Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
Contemporary Art and Matters of Science
Peggy Rawes, Goldsmiths College, University of London. peg.rawes@blueyonder.co.uk
This session will consider issues in contemporary art practice and aesthetics that reflect new paradigms of matter that are produced in the contemporary natural sciences. The exhibition Force Fields (Hayward Gallery, 2000), and art works by Cornelia Parker (Mass - colder, darker, matter) Stelarc (Zombie Cyborgs) the Chapman Brothers (Chapman World), or Thomas Grünfeld (Misfits) suggest concepts of materiality in contemporary science. Sciences such as micro-biology, genetics and theoretical physics produce concepts of matter which can be understood as a series of concrete and potential states, rather than an idealised and inert concept brought to life by the external principle of form. These radically altered states of matter therefore offer new structures through which to consider issues of identity, embodiment and technology in the production and consumption of art.
Synthetix
Esther Leslie (Birkbeck College University of London, England)
When Alexander Baumgarten coined the term Aesthetics (1750-1758), he argued - against Newton - that the eye, and the senses, play an active role in perception. He drew this from the Greek term aisthetos (perceivable), and also the term aistheticos (capable of perception). This notion is taken up in the natural philosophical tradition of early German chemistry, which refuses a distinction between science and art. E.g. F. Runge, inventor of the first synthetic dye, bases his scientific method on the notion that objects \'see\', and possess a drive within themselves. His book of experiments with coloured solutions dramatises this \'will to self-formation\'. Influenced by Romantic natural science (\'everything which is real thinks\') and Hegelian philosophy (the dialectic of actuality and possibility), Goethe wrote: "Those natures which...quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids, which although they are most usually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, must decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance." I examine the relationship between this active concept of matter and emergent ideas of synthesis and plasticity in chemistry and theory (i.e. Marx\'s \'cytoblastic\' commodity). These ideas appear in later art practice (e.g. in Baumeister), and in also contemporary collaborations
Art and Visual Perception: An Exploration through Science and Art
Rory Hamilton and Jon Rogers (Royal College of Art, England)
How does our mind perceive the world around us? The formal study of the mind raises large questions which are tackled very differently in the realms of science and art. Science attempt to objectify this study, and to reduce the scope of its questions to ever smaller areas of enquiry. The goal of art is more elusive, as is its nature. It allows for ambiguity, and even for irrationality. The senses become super-enhanced when "experiencing" art. Science reduces while art expands our conscious selves. In this paper, a scientist and an artist will describe a working practice, broadly entitled "Art and visual perception". Particular attention is given to movement and perceived depth, using the scientific tools of Gestalt theory, and ecological theories of perception in relation to art practice and history, design and new technologies. A dialogue between methodologies is set up and the nature of subject and object, viewer and work is questioned. The artworks function as experiments within themselves and upon the audience. The audience must question their perception of the work and how their minds perceive it. This provides a new way of juxtaposing science, art, theory, curation and practice.
Digital Formalisations
Suhail Malik (Goldsmiths College University of London, England)
Recent developments in architectural practice have led to proposals of a bypassing of formal concerns in design processes in favour of productions determined by iterative and flux-based animation programmes. It is argued that producing shapes a fortiori, in part by following the unforeseeable development of turbulence in such flows, renders the notion and value of form (with all its Platonic resonances) obsolete. Though similarities can be found between these claims and those of process art in the late 1960s and 70s, the significant difference between the two is that the recent developments are digitally rather than materially constituted (not least for reasons of engineering). Material production is then determined and constituted otherwise than materially - if only because the standard form-matter couple no longer has the same bearing on production. However, it is by now clear that such shape generating devices have their own aesthetic which has influenced many contemporary artists, and does so formally more than in any other way. This paper will then consider whether form can be so easily dispensed with from the ambitions of digital shape production.
Cybernetics and Cyborgification: John McHales Telemaths
Jenifer Way (University of North Texas, USA)
During the late Fifties, John McHale, then associated with the Independent Group, figured emerging theories and popular culture representations of cybernetics in collage paintings called Telemaths. As the study of how machine, social, and biological systems behave, cybernetics offered McHale the material and conceptual means with which to demonstrate ways that an American consumer economy generated subjectivity, which he espied in mass media and popular culture, and encountered at Yale University, 1955-6. McHale treated his materials as both manifestation and allegory of American consumer cultures reification, really, cyborgification, of the body and its desires. With paint and magazine pages he generated a quality of surface in, on, and across which he and his colleagues gleaned analogs for new sociocultural identities. Cyborgification also indicates that materials constituting Telemaths behaved like the cybernetic processes and economic activities McHale claimed were spawning them. Certain techniques staged the cyborgs as effects of brain, economy, and machine communicating through signs of image and tactile-based networks motivated by output and feedback. Today, they should oblige historians of art and culture engaging cybernetics to revisit the gap C.P. Snow identified between the sciences and humanities, a gap, Snow argued disingenuously, that precluded constructive dialogue.
