Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present (Thoughts on "Performance Art")

Streaming on Netflix as I write this, this documentary about Abramovic's 90 days of sitting in a chair silent at NY's MOMA in 2010. The film also covers parts of her long career as a performance artist. I loved the film.

                          Marina Abramovic: Balkan Baroque: Dozing Consciousness (1997)

Definition of "Performance Art": Dicey at Best
The definition of "performance art" is famously contentious, and when I read the Wiki on it one of the further links is to an article "Classificatory Disputes About Art," and this very nebulousness is one of the things I most like about performance art. Read a few textbook-like articles that explain what performance art "is" and you will very likely run into a sentence or two that could easily apply to why people use psychedelic drugs. Some people really don't like the effects of performance art; it wigs them out. I'll return to this subject below.

(I wish the filmmakers in the Abramovic doc would've gotten responses from some of the people who were caught looking on quizzically and then turning away with a semi-disgusted look as Abramovic sat still and gazed into the eyes of fellow museum-goers, but maybe that's just me.) The eminent art critic Arthur Danto sees Abramovic's sitting a New Thing in the history of art, because it's well-known that most museum-goers spend about 30 seconds in front of the Mona Lisa, while lo!: they sit or stand all day watching Abramovic sit and gaze. Taking in The Artist Is Present makes Waiting For Godot look like a Jet Li flick...or Cirque du Soleil. (Only if you feel like it, no pressure: think about that?)

I found Abramovic's family background edifying vis a vis what she ended up doing with her life. Some writing on her suggests that performance art was a big deal in the Eastern Bloc because of its transitory nature, which makes sense to me.

One thing I think of immediately when someone says "performance art" is "nude bodies?" Indeed, there is a lot of Marina and others nude in the documentary. And in performance art in general. Why? Well, how else to make claims for a relatively new form of art? Shock people. How? Nudity, violence, blood, gross-outs, and outrageous speech acts, for starters. In my personal aesthetics, shock is rock-solid legit in Art. I want more shock from Art. (But is it all tapped out by now? As one young Abramovic-watcher at MOMA says, "Pretty soon you'll see someone shoot someone else in the face and they'll call it art." I paraphrase from memory. Let's hope Art doesn't go there. But: it has come pretty close.)

You Say All Performance Art Is Bullshit?
How close? In an early performance in Belgrade, 1974, Abramovic decks out tables with all sorts of implements, tools, gadgets. 72 items. The audience can do whatever they want with her. The audience can walk up to her and pick anything from the table and apply it to her body. She has her clothes ripped off rather quickly. Among the 72 items: feather duster, olive oil, whatever. Some cut her body with sharp instruments Abramovic has supplied. Someone else drinks some blood from her neck. She just takes it. The kicker: the audience is informed the pistol over there on the table is loaded. Someone puts it to her head but doesn't pull the trigger. Someone else pushed rose thorns into her stomach. There was always the chance some suitably deranged individual could have shot her. But they didn't. Many did do vicious things to her. She was tearful but elated (and laughs!) after the six hour piece because she wasn't shot or mutilated beyond repair, and she got her point across: a group of people can take on a nasty tone and do some fairly heinous acts to someone else's body, just because it seems it they have carte blanche to do so. I know people who think performance art is bullshit, but you have to admit: this seems compelling.

William S. Burroughs, in one of his apocalyptic moods, wrote about Art spilling off the pages, escaping the frames and filling the streets, becoming Writ Large. In a way, certain performance art is a step towards this, but it is still "framed" by the various notices and literature that performance art will take place at a certain venue, a certain time, admission is $16, parking can be found in a number of lots nearby at $20 for three hours and the subway is just around the block, etc.

As I write, Marina Abramovic has just arrived in Australia and is "like the Beatles," as a promoter waxes hyperbolic.

Zen Shit
But let's not be cynical. I love her work. But I also laugh at almost all of it, because she's able to carry it off. Someone once said that "Art is what you can get away with," and I have to agree. Abramovic also seems genuine to me. She's 68 as of last November and in the documentary, in an interview at age 63 she states her age and - yes, she's in makeup for the interview - but she's astonishingly gorgeous at 63. Now here's some cynicism on my part: would she have attracted as many followers if she didn't look like a Slavic Goddess archetype? (Maybe...)

