The Shock of the Then. . .

 I began teaching art courses at my own Art School in the early 90's and since we needed a History of Art Curriculum, I began compiling a course outline for the History of Art.

Having gone through the standard  student's Art History at UCT I pretty much went along with the accepted point of view, I remember buying a few of the recommended books and among them was Frederick Hartt's (1914–1991) Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture - A comprehensive, scholarly and somewhat dry two volume collection of general art history.

I used it sparingly at the time finding it a bit of a slog, but when I began my own research I used Volume I extensively.

In this book he goes from the Paleolithic cave paintings to late medieval art. This is the book that formed the backbone of my reading and I must say it became a kind of Art Bible to me.

But at this time my view of History and might I add, also of reality, began to change in the mid 90's, As i began exploring different literature for my lectures I began to feel a bit dissatisfied, and began to wander far from the basic requirements of Art History for Students. This path would lead into areas that are not directly concerned with Art History itself.

A more wholistic Experience

Firstly I wanted to address, a far more wholistic approach to Art History. The publications we used as Students were all overviews focussing on art movements in periods of time, documented and described more or less in Chronological order. I now wanted to find out more about the social, political and philosophical developments of the day, since it was becoming obvious to me, Art doesn't just happen in a vacuum, there must be a lot of circumstances to consider. So, of course, there are books for these and therefore one has to put the general volumes aside and start reading books on specifics topics and time periods in which backgrounds, places and events are enlarged upon.

But that was just beginning. 

I could mention so many influences and books I read over this time, but I want to draw attention to some TV programs that forever etched themselves on my mind, so much so that I have to say they definitely formed a significant part of my psyche.

The First was "THE WORLD AT WAR"

This was still in the 1970's when TV was new in South Africa and the whole country, it seems, was mesmerized by this brilliant BBC production which I have recently watched again from beginning to end on You Tube.

At that time I was only a teenage kid but I was totally captivated, later we did the two world wars for History at School and this was definitely the beginning of my passionate love affair with History.

The Second Series was "CIVILISATION" By Kenneth Clarke  

This series caught me by surprise, it was aired in SA in the early 1980's and I initially thought of it as just some dull History documentary.



But I felt myself once again drawn in and totally transfixed with fascination as 'Lord Clark' took me on a journey back into the sands of time and instilled in me a thirst for more. . .

And yes I bought the book and this with Frederick Hartt formed part of the back bone of my 'overview'.

However: The Third Series was the most important of all for me.

I did not watch it on TV, no they aired it at the Cape Town Art Gallery in Gardens. I had just graduated from UCT and was working at my very first job, as a teacher in a private Art School in WoodStock near CapeTown and we all drove through, once a week sometime in the mid 1980's to watch this TV series.

The "SHOCK OF THE NEW" By Robert Hughes

Another high quality BBC documentary but not a Brit narrating this time, no, but a gifted presenter and writer, Robert Hughes from Australia. It is hard to describe now just how radical this video series was,  at the time, we were watching on video cassette on a bulky box TV at the CT gallery of Art with a small group of people who travelled through especially for the occasion every Monday or whatever day it was.

And I have to say I had never seen anything like it. We did get lectures once a week at Varsity with a talk and a slide show, but here was a very slick audio visual presentation, not to forget the unforgettably witty dialogue of Robert Hughes who could discuss difficult philosophical concepts with casual ease so young novices such as I could follow.

The Pinnacle of Success early 80's

The series is packed full of quotes that I have never forgotten 

Such as “Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future."

or "Like plants we need the shit of others to grow" and

“The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.”

“It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.”

“Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction.

A Young Hip Hughes in the Early 70's

It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.”

etc. etc . . .

When Robert Hughes died on 6 August 2012, aged 74, I felt a great personal sense of Loss, like I had lost a good friend, I'm pretty sure many other lovers of Art felt the same and I wonder how many would agree on the enormous impression he made on our collective consciousness. Any program on Art seems to have the Shock of the New in the background, the high water mark of Art-Documentaries, in my opinion.

