I’ve recently been reading The Quarterly Conversation, a great literary criticism online journal (no less so because of my contributions). In this month’s issue, Jeremy Hatch reviews and muses on Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly. I’d never heard of Cyril Connolly, but both the premise of the book and a few snippets of his biography are fascinating. Connolly, who wrote in the 1930’s was described by his contemporaries as an example of extreme failed promise: 

 [Stephen] Spender listed a number of recently deceased friends whom he felt had not quite lived up to their promise, naming last among them Cyril Connolly.

“He used to write reviews that were extremely witty,” Spender said, every week for the Sunday Times. “He’d write [a thousand-word review] in a taxi going to the airport, he could do it so easily.”As if exasperated by this memory, Spender burst out with a rhetorical question: “How can one understand a person so gifted, who could do something so easily, [that he] should use his gifts so little?”

Connolly’s one enduring work is Enemies of Promise, a book about the circumstances and abilities an author needs to survive  beyond a decade, and why Connolly himself failed to live up to his own promise as a writer. The idea that a writer would write a book about the reasons for his artistic failure is mesmerizing, and Connolly seems to have developed a special understanding of what one needs to be a successful writer by enumerating all the qualities he lacked. Hatch’s article is well worth reading, and gives a better summary of Connolly’s complex project than I will here.

The article got me thinking about the difficult relationship between art, artists, and promise. Like all aspirant writers, I look to the future in hopes that I will one day “reach my potential,” whatever that may be. And, like all aspirant writers, every time I put pen to paper I see my potential retreat as rapidly as I try to meet it. It remains the same distance—unreachable—as ever. But I have always thought that the idea of “promise” is misleading, as it applies to both art and to a life’s possibilities in general.

In every great artist, as in every good piece of art, there is a sense of tension or unresolvedness. When such people are early in their careers, they are described as having “potential,” or “promise,” because there is an idea that some future accomplishment will unify and resolve these tensions.   The problem with this equation is that the very things that made them a “promising” artist in the first place were the contradictions and impossibilities within them, and these traits will persist whether or not they make good art (and are, in fact, a precondition of good art). The promise we perceive is not a projection into the future (they will one day achieve something) but in fact a permanent quality—a transfixing inconclusiveness.  Just as resolution saps the power of art (i.e. a story with a too tidy ending, a painting too perfectly balanced), an artist that “fulfilled” his promise (and thereby resolved all tensions) has also fulfilled the need to make art.  The best artists, paradoxically, give the impression that their best is yet to come, and the best art likewise gestures beyond itself.

Of course, this is not to say that a writer like Connolly could not have written more, or better. Certainly there are artists that do not do all that they can do. But rather than say they have not reached their promise, it would be more accurate to say that by not going where they can go, they do not reach their limitations and therefore cannot make aesthetic use of them.

On that obscure note, I give you a fitting excerpt from A Catalogue of Rare Movements, the chapbook of drawings and prose Curtis Rhodes and I put together. The work has just been released by Xexoxial Editions as issue 42 of Xerolage. The chapbook imagines 24 imagined art movements, one of which is very relevant to any discussion of potential and what could be.  Here is the text only (in the book, there’s an accompanying drawing) for that movement:

Couldism (Neo-Shouldism)

I’ve now read On Bullshit and it’s interesting how far off the mark my speculations about bullshit were. I roughly defined bullshit as the “attempt to make style stand for substance,” and my post was mostly concerned with the process by which bullshit is created. I imagined that a bullshitter is essentially an expert in the superficial, who is able to fluidly extract and use stylistic features to create a false impression of substance. I praised the bullshitter’s inspired, jazz-like riffings on topics he knows nothing of, and pointed out that writers and artists could learn much from the bullshitter’s passionate improvisation when faced with the unknown. My take on bullshit was not surprisingly focused on its aesthetic qualities.

