Art, Aesthetics, Evolution, and Work in Progress

In my last post I wrote about the nature of abstraction and the (possible) responsibility of the artist to work the abstract idea until it becomes somehow understandable to a viewer. We might look at a successful abstract artwork as a conveyance of the artist's ideas, something unique to the artist communicated to the one engaging the art. This challenging idea, suggested to me by my friend and teacher Renato Riccioni, led to more challenges.

Once again the "Man in the Holocene" exhibit at MIT provided a nourishing substrate for new ideas that arose from Renato's challenge. Lots of sparks there and as an aside, a great example of how it helps to take in an exhibit several times. The heuristic nature of a well curated show emerges as you study it more. Just like nature.

All of the ideas of a scientist arise from observing nature. Though they are processed in some subconscious, the fact of nature provides the material for the scientist's thought.

Roger Caillois, a thinker whose work I had never heard of was featured at the Holocene show. He wrote that biological mimicry is a form of photography. Here is my interpretation of that idea.

Everything alive is a product if evolution. Though we cannot see the process of evolution, every form, every living tissue, every biologically derived molecule reflects the evolutionary process. In a lab manual I wrote for my undergraduates I noted that the world as we see it is a sort of snapshot, the physical manifestation of an instant in time that is constantly, inexorably changing. The words of Caillois put this idea in another, perhaps more nuanced light.

The living world is an evolutionary work in progress. Whatever we observe has been shaped by billions of years of evolutionary history. Any living body, whether a single cell or a redwood tree was literally formed and survives by the forces of evolution. Its physical existence captures all the forces that shaped it in a visible, tangible, albeit temporary presence. Like a photograph that captures the moment, the living body is a proof of the physicality of evolution.

We could take the idea of Caillois a step further and consider the life as a sculpture molded by the "hand" of evolution. In a sense, this makes a satisfactory connection to the concept of communicating abstraction. In another sense the question is left unanswered. Darwin and modern science understand that evolution is the force of change behind all life. And it's hardly rocket science to understand the biological function of most of the things we observe in nature. The difficulty comes in trying to understand the smaller nuances, a curve, a color, a combination of shapes and angles, the folding of a bud or the trail of a slug. How has evolution shaped these things?

A further look at this question may reside in the realm of aesthetics, a work in progress we still need to uncover.

Rethinking the Abstract

A great conversation with my friend Renato Riccioni today as he coached me through an ongoing sculpture challenge. In yesterday's post I wrote about the abstract. I suggested that ideas emerge in an abstract fashion. I also wrote that abstract ideas need to be translated in order to communicate them. I implied that in the act of translation something may be lost.

In our discussion today Renato suggested a different interpretation. Where I implied that the abstract idea he emerges in a burst of creativity, Renato countered with the idea that the act of translation extends the creative process. In my artistic process I have tended towards the immediate. This tends to result in pieces that are difficult for other people to interpret.

Renato put a more blunt interpretation on this. "If you want to stay in your own bubble you can focus on the immediacy of the creative process. But if you want to communicate with others successfully you need to extend the process by working on your piece."

Renato's idea remains a challenge to me. But if I want to communicate with others through my art it makes sense for me to pay attention to this challenge.

Of course there is no "right answer." But it's amazing to have the opportunity to discuss the creative process, cognition, and the way we do art with another person.

Adorno and the Abstract: Innovations, New Ideas and Non-Judgemental Judgement

Still finding food for thought in the crammed alleyways of Adorno's brilliant writing. The other day I found this quote:

       ...the new is a non-judging judgement...(it) is 
       necessarily abstract


Always at work in the abstract I found that this sparked many ideas I've been trying to articulate.

New ideas it seems, always must be abstract. They come from recesses of imagination where they are processed by a brain constantly challenged by what's "real." In other words, as we observe the everyday world our brain processes it into abstractions. These abstractions may be translatable only to the individual, or they may not be translatable at all. When an artist or scientist shares his abstractions they become articulated as new ideas, novel ways of visualizing the world. And because they are original, they must be communicated out of the abstract into words or visuals that are understandable to the non-self. 

I envision Adorno's "new" as new ideas, these partially-to-fully formed original ideas that come out of the artist or scientist. They are a judgement in that they may determine the future of thought. But by their abstract nature they cannot judge. New ideas translated into a hypothesis may revolutionize culture. Darwin's ideas for example revolutionized biological thinking and continue to influence ideas in other sciences such as physics. They were not judgmental (thought they were judged!) because they stated the facts as Darwin processed them in his brain. Darwin attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully I think, to take them out of the realm of the abstract. But if you read his paragraph on the "tangled bank" you get a feel for Darwin's struggle to put into words a very complex set of ideas. For most of the world, and I think even in academic and intellectual worlds, his ideas remain abstract. 

