Adorno and Aztec Aesthetics

I was affected by the MIT exhibit "man in the Holocene," and especially the work of one artist, Germaine Kruip, whose 2009, Video "Aesthetics as a Way of Survival," documents the presumed "aesthetics" of a bowerbird preparing its shelter in order to attract a mate. A little research into the matter shows that Darwin himself considered this behavior and other aspects of sexual selection to represent an expression of aesthetics, so it's not something new. However I began digging a little more and came up with the writing of Theodor Adorno, whose controversial and convoluted writings I've shied away from (scholarship of the Frankfurt School was banned at BU when I started there in 1993!).

Anyway I came across a very interesting quote by Adorno that spoke to me in terms of barely articulated but strongly felt questions I pondered during my NEH trip to Mexico. I don't know whether I interpreted Adorno correctly and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, but here goes.

Adorno wrote in his book "Aesthetic Theory", "Aesthetic reality seeks to aid the non identical, which in reality is repressed by reality's compulsion to identify."

As a scientist these words struck deep. My work as a taxonomist was entirely focused on a "compulsion to identify." For better or for worse this is what taxonomists do, and recently I reviewed a paper that was so hidebound in its need to identify that the authors were unable to allow new perspectives in their work. More to the point, as I grew dissatisfied with mere identification I tookwhat I  came to call an aesthetic approach that tried to qualify subtle shapes, growth patterns, and dimensional relationships among the organisms I studied. As I have written before in these pages, the attempt to jump off the reductionist, identity-obsessed taxonomic bandwagon resulted in disfavor among my colleagues. But I think I was onto something.

How does this relate to my question of Adorno and Aztec aesthetics?

This past summer as I observed closely the murals, the monuments, and the stone sculptures of ancient Mexico, I began to discern certain angles, curves, and ways of massing space that appeared unique and consistent in the works. This is something I had noted before, for example in Mayan work, but which I had never formulated into a question.

It occurred to me that there might have been an Aztec aesthetic that somehow transcended Aztec religious practices or polity. Instead of considering the aztecs on a "grand" scale, what if we considered the subtleties of Aztec art, with the goal of coming closer to it?

Now let's take apart Adorno's quote and see how it applies to this question.

When Adorno wrote "aesthetic reality" I think he might have meant a way of seeing or interpreting the world not on a grand scale, but by looking at its curves, angles, shades, and mass relationships. Exactly what I was trying to do in Mexico (often to the woe of our visiting scholars whose iconographic interpretations seemed to exclude my queries).

Second, when Adorno writes that aesthetic reality seeks to aid the non identical, I think he meant foremost, things that defy identity. A curve, a shadow, a relationship is not a pyramid or a mural. It is something without identity. And by non-identical I think we can conclude it is also unique. So we can say in this framework that aesthetic reality provides a framework for observing and interpreting non-identifiable, unique things.

Finally, his judgement about the compulsion of reality to identify refers to the hard wired nature of human cognition. We need to identify in order to understand.

But looking at it in another way, if all we do is identify, them we lose the subtle tools that help us identify in the first place. Identification is in a sense machinean, either a thing is or is not what it is identified as. But describing the hidden folds, the subtle shades, or the unique curves of an object, all of which contribute to its identity, require a willingness to shed the compulsion to identify and embrace the will to interpret.

More on "In the Holocene"

One of the amazing things about living so close to MIT is that we can just walk out of our house and stroll around the campus. They have a wonderful collection of monumental sculptures that have caught my attention recently as I work on thinking more in three dimensions.

One of the best is a large work by Alexander Calder. 

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22887580@N06/8132004719/" title="Cool Alexander Calder by Plant Design Online, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8467/8132004719_79048a922e.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Cool Alexander Calder"></a>A different view from every angle, it is even more dramatic from the inside. 