But Harry G. Frankfurt’s bullshit was of a different sort. Rather than discuss how bullshitters create bullshit, Frankfurt was more concerned with bullshit’s relationship with truth. Bullshit, Frankfurt claims, is very different than a lie. Sure, both bullshit and lies may be untrue, but lies at least are concerned with truth. A liar is engaged with the truth insomuch that he makes a point of saying something untrue. As Frankfurt puts it: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth…A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.” But the bullshitter has no such respect: “For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the truth nor on the false.”

I’ve always thought it would be interesting to do a before-and-after review. The “before” would be what the reviewer anticipates a book/film/exhibition etc. will be, and the “after” would be what it really is. As I’ve expressed in earlier posts, I have a love of speculation and half-knowledge that makes this idea particularly attractive. The closed book is often the best book.

Today’s Before Review will be of On Bullshit. To make my “before” review completely accurate, let me say that I have not read On Bullshit, nor have I opened the book. All I know about it is the author (because his name is on the cover), that the author is a philosopher (because it was in the philosophy section) and the book’s physical appearance. On Bullshit is very slim, very small (maybe three by five inches) and clothbound with no dust jacket. The title and the author are the only information on the outside of the book–no images, insignias, publisher’s brand, nothing else. I have held the book in my hand, but put it down before the temptation to open it got the best of me.

Obviously the book’s title attracted me, but so did the fact that it was a rare small book in the philosophy section. The lack of glossy, blurby dust jacket also was a plus–the book’s minimalist cloth cover made it seem like a tome for the ages. I also chose this book for my first before-and-after review because I believe the concept of “bullshit” is applicable to the arts, and what artists do.

There’s much about the idea of bullshit that’s fascinating when you really think of it. First of all, people immediately know what is meant when someone says they “bullshitted” something or “that’s bullshit.” But what is meant? In the first case, “bullshitted” often means creating an approximation through mimicking the style of something. So, if a boss came up to a worker and asked how a project was going, and the worker hadn’t started the project, the worker might say something like “I’m in the assessment phase at this time.” This statement is calibrated to parrot the sound of productive corporate-speak, with the hope that the sound of it alone will suffice. It is an attempt to make style stand for substance.

Philip Roth’s new book, Indignation, received a nice review in the Sunday’s New York Times Book review a few weeks ago. Like most Roth books, Indignation is largely about death, and the review in tandem with some sad life events has got me thinking about art, death, and the afterlife (my usual go-to dinner topics). The close of the Roth review includes a quote from the book’s narrator as he languishes in the next world:

“There is no letup — for the afterlife is without sleep as well. . . . There are no doors. There are no days. . . . And the judgment is endless, though not because some deity judges you, but because your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself.”

Roth speculates on death and the afterlife in many of his books. This is often attributed to his age (75) or simply to the brooding and grim turn of mind that afflicts all artists. But the relationship between artists and death–or aesthetics and death–is far more complicated. What kind of question is ‘what happens when we die?’ to an artist?

The question itself–the most universal question and also the most personal–seems to be a philosophical or theological (or even scientific) one, and best answered by worthies of either field. When an artist takes on a “big question,” he or she is a little like a well-meaning toddler trying to answer a ringing phone by ringing in response–cute, perhaps poignant, but ultimately ineffective as a response. Roth’s playfully bleak imaginings of the afterlife seem to hold no more weight than any idle guess about death. And this is true if you think of art as trying to answer a philosophical, theological or scientific question. Art is not equipped to answer any question other than one it frames for itself. This is why the best writers and artists , like Roth, make death itself an aesthetic question.

How does an aesthetic question differ from any other? It is clearly different from a scientific question because it does not depend on quantifiable evidence. It is different from a theological question because its goal is not to offer comfort or continuity with a network of belief. And an aesthetic question is different from a philosophical one, though the difference might be subtler. Philosophy aspires to a kind of sense–a making of systems out of chaos, if nothing else. It attempts to find the links between things. An aesthetic proposition, on the other hand, is not concerned necessarily with systems and connections but arrangements–the arrangement of forms, words, people to their world. Arrangements, unlike systems, do not depend on the links between things but rather the effect of the space between them.

