84 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
84 lines
5.9 KiB
Plaintext
The Art of Science
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<p>One of my earliest blog essays (<a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200205#65'>Terror Becomes Bad<br />
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Art</a>) was about Luke Helder, the pipe-bombing “artist” who created<br />
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a brief scare back in 2002. Arguably more disturbing than Helder’s<br />
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“art” was the fact that he genuinely thought it was art, because none<br />
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of the supposed artists or arts educators he was in contact with had<br />
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ever taught him any better and his own talent was not sufficient to<br />
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carry him beyond their limits.</p>
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<p>I am not the first to observe that something deeply sick and<br />
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dysfunctional happened to the relationship between art, popular<br />
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culture, and technology during the crazy century we’ve just exited.<br />
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Tom Wolfe made the point in <a href='http://www.billemory.com/NOTES/wolfe.html'>The Painted Word</a><br />
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and expanded on it in <cite>From Bauhaus To Our House</cite>. Frederick Turner<br />
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expanded the indictment in a <cite>Wilson Quarterly</cite> essay on<br />
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neoclassicism which, alas, seems not to be available on line.</p>
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<p>If we judge by what the critical establishment promotes as “great<br />
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art”, most of today’s artists are bad jokes. The road from Andy<br />
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Warhol’s soup cans to Damien Hirst’s cows in formaldehyde has been<br />
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neither pretty nor edifying. Most of “fine art” has become a moral,<br />
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intellectual, and esthetic wasteland in which whatever was originally<br />
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healthy in the early-modern impulse to break the boundaries of<br />
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received forms has degraded into a kind of numbed-out nihilism.</p>
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<p>There are exceptions, though — artists who engage the world, who<br />
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are deeply involved with ideas, and who playfully incorporate all the<br />
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possibilities of our technological age into their work. When I was a<br />
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guest of honor at Arisia 2004 I had the good fortune to meet one of<br />
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these; <a href='http://www.arthurganson.com'>Arthur Ganson</a>, an<br />
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artist/engineer who creates beautiful and sometimes disturbing kinetic<br />
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sculptures.</p>
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<p>One that I’ve just discovered is <a href='http://www.bathsheba.com/artist/'>Bathsheba Grossman</a>. She<br />
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visualizes and then realizes beautiful ideas from mathematics,<br />
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cosmology, and organic chemistry. Contemplate her <a href='http://www.bathsheba.com/crystalsci/largescale/'>Large Scale<br />
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Model</a>, an image of the galactic clusters in the three hundred<br />
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million cubic light years around Earth — an eidolon of a<br />
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substantial fraction of the observable universe laser-etched into a<br />
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three-inch-tall glass block.</p>
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<p>It isn’t quite “to see the Universe in a grain of sand”, but nobody<br />
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with more sensitivity than a brick could fail to have dizzying and<br />
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wonderful vistas of time/space and paradoxical thoughts about scale in<br />
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the presence of this luminously beautiful work of art. All too many<br />
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artists portentiously claim that what art is supposed to do is induce<br />
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one to meditate on one’s place in the universe, then deliver pettiness<br />
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(or perhaps a toxic political screed) as the punchline.<br />
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Ms. Grossman’s Large Scale Model is the real deal, and a hard slap in<br />
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their faces.</p>
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<p>Or contemplate Ms. Grossman’s gorgeous metal sculptures, derived<br />
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from mathematical forms by a process that combines hand-modelling with<br />
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CAD and produced with cutting-edge 3D-printing technology. It’s not<br />
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just the end results that are beautiful but the whole dialogue between<br />
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art and technology implicit in her<br />
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<a href='http://www.bathsheba.com/sculpture/process/'>technique</a>.<br />
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After reading about it, I am not surprised to learn that she sometimes<br />
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writes her own modeling software — and, having seen her art, I<br />
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would lay a healthy bet that she writes damn <em>good</em> software.</p>
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<p>There’s something refreshing even about Ms. Grossman’s most narrowly<br />
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commercial work. She will laser-etch the protein structure of your<br />
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choice into glass, using the same technique as in the Large Scale<br />
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Model, for prices starting at $145. These images of cloudy, intricate<br />
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structure are visually beautiful enough as abstracts, but they derive<br />
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their true power from being <em>about something</em>. About<br />
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hemoglobin, the molecule in your blood that carries oxygen. Or about<br />
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the DNA polymerase crucial in cell replication, or the<br />
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neurotransmitter acetylcholinesterase. Each one is a joyful<br />
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celebration of our ability to know, to find beauty and meaning in the<br />
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complexity of the natural universe.</p>
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<p>To see these craft objects, unashamedly made for money (that’ll be<br />
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$40 extra for molecular-surface etching, thank you), is to have your<br />
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nose rubbed in the desperate poverty of most modern art, to be<br />
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reminded of the vacuum at its core and the pathetic Luke Helders that<br />
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the vacuum spawns. It’s a poverty of meaning, a parochialism that<br />
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insists that the only interesting things in the universe are the<br />
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artist’s own psychological and political quirks.</p>
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<p>Bathsheba Grossman’s art reminds us that exploration of the narrow<br />
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confines of an artist’s head is a poor substitute for artistic<br />
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exploration of the universe. It reminds us that what the artist owes<br />
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his audience is beauty and discovery and a sense of connection, not<br />
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alienation and ugliness and neurosis and political ax-grinding.</p>
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<p>Forgetting this value rotted the core out of the fine arts and<br />
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literary fiction of the 20th century. We can hope, though, that<br />
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artists like her and Arthur Ganson will show the way forward to<br />
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remembering it. Only in that way will the unhealthy chasm between<br />
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popular and fine art be healed, and fine art be restored to a healthy<br />
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and organic relationship with culture as a whole.</p>
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