Saturday 28 February 2015

Art For Peace

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
 Albert Einstein

  Peace and Love Doctor, Grant Avenue, San Francisco, by  Banksy

Non-Violence (1988) 
Sculpture by Fredrik Reuterswärd at the United Nations, New York.




My Soul Mates from Books

Often I feel so alone and sad with my view points, without soul - mate and like minded people from past and from books I will die, hopelessly.
K. Shiuka
My country is the world and my religion is to do good.
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Thomas Paine




Friday 27 February 2015

The Power of Students

 Building a Culture of Peace & Non - violence. ( K. S)
The Power of Students




Thursday 26 February 2015

My artwork and books :))))

 My books and the orange night lamp ( my artwork) and of course, photo by me. :)
khatia Shiuka

The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 26.02.15

 The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2015

(Photos by K. Shiuka)
Cornelia Parker is a London-based British sculptor and installation artist. Parker  was born in 1956 in Cheshire, England.  Cornelia Parker's work is regarded internationally for its complex, darkly humorous, ironic style. Cornelia Parker's work is highly allusive and patterned with cultural references to cartoons, a style which she adapts to her need to capture things in the moment before they slip away and are lost beyond human perception.
The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) (2003) 
Inspired by Auguste Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ (1901-04)
August Rodin’s The Kiss with a mile of string wrapped round it, by  Cornelia Parker.
Photo by K. Shiuka
About her artwork Cornelia Parker said; “I love Rodin – he’s so sensual and erotic. But sometimes I feel he’s too lyrical and beautiful. The Kiss, which used to sit in the rotunda of the Tate Gallery is probably the most popular sculpture in Britain. As a romantic idea, though, it feels simplistic: it’s about love, but not about the complications of love. So when I was invited to participate in the 2003 Tate Triennial, I decided to wrap it in string, to add some complexity to the sculpture. I was also referring to the artist Marcel Duchamp, who draped a mile of string over a Surrealist exhibition in New York in 1942, as an act of sabotage. The string in my work was a punk gesture – a deliberately provocative act. I started by wrapping it tightly around the heads of Rodin’s lovers, so that the kiss itself was obscured. It became a piece about the complexity of relationships – about how the things that bind people together can also suffocate them. When it was shown, someone chopped off the string with a pair of shears. He got arrested and the Tate wanted to prosecute. But the police said it would be hard to prosecute cutting a piece of string. I didn’t want it to go to court. It would have been silly, and I hadn’t set out to make a frivolous piece.”
 Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View(1991)

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View(1991)  is the restored three-dimensional volume of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the request of the artist. The surviving fragments, suspended from the ceiling and lit by a single bulb, create a dramatic effect and cast shadows on the gallery's walls.
The Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by Cornelia Parker.
The highlights of my visit were many, but chief among them was the Cornelia Parker's exhibition, Getting up close to her   Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) signature piece  alongside two new commissions and a variety of her other works was a thrill.  
Manchester, 26 feb, 2015

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines, by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines
 (Pablo Neruda)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tries to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell & Bertolt Brecht

 Jean-Paul Sartre; When the rich wage war it's the poor who die'.
 * Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
I am condemned to be free

(photo; Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre during an interview, Paris, 1970)

 Simone de Beauvoir; Feminists who oppose revolution do much harm to the struggle of women. They are fools with no real political agenda.
 I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.
One's life has value  I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
P. s  Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.



  ✌️ ❤️ ✌️
 Bertrand Russell; War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

  Bertolt Brecht; Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.

Sunday 15 February 2015

Thursday 12 February 2015

My photos

                         Khatia Shiukashvili, Tbilisi, 2010

                                 Khatia Shiukashvili, Tbilisi, 2010











Wednesday 11 February 2015

Aesthetic Education of Man

Aesthetic Education of Man
 When we develop our aesthetic capacities, we develop our moral capacities, so much so that aesthetic education renders moral education superfluous.
Friedrich Von Schiller
* Art is the right hand of nature. The latter only gave us being, but the former made us men.
 * The key to education is the experience of beauty.
 * Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.
*
3. When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love.

8. Dare to be wise! Energy and spirit is needed to overcome the obstacles which indolence of nature as well as cowardice of heart oppose to our instruction. It is not without significance that the old myth makes the goddess of Wisdom emerge fully armed from the head of Jupiter; for her very first function is warlike. Even in her birth she has to maintain a hard struggle with the senses, which do not want to be dragged from their sweet repose. The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Content if they themselves escape the hard labor of thought, men gladly resign to others the guardianship of their ideas, and if it happens that higher needs are stirred in them, they embrace with a eager faith the formulas which State and priesthood hold in readiness for such an occasion.
*  Be noble minded! Our own heart, and not other men's opinions of us, forms our true honor.
* They would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom. * Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
* The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.
* He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

* Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.