What would the afterlife have to be to create a compelling dissonance or a fitting compliment juxtaposed with life? That is the question art asks of the afterlife, and that is far different than simply asking what the afterlife might be. When other fields of thought discuss death and the afterlife, they are looking for either the answer most contiguous with what we know, or the answer that provides the most hope or comfort. Rather than trying to fill it in, art makes use of the negative space the unknown of death creates.

I’ve been away from this blog for a while because of a job that pulls me daily out of the realm of art and ideas. In this, I am in good company. Hawthorne–and Clement Greenburg, for that matter–worked in Customs, stamping shipments of “annatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kind of dutiable merchandise…” Wallace Stevens spent most of his life as an insurance agent, and it is a common narrative that writers and artists often toil in menial jobs before the slow-on-the-uptake world gets wise to their talent.

But even though my daily life is pretty antithetical to art (I.e. much of my job involves enforcing rules and maintaining order–not exactly in line with the effects of good art), a review in last Sunday’s New York Times got me thinking about how art interacts–or should interact–with the white noise of everyday living. The review is of James Woods’ How Fiction Works, a stodgy and retrograde tribute to the craft of fiction if you trust the reviewer Walter Kirn. Kirn presents Woods as a preening holdout of art with a capital A, a man who still believes in fiction as a realm that can and should hold itself primly away from the vulgarities of the everyday. Wood focuses on formal meticulousness and fine-combed sentences as the crux of the art of fiction, a concentration which Kirn feels leaves no room for the more sprawling, “messy” works of authors like Thomas Phycheon and Mark Twain. Wood’s exclusion of these works is beyond simply preferring more tightly built fiction, however. Kirn points out that Woods does not like fiction that lets too much of the world in:

Conversely, the folks who spoil the experiment are David Foster Wallace types who let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd. Wallace, to whom Wood grants the dubious honor of being one of his book’s few aesthetic villains, is accused of “obliterating” his characters’ voices in an unpleasing, “hideously ugly” attempt to channel cultural chaos rather than filter, manipulate or muffle it. For the vicarish Wood, sequestered in his chamber, part of the fiction writer’s true vocation appears to be acoustic regulation — the engineering of a mental space in which literary whispers can be heard.

 This last sentence is of particular interest. Should writers and artists “engineer a mental space where literary whispers can be heard” or should they instead recreate the noise that drowns them out? Woods seems to prefer works that allows a character’s worldview to develop almost unimpeded by the world itself. There are no grating jobs, household chores, petty dramas, traffic jams, paperwork, ect. that are fit to intrude on the poetic absorption of experience. If such fixtures of life are included in fiction, Woods prefers they be presented with nuance and virtuosic prose–in other words, they should be disabled by artistic sensibility. For writers like Foster Wallace, however, the detritus of life is presented in its complete and obliterating truth.

To put this in another way, there are two main ways a character might interact with the world. In one way (the fiction Woods prefers), the character (or narrator) is uncommonly resistant to smallness and minutia. There is a beauty/moral imperative/philosophical concept in every thing they see. No detail is without color and character, and the narrator and/or protagonist is incapable of describing even the dullest of scenes without a poetic wash. Essentially, this type of character achieves what so many of us aspire to: a kind of sweepingly insightful, seen-from-above perspective of the world, regardless of whatever slights and stresses we might personally suffer. James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might be two examples. In these works, there is nothing in the world that is small, because there is nothing but largess in the teller.

Part of the appeal of this type of art is that it is able to elaborate what in life must be brief; it develops thoughts and impressions in a way real life does not allow. What older person hasn’t thought back to a past passion or opportunity they let pass, and wondered on the alternate life they would be living had they pursued it? What young person does not look ahead to the span of years and wonder when they would be secure enough (a fantasy!) to develop their ideas or aspirations? The future or missed experiences aren’t really the point–it’s the is a sense that there is not enough experience itself in the here-and-now of life, hence the need to speculate on the past or future. A lived existence is a like a skipping stone only intermittently wet with full experience. Art can be like a river rock, seeing everything that floats by from a steady vantage.