Likewise in the world of art there are innovations that are abstract when they first come to be created. This applies not only to "abstract art" but to abstract moments in depictional art. Consider the Renaissance innovations of perspective, torsion, and light. These visual "moments" represented a revolution in painting. They represented the development of an aesthetic that came to define the way art was done and seen for centuries. More than that I think, they came to define the way the Western eye saw its world. Oddly, as much as these innovations became the standard, they remain profound abstractions, something we may not be able to quite "put a finger on."

When these ideas are applied in architecture or in a landscape, even when they seem to exude an order, a logic, or a satisfying sort of beauty, they remain a challenge to the observer, something of a hypothesis that once stated, needs to be experimented with.

Repulsion, Cessation, Suspension, Opening the Box, and Scientific Method

Delving deeper into Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory," wading through some pretty hoary stuff, finding gems where they gleam through the mud and muck. The searching through this is in itself similar to raking through piles of data or groping through bags of clay. But the relevance to both art and science is unmistakable.

Here's the quote...

"The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed. Every artwork is an instant; Every successful work is a cessation, a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye. If artworks are truly answers to their own questions, they themselves truly become questions."

And my interpretation...

The act of repulsion is a stocktaking of the work, the project, the experiment, the published paper. The "final draft" or the completed sculpture may have been prepared to be "perfect" but there are always errors. Errors in typography, errors in execution, the error of a curve gone wrong, a problematic methodology. In hindsight, the finished piece is by nature unfinished. It is dynamic, boiling, and only a step on the way to yet another hypothesis, whether scientific or artistic. It is either a knot being untied or a knot that you are continuing to tie.

The artwork, like the scientific work is truly an instant, waiting to be superseded, undone by a critic (or by yourself), reinterpreted. Its physicality is temporary, part of iterations of work. The iterations may be layers of effort spent on the individual work or new related projects. This is art and science at its most active, at its best. 

Amazingly the art, or the science, is connected to the living world, either literally or through the artist's brain and body, which are alive. The constant change of the living world necessitates re-interpretation and reiteration, and posing new questions about the work. This is scientific method. But it is also artistic method.

Finally, artworks and scientific works are "answers to their own questions" (I explored this briefly in the previous post); They are epistemological (a way of knowing) but above all they pose new questions. They are heuristic in that they prompt more questioning. This is the heart of creative exploration. Why it is that Adorno wasn't able to link science and art through processes that are nearly identical in both, is a strange question to me. Was it the time that he wrote? The conditions of the world? The strong conceptual division between arts and sciences that was being plated at that time? 

I think we need to be careful not to get ourselves stuck in one mindset or another, regardless of our personal biases. It's less thinking out of the box than opening the box to explore what's inside.

Material and Consequence and Solving Puzzles

Works of art "are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them."

Another quote from Adorno's "Theory of Aesthetics."

What does it say about science? Although Adorno insists that art is non-empirical (presuming the opposite for science?) I think we can apply the quote to science as well as art. Our projects are particular, perhaps particularistic, and in the sense that no one may care about them (tree falling in the forest) may be considered not to have a grounding in reality, even though they may spring from observations or thoughts about the natural world.

So the scientific project, the experiment, certainly the hypothesis--are all puzzles "externally posed" by the scientist, just as art derives from a puzzle externally posed by the artist.

In my opinion the acts involved in posing and solving the puzzle, as well as the media used, the standardized framework involved, and the potential for isolation (or connection) are remarkably similar in art and in science.

Looking at this rotting concrete wall on the MIT campus, a mixture of physicality and theory, design and destruction, time vs. purity, material and consequence, convinces me that creating boundaries between art and science is a futile endeavor.

Art, Science, and the Sacred Landscape

I'm reviewing an interesting book called "Earth Perfect?" edited by Jannette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs. It's a look at nature, utopia, and the garden, loosely organized around themes of design, ecology, and aethetics. As I explore the book it strikes me that in spite of an introduction that retells an ancient Chinese tale, the book is solidly western in its orientation. This is an unfortunate oversight that results in a limited view of the topic.

For this summer's NEH travel seminar one of the highlights of our reading was a text derived from an exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum called "Road to Aztlan, Art from a Mythic Homeland." As the title suggests, the theme of the book is a retelling, in many media and over many hundreds of years, the "Eden" story of the Aztecs. The book (as well as the seminar) opened my eyes to the fact that in pre-conquest America there were many interpretations of human cultural origins. All of these centered around the sacred landscape.

As we learned during the five-week seminar, sacred landscapes are part of an historical and contemporary world vision that extends over thousands of miles and hundreds of cultures and languages among indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is a different conception of landscape than our "western" vision, and it is worth studying in detail. Beyond art and beyond aesthetics, the concept of the sacred landscape is one in which humans, as part of the landscape, are part of a larger, living, spiritually charged world.

