circleSelf-reference and reference are intimately intertwinedOne keeps returning to the mystery of how it emerged from nothing. In his Ethnoaesthetics, Petru Ursache speaks of the geometry and the subtleness of nuances inherent in Romanian visual art - color harmony is the reenactment of the central theme of the mioritic worldview, the relation of the multiple to the One, a qualitative scale of the sensible where other units may be situated as transitions or nuances: One of the characteristics of Cucuteni painting, and of Romanian painting in general, is the tacit dialogue between line and colorThe second characteristic of folk art regards the particular way of the evolution of color and line within the compositional space: the former tends toward nuance, the latter toward the non-figurative We shall conclude these remarks with another brief excerpt from Petru Ursaches Ethnoaesthetics: God geometrizes, says C. Noica. Order is the condition of the cosmosby cosmos the Greeks also meant ornament, an ideal model of harmony where mathematics and music meet.

(from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fr-carte-balkans-vlachs.png )

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St Nicholas princely court church, Curtea de Arge, 14th century

St Nicholas princely court church, Curtea de Arge, 14th century

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St John the New monastery, St George church, Suceava, 16th century

St John the New monastery, St George church, Suceava, 16th century

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Drago Coman zographer, Arbore monastery, Beheading of St John the Baptist church, 16th century

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St Nicholas wood church, Glod, Maramure, 18th century, painted in 1829 by Vasile Tivadar zographer-priest

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St Nicholas wood church, Glod, Maramure, 18th century, painted in 1829 by Vasile Tivadar zographer-priest

Vasile Tivadar zographer-priest, self-portrait, St Nicholas wood church, Glod, Maramure, 1829

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Folk rug, 19th century

Folk rug, 19th century

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Folk rug, 19th century

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Fresco layers, St Nicholas princely court church, Curtea de Arge, 14th century

Coula monastery, St Nicholas church, 16th century

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Stefan Arteni The East-Central European Cultural Model. 9. Romania, Borderland of The Byzantine Semiosphere. [January 7, 2010] Motto. having eyes on the fingertips (Magda Ursache) Isarlk, you heart of mine, All daubed white, like a rayyah In a day with plague and quick-lime, Vegetating nest of stone - Eden bliss, be as you are. Be a townlet feared and trifling, Balkan and peninsular. (Ion Barbu) We will be following Lucian Blaga on his path of thought. In Genesis of the Metaphor and the Sense of Culture Blaga writes: To exist as a human being means firstly to distance oneself from the present-at-hand by situating oneself within mystery. The present-at-hand exists for humans only in order to be surmounted. The present-at-hand exists for humans only as a passage, as symptom of something else, as signal of a beyond A work of art is a cosmoid, a special world with a revelatory intent which tends to substitute itself for the perceptible world. The total perceptible world appears downgraded when compared with the work of art. In Horizon and Style Blaga writes about the work of the often anonymous zographer: In order to see all things and creatures the way God sees them, the Byzantine painter had to step outside himself, to take a theocentric position by means of a leap into extasis. Byzantine metaphysics (that is to say, metaphysics of the church of the ecumenical councils) weighs heavily upon the individual seeking deification, that is, upon the human who ceases to be himself in order to become a vessel for divine revelation. A kenotic space destabilizes perception, repositions and deploys an open-ended experience which gathers the meanderings of memory. "In cybernetic terms, observer and observed are unconsciously merged during the act of makingthis stage depends upon procedural memory," writes Terry Marks-Tarlow. Lotmans concept of auto-communication allows us to see that some communication does not operate primarily to transmit information or persuade others. Instead it forms an internal dialogue, an I-I communication, that shapes the identity of the self by means of a creative self-transcending and also restructures formalization systems the act of chiseling out an idiolect.