The hardest I’ve ever laughed is at myself. There have been times when I’ve been alone, or in company, and have laughed so hard at a thought or impression of mine that I become almost unhinged: my eyes tear up, and I throw back my head and cackle to the skies. Sometimes I try to explain what I’ve found funny, but these attempts inevitably turn into broken raving–I can’t speak fast enough to match my thoughts, and there seems no way to make it make sense. The more I try to explain it, the more I realize how impossible it is. My laughter picks up again–I can’t be understood! Ha!

But what do I find so funny? Of course I can’t explain it. A thought or impression I’ve had becomes a true “inside joke,” that is, only a joke I could get, a thought that would make sense if you were me, and knew the whole history of my inner life. This “inside joke” seems to reference the most inward part of me, and reminds me, in a way, that I have a self. Of course, everyone knows they have a self. But most of our lives are directed outward, and most of our thinking about our “selves” is when we are distressed. We think about our self when we need to hammer out some emotional issue or try to fix some problem. How rare it is to actually have a completely inner-looking experience of joy?

What’s really going on when I get into a laughing fit is that I’m accessing the most obscure part of myself. We can think of a person’s s sensibility as being in layers, with the most superficial layers being the most easily communicated and the deepest layers being the most particular to the person and therefore the more obscure. But one of the great paradoxes about obscurity is that the more you can explain, draw out, or otherwise present the most undiluted part of your sensibility, the more resonant your art will be. So the artist must deal with a paradox: he or she must be facing inward (towards the self) while projecting what he or she sees outward. Art might be a little like the old trick of throwing your voice–a sound deep in the self that can be heard elsewhere.

Another way to say it is that to think like an artist is to carry on an idiosyncratic, private, and inexplicable dialogue with your imagination. But to actually be an artist, one must tangibly and deliberately bring forth this dialogue into concrete, comprehensible form. All artists must grapple with the inevitable compromises and losses that come from this transition from the inner to outer. The struggle, although really only a struggle of expression, seems to have an ethical element. There is something that doesn’t feel “right” about the feeling of reduction, of diminishment, that comes the minute we try to commit a fleeting impression to a permanent medium. And of course, there is the inevitable feeling that somehow we have edited out the very thing we hoped to convey in our very mode of expression. In all our thoughts of making good art, of creating something formally strong and recognizably beautiful, we end up fussy and restrained, when the feeling we hoped to covey was anything but.

A line in a recent New Yorker article about a staging of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury speaks to what artists wish for:

 A few posts ago, I wrote about art and science, specifically Jonah Lehrer’s book Proust was a Neuroscientist and his article “The Future of Science…is art?”  Since then, I’ve kept up with reading Lehrer’s blog, The Frontal Cortex, and the other week he wrote a post making the claim that creating art was just as difficult and serious-minded as scientific research, and therefore the discoveries made by art merit equal respect. Art is hard, Lehrer claims, because artists are “passionately interested in reality…”  That is, accuracy.

Basically, Lehrer (like many theorists who seek to blend art and science) is making the point that both artists and researchers are focused on same goal: to add to the store of human knowledge. But after reading Lehrer’s post and thinking about it a bit more, I believe art and science have even less in common than I indicated in my Art Science Phenomenon post. Art and science have different ideas of what knowledge is, and behind both art and science are contradictory assumptions about what can be known, and the value of knowing itself. Additionally, what is considered progress in art and science is nearly opposite: while science moves forward to more accurate truths by building on certain theories and shucking others, the “progress” of art (if you could call it that) involves simply inventing news ways interact with the unknown.

When I first started thinking about this, I drew a diagram depicting something like a climbing vine with offshoots to the right and left. The main trunk of the vine grows upward from some of the offshoots, while others end within themselves. This represents the progress of science–generally moving upward in knowledge by growing from solid ideas and leaving the inaccurate ones behind. Theories that do not end up being useful for the progress of science die, apart from than the afterlife crackpots might give them (I.e. stuff like this). In general, the progress of science has no room for its own folly. A discounted theory has no value, other than to show how much progress has been made (mankind used to be so foolish! We thought mice were born of grain! ha!) This model of progress is directly in conflict with art.

