September 7, 2023 : Issue #50

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

Welcome

This time out we begin with the second of two parts of my talk on “Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing,” followed by a postscript to last week’s Wondercab triptych commemoration of the late sublime Sinead O’Connor.

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The Main Event

“Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing”

Part Two

Readers of Part One (see our last complete issue here) will recall how this talk began its life, back in 2011, as the keynote address for a two-day symposium of the same name in San Francisco, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and that it has been fractalizing and compounding across successive versions ever since, this being the current version. Note that we begin by overlapping the last full paragraph of the prior section, foregrounding our good friend Nicholas of Cusa.

All of which (but especially the discovery of the calculus) puts me in mind of one of my most treasured formulations—people who know me get bored with it, but I can't help but share it with you here in this context. One of my all-time favorite metaphors was provided by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) who was a late medieval jurist, astronomer, diplomat, the archbishop of Cologne, and a mathematician, and in that final capacity something of a number mystic. His great masterpiece in that latter regard was called Learned Ignorance (scientists, take note: Einstein would have savored such a title, perhaps he did). At any rate, at one point Nicholas, a good neoplatonist, was engaged in a sort of argument with Aquinas (from over a century earlier) and his followers about ways of getting to knowledge of the whole, which was to say, in those days, knowledge of God. Aquinas, a good Aristotelian, seemed to take the position (granted we are way oversimplifying here) that if you just catalogued everything—if you composed a book on botany, a book on zoology, a book on ethics, on astronomy, and so forth, which is to say to the extent that you were able to, you endeavored to catalog all of Creation—you would eventually achieve knowledge of God the Creator. But Nicholas, for his part, suggested that surely it couldn’t be quite like that. Imagine, he challenged his readers, a circle with an n-sided regular polygon inside. Say, an equilateral triangle. Add a side and you get a square. Add another side and you get a pentagon. Keep adding sides and eventually you get a million-sided polygon.

Granted, at some point it starts looking more and more like its surrounding circle—here he was anticipating the calculus by over two centuries. But in a profound sense, Nicholas went on to argue, that compounding figure would have been getting less and less like a circle. For that thing has a million sides, whereas a circle has only one. That thing has a million angles, and a circle has none. At some point, he argued, you were going to have to make a leap—and he coined the phrase, the leap of faith (Kierkegaard got it from him)—from the chord to the arc. A leap which in turn could only be accomplished in grace, for free. And those would constitute two essentially different ways of knowing. I've always liked that formulation as a writer. You keep piling on detail after detail, and somehow the thing just doesn’t come together, which you can tell, because when you tap it, it just doesn’t ring true. But then suddenly, almost unaccountably, it pops into shape. There’s all that work, which was preparation, preparation as it were for receptivity, but when things finally come together they seem to come together of their own accord. I wonder how much that too is like the work, the practice, of science.

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Anyway, I wanted to float some of those notions before going on to talk about two artists in particular with whom I've spent a good deal of time over the years, which is to say Robert Irwin and David Hockney, and in particular about their growing respective involvements, across their separate careers, with the scientific worldview. In so doing, I will be deploying passages from the pair of contrapuntal biographies about the two of them I released now over a decade-and-a-half ago—a new edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and True to Life, respectively—as a way into some of these issues.

As different as the two artists are (and they often conceive of each other as diametrical opposites), they do have many things in common: for starters the extent to which they are both largely self-taught in matters beyond the art world (and in particular science), and how both of them are so endlessly, omnivorously curious.

Starting with Irwin. If one had asked him back in 1965, about a decade into his artistic career, how he viewed the relationship between his activity and that of a scientist, he might well have replied that he saw none whatsoever. By 1970, however, after he'd been working for over a year on an Art and Technology project at the LA County Museum, which paired him with life-sciences engineer Ed Wortz of NASA and Garrett Aerospace, he had developed a rich sense of the interpenetration of the two endeavors. “Take a chemist, for example,” he elaborated for me one afternoon, a few years later:

He starts out with a hypothesis about what might be created if he combined a few chemicals and he begins by simply doing trial and error. Two-thirds of this and one-third of that, and he marks down the result. He tries one-third of this and one-third of that plus one-third of something else; and then he tries one-quarter and three-quarters; and he proceeds on that basis, a sort of yes-no trial and error.

