MASTERS OF FEMALE PRESENCE HELMUT NEWTON

Anyone can photograph women. But not everyone can photograph women like  Helmut Newton.

The female form is ubiquitous and unsurprising. Its contours are well known. They are visible everyday in various contexts. This standardisation and pervasive presence does not mean that the female form  is not fascinating to men and women. Its fascination endures in spite of the sheer rain of female presences in every society. The female form is like a drink that people never tire of imbibing. It is represented endlessly in various media. It is foregrounded even in the strict Islamic decorum in which women cover the entire body in black cloth with only the eyes showing. Such total covering, demonstrating an absolute determination to control visual and ultimately mental and physical access to women, suggests that something unique, perhaps even perilous, is being covered by those lines of impenetrable black.

This form so resolutely hidden in some religious  contexts is on full display in  many places places all over the world, as in the presence of naked mannequins modelling female underwear in shop windows in streets where children pass on their way to school. We have all become inured to the use of the female body as a means of advertising. It is rare to watch a US feature film without some degree of male and female nakedness. 

In spite of this shaping of the visual landscape by the female form in various states of dress and undress, people remain fascinated by that form, even though its general features  are identical in all examples.

One artist of what I would describe as female presence is photographer Helmut Newton. Newton's art goes beyond the representation of the female form to constructing female presence. Presence, because his compositions are less efforts to simply depict women than  attempts to bring alive in a manner that is unique in each instance, what can be understood as the shock of recognition of  the distinctiveness constituted by  a particular configuration of the human species, a configuration  whose uniqueness is expressed primarily in terms of the body.

There is little that is new in nakedness but a broad,  perhaps infinite range of variations can be created out of various stages of relationship between nakedness and near nakedness, between nakedness and being fully clothed,  between nakedness and the forms of things that are not human, correlations  that make the human more distinctive and make nakedness no longer familiar.

Clothes are often fashioned to talk and not simply to act as covering for the human being. The eloquence of clothes as a capsule for the human being, advertising the sheer dexterity of the person, showcasing  human physical  flexibility and aliveness, is strikingly brought alive  by Helmut Newton.

Through Newton's eyes we see the glory of the physical grounding of human existence. Everything that humans are capable of is achieved through the body. The body will age but, as described by the philosopher Demas Nwoko,  that ageing is part of its beauty. 

Are we not all to some degree voyeurs of the body of the sex we are attracted to?

As for Newton, I did not post a broader selection because the others dealt with nakedness. Even then,they demonstrate the power of nakedness as evocative of the fundamentals of human being, as suggested by the expression one's 'birthday suit', indicating one's naked body. A beautiful expression of the fact that one came into the world naked and actually leaves it naked, anything else being actually a disguise.

This understanding of nakedness, which may be seen as resonating in some of Newton's nudes in public spaces, evokes for me the nakedness of the 'traveller in space', the Tibetan dakini or the Baudlerian and Benjaminian flaneur, in the Newton context understood as in motion within the urban landscape, like the delightful creature whose back we see in the picture above as she strides into the metropolis.

What do we encounter through the eyes of this figure in motion through streets, homes, boardrooms, bordellos, her calves terminating in the black terminal conches of the exquisitely stilettoed heel in the other picture, of the kind that sent Hamidou Kane's traveller to Paris from Senegal in the early days of empire into shock on witnessing for the first time the absence of a naked foot in a space occupied by that creature who ' rests on one foot and then on the other in order to move forward' as described in Ambiguous Adventure, ambiguous in being both revelatory and unsettling, as perhaps evoked by the the creation of beauty through incongruity that seems to be Newton's forte?

Some of Newton's art has been described as politically incorrect. This is an accurate description of some of his  compositions, like those in  which   undertones of subjugation and violence are fundamental aspects of its beauty.

Some of Newton's art has been described as politically incorrect. This is an accurate description of some of his  compositions, like those in  which   undertones of subjugation and violence are fundamental aspects of its beauty. 

Must politically incorrect art necessarily feeding negative attitudes?

