It's odd that at just the moment in time that time is
freezing in moments, that things are becoming more visible and definable, that
the world of art, in its way, became less so. Etienne Marey and Ed Muybridge displayed the acts of motion in slivers
of itself, captured and presented for study, images that had never been seen
before, while shortly after this William S. Hart transformed their intellectual
heritage and wrestled it into train robbers and kissing thieves at 16 frames
per second. And just as the segmentation
of motion had reached it highest modern heights, Marcel Duchamp, the great
artist-like chess master and comedian, presented the world, in 1912, with his
Nude Descending. This painting continued
on the steady track laid down in the 1860's by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, building on
their sense images, their descending denial of "detail", and made the human figure almost disappear.
It was Wassily Kandinsky in the next year who actually made
everything disappear--everything that is but color and disparate forms. In his painting
Improvisations there were no human or natural forms--it was the first
non-representational painting in history, with nothing at all being recognizable in his epochal work, showing people for the first time the "other" side of the mirror. Making things disappear, en plein air, performing an emparquementage, if
you will, is truly quite a work of art.
Kandinsky tried to relate the philosophy of his
approach in an inner-secretive, mysterious, occulty work called Concerning the
Spiritual in Art (1912). It is a lovely
book, with thick paper, very wide margins, beautifully printed, sumptuous even (in
the original)--but it makes the innovation of his art ever more unreachable,
more wispy--smoke without color, at least for me. The great Kasimir Malevich made a similar
attempt with similar results--at least, again, to me--trying to explain how he
eliminated natural forms and replaced them with rectangles, squares and
circles. Later, Malevich would begin to
replace color, working in white. He was
sublime.
Disappearance is not
necessarily sublime. Ralph Alpher and
Bob Herman got disappeared. With George
Gamow they hypothesized the Big Bang and predicted where the remnant of the heat
of the explosion (the so-called background radiation) would, could, be
found. Alpher and Herman were basically
correct in thei research (over the period of 1939-1949 figuring it would be
about 5-degrees Kelvin), but were basically a little sleepy over their results,
or at least until the numbers proved out to be good, when the background
radiation was “discovered” in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson with the Big Ear at
Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. It all bore
out, except, of course, their contribution—Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel for
their work, and Alpher and Herman got, well, nothing. (For a long, lovely article about Alpher see fellow Asheville resident Joe D'Agnese's article in Discover.)
Penzias and Wilson did arrive at their
findings independently of A+H, but that’s another story—that they were “Gone”,
even when their contributions were made known in the thrill of the more modern
discovery, was just not right. I met Alpher
and Herman together in the late ‘80’s, coming into my store for a visit with
books. Herman was pleasant and chuckly;
Alpher, not. His pissed-offedness at the
sleight of the background radiation work shone right through when discussing
Penzias and Wilson.
Einstein too slipped away a bit in what could have been a moment of monumental insight. Max Wertheimer, a colleague of Einstein’s who had a background in physics and was one of the founders of German gestalt psychology, had a chapter in a book of his called “Einstein: the Thinking that Went into General Relativity”. The chapter is coercively bland; basically nothing. Too bad, since Wertheimer was present at the creation, was friends with Einstein, had some sort of background and grasp for the material, and was a trained observer. The great historian Arthur I. Miller in his book Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Copernicus, Springer-Verlag, 1996) thought the *promise* of the chapter heading to be phenomenal—he was deeply disappointed with the very little that was offered, which was basically a gestalt interpretation of E’s being at the time. (And psychology happened to be a “science” that Einstein would not admit into the scientific field—he had little use for the discipline.) The creativity, the intuition, the explanation, of some of the most creative thinking of the century, which was most probably on display for Wertheimer, was lost. Disappeared.
Sometimes when things disappear they illuminate, as in the case of Kandinsky and Malevich and Duchamp and company. Sometimes when they disappear we see the forms of the missing, making them further suggestive and capable of initiating inquiry. (A very bald example being The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, a work by south-Philly-born-Emmanuel Radnitzky, otherwise known as Man Ray, the great Dadist, photographer and Rayographer, and 40 years before the work of Christo. He made Ducasse disappear and become mysterious by wrapping up a singer sewing machine, creating art and inquisition.)
And sometimes when things disappear, they just, well, disappear.
_________________________
I can heartily recommend the following books by Arthur Miller, who has a very deep knowledge of numerous fields, and who brings them beautifully to bear in his books, as follows:
Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes (Little Brown, UK edition; Houghton Mifflin, USA edition, 2005).
Shortlisted for the Aventis Prize
Einstein and Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (Perseus Books, 2001). Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Springer-Verlag, 1996 cloth; MIT Press, 2000 paperback).
Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity: Emergence (1905) and Early Interpretation (1905-1911) (Addison Wesley, 1981: new edition SpringerVerlag, 1998)
Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th-Century Physics (Birkhäuser, 1984; MIT Press, 1986; reprinted 2003, Dover Publications)
Frontiers of Physics: 1900-1911 (Birkhäuser, 1986)
Early Quantum Electrodynamics: A Source Book (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Editor, Sixty-Two Years of Uncertainty: Historical, Philosophical and Physical Inquiries into the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Plenum Press, 1990)
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