It feels good to laugh but laughter is contagious and addictive. Humor should be treated like a controlled substance. After all, it is the leading cause of laughter - real laughter. I'm talking about spontaneous, involuntary spasms of genuine mirth. Artificially induced chortling needn't apply.

Laughter is caused by the sudden and favorable resolution of an anxiety. Humor is art's ugly sister whom we exhort instead of exalt, but some art - like Yue Minjun's toothy self-portraits or even ancient hieroglyphics of people with cat or bird heads - can make me laugh. Music is more apt to make me cry.

Laughter is an effect, not a cause. It is a reaction to, and a symptom of humor. We yawn, we sneeze, we laugh. Laughing is a physical paroxysm that is good for the heart due to stress relief. So the chucklish endorphin-rush is indeed a tonic to many mental and physical maladies but the quality of humor that uncorks it varies as widely as Bordeaux to Boone's Farm, or in artspeak - da Vinci to Dilbert.

Some people laugh only to signal their superiority in a social pecking order. I just let these connivers twist in their own wind. Others laugh to convince themselves that they are having fun. This too is fake laughter and, like canned laughter, leaves a bad taste in my ears. Genuine laughter has a trenchant musical quality like Aristophane's Frogs versus, say, Kermit.

Humor is where it finds you. Be happy when it does, but don't try to summons it at will. It cheapens the effect. Maybe we should all just learn to relax: Meditate, do math, or paint a mustache on Mona. Can you touch your nose with your tongue? Pleasure has more manifestations than just laughter. One can chill without the venting action of laughter. If your disposition is good, humor will find you like those cute little munchkins in Francois Boucher's "Putti with Venus." If you're really funny you may even get lucky like Toulouse-Lautrec. Laughter has a charitable effect on people.

Humor can be an art form so don't compromise it by cackling at every irony, pun, and bodily function. A sense of satisfaction will soon supersede the honk-fest of social laughter. Never laugh at your own jokes and there's no need for bloggers to write "lol" so knock it off (ha!). Your wit is an indication of creativity and intelligence whereas unbridled laughter at anything and everything can dim one's wit. As Don Quixote said, "Nothing is as foolish as the excessive laughter over a slight occasion." Then again, he jousted with windmills.

Beware: Humor is usually based on someone's misfortune or shortcoming so your laughter is sure to offend someone. Of course, that may be your intent. Humor is a quick fix of poetic justice like David slaying Goliath. (By the way, have you seen the hands on Michelangelo's sculpture of David? Those mitts are huge!) At other times, it is just the ego gratification of solving a pun or riddle, i.e. "getting it." But if your ego, urges, or vanity feeds a laughter addiction, then the underlying anxieties may grow to be more serious than can be laughed off. Or not.

Laughter is a good thing but it's best when it sneaks up on you. It's that highly coveted kind of hilarity that makes your face hurt and beer shoot out of your nose. So go ahead, let a smile be your umbrella - but plan on getting wet every now and then. Meanwhile, laugh responsibly.

Back in the 80s, artist Richard Prince took a picture of a picture of the Marlboro Man and sold it as art. The original photo by Jim Krantz was part of an ad campaign to sell cigarettes. Talk about "branding!" What Prince did was liberate a cultural icon, the cowboy, from the sales force. His re-image is sort of a parody - humor so sophisticated that it's not even funny. The dialog between those two seemingly identical images is not about craft, but meaning.

Did Prince's copy lessen the value of the original photo? No, I'd say Krantz's stock went up on the notoriety of his cowboy and its doppelganger. Similarly, Shepard Fairey's "Obama" portrait, appropriated from an API photo, now hangs in the National Gallery with compliments from photographer Mannie Garcia.

Richard Prince compares the contextual effect of his work to the funny way that "certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we're home alone and play the same records ourselves." I get that. It also reminds me of how the musical group The Doors, in the final four notes of their hit song "Touch Me," took the tag line "stronger than dirt" from Ajax, the white knight of scouring powders, and freed up the underlying musical cadence in the name of art.

I too have scrawled portraits aplenty like my "Rod Serling" done after a publicity photo, but I don't sweat copyright issues thanks to the "parody" rule and fair use. My renditions look like cartoons. I also interpreted a dozen famous images from the Detroit Institute of Arts collection without once thinking that the DIA, or the artist's estates, might object. The fact that they sell my art cards in the gift shop is an encouraging sign.

I don't claim anyone else's idea or creation as my own and always give credit where due. Yet, in a world where everyone seems to be packing a picture phone or camcorder, there are bound to be duels in the gray areas. Frankly, I'm more wary of lifting musical motifs than visual imagery. There's something about a melodic fingerprint that keeps me from replicating too closely any existing tune - but I still scoff at the judge's decision that George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" plagiarized The Chiffon's "He's So Fine."

Then there's the vintage Indian-head TV test pattern that I recreated as a screen print. With a retro-style mahogany frame and a custom-cut 50's era gold metallic picture-tube mat, I elevated that antiquated broadcast paraphernalia into art. Since then, I've been looking over my shoulder thinking that RCA might have a bone to pick with me, especially when they learn I've been earning tens of dollars off of that familiar chart. I've stopped losing sleep though and I'm pretty sure they've let it slide - although with the stock market in its swoon, even corporate behemoths are scrounging revenues.

Television has come a long way. The picture quality is awesome. Of course, the Stanley Cup Playoffs are my only excuse for watching TV but, regarding art, it's hard to compare marks on paper with, say, a National Geographic special. Even the commercials are mind blowing. I was watching a hi-def fiber-optic hummingbird flit across an enchanted psychedelic landscape that stimulated my retinas like no Rembrandt or Picasso or cave painting ever could. It was an ad for some big-ass flat-screen HDTV and when the camera panned out, I saw that the product was the exact brand and model I was watching - a device with every bell and whistle short of an ice maker right there in the comfort of my living room. It was disquieting.

I needed to get outside, back to nature, so I took refuge in the bird sanctuary adjacent to my property where, I swear, I saw twelve acid-yellow warblers in one bush all whistling in full fidelity on this sunny spring day. I thought of snapping some pictures or recording the sounds, maybe do a color sketch and hone my craft like a real artist or jot down the cacophony in musical notation. But, no, I was just standing there having my grand think-fest without actually lifting a creative finger when all of a sudden...bam!

