An exhibition and catalogue…
School of Visual Arts Commemorates 9/11: Art & Observance
by Art & Observance
An exhibition and catalogue
The following is an excerpt from Lucio Pozzi’s contribution to the catalogue.
(…)
On the 11th of September I painted a little landscape scene, copied from the photograph of a work of mine. Strangely, fate plays such odd tricks. I am not certain about this, but I gather the original might have been hanging among a group of watercolors in a corporate collection in the World Trade Center.
I’ve asked myself why I painted it that very day. I feel that the delicate vulnerability and the inutility of a little picture like that one are an answer to horror. It was not an evasive gesture, nor was it an act of hope or defiance. Art does not change the politics of the world. Art shall never convince our rulers that acting towards the millions of poor, sick, dying and hungry who dwell outside our gilded walls is not only charitable but the best self-defense.
A European artist friend, yesterday, found a cleft in the congested telephone network and reached me in New York. He said: "At this point, one cannot persist in making art." I answered: "Today I have painted a little watercolor and I shall paint another tomorrow." (…)
"Today the framed painting on the wall has become a decorative cipher without life and meaning, or else, to the more susceptible observer, an object of interest existing in a world distinct from his. Its frame is at once symbol and agent of an artificial duality of "vision" and "reality" or "image" and "environment," a plastic barrier across which man looks from the world he inhabits to the alien world in which the work of art has its being. That barrier must be dissolved: the frame, today reduced to an arbitrary rigidity, must regain its architectural spatial significance." Frederick Kiesler, 1942
Frederick Kiesler’s visionary concepts, stemming from his experimental architectural and theater designs begun in the 1920s, inform a number of contemporary art projects designed to regain architectural-spatial and symbolical significance, ranging from total installations employing traditional media to high-tech, multi-media environments. While it is axiomatic to point to Marcel Duchamp, Kiesler’s friend and sometime collaborator, as the conceptual ancestor behind many of the most inventive postmodernist installations, Kiesler’s integrated, synthetic, and dynamic projects set a trajectory toward a vast matrix of productive interdisciplinary relations (and deep affinities) between art and science. Kiesler’s overall project did not seek to emulate a Duchampian endgame. Instead, his prescience envisioned permeable systems and continuous exchange, or "Correalism," as he termed it, between humans and natural and technological systems. Kiesler drew up a stream of visionary plans based on themes of contiguity, permeability, and correlation, employing novel descriptions of "Environmental Design" and "Continuity and Continuous Tension in Structure and in Life Dynamics." Kiesler’s projects, including "City in Space" (1925), "Space Stage" (1924), "Space House" (1933), and "Endless House" (1959), did not favor the autonomy of a work of art in isolation from its surroundings. At the International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques in 1924, he sought an interactivity among observer, art, and the surrounding spatial context in order to activate the viewer, producing a dialogue between an engaged participant and works of art linked to the larger environment. His ideas were wide-ranging and challenging for his students and colleagues alike at Columbia University’s "Experimental Lab for Design Correlation" where he taught. His important text, "Contemporary Art Applied to the Storefront and its Display" (1929), predicted the emergence of television and an inkling of the power of the internet in the redefinition of museums ("the oxygen tents of art"): a ‘telemuseum’ with "sensitized panels which will act as receiving surfaces for broadcasted pictures… Just as operas are now transmitted over the air, so picture galleries will be. From the Louvre to you, from the Prado to you, from everywhere to you."
Kiesler had intuitively visualized both natural and technological dynamical systems as inter-connected and inter-related. He surmised that defining closed systems and drawing boundaries between them was arbitrary, reflecting a reductive dualism and linearity imposed onto a contiguous range of naturally occurring phenomena. Kiesler’s search for an extended architectural-spatial significance and the intersections of the languages of art and science, find serendipitous resonance in the projects of contemporary artists exploring ways to visualize and apprehend the implications of expansive new scientific theories of complex systems.
Ellen K. Levy, an artist working, exhibiting, and teaching in New York, had early on recognized the importance of Kiesler’s themes to the burgeoning art-and-science projects percolating in the 1970s and 1980s. After receiving an undergraduate degree in zoology at Mount Holyoke College, Levy pursued a graduate degree in painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, while working as a lab research assistant at Harvard as well as a medical illustrator. She was fascinated by the links and correlations between biological and architectural forms, nurtured during her childhood visits to the Museum of Natural History and the many art museums in her native New York. Levy’s discovery during her high school years of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book, "On Growth and Form" (1917), triggered her ongoing examination of the architecture of natural systems. Thompson’s illustrations and methodology compared living things and physical phenomena, showing the processes governing the growth of form. He exposed the underlying workings of nature through topological transformations. Levy’s interest in Thompson’s investigation into the morphologies of form dovetailed with Kiesler’s identification of the intersections among the visual arts, biological systems, and developing technologies. By the 1980s, Levy’s interdisciplinary dialogues deepened as she exhibited widely her mixed media paintings in galleries and in such venues as the New York Academy of Sciences (1984), the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C. (1985), and at NASA, where she executed a commission ("Challenger," 1986). Levy pursued an active engagement with emerging theories in the sciences, especially, nascent Complexity or Chaos Theory, which built upon and extended interdisciplinary exchange. The unprecedented convergence of Complexity Theory in the mid-1980s, energized by the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, and the development of the world wide web, genetic engineering and biotechnology, virtual reality, and robotics proved to be strong attractors to the artist-scientists of Levy’s generation.