And yes of course, I bought the book, which graced my shelves and formed another (Few) vertebrae in my backbone of references.

Appendix to my Robert Hughes Tribute: 

In 2003 Hughes wrote a biography on Francisco Goya which was also made into a TV series. In the opening chapter of the book he describes a car accident he was involved in 1999 which very nearly killed him.

One Of Goya's nightmarish 'Black' paintings 

He was 60 years old at the time and apparently had multiple bone fractures and should have died. In the aftermath he described a nightmare vision of Goya, tormenting him in his pain, which inspired the book, well it sounds a bit melodramatic but he must have suffered terribly.

In year 2000 he got up off his hospital bed to finish his TV series "Australia - Beyond the Fatal Shore". Here is a clip in which he returns with remarkable courage to confront his smashed up car to relive that fateful day.

A very tough and erudite character he seems to have become a little cantankerous in his late years somewhat disillusioned by the superficiality and commercialism of the Art World these days.

And this really does bring me to my point, the Art business is a money making scam in which advertising and connections seem to be what it's all about - My personal view is the Art world, (and by this I don't mean the thousands of talented painters sculptors and gifted people who use the Art process to express themselves), but rather the collusion between certain individuals and the big Art dealing business that writers such as Robert Hughes would be intimately involved with.

Names like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons spring to mind, their "talent" is not really their ability to express themselves poetically using Artistic processes but rather an uncanny skill to feed off a drip inserted into the financial arms of the wealthy elite who seem to have an endless need for notoriety and hype.

Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst 

"Hirst's 1991 suspended tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is, Hughes judges, a 'tacky commodity', even though collector Charles Saatchi sold it for £8m in 2004.

'It is a clever piece of marketing, but as a piece of art it is absurd,' Hughes says. The common defence is that Hirst's work mirrors and subverts modern decadence: 'Not so. It is decadence,' says Hughes."

In the first episode of "The Shock of the New"

Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter
  Zurich 1918

A small group of dissenters hides out in Zurich from the horrors of the first world war. They declare a need to wipe the slate clean and "restart culture from scratch".

Since then, all the freedoms that these rebellious poets and Artists yearned for have in fact, actually happened, the western world has never enjoyed the kind of rights and freedom it now has. . . from the emancipation of slaves and protections from racial discrimination, woman's rights, gay rights, freedom of choice in a democratic society. . . etc. etc. and yet still nobody is happy, there seems to no end in site to peoples clamoring and demanding, like over-indulged and spoilt children they will never be satisfied.

Would the artists of the Dada era and the abstract expressionists feel the world has changed for the better? I guess Dadaist Marcel Duchamp would remain aloof and indifferent, maybe the hedonistic Pop Artists of the 60's would be quite happy, hard to say. Damien Hirst the wealthy millionaire sitting in his Castle in England couldn't care less.



But I believe Robert Hughes cared, and cared a great deal. I'm sure he loved his success and fame, and he was probably quite arrogant and proud, but a serious car accident and encroaching old age can go a long way in curing arrogance and pride.

He returned to the Art world because its what he new best, to be sure, but he also loved Art and loved the poetry of it, a form of visual communication that is so difficult to grasp at times and so tantalising as well as frustrating but also so satisfying that it can mesmerize the onlooker just as a beautiful or powerful piece of music or prose can.

Not long before he left this world defiant, unapologetic and totally honest.

But sadly I think Robert ended his days unhappy with Art and at times he sounded like a grumpy old man but I think he felt disappointed and died disillusioned.

Perhaps he didn't bother to, or ran out of time, or was too "locked in", too deeply invested,  to look beyond the narrow confines of liberal capitalistic western concerns. He couldn't find a solution and basically "painted himself into a corner" from which he could see no escape.

Perhaps there isn't, or on the other hand, maybe there is! This was left for another, younger generation  not locked in to the "official" Paradigm of the last century or so. Of course, there are plenty of young writers and journalists who carry on enthusiastically from where Hughes left off, the worn out themes from yesterday are all new to them, but then there are others who are forging a new path. This is where I am wanting to go. . .

