NOTE to students in One Culture at OLLI-USM
After the course ends, these recaps of, and comments on, class discussion of literary works will move to the sections called "Poetry and Science".
Comments on Class 7 Discussion
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Artists just don’t look at things the way the rest of us do.
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| LIFT, by Aaron T. Stephan |
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| Book I, embroidered music score by Anne Rhodes. Music composed by Anne Rhodes, performed by Broadcloth (http://broadclothtrio.com) |
At our seventh class, I talked about some connections between art and science, drawing examples from a current exhibit at a local museum. The exhibit is the 2013 Portland Museum of Art Biennial: Piece Work. It is the eighth in an ongoing series of juried exhibitions showcasing new or recent work by living artists.
A recurring theme in this exhibition is complexity that emerges from the repetitive application of relatively simple rules, protocols, or procedures. Scientific findings tell us that our universe is filled with complexity that emerges naturally from the relative simple laws of gravity, electricity, magnetism, and thermodynamics. So there are many parallels between this kind of art and the natural world as science sees it.
I have mentioned Coleridge's statement that beauty is unity in variety, and Jacob Bronowski's idea that creativity is the discovery of such unity. I often find myself thinking that a poem "draws a likeness" between two things, as does Howard Nemerof's poem, "Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry", which likens this line to the line between freezing drizzle and snow. As another example of bringing together the superficially unlike, Broadcloth Trio of New Haven improvise music based on their responses to embroidered scores (second photo above). The nature of the likenesses between embroidered symbols and the music that results probably can vary greatly from musician to musician and even from performance to performance, but this idea also exemplifies exploration of likeness between unlikes.
If you get a chance to visit the Piece Work exhibition, and you see something that gives you that "Aha!" feeling of recognizing creativity in a work, ask yourself if this notion of creativity can be applied to it. Do such works bring together familiar things in ways that, at first, seem incongruous, and then suddenly seem meaningful?
We also looked at some of the winning entries in the 2013 Science Visualization Challenge, a yearly competition sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publishers of Science, one of the world's most respected scientific journals. These works probably often start out as "art in service of science", with their creators setting out to illustrate something, to make a subtle idea clearer by vivid example, or to make trends in data stand out. It is inevitable that artistic considerations gradually come to the fore, and beauty becomes a prime consideration (as does the possibility of landing a cover photo on an issue of Science or Nature, which is great publicity for one's research).
If there is "art in service of science", is there also "science in service of art?" Certainly science provides much in support of art. In materials and media, science, and particularly chemistry, has been the source of many new ways of creating art, including such seemingly mundane things as acrylic paint. In the realm of ideas, science is also a prolific provider of grist for an artistic mill. Newton's work on the prism, with its revelation that white light is a mixture of all colors of light, was followed by an explosion of artistic interest in color. The chemistry and physics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was followed by much art that explored beneath the surface of appearances.
In a Reflection, I asked, "What is science?" For me, it is an easy question to answer. Science is the communal process of trying to uncover truth about the world around us. Is it just as easy to answer this question: What is art?
For me, it is not an easy question at all; perhaps there is no answer that would satisfy everyone. In science, the subject is the physical, material world in which we live, that world of which we can make—and agree upon—observations. Even when scientists imagine the unobservable, they restrain their imaginations to fit with what we know.
In art, the subject is much broader. It includes the material world, but also imaginative worlds that are not restrained by data. It deals with every aspect of human experience. We might think that we should be able to recognize art even if we cannot define it; but no, we often encounter rancorous discussion over whether something is art or not, poetry or not, music or not.
Perhaps it is art if anyone says it is.