The progress of art best matches this image: a long fence or barrier, with activity and construction running the length of it, the point of which is to try to get over or through. The fence represents the unknown, I.e. the most enduring mysteries of existence (death, meaning of life, etc.) If art progresses, it progresses outward and not upward. Art walks the fenceline of the unknown, and each artist marks out a section of fence to try and break down. If there is any progress, it is in the growing knowledge of the unknown, revealed by each artist moving a bit further down its length as they look for a weak spot or way through. Progress might also be in the sheer variety and ingenuity of the attempts–some might try to dig under (would this be black humor?) and some try to launch themselves over (transcendentalism?) and some simply try to bore straight through (realism?). This model of progress values the attempt to understand the world, not the success of that attempt. Unlike science, there is no such thing as true dead end in art. Art succeeds by presenting a compelling way of confronting the unknown, rather than by adding to the known.P.S. Stay tuned for Artropolis Chicago 2008 coverage!.

Unlike people in most professions, a person who makes art must continually grapple with the title that comes with what they do. A teacher, cabinetmaker, or businessman can identify his or herself by profession without any real philosophical complications. Even if, say, a cabinetmaker does occasionally struggle with the meaning of what they do and why they do it, that struggle is not made manifest every time they must refer to themselves as a cabinetmaker.

 For an artist, however, identifying oneself as an artist is full of complications, both personal and public.The public end of it is pretty well known. Artists (and poets and writers) who refer to themselves as such have to deal with various public attitudes, ranging from condescending to needlessly reverent. For every person who skeptically asks how you’ll make a living, there’s someone else who is full of envy and admiration for what they imagine your life must be. Both responses can be uncomfortable, but the public or familial perception of an artist isn’t nearly as interesting as how an artist views his or herself.

Being an artist, almost above all else, requires attention to the “self.” I do not mean simply that an artist needs to be introspective, which is not always true, but that an artist must forever struggle with what it means to be a “self” out in the world. The role of the artist itself already makes this hard. On one hand, an artist needs to have a strong sense of self–an ego–to even have the confidence to make art or believe they have something worth saying. In other words, there needs to be a strong self to supply the “vision.“ On the other, an artist must renounce the self enough to be able to engage with some more universal strand of existence to avoid making work that is merely personal. And since observation is where all good art begins, an artist with too much self will limit what they can see in the world. Too strong a worldview interferes with perception, because it makes every observation match up with a preexisting view. But without any personal vision, the observer risks creating a mere record.

To frame this problem in a different way, the artist needs to simultaneously see themselves as a gifted individual with the ability to create, and as a humble conduit to a higher (universal, sublime, etc) truth. Obviously, these two conceptions of the self are in conflict. What is the role of an artist? A selfless chronicler of the beauty in the world or a bold individual who can find beauty in the banal and barren?

In numerous works, Hawthorne brings up yet another irresolvable conflict in the artist’s sense of self. Hawthorne seems to imply that an artist, to create art, must be more attentive, engaged, and connected to world than an average person. In essence, an artist must bear heightened witness to what they see. Yet this very attentiveness–a tight focus with art-making as its final goal–actually distances the artist from the very world they wish to engage. The fanatic attention to detail, the deep appreciation of quirks and foibles, the worship of the particular–none of this has much to do with the real business of living. If life is a rushing stream, the aesthetic and the beautiful are the rocky outcroppings that pull one out of its flow. So an artist, in their desperation to fully see and understand the world, becomes less a part of it in the very intensity of their attention. Hawthorne saw this paradox in its full irony and tragedy.

There is indeed a great deal of absurdity in the artist always seeing lines and forms rather than streetscapes, the poet taking line breaks rather than breaths, the actor tuned to the delivery over the thing said. Hawthorne makes liberal mockery of obliviousness of the artist–in all their talk of form, alliteration, and tone, they miss what’s really there. Yet at the same time, Hawthorne recognizes that the artist must step back to be an artist–like a impressionist painting, the world cannot be fully recognized close-up. The universal and the infinite must factor into their viewing.  But by stepping out of the personal and temporal, the artist necessarily becomes “out of touch” with the moment in which he is living There is something tragic in the idea that an artist who loves life enough to document and honor it with song or image must also, in some ways, renounce it in order to pay full homage. The best worshippers, at least in the world of art, are those standing back from their god.