   Friedrich Schiller

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Against stupidity the gods themselves labor in vain.

Against stupidity the gods themselves fight unvictorious

Against stupidity even the gods contend in vain.

Against stupidity gods themselves contend in vain.

With stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
                     Aesthetic regime of art


 Aesthetics Philosophy of the Arts

Tuesday 10 February 2015

All politics is Realpolitik," warring! P. P. P

 Warring!
(A self-portrait by Pier Paolo Pasolini)
soul, with your delicate anger!
You do not recognize a soul other than this one
which has all the prose of the clever man,

of the revolutionary devoted to the honest
common man (even the complicity
with the assassins of the Bitter Years graftedonto protector classicism, which makes
the communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart
that becomes slave to its enemy, and goes

where the enemy goes, led by a history
that is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,
perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears

of a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,
shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,
as through a pessimism into which hopes

drown to become more virile. Joyous
with a joy that knows no hidden agenda,
this army-blind in the blind

sunlight-of dead young men comes
and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed
in a mysterious debate with Power and bound

by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly-
if he abandons them,
in the white mountains, on the serene plains,

little by little in the barbaric breasts
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.

Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!
Ah, Anarchy, free love
of Holiness, with your valiant songs!
      Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Monday 9 February 2015

Carl Jung; Who looks outside, dreams; Who looks inside, awakes

Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
 P. s Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung



Theory Of Human Nature

  Freud's Theory Of Human Nature  
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian psychologist and the founder of psychoanalysis.
Freud was born in Freiberg, which is now known as the Czech Republic, on May 6, 1856
His family moved to Vienna when he was four- where he later attended university. His family was Jewish, however he distanced himself from the traditions.
 In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud's books.
In 1939  Freud and his family; wife and daughter Anna fled Austria as a result of the Nazi annexation, and they settled in England.
Sigmund Freud  had been diagnosed with mouth cancer  in 1923, and he died of cancer on 23 September 1939.
 Freud developed psychoanalysis, a method through which an analyst unpacks unconscious conflicts based on the free associations, dreams and fantasies of the patient. His theories on child sexuality, libido and the ego, among other topics, were some of the most influential academic concepts of the 20th century, according to him, all the "energy" in our minds comes from our instincts. Freud thought that all instincts come from a few basic ones: Eros (the basic "Life" instinct ) and Thanatos (the basic "Death" instinct), Freud created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality.
Eros is the drive of life, love, creativity, and sexuality, self-satisfaction, hunger and self preservation.
Thanatos from the Greek word for "death" is the drive of aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death.
 - What are we?
-  Human nature is essentially in conflict—consisting of an unconscious mind (Id = our old biological instincts transformed in the name of civilization), an Ego (conscious rational part, the product of taming the Id); and the Superego (an agency that promotes guilt in order to "tame" the Id).
 - Who are we?
- Each of us is repressed, we repress and censor our instincts, our memories, our fantasies, and our guilt.
 How should we live?
Success or failure in life depends on getting medical help, therapy, on being psychoanalyzed—in order to escape the determinism of our pasts, or at least prevent it from turning into a neurosis. This way we can aid the Ego in its fight against the Id and the Superego.
 - How do the normative implications follow from the theory of human nature?
- The Id accounts for 90% of who we are. It is unconscious and therefore unknown to us, but it shapes our conscious life and sometimes even dominates the Ego. We then become neurotic. There is no choice about who we are. Repression is normal and required in order that the conscious mind can function in daily life in spite of the eternal conflict waging itself in our psyche.
*
While theorizing that personality depends greatly on experience and heredity, Freud also introduced the psychosexual stages of development through which every child is supposed to grow.

He suggested that infants first obtain pleasure from the mouth (the oral stage) and then from the other end of the alimentary tract (the anal stage).

Both boys and girls then become interested in the male sexual organ (the phallic stage). The little boy is alleged to feel sexual desires for his mother and to fear castration by his father- the *Oedipus complex. Both the desire for mother and the hostility to father are then normally repressed.
Freud suggested that around the time of the Oedipus complex in boys, little girls develop "penis envy."
He rejected metaphysical dualism, however did acknowledge a distinction between mental states and physiological states of the nervous system-which many philosophers would agree with today.

Based on this assumption Freud boldly attempted to identify a physiological basis for all mental states in his book "Project for a Scientific Psychology" but instead was content with leaving it to the future development of science because such theorizing was "too far ahead of the knowledge of his time."