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Aaron Gurwitsch remarks that visual appearance, the perceptual datum, "has its phenomenal identity only within a contexture" - a culture is often observed to be latent, a tacit knowledge or habitus. Vittorio Benussi argues that "mental habit is a simulation of evidence". Primacy of the eye establishes and legitimizes a visual paradigm - visual parainformation, the primordial elemental type of information, and structural information composed of pieces of parainformation. Vision becomes haptic and generates a haptic space. The eye is trained to navigate through the complex visual semiosphere - the act of seeing is not instantaneous, it spans through time and it is associated with ocular motility. "Seeing consists of a series of gestures," remarks Brian Rotman. The interest in non-verbal manifestations of Lakoffian culture-specific idealized cognitive models, accounting for visual prototype effects by means of image-schemata, metonimy and metaphor models, is still a fairly recent development. Investigating and theorizing pictorial and other non-verbal models is important not only as a means to test, and elaborate, George Lakoff's project of charting idealized cognitive models, but also as an instrument to help integrate cognitivist approaches with culture-oriented ones, that is with thought styles or cognitive models where particular modes of experience are favored. Speaking about aesthetics and cognition in the Byzantine cultural area, Jostein Bortnes observes that imagination and thinking in mental images was a cognitive activity. They were absolutely in keeping with modern neurologists, who have established that the human brain in subtle ways stores sensory impressions, words and musical impressions in the form of images. While proposing a science of neurosemiotics and describing the construction of representema, Donald Favareau writes that the eyeis a sign-vehicle whose activity is a recursively generating semiosis. John Deely indicates that a sign is neither a thing nor an object but the pattern according to which things and objects interweave to make up the fabric of experience. Mary Carruthers expatiates on the concept of making art: An orthopraxis can never be completely articulateit relies uponritualized behaviorAny craft develops an orthopraxisit must be learned by practicing over and over againIt is practice both in the sense of being preparation for a perfect craft mastery that can never fully be achieved, and in the sense of working in a particular way . As Constantin Noica writes: there is no art without craft, that is to say without techne, which signified, for the ancient Greeks, both art and craft. The Latin repetere means to seek again. The power of tradition has to be rediscovered anew by every generation. At this point we feel it is pertinent to quote Zissimos Lorentzatos: "Originality means to remain faithful to the originals, to the eternal prototypes, to extinguish 'a wisdom of [your] own' before the common Word, as Heraclitus saysin other words, to lose your soul if you wish to find it, and not to parade your originality or to do what pleases you." (Zissimos

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Lorentzatos, "The Drama of Quality", tr. Liadain Sherrard, Denise Harvey Publisher, Limni, Evia, Greece, 2000, p. 15.) Ernst von Glasersfeld makes reference to the apophatic view in connection with the seed of radical constructivist ideas. By modulating emptiness through a calculus of distinctions, all form may be seen to arise from a void. The indeterminacy of signification noted by the Schoolmen became a component of Peirce's theory, drawing attention to an apophatic trend grounded in what Gregory of Nyssa named diastema (distance, ontological gap,) a concept that may be used as a metaphor for the distinction between the graphic identity of visually presented marks and content. Byzantine legacy is a way of being in the world, a high-context matrix of visual, intuitive, contemplative, indirect communication, releasing visual events into a mytho-cultural appreciation which privileges material instantiation of images over informational pattern. The field of perception was conformed by an oral-plus-chirographic culture. J.P.Lewis suggests that fuzzy structures or class of patterns specified by example may lead to novel visual constructs. This is achieved by means of a sort of creative computation which 'refines' random creations in correlation with the input pattern. The archetypal imagic constitutive similarity and otherness subsist in spite of the many physical-material variations from one instantiation to the other. Figuration as trans-figuration rests on the relational aspect of the image, on a notion of equivalence, not on an exact resemblance. This has as direct effect a ritual dimension of any activity, a ritual cultural imprinting, where the expressiveness of the style conceived as an interplay of directed visual tensions and ocular memory is syntactically strengthened. As Frits Staal has pointed out, a ritual culture gives greater importance to practice than to doctrine. In other words, a ritual culture includes a conspicuously performative dimension of art practices, based on assumptions which are at variance with those of Western aesthetic interpretations. Painting, zographia, was not meant to stand in isolation like the works hanging on a museum wall. The visual was part of a complex strategy: the total artinstallation-performance. Writing from the Eastern Orthodox perspective, Petru Ursache has offered in his Short Treatise on Theological Aesthetics (first edition 1999, second edition 2009) a systematic account of an art concerned with the five senses: what imposes itself is a presence, an awareness of form, of a mesh of powers concentrated in a figure, a gesture, a voice, a sound. We cannot in this brief space do justice to Ursaches remarkable book which encompasses an impressive range of philosophical and theological sources. We shall only quote a few brief excerpts. Says Ursache: The Beautiful is an open concept and, therefore, universalSeen from a theological perspective, the Beautiful, understood also as truth of faith (D.Staniloaie), is situated, because of its complex divine-human nature (Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite), on a high metaphysical plane, becoming a heavy burden for our power of understanding.

