Stefan Arteni

The Way of Form

SolInvictus Press 2006

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NOTE :

The illustrations of this essay reproduce

original paintings done by Stefan Arteni.

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The Way Of Form

To traverse the whole, to touch the

depth of being, is to awaken the
ambiguity coiled inside.
Emmanuel Levinas

East-Central Europe is not a static abstraction. The complex Culture is created on the
pattern of interaction rises out of the peculiar aspect of limes border of cultures.
ethos as the site of continuity of the archaic and of a Mikhail Bakhtin
paradoxical fatalistic optimism, and can provide a picture of
comprehensive correspondences in space and time - the
multiscale non-linear 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 modernity’s
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 art is able to realize by attempting to make
sense of the past in the present. In order to decipher the
strategy of composition and the metamorphosis of color -
simply put, a specific predominance of organization and of
the materiality of the color-medium, a subtle way to get hints
of emic categories and of mental algorithms as cultural
construction - it is necessary to return to the traumatic roots
and fuzzy boundary of identity, to the doubt and disquiet of
a Borderland. The tacit assumption that art is the moment of
form, form paradoxically endowed with the seal of indelible
contingency, is elaborated by Danilo Kiš: “…form as
possibility of choice, form that is an attempt to locate points
of fulcrum…in the chaos around us…”.

Composition with Idols

Undated
Ink on tinted paper
17 ½ x 22 ½" (44.5 x 57. 2 cm)

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According to Vessela Misheva, systems theory maintains that And myth is always
only those actions and communications that did not receive against history.
expression can be accumulated in the social system - there Manfredo Tafuri
will thus be a ‘culture of the soul’, a boundary position able
of bridging gaps and schisms. Alexius Meinong speaks of the
play and counterplay of “possibilia that subsist”, of
Aussersein, and of Sosein as independent from Sein.
Constantin Noica describes Being as caught in-between the
actual and the potential. Says Jan Patocka: “…myth, rather
than logos, is capable of…carrying or pointing out the trans-
reflexive foundation of our thought”. Such a stance will
require a mapping of the terrain of memory, an interplay
between ‘present’ and what Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘great
time’. It also forces recognition that 'systems' in non-
Western cultures need different approaches. Because of the

> Mythological Figures

Undated
Ink on tinted paper
22 ½ x 17 ½" (57.2 x 44.5 cm)

Folktale (From Folktales Series)

Undated
Mixed technique on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)

Composition for Mural

Undated
Textured gouache on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)

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contradictory mix found in the elusive and shifting zone of
semi-periphery (the concept has been introduced by
Immanuel Wallerstein) recognizing both an amalgam of the
pre-modern and modern as well as multiple modernities, the
dynamic character of a cultural system in a situation of
marginality appears as a limitic emically substantiated
structure (which can also become detached from regional
reference) against global monocultural centralness. Milan
Zeleny indicates that an autopoietic system acts "upon an
already ordered, structured milieu" and has a life-span :
"…autopoiesis is bound to exhibit gradation,…it becomes. It
gradually degrades itself; the processes of autopoiesis
weaken and dim". The need to integrate different
perspectives as the backdrop or background of a space of
autopoiesis, leads Vessela Misheva to develop a corollary to
the theory of autopoietic systems, that is the notion of proto-
autopoietic or undifferentiated poietic systems, systems
which lack self-defined boundaries and use condensed
(abstract) and often tautological constellations of messages.
This presumption stems from a definition provided by
Edward T. Hall: in polychronic and high-context cultures,
messages involve intuitive and hidden cues, while
background information is implicit. In a similar vein, Beth
Dempster points to the other end of the spectrum, to the
potentially significant concept of sympoiesis (meaning
'collective making'). Sympoiesis reflects the fuzzy
unboundedness, the amorphous and diffuse structures, the
ambiguous characteristics of a system which exhibits
interaction and influences, and is continuously, although not
necessarily consistently, changing. As Dempster puts it:
"Sympoietic systems arise and evolve by virtue of the
complexity of their component autopoietic systems".

