PRESENTATION: BEASTS in the BRAIN (2008)

[GALLERY PRESENTATION for opening of Beauvais Lyons exhibit; Art Gallery of Knoxville]

Caprichos Plate 43
The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters

21.6cm x 15.2cm
12.5″ x 8.75″ inches (uncut sheet)
8.5″ x 6″ inches (published sheet)

Text caption from the “Prado” etching version:

“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”

“La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.“

http://eeweems.com/goya/bio_index.html

Edward Hicks (American, 1780–1849). The Peaceable Kingdom, 1833–34. Oil on Canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 40.340

 

 

It really the war of all against all … competition is key: 

 

“Any human society set up along these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and misery – Hobbes’s brutal world of bellum omnium contra omnes (where bellum means “war,” not beauty): the war of all against all. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in mitigation of the struggle that defines nature’s pathway. Study natural selection and do the opposite in human society:

But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence – the war of each against all – the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.”  — from SJ Gould’s 1997 essay. “Kropotkin was no crackpot.”  Natural History 106 (June): 12-21;

Koko and the Kitten