Abramovic has done a few pieces in which nothing happens; she just sits there. One of the main reasons for doing this is to test the limits of her body. Indeed, much of it seems brutal, grueling. But she also hints there's a political component to these pieces: in the West, it's anathema to Do Nothing. Just sit there; it's provocative!

To prepare for these works, she does "zen shit." There's a sequence in the documentary where she takes thirty or so young artist-recruits to her house in upstate NewYork, where they prepare mentally and physically to perform some of Abramovic's past pieces at MOMA, along with performance pieces by other artists. It all looks like very zen-retreat-ish with a dash of surrealism to me. (Yea, maybe you wanna see the film.)

The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson
Not long ago I read this novel and let me just say that if you're a performance art junkie who also likes to read novels, you might want to look into this one, which addresses serious items about the possible damages parents may cause their children, if the parent-artists take this sort of art too seriously. And I found it quite hilarious and entertaining too.

One of the ideas highlighted in this book is this: if you live with these sorts of artists - or actively seek out that which constantly challenges your ideas about what's "real" and who or what to trust, etc - often the most mundane situations you find yourself in can be fraught with High Weirdness. 'Cuz now you're on your toes, more than most people. About the whoopee cushions of "reality."

Toward a Taxonomy of Performance Art
Is a Marilyn Manson show "performance art"? I leave it to you. What about Christo's various monumental environmental installations? What about pranks? Guerrilla ontology? Hoaxes? Art "Actions"? Flash mobs? Fluxus performances? Interventions? Happenings? Neo-Dada? "Manouevres"? Circus freak shows? Yes, I take your point that hoaxes seem to be done for gain, and that generally the hope is that no one will catch on. And all of these things might fall under "guerrilla ontology" in that they hope to make the audience re-think what they thought was "real." Must the Work have an intended agenda or message? When, if ever, is a well-thought-out prank not performance art? (There are certain performance art aficionados who will not allow pranks in their club.) Sometimes those who take part don't know they're part of the Thing. To what degree is the audience necessary or complicit in the art-form? "Happenings" in the sense of Allan Kaprow's works seem to begin with a few parameters and then, like a scientific experiment, wonder how it will all turn out. In this sense they remind me of magickal workings. Does ceremonial magick belong somewhere in this taxonomy? Must there always be disruption? The possibility of danger? An overtly (or semi- ) political statement? Nudity? Profanity? (One would hope so for those last two...) One of the most pervasive ingredients in these things seem to be Indeterminacy, which has me buying it if only for that, because, ya know, life's too short.

Some of this stuff seems mostly to want to delight or entertain certain types of cognoscenti, and to piss off the philistines, which is all good to me. I've yet to see a very convincing taxonomy. Anyone got one?

Children
In an ideal world, children and other innocents would be spared exposure to violent ruptures in "reality" but we all know a few hearty kids who thrive on this material from the get-go. Clearly there were children entranced by Abramovic just sitting there. There were adults who looked outraged that this was A Thing. At some point in our lives, we can go on enjoying the shock or the surrealities of these things; others shut down. It's genes plus environment plus memory and experience plus a few other things I can't remember just now. Which brings me to...

Drugs and Performance Art
Abramovic is against drug use, and claims to have smoked a cigarette in the 1970s, because it was supposed to be cool. I think her work is about zen, the body, endurance, and facing fear and overcoming it. (Much of her earlier work with her lover Ulay seemed to be about incommensurability between men and women, too.) I see her work as having a drug-like effect. It works this way for me; it may not for you. What I want from any altered state is a novel perspective on some phenomena. I look at all art as a chance to enter into what the phenomenological sociologist Peter Berger calls a "finite province of meaning." I exercise a lot and enter a non-ordinary state. I meditate, smoke cannabis, read Finnegans Wake, listen to Bach/Stockhausen/Coltrane/Sun Ra/Vilayat Khan/Balinese Monkey Music/Pink Floyd, have sex, do math or logic puzzles, eat very spicy foods, sit in a hot bath in the dark with earplugs and eyeshades on, engage with sophisticated technology, watch films: voila!: non-ordinary states. I think this came with the Instruction Manual for the owner of a Mind. Many seem to have displaced their manual. Personally, I model all of these wonderful gimmicks as sorts of things and of a piece with the practice of magick. Your Mileage May Vary. To me, it's all Drugs. Try to stop me from doing my bathtub routine, DEA!