Both Jan Patocka and Constantin Noica took the question of

…another choice of
the soul as their core concern. Patocka writes: “Europe –
tradition…
Western Europe first of all, but also what is called the ‘other
Milan Kundera
Europe’ - is issued from the care of the soul”. Certainly,
one acts ever in a situational context. Yet ultimately the ‘care
of the soul’ is the mode of overcoming Dasein’s ‘throwness’.
“Culture is a memory and control device of society”, writes
Dirk Baecker. Lorand Hegyi points out that “in the Central
and Eastern Europe…no generation was able to escape some
form of confrontation with the immediate danger of
existential annihilation”. What, now, of the fate of art? A
cultural world is given to Dasein in an historical throw, a
throw that discloses limits and possibilities. Art is essentially
a solitary vocation, yet it can come into its own only by
entering into dialogue with the most heterogenous sources.
The secret of the occurrence of transmission is intrinsically
interwoven with the illusiveness of art, which, for the artist,
tends to efface itself in favor of the experiental event of

5
creation. The realm of silent practices is suspended between
the polarities of the singular act and culture-bound
constraints. In the Western world of today, the relationship
to tradition is an irreparably broken one. The connecting
thread is to be found adumbrated or realized elsewhere and
elsewhen, indwelling, for example, the still archaic
mentality of the East-Central European and the timelessness
of Chinese and Japanese calligraphic art - Byzantine
Hesychasm is remarkably parallel to Zen understanding,
both aiming at a state of dynamic nonaction or, more properly,
acceptance.

It must be borne in mind that, as Caryl Emerson points out, Multilingualism…

“Central and East Europeans (for all their contributions to the highlights the inherent
avant-garde) have routinely stood up to Western models.” instability of meaning.
(To approach the question of modernism’s relationship to Antony Adolf
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. 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. Language is a repository of
culture. The polyglot inhabits someone else's culture,
including the culture or cultures. An artist's split between
cultures becomes a potential means of deautomatizing worn-
out formal devices, a strategy of inserting and asserting, of

6
uprooting and defamiliarizing. "The boundary is a zone of
semiotic polyglotism", writes Jola Škulj. She continues:
"Selfhood is not inevitably sameness".

It may be suggested here that Mircea Eliade’s notion of Sometimes one's duty
enstasis or Jose Ortega y Gasset’s concept of ensimismamiento while facing a true
are close to Vladimir Dimitrov’s and Robert Ebsary’s thoughts mystery is not to solve it,
on intrapersonal autopoiesis and to Yuri Lotman’s idea of a but to elaborate it so
ritual culture oriented towards autocommunication and the much that it transforms
resulting idiolect, thus recognizing the predominance of the into a deeper mystery.
performative side of art (Michael Polanyi speaks of a tacit Lucian Blaga
knowledge) and of its ludic subliminality before and beyond
any theory. By focussing on the ritualistic substrate of art, S.
N. Balagangadhara defines performative or practical
knowledge, the pattern of actual activity combining
contingency and necessity, as the ability to act recursively.
Conventions and norms adopted as solutions to recurrent
problems have been reformulated in game theoretic terms by
D. Lewis. J. Van Huyck speaks of the emergence of
conventions in evolutionary games. Peter Vanderschraaf has
the same problem in mind when he shows that game-
theoretic characterizations suggest that the emergence of
correlated convention (correlated equilibrium) occurs even if
the initial actions are randomized. Jenna Bedmar and Scott
Page investigate the multiple-game approach as suggestive of
the emergence of culture. Like any game, art is subject to the
continual alternation of exploration and play, and to a set of
pragmatic and historical framing conditions. In fact, the
relation between culture and mediated communication
implies standardization and traditionalization
(communicative conventions).

Study for a Composition

Undated
Gouache on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)

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Composition
Undated
Mixed technique on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)
Mythical Figures
(From Folktales Series)
Undated
Mixed technique on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)
Study with Mythical Bird
(From Folktales Series)
Undated
Mixed technique on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)
Composition with Tree of Life
(From Folktales Series)
Undated
Textured gouache on paper
30 ¼ x 22 ¼" (76.8 x 56.5 cm)
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Study. Atlantes and Caryatids
Undated
Egg tempera on paper
26 x 20" (50.8 x 66 cm)

Figures and Idols

Undated
Egg tempera on paper
26 x 20" (50.8 x 66 cm)