A bunch of hooded henchmen leaped out of the brush and overpowered me. Oh, I got in a couple good licks, but it all happened so fast that my vertical hold went haywire and my mind went on the blink. I was taken to a Quonset hut (with a familiar corporate logo on the door) beyond the duck pond where I was interrogated by a bevy of beautiful babes in skin-tight metallic jumpsuits just like in a beer commercial. They tried to get me to fess up about stealing the Indian-head TV test pattern but I was hip to their tactics and after a lengthy but not-unpleasant interlude we were joined by some paramilitary thugs. Oh, I knocked a beret or two off of their heads before they threw me in the pond much to the consternation of the ducks who hadn't seen me this irate since I fell through the ice a couple months earlier.

I schlepped back to the house pondering my total immersion in the arts: the creative process of melding disparate elements into something novel, a practice I defend for every artist, scientist, and philosopher in this swamp. Slogging across the patio, I can see my lovely wife in the window, a "what in the world?" expression on her face. Through the door wall I see my big-screen TV flashing more graphics and logos, all spinning and morphing in virtual reality, heralding the start of the hockey game. True story - except maybe for the part between the warblers and the ducks* - I'm still sorting out the details on that episode.

*(Not to be confused with the Ducks whom the Wings beat in seven.)

I wrote a new song and painted a picture based on the lyrics. It all started when my fingers stumbled across an A-minor-2nd chord on the guitar. That feverish tone cluster has a half-step interval between B and C at its core, dissonant but in a good way.

I usually compose instrumental music which equates to abstract art but a song is narrative, hence the picture. The watercolor-pencil drawing was done afterward but the image evolved in my mind's eye as I worked on the music. The words describe idle pleasantries and the psychological relationship between this man and woman. The picture is a still-life in multiple exposures. Life is not a dream but it's stranger than fiction. The music engages the mind to explore the space of this painting. The colors are less than natural but then so are the vocal harmonies in the song; they're dark sounding at first, like the Volga Boatman, but they lighten up.

I used a flat pick for this tune instead of finger-style guitar playing. The wrist action articulates the bright, treble tones of the Am2 arpeggio heard after the first two lines of each verse. It's atmospheric: sounds like water in a river, all swirling and eddy-like. That minor chord jangles the nerves real nice and then resolves perfectly into the C major of the main chorus which soothes the ear and translates to the calm, ordered scenario of this dreamscape.

Inspired by a "row, row, row your boat..." motif, I was even going to put "merrily, merrily" in the background vocals but my empiricist philosophical leanings insisted that life is NOT a dream. Still the illustration looks like someone's dreaming -- or hallucinating. What's with the couple in the tree, anyway? Well, the line, "...up a tree without a paddle" is just me being funny. We've all been there. Musically, I underscore this semantic glitch with a B-flat major in the chord progression just prior to that line, sidestepping the established pattern. Ha!

Elsewhere, the line "...steady as a rock, now let it roll" points to two lovers who look kind of like Canova's version of Cupid and Psyche perched on a boulder on the far bank. The entire scene is viewed from an enclosed foreground as if inside the listener's head. The dreamer is both the object and subject. Geez-O-Pete what a mix-up. It's like hearing the music from the inside out. This reverie ends with the ethereal A-minor-2nd chord.

Lyrics:

It's not how things look that makes them real But how you see them, what you think and feel
Funny how that works but here's the deal...

Life is like a dream

Lying fast asleep upon the bed You were wide awake inside my head
Looking through my eyes you smiled and said...

Life is like a dream You row your boat downstream
But it's not what it seems...to be
Life is not a dream

Sometimes we laugh until we cry 'Til streams of consciousness run dry
Out on a limb we straddle
Up a tree without a paddle...high, high and dry

Love is like a river let it flow We can make the time to take it slow
Steady as a rock, now let it roll

Life is like a dream You row your boat downstream
But it's not what it seems...to be
Life is not a dream

I love you more than life, no lie I cross my heart and hope to die
But if I die I won't be dead
I'll be alive inside your head, surprise!...close your eyes

(guitar)

Click this link to hear "Life Is Not A Dream" by Gary Peterson

]]> http://artid.com/members/art_aesthetics/blog/post/2603 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Looking at Raphael's painting, The Deposition of Christ, one can only imagine the preparation he put into that masterpiece: the finely orchestrated chaos of forms and figures depicting the somber entombment. His style was less dramatic than that of Michelangelo or Leonardo but more earthly and humanistic. This piece of work is strong and moving in its pathos. It transforms a sacred written chronicle into a believable illusion that engages the viewer with the narrative and not just the artist's hand.

It was in 1508 when Raphael painted that picture, a recreated vision of an event that occurred in the year thirty something. I wonder how the scene might look if someone had been able to snap a photo way back then and there at Gol'gotha. In their sorrow and passion, would this group really have looked as composed and harmonious, arranged in such perfect disarray as Raphael, the quintessential draftsman would have us believe? Who are these posers, anyway - actors, models? No matter. The important thing is the actual people and event that they are portraying. I admit that I had to go to my bookshelf and blow the dust off of the number-one best seller of all time, The Bible, to refresh my memory. Yes, of course - it was Joseph, John, Mary, and the other Mary et al (including one mysteriously unnamed disciple mentioned in John 19:26). I'm a hard-boiled skeptic, but once again I am moved to tears by the account.

Back to the picture, my eye moves in an arc from the hilltop in the right corner, pulled by gravity down to where the weight of a brutal world rests in Jesus' lifeless body before taking an upward trajectory into the dark uncertainty at the left margin. To get more familiar with Raphael's rendition, I redrew it. Admittedly, some details were lost in my reinterpretation - the sparse foliage springing up in the foreground, the leaden sky and heavenly light of some unseen portal that shines on Christ and reflects on the disciples - but it still tells the story.

