Dear Art in America: Letter on Thomas McEvilley’s Monochrome Math
H. L. Resnikoff
I formed my high regard for Thomas McEvilley’s illuminating insight and
solid scholarship when I read his “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’
in Twentieth-Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984,” so I was
surprised to see that, in his review (1) of Bernar Venet’s recent math-based
murals and paintings, he commits the error he once decried, making the “…decision
to … wrench [the objects] out of context, calling them to heel in the formalist
defense of modernism…” (p.157) (2), to use McEvilley’s own wise words.
This gives the impression that he is unsure of his subject.
We have some shared
experience. McEvilley and I were, for a number of years, colleagues at Rice University.
He went on to write about art and math; I went on to chair a math department
and write about art.
McEvilley writes
that Venet’s titles, which begin with the phrase “Related to:”,
“…seems to indicate that the painting’s presence is not entirely
identical with the mathematical formula, that there is something more added by
the art context: materials, color, art historical context,” but this approach
“breaches the principle of economy, on which all science is based: that
explanatory principles be kept to the smallest possible number” (p.157).
It is more economical to suppose that the artist has adopted a judicious policy
of caution (3) since he admits that he is not in a position to be quite certain
what the subjects of his work are really about.
Although the artist
may intend that “these pictorial suggestions should be read as accidental,
like forms seen in clouds, and not as attempts to smuggle representation into
the paintings,” the informed viewer—of whom there are many more than
either the reviewer or the artist may realize—will necessarily see them
in a richer way, fully loaded with both conceptual as well as representational
meaning. To place this in context, how would—how could—someone unfamiliar
with the English language or its alphabetic characters understand the meanings
implicit in Robert Indiana’s Love (1966) other than to be “intrigued
by the inaccessibility of their contents”? How would—how could—someone
unfamiliar with the language of mathematics understand the meanings implicit
in the images Venet has appropriated? The reviewer might have addressed how the
lack of ability to understand the meaning of a visual work limits the ability
of the viewer, and the reviewer, to appreciate it. Perhaps we will be treated
to his insights on some of the deeper issues raised by these paintings in a later
article. But we can make a small start here by remembering what McEvilley has
written earlier:
“Consider from the following anthropological example what absurdities one
can be led into by assuming that the look of things, without their meaning, is
enough to go on: In New Guinea, in a remote school taught by a local teacher,
I watched a class carefully copy an arithmetic lesson from the blackboard. The
teacher has written:
4 + 1 = 7 3 – 5 = 6 2 + 5 = 9
The students copied both his beautifully formed numerals and his errors.”
(p.159)
McEvilley notes
that “For Venet, it is the essential unavailability of the content [my emphasis],
its pristine seclusion—like a vestal virgin of hidden inner meanings to
which the viewer does not have access, that is the point” of his works.
Yet there are certainly more people who understand Related to: “A Parametric
Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order in Two Dimensions” than
there are art historians and critics. And these viewers see far more than the
“massive wave of arrows that seems to expand across the field of the painting.”
Where McEvilley sees an “unintended quasi-representational association”
(but how can he be certain?) of a cartoonlike face in Related to: “Dispersion
Relation for the Pion Propagator”, others might equally easily and more
accurately see the higher dimensional space that so intrigued Duchamp, here enriched
by beautiful structures that it would be out of place to describe in this letter.
According to the
review, Venet believes that there are three types of signification in visual
art. Traditional polysemy (We might say Related to: “Figurative Painting”),
modern pansemy (Related to: “Abstract Painting”), and his own innovation,
monosemy, “where the sign means itself and itself alone.” But these
math signs mean infinitely more than themselves alone. Placing them in the artworld
context of a painting should make them mean even more and cannot make them mean
less. They are not examples of monosemy, and the reviewer should have pointed
that out. These signs stand, like the ideas of Plato, for classes of innumerable
instances that share meaningful properties. They are grammatical, and often poetic,
combinations that are unique and charged with individual signification. One signification
may be the laws of the motion of the wind that propels the scudding clouds, made
visible to the mind by a massive wave of invisible arrows.
Art is a way of
telling us something important about the outer world of the sensations and the
inner world of belief and feelings, and about the relationship between them.
Some viewers (I am one) believe that the importance of art derives from the significance
of its metaphorical content. There are universal paintings whose meanings are
accessible to all, but they are the exception. In most cases, an artwork may
not be understandable to all because some knowledge is needed to unlock the artistic
significance of the work.
When McEvilley writes that “each painting’s content is simply a flatly
stated fact about how the physical world works, according to the science of our
day,” he gets it wrong two ways. The math paintings have nothing to do with
the science of the day. Venet thinks that his paintings will become “outdated”
when the formulas they carry are scientifically superseded, but the formulas
of math, as the pure expression of logical thought, are the most eternal truths
we have: they will last forever. Rather than being celebrated as humanity’s
certified success in the quest for immortality, both artist and reviewer confuse
the math reproduced by Venet with ephemeral scientific theories because neither
of them understands what they see.
Nor are these paintings,
whether science or math, more “flatly stated facts” than Malevich’s
powerfulBlack Painting, which hides within its flatly stated blackness meanings
of great power and philosophical depth for those who know how to read them.
“Finally,” McEvilley writes, “the viewer is left with the experience—delight
in colors, amusement at chance resemblances and a confrontation with an essential
unknowability.” I cannot do better than to respond with words that he wrote
in another, but not unrelated, context:
“In fact, I am saying something quite different—that these objects
fall outside the categories of our language, that this is the great freedom that
they offer us, and that a vast opportunity is lost when we force them into one
of the categories of our own language with its familiar and limited horizon of
intentionality.” (p.196).
_______________________
1 Thomas McEvilley, Monochrome Math, Art in America, April 2003, pp.108-113.
2 Quotations without page references refer to the review Monochrome Math. Page
references are to Thomas McEvilley, “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’
in Twentieth-Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984,” in Uncontrollable
Beauty, edited by Bill Beckley, Allworth Press, New York, 1998. pp. 149 et seq.
3 The implicit dangers have become explicit in the surely erroneous Related to:
“Causical Field Quantization” on p.110 of the review, which makes no
sense to anyone familar with the deep philosophical issues of causality that
are intertwined with quantum field theory. No doubt a mere misprint, it nevertheless
emphasizes the good sense in Venet’s titling policy.