The artist is absorbed in the flow. Autotelic activity reduces The inside-outside
the participant’s awareness of self. The constitutive alterity to position of an observer
oneself, re-making the self away-from-self, is woven into the located on a
fabric of a multi-sited memory, leading to a more penetrating boundary…the boundary
grasp of the pattern of autocommunication. To put paradox position that is
at the heart of art, it is this very ‘nowhere here nor there’, responsible for the
the homelandlessness of the ever atopos, the always construction of a mind
multiplicative factor of coexistent insideness and outsideness, with a non-modern…
that appear as the way to inscribe enstasis into an integral structure…
unfolding experience. One may add, by way of explanation, Vessela Misheva
that the pervasive kenotic spirituality of East and South-East
Europe, profoundly akin to the principle of sunyata (void,
nothingness, emptiness) or to Kitaro Nishida’s notion of the
mu no basho, the place of nothingness , discloses itself as the
path of operational suchness. Kenneth Inada describes
emptiness as “an experiental fact of epistemological non-
assertion”. The work is methodically deconceptualized –
Byzantine apophaticism and the Upanishad’s via negativa,
“neti, neti”, which means “not this, not that”, or

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“neither…nor…”, point to the fact that visual art is forever
resistant to and refuses the limit imposed by definition and
conceptualization. If one considers this thought further, one
sees that it actually corresponds with Thorsten Botz-
Bornstein's insight: "There are indeed parallels between Zen
aesthetics and Byzantine aesthetics…art is in the first place
virtual". The works "are supposed not to represent but to be".
They "present style in the form of a virtual world" by means
of "continuous acts of severe formalization...This means that
through art, nothingness, though itself absolutely formless
and invisible, can project itself into the visible world".

Stephen Jay Gould and E. S. Vrba suggest that language, The act is a gesture, a
religion, fine arts, poetry, music, dance, writing and reading, ritual, measured by its
are examples of contingent exaptation (fit by reason of form), function, not by its result.
while Jan Koster agrees with Frits Staal in the idea of the M. A. Pop
autonomy of form in ritual - the world of rhythm is self-
enclosed, rhythm unifies all aesthetic experiences, syntax
and rhythm constitute a semantically empty, autonomous
structure, going back to ritual, to a set of recursively
applicable formal gestures and procedures. This viewpoint is
also shared by Rober N. McCauley and E. Thomas, who
advance the ritual form hypothesis, that is a theory of
procedural memory or tacit knowledge - embodied activity
is central to cognition. Alvin I. Goldman’s studies have found
that “extensive practice on a task often produces a shift in the
brain pathways used to complete the task”. According to
William Seeley and Aaron Kozbelt, the capacity for syntax,
for reorganization, presupposes a loop of continuous
reciprocation between the formal method that utilizes a class
of practical knowledge which renders objects themselves
invisible by recovering only visual cues and saliency, and
visuo-motor skills that are pertinent to particular media.

Study for a Composition

Undated
Ink on tinted paper
23½ x 18" (59. 7 x 45. 7 cm)

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Figures and Spaces
Undated, sanguine relief ink monotype on
Japanese paper
32 x 21" ( 81.9 x 53. 3 cm)

> Composition with Frieze

Undated, etching ink monotype on light
green tinted Japanese paper
21 x 17½" (53. 3 x 44.5 cm)

> Caryatid
Undated, etching ink monotype on light
green tinted Japanese paper
21 x 17½" (53. 3 x 44.5 cm)

G. Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form is an exploration of the The Museum Europe

syntactical possibilities of ‘drawing a distinction’ and of liberates us from the
‘covert conventions’. There is an interaction between specific modern
kinesthetic/spatiomotor and visual input. The traces of obligation of being
medium-specific actions defined by Peer Bundgaard as always absolutely
‘exploitation of ontic constraints’, the systems or patterns of modern. It quotes the
brushstrokes, are transformational and probabilistically Modern ironically and
thinks it anew - as
deformed by noise, blur, superposition, warping and
something past.
interruption. Improvisation may involve repetition and
Norbert Bolz
revision, embedded in which are appropriative allusions to
and fragmented citations of previous historical practices - it
is up to the painter to reactivate the past. Ranulph Glanville
describes art as an “iterative and circular process with the
unknowable” and concludes: “Art is deeply cybernetic”.