Levy and her colleagues in the arts were eager to study the ways that order, structure, and pattern arise from apparently chaotic systems, finding in them parallels to aspects of the creative process in the studio that give rise to form. This complexity of interpenetrating structures and patterns on the edge of chaos exists in all man-made and natural systems and in social structures; it is ubiquitous, as Kiesler had speculated earlier. Levy’s aim was to bridge across the fields of science and art in order to understand and visualize the implications of the new mental/visual sets arising from Complexity Sciences which impact our perceptions about our place on earth and in the cosmos. For the artist, this search involves exploring and articulating creative processes and aesthetic content as well as employing new technological tools and resources. This cross-disciplinary approach involves an overlap of epistemological questions concerning the investigation of knowledge and ontological questions about the nature of existence and its meaning–a return to Kiesler’s initial eschewing of the artificial duality of rigid categories of "vision" and "reality" or "image" and "environment."
The Human Genome Project and the resulting speculation about the importance of "junk" DNA, which does not code for protein but may provide the actual regions or milieu for evolutionary change, have been catalysts for Levy’s recent work. Her interest in the interconnections among creative processes, genetic coding, and the implications of "junk" DNA, led to an invitation in 1996 to edit a special issue of "Art Journal," the College Art Association’s scholarly publication, on "Contemporary Art and the Genetic Code." Levy experiments with collaged and painted formats, weaving dynamic intersections of art historical, scientific, and historical moments and their visual symbolization across epochs. By interpreting her ideas in a variety of media—-chromogenic prints, video animation, computer imaging—-and combining these with traditional painting and collage methods, Levy achieves a density and apparent compression of space/time in which hybrid natural and man-made forms shift and pivot on their axes, setting in motion a panorama of surprising permutations of form. Fragmentary codes and topologies suggest a narrative flow of thought processes that seem always to slip into anti-narrative intervals, verging on entropy, chaos or bifurcation. Her images suggest that spontaneous, random reorganization at the edge of chaos and catastrophe can inform adaptive creativity and function in evolutionary survival. Levy’s projects derive from the continuous mining of complex systems, relational taxonomies, patent archives, and biological, technological, and artistic form-making. Levy sees the ways in which intelligible forms are created in nature, or in the studio or laboratory, as intimately linked to the processes of discerning, collecting, and patterning information in archives or museums, and in interpreting these elements in visual compendiums. Artwork becomes part of the larger, integrated evolutionary order, a notion of which Kiesler would have approved.
Levy has broached many of these convergent themes in her most recent project, a collaboration with her colleague, Philip Galanter, generative artist and Associate Director for Arts Technology at NYU’s Courant Institute. Together they have organized an important group exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, "Complexity: Art and Complex Systems," running from September 14 through November 24, 2002. This group exhibition is the first major museum exhibition about complex systems (www.newpaltz.edu/museum). The artists included deal with interrelated systems interpreted in many different media. Some of them work intuitively, while others create analytically; some produce metaphorical imagery and others unravel processes or visualize relationships. Levy and Galanter state: "Complex systems are those that include large numbers of components interacting in non-linear ways, often leading to unexpected behavior. Complexity sciences explore how parts are related to wholes, describing the interactions between environment, system, and observer. In common language one is reminded of the saying that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ Understanding art as a language, the historical development of art, and the creative process itself are all key areas in which art and complex systems have common ground." Exhibiting artists include both familiar and unfamiliar names: Mauro Annunziato, Manuel Baez, Jonathan Callan, Remo Campopiano and his collaborators Guy Marsden and Jonathan Schull, Nancy Chunn, Janet Cohen, Philip Galanter, Frank Gillette, David Goldes, Hans Haacke, Paul Hertz, Ellen K. Levy, Brian Lytle, Daro Montag, Jack Ox, Daniel Reynolds, Marianne Selsjord, John F. Simon Jr., Karl Sims, Nell Tenhaaf, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Leo Villareal. The bringing together of artists who have had long-standing engagements with Complexity Science and its ramifications is a significant artistic event.
When computers spewed out the first fractal shape, it took the form of a butterfly. The butterfly arose from graphing the changes in weather systems modeled by Edward Lorenz. The emergence of this literal visual phenomena embodied a metaphor of complex systems: a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can effect the course of a tornado in Texas. The complex dynamics of growth, weather patterns, traffic flow, populations, organizational behavior, epidemics, urban development and decay, or the rise and fall of civilizations, prove to be neither completely random nor completely deterministic. Levy and her colleagues seek out the often ‘traumatic’ jolt of visualizing these unexpected encounters at the edge of Complex Systems, which may disturb our mental equilibrium temporarily. But encounter and intrusion set in motion the process of becoming human.