In that landscape, every rock, every tree, every hillock, holds meaning and a connection with the supernatural. It is a landscape that humans are part of, but also a landscape in which humans must tread respectfully to maintain balance. It fascinated me to learn that this concept was shared by tiny native communities in nearly inaccessible forests or deserts, as well as mighty empires like the Aztecs or Toltecs.

I had a chance to learn more by taking pictures that told their own amazing stories. One example is Teotihuacan, the gargantuan pre-Aztec city north of contemporary Mexico City. The pyramids of Teotihuacan were built in a distinctive talud y tablera style, a style meant to mimic terraced agricultural fields. In their bright white coating of lime they must have shimmered against the blue sky. These pyramids, and the city in which they were centered, may have been built to invoke an Edenic, pre-empire concept of Aztlan.

Teotihuacan was a built environment. It was designed to mimic a domesticated natural environment (terraced farmlands). But wild natural environments were (and remain) primally important to indigenous peoples. For example, we consider the Grand Canyon as a transcendently beautiful, perhaps even spiritual space. But to the contemporary Hopi who live in the vicinity of the Canyon, the space is more than beautiful. It represents the place of Origin, the sipapu, from which a new generation of humans emerged into today's "Fourth World," after the collapse of an earlier generation.

Not far from the Grand Canyon lies the mysterious city of Chaco, remotely sited in the Chaco Canyon and abandoned for centuries. Chaco is a quiet, almost desolate place now, accessible via a miles-long gravel road in the heart of Navajo country. Chaco's amazing sandstone formations are a dramatic backdrop to the ruins of the largest ancient cultural center north of the Rio Grande. A close look at its architecture suggests that the distinctive style of building at Chaco mimics in some way the sacred landscape in which it is found. 

Teotihuacan, Chaco, and the Grand Canyon are outsize examples of sacred landscapes. All of them incorporate the idea of humans and their place in nature. But the same ideas apply to small communities such as the Nahua settlements in Veracruz described by Alan Sandstrom in the Nahua Newsletter 

http://www.nahuanewsletter.org/nnarchive/newsletters/Nahua50.pdf

and in decades of scholarly papers in which he has contributed immensely to our understanding of humans and their relationship to landscape. 

In the interest of keeping this post short I've written only the shortest summary of my thoughts. In keeping with my theme of art and science I want to stress that non-Western concepts of landscape are yet another way we can consider how things are looked at in many different perspectives. The relationship to the landscape of the builders of Teotihuacan, Chaco, or a tiny village in Veracruz all are mightily different than that of the planners of New York or Boston. But in all these cases, humans have beheld the natural world and struggled with their place in it. In upcoming posts I want to explore more the differences and similarities in these world views.

Seeing Things Differently and Building Bridges

Man in the Holocene, a photo by Plant Design Online on Flickr.

The major goal of my sabbatical is to build bridges between the sciences and humanities. The role of art as an interpretation of scientific facts, something I have explored deeply in these pages, is getting a lot of attention these days from a number of directions. I think there's still so much to be done. Art can serve science and science can serve art, but these seem to be less philosophical and more practical aspects. Although I'm not a philosopher (far from it) my focus seems to be headed more in the direction of philosophical (or perhaps anthropological or maybe cognitive) connections between art and science. For me, the most interesting question is how processes of doing art and doing science are similar. Do people who see things differently act differently? Do they approach some things differently but others the same? How can they work toward some shared goal?

Writing on the morning after the election, I am exhilarated and buoyed by the fact that the American people have seen through the lies promulgated by a political entity that pandered to the so-called "tea party." So much of the practice of the Republican Congress over these past four years has been simply to block Obama, acting as if there were not shared goals that the country needs to meet. There is no question that people see things differently from one another politically but isn't there some common ground? In a large, complex society there has to be room within political communities for so much variation in thought and practice. In the broadest sense, people of all convictions need to be tolerated, at the very least. In some ways this sounds libertarian, which is very far from the way I approach things. But as my friend Saul Tannenbaum has written, "right libertarianism wraps around to left direct action." Incredibly, the Republican right (represented by Romney and others who might have been considered the Republican "mainstream") has shot itself in the foot with recent comments on a whole range of topics; women, rape, climate, the economy, immigration, etc. Demonizing any group is a recipe for disaster.

So how does this connect to art and science? Besides for the fact that both disciplines would have risked becoming endangered species in the Brave New World of Romney/Ryan, I think both disciplines have much to learn from one another. Creativity, spontaneity, and aesthetic are wonderful aspects of art, but they are not restricted to the artist's world. Analysis, critical thinking, and precision are not the sole domain of the sciences.

My friend Renato Riccioni uses his background in theater to search for aesthetic pathways in his sculpture practice.
As a trained scientist who does art for a living (that is, to live), I dig and delve into all my recesses to find solutions to problems of form, composition, and balance. Our common goal is to create. And in the same way, the common goal of our newly reconstructed legislature is to find a way to make this a fairer, more balanced, and more functional society. Here's hoping that we can create this monumental work for human good together.