Some people do not like many (or all) of these sorts of things, and they should not be forced to engage with it, much less endure it. As with Timothy Leary's Two Commandments:

1.) Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow men.
2.) Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow men from altering their own consciousness.

With the First Commandment and taking into consideration the somewhat fugitive nature of much of "performance art" in the wider senses of the term, sometimes we cannot help it. It could be the Times we're living in?

Other Perf-or-mances/Other Arty Mental States
A lot of the enjoyment of this - if enjoyed at all - seems idiosyncratic, a matter of taste. I have gotten my rocks off watching sword swallowers and gorgeous mostly-nude babes walking barefoot on a bed of broken glass at freak shows like the CIA in North Hollywood. Then again, I would return again and again to David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology because I was never sure what was a put-on or what was legit, and it was all so incredibly well-done. (And I liked not knowing for sure what was a put-on or fancy; I love the indeterminacy.)

If extremes with the body is the subject, many artists come to mind. Like Bob Flanagan. Or Martha Graham stuff I've seen. Ever heard of Fakir Musafar? His stuff set a mind a-wonderin', aye.

Some of the best altered states I've been in were when I flew to Tokyo or London or Amsterdam or Lisbon or Kathmandu...and jet-lagged, I got out and walked aimlessly around those metropolises. This is not art, but it does seem linked to Abramovic's body-based work. Yet no one else can enjoy it but myself. And then I get back to my hotel room and collapse from sleepiness and the dreams extend that overall weirdness. The worst part of this is the actual flying part, hands down. What, in these scenarios, is the Art? I say to you: the cities and their inhabitants. It's yoga, a connection: my blitzed nervous system and the new city's overwhelming info-density and novelty.

I remember getting high off the hijinks of Andy Kaufman. I could rely on Andy to knock me into the finite province of wonder. There's a funny put-on/performance artist alive today (not saying you're not still alive, Andy!) named "Hennessy Youngman" who cracks me up. He seems like Sacha Baron Cohen ratcheted up a notch, and he makes Modern Art seem a lot more fun than some overly serious staid lecturer at Uni. I've seen lots of video of the robot anarchy from Survival Research Labs that really blew my balls to the far side of Eris. I recall when, around age 20, I read and delved like a madman into John Cage and Lamont Young, and felt a quite visceral thrill when I read that one of Nam June Paik's "serious" music performances consisted of coming out to applause, and, instead of sitting down at the piano, he took an axe and a chainsaw and cut the piano in half. Because...it had yet to be done?

As far as pranks go as a possible subset of performance art, here's one of my all-time favorites:

If you aren't familiar with this prank, please READ HERE. Effing genius.

Art and DNA: Careening All Over Da Place

Friends: Let us take a moment...let us all bow our heads and take a few deep breaths and...WILL YOU TURN THAT SHIT DOWN? WE'RE TRYNA GET IN TOUCH...with something profound. Sorry. I lost my head for a moment. Exhale loooong, slow, deep...seven...eight...that's good enough. Now: check out the pic an atheist took of Jesus in mold behind his refrigerator: HERE. (I thought it looked more like proto-neo-classical shred guitarist Uli Jon Roth, but what do I know?) I love how dad says he took the pic with his phone, then wiped it up and aye, it may be Jesus, but he's got three kids and he can't allow mold. For some reason this made me think of Robert Anton Wilson. RAW may have also liked this other little bit from the artworld's museum without walls:

A pubic hair on a urinal shaped perfectly like a treble clef. The comments on this I've seen fall into two basic camps: a one-in-a-million shot. Or: someone - some freak - spent way too much time before resuming time with friends or acquaintances in the bar. I thought, Hey, maybe he practiced this a lot and just got really good at it? He may have been able to pull it off in a few seconds.

Isn't the Art World wonderful?

