Curated by Grant Edward Tyler
Nicholas Campbell, Grant Falardeau, Haniko Zahra
The Greek architecture of the psyche is constructed of three faculties: the logos, ethos, and páthos. To these static faculties they ascribed knowing, morals, and feeling respectively, which in turn relate to the eternal attributes of the true, the good, and the beautiful. And each were aspects of the same thing: páthos is the beauty of logos/ethos; logos is the truth of ethos/páthos; and ethos is the goodness of logos/páthos.
But páthos had another meaning in melancholia, suffering, and the experience of loss. That the Greeks identified the realm of feeling in general with the specific feeling of melancholy is telling: what became known to us today as quintessentially Romantic was taken for granted by the ancients as the basic principle of artistic culture in general. Hence tragic drama’s domination in the artistic heritage of Attic culture.
What—we might wonder today—gave the Greeks such a cause for sorrow in the first place? What was it that has been lost? In the Meno, Plato expressed the belief that knowledge itself is actually re-cognition. Plato posited that quotidian experience is clouded by amnesia and repression. Knowledge is remembrance. The feeling of melancholy and surrender associated with experience of beauty is the feeling of a dim re-cognition at the truth which had until then been forgotten. This is art’s secret function. The “truth” of art is lodged within it aesthetically as beauty rather than didactically, as truth per se. Through artifice is expressed the authentic. Beauty resonates as a function of remembrance.
Photos by Bjarne Bare.