art and science similarities, differences and interactions: special issue || the role of scientific...

Leonardo

The Role of Scientific Concepts in ArtAuthor(s): Jesús R. SotoSource: Leonardo, Vol. 27, No. 3, Art and Science Similarities, Differences and Interactions:Special Issue (1994), pp. 227-230Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576057 .

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INTERACTION

The Role of Scientific Concepts in Art

Jesus R. Soto

To be sure, when the pioneer of science sends out the inquisitive antennae of his mind, he must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not born of deduction, but indeed of creative artistic imagination.

Max Planck

Circumstances require that I should limit this paper in length, and consequently it can only be viewed as an outline in which I introduce several examples of the complex relations between art and science. Therefore, my discussion will be limited to a consideration of some of the issues involved and will consequently be presented in a rather schematic fashion.

The relationship that exists between art and science cannot be reduced to a simple case of an artist's appropriation and application of scientific methods and concepts. Art is not the illustration of scientific ideas; there is no cause-and-effect relationship between the two fields. Art and science are engaged in a common struggle to confront universal questions.

I consider Art with a capital A (and I use the term unashamedly) not as a way of speculating about beauty, but above all as a form of knowledge, a kind of sensitive thought embedded in the general context of a culture that it directly helps to create. Therefore it is never a mere illustration of the ideas engendered by that culture.

I will begin my demonstration of this assertion by dealing with one of the characteristic aspects of art with which I have

Fig. 1. Ambivalencia en el espacio color No. 25, wood and metal, 150 x 150 cm, 1979.

. . . IL

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always felt a kinship: movement. Artists have always been vitally in- terested in movement; both Lascaux and Altamira bear wit- ness to this age-old concern. Other cultures nearer to us in time-those of Egypt, Assyria and Greece-manifested the need to make the figures in their painting and sculpture move. Later on, from the Middle Ages until the eve of the Renaissance, the artist felt compelled to represent the same figure several times-either in the same space, or in succes- sive spaces-in order to suggest the passage of time and the idea

ABSTRACT

The author examines how the new concepts of space, time and matter, put forth in science at the beginning of the century, can transform the imaginary world of artists. In his opinion, artists should not try to study the details of scientific theories or concepts, but should instead grasp the fun- damental principles and general philosophy underlying these ideas and use them in artistic research. The author illustrates his discussion with examples of his artwork.

of a series of separate actions united by their meaning. In spite of the permanence of this concern throughout his-

tory, there have also been times when painters have wanted to represent moments of reality. What could be more illogical, especially from a modern point of view, since we all know per- fectly well that continuity in time precludes freezing any in- stant, no matter how short it may be?

One of the most interesting aspects of the parallelism between art and science concerns the problem of space and its relation to matter, as well as the behavior, measurements, char- acteristics and dimensions of matter. In the days when the universe was viewed as a huge mechanism in which bodies or masses were carried along in space and time by certain forms, all of which could be measured by Euclidean geometry, the painter's task consisted of placing bodies or shapes in three- dimensional space according to the laws of perspective.

In 1854 Riemann determined the point of departure for the revision of classical geometry [1], and thus elliptic geometry succeeded Euclidean geometry. In elliptic geometry no parallel to a given line can be drawn from a given point; the concept of the infinity of the straight line was thus discarded.

The notion of perspective was challenged. Cezanne made history by replacing monocular perspective with "polyvision," born of the movement of the artist (and thus, vicariously, the viewer) around a stimulus belonging to the real world. The strong emotion that takes hold of us when we look at one of

Jesus R. Soto (artist), 10, rue Villehardouin, 75003 Paris, France.

Manuscript solicited byJacques Mandelbrojt. Translated by Barbara and Yves Lemeunier.

Received 19July 1993.

This paper was given at a colloquium entitled "La Dimensione Scientifica dello Sviluppo Culturale," which was held in Rome from 30 September to 2 October 1987 and sponsored by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga- nization), the European Academy of Arts, Science and Letters, and the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei.

LEONARDO, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 227-230, 1994 227 ? 1994 ISAST



Cezanne's paintings stems from the fact that for the first time in history, he gave us the pictorial vision of a new concept of space. Cezanne settled in Provence in 1883. Phoebe Pool has written:

Although the Impressionists were en- grossed in their struggle to satisfy their artistic ambitions, it is unlikely that they were not aware of the scientific articles in the newspapers that everybody read. Cezanne's mother and sister had a subscription to La Gazette des Beaux- Arts in 1865, when Charles Blanc was writing his articles on color. Cezanne showed his interest in them in a note in La Gazette, which deals with one of his sketches for L'Apotheose de Delacroix. If Cezanne knew about those articles, Pissarro, with his analytic mind, must have known about them too [2].