What the artist does is essentially the same. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what it is you're setting out to do (a figurative painting or nonfigurative or whatever). Say you're going to paint a figurative painting about that model over there and the trees outside behind her and the oranges on the table. It's just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, ‘N-n-no.’ You sort of erase it out, you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing. The only difference is the character of the product.

Let's say at a particular point the scientist gets what he has set out to get, he arrives at what he projected would happen if he mixed this particular combination of chemicals in the right way. But the same thing is true of the artist when he finally gets to the right combination. He stops. He knows he's finished.

For Irwin, however, if art is in many ways like science, it is at the same time not science, and the ways in which the two differ are as revealing as their similarities. “Once the scientist is finished,” he went on,

you can look back over his notes to consider the precise sequence of yes-no weighings that brought him to that solution. It's all quite logical and structured. The artist, on the other hand, keeps no such record (although historians would love it if he did). Rather he literally paints over his errors. Six months later when you ask him, ‘Why did you stop there?’ and he says, ‘Well, because it felt right,’ his answer may not seem acceptable from a logical point of view—I mean, it seems as if he just chanced upon the final version. But in fact it’s quite reasonable. Given the basic fundamentals, he’s tried just about every damn combination possible, every way possible, until he’s finally arrived at what makes sense to him. The critical difference is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. In other words, he uses himself as the measure. Whereas the scientist measures out of an external logic process and makes his decision finally on whether it fits the process in terms of various external abstract measures.

Elsewhere Irwin has characterized this distinction as that between logic and reason. It's funny because he would always talk to me about logic or reason and, for a long time, I thought they were the same thing. But the distinction, as he explained it to me one day, is that I can reason, but I cannot logic. I use logic. Another afternoon, Irwin phrased it this way:

Scientists tend to operate through a logical process in the material world. In science, it seems necessary that your facts be concrete, repeatable and predictable, which means there has to be an existing reliable form of measure. And the only reliable forms of measure as far as scientists are concerned are pure abstractions—that is, abstract systems that can be overlaid onto the world of experience. Euclidean geometry or clocks or scales are pure abstractions. You can count on them to be same every time, and as long as you have that kind of measure, then what you're getting can be held to be factual, as it were, in line with the original hypothesis or proved in performance.

Irwin however argues that the artist's enterprise is different both in terms of its way of measuring and what it sets out to measure:

Reasoning appears to be more confused, more haphazard, partly because of the scale of what it tries to deal with. The logical, in a sense, seems more successful because it cuts the scale down. In fact, that's what makes it logical: it takes a very concise cut in the world {we're back to Descartes, here} and simply defines or refines by deduction the properties of that cut. But it never deals with the overall complexities of the situation. It only applies within the confines in which it operates, so it seems much clearer.

In this context, I'm reminded of the digital maven Jaron Lanier who once wrote about the way that “Information systems need to have information in order to run. But information under-represents reality. What makes something fully real is that it's impossible to fully represent it to completion” (going on to elaborate: “A digital image of a painting is forever a re-presentation, not a real thing. A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing. An oil painting changes over time; cracks appear on its face. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.”)

Lanier / Welty / Kant.

Such that again we're back with Nicholas of Cusa: Information is the million-sided polygon, whereas The Real is the circle. Or with Eudora Welty: “Making reality real is art’s responsibility.” Kant says somewhere that a work of art is a specific instance of a general law that cannot be stated.

“The artist, however,” and now I'm back with Irwin,

as a reasoning being, attempts to deal with the overall complexity of which all the logical subsystems are merely segments. He deals with them through the intuitive side of his human potential—and here inconsistencies are as meaningful as consistencies.

