Royal Way Research Articles

Ornament and abstraction: the dialogue between non-Western, modern and contemporary art

The importance of ornament in the emergence and development of abstract art has long been underestimated. Pioneers like Kandinsky and Mondrian looked upon it as a sin in which abstraction should not indulge. Ornament, with its history dating back thousands of years in all world cultures, was secreted in the development of modern nineteenth-century painting, but surreptitiously began to influence abstract art as a formal and methodical element. This book is an in-depth study of this major theme in twentieth-century art history. The catalogue features four artists who help to highlight the role of ornament in the history of art: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse and Frank Stella. The study begins with the innovative pictorial conception of Philipp Otto Runge, whose early nineteenth-century paintings featured the last genuine form in the history of ornament, the arabesque. The arabesque was influential in Symbolism (Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin) and Jugendstil (Henry van de Velde, Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann), and on painting's move towards abstraction (Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Adolf Hoelzel). It is argued that this resulted, on the one hand, in a non-figurative, geometric structure of lines (Mondrian), and on the other, in the swirls of Matisse and Jackson Pollock. Side by side with the royal way of Cubism, arabesque abstraction therefore opens up a second doorway to the world of non-figurative art. In addition to this line of enquiry, the authors examine theoretical findings on the theme of ornament, and what it reveals about the relation between abstraction and figurative art (Malevich, Kandinsky, Paul Klee). Significant influences also result from modern artists' preoccupation with exotic ornamentation found in distant cultures: Matisse & the Orient and Oceania, Ad Reinhardt & Asian culture, or American painting & pre-Columbian ornament (Josef Albers, Barnett Newman). In also considering Minimalism, new media, digital technology, the Renaissance and the Rococo, the book celebrates the impact of ornament on abstract art, as well as showcasing a remarkable array of masterpieces.

A Dutch treat: randomized controlled experimentation and the case of heroin-maintenance in the Netherlands

In 1995, the Dutch Minister of Health proposed that a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with heroin-maintenance for severe abusers be conducted. It took nearly four years of lengthy debates before the Dutch Parliament consented to the plan. Apart from the idea of prescribing heroin, the minister and her scientific advisers had to defend the quite high material and non-material costs that would arise from employing the randomized controlled design. They argued that the RCT represented the truly scientific approach and was the royal way to unambiguous results. In the present article, I question this common dual justification of RCTs. First, I situate the historical origins and the basic assumptions of the ideal experiment in 20th-century economic liberalism. Secondly, using the Dutch heroin experiment as an example, I discuss human-science experimentation as an attempt to create reality rather than merely record it. Finally, I discuss some surprising responses by heroin users. These responses display the assumptions of RCTs discussed in the historical section, and underline the importance of the culture of heroin use. In the epilogue, I suggest that cultural aspects of heroin consumption can best be studied by thorough ethnographic research.

Tennyson's Poetics of Melancholy and the Imperial Imagination

Ever since Arthur Hallam's early review of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems, critics have recognized that Tennyson's early work attempts to establish kind of authority, and that its characteristic power is grounded melancholy. The best recent criticism, by Herbert Tucker and Isobel Armstrong, argues that Tennyson was especially eager to establish poetic authority as as an urgent project [in the] context of society which seemed on verge of revolution and lawlessness. 1 It has not been sufficiently recognized, however, that Tennyson's melancholy, usually regarded as an apolitical character trait, is itself source of authority that draws not only on intensity of mood, but also on current sexist and colonialist discourses, and upon an idiom of eroticized political imperialism. Hallam, however, even while denying that Tennyson had political agenda, noted that which so evidently characterizes spirit of modern would ultimately exercise politically conservative function as a check acting for conservation against propulsion toward change. Though Hallam worried that such poetry in proportion to its and is likely to have little immediate authority over public opinion, his reference to depth and truth suggests that authority of melancholy proceeds from depths of self, and carries with it of feeling that Thomas Carlyle called felt indubitable certainty of Experience.2 Melancholy is physical sensation and seems therefore unarguably natural, not ideological, so it is not surprising that generations of critics have seen Tennyson's best and most characteristic poetry as apolitical. Julia Kristeva has suggested poetics of melancholy as the royal way through which humanity transcends grief of separation from supposed lost wholeness of being.3 Tennyson, indeed, would seem,

The relativist stance

The two mindsets of absolutism and relativism are juxtaposed, and the relational or relativist stance is vindicated. The only `absolute' entity which undeniably exists, consciousness has the reality of a dream. The escape hatch from this prison is relational, as Descartes and Levinas found out: Unfalsified relational consistency implies exteriority. Exteriority implies infinite power which in turn makes compassion inevitable. Aside from ethics as a royal way to enlightenment, a new technology called `deep technology' may be accessible. It changes the whole world in a demonstrable fashion by manipulation of the micro frame—that is, the observer-world interface.

Faustus of Riez and the Royal Way

Faustus of Riez and the Royal Way