I too have been around long enough to have become more and more bored with the endless repetition of old themes in Art with people trying to push beyond already overstretched boundaries in territories already explored quite thoroughly and, in my opinion, exhausted by previous generations.


My fascination for Art History remains - but I feel the tired and worn out themes of today may be indicative of a tired and worn out (Western) culture that knows how to complain but has very little else to offer.

I would rather explore new ground, but what? and where?

Books come to the rescue again.

 Just after the 80's closed there arose a new consciousness in the world of literature, the shock of the new was no longer new, or shocking What would be the new approach to Art and History? Perhaps just like the Dadaists in 1916 we need to wipe the slate clean once again, just like the great communist experiment in Russia that crumbled and fell apart at the end of the 1980's the western experiment with Darwinism and Democracy is crumbling into ruins as well.

There was a different approach altogether the overturning of the old Regime, just as the Jacobins wanted to overturn the ancient regime in the French Revolution, we have a modern overturning of the Paradigm they have constructed for the last century or so. . . .

One writer was to stand out as a spokesman in a pivotal book of its time and there were a great many people who were deeply affected by it,  and not least of them was me. . .

I first read Fingerprints of the Gods back in the mid 90's. . . 

This was at a time that I now realize, was the beginnings of my own and at the same time, a world wide awakening. 

Fingerprints hit the shelves at a particularly key moment in History and touched the pulse of a growing minority of progressive thinkers.

This book was part of the beginnings of a ripple effect in the world that continues to expand to this very day. 

There were many other writings that had a similar effect on myself and others, but if I had to choose a particular beginning to my Odyssey, it would be that fateful day when I picked up this book.






Since then, the internet has taken up the challenge and it has now exploded across the Globe, unfortunately running parallel to this fabulous outpouring of shared ideas and research is the flip-side. Muddying the waters and reducing the credibility of genuine Scholarship is any number of nut-cases who use the net to vent and deposit misinformation of varying levels of facts, fiction and garbage.

This alongside the inevitable plethora  of mindless rubbish that occupies the minds of those still fast asleep creates a real challenge for a serious truth seeker. Also the likes of Poor Graham being thrust into a public forum has had his fair share of mudslingers accusing and insulting him,  mostly ignorant people's knee jerk reactions to anything outside of the accepted paradigm.

Speaking of which

The Accepted Paradigm in which Anthropologists Archeologists and Historians work within. . .
A neatly ordered concept of a materialistic reality that dovetails comfortably into a progressive development of History that moves from simple to complex and from Dumb to Smart.

The Smart part is us today, humankind in general and . . . more specifically the high priests of the materialist universe. . . the Scientific community.

These 'clever' guys have basically proclaimed themselves the high point of all evolution. 

In other words they are the greatest beings in the known Universe. Bit arrogant? Just a tad.

A position they are understandably reluctant to relinquish. Rocket scientists and professors their elevated brains must surely be in an advanced state of evolution which places them a little bit in front of the rest of us, average and below, people. Second to them is those with money, wealth is power, so they may not be as bright, but they are privileged and also, they run the planet, so they can by necessity associate themselves with the high priests. . .  since they fund them. So these rule the earth like a modern version of a (secularized) Church and State, under which all the ordinary people just like medieval serfs must pay their taxes and fight in their armies. And. . . believe in their paradigm of reality.

Bit simplistic to be sure, 

But my point is simply this, there is so much evidence all around us that there is a whole lot more to this reality than we are being s/told.

Which is fine, we have to do some digging around and find out for ourselves. Which is precisely what Graham Hancock did and is still doing. Does this mean I believe in everything he says? No of course not, but what I love about him is is openness to debate, to the weighing up of evidence as we find it, at the same time admitting that we do not have all the facts and at some stage we are going to have to speculate and hypothesis on very scant physical evidence.