*
Freud's theory includes a strict application of *determinism- the principle that every event has preceding causes- to the realm of the mental.
Freud's hope was to "restore a harmonious balance" between the parts of the mind and, ideally, to suggest ways to improve individual adjustment to the world. He'd suggest becoming more "self aware" through dream analysis and psychoanalytic treatment.   However, Freud never thought that psychoanalysis was the answer to every human problem.
He completely denied Free Will, believing instead that nothing a person thinks, does, or says is really haphazard or accidental; everything   actions, dreams, and neurotic symptoms can in principle be explained by something in the person's mind, he  believed there are lots of mental states and his crucial assertion was that our minds are not co-extensive with what is available to conscious attention but includes items of which we can have no ordinary knowledge.
To explain puzzling human phenomena such as hysterical paralyses, neurotic behavior, obsessional thoughts, and dreams, Freud postulated the existence of emotionally charged ideas in the *unconscious part of the mind, which actively yet mysteriously exerts influences on what a person thinks, feels, and does.
Freud would claim that there are "unknown causes" that determine our choices- we're far from being perfectly "free" and uniquely "rational," instead things are determined by causes of which we are not normally aware.  ( Determinism--  - The doctrine that all events, including human action).
Freud also theorized that unconscious desires or memories can cause people to do things that they cannot explain rationally, to others or even to themselves. Some unconscious states may previously have been conscious, but have been repressed because they became too painful to acknowledge.

SOURCES
S. Freud. Project for a Scientific Psychology. Vienna, 1895.

Stevenson, Ten theories of human nature. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Quotes on Human Nature and humans :))
*  Human nature tends to value and wish what he can not reach.
* Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
* 'It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
*I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
* The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
* I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
* The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
*The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
* The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
* Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
* Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Sigmund Freud
*****************************************************************************
 *  Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung
* If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
Albert Einstein
* *  Keep your religions away from our children, out of our governments and our courts, and we might stop ridiculing them.
*  If there is a God he doesn't deserve to be worshipped.
* If you are agnostic, how you are atheist too?-:))
* If 'religion is the opium of the masses' then why people aren't happy,
 under religious?:))) I think that Religion isn't 'the opium of the masses', because opium makes you happy or happier, and religion makes you fear and coward and conformist.
P. s I remember religious most famous slogan "Fear God!' :) K. Shiuka.)

Karl Marx - Theory of human nature
 - What are we?
 - Humans are natural producers; historical conditions determine what and how they produce. Humans are also species beings.
- Who are we?
- Marx’s vision tended to focus on classes and groups; it is unclear what to say about his theory of the self.
 How should we live? 
- History will unfold according to its own laws—we can only hasten the inevitable revolution where all alienation and false consciousness will disappear, and we will return to ourselves as Homo faber. This will be the coming of human liberation.
 - How do the normative implications follow from the theory of human nature? 
Freedom is not the basis of human life, but its end—history unfolds by a necessary process and each "historical moment" moves us closer to freedom. This is the dialectic of history. The historical forces of production alienate humans from themselves (their productive powers). The abolition of history will therefore be the abolition of alienation and creation of freedom.
* Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
* The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.
* Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
Steven Pinker The Blank Slate, 
The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
In book 
Profesor  Steven Pinker said that; genetic is main component of human nature.
  The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, published by Viking. In it, he describes three major theories that have shaped our understanding of human nature, including the idea that the mind is a "blank slate" shaped entirely by external influences. The theory of man as a "noble savage" and the theory that the human mind is independent of the body are also discussed. Professor Pinker argues that these theories are flawed and suggests that there is a genetic basis for human nature that all three theories ignore. He also addresses the backlash, from both the political left and right, to the idea that genes influence human nature and argues that the arguments these critics make are based on non-sequiturs. 



David Linch

 Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.
David Lynch
Good day today :))))

Gods & Religions

 If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
 Albert Einstein

Sunday 8 February 2015

Our Poor Individualism, by Jorge Luis Borges

Our Poor Individualism
 by Jorge Luis Borges
(Sorbonne University; Jorge Luis Borges (aged 79) receiving the honorary degree of doctor Honoris Causa in Paris France in 1978)
There is no end to the illusions of patriotism. In the first century of our era, Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon; Milton, in the seventeenth, observed that God is in the habit of revealing Himself first to His Englishmen; Fichte, at the beginning of the nineteenth, declared that to have character and to be German are obviously one and the same thing. Here in Argentina we are teeming with nationalists, driven, they claim, by the worthy or innocent resolve of promoting the best traits of the Argentine people. Yet they ignore the Argentine people; in their polemics they prefer to define them as a function of some external fact, the Spanish conquistadors, say, or an imaginary Catholic tradition, or "Saxon imperialism."