Things that would fall outside the scientist’s purview are precisely the kinds of things that activate the artist's curiosity. Irwin went on to talk about Leonardo, and the days when, as we have seen, science and art were more closely tied together, and about what then happened across the 18th century, with the rise of logic, which is the organizing principle of our civilization today, and the way in which, from that point forward, art began to fall away from all of that.

The civilization which you and I live in makes most of its critical decisions based on logic. I feel that maybe 150 years ago, which is a legacy we're now having to deal with, art began to drop out of that; it began to become less logical. Even though it proceeded logically, it found questions that could not be answered logically.

Hockney / Irwin.

Now I want to go over to Hockney for a few seconds. After I published the original edition of my book about Irwin—my first, back in 1982—I got a call from Hockney, whom I’d never met before. He said he'd been reading the book and though he disagreed with just about everything in it, he couldn't get it out of his head, and might I be interested in coming over to discuss things? Hockney is obviously a much more figurative artist, and Irwin a more abstract and perceptual one, though in the end it seems to me that they evince far more similarities than either is prepared to acknowledge. Both of them, for one thing, believe that cubism was the most important development during the last century, and it was not merely a historical style or fashion, nor even a project confined to the artistic realm, that indeed if you were to take it seriously you would see that it proposed a revolution in our entire way not just of seeing but of being in the world—a liberation from the tyrannical hegemony of one-point perspective that had been holding sway for the previous four hundred years, with all that that entailed in terms of hierarchical relations—and a revolution that is still far from complete. Indeed, and here the divergence begins, each believes himself to be the true heir of that revolution: that if you took the cubist revolution seriously, you’d be doing the kind of thing he was doing and specifically not the sort of art that the other one was doing. The text I went on to compose for Hockney, covering the photocollage work he was at the time launching into, thus served, in addition to being an overview of that work, as a sort of refutation of Irwin’s interpretation of history. Just as the retrospective catalog I subsequently composed for Irwin in part functioned as his response to Hockney, and so on, in a sort of back-and-forth call-and-response that has been going on for over forty years now. Even though the two have never actually met! And even though, as I say, the two seem to me to agree on much more than they disagree, if they could only hear each other. (Such at any rate was part of my intention in gathering up all my writings about each of them into those two parallel and contrapuntal books: to bring out those crosscurrents, while at the same time trying to be true to each, and in a sense to lay the argument to rest.)

Anyway, as I was starting to say, a few years on in those conversations, Hockney’s interest in cubism brought him into an ever more intense engagement with the revolutions in physics that were taking place around the same time. “I was at a friend's house in Canada,” he recalled for me one day,

and I was just browsing through some of his books about physics. And in one of them there were two or three sentences that got me going. Coming back, I picked up several other books and to my amazement I found that I could follow them and their arguments. I mean, quantum physics is something way outside my ordinary understanding or involvement, but I quickly found incredible connections with the sorts of things I was concerned about. For instance, in the old Newtonian view of the world, in Newtonian physics {or as we might call it in the present context, in post-Cartesian physics}, it's as if the world exists outside of us. It's over there, out there. It works mechanically and it will do so with or without us. In short, we're really not part of nature; it virtually comes to that. Whereas modern physics has increasingly thrown that model into question and shown how that cannot be. Mr.Einstein makes things more human by making measurement at least relative to us, or anyway, to some observer. The supposedly neutral viewpoint is obliterated.

There can be no measurement without a measurer. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is, of course, highly technical and specialized. It deals with a paradox in particle physics, showing how if you attempt to measure the velocity of a given particle you won't be able to identify its exact location and vice versa. Previous to this, of course, scientists believed that given enough technical advancements, they would eventually be able to measure anything. But Heisenberg showed that this was not just a problem of not yet having the right measuring devices, but the problem was inherent in the nature of physical reality itself. The old conception of scientific inquiry had gone on as if we could measure the world as if we weren't in it. Heisenberg showed that the observer, in effect, affects that which he is observing so that some of those old borders and boundaries begin to blur. Just as they do with cubism.

