What is Art?
Is the fundament a vector or raster?
When you zoom into an atom you find that the world of discrete objects blurs. Like a vector image, you see a vast, sprawling monochrome nothingness. Energy perturbations splay in the margins, teetering in their latitudes, quivering and wavering in a state of irresoluteness, waiting to be wrested from their snug perturbation-space by brighter realms.
Like a kernel, a condensed bundle, the centre relays pressure. A pressure it itself cannot, in the fullness of time, withstand. It has a half-life. It splinters with coruscant catalysis into equilibria of improper subsets. When excitation accretes in the turgid vesicle, it expels particles or clusters thereof. Some transubstantiate into daughter pairs. Yet others undergo internal conversion, conserving their identity.
Nucleosynthesis, the creation of radioactive matter, accumulates against a background of disorganization. The totality displays either an unfathomable or indescribably banal preference for the latter. A unidirectional evolution whose prevalence permits the exuberance and bountifulness of circumscribed events, from the energetic extravagances of supernovae and intergalactic hostilities condensing, extirpating, and mangling the very fabric of the cosmos into topographies and dimensions inconceivable by the nous, to the temperate placidity of our snug solar family, gingerly stirring the broth of our sumptuous terrestrial soup, and its byzantine tangle of flora and fauna.
Against the diffuse geometrical sprawl of the infinite, these smouldering embers, from intergalactic collisions and conflagrations to the inner fugues of the human spirit, comprise the sparse, the minute, the exhaust of infinity, cinders consummated into irreversible non-existence. Hence the indescribable aspiration from the dawn of our consciousness for immortality. The hunger to escape entropy and ascend, as negentropic-form, into the perennial.
Art reduces the unimaginably layered and tangled tapestry of experience — which systematic scientific observation transcends but also must necessarily pass through — into its composing elements, by disassembling the unity of experience and offering select pieces to cognizance. Art also at the same time reassembles these elements into new unities that form a supplement — an extension of the set of — possible recombinations that nature and social reality already offer.
The latter tend to be extremely conservative in their recombination outcomes because they tend to — with good reason — adhere to strict functional constraints. Art does not plea allegiance to such functional constraints, or rather, the types of functional constraints that are immediately germane to practical social ends. Of course, the recombination space that art occupies and probes does play an indescribably important functional role in our organismic interaction with the environment. In fact, art plays a central role in our plea for viability, which admits to a large set of — either overdetermined or underdetermined — conditions of satisfaction. By that I mean that art expands the conditions of viability for the organism: it reconstitutes what it means to flourish. Art is an enactment of the organism burgeoning toward flourishing. Therefore its fruits are always in the process of reconstituting the very being that engages in it. Art recombines received structures in a way that makes them pliable to individual ends and germane to meaningful interaction.
The line recombines the extant into the re-entrant. Art refracts the re-entrant into yields that recombinant time must stretch to infinity to realize. Art relaxes re-entrant relations and introduces in them a felicitous variability. Against extreme sensitivity to their coagulated range of initial conditions, these re-entrant relations evolve into an ebullient variation. Lines diverge and converge in irregularly patterned revolutions. They touch hitherto untouched extremities. They invite cold, uninitiated regions into their energetic splaying. Ripples of stochastic growth summon foreign breaths. The dance glimpses an ecstatic novelty. A horizon that perennially beckons.
Art testifies to a monstrous stratification of metastability.
Every repetition against the viscous broth of its cultural milieu does this. The line was freed in the precipice of modernism. Yet it became newly free; for it was always free, albeit milieu scoped.
We dive into events oscillating at near-light, subatomic speeds, odyssey upwards, surveying the sedimentary formation of scales, and submerge into some intermediary region, a sprawling nebula, caught between the cataclysmic centre and stable star systems.