"Invisible, Thermal, Dynamic, Magnetic, Sonorous Revelations." Modern Physics and Surrealist Art and Theory, 1934-43.
Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute of Art, England)
The epistemological questions raised by surrealist theory, psychoanalysis, and Relativity and quantum physics forced a debate in the early 1930s within French philosophy circles on the cultural and intellectual value of the irrational. Several figures on the fringes of surrealism, such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, and Gaston Bachelard contributed to this exchange. Some of them sought to foreground the similarities between the languages of dispersal and fragmentation that had animated both psychoanalysis and modern physics on the one hand, and vanguard painting on the other. These languages seemed set upon giving an image to the invisible forces directing (human) nature, whether describing the behaviour of the unconscious or that of the subatomic world. This paper positions surrealist artists within the same debate. It argues that in the late 1930s, the Chilean painter Matta sought to forge a pictorial language indebted to cartography, seeking a coalition of the inner and outer, microcosmic and macrocosmic, subjective and objective \'domains.\' It also records how the Viennese painter and writer Wolfgang Paalen mobilized a knowledge of quantum physics to escape the static, ocularcentric image framed by the traditional genre of landscape painting, aiming to invoke the pattern unveiled by quantum physics as the rhythmic vibration, the very pulse of life.
Landscape Unbound: Science and the Redefinition of Landscape in Art
Yvonne Scott (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
This paper argues that science provides a valid basis for reinterpreting and redefining landscape as a spatial concept in contemporary art. While "landscape", has been, traditionally, limited to what can be seen with the naked eye, its scale determined by the relationship of man to the environment, and its representation confined largely to either view or context, science has provided the means to challenge and, in particular, to extend the definition of landscape in art _ by revealing and disseminating, through contemporary media, the infinitesimal and the infinite dimensions of the matter of which landscape is ultimately comprised. In this context and with reference to the work of three Irish artists Fionnuala N¡ Chios in, Mark Francis and Nicholas May, selected existing aesthetic and philosophical theories of landscape imagery are reconsidered. These artists have variously interpreted the microscopic and telescopic in vistas, intriguingly ambiguous in scale, and their work is commonly described in language generally associated with landscape and its structures (e.g. motorways, regions, territories, or inhabitants). In the light of their imagery, the paper explores the extent to which the deconstruction of the landscape, by science, promotes its re-evaluation and cultural repositioning.
This session will consider issues in contemporary art practice and aesthetics that reflect new paradigms of matter that are produced in the contemporary natural sciences. The exhibition Force Fields (Hayward Gallery, 2000), and art works by Cornelia Parker (Mass - colder, darker, matter) Stelarc (Zombie Cyborgs) the Chapman Brothers (Chapman World), or Thomas Grünfeld (Misfits) suggest concepts of materiality in contemporary science. Sciences such as micro-biology, genetics and theoretical physics produce concepts of matter which can be understood as a series of concrete and potential states, rather than an idealised and inert concept brought to life by the external principle of form. These radically altered states of matter therefore offer new structures through which to consider issues of identity, embodiment and technology in the production and consumption of art.
Synthetix
Esther Leslie (Birkbeck College University of London, England)
When Alexander Baumgarten coined the term Aesthetics (1750-1758), he argued - against Newton - that the eye, and the senses, play an active role in perception. He drew this from the Greek term aisthetos (perceivable), and also the term aistheticos (capable of perception). This notion is taken up in the natural philosophical tradition of early German chemistry, which refuses a distinction between science and art. E.g. F. Runge, inventor of the first synthetic dye, bases his scientific method on the notion that objects \'see\', and possess a drive within themselves. His book of experiments with coloured solutions dramatises this \'will to self-formation\'. Influenced by Romantic natural science (\'everything which is real thinks\') and Hegelian philosophy (the dialectic of actuality and possibility), Goethe wrote: "Those natures which...quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids, which although they are most usually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, must decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance." I examine the relationship between this active concept of matter and emergent ideas of synthesis and plasticity in chemistry and theory (i.e. Marx\'s \'cytoblastic\' commodity). These ideas appear in later art practice (e.g. in Baumeister), and in also contemporary collaborations
Art and Visual Perception: An Exploration through Science and Art
Rory Hamilton and Jon Rogers (Royal College of Art, England)
How does our mind perceive the world around us? The formal study of the mind raises large questions which are tackled very differently in the realms of science and art. Science attempt to objectify this study, and to reduce the scope of its questions to ever smaller areas of enquiry. The goal of art is more elusive, as is its nature. It allows for ambiguity, and even for irrationality. The senses become super-enhanced when "experiencing" art. Science reduces while art expands our conscious selves. In this paper, a scientist and an artist will describe a working practice, broadly entitled "Art and visual perception". Particular attention is given to movement and perceived depth, using the scientific tools of Gestalt theory, and ecological theories of perception in relation to art practice and history, design and new technologies. A dialogue between methodologies is set up and the nature of subject and object, viewer and work is questioned. The artworks function as experiments within themselves and upon the audience. The audience must question their perception of the work and how their minds perceive it. This provides a new way of juxtaposing science, art, theory, curation and practice.