We call it Good Friday now, but it was a hell of a weekend. Crucified as a heretic, Jesus must have had His disciples wondering what gives with all the pain and humiliation. I mean, the Son of God is dying here - hello-o-o?! Still, He demonstrated the most amazing grace under pressure before giving up the ghost after which His disciples were given to lower His body from the cross - the ultimate symbol of sacrifice, like up on that hill - and carry Him to the tomb as rendered here in my not-so-Renaissance style after Raphael (who, ironically, also died on Good Friday some fifteen hundred and forty-odd years later). But on the third day it was Jesus Christ who came through for us all, big time, in a spiritual rebirth celebrated to this day: The Resurrection. The scenario depicted here, whether well or crudely rendered, simply represents the saddest part of the happiest ending of the greatest story ever told. I thank the Lord for the ability to believe in miracles. Happy Easter.

Art was no longer imitating life but vice versa, so Garathustra chucked it all and moved up north to live in a bat cave. He scrawled pictures of moose and beavers on the walls with wild berries and lead a hungry, horny, but mostly happy life for many years until he finally went nuts and came back to civilization where all that was left of art were video games and air guitar that anyone could play like a superstar.

"Art is dead" he proclaimed.

"WTF?" everyone twittered.

"Virtual reality cannot be without real reality." Thus spake Garathustra.

Old-schoolers still slung paint while the new ones pushed pixels. Some had artistic vision and others, not so much. Art became a competitive sport. Flame wars broke out on the Internet so Gar left cyberspace for nature. Hanging out with the plein aire crowd he was content to memorize the scenery instead of painting it. When they booted him out, he hooked up with some figurists but got on their bad side waving his arms all "look at me - draw me" and stuff. Thus began Garathustra's downward spiral.

He tried watercolors, duck and trout stamps, but his masks were gummy and the competition stiff. Auction houses were selling pickled sheep for big bucks so he tried conceptual art with cow pies. He showed at a gallery called The Pied Cow and stunk the place up. So he turned off his mind, relaxed, and floated downstream. He slept under bridges and on sidewalks and in abandoned cars. He took lots of catnaps but things always seemed the same when he awoke: Artificial. Being philosophical, like so many artists, he fell prey to existentialism and convinced himself that there is no good art or bad art, just art that bangs your gong - or not.

Garathustra developed an arcane visual language to express his pleasure and pain. A picture is worth a thousand words but just when he was getting some traction with the critics the economy tanked and he couldn't get a sawbuck for his abstracts. He was despondent. Pretty soon he's drawing menus and manuals and hawking advice on the street corner. "Never match wits with idiots" he'd say, "but don't put all your colored eggs in the intelligence basket. Paint with emotion. Temper those Apollonian sensibilities with a Dionysian splatter-fest now and then. Get down and dirty." Thus spake Garathustra.

He painted in the moment, in the zone, working with live models or from photographs or just making stuff up in his head. He got all bohemian, tattered and torn, but then he got lucky when - unlike that other thustra, that misogynistic figment of Nietzsche's imagination - Garathustra found a woman, a real nice gal. O.K., she found him. They did Day-Glo body painting and other stuff that never saw the black light of day but soon ditched that scene and started anew.

Garathustra wanted artists to rule the world (what's wrong with that picture?) but with power comes responsibility. He cleaned up his act and went on the lecture circuit. "Make love not war" became his shibboleth but in a pinch he made the first punch count.

"In a food fight, put your money on the hambone." Thus spake Garathustra.

Funny how things turn out; he coined that phrase into a retirement fund and back to the cozy cave he went with his _berwoman slash interior decorator. On a laptop they ordered the perfect art to hang over the couch in Plato's den: art that spoke to them, real art by real artists from vast online emporiums like ArtId.

Meanwhile, the happy couple still makes hand puppets in the firelight and draws stick-figure beasts with berries. They joined a social network to keep in touch and market their own brand of swag. Some artists are ahead of the curve and others reinvent themselves at will. Timing is everything.

Art, like life, is a process. It's not what you see, but how you see it. It's not always a pretty picture but "art is dead?" my ass. Long live art!

This visual abstraction seems electromagnetic: a bristling force field all centrifugal and kinetic and laughing at gravity too, but is it some galactic spiral like a cosmic pinwheel in 3K soup or is this nebular nooky the nucleus of some organic germ cell or a runny egg? Is it a nautilus or just water down the drain?

A faint octogram scrawled on the surface dissolves in the flux as swervy vectors radiate to a backbeat rhythm. One can almost hear the harmonic overtones that are clearly seen. It has a musical timbre; a shimmering tremolo in sweet syrup that usurps the suck and gurgle of chaos. The signal-to-noise ratio translates to a figure-ground visual aspect as this membrane mambos with a black hole in an eerie plasmatic light while unlikely reflections of deep space propagate towards the edge of the universe. Is it a color weather radar map of a sun storm?

No. Actually, it's a screenshot of the random patterns generated by my Microsoft Media Viewer (visualization setting: Alchemy) captured from my computer monitor and frozen in time at the push of a button while I was listening to a wave file of some splendid new music. Stay tuned.

To think that I used to screw up the picture on my old black and white TV by messing with the vertical hold and fiddling with the knobs on the back of the set -- the ones labeled "Qualified Technicians Only" - just for the visual effects. Ha! Nowadays the glorified kaleidoscopes we call computers can turn an audio event into an objet d'art at the flick of a wrist. Of course, an algorithm that creates "art" isn't exactly Abstract Expressionism but that's not the issue here.

The connection between this push-button abstraction and music is tenuous though; any sound or noise would have sufficed. The disturbances on this raster are triggered mainly by the wave amplitude of low frequencies like from a bass guitar or a kick drum. That is to say it's rhythmic, but not owing to melody or harmony. I see no color correspondence between the visual and audio spectrums: slow red light for the bass notes and fast blue light for treble, let alone the tints and shades of higher and lower octaves. It's not exactly Walt Disney's film "Fantasia" - he really did a number on The Sorcerer's Apprentice with that 'toon - but these desktop graphics do manage to convey the click and sizzle of a jazzy ride cymbal pretty well, what with the raindrops-on-oil effects and all.

Of course, there was a time when, transfixed by colored light, I might get lost in the luminous amorphous globules and become one with the fluid free-forms in a lava lamp. Then again, I was probably "baked" on brownies, if you know what I'm saying. But psychedelic interludes with Betty Crocker aside, one thing is for sure; the synthesesia found in today's animated computer graphics, beyond the flying toasters, might have blown my mind for good back then.