Our contemporary taxonomy of the mind dispels the idea of some distinct and kinetic faculty called the imagination. Yet in previous historical stages, the philosophical tradition reified the imaginative faculty; understood it as distinct from the intellect because the latter analyzes while the former synthesizes. The two are, of course, caught in a dance. Yet they might be sufficiently distinct such that, when either activity predominates, different brain regions ignite. The former engages remote corners of memory; awakens from their slumber disparate and time-reinforced networks, however feeble their connecting threads, and reintegrates them. It clamours for the totality of the distributed constellation to undulate in unison. The latter, meanwhile, intent on problem-solving at a very circumscribed attentional space, must activate very select network regions.
We digress.
Who is in the sacristy? The sacristan.
It is unclear whether the creative process should take place in the sacristy or in the violable public sphere, where every interaction and chance whim of the rabble reshapes it. Is it to be shielded and hidden, accessed only on special occasions, or open to the grotesque and carnivalesque, the broth of civilization? I’ve always operated in the former mode, spinning my yarn in the sacristy. But as I’ve matured, I’ve come to understand that art should also be thrown to the dogs to become more like itself. Art takes place just as well in the secretion of the Rabelesian carnivalesque.
In Aesthetics of the Unfinished, the line is expressive. It teeters between refinement and raw aggression. In Two Geishas, the line subjugates itself to stringier representational constraints, but performs its expressiveness in the bounded terrain of form. The line opens the clearing, to use a term from Heidegger. Carves the clearing. Cleaves the clearing. It’s been drafted, under some hypnotic fixation, in the sacristy.
In both Aesthetics of the Unfinished and Two Geishas, by putting pencil to paper, the artist channels an indexical of experience. The drawings inscribe a richly transduced, historically moulded and accumulated personality on paper. In Adaptation to the Mean and Crystal that preferential re-entrant pattern that cleaves a clearing is differently mediated. It interacts with an intermediary cybernetic system, the computer, and shapes a pattern against a cairn of digital affordances. The digital, unlike the analog, is sculpted from the bottom up. Hence the forms here are vectors (or rasters that simulate vectors), something that analog draftsmanship can only emulate imperfectly. Even though reality is, in many ways, analog, it aims to create vectors. DNA encodes the genome, but reality only achieves the phenotype: flexibility is invariably part of the path of genetic expression, and the better, at that.
Two geishas, observant of the formality required of them, convey with their postures of humility and grace either a courteous reticence toward one another or a warmth that surpasses their plea of modesty. Which is it, excessive reserve or subtle warmth that emanates from their poses? Or is it that the one on the left appears to withdraw, while the other receptive and congenial? Perhaps they are communicating entirely with their eyes, sharing in some pleasantry, joke, or even mishap? Or perhaps they are just about to part, and some lingering awkwardness from recent history betrays in their poses? The image does not tell us. The image suspends definite meaning by virtue of being a still, a single frame abstracted from the richness of interaction. Yet, by virtue of omission, the image also captures a superposition of possible meanings. Perhaps it captures more than testimony of the entire stretch of interactions could have, by virtue of isolating an authentic moment from the average theatricality of human interaction.
An index of the incommunicable. Can words ever exhaust the experiential?
The entire dialectic of civilization has been a contest between those who wish to elevate the irreducibly experiential into an ecstasy of movement, to deliver time from its prosaic shackles of toil into the shimmering fold of divinity, to usher the delta of our finite procession into the estuary of perennial time, to exalt being by puncturing its blossoming with exultation, and those who wish to convert with maximum efficiency movement through the evanescent into a bargain for the future. Surely these are not mutually exclusive. And yet, because our contemporary moment has re-enshrouded the latent structure of being, a structure intricate, sinuous, labyrinthine, we are ushered like shorn livestock through sacrificial cycles of labour, void of the adornments that swaddled and embellished our ancestors — adornments founded on an incommunicable bond between collective and cosmos.
Today the oath of fealty splays across communication networks, data tombs, identities refracting and coalescing in the ever-distending space of standards, protocols, cables, antennas and legal infrastructure.
And yet affective beings invariably aesthetize their conditions. The act of aesthetization necessarily attenuates the recrudescent, until the contours of the environment have absorbed the mark of their maker.
And so, art gestures toward the new synthesis. It feeds the stratified and bloated ore of functional social processes into its smelting furnace, in order to extract the iridescent prima materia from which the promise of being is redeemed.
