 |
| a Brice Marden, "Untitled 3" |
The answer to this question can be revealed through artist Brice Marden's talk at the Tate Modern Museum in London in May of 2012. Though his own words are also poignant, Marden cites another artist, Marc Chagall (1887-1985), who had said, that "the ultimate aim of painting is not decorative beauty but truth," which truth, "must not be confused with formal resemblance." Formal resemblance, he had said, presents only appearance while truth captures an essence.
This dichotomy between resemblance and essence exists also in science. The now classic conundrum of our effort to look in on the tiny matters of nature is that we cannot look without disturbing. Indeed, physicists will now casually say that the instrumentation is part of the experiment. That is, part of the natural system of which it also attempts to note a record. In order to "see" an electron, we must register its mark somewhere. In order for it to make mark, it needs to collapse from a wave state to a particle state. In order to collapse, it needs to collide. And so, to count one, we need to put up an electro-sensitive screen and fire what we believe to be electrons at it. If we succeed, we see only the mark the element we harnessed made in the environment we gave it. Clearly, without the screen it would not have registered and we know now that it would not even have collapsed. So, our experiment has quite literally produced an outcome that would have been different - would have looked different - if registered in some other way.
And yet, the energy value of such an electron, no matter whether measured or not, has a distinct property. Even if the electron is in the form of a wave and extends out into space infinitely in all directions, it still has an essence. Or, more precisely, its interaction with other energy states has a particular character. This is what allows us to use a definitive, singular pronoun to describe something that is more like wind than like a marble. Because if we stop it it allows us to measure its energy value, we agree that we will call this value an electron and the other value a proton or a photon. So, to use the artist's language, essence exists even if semblance is not its mirror image, if we cannot count on the image housing the essence.
Perhaps this general flow of universal everywhereness of electric and other energy is what artists who throw paint on canvas or lines on canvas are trying to convey. And may be what they mean when they say that to see an electron or to draw one is not to engage truth.
I would argue that in larger systems, such as girls sitting in chairs, what you see is closer to what is than it is in elemental systems. Because we have learned to recognize a human being by the expressions on her face, to portray those emotions is to say something real about her. And, if we agree that a portrait is maybe a portrait of an emotion rather than of an individual, then the emotion that lives in the semblance of the person is both what is visual and what is essential.
But what Brice Marden points to in his Tate talk is still true: art is here to "accentuate the validity of vagueness." To remind us that we cannot characterize an ocean wave by the splash it makes with our body, and which splash we may be inclined to paint for sentimental reasons. Art is here to remind us that that wave has a long and involved natural history and that, if we dare to call it a wave at all rather than the effect of distant forces interacting with a system of topography, winds, currents and temperature, then, at the very least, we should not paint it as one.
Hi Maya.
ReplyDeleteI like your ideas. The dichotomy that you speak of, the search for the essence, was also spoken of by Einstein, who said that epistemology was a proper study for the physicist.
If you drop back a few dozen centuries, your 'essence' Mardin's 'Validity' and Chagall's 'truth,' were all preceded by Plato's or perhaps Socrates' theory of forms. Namely, that ideas and ideals of objects had substantial and separate form, that could be divined by man. These forms were the true essence of the class of things without actually being those things.
Perhaps what Chagall and Mardin were attempting to convey was their ability to create a representation of the Ideal Form through artistic media. One can photograph a dog, or one can painstakingly paint a facsimile of a dog in oil or even look at a dog and see nothing but another mutt. Some artists however, can absolutely convey the spiritual essence of the nature of all dogs through a representation composed of few lines of ocher scraped on a cave wall thousands of years ago. Could that be called 'Modern' art?
Plato came very close to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theory in his dialectics. Perhaps he had an indeterminate cat of his own.
All the best,
Jim.