Still, the marriage of art and pure music is necessarily abstract: an intimate connection between the eye and ear, a sound-stage of color and form in space-time, not just the coincidental sights and sounds of music videos. It's oscilloscopic, like the stringy knots of warbling light in my head when I hear myself giving artistic credit to the programmers of those random pattern generators. So put that in your "what is art?" pipe and smoke it.

Meanwhile, if you have a media player with visualizations, check out the recording of my new musical composition on which I played real instruments - guitars, bass, and drums -- seemingly all at once. It's not too trippy, just pop-rock with a twangy flavor. Even if you don't have any visual effects on your 'puter, just close your eyes and listen anyways. It's a tune I call STRING THEORY. (Click on title; turn it up.)

I had just sat down to read The Matrix and Philosophy when I realized...there are squirrels on my roof. I can't see them, but I can see their shadows on the lawn as I look out of the window on this sunny morning. I'm reminded of Plato's Cave: the one with the campfire inside and the prisoners beyond that, facing the back wall so that they can never see anything but shadows cast from the fire light. My world view from here on my comfortable leather couch does have its parallels with that ancient scenario. The cave allegory highlights the gap between shadow and substance; appearance and reality. But unlike those prisoners who know of nothing about the world outside of shadows on the wall, I recognize that there probably are squirrels loping along the ridge of my roof. Still, there remains a shadow of doubt in my mind. Maybe it's just a prankster with hand puppets up there (on the roof, not just in my head).

Perception is a three-way affair: It takes an object, an observer, and the medium between them. Let's say I shine a spotlight on your face in the dark. Now I can see color, texture, and facial features (my, what squinty eyes you have) instead of just a dark silhouette where your head has blocked the light on the wall behind you. The angle at which I aim that light beam alters my perception of you. With the light overhead, like natural sunlight, you are easy to look at. But point the light upwards from below your chin in the dark and, whoa - scary! And even in the best light, we lose the details in the distance. In other words: Seeing is not necessarily believing.

Language also conveys "second-hand" views and likewise distorts reality with word play. That's why Plato didn't cotton to poets: too much drama, not enough description: Roses are red, and donuts are - Doh! (Sorry, wrong Homer). But seriously, people will blindly accept the mediated words of poets, priests, and pop-stars. We all tend to pass judgment on people and things we don't really know. Today, as always, we must weigh the verbal accounts of anybody with an agenda - that ilk of zealots and hucksters who sell anything from ideological dogma to mortgage-backed derivatives.

Experience is the essence of knowledge, or as we philo-sofa types call it - epistemology. Wisdom is how you use that knowledge. Rene Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." But how much can we really know about anything besides ourselves? The answer: not nearly as much as we believe. And even then, our perceptions are colored by our prejudices, emotions, and cheap sunglasses. If shadows represent the lowest rung of the comprehension ladder, then reflections and images are only slightly higher. And just when you think you've got reality pegged, context changes everything because the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Plato's Allegory of the Cave suggests that we must not only step outside into the proverbial sunlight to better discern the details that enrich our lives, but - as a matter of duty - parlay those details into ideal forms of justice, honor, and the odd toga party.

Meanwhile, are those shadows that I see from squirrels on my roof or just a puppet master with a couple of sweat socks? I can't be absolutely sure. But if I had to bet my life on it, I'd go with squirrels. And, sure enough, I now hear the patter of tiny paws on the eaves, and then - voila! There they are! A couple of furry nut-bags suddenly leap into plain view, scurry twice around the tree trunk just outside of my picture window, and then chase their shadows across the lawn and back out of sight. Well, now - back to my book.

In this age of conspiracy theories, it's no surprise that artist David Hockney's book "Secret Knowledge" caused a flap some years ago. In it he purports that many of history's great painters used optical devices like lenses, mirrors, and primitive cameras in the creation of their works. Omigosh!

I've not yet read that book, but I'm amused by the fervor with which the debunkists mock Hockney and his theory. Surely he can't really believe that "the Old Masters didn't know how to draw" as one detractor fumes, adding that it's Hockney who can't paint or draw. Oh, the acrimony! The project is a work of art in itself just to spark such dialogue. In a world inundated with imagery, I wonder who can truly imagine how the great minds of less-jaded ages viewed their technology: gadgets that might spawn a yawn by today's standards.

Art is still made with a human touch by traditional artists trained in ateliers, forging ahead with themes of humanity, universal and timeless. But art is in the brain before it reaches the hand so why not employ optics now and then to help focus the vision? Even an object seen through a vacuum is distorted by lighting and distance before it reaches an imperfect eye. Besides, everything we see is ultimately reduced to a postage stamp-sized array of photons beamed upside-down on the back of our eyeballs anyways. At that point, it's all in the head.

Of course, tools should be used to best effect if at all; otherwise it's like stealing a bad idea. One could fault, say, Eric Fischl for using photos to compose quirky scenes that end up looking like haphazard snapshots taken by a kinky tourist, but they also make for some interesting, if voyeuristic, scenarios. Photo-based paintings have a distinctive realism about them. I look for this aspect (and might add it to my checklist) but I wouldn't hold artistic expression hostage over it. There's a difference between craft and art. An artist doesn't have to reinvent the wheel time and again as a slave to tradition. Skilled painters will always be regarded for their style and technique, but advancing art as a current concept of reality isn't always their objective. Meanwhile, innovators run the risk of crackpotism.

In an experiment of my own, I designed a dual-mirror device that superimposes the view of an object onto a sketchpad so as to "trace" said object. But because the referent and the drawing surface don't actually occupy the same space, there's a distortion issue as seen in my rendering of a stack of cameras. By and large I prefer the unpredictability of drawing something with the naked eye but without looking at the sketch as I draw it. This conveys a surprisingly coherent rendition except for the overall form. Without visual feedback the basic shape is lost in this rudderless hand-eye maneuver.

Referencing Van Gogh's painted self-portrait, I redrew the rough outline on the left while my synchro-tracer was strapped to my head. The outline on the right was drawn straight, no chaser. That unaided doodle was more fun so I went with it, the finished results as shown. At best, any tracing device serves to delineate only the basic outline -- the fundamental mode if you will. Once an artist establishes a baseline, all else flows swimmingly.