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22887580@N06/8134485489/" title="Before the Hurricane by Plant Design Online, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8331/8134485489_7ceb639558.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Before the Hurricane"></a>

A smaller model in the lobby of the List Center shows that Calder was still working through problems of form and engagement before the final construction. For example, the openings to the outside, which are such an appealing part of the monument, are lacking in the smaller model. The finished sculpture is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. What strikes me the most about it is that you are engaged with the sculpture as a viewer. You get inside it while it enters you with its wit, its life, and its aesthetic. How does this relate to the interesting, challenging, and provocative exhibit at the List Center?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22887580@N06/8134487711/" title="Contrasts by Plant Design Online, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8193/8134487711_3826621d36.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Contrasts"></a>

The curator, João Ribas, proposes that art is a "speculative science" that "acts as an investigative and experimental form of inquiry..." Somewhere on these pages I know I've written the same thing, but not as well articulated as in Ribas' introduction to the exhibit.

Ribas put together a sensational collection of work that challenges the line between science and art. Like the Calder sculpture, the work suggests the struggle of artists trying to depict scientific concepts through their process. As an observer I found myself struggling as well. Not with the question of art/science connections, but with trying to figure out how some of the pieces in the show connected to the question. 

I left with a sense of exhilaration but also frustration, as though all the thinking had already been done for me. The overall impression was that the exhibit was cold and not particularly engaging, which I think is not what the curator had in mind. 

There are many memorable pieces at the exhibit. One of them is a video of John Baldessari singing the Sol Lewitt's canonical Sentences on Conceptual Art. It occurred to me how many of these sentences relate to questions I've been posing about the art/science connection. Wouldn't it have been wonderful to have the opportunity to engage the sentences with this question by using the video as a touchstone? What I'm thinking is this: Why not have the focus of the exhibit as the Lewitt Sentences, and ask viewers to seek connections between science and art through observing the various pieces in the show? 

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22887580@N06/6404803413/" title="Lewitt Partial Cubes by Plant Design Online, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6095/6404803413_f9b031da96.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Lewitt Partial Cubes"></a>

This might have proven a challenge to viewers, but I think it would have been a positive one.

As the World Turns...

Getting back to my studies of art, science, and how they connect. It's been a difficult several months filled with illness and loss, but punctuated by many happy moments, especially Julia's wedding. My trip with the National Endowment for the Humanities was an outstanding experience, and I hope to continue to unpack it (I feel like I've barely begun) on these pages. In addition, a wondrous two weeks making art in collaboration with composting worms in the Catskills; memorable and productive. I've posted pictures of all this great stuff in my flickr pages 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22887580@N06/

but there's so much more to share about these experiences. Especially how they have helped me arrive at new understandings about the intersection between art and science. 

Here's a short vid that shows you what I did at Andes Sprouts. Looks like fun doesn't it? It was!

So let's start with this past week, where I visited a provocative show at the MIT List Center that was brought to my attention by Julia. More on this tomorrow after I learn how to use the new blogger format...grrrrrr.

Things Hidden and Buried

So much learning from this trip to Mexico and the southwest. Yesterday afternoon we reached Aztec Ruins National Monument. An amazing site now in the middle of oil and gas fields in northeast New Mexico.

The site took a generation or two to build and was inhabited for maybe 100 years. Wooden beams were brought down from the mountains. River cobbles for building were close by. The sandstone for most of the building had to be brought from miles away. And greenstone for decorative layers of wall had to be brought from quite a distance.

The outer walls are more or less flat, but buried inside the walls the rocks are irregular and shaped together with mortar or mud. So, much of the wall material is buried inside the thickness of the mud.

Archeologists have found pottery and baskets, probably connected to rituals, buried intact in layers of midden and soil. These objects were apparently buried as is, not thrown away or lost under layers of ruin. Like sacred bundles, they are hidden and part of the site. After they were documented and studied they were reburied by the archeologists.

The long lines of greenstone are curious and perhaps hold some hint of how people thought about their structures and their world. They seem to be decorative, perhaps commemorative or symbolic. They are reminiscent of serpents, rivers, etc., all of which are symbolic in Mesoamerican expression. Green may also symbolize life, growth, and fertility. But the interesting thing is that these lines of greenstone, which took enormous effort to bring to the site, were also buried intentionally by the builders.

It's as if it were enough just to have the presence of the stone, the symbol of life and fertility, hidden in the walls of the structure, again like a sacred bundle.

In some ways it's hard to understand what people were thinking when they engaged in this kind of nuilding project. In some ways though, it's not. Our culture revels in the visible, the apparent, the facies. But artists are also concerned with process, the hidden or buried effort that goes into artistic expression. In science as well there is almost overwhelming stress othe internal, processes and patterns "hidden" in molecular combinations deep within the cell.