By upsetting traditional geometry, Rie- mann undoubtedly could never have

imagined that, immediately afterwards, Cezanne was to do away with aerial perspective in painting his landscapes of the Sainte Victoire mountain; still less could Riemann have suspected what the result would be: the spatial ambiguity of Cezanne's still lifes, in which the support (the table) is drawn in a vertical position, but is covered with objects (baskets of

fruit, bottles, etc.) drawn from a horizon- tal viewpoint. Thus Newton's laws of gravity were contradicted.

I would like to note a paradox here: by starting with typically Euclidean elements-a cone, a cylinder and a sphere- Cezanne ended up with an antithetical result. The perception of his famous "certain something" was possibly nothing other than an intuition close to

Riemann's, since he transformed the Eu- clidean volumetric concept into a non-Eu-

clidean spatio-temporal hypothesis, and in

doing so, sowed the seed of abstraction. And why did this seed of abstraction

bloom? In the art of the postimpres- sionists, a square (Fig. 1) or any other

geometric shape, unlike a figurative ele-

ment, is not limited to a system of rela-

tionships and periodic measurement: a

tree, for example, can reach a height of 30 meters or so, whereas a square has the property of being "infinidimen-

sional," or having no limit to its size. From a conceptual point of view, the dimensions of an abstract element surpass the traditional parameters of measurement. To this can be added the discov-

ery in the 1950s of serial structures (Fig. 2), which defined the work of art as part of a universal whole, thus eliminating all

possibility of anthropomorphic relations.

Can it be contended that abstraction is a form of objective reality? I am certain that it can. In the words of a conclusion written by Henri Poincare:

What we call objective reality is in the last resort what is common to several thinking beings and what could be common to all. This common element, as we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed in the laws of math- ematics. Therefore this harmony is the sole objective reality, the only truth that we can attain; and if I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, we can easily un- derstand the price we ought to ascribe to the slow painful progress which little by little reveals it to us [3].

The situation in which we find our- selves here is analogous to the process of

development of contemporary physics, particularly quantum physics. Indeed,

Fig. 2. Etude pour une serie, wood, 100 x 100, 1952- 1953. (Photo: Andre Morain)

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the new referential systems of causality, movement, mass, energy, space and time are closely linked to the preoccupations of today's art. These common preoccupations concern the ambiguity of space (Fig. 3 and Color Plate B No. 2), its structural plasticity, the instability of

matter, the essential value of energy and the random condition of the relation-

ships between these elements, which take precedence over the emphasis placed on the elements themselves. By accepting the fact that the impact of scientific research can transform the traditional course of language inherent in a work of art, it has been possible to ascer- tain that artists react to this impact by transforming their imaginary worlds to achieve ends that are different from those obtained in the field of sciences.

Furthermore, as W. Heisenberg stated in The Nature of Contemporary Physics:

There is really no reason to believe that the image of the universe given to us by the natural sciences has directly influ- enced the dialogue between man and nature, that of the modern artist for example. On the other hand, we are entitled to presume that the changes in the bases of modern natural science are symptomatic of the profound trans- formations in the foundations of our existence, which in turn have definitely brought about reactions in other areas of life. From this point of view, he who attempts to penetrate the essence of nature, either to create or to explain, may find it important to wonder what changes in the image of nature have been effected by science in the course of the last few decades [4].

In a monograph devoted to my work, I ventured to write the following inter-

pretation:

I believe that it is dangerous for an artist to give himself over to a systematic study of any science. It is not dangerous for himself, but for his artistic activity, for indubitably, the world of scientific knowledge, which is as fathomless as the world of art, may absorb him in its com- plexity and prevent him from returning to his art. In my opinion, he must take another path; he must study the philosophy of science, search for the fundamen- tal principles that have led scientists to ponder determinedly over certain phe- nomena and see what other possibilities can be utilized in artistic research [5].

It is a fact that in the twentieth cen-

tury the system of an immediate rapport between man and the world no longer functions as the standard by which the world is measured. This explains why, in

quantum physics as well as in abstract art

(and especially in constructivist abstract

art), we find it necessary to create new words and concepts in order to explain

228 Soto, The Role of Scientific Concepts in Art



and interpret the results we obtain. Even if we use existing vocabulary and distinc- tions, it is still necessary to be constantly aware of their limits, which must be defined each time we use them. As

Heisenberg reminds us,

The concepts of classical physics make up the language which we use to de- scribe the conditions in which our ex- periments are carried out and to com- municate the results-however, the use of these concepts is limited by unstable correspondences; therefore when we use these classical concepts, we must never lose sight of their limited scope [6].

