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These ideas are, of
course, already widely accepted concepts of Gestalt theory regarding
their applications to the philosophy of, for instance, history, science and
religion; however, their assimilation and understanding by the artists
themselves may be much less common. One explanation which is applicable
also in Skov’s case, would seem to be that artists are, and necessarily
have to be, expressive-creative individuals first and integrators of their
cultural context only second. The creative process and the psychological
makeup of creativity seem to demand this, perhaps because the artist must
develop and rely on creative intuition as early and as much as he or she
can, in order to produce results while managing to maintain a wellspring of
creative enthusiasm.
Skov’s approach to
developing a holistic view of the contemporary Western civilization and its
culture, included the integration of its Hellenistic roots in classicism
with the Aristotelian ideology, the Judeo-Christian philosophy and ethics,
the Galilei-Newtonian physics and its resulting mechanistic determinism,
and finally the still evolving Bohr-Heisenberg-Einstein Quantum Mechanics
with its relativity and uncertainty principle heralding the “new weltbild”
of today. And not content with accepting the conventional barriers to
cultural and artistic development, Skov would argue, as he often did in
discussions during the 1950’s, that other cultural paradigms, e.g., Hindu,
Buddhist, Dialectic Materialism, etc., could and actually should be
included or at least be given consideration to the extent of their
potential compatibility and complementarity within the overall
picture.
The principles of
complementarity and indeterminism according to Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg, were, in Skov’s view, potentially operable as a basis for the
reconciliation between otherwise incompatible philosophies and paradigms.
The point here is not the question of validity of this approach in a
generalized sense, but rather Skov’s realization in the late nineteen-forties
that, without the incorporation into his cultural paradigm of the latest,
most significant, fundamental changes of our weltbild - in this case the radical departure from the
pre-Einsteinian mechanistic philosophy which evolved during his lifetime in
both a scientific and philosophical sense - he would, in an artistic sense,
in essence become a spokesman for the ideology belonging to the past
century rather than being a representative of his own time.
How well Skov can
be said to have succeeded in providing
a visual interpretation of the consciousness of a more true “mid-
twentieth century expanded weltbild”, is a question to be
addressed by his contemporary and future viewers; however, it
may be well to keep in mind that to pass judgement on the
paradigm of a new ideology may at best be difficult, and at worst
impossible, for the individuals already grounded in the old
paradigm - since the new order is of value only to the extent it can
destroy and expand the old, reducing it to a “special case”. And
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