Digital Formalisations
Suhail Malik (Goldsmiths College University of London, England)
Recent developments in architectural practice have led to proposals of a bypassing of formal concerns in design processes in favour of productions determined by iterative and flux-based animation programmes. It is argued that producing shapes a fortiori, in part by following the unforeseeable development of turbulence in such flows, renders the notion and value of form (with all its Platonic resonances) obsolete. Though similarities can be found between these claims and those of process art in the late 1960s and 70s, the significant difference between the two is that the recent developments are digitally rather than materially constituted (not least for reasons of engineering). Material production is then determined and constituted otherwise than materially - if only because the standard form-matter couple no longer has the same bearing on production. However, it is by now clear that such shape generating devices have their own aesthetic which has influenced many contemporary artists, and does so formally more than in any other way. This paper will then consider whether form can be so easily dispensed with from the ambitions of digital shape production.
Cybernetics and Cyborgification: John McHales Telemaths
Jenifer Way (University of North Texas, USA)
During the late Fifties, John McHale, then associated with the Independent Group, figured emerging theories and popular culture representations of cybernetics in collage paintings called Telemaths. As the study of how machine, social, and biological systems behave, cybernetics offered McHale the material and conceptual means with which to demonstrate ways that an American consumer economy generated subjectivity, which he espied in mass media and popular culture, and encountered at Yale University, 1955-6. McHale treated his materials as both manifestation and allegory of American consumer cultures reification, really, cyborgification, of the body and its desires. With paint and magazine pages he generated a quality of surface in, on, and across which he and his colleagues gleaned analogs for new sociocultural identities. Cyborgification also indicates that materials constituting Telemaths behaved like the cybernetic processes and economic activities McHale claimed were spawning them. Certain techniques staged the cyborgs as effects of brain, economy, and machine communicating through signs of image and tactile-based networks motivated by output and feedback. Today, they should oblige historians of art and culture engaging cybernetics to revisit the gap C.P. Snow identified between the sciences and humanities, a gap, Snow argued disingenuously, that precluded constructive dialogue.
"Invisible, Thermal, Dynamic, Magnetic, Sonorous Revelations." Modern Physics and Surrealist Art and Theory, 1934-43.
Gavin Parkinson (Courtauld Institute of Art, England)
The epistemological questions raised by surrealist theory, psychoanalysis, and Relativity and quantum physics forced a debate in the early 1930s within French philosophy circles on the cultural and intellectual value of the irrational. Several figures on the fringes of surrealism, such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, and Gaston Bachelard contributed to this exchange. Some of them sought to foreground the similarities between the languages of dispersal and fragmentation that had animated both psychoanalysis and modern physics on the one hand, and vanguard painting on the other. These languages seemed set upon giving an image to the invisible forces directing (human) nature, whether describing the behaviour of the unconscious or that of the subatomic world. This paper positions surrealist artists within the same debate. It argues that in the late 1930s, the Chilean painter Matta sought to forge a pictorial language indebted to cartography, seeking a coalition of the inner and outer, microcosmic and macrocosmic, subjective and objective \'domains.\' It also records how the Viennese painter and writer Wolfgang Paalen mobilized a knowledge of quantum physics to escape the static, ocularcentric image framed by the traditional genre of landscape painting, aiming to invoke the pattern unveiled by quantum physics as the rhythmic vibration, the very pulse of life.
Landscape Unbound: Science and the Redefinition of Landscape in Art
Yvonne Scott (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
This paper argues that science provides a valid basis for reinterpreting and redefining landscape as a spatial concept in contemporary art. While "landscape", has been, traditionally, limited to what can be seen with the naked eye, its scale determined by the relationship of man to the environment, and its representation confined largely to either view or context, science has provided the means to challenge and, in particular, to extend the definition of landscape in art _ by revealing and disseminating, through contemporary media, the infinitesimal and the infinite dimensions of the matter of which landscape is ultimately comprised. In this context and with reference to the work of three Irish artists Fionnuala N¡ Chios in, Mark Francis and Nicholas May, selected existing aesthetic and philosophical theories of landscape imagery are reconsidered. These artists have variously interpreted the microscopic and telescopic in vistas, intriguingly ambiguous in scale, and their work is commonly described in language generally associated with landscape and its structures (e.g. motorways, regions, territories, or inhabitants). In the light of their imagery, the paper explores the extent to which the deconstruction of the landscape, by science, promotes its re-evaluation and cultural repositioning.