Investigating the ways, means, and motives of artists past and present promotes an appreciation of art. When the debate over optical devices becomes rancorous, one can just move on and argue about whether Ingres used a French curve or Hopper a straight edge. Pretty soon someone will chastise Brunelleschi for having advanced the principles of perspective in the first place.

Serendipity means finding one thing while looking for another. I found that mechanical aids aren't all they're cracked up to be, but also that paintings and drawings actually require more active participation by the viewer than watching videos or listening to music because those latter things change with time, making the audience passive as the program glides past them. Therefore, I submit that viewing art is as demanding and rewarding as it is to create it - and only slightly less likely to make one rich and famous.

The funniest part of "The Divine Comedy" is when Barbariccia signals his demons to march by tooting his butt trumpet. Otherwise, the story isn't too amusing.
Dante Alighieri's epic poem, written in medieval Italy, chronicles his trip through hell, purgatory, and paradise (guided mostly by the ancient poet Virgil). Dante's trilogy brought the Italian language up to speed in the world of literature. The first of the three books is "Inferno" and it's a hellish read in any language - but at least in Italian it rhymes.

The Holy Bible portrays hell as the "gnawing and gnashing of teeth" and such. Dante's description is even more prolific. It's a freakish nightmare of a story. The torments have wretched souls howling like dogs, pale and colorless with sores and mold-encrusted orifices. Dante meticulously conveys the maladies and malfeasance that his eyes witness, his testimony intended to instill a fear of God. The punishments are on a graduated scale.
There are nine rings of hell in the Inferno. The inscription above the entrance reads:

"Abandon all hope whoever enters here."

Hopelessness in a place where the sun never shines? A bummer for sure. Dante's Inferno is a malaise of fire and ice populated by "shades," sort of like zombies. Here's the tour:

First ring: Non-Christians spend their endless days living with the likes of insatiable she-wolves. That's mild.

Second ring: Fire storms are forecast in the region designated for those who lived a lustful life. A great sorrow is remembering happy times in misery.

Third ring: A cold filthy rain pours on this squalid neighborhood where the gluttonous are food for Cerebus, a beast with three throats and blood in his eyes. That bad dog rips whatever flesh these shades have left.

Fourth ring: In this ditch, the demon Plutus rides herd over prodigal types that will forever push huge stones back and forth but get nowhere.

Fifth ring: The wrathful and sullen (apparently you can catch hell just for being moody) herein get to drink the slimy waters of the river Styx.

Sixth ring: The heretics in this rut have to deal with the three Furies and Medusa with her hair of horned vipers. Here one cannot see the present but only the future - and it ain't good.

Seventh ring: This is where common frauds inflict pain and death on their neighbors who are, of course, more panderers and sorcerers. There is hell fire aplenty, and serpents with hairy armpits.

Eighth ring: This ring (Malebolge) and its subdivisions are reserved for treacherous frauds - the likes of Alexander and Dionysius (who knew?). For those not sunk up to their brows in boiling blood, it's the hounds of hell. Other sinners are in crap-filled ditches. Others have their noses hacked off and more scabs than fish have scales. Astrologers have their heads turned backwards.

Ninth ring: This central pit of Dante's Inferno is where hell freezes over leaving its inhabitants, including Judas, with their tears frozen solid. One beast has tears rolling out of six eyes, down three chins into a bloody frozen froth.

Dante supposedly bridged the gap between ancient and modern literature, but his version of hell is still medieval compared to, say, the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre who proposed simply: "Hell is other people." Dante was not without his prejudices; he had a grudge against those who exiled from his home in Florence. Personal vendetta colored his view of the world - the ponderous blend of history, mythology, and religion expounded in this cautionary tome. For instance, Pope Boniface, who conspired against Dante in real life, is placed in the eighth ring of the Inferno.

Dante shows something akin to a sense of humor when, in reference to the diabolical tortures and ghastly scenarios that he sees in the Inferno, he wonders:
"Tante chi stipa nove travaglie e pene?"

which, very loosely translated, means: "Who thought this stuff up?" This is funny because obviously it was Dante himself; he wrote the damned book. Talk about poetic license.

Things get a little better in Purgatory (the second book of the trilogy), and then finally in Paradise where Virgil can't go but where Dante hooks up with his childhood sweetheart and lifelong inspiration, Beatrice. It's the happy ending which, in my view, makes this comedy divine.

Top illustration: Botticelli (detail).
Bottom illustration: Peterson.

Well, here's one more thing that I invented, discovered, or developed only to find it has already been done. In this case it's the practice of putting visual art into words: making art from art, prose from paint. Sure, writing about art is like dancing about architecture; I've been doing that for years, but I guess the ancient Greeks were it doing too -- Homer, Aristophanes, and all those guys verbing on their favorite temples and sculptures and stuff. Come to find, there's even a word for it: ekphrasis. John Keats was still doing it ages later with his Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Any Google genius can find a whole ekphrastic universe out there - creative writers waxing poetic about other people's artwork. Why give verbal expression to a painting when every picture tells its own story? Just to keep it honest, I suppose. Maybe a painting doesn't really know what it's trying to say and I can help articulate its meaning. Maybe not.

I was going to ruminate about Picasso's Old Man with a Guitar but I figured I'd have to mention all those things we already know about Pablo's "blue" period after the death of his friend, his acquaintance with a seamy society, and how he honed his style on this tiny canvas that, by the way, has the image of a woman painted under the surface of the broken down old blue guitarist (see detail). Is it mere coincidence that there's some gal behind this dejected looking fellow? Probably. Pablo just didn't have the coin for art supplies. It was early in his career when he migrated to Paris to live on the fringe. Regardless of that, an ekphrastic number has already been done on this painting - Wallace Steven's poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Here's an excerpt:

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said to him, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar, Of things exactly as they are."

That's more proof that art says what can't be said, but it is ironic that in the actual monochromatic painting the guitar is the only thing that isn't some shade of blue. So I sketched up my own pen and ink version of The Old Guitarist in Son of Pete style which is a second cousin to Cubism on the temporal side. It shows things at the moment of abstraction: when the whole starts losing track of its parts. Form escapes from the lines of contour like steam venting through fractures in the continuity. Of course, my process had a head start on this image considering that it was pre-visualized by Picasso, an artist not prone to realism in the first place. But here's how I see and say it when all is said and done. Ahem: 'Tis not here Tom Dooley, folks, hangin' down his head,
But Pablo "Blind Onion" El Greco instead

Like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy, or Mister Bo Diddle, He gots dem bad blues and plays the git-fiddle.

