Steveauxe

The early cultural authors did not grasp the full cause and effect of culture.  Without looking into the observed experience of the “others” and failing to look at culture as a complete human form, that is unique to the individuals thoughts and emotions the process is flawed.  This rejection of the human factor, seeking a grander      existence resides deeper in Platonic philosophy.  That there is a higher existence of self that cannot be found on temporal terms.  The approach from a high culture point of view negates the human value of culture.  Mach’s Principle is based on the experience of sensation is the only true foundation for observable truth.

Ernest Mach an Austrian physicist who expounded that nothing exists without being directly observed.  In the modern since this is impractical but taken as a tool for what is perceived by closer examination and removing, the illusion of what is not real we find a better glimpse of our reality in things that are contingent from observations may also exist.

John G. Hatch draws the influence of Mach’s Principle to Frantisek Kupka's evolution of abstract paintings, “The relationship between our subjective perceptions and objective reality and the role of sensations in this relationship.  Both of these are corner stones of Mach's scientific philosophy” (Hatch).  Hatch documents Mach’s influence on Kupka’s as a pursuit of the coexistence of art with nature.  Through our synthesis of observation, the mental evolution of instinct to abstract cognition creates a sensation from object to subject.  In Kupka’s book, La Creation dans les Arts Plastiques he relates the artistic interpretation cannot be removed in that nature it is not static.  The artist is a part of the nature that he is interpreting and Kupka used Mach’s principle as a basis to show that relationship of artist, nature and those sensations used to interpret both.

Examples of Kupka’s abstract approach after completing  La Creation dans les Arts Plastiques are his Colour Planes, 1910-11 and Cosmic Ray (1913-1914).  Colour Planes “embodies Kupka's attempt to identify and define in painterly terms a fundamental component of natural reality; in this case, the manifestation of natural energy in terms of waves.” (Hatch) As Kupka’s own perception evolved, three years later in Cosmic Ray, an intrinsic sphere with intertwining network of colors compare to what we see now in the captions of our universe.  An almost surrealistic examination of nature and we are its observers. 

 

Hatch, John G., "Machian Epistemology and its Part in František Kupka's Painterly Cognition of Reality" (2000).  Visual Arts Publications.  Paper 9.  http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/visartspub/9