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"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." James Baldwin |
"Physics is a form of insight and as such it's a form of art." David Bohm |
| The Alphabet Vs The Goddess › Sex, Time and Power › | |||
| Despite each discipline's similar charge, there is in the artist's vision a peculiar prescience that precedes the physicist's equations. Artists have mysteriously incorporated into their works features of a physical description of the world that science later discovers. The artist, with little or no awareness of what is going on in the field of physics, manages to conjure up images and metaphors that are strikingly appropriate when superimposed upon the conceptual framework of the physicist's later revisions of our ideas about physical reality. Repeatedly throughout history, the artist introduces symbols and icons that in retrospect prove to have been an avant-garde for the thought patterns of a scientific age not yet born. Few art historians have discussed this enigmatic function of art in depth. Robert Hughes, another art critic, explains why it is so often overlooked: The essence of the avant-garde myth is that the artist is a precursor; the truly significant work of art is the one that prepares the future. The transitional focus of culture, on the other hand, tends to treat the present (the living artist) as the culmination of the past.7 All too often, when reading about the work of exceptional artists, we are told about the past styles that influenced their work. Their pedigrees are traced backward to former artists, and rarely is their work explained in terms of how they anticipated the future. A large segment of present society, unable to comprehend art's vision, dismisses the importance of art. Marshall McLuhan, in his seminal work, Understanding Media, asks: If men were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties... Revolutionary art in all times has served this function of preparing the future. Both art and physics are unique forms of language. Each has a specialized lexicon of symbols that is used in a distinctive syntax. Their very different and specific contexts obscure their connection to everyday language as well as to each other. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy just how often the terms of one can be applied to the concepts of the other. "Volume," "space," "mass," "force," "light," "color," "tension," "relationship" and "density" are descriptive words that are heard repeatedly if you trail along with a museum docent. They also appear on the blackboards of freshman college physics lectures. The proponents of these two diverse endeavors wax passionate about elegance, symmetry, beauty and aesthetics. The equal sign in the formulas of the physicist is a basic metaphor used by many artists. While physicists demonstrate that A equals B or that X is the same as Y, artists often choose signs, symbols and allegories to equate a painterly image with a feature of experience. Both of these techniques reveal previously hidden relationships.
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