Coaxing out vibes in a funky blue sonic From a hole that appears to be stereophonic.

Strumming fandangos with knuckles a rappin' Don't mind that his forehead it has a big gap in.

While fleet fingers flailing an E-minor chord, He hums Malague_a through that hole in his gourd.

Despite any strange visual cues that decoy, The tune isn't "Flat-footed Floogie with a Floy-Floy."

A song as unheard of as Hank's "Cheatin' Heart" Way back then on any flamenco pop chart

Far fetched as it seems though, it's debatable whether It's some wistful Dylanesque ballad like "Boots of Spanish Leather." -GP

Thank you and, as long as we're talking tunes, feel free to listen to my rather rustic solo guitar attempt at Lovesick Blues. Click here. (No, I don't yodel or even sing on this instrumental rendition.)

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Pettry amzanig huh?

Words, not letters, are the building blocks of language and spell-checking is optional in the human brain. Wondering if this self-correcting phenomenon also occurred in visual art, I randomly took an image of Georges Seurat's familiar masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," divided it into 49 equal parts and turned each part upside down. Yep, I can still recognize it, but I've found that 49 is the optimal quantity to obscure a picture in this manner. Any less means bigger pieces and soon leaves the whole picture upside down. Any more, and the pieces reduce to pixels that can spin without changing the image. I'm a scientific guy, but 7 up by 7 across seems pretty mystical.

So the brain is also forgiving when viewing art; it takes what you give it and fills in the gaps as it sees fit. This is true with both representational and abstract art. I like to straddle the borderline of recognition when drawing pictures. My line art has about a ten-percent threshold of recognition which means that large portions of a drawing are unidentifiable if separated from the whole shebang.

The detail shown below is from my linear translation of Seurat's piece. On its own, it makes one wonder what are these morphological mutations that seem to look like something, but who knows what? Well, it has to do with phenomenology: the structures of consciousness when experiencing the meaning of an object -- or as I like to think of it: how things look when we're not looking at them. In this case, the said morph-o-doodles turn into children and monkeys and lovers and soldiers as soon as we divert our gaze by one degree. Only in context to the whole does it make any sense at all. It's not what you see, but how you see it. Fortunately, my work being a scientific investigation spares me the sanctimony of the "you call this art?" crowd.

Then again, Georges Seurat was scientific too, what with his pointillism trying to emulate the physics of light. My line investigations are more cerebral. If I were viewing Seurat's bourgeois beachscape and leisurely strollers, you could check my brain with Doppler color radar (or whatever tomography the medicos are using today) and find the brightest mental storms clumped around the lateral geniculate nucleus because that's where colors are mixed in the brain. My pen and ink rendition, on the other hand, would affect hot spots near the layer of feature-cells in the visual cortex because of the way the eye pinballs through my ink map of the original. I've actually drawn a maze into this picture-puzzle. As for the words that started this, they light up different parts of the brain like Broca's area and Wernicke's neighborhood.

Still, the visual cortex forgives the ambiguous (but decorative) squibs and blotches as generously as the more cognitive regions ignore typos. The big picture emerges from the seamy details largely due to memory traces plowed in the furrows of gray matter. In conclusion, I submit that the pre-attentive process of vision averages out background noise until some figure grabs your attention, be it a top hat or a big bustle, for scrutiny by pin-point focus -- and, oh yeah, that limited-edition screen prints of my pen & ink homage to Seurat are still available. Forty bucks.

I was at a potluck supper at the church when the reverend leaned over my folding chair and asked me,

"Did you hear about the skunk that went to church?" "No," I replied.
"He sat in his own 'pew!'"

I had to laugh, although I prefer humor from certified comedians. Clergyman should offer homilies, not homonyms. Don't get me wrong, Reverend Liscomb is a cool guy -- stops by now and then to borrow my belt-sander or talk theology, the Nicene Creed and whatnot. But that skunk joke stuck in my brain like a pop-song. It was like trying not to think about a blue nun or a holy mackerel. So, at home I checked it out on my Model 1300 Laf-Graf humor analyzer. Sure enough, it was a matter of semantics. That verbal quip hinged on the double meaning of the word "pew." Did the skunk sit in his own "pew," as in bench seat, or his own "PU," as in bad odor? The answer is, of course, both. It was a play on word -- a pun!

Now, I trust you've read my previous blog on art, humor, and aesthetics so I won't cover the same ground, but the parallel between humor and art is form and essence. The two types of humor are practical versus poetic, the former being a mere glitch in the medium that renders the message ambiguous. Poetic humor, on the other hand, is also called irony in real life: poetic justice. In art, it's the surface that provides the optical illusions (my rendering has none, but I could have, say, superimposed my face on the skunk to make a visual pun) while the content tells a story, be it comic, tragic, or just anecdotal. The narrative beneath the surface is, in this case, the congregation dutifully accepting their new member (insufferably, by the looks on their faces).

In a book review of Richard Wollheim's "Art as Representation and Expression," David Hills of Stanford University cites a similar duality thusly:

"...there is a sense in which a detailed point-for-point comparison between them...is out of the question: seeing-in and the simpler experiences to which it is in various ways analogous are 'phenomenologically incommensurate.' (Painting as an Art - Princeton University Press, 1988, 47) Such, Wollheim thinks, is the 'twofoldness' involved in seeing-in. A painting 'represents' a given subject matter when we are retrievably intended to see that subject matter in its surface and can indeed do so."

Boy, I'll have to read that one sometime.

Meanwhile, I ponder the social implications of the skunk scenario and reconcile the use of humor in church, what with all of the singing and dancing, guitars and hand bells, spotlights and theatrical hoopla to keep the faithful from nodding off. After all, it was Jesus who quipped about stuffing a camel through the eye of a needle. I'm not sure, but maybe He was being just a little sarcastic to get His point across; more proof that the Good Lord has a sense of humor. But by the way: You know those Ten Commandments? Sorry folks -- no joke.

In the realm of aesthetics, music spans the gap between matter and metaphysics. Music is an aesthetic model for all forms of art.