How can an artist reconcile the ego and humility it takes to be an artist? The engagement and distance? For many artists, the never-ending ricochet between the poles of identity is too much. They simply chose to be humble or filled with ego, to resign themselves to the clarity of distance or the narrowness of engagement. We’ve all know obsessively autobiographical artists who let the ego and the moment rule and the opposite–artists who act as if they have no selves and see themselves as a mere tool, as if rather than using a medium to create art, art is using the artist as its medium. There are also enough examples of writers and artists who hold themselves outside of life to nurture their imaginations, and those that insist that they are no different than anyone else. But artists like Hawthorne never decide. In the world of self-help books and fanaticism about hammering out just “who we are,” the artist must resist the temptation to settle into any certainty about the self. Art is born of the paradox the artist must live.

P.S.  There’s some updates on this site.  Check out the Projects page for completed and upcoming projects.  Also check out my collaborator Curtis’s new page. 

 P.P.S. Hawthorne here. Did McFawn need to invoke my name to make these points about the artist’s self? For a writer discussing the “self,” McFawn seems to rely pretty heavily on my name and her conjecture about my ideas. Perhaps McFawn needs to write about the questionable selfhood of writers who presume too great an affinity with their influences.

I’m visiting Tucson this week, and one of my stops was the fairly new Sixth & Sixth Gallery in downtown Tucson. Sixth & Sixth opened two years ago and specializes in American Modernism and its contemporary heirs, specifically “non-objective art that celebrates line, texture, form and color: i.e., ‘art for art’s sake.’” The exhibition up now through April is Bohdan Osyczka: Monumental Watercolors II. Osyczka is in his late eighties, and spent most of life pursuing art part time while working as an illustrator, and it is only recently that his work has begun to find a larger audience. The show spans several decades, and Osyczka’s work range from nebulous compositions reminiscent of color-field paintings and tighter, ominous abstractions that echo Clyfford Still. The gallery’s promotional materials stress Osyczka’s methods as much as his outcomes: Osyczka built a special titling table to manipulate the flow of paint, as well as “rolling, pitching, pouring, speckling and spattering paint” to create his intended effects.

Of course, “intended” may not be the right word for a painter employing methods meant to maximize chance and happy accident. The paradox of gestural, expressive methods such as Osyczka’s is that while the end result is Modernist and concerned with formal elements, the method itself is making a conceptual claim. Art, performative painters seem to say, is as elemental and uncontrolled as the path of fire or the rolling in of a storm, and therefore the painter’s duty is to create the conditions for art (paint, gravity, etc) and watch what happens. In life, we try to control or minimize chaos, but in painting, artists like Osyczka preserve (or even encourage) chaos to find the aesthetic power within it. Exactly how that power is emphasized is dependent on the artist’s touches of willed design, and that is where the painting succeeds or fails. Osyczka’s watercolors try for a symbiotic relationship between will and chance, an admirable aim for both life and art.

While it is impossible to look at a painting and know for sure which part is the accident and which part the design, Osyczka’s works do seem to contain spontaneous passages paired with elements that comment upon them. In his best works, the comments make the painting. The strongest work in the show, 01 WN/19 (the nomenclature indicates the year and number painting of that year) consists of soft vertical swaths of color encroached upon by the sideways scrape of a geometric tool. Happy chance is evidenced in one of the lines that bleeds softly outward in the grain of the paper. What would otherwise be a defined verticality becomes a compelling detail–a spidering out of color, conjuring up both striated bacteria under a slide and the iris of an eye. This accident of the medium is commented on by a single dark oval that interrupts another vertical strata. The oval is self contained and tight while the line is open and seeping–representing the contraction and expansion of both art and nature. The potentiality of the oval–a seed, a thought, an inward look–contrasts the realization of the line–color that has spread out, flattened, and can go no further. The combination of accident and careful accent create a contrast between the exhaustion of realization and the bounds of possibility.

