JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 583
Blog Bookstore
Finding recurring events, schemes and objects, finding predictability, finding a pattern, making a pattern emerge seems to be what we do here on earth. After all, the stuff that we use to organize our existence into transferable bits of knowledge--points and lines and symbols that stand for sounds which stand for other things which constistute language--don't exist, but they do tell us pretty much everything we need to know about our environments, real and imagined.
Stars are (as my daughter Emma pointed out when she was four) "messy" until imaginary lines are drawn between them; the relationship of the elements are mysterious until a (a) they were "discovered" and (b) table of relationships was figured for them. Mathematics, the queen of the sciences, is nothing but making patterns emerge. Art* and aesthetics developed over millennia to arrive at things like paint and the golden ratio [(a+b)/a=a/b] and perspective, making images and other representations emerge from the chosen media. Patterns emerge from massive, seemingly too-complex entities: even the weather's patterns emerge (to within a particular range). (Better yet, with weather, it is extraordinary to see how small variations of the initial condition of this sort of dynamical system can produce large, long term variations. Have a look at one of the greatest works on the circulation of the atmosphere at my blog store.)
In a slightly odd and definitely beautiful book by Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Aberrations, an Essay on the Legend of Forms (MIT 1989) I found a fantastic illustration of the work of Mathieu Dubus (1590-1665/5). Dubus evidently was a pre-modern modernist, and painter of fantastic landscapes, though (apparently) very few have survived the years. He was an outsider to the great Golden Era of Dutch art of the 17th century, probably a little too far afield for most tastes, though his associate and contemporary, Hercules Seegers (Seeghers), another experimentalist-as-artist, found far more afield, at least so far as royal patrons were concerned. (Segers was also collected somewhat by Rembrandt, who owned at least one of his paintings. In his own bit of "emerging", Rembrandt actually purchased one of the metal plates from which a Seegers print was made, and reworked it, making it his own, publishing prints from the "combined" effort.) It is also interesting to note that if Dubus was included in the Big Books on Dutch art of this era, he would fall between the beautiful Gerard Dou (small, exquisite, dark, very layered) and Jakob Duck (who had a very Dickensian taste for street/common/low life).
The Dubus work, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha., is exceptional, and odd--I still don't understand if the image was actually painted on an old and decaying wall, or if was painted on agate that looked like a decaying wall, or if was painted on canvas and made to look like the above. No matter--the effect is that the artist used the "natural" occurrence of breaks and segments to make his picture of the great destruction from Genesis emerge from the seemingly "found" surface. It is a remarkable image, and I'm fairly well certain that the 17th century wasn't ready for it.
It is remarkable that humans have sought for thousands of years to make representations of their environment and ideas more clear; and it wasn't until the second decade of the twentieth century that artists sought the "reverse", until, finally, a person wasn't able to tell what a painting was "of" unless told so. (Jackson Pollock told the story many times of seeing his work exhibited upside down.)
*"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern." is what Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1944, English philosopher and mathematician) said, sucking the very life out of the discovery part of the whole experience.
Comments