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5.0 out of 5 stars
OMNIVOYANCE, July 24, 2007
This review is from: Art Line Thought (Contributions To Phenomenology) (Hardcover)
OMNIVOYANCE
Samuel Mallin, in his prodigious book "ART LINE THOUGHT", written over a period of 20 years and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1996, in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, actuates a reflexive meditative quiescence and dazzlingly insightful, existential and hermeneutical phenomenology which ranges panoramically over art history, making use of its hypersophistocated yet completely accessible transitions through eidos, the formal content of a culture. Mallin begins with the radiant Korai/Kouroi, male and female sculptures of prehistoric Greece and proceeds through Minoan/Nazcan pottery and then on to the sculpture and dance-theatre of our eminent contemporaries: Richard Serra and Pina Bausch, respectively. Mallin, in the pure immediate and refluent hiddenness of qualities within the works themselves, generates a sublime union of biocentric ideas and flexuous intricacy much in harmony with string and feminist theories, beyond the confines of psycholinguistically bound operations of intellect.
Invigorated by what ultimately does exist in each artwork, Mallin offers us a rivulose hermeneutic and willowy epoché or suspended judgement, by way of that which shows itself, in itself; revealing the inside of an inherent dynamism and soul of an art object, to challenge degenerative facticity and obliterating hegemonies of regularity with their peculiar difficulties and manifest harshness; our plight within the ineluctable
predominance and transgression of science and monologicality, master narratives, machines and money, in particular, linear analysis and androcentrism anathema to holisms. Thus Mallin conceives of nothing less than the lighter and finer transcendence of learned ignorance, apotheosis of irresponsible will, false vacuums, contrived pieties and dualities, in a thorough revisioning of our fibered-over grund or ground of being, to
reach a theosis which unifies all epochs. Time pretends to flow.
Naturally, Mallin does not simply posit yet one more imbalance but rather, evinces a moral philosophy and equilibration of which modes of being thoughtfully harmonize with the beauty and absolute necessity of line which is "the preeminent example of a transcendental structure that is visible and sensuous through and through and, thus, belongs to the vision of the body rather than to cognition or reason". That is, the postulate
of a gracious ontopoietic sinuosity similar in spirit, characteristic and natural to geodynamical processes such as wind, fire, seismicity, electromagnetic waves, water and earth tides to name but a few, and already begun in art, physics, hypertext, complex systems, non-linear sciences, the throb of consciousness, etc.
ART LINE THOUGHT itself is no mere mental clarity but a consummate/immaculate art of understanding chiasmata, occurring in the depths of the osmotic, limpid depth, in what is generally regarded as evanescent and beyond the known, to further the rigors of vision
itself while simultaneously urging us to reintuit our conclusions. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are frequently cited and have contributed much to the delicacy of Mallin's perceptual thought process. By his gathering back and holding forth animum reflectere, from the widest possible vistas, in bare essences, he locates that which is not expressible linearly; a broadened magnetism during the process of cognition; ontological coincidenceof agency and human presence, in a comfort of discontinuous space auspicious to the breadth of moral character, living relevance and social enlightenment potential, for within this particular schema of organoleptic , creative dislocation we may ascertain a vivid, palpable presence of sensory fields..."the phenomenological begins always where
scientific fact breaks off", which when mirrored and conjugated against our total life experience, contributes to its expansion, finding out how much value there is in a good.
Mallin exquisitely does not interfere, but with the acuity of an angel, listens, watches, and allows things observed to reveal their own meaning and by his passionate attention in the primordial bosom of common things brings forward the traits that bind us together without surrender of individuality. ART LINE THOUGHT holds the socio-political wasp by the tail to reveal the coruscating freedom of the human project. A mordant, reaching and merciless analysis of human character from within the bristling walls of Lebenswelt (life-world), Mallin intuits from a prereflective order of things to quicken and transmit essential insight to the structure of reality affording us social utility, value and emotional-volition from within universal historical space towards concord, inseparability and intimacy with the divine, timeless Being-qua-Existenz; a ratio cognoscendi, ratio essendi and ratio agendi.
This is a book of astonishing scope, elegance and sobriety, amplifying and resolving coetaneous philosophical issues, the "chthonically involved" mooty deep, or phusis, as well as bearing witness to our civilization's most trenchant blindspots and automaticity to reification/deification, in an omnivoyant, inexhaustible poetic truthtelling.
Lissa Wolsak
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