The Argentine, unlike the Americans of the North and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the State. This is attributable to the circumstance that the governments in this country tend to be awful, or to the general fact that the State is an inconceivable abstraction [1]. One thing is certain: the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Aphorisms such as Hegel's "The State is the reality of the moral idea" strike him as sinister jokes. Films made in Hollywood often hold up for admiration the case of a man (usually a journalist) who seeks out the friendship of a criminal in order to hand him over to the police; the Argentine, for whom friendship is a passion and the police a mafia, feels that this "hero" is an incomprehensible swine. He feels with Don Quixote that "everybody hath sins of his own to answer for" and that "it is not seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow-creatures, on account of matters with which they have no concern" (Quixote I, XXII). More than once, confronted with the vain symmetries of the Spanish style, I have suspected that we are irredeemably different from Spain; these two lines from the Quixote have sufficed to convince me of my error; they seem to be the secret, tranquil symbol of our affinity. This is profoundly confirmed by a single night in Argentine literature: the desperate night when a sergeant in the rural police shouted that he was not to consent to the crime of killing a brave man, and started fighting against his own soldiers alongside the fugitive Martin Fierro.

The world, for the European, is a cosmos in which each individual personally corresponds to the role he plays; for the Argentine, it is a chaos. The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize. In general, the Argentine does not believe in circumstances. He may be unaware of the fable that humanity always includes thirty-six just men - the Lamed Wufniks - who are unknown to one another, but who secretly sustain the universe; if he hears of it, it does not strike him as strange that these worthies are obscure and anonymous.... His popular hero is the lone man who quarrels with the group, either actually (Fierro, Moreira, the Black Ant), potentially, or in the past (Segundo Sombra). Other literatures do not record analogous events. Consider, for example, two great European writers: Kipling and Franz Kafka. At first glance, the two have nothing in common, but Kipling's subject is the defense of order, of an order (the road in Kim, the bridge in The Bridge-Builders, the Roman wall in Puck of Pook's hill); Kafka's, the unbearable, tragic solitude of the individual who lacks even the lowliest place in the order of the universe.
It may be said that the traits I have pointed out are merely negative or anarchic; it may be added that they are not subject to political explanation. I shall venture to suggest the opposite. The most urgent problem of our time (already denounced with prophetic lucidity by the near-forgotten Spencer) is the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual; in the battle with this evil, whose names are communism and Nazism, Argentine individualism, though perhaps useless or harmful until now, will find its justification and its duties.

Without hope and with nostalgia, I think of the abstract possibility of a party that had some affinity with the Argentine people; a party that would promise (let us say) a strict minimum of government.

Nationalism seeks to captivate us with the vision of an infinitely tiresome State; this utopia, once established on earth, would have the providential virtue of making everyone yearn for, and finally build, its antithesis.
Everything & Nothing, by Jorge Luis Borges

Saturday 7 February 2015

Abandoned Old Monuments From The Soviet Era

 Abandoned old monuments from the Soviet Era, (In post Soviet Countries) that look like they're from the Future.
'Here is a selection of some great photos of modernist abstract memorials to partisans in the former Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.
These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place or where concentration camps stood. They were designed by different sculptors  and architects; Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković , conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their "patriotic education." After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.
(Makedonium monument in Krusevo)

"Those monuments have an abstract, often monumental, but always unusual and peculiar formal vocabulary in common. They are located in the centre of Yugoslavian modernism, because they mark its starting point and they announce the modern outlook. In doing so, they still proclaim a future, which already has become past. They are expressions of this future and they refuse to stop epitomising its coming. They keep calling: Ahead! Spectres still inhabit the monuments, but their context, their audience has been lost... They open the scene for numerous associations; they could be ambassadors from far-away stars, or from a different, unrealised present."
--Robert Burghardt

(Partisan Memorials in Former Yugoslavia)


(A 32m, Holocaust memorial , Lithuania, 1983)

Ministry of Transportation's building. Suprematism in The Soviet architecture. Tbilisi/Georgia.

Ministry of Transportation's building, Tbilisi, Georgia (1974).









The Palace of ceremonial rites, Tbilisi, Georgia. From the Soviet modernism erected in 1985. 

Tbilisi, 1985

Structure in Tbilisi,  from Georgian Soviet-era architecture since 2004 has demolished.

( I'm not sure where came from this building.)

Youth place, from Soviet Modernism, Armenia (1977)  


Druzhba Holiday Center. Ukraine

Wednesday 4 February 2015

Self - portraits by Paul Klee, Louise Bourgeois and khatia Shiuka :))))

Self - portrait by Louise Bourgeois

Self - portrait, by Paul Klee

 Self - portraits by khatia Shiuka :))))

   Both artists;  Paul Klee & Louise Bourgeois inspired me, because both artist was part of  my personal artist research, and we used artist experience in our artworks,  I demonstrated a continuous line drawing technique.   I start at the nose, and draw the entire face and neck without lifting the black 'pen', in 3 minutes, next I added colors in 5 minutes, that's all. It was just fun to me:)
K. Shiuka