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 Composition with Bacchantes
Undated
Relief ink monotype on Japanese
paper
32 x 21" ( 81.9 x 53.3 cm)

Even the viewer’s experience of art can occur in the absence of …enter through the
an ‘understanding’ of the work, or, as J. H. de Roder argues, image.
the experience is a physical event. The work is to be seized From a Nag Hammadi
through a personal relationship, in reciprocity and in an Gnostic Text
unfolding, or, to use H. G. Gadamer’s term, by tarrying
(Verweilen). It has proven difficult to formulate a semiotic
theory in relation to visual media because, as Sandra
Moriarty puts it, the linguistic ‘anchoring’ of the image is
reductive, the verbal language metaphor frustrates much of
the research on visual thinking. In many non-Western
societies language plays a less dominant role. Moriarty insists
on the autonomy of visual modalities of communication – a
Luhmannian ‘compact communication’ (work of art) that
mobilizes perception. Thomas Sebeok argues that the visual
is neither derivative nor peripheral to language, and that,
properly speaking, visual communication may constitute a
primary modeling system.

But more important, and in the end more powerful, is the We might cross over and
idea of heterarchy, the play of parallel and simultaneously back….
active and/or interwoven multiple artistic frameworks while Friedrich Hoelderlin
respecting the logic of each, and producing ambivalence and
paradox when they intersect. In a true sense the process
exhibits a polycontextural stylistic matrix and a distributed
artistic identity – one runs across the terms heterarchy,

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polycontexturality and kenogrammatics in Gotthard
Guenther’s transclassic logic investigations suggestive of new
and unrehearsed practices. A cultural space set at the
crossroads of semiospheres is the meeting point of
incongruent traditions mediated by procedural transjunction –
the Eastern-Orthodox Byzantine (painting as prayer of the
heart), the West European, the East Asian (the way of the
brush as meditation that dismisses thought and concepts).
Cultural borders transpassing engenders approximate
equivalences which may be termed benign pseudomorphic
operations, that is to say the imprecise, de-creative,
interpretative, appropriation of empty sign systems (i.e.
formal domains) within essential medium based limitations -
a coexistence, a heterarchy of artistic systems, where the
operator is free to move among formalizations. It is, of
course, the methodological value of direct experience, what
Francisco Varela has elegantly called ‘embodied action’, that
comes into play. The tendency toward a playful
autonomization of the sign-construct instead of toward its
semantization, provides the ground for the unpredictable
trajectory of a polyphonic monologue, the play of
transjunctional operations, including equivalence,
transmutation, poly-negations, and rejection, that may
involve parallel operations in parallel artistic frameworks -
in a heterarchy, self-reference is essential to its nature. In
scrutinizing Charles Peirce’s semiotic model, Roman
Jakobson defines art (ars, that is skill, craft) as artifice
(artificium, that is craftmanship, crafty strategy or expedient),
as a playful fabrication: “The signs of…art can carry the
imprint of…symbol,…icon and…index, but it is obviously
above all in their artistic character that their significance is
lodged”. Art itself is an inscription of praxis and as such
preserves the historicity of its unstable and ever shifting
horizon, the is-ness of the placeless place, the no-man’s-land
that spans a manifold of co-present different cultural systems
and perhaps dramatizes latency, the improbability of
communication, and silence. The fixed work, the closure, is
based on the possibility of openness, it occurs as nowness
(Vergegenwaertigung) under erasure.

Moreover, it should also be noted that since the iconoclastic Every sign consists in a
controversy the sign model is conceived as a contingent relation as such…an
relation – one must think of relation as ontological principle. irreducible triadic
It is a matter of seeing as. The mapping of sign systems onto relation…
kenogrammatic structures viewed as patterns of connections, John Deely
as patterns of empty slots within the organization of the
work’s form-space, displays the interplay of the stochastic and
the lawful, of chance and necessity, as the awareness of form
– lines, areas, textures, contrasts. The semantic kenosis to
which one subjects art is conducive to the emergence of the
work as sedimented, fragmented, form-space topology, as a
chronotopic palimpsest.

