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.

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.