So when we explore the "mysterious" cultures of "non-western" people perhaps we can look for hints in our own ways of thinking and problem solving. Maybe there are human universals that are expressed variously by various cultures. Alternatively, we can try to understand the "other" on it's own terms, a challenging, frustrating proposition that may offer insights of its own.

Typology, Teleology, Contradiction

As a botany student at Harvard I encountered great thinkers whose agenda was to re-evaluate and ultimately to reject 18th century Linnean typology. It made sense. Linnaeus based his classification on an essentialist understanding of nature that did not recognize evolutionary process. The Linnean classification system borrowed from the Aristotelian world view a teleological approach in which all living entitites, created by a deity, were unchanging, perfect, and hierarchical. From lichens and earthworms to oak trees and humans there was a "scale of nature" by which every species held its predetermined place according to its "complexity." Typology ignored evolution as a force in the dynamic flow of life as a phenomenon of change. While the binomial nomenclature scheme of Linnaeus continued as a convenient if antiquated tool, pre-evolutionary thought had to be reconsidered in light of the great complexity of nature and enormous advances in ways of knowing. Botany in the late 20th century was, it seemed, finally catching up with Darwin.

I shouldn't have been surprised but I was. The deconstruction of Linnean taxonomy led to a different set of formalities as scientists began shaping their classification systems in the "new" bottle of cladistics, a formalistic, mathematically based system devised in the 1950s by the German entomologist Willi Hennig. As we struggled to master this new style of taxonomy we were driven by an almost messianic belief that the New Phylogeny would revivify botany, adding relevance, attracting funding, and polishing up our dusty self-perception. Finally we would pull ourselves off the bookish piles and creaking cabinets and join with pride the new Computer Age. By deconstructing Linnean teleology I wonder, were we forcing ourselves into a new teleology?

Cladistics transformed botany but not, I think, in a positive way. Hot on the heels of hennegian systematics followed dizzying heights of New Technology as research teams and institutions sought to outdo one another vying for equipment, superstar faculty, and an ever dwindling pool of graduate students. Botany, which had shaped itself as a syncretic, literate, broad-based study of nature joined post-modern academia in a narrow minded, reductionist, exclusionary approach. Molecular phylogeny rejected the whole organism in the search for Truth though genomic analysis. There was less room for discourse that didn't address molecular phylogenetics. Phylogeny established itself as the coin of the realm even in disciplines like mycology which had been, if possible, even more broad-minded than botany. For example, my studies in lichen morphogenesis- the way these tiny insignificant organisms attain form- did not fit the reductionist agenda of my journals and became unpublishable. Whole systems of classification were (theoretically) toppled, and botanists shot themselves in the foot by basing a scienltific practice and a set of theories on what had become little more than expensive lab techniques.

What does all this have to do with the connection between science and art, and how is this connected to the wonderful National Endowment for the Humanities trip I'm on right now?

Here on our NEH Mesoamerica trip I'm a happy observer. The one non-humanities participant on the trip I have the opportunity of seeing a whole range of other disciplines roll out their best ideas. I'm seeing a huge amount of art history, anthropology, archeology...and that's only the "a"-list. I'm getting to see amazing analyses of culture, history, iconography and art, a sweeping view of a diverse, perhaps chaotic world. And travels to places at once beautiful, challenging, and sometimes uninterpretable. Our goal is to connect conceptually the desert southwest with Mesoamerica, regions that have been arbitrarily divided for political expediency. A challenging goal and one that deserves attention, the kind of scholarly attention that has been lavishly, elegantly demonstrated during these weeks of the seminar.

Something that has come up in several discussions is the reality that there are many ways of knowing. Obviously we've addressed that by rolling out a wide range of scholars in a variety of disciplines. But shouldn't we consider more seriously ways of knowing outside of traditional academia? Something equally troubling? I've heard critique of certain disciplines or approaches as being "old fashioned," something that makes my botany antennas go up.

The beauty of this scholarly pursuit is that it allows all kinds of input. "Old fashioned" ethnography may not provide the formality some scholars would like to see but it does reveal, in bushelfulls, insights into rare and endangered cultures. Iconographic analysis may not seem "scientific" but it is a portal to ideas about seeing and depicting the world that are unmatched in their beauty and elegance. And a "scientific" approach to archeology may seem to be narrow minded. But beware of replacing the narrowness of denrochronoly with other varieties of typological conceptualizing.