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Without going into details, one must stress the cultural Culture…supposes that
perspective and its constraints. William of Ockham defines the individual is placed
representative signs as ‘rememorative’. Jan Assmann more or less consciously,
distinguishes a cultural memory maintained by artifacts and but at any rate actively, at
performance that claim an a-symmetrical function of the essence of things.
recollection. The term mnemohistory, Assmann’s own Vasile Bancila
coinage, adheres to the truth of memory. While memory, as
Thomas Sebeok puts it, is a “reservoir of interpretants”, the
signified, itself a complex system of relations, is external and
somehow mapped to the sign. This involves a demarcation of
the characteristically ignored historical aspect of a semiotic of
representation: as Merlin Donald points out, one can define
and redefine maps of meaning onto form. Due to their
iteration throughout the centuries, visual sign-constructs may
have become automatized, a sort of conventionalized
shorthands, and thus may be described by invoking
Peircean symbolicity. Søren Brier writes for instance:
“Peirce’s definition of signs is…cybernetic and self-
organized…It underlines habits and historical drift.” In fact,
the formal elements of the signifier can acquire primacy over
the signified. This operativity and materiality slips away since
the contemporary dominance of ‘significance’ blinds the
viewer. If the image-content builds a first message, the
material-artistic utterance (the ontic foundation, the
signscape as concrete assemblage of self-sustaining marks,
marks as marks of themselves that may refer only to other
marks, marks as instance of sign-form pointing toward what
E. Cassirer calls Formschoenheit) is another message that
contradicts the first one. And one can argue, as Niklas
Luhmann does, that “in the theory of signs as a form, there is
indeed no reference”. But drawing a mark immediately
creates a foundational paradox. Carole McKenzie and Kim
James indicate that a mark “is a change in the surface of an
area as the result of an event and which signifies that event”,
or, put in a more Luhmannian way, “the trace is a signifier of
difference”. It seems almost unavoidable to place James
Elkins’ insight in this context. Elkins insists on painting
furnishing “a cast of the painter’s movements…the quick
jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures”.
This is why Elkins maintains that it “makes sense to propose
that… marks be understood as objects that are simultaneously
signs and not signs”. The marks may be conceived as haptic
gesture-signs, and, at the same time, as performative, operational,
processual self-reference.

What is called art is treated here as a class of phenomena We human beings are
characterized by complexification. Extrapolating from Lotfi always more our
Zadek and his incompatibility principle (as complexity contingencies than our
choices.
increases, meaning becomes necessarily fuzzified), one may
Odo Marquard
deduce that the rich complexity of syntax consists of a web of
fuzzy occupancy, and consequently one should shift towards

14
Composition
Undated, ink and color on paper
26 3/8 x 17 ½ “ (67.0 x 44.5 cm)
Private Collection, Kobe, Japan

> Composition
Undated, ink and color on paper
26 3/8 x 17 ½ “ (67.0 x 44.5 cm)
Private Collection, Tokyo, Japan

> Composition
Undated, ink and color on paper
26 3/8 x 17 ¼ “(67.0 x 44 cm)
Private Collection, Tokyo, Japan

David Lidov’s idea of processual interpretant. With

Luhmann, the form patterns of ritual repetition (the Latin
repetere means to seek again) and stabilization are entwined
with compression of form and reduction of meaning. Richard
K. Payne points out that ritual practice is repetitive but not
semantic. Repetition, which, for example, is the foundation
for mastering East-Asian calligraphy, combines the idea of
linear progression with that of a cyclical return indicating that
innovation too is a recursive process. In other words, the
context of feedback, of recursive self-reference, suggests that
art is both determined and unpredictable, a mode of activity
that incorporates paradox itself.