Further inquiries into this matter

might clearly reveal the existence in art of a manner of thinking similar to that of science. In Impressionism, Pool wrote,

In France, from the first half of the century on, there was a growing fasci- nation for science. When Gautier became editor of the Revue de Paris in 1851, his policy, which at the outset was solely literary and aesthetic, was rapidly modified to include scientific articles to respond to insistent public demand. It is noteworthy that men who were ba- sically non-scientists like Delacroix and Baudelaire made reference to scientific terms and discoveries [7].

Emphasis must also be placed on the fact that for painters, as for writers, the word "truth" replaced the word "beauty" as a term of reference. Pissarro and Seurat studied the work of the physicists H. Helmholtz, J. Maxwell and 0. Rood, who observed that the eye of the viewer can reconstruct the brilliance of the

light it receives from the prismatic col- ors that compose that light.

Here is yet another example: when Cezanne and, later on, the cubists tried to redefine a new space-time concept, they came up against the impossibility of

separating form and matter. In the land-

scapes of the Sainte Victoire, the moun- tains and especially the skies all have the same pictorial density as the fore-

ground, which unequivocally contra- dicts aerial perspective; the blue of the sky penetrates the roof and vice versa. With cubism, the decomposition of the observed shape was to attain a similar result: a simultaneous distribution of the

images received by the artist as he moved around the object, or polyvision.

I do not intend to establish a strict

equivalence between observations on the

contemporary plastic arts and the theory of relativity (which postulates the equivalence of matter and energy, as well as the

we are confronted with two separate modes of thought whose working methods made it impossible to separate elements that had hitherto been conceived of as autonomous entities. Moreover, we can note an astonishing parallelism between the drawings of Planck and Cezanne, whose work brought about fun- damental changes in contemporary thought and heralded, respectively, the

theory of relativity (1905) and cubism (1907-1908); it is obvious that in cubism "the center is both everywhere and no- where."

Velazquez comes irresistibly to my mind when I advocate knowledge as the cornerstone of art. Velazquez intuited and materialized situations far ahead of the thought of his day. Whereas painting was considered a window that opened onto the world and, consequently, a

spectacle for an exterior viewer (a vision shared, it seems to me, by the entire scientific world of the period), Velazquez created Las Meninas [8] in which the traditional situation is explicitly reversed: The painter is no longer in front of a scenic space in which there is a succes- sion of elements to be painted, but im- mersed in a space with other viewers, after the fashion of the commedia dell'arte. Las Meninas prefigures the "penetrable" works of the twentieth cen-

tury in which there are no longer any viewers, only participants in works of art that have become action (Fig. 4).

Let us consider a scientific remark by

Heisenberg:

Exponents of atomism have been obliged to admit that their science is only a link in the endless chain of dia-

Fig. 3. Cubos ambiguos, wood and metal, 100 x 100 cm, 1958.

logues between man and nature and that it is no longer possible to make simple references to nature "per se." The natural sciences always presuppose man, and, as Bohr has stated, we must realize that we are not spectators but actors on the stage of life [9].

THE IMPACT OF EINSTEIN The Einsteinian revolution was without a doubt the most significant event in the transformation of thought that has taken place in the twentieth century. Its

impact on artists at the beginning of the

century made possible a transformation of the space-time concept and, from that moment to the present day, the plastic arts have constantly conveyed anxiety and stimulated the most audacious creative proposals.

Although it is true that when the theory of relativity was first put forward, only a handful of fortunate scientists understood it, it nonetheless challenged all of the structures of the "intellectual" world.

Never had there been such efferves- cence in the field of culture-nor such a

comparable wealth of creative possibilities-as in the 20 years that followed the

presentation of the theory of relativity, which saw the birth of dadaism, cubism, surrealism, abstract art and futurism, to mention only those movements with the

largest followings. I am convinced that Einstein himself never dreamed of such turmoil; moreover, it is improbable that he could have followed all of those revo-

lutionary proclamations. In 1920 Gabo created his virtual vol-

ume Construction Cinetique (1919-1920), which was undoubtedly a highlight after

impossibility of thinking of space and time as two separate entities). But it does seem important to me to point out that

Soto, The Role of Scientific Concepts in Art 229



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the cubist movement [10]. In this sculpture, volume is not an opaque mass ruled by gravity, but an impression created by the modulation of "space-light" produced by the vibration of a wire at a

given speed-an effect that is reminis- cent of the flight of the dragon fly. Al- most half a century later, in 1966, Gabo confided to Jean Clay, "I wanted to create the simplest form possible. At the same time I had to integrate time and draw a volume in space. Today when I observe the stem vibrating with what seem almost like heartbeats, I can't help laughing, laughing for joy" [11].