True, one sees some Newton images of women as the focus of the gaze of men in terms that do not suggest tenderness. I see that as part of the imaginative world we may inhabit without necessarily enacting. His art has also been described as showing women in terms of dominating men, as described by a reviewer on the Amazon.com site of The Best of Helmut Newton. He was active from his 20s I think, into old age, so I expect he tried different themes, perspectives etc.

I am becoming curious about the scope of portrayals of women in Newton's work. What is the level of power accorded to women and men in his work? What may these compositions suggest about both the creative and destructive aspects of human possibilities? Can this be related to the creativity/destructive polarity evoked by conceptions of relationships between the body, consciousness and power in Western, Asian and African understandings of the feminine as indicated by the history of witchcraft in the West, of related conceptions in other cultures such as the aje of the Yoruba, the azen of the Bini, the dakini of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dakini Daemonicon of English artist/magician Mark Dunn's adaptation of this Tantric conception (www.dakini-daemonicon.com)?

Examples of the master's work:

1. http://community.livejournal.com/ruguru/677468.html

2.http://user.tninet.se/~ryk484d/newton/newton.htm

Examples of the master's work: 

1. http://community.livejournal.com/ruguru/677468.html

2.http://user.tninet.se/~ryk484d/newton/newton.htm

PUZZLING SIMILARITIES BETWEEN AKAN/GYAMAN ADINKRA SYMBOLISM AND ADINKRA IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS

Physicists Michael Faux and Sylvester James Gates and their collaborators have developed "Adinkras" which they describe as a "graphical technology for supersymmetric representation theory". They name this visual technology Adinkrammatics. Their work is in supersymmetry, a field in physics.

I encountered their work in the course of a search on the older classical Adinkra corpus of visual symbols developed by the Gyaman of Cote d'Ivoire and the Akan of Ghana. I came across Faux and Gates  paper introducing their symbol system  “Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory”  published in Physical Review D, vol. 71, Issue 6, id. 065002( 2004). There, they describe the role of visual imagery in physics and explain their decision to name their system after the Akan/Gayam Adinkra symbol corpus:

"There are important examples in which theoretical physics incorporates elegant motifs to represent mathematical conceptions that are vastly simplified thereby.One such example is the wide-spread use of Feynman diagrams. Another one of these is Salam-Strathdee superspace, a stalwart construction which has proven most helpful in organizing fundamental notions in field theory and in string theory... In this paper, we introduce a graphical paradigm which shows some promise in providing a new symbolic technology for usefully re-conceptualizing problems in supersymmetric representation theory.

 The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions. The Asante people of West Africa have long been accustomed to using simple yet elegant motifs known as Adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose. With a nod to this tradition, we christen our graphical symbols as “Adinkras.” 

I deeply admire the visual elegance of their work even though I dont understand most of what it means. I am puzzled, however, by the visual similarities between their work and the older Akan/Gyaman Adinkra system. These similarities emerge from the exact visual identity between one of their symbols and the older Adinkra symbol of Eban  and less precise but close similarities between one of their symbols and the Akan/Gyman Adinkra symbol of Epa and inexact but suggestive relationships between another symbol of theirs and the older Adinkra symbol of Nyansapon. I find these similarities puzzling because both Faux and Gates have insisted, in my correspondence with them, that their work is uninfluenced by the older Gyaman/Akan Adinkra system.

A depiction of the visual similarities between the two systems along with the Faux and Gates paper, are attached to this post.

Ever since I came across these similarities between 2007 and 2008, I have had an ambivalent relationship with  these correlations even though they fascinate me, inspiring me to explore the possibilities they suggest of dialogue between the ancient and the new systems as well as the mathematical and other cognitive possibilities of classical Adinkra. These explorations of mine are described in  my essay on Adinkra in the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought edited by Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo.

 Seeing a description of the Adinkra symbolism in physics on the Wikipedia site on Adinkraspurred me to post this description of my puzzlement, freeing me from the ambivalence I feel towards these similarities between both systems, and facilitating my emotional freedom to post later my explorations of the mutual illumination between classical and supersymmetric Adinkra.