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There is a suggestion of a unitive and correlative reality which we may call the Beautiful of faith There are two types of creation: ex nihilo, justified only in cosmogony or when there is an absolute beginning, possible only at the divine and genius level, and creation by synthesis and adaptation of preexisting forms, which, by means of emptying and re-elaboration, are incorporated within the edifice of new creations Aisthomai, I perceive, with the substantive aisthesis, is based on the Homeric aistho, I gasp, I breathe in. Ritual performance (a set of recursively applicable formal procedures), the enactment of the Orthodox liturgy, becomes a unique Gesamtkunswerk: a complete aesthetic experience involving vision, audition, gustatory experiences, tactile and olfactory senses, an overawing aesthetically mediated encounter with the redemptive spiritual mystery. With the main line of the argument now in mind, we return to Petru Ursaches Short Treatise on Theological Aesthetics. Ursache sheds light on the role of Icons: Of course, after many struggles, detours and even defeats, Christian art has reached the understanding that the Icon fulfils many-sided aesthetictheological functions and that it is incorporated into the liturgy, like poetry, song, prayer The Icon co-participates in the liturgical act, this is why it has a precise place in the architectural space as well as in the structure of ritual. Since the rite represents an unfolding of moments, in time, in space and in spirit, the Icon does not appear to be isolated, for it is integrated into a well structured syntax of images and gestures. Dogmatic poetic language says that the Church is the House of the Lord, that is, a sacralized cosmos where the Beginning meets the End, East meets West, Alpha meets Omega A few pages later, Petru Ursache draws attention to the faultless enactment of ritual performance: The Cross, the Gospel and the Icon stand for specialized aspects of the liturgical language and converge toward a unique meaning, the mystery of the Nativity and Resurrection. They are not placed in relations of subordination or juxtaposition within the liturgical ritual: the Icon makes its presence felt contrapuntally or in unison with the other elements of the liturgical language in the same way as, in a symphony, a musical theme is transferred from one instrument to another or between groups of instruments, changing its timbre imprint, tonality and rhythm; this is called the Icons participative function within the liturgy, an explicit participation of a somewhat technical nature, for it can be viewed sequentially like a performance unfolding in full sight. At certain moments, the believer also becomes involved in the celebration, joining the priests in actualizing the ritual pageant through song and prayer. Vintil Horia once said: All empires decay; only the eternal empire of the spirit survives.

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Moldavian coat of arms under Alexandru Lpuneanu, Slatina monastery, 16th century

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St John the New monastery, St George church, Suceava, 16th century

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St John the New monastery, St George church, Suceava, 16th century

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St John the New monastery, St George church, Suceava, 16th century

St John the New monastery, St George church, Suceava, 16th century

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Zographer Toma from Suceava and his team, Dormition church, Humor monastery, 16th century

Zographer Toma from Suceava and his team, Dormition church, Humor monastery, 16th century

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Sofronie and Ion zographers, Sucevia monastery, Resurrection church, 16th century

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Sofronie and Ion zographers, Sucevia monastery, Resurrection church, 16th century

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Sofronie and Ion zographers, Sucevia monastery, Resurrection church, 16th century

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A later zographer ? Sucevia monastery, Resurrection church

A later zographer ? Sucevia monastery, Resurrection church

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Wallachian coat of arms under Radu erban, 17th century

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Sinaia monastery, the old church, 17th century (?)

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Sinaia monastery, the chapel, 17th century (?)

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Sinaia monastery, the chapel, 17th century (?)

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Teodosie, Gheorghe and Preda zographers, Srcineti monastery, 1718

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Petru Ursache, Short Treatise on Theological Aesthetics, 2009 (the cover reproduces a painting by Stefan Arteni)

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Petru Ursache, Short Treatise on Theological Aesthetics, 2009 ( the illustrations reproduce paintings by Stefan Arteni)

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Death of Orpheus, Attributed to Hermonax, Greek stamnos, 5th century BC

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