Music is all math and vibes. It doesn't inform us like words or pictures do. Its "language" is a balancing act of sound and silence based on syntax not semantics. Tones have no meaning but it's their relations to each other - the differences between them -- of which music is made. Music and art aesthetics are independent of the physical world. Beethoven was stone deaf when he wrote his Ninth.

Absolute music doesn't tell stories but it evokes feelings. If I'm moved by a good guitar solo, it's not just due to modes and moods, sympathy or empathy, but by the genius of the artist -- the sense that he or she has captured lightning in a bottle. Sure, I can relate to simple harmonic structure too; aesthetics are the natural resonant frequency from which one cops a buzz. My life is an Am7 (A minor seventh chord). Books, poems, and films can move me too, but a painting hanging silently on the wall can bowl me over just as well. That's the kind of power that has made aesthetics a propaganda tool for commercial and political ends. Forget "branding" for now. Aesthetics are indifferent to context but not ulterior motives. Of course clichés exist in music and art, from the "shave and a haircut, two bits" musical cadence to that icon of corporate culture - the ubiquitous "let's make a deal" handshake image. Put 'er there, partner.

Musical tones and colors aren't like words, but they could be. The crude melody uttered in "nuh-uh" means "no" and in "woo-hoo" means "yes!" Stories are told with voice inflections and facial tics: physiognomy. Visually, red means stop and green means go (or port and starboard) and "code blue" means "step on it." O.K., that's a metaphor, but verbal language is more nuanced, and eidetic (visual) thinking is more direct in its representations. In music there is no encoded message, just pattern recognition and its appreciation, assuming it's played by a musician, not a plumber.

A musical scale is not an alphabet per se. Letters are specific to words but tones are only relative to a melody. If every note of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star is transposed up or down by one musical step, the tune still sounds the same, but if you bumped each letter in the alphabet up a notch, the phrase "see what I mean?" would read "tff xibu J nfbo?" Then again, the Fauvists painted wildly colorful, if unnatural, portraits to great effect by jazzing up their palettes.

Music represents nothing but itself. It exists in the time and space between its notes, which means it's made out of nothing; it is defined by what it is not. This makes it a paradigm for aesthetic value in the arts. Its logical structure - the scales, intervals, and dynamics - have parallels in visual composition. A symphony is like a novel or master painting and a simple tune is a poem or pencil sketch. Birdsongs are something else, but I like them too.

There is beauty in math. A chord built on the fifth tone of the musical scale (called the dominant) has the lowest ratio of 2:3 to the tonic key at 1:1 which makes it pleasant to the ear. The subdominant chord has the next lowest ratio of 4:3. Thus "three-chord" rock and blues is basic to orchestral music as well in Western civilization. In art and architecture, the Golden Mean proportion plays a similar role in visual harmony.

I liken musical chord progressions to the figure and ground in painting - the basic configuration. If it's easy to discern, the viewer will "get it."!IMAGE404! Harmony has a sense of gravity while lines and contours are like the melody in a drawing. The dynamic range (pianoforte) makes for dramatic lighting in a painting as well as perspective -- hearing a soft sound is like seeing through the haze. Rhythm suggests pattern and gesture, the bump and grind in a picture whether representational or abstract, cha-cha-cha. Instrumentation and phrasing lend texture and style to the plastic arts. Dissonance in music or art can be comic, tragic, or just plain annoying.

When we hear the four-part counterpoint of a Bach fugue, it is actually a single chord at any given moment in time. In painting, we likewise splice visual cues into a cohesive whole. An artist adjusts each color segment of various flesh tones to convey the streaks of a shadow on face and forms, or combines the reflections of treetops above, and a catfish beneath the surface of the water on which autumn leaves float -- a triple whammy to achieve an illusion of singularity across the picture plane (_ la M. C. Escher).

God is in the details -- a grace note or a glint of light. Aesthetics boil particulars down to generalities -- sentiment without referent. The artist makes it look easy, not just convincing, so that the observer might not see the forest for the trees. For "good" art, the artist becomes unconscious, guided by an intuition that informs the hand and mind when he or she is in the zone. It's a coordinated effort for a painter to achieve color, line, and volume like a drummer gets all four limbs to do their separate things to the same beat -- kick, snare, ride, and crash. That reminds me of a funny quip by comedian Stephen Wright:

"I wrote a song, but I can't read music, so every time I hear a new song on the radio I think_'Gee, maybe I wrote that song.'"

The extrasensory aspect baked into a work of art will elicit empathy from the attuned viewer which affects a reaction in the brain (prefrontal cortex, meet hypothalamus) that feels like a supernatural event. It's like learning a foreign language when, for the first time, you hear or speak it without "doing the math" in your head -- actually thinking and comprehending directly in that language without interpretation. Vous comprenez?

A human being, like a work of art, is a process and one's identity depends on the continuity of that process. Art is a reflection of history and culture of its time and one must account for the conventions of a given period, but just like the abstract properties of music combine to make a whole beyond any objective purpose, a visual image transcends the surface through "intellectual intuition," as Immanuel Kant would say. It's phenomenological: creative thinking at its best - really "out of the box." The art aesthetic brings our conscious reflection into harmony with the modern world much like mythology did for the ancients. It's the spirituality behind a simulacrum. Art says what can't be said..

It doesn't seem like a hundred years ago that Wilhelm Worringer published Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einf_hlung). His thesis on the psychology of style is a primer on modernism that has influenced artists from Kandinsky onward. Written just after Cezanne painted his "Bathers" and a year before Picasso's "Les Demoiselles," it marked the shift in the arts from academic towards the primitive and linear styles rediscovered in artifacts like African tribal masks and Japanese woodcut prints. It anticipated Cubism and Art Deco too. It's a freeze-dried view of the organic nature of things.

This book challenged my perspective on abstract art. I take a scientific view of natural phenomena whereas Worringer opts for intuition and metaphysics claiming that any art which merely imitates the visible world does so to elicit empathy from the observer - an "objectified self-enjoyment," or what we might today call "wrapping one's head around" something. Supposedly, any society with such a projective world view is complacent in their environment - too comfortable with their own bad selves. He further contends that insecure peoples living in hostile surroundings develop an artistic volition based on a "spiritual dread of space." This fear leads to an aversion of the third dimension: depth. But certain cultures and civilizations transcend the sensory world by making art that is an "inorganic crystallization" of the spiritual world, one that provides an object with "material individuality and closed unity." Hence, art becomes a rigid simulacrum constrained to a single plane. Wow, I did not see that coming. It's like we can't believe our eyes so we iron out our skin into one flat surface and "see" only what we touch.