The Faux and Gates paper is at  http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0408004

A description of the similarities between the two systems is at Scribd:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/48504094/Classical-and-Super-Symmetric-Adinkra-Visual-Correlations

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE AND HEART OF ERWIN SCHRODINGER

What are the paths of development through which  a creative person,  and particularly a scientist, arrives at creations and discoveries that reshape the landscape of human possibility? How do these intertwined paths of possibility  interact with the totality of the person's life?

These are the organizing questions of  Walter Moore's A Life of Erwin Schrodinger, an iconic figure in understanding the world of the atom and the conditions of scientific knowledge, who also catalyzed the discovery of the helical structure of DNA. Within this book, the  domestic and the erotic, the politics of work and the vicissitudes created by national and international politics, within the context of an international European scientific culture, comes alive. The dialogue between Germany, Austria and Denmark, in  the pioneering figures in the early and mid twentieth century rethinking of the foundations of physics as a description of the underlying physical structure of the universe, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Weiner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others,against the background of dialogues with Albert Einstein and his work, in the periods  during, betweenand shortly after the two World Wars, lives again through the imaginative recreation of Walter Moore, a  biographer clearly in love with his subject.

This biography defines itself through elegant prose, through an  imaginative and critical sensitivity to the development of  Schrodinger's mental universe.Schrodinger's  immersion in the Indian monistic philosophy of Vedanta in dialogue with Western philosophers like Arthur Schopenhaur and philosophers of science like Ernst Mach, as these intertwine with the cross-fertilization between scientific ideas, between methods of scientific investigation  and the figures who develop them, as these are integrated and transformed in the crucible of Schrodinger's intelligence, are seamlessly described. The reader seems to live in the biographical figure and to experience Berlin, Vienna, Oxford and the United States with Schrodinger, as he moves between these places in the course of his professional development and to experience with him  the relationship between his career and personal life and the  political forces reshaping Europe at the dawn of the latest stage in Western political history.

Schrodinger emerges as a consummate philosopher scientist, whose seminal  impact extends from his primary discipline of physics to his avocation in biology, shaping the thinking of James Watson, one of the discovers of the helical structure of DNA, through  his book What is Life?, where the fundamental description of  the genetic code is  worked out with pregnant clarity.

The Cambridge UP Canto edition provides a smooth, easy read that brings out these sterling qualities but the sheer wealth of the book suggests that reading the unabridged version, Schrodinger: Life and Thought , where these qualities would emerge more fully will be very rewarding .

I read selections of this book in order to explore the question of similarities between methods of scientific modelling and philosophical conceptions described by the Nigerian philosopher Abiola Irele. These similarities emerge from Irele’s exposition of the Negritude philosophy of Leopold Sedar Senghor in his The African Experience in Literature and Ideology and The Negritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought and of Orisa cosmology in “The African Scholar.” 


Senghorian philosophical cosmology and Schrödinger’s scientific thought are related through the image of waves as demonstrating fundamental relationships between forms of being. What can the similarities between the Senghorian philosophical conception and Schrödinger’s scientific concept of wave mechanics as describing the fundamental character and behaviour of sub atomic forms demonstrate about the implications of convergences between philosophical, religious and scientific cosmology?

Niels Bohr and Weiner Heisenberg eventually developed a conception of complementarity in which material forms demonstrate both the qualities of a wave and a particle, the wave-particle duality. This notion of ontological simultaneity may be related to the idea of epistemological mutuality in quantum mechanics in the idea that the observer of these forms influences their behaviour, making impossible an understanding of these forms as indepdent of the influence of the observer. What illumination could this provide in suggesting a cohesive picture of the universe in dialogue with philosophical and religious cosmologies that emphasise plurality of being and cognitive dynamism where observer and observed shape each other’s responses? This question is suggested by Irele’s description in “The African Scholar” of a possible correlation between mythic, philosophical and scientific cosmologies that foreground ambiguity, plurality and dynamism as embodied in the ambiguity  and dynamism of the mythic figure of the Orisa tradition Esu who demonstrates temporal, material and cognitive ambiguities, transformations and liminalities.

 “He throws a stone today and hits a bird yesterday. If he was not so tall, his head might not have been visible above the path. House, verandah and field are constricting for him, but in a groundnut shell, at last he can stretch himself! “.

Image credit
 Good Book Reads