Many of Osyczka’s work are similarity successful in their judicious use of gesture and reflection. A few works fall flat, simply because disparate elements, rather than comment upon one another, seem to void each other out. 99 WN/17 consists of a rippled field of teals and purples overlaid by what looks like wobbly red staff paper complete with concentrations of paint resembling musical notations. The lines seem to hover above the field behind them, though they drip outside their pattern in way that looks calculatedly free. Occasionally, the red streaks and speckles join up with the folded peaks of the backdrop, but the overall effect is not a harmonized whole but two levels that neither speak to each other nor create an intriguing contrast. In this case, Osyczcka’s methods produced something that ends up in the uncomfortable space between spontaneity and deliberation, and therefore lacks the power of either approach.
 

Monumental Watercolors II is a strong collection that shows the chance inherent in all orchestration and the orchestration behind what seems like chance. In Osyczka’s best works, the question of what was intended and what merely appeared is moot: the result is a whole apart from control or chaos, natural law or man-made resistance.  What remains is the balance and sublimity of the brief moments when both art and the world cease spinning and fall together in the velocity of the stop.

Lately, there has been several books, articles, and even critical movements that aim to break down the walls between art and science. These approaches, in general, strike me as either irrelevant or absurd. The “walls” that exist between science and art are simply the bounds of their description, and “breaking them down” serves only to make both art and science more fluidly defined. While there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, the problem I see is that many of these thinkers seem to assume there is an inherent benefit in collapsing the differences between art and science. But if there is value in simply breaking down the walls between distant bodies of knowledge, then why stop with art and science? Why not break down the walls between surgery and sculpture? Between literary criticism and horticulture? Between manufacturing and eulogistic poetry? There’s an inherent drama in the gesture of pulling together disparate fields, and it is this drama, not the articulation of any real benefit, that seems behind the movement to join art and science.

Beyond that, the fruits of the art/science movement tend to dilute both art and science rather than meaningfully melding the two. For instance, Ellen Dissanayake’s Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, posits an evolutionary basis for art. Dissanayake claims that “artifying” helps strengthen community bonds, and this is of critical importance for the survival of a species. Dissanayake also believes the interaction between mother and child is the original source of communal aesthetic pursuits. A New York Times article describes her watching mothers and children for “hundreds of hours,” coming finally to the conclusion that “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too.” This claim, while interesting enough, is in no way dependent on the “hours of study”–it is a purely subjective reading of what goes on between a mother and child, and what art itself is.

This is the problem with “scientific” studies of art–they can’t really be scientific. Art is such an open concept that it can be adjusted to concur with any body of research. For example, given the generalness of Dissanayake’s observations, a completely contrary thesis about the origin of art could find equally legitimate proof. It would be just as easy to say, and find evidence for, the idea that the purpose of art is to isolate and disarm a group of humans unfit for the more critical functions of society–hunting, gathering, finding shelter, etc. The “artists” were the physically inferior and emotionally dissonant members of society that, in their ineptitude, threatened a groups’ survival. Rather than simply culling them, “art” was created to keep them too busy to interfere with the hunt. I could watch artists for “hundreds of hours” and find “evidence” just as solid for my claim as what Dissanayake found for hers! The point here is not that Dissananyake’s ideas are incorrect, but that they are not truly supported by research. At best, Dissanayake’s study is an interesting daydream about the origin of art. At worst, it’s a reductive speculation that passes itself off as research-based, and thus benefits from an unearned authority.

And even if Dissananyake’s study could somehow be made more legitimately scientific, I’m not sure explaining art with science is all that worthy a goal. What does art stand to gain from being given an evolutionary purpose? Will we discover that art is like the tailbone, a leftover nub of something that once had purpose? How can scientific explanations do anything but simplify and diminish art? Even art itself–with all its imagination and subtleties–is hardly up for the task of explaining itself. How can the logic-bound world of science have a better shot?