15
Likewise, when it comes to defining resistance to self- …a form of irenic play
colonization and to the deluge of sameness, monoculture, and can…assume a culturally
leisure amateurs, some of the most innovative gestures transcendental
ultimately resort to the paradox of a fragile tradition based on dimension, in the sense
reflexivity and innovation, to the ability to salvage, mutate, that it can go beyond its
and build upon the fragment as ruin or assemblage used to immediate historical
materialize memory and as a system of communication, as context.
record of a world under erasure/crossed out or essentially Mihai Spariosu
lost - the canon functions as hermeneutic provocation. It is a
rather metalingual painting, making reference to previous
artworks as sites of memory, to cultural memory qua
artifacts, mentifacts, and performance, a memory
reconstructed in the light of the present, an ocular memory
that displays historical visual data revealing metaphorical and
metonymic processes transported across generations through
representational traditions of unfettered flexibility. Markings
are ideational cultural patterns even when corrupted by
'noise'. A traditional culture's jest, joke, anecdote, grotesque
and allegory - sublimating tragedy into humor - proceed as a
ludic and cathartic autonomization of the sign. The ethos of
open play allows for much variation and improvisation,
although play involves voluntarily submitting to a system of
rules. The player is an observer as well as player. Johan
Huizinga speaks of a 'magic circle' which accounts for the
second-order reality or holding power of extended play.

Study for a Mural

Undated
Ink monotype on paper
35 x 37" (88.9 x 94.0 cm)
Private Collection, Osaka,
Japan

16
a-b. Apollo and Marsyas

Undated
Portfolio of 12 acrylic monotypes on
Japanese handmade paper. [12] leaves;
24.5 x 20" (62. 2 x 50.8 cm). Edition size: 1.

17
Summing up, art operates between societal system and In art the process of
consciousness and uses medium specific phenomena of perception is an end in
perception as communication - inspired by Humberto itself and must be
Maturana and Francisco Varela, one may describe perception lengthened.
as an inner selective construction by means of which a reality Viktor Shklovski
springs forth. It is critical to recognize the importance of
historical accident and the fragility of an historical
instantiation of art, especially in an era that has witnessed
societal systems excluding the sphere of art from the
aggregation of communication - Vessela Misheva proposes
the term ex-communication - and thus reducing it to an
external environment. But an "environment is a logical space
consisting of the other possible ways", hypothesizes Tosiya
Nagai. Actuality is certain but unstable, potentiality is
uncertain but stable. Contingency involves the exclusion of
necessity and impossibility. It builds upon the demiurgic
enterprise and opens up a shifting horizon of polycontextural
interdependencies. The latency of internal references and of
non-linear ramifications are interlinked in never-ending
cycles. So it is tempting to think of art as a kind of goal-less
waying, the waying of ways that have to be created every
moment anew, and - speaking of the ‘pilgrim’ - to think of
the artist as finely attuned to the way. “Those on the way
need to become the way,” said Laozi. Here one encounters a
paradox. The accidental character of the pilgrim's aimless
wandering is delusive. The Way is the Quest, the spiritual
nostos (homecoming), the natural environment of the artist.
"This is why, as opposed to a post-modern Nomad," writes
Maria Roginska, " the apparent nomadism of a pilgrim does
not know any accidentality".

As alluded to earlier, recursivity documents the movement Creation is the answer we

across boundaries. Performative recursivity is can give to the terror of
multidimensional, multi-faceted and multi-layered, it self- history.
organizes into deep dynamic aspects and into endless Mircea Eliade
complex zones of articulation and negotiation. Art accepts the
task of coding the undetermined and indeterminable and of
conveying the inexpressible. Stefan Afloroaei opines that
"the symbol becomes…able to reveal the existence of a
perspective whereby certain heterogeneous realities are
granted a chance to articulate themselves as an ensemble...". It
is the form of the medium that dominates the ways of
encoding. Robert Chia points out that communication
becomes cautiously indirect and circular. He writes: "That
which lies beyond the grasp of language is approachable
through a complex form of paradoxical utterances".
T.Shimomura uses a musical analogy: "Like a musical theme,
the basic theme is repeated and emphasized many times
over…while executing variations…". However, as Chia
states, the master theme lies beyond the individual
instantiations. The emphasis is on a deep sensitivity to the

18
tacit. 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. Some basic but ultimately prosaic question such
as 'why art?' may inevitably be posed. "Art is quite useless",
proclaims Oscar Wilde. But Zhuangzi and Martin Heidegger
praise the worth of uselessness. Niklas Luhmann raises the
question: "What difference does the work of art make?"
Constantin Brancusi’s saying comes to mind: "Art may
redeem the world".

Stefan Arteni

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