‘Complexity-Uncanny’
Concepts and methods in 20th
century art
Assimina Kaniari
Is it meaningful to look for first principles and overarching conceptual
categories to group the diverse and aesthetically different cultural creations
of the 20th century in both the visual arts and architecture, such
as buildings aspiring to the principle of complexity and images created
digitally presented in the pages of Leonardo
journal from the 60s onwards? Artists’ and architects’ own writings from the
60s onwards but also their claims and aspirations recorded in parallel to their
work support the usefulness of a conceptual approach to the study of art forms.
Shared point of reference in both practices is however not an aesthetic
manifesto but a science textbook of the early 20th century.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s seminal book On Growth and Form first published in
1917 became increasingly influential among modernist circles of the early 20th
century, artists working on new media and technologies from the 60s onwards and
can still be found in a prominent position among the readings comprising new
architects’ curricula; especially architects with a predisposition for
complexity. Why a science book found such an unprecedented reception in the
second half of the 20th century and why does this matter to the
people involved in the writing of art history concerned with the rise of new
media and the uses of science and technology in art?
Thompson’s own comparisons in the book perhaps
is one reason which helps understand why such a book would offer itself to
comparisons between art and science. In the book Thompson discusses in a
comparative light truly Leonardesque, in the sense that no boundaries between
art and science are imposed in his examples illustrating natural laws, both ‘art’
and natural form in the light of a ‘topologically’ inclined biological approach
to the development of form in nature and inversely in art.
So Thompson argues for the presence and
importance of natural forces, materials and physical laws in shaping form across
time in nature in a way similar to how perhaps artists have manipulated form in
their various works and aesthetic results. Growth not only stands for the
transformation of forms across times but Thompson conjures a different word to
discuss the mechanism which in his view contrasts with Darwin’s evolution by
natural selection, discussing the details of what he calls ‘morphogenesis’
through a variety of examples including “a splash of water”, an image from Dürer,
a bridge and Haeckel’s radiolarians.
Thompson’s slightly anti-evolutionary edge in
his treatment of development in form and his theory about how forms come into
being in the particular visual and aesthetic ways they do is of course tightly
connected to the uses of novel imaging techniques which capture glimpses of
matter’s behaviour at vary small scales, a site of the wonderful but also the
strange and unknown according to Thompson. It is perhaps no coincidence also
that the artists who first looked at Thompson, such as Nigel Henderson, Eduardo
Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton were also preoccupied at a fundamental level with
imaging techniques and the role the latter could play in the shaping not only
of new space and art practices but aesthetic results as well.
Uses of technology outside science and
technology and in the context of science not only produced new art in the
context of the 50s but new styles of art education and philosophical discourse
which transcended the boundaries of art and science, history of art and the
history and philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn’s Essential Tension and his famous ‘Comment on art and science’ would
perhaps never come to occupy the significance it did in the context of both
history of science and the history of art, if such work had not emerged in the
field of art and 20th century artists’ never took seriously the
importance of this new imagery derived from instrumentation in science in the
modern world.
To make the connection one only has to go back
to the writings of art theorists from the 60s onwards but also from much
earlier and the writings of the Bauhaus to understand how imaging informed
imagining and the aesthetics of modern art. Maholy Nagy’s writings on the
microscopic and uncanny vistas modern technological instrumentation offers to
the artists for use and inspiration found perfect ally in the UK in the
writings of Herbert Read and Read’s friend Lancelot Law Whyte who actively
pursued the potential of a structural thinking derived from ‘biology’ for art
and artists through his writings; a call which as the pages of Leonardo Journal show seems to have acquired
an important response from the side of the artists.
Already from the 50s and in the context of the
Festival of Britain of 1951 Whyte together with Read will set up a conference
to accompany the ICA show On Growth and Form on the possibility of comparisons
between art and science in this structural light derived from biology. Physics
and the principles one could extract from the discipline’s achievements up to
that point for the sake of art, architecture and philosophy belongs to the
past, while biology rules the landscape of science but also the future of art
and architectural practice, Whyte will emphasize. What he will single out however
from his special affinity for biology and the biological approach to matter is
the notion of complexity which such an approach both takes into account but
also allows to emerge.
It is no coincidence that among the
participants of the conference Aspects of
Form organized and edited by Whyte will be Rudolph Arnheim whose work Entropy and Art will devote an important
part of discussion to D’Arcy Thompson and the complex ways of natural and
artistic form.[1]
[1] This is part of my on going research
at the Art History Department,