“But perhaps my greatest excitement along these lines,” he continued, “came from reading a then fairly recent book by physicist David Bohm entitled Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Just a second.” He bounded out of his chair, out of the house, over to the studio, returning a few minutes later, flipping through an obviously well-thumbed copy of the book. Here, listen to this. He proceeded to read a long passage from Bohm’s introduction: “The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality he thinks about,” Bohm writes (and Hockney read), “is of course firmly embedded in our tradition. But general experience along with a great deal of scientific knowledge suggests that such a division cannot be maintained consistently.”

After he’d read several more paragraphs along these lines, Hockney put down the book, thoroughly invigorated.

You can see why I was so excited. That insistence on the need to break down borders, to entertain the interconnectedness of things and of ourselves with things; the notion that in science today it is no longer possible to have ideas about reality without taking our consciousness into account. And beyond that just the language that Bohm shares with that of other physicists. They’re always talking about ‘overall worldview,’ the need for ‘new horizons’ or ‘wider perspectives’ or ‘a new picture of reality’—all of these visual metaphors, which a painter of pictures can understand and which have relevance for how he thinks about his own pictures. There's that famous phrase of Gombrich's about the triumph of Renaissance perspective—‘We have conquered reality’ {which, again, in our context is basically the neo-Cartesian boast}—a phrase that has always seemed to me such a Pyrrhic victory, as if reality were somehow separate from us and the world now hopelessly dull because everything was now known and accounted for. These physicists, by contrast, were suggesting a much more dynamic situation, and I realized how deeply what they were saying had to do with how we depict the world, not what we depict but the way we depict it.

And he goes on from there.

Which brings us back to Irwin. Because for all his thoughts on the differences between science and art, Irwin has nevertheless come to feel that “at the periphery of any body of knowledge,” whether we're speaking about chemistry, physics, mathematics, psychology, or art, there are laborers who are working beyond the sovereignty of the techniques of their disciplines. They are all guided principally by reason, as opposed to logic, quite simply because past a certain point the tether of their logic no longer extends. (Or more accurately phrased, perhaps, it is they who are the ones extending it.) These researchers, in Irwin's view, have more to do with each other than they do with the technicians in their respective disciplines. He has dubbed their colleagueship the dialogue of immanence. As he explains,

I really feel that there is this kind of dialogue of immanence, that certain questions become demanding and potentially answerable at a certain point in time, and that everyone involved on a particular level of asking questions, whether he's a physicist or a philosopher or an artist, is essentially involved in the same questions. They are universal in that sense. And although we may use different methods to come at them, even different thought forms in terms of how we deal with them—and we will eventually use a different methodology in terms of how we innovate them—still, really those questions are happening at the same moment in time. So that when we find these so-called accidental interrelationships between art and science, I don't think they're accidental at all.

Another word that Irwin uses in this context is inquiry. All these researchers are engaged in their own way in the process of inquiry. And the most salient feature of inquiry is its open-endedness. It is pursued for no reason whatsoever; it is the project of the passionately curious. The wilderness is stalked by explorers without maps and without any particular goals, and their principal compass is their reason.

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The late Freeman Dyson, writing in The New York Review of Books, once argued that “The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school, falsely, that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”

Coming from the other side, James Baldwin once wrote, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been occluded by the answers.”