The dividing line between empathic art (mimesis) and abstraction separates the Western mindset of Classical Greece and Rome (also the Renaissance) from Eastern mysticism as seen in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Gothic tectonics, as well as Christian and Islamic decoration. I suspect Worringer's views favor the psychological leanings of Jung's archetypes over Freud's libido; or the alienated philosophy of Schopenhauer over the logical axioms of Wittgenstein. Worringer's ideas have even been applied to the literature of Proust and T. S. Eliot. I might look for a musical analogy between classical and jazz, but all music is abstract.

Favoring the experiential over the unknowable (a priori), I consider abstract art - the extraction of essence from form - to be an intellectual endeavor. Nuh-uh, says Worringer: It's strictly intuitive. That's always a red flag for me therefore I must report a flaw in his theory. To wit:

In his depiction of space-time as a necessary evil, Worringer posits that even the sculptural (3D) arts should "purify" an external object down to its absolute value. So far, so good. He deems Egypt's ancient pyramids - memorials to the supernatural forces that shape the human psyche - as the perfect form. He vigorously pursues this conclusion citing pyramid power as "the perfect example of all abstract tendencies," the ultimate construct for "divesting the cubic of its agonizing quality" and being the most "consistent imaginable fulfillment of this endeavor" - the so-called material individualization and closed unity. Wrong!

Here's the rub. Given the stated purpose and criteria of his argument, the perfect form would have to be the tetrahedron - a three-sided pyramid, not four! For Worringer to overlook this logical conclusion is astonishing. A tetrahedron, the geodesic building block of simple linear elegance and spatial economy, is one of the most spiritually inspired constructs in the material world -- the right tool for this job. Methinks it just didn't fit the intent that Worringer ascribes to the ancients (and who knows what they were thinking?) It's a glaring inconsistency that subverts his otherwise impressive theory. It happens.

Still, I concede that it does not diminish Worringer's worthy exposition or his legacy. Any theory, especially one as wide in scope as his, will likely falter in the light of new evidence and constant scrutiny, but Abstraction and Empathy, in its bold investigative nature, transcends the mere correctness or incorrectness of a few details. This landmark treatise, which delimits the aesthetics of art from the platitudes of natural beauty, is as entertaining as it is informative.

Here are my thoughts about abstract art and this piece that I created with watercolor pencils.

When the eye sends light signals to the brain, those impulses goes through the Lateral Geniculate Nucleii to the visual cortex (the projection screen in the back of the head) which then routes the signals back to the LGN via the information processing channels of the "subconscious" including memory, associations, personality and all other so-called intentional states of mind like beliefs and desires which are extensions of the intellect and emotions, and which account for things like empathy and spirituality in art and religion.

Without this perceptual feedback, the owner of the brain cannot recognize the image before his eyes. For example, that person might describe seeing something that has a five-pointed polar array connected with lines, but he doesn't see a "star" as we know it (or a face or a salad fork, etc.) Like a dog watching TV, he sees only an ambiguous blur of light and shapes.

An artist can also imagine (visualize) an object and paint a picture of it, but if we eliminate any referent, real or imagined, all that's left is the mental abstraction which is as unrecognizable as the front (reticular) half of the vision. Now substitute this strange back-half of the mental configuration with some random concept - say a circle to represent motion - and paint a picture of it. Then say you deduce that a straight line is needed to support that symbolic "wheel" and add it in. With color, texture, juxtaposition of elements, etc. the artist adds deeper "meanings" to his vision, or he might add a purely decorative element for the heck of it, and so on and so forth in a push-pull process of aesthetic judgments until we have a satisfying entity that is both self-referential yet based on our beliefs and desires. The process toggles between focus and distraction (conscious), instinct and reflex (sub-conscious) to arrive at a construct of pure abstraction.

Someone posed the question of "how a blind person would express himself on canvas?" It reminded me of an account of a man, blind at birth that became an accomplished guitarist. In his adult years, a surgical procedure gave him sight for the first time and then (after meeting the wife and kids, etc.) someone showed him his guitar for the first time. He had no idea what it was - not a clue. This thing with which he was so intimately familiar through touch and tone was totally unrecognizable to him upon sight. He had only ever "seen" it with his hands which shrink the "visible" world to an arm's length. Beyond that, I suspect he could detect interior spaces by the echoes and acoustic resonances of sound in a room (the abstract properties of musical composition are something else altogether).

Trying to imagine the world without sight, I created the above abstract visual representation of the sensations of touch and tones while playing the guitar as "seen" inside of my head without any reference to the instrument's outward appearance. Only the area where the two hands touch the guitar fills the picture frame. Beyond that is nothingness without eyesight. Color is a property of light (vision) but also of sound, both being functions of wave frequency.

The amorphous shape at left is where the palm of the hand or thumb touches the back of the (guitar) neck. The white spots are the fingertips playing an Am6 (A minor sixth) chord - my favorite. The four flat ovals at top left are where the left-hand fingers wrap around the fret board. The white dot at top right is where the little finger rests on the soundboard for a finger-picking style. The crescents are fingernails (but feel free to perceive them as some kind of lunar calendar or whatnot if you prefer). The strings and frets are obvious; they can be "seen" (anticipated) by touch. The prong at the bottom, just left of center, is the occasional zinger, the twanging sound of the fingers scraping across the bronze wound bass strings.

As fascinating as the parallels are between light and sound, the differences are also profound. I used color as a convenient analogy in this rendering but I would emphasize that a blind person has no concept of color as we know it. Then again, Ray and Stevie (Jose, Doc, Blind Lemon, et al) demonstrate the expanded resources and enhanced musical connections possible in brains that are free from the demands of visual processing. Those acquired sensibilities are beyond our experience except as enrapt listeners, but I hope that I've provided a reasonable visual model with "Touch Tone."

On a related note, if you care to hear my solo guitar performance of "Embryonic Journey" written by Jorma Kaukonen, here's a link: Gary Peterson plays the guitar.