In 1919 abstract art made its appear- ance in motion pictures with Eggenling and Richter. In 1922 Moholy-Nagy be-

gan building his Space Modulator, a work that prefigured future incursions of cy- bernetics in the world of art.

In 1925 Duchamp created a white, motor-driven, rotating half-sphere in which he drew a black spiral; when it moved, the half-sphere became alter-

nately convex and concave, without en-

abling the viewer to anticipate the moment of change from one to the other.

It is indispensable to mention the work of Piet Mondrian and of Kasimir Malevich, with a view to future analysis. These two great masters of the first half of the twentieth century wavered along the imperceptible and probably uncer- tain borderline between physics and

metaphysics. In his search for a basic structure, Mondrian established a con- nection that has become dear to contem-

porary scientific philosophy: He com- bined objective process with the mystic subjectivity of Oriental meditation.

Malevich, especially in his painting White on White (1918), stretched the con-

ceptual relativism of cubism to the limits of the absolute. Planck wrote:

The so-called theory of relativity itself is based on something absolute, that is to

Fig. 4. Pnrable, installation at the Palacio de Velazquez in Madrid, 1982.

say the well-defined metric theory of a universe in four dimensions or a space- time continuum; and it is a singularly stimulating undertaking to discover the absolute which alone confers full meaning on what passes for relative. Indeed it should be specified that the "interval of the universe," that is to say the spatio-temporal interval, is a tensorial invariable [12].

In the 1960s there blossomed a number of conceptual artists whose preoccupations were close to those of philosophy and even metaphysics (by metaphysics I mean physics that has not

yet been demonstrated). These pro- cesses are not too remote from the preoccupations entertained by contemporary science on uncertainty in the

knowledge of microsomal structure. I have always felt that there was a kinship between the intrinsic anguish in the

conception of emptiness in the work of Yves Klein and that of fullness in the work of Arman, as well as in Lucio Fontana's determination in lacerating a two-dimensional canvas to create

pluridimensional space. There remains for me to define my

point of view on the contemporary process in which I am engaged: kinetic art. It is entirely possible that kinetic art, which involves the notion of the fourth dimension, may have undergone inaccurate

qualitative interpretations or may be only partially exploitable in the "laboratory" of the researcher in the plastic arts. Whatever the case may be, for those of us who are artists, the fourth dimension bears an unequivocal name: movement.

This name does not refer to the movement suggested or proposed by traditional painting through the establish- ment of conventional lines known in classical vocabulary as rhythms. Rather, it refers to two sorts of movement: that which is produced by artificial or natural forces and virtual movement, which is

created by a modulation of space-time relations.

We must note in passing the research devoted to "environments" in which

space is the key element in the work. I do not intend, however, to expatiate at

greater length on a phenomenon that has played a primordial role in my work. In conclusion, here is a short extract from a text I wrote in 1965:

We are aware of the existence of Rela- tions in all the lucid moments of our behavior.

We marvel at the laws of chance, without realizing that we are merely becoming aware of realities we never dreamed of.

The elements plunge into a work of art as a fish plunges into water; their di- rection, speed, accidents and positions are all ordered by a surrounding whole on which they are dependent and which conditions their variations. Their force can be measured by the number of their revelations.

This state in which the contemporary artist finds himself, consciously or un-

consciously, has endowed the art of our time with an astonishing richness of possibilities [13].

Acknowledgment This article was translated by Barbara and Yves Lemeunier, thanks to a contribution from the Uni- versity of Provence, France.

References and Notes

1. Max Planck, Autobiographie scientifique et derniers ecrits (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1960) pp. 152- 153.

2. Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967).

3. Henri Poincare, La Valeur de la science (Paris: Flammarion, 1970) pp. 23-24.

4. Werner Heisenberg, La Nature dans la physique contemporaine (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1962) pp. 9-10.

5. MarcelJoray andJesfis Rafael Soto, Soto, French/ German Ed. (Neutchatel, Switzerland: Editions du Griffon, 1984) p. 46.

6. Werner Heisenberg, Physique et philosophie (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1961, 1971) p. 35.

7. Pool [2].

8. See the reproduction of Velazquez's Las Meninas in the article by Serge Salat and Francoise Labbe in this issue.

9. Heisenberg [4] pp. 18-19.

10. Reproduced in L'Art en mouvement, exh. cat. (Saint-Paul, France: Fondation Maeght, 1992) p. 135.

11. Jean Clay, Visages de l'art moderne (Lausanne: Editions Recontre, 1969).

12. Planck [1] p. 96.

13. Signals X (London) 1, No. 10 (1965) cover text.

230 Soto, The Role of Scientific Concepts in Art

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