In closing I’d like to evoke a few last thoughts from other people. One of my favorite writers is The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier. He once had a wonderful piece in the magazine which was called “Bear News,”

one of those pieces which only goes to show that a real writer can make a marvelous piece out of just about anything. In this case, he had been collecting clippings of bear-human encounters, and he eventually decided to inventory the results, concluding finally as to how

It's possible to walk for a long time through the woods and not see much of anything. Beautiful scenery makes its point quickly; then you have to pay attention or it starts to slide by like a looped background in a Saturday-morning cartoon. A pinecone falls from one limb to another, a rock clatters down a canyon, and your own thoughts talk on inside your head. People sometimes say that what is great about bears, and especially grizzlies, is the large tracks of wilderness that they imply—that a good bear population implies a healthy, unspoiled habitat. But bears don't simply imply wilderness—bears are wilderness. Bears are what all the trees and rocks and meadows and mountains and drainages must add up to. When you see a bear, the spot where you see it becomes instantly different from everyplace you've seen. Bears make you pay attention. They keep the mountains from turning into a blur, and they stop yourself from bullying you like nothing else in nature. A woods with a bear in it is real to a man walking through it in a way that a woods with no bear in it is not. Roscoe Black {—and how I love that name, it’s perfect in this context!—}, a man who survived a grizzly attack in Glacier Park several years ago, described the moment when the bear had him on the ground. ‘He laid on me for a few seconds, not doing anything.... I could feel his heart beating against my heart.’ The idea of that heart beating someplace just the other side of ours is what makes people read about bears and tell stories about bears and argue about bears and theorize about bears and dream about bears. Bears are one of the places in the world where the big mysteries run close to the surface.

I began with some poems and I think I’ll end with a poem as well. This one is from Tomas Tranströmer, the great, great Swedish poet. (In the old days I used to say how if there were any justice in the world he would have been awarded the Nobel Prize a long time ago, but unfortunately the Nobel Prize was given by Swedes and they appeared to be too shy and self-effacing to give one to one of their own—but then, in 2011, they went and proved me wrong, properly honoring him after all.)

At any rate, he had a great poem called “Sentry Duty,” here translated by Robert Bly. Apparently in Sweden they have, or used to have, some form of universal conscription; everyone had to serve in the army for a year or something like that, to guard the Finnish border, or some such. And this is a poem about one of the nights, back in his younger days, when he’d been staked out, doing just that.

I'm ordered out to a big hump of stones
as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the Iron Age.
The rest are still back in the tent sleeping,
stretched out like spokes in a wheel.

In the tent the stove is boss: it is a big snake
that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.
But it is silent out here in the spring night
among chill stones waiting for the dawn.

Out here in the cold I start to fly
like a shaman, straight to her body—some
places pale from her swimming suit.

The sun shone right on us. The moss was hot.
I brush along the side of warm moments,
but I can't stay there long.
I'm whistled back through space—
I crawl among the stones. Back to here and now.

Task: to be where I am.
Even in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation does some work on itself.

Task: to be where I am. Even in this solemn and absurd role: I am still the place where creation does some work on itself. {!}

Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks
take on color now, the frostbitten
forest flowers form a silent search party
after something that has disappeared in the dark.

But to be where I am...and to wait.
I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.
Things not yet happened are already here! I
feel that. They're just out there:

a murmuring mass outside the barrier.
They can only slip in one by one.
They want to slip in. Why? They do
one by one. I am the turnstile.

To be the turnstile, and to wait. To be the place where Creation gets to do a little work on itself. One could hardly do better by way of characterization of the scientist’s lot, and the artist’s. Only attend.

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THE A-V ROOM

Following on from our triptych in memory of Sinead O’Connor last week:

In the flattening manner of so much of American culture, O’Connor was probably best known on these shores for the supposedly career-destroying scandal of her appearance on Saturday Night Live back in 1992 in which she capped a powerfully raw a capella cover of Bob Marley’s “War” by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II in a slashing denunciation of the Catholic Church’s terrible record on child abuse (a good decade before such pronouncements were even remotely sanctioned). But that O’Connor’s own spirituality might well have been far more layered than the simple atavistic atheism impugned to her at the time is evinced in this astonishing cover of Mary Magdalene’s aria “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar:

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

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NEXT ISSUE

Not sure, but give us a break: This is our fiftieth issue! We need to catch our breath. But we will and you’ll see…

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