Contradictions? We're rife with them as humans and as scholars. But here I venture an unsubstantiated and perhaps unsupportable suggestion. We acknowledge that the world is chock full of complexity. Instead of narrowing our vision to make complexity "manageable" (some sort of famous last words) can we open our minds to complexity, embrace it, embrace one another for our divergent visions, and observe in gaping wonder the chaotic world around us?

Art as Inquiry

I was in a discussion with my friend and colleague Eva Garroutte when she made the profound suggestion that making art is a mode of inquiry into the unknown. Eva is a Cherokee woman and I can't recall if she was speaking about Cherokees and art. But I went ahead and started making connections to some of my observations during this wonderful NEH seminar. For example, we learned from the ethnographer Alan Sandstrom that in the Nahua village he studies people make innumerable paper figures that are used in ritual contacts with the spirit world. The dolls are lovingly made, counted, wrapped in bundles, and later laid out carefully for the ceremonies. In the narrowest sense they are ritual objects but in a broader perspective I would call them art. They are beautiful, handmade, decorative, and above all, an expression of each person who creates them.

We were discussing this with our colleague Lise Mifsud, a physical anthropologist and fellow participant in our seminar trip. Earlier Lise and I had pondered the connection between tool making from stone and ancient stone figurines. Did our earliest ancestors inquire into the unknown spiritual world by creating stone effigies related to their tools? It seemed to make sense that in this case "art" emerged from "necessity," or more to the point, that the creation of artistic ritual objects was connected to working the stone for tools. I think I've suggested this in earlier posts and it's an idea that seems to stick.

Back to the big question of art as a mode of inquiry into the unknown. If we consider the supernatural world of the Nahua to be unknown, then the paper figures they make provide a connection, or a mode of inquiry into that unknown. Ancient stone tool makers, our non-human or early human ancestors, delved into the unknown by creating tools that extended their physical capabilities. As their capabilities increased and they penetrated further into the physical world new unknowns emerged. As their descendants we continue that process.

What does this have to do with scientific inquiry? During my botanical research at Harvard I prepared thousands of specimens for distribution to museums around the world. The rote activity of soaking, arranging, pressing, drying, and packing the specimens (they had already been collected, studied, identified, labeled, and stored), was a kind of symbolic act akin to the intricate activities associated with Nahua paper cutting. The specimens themselves were not "artistic" but they reflected my painstaking curatorial work. They were "valueless" in terms of nutritional or monetary worth but they were symbolic of my work and accomplishments. They provided evidence of my inquiry into the unknown.

Science is nothing if not an inquiry into the unknown. The tools we make, the ritualized activities we perform, and the symbols of our discoveries, all can be considered part of the same process of our prehuman ancestors or the Nahua paper cutters.

This topic carries a huge amount of epistemological baggage we could unpack for a long time. "Inquiry into the unknown is the way we make art and art is our inquiry into the unknown."

It's What's Going On Inside That Counts

Woke up to a hazy chocolate-colored sky in Santa Fe with this thought. It's so well-worn its almost trite. But in the perspective of what we've studied so far in this seminar it takes on new meaning.

Some examples from ancient Mesoamerica seem to fit.

Inside of mountains, deep inside caves, the source of water is present. That water is depicted and felt as wind and in later conceptualizations (and almost universally in iconography) depicted as breath emanating from the mouth of a god.

Pyramids came to represent mountains. Much less something to climb than a physical representation of water and well-being.

Inside a shell bracelet resides the power and flexibility of the wrist. Thin in proportion to the arm and hand, the wrist harnesses the power of movement.

In many of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures, sacred bundles were placed inside caves or containers, or closets. The sacred bundles were themselves a phenomenon of the inside, holding perhaps paper, feathers, and other talismans.

My friends in the Collectivo Tres made "sacred bundles" of basura (garbage) wrapped in ziplock bags and sold them on the Mexico City subway The way people sell chiche (chewing gum) or CDs.

Inside resides the power, whether it's power of the heart, brain, or hands, a thought as contemporary as it is ancient.