Check out a photo of an interesting artist. I'll tell you why I think she's interesting, but first get a good gander at her:

                                                     Heather Dewey-Hagborg

Heather's one of those artists that would make C.P. Snow have a coronary if he had a time machine and  we could show him what Heather's been up to: she's a PhD candidate who combines: found detritus on the streets of New York, DNA sequencing, 3-D printing, forensic biology, algorithms, and art, all in a guerrilla ontological way.

Here's how she does it: she finds someone's used coffee cup or chewing gum or fingernail or cigarette butt (or maybe a pubic hair from a urinal?) and extracts enough DNA from the trash discarded by a stranger to sequence it. We have accelerated our abilities to do this so quickly that it's become cheap enough that a biologist-art student, working out of Genspace in Brooklyn, can afford the equipment to do this! Heather then feeds the information from the sequenced DNA into a computer, which has such fancy algorithms available to her that it quickly churns out a 2-D model of the face of the person who threw away the trash.

But wait, there's more: Dewey-Hagborg then uses the 3-D printer and creates a life-sized mask of the person...turning it into "art" and...well, just really making us think a whole hell of a lot about the implications of this. I think it's astounding stuff. Get a load of these "masks." Note the inclusion of the "self-portrait." She calls herself an information artist who's interested in art as research. Just imagine: you throw away a coffee cup in NY; you just had to have your latte, being from out of town and jet-lagged to boot. You walk on and don't give it the slightest thought. Heather finds it and ends up making a replica mask of your face, and hangs it on a wall. She's trying to make us think. It works for me: I've been thinking a lot about her work...

The DIY-Biology movement is shaping up to bring us all sorts of surprises, no doubt.

For more on her, Slate did a piece not long ago. (NB the title?)

That reminds me: have you heard of 23 And Me? Here's a video:

Now: genetics is NOT destiny (except in a few relatively rare cases), but this is cheap and promises all sorts of information about your risk factors (so you and your doctors can possibly avert unpleasantness), and your ancestors, which is, I think the thing that will begin to make this more and more popular. It also opens up a Pandora's Box: now that you know you have a substantial risk of getting a disease of which there is no known cure on the horizon, are you still glad you know? Do you have some sort of moral obligation to find out about what's lurking inside you, including who your relatives are? Etcetera! Whoa...(Already there are many stories of people who found out that the sibling they grew up with was really their cousin or uncle, or they aren't related, or mom probably had a tryst with the FedEx guy while dad was at work, etc.)

Returning to Heather Dewey-Hagborg, the Supreme Court, this week voted 5-4 that police can take a cheek swab/extract your DNA even if you've only been suspected of a crime! In other words, says the Court, no, that is not a violation of the 4th Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure and personal privacy. What world do the five Judges live in? This was astonishing to me, but on another level, it figures. This is a court that also ruled, again 5-4, that cops can strip search anyone, even for minor offenses like traffic stops or failure to leash a dog. In the you-haven't-been convicted-but-we're-taking-your-DNA-anyway case, Sotomayor worried that the State was overextending itself, and Scalia - who I find extremely offensive, personally - basically agreed with Sotomayor. Vociferously. But Alito saw DNA as the "fingerprints of the 21st century," and didn't have a problem. Notably, Scalia voted against the cops strip-searching for trivial offenses. He does seem to be for some personal privacy, but especially the personal privacy of corporations to do what they want.

I plan to write Heather Dewey-Hagborg and ask her if she can see if she can get hold of Alito's DNA and make a mask of him so I can throw darts at it, while sipping double IPAs, in time for next Halloween.

Meanwhile, sorry for ruining anyone's buzz, but the very real and growing danger of not only identity theft, but genome theft, is a thing now.

To recap our Top Story tonight: an atheist father sees Jesus in mold behind his fridge, then wipes it out with some disinfectant, while another guy either found or made a perfect treble clef from a pubic hair on a urinal. This led to a brilliant artist-scientist who really makes us think about what can be done with our own discarded waste, little intimate shards of our unique informational makeups we haphazardly leave all over the world, which led us to ponder whether we should spend $100 to find out detailed information about what diseases we might get and where our ancestors actually came from. This logically led to The State being able to strip search us and take our DNA for any reason, really. And we  learned that our genomes can be stolen by others, besides the cops.

Beautiful weather here in the Bay Area with a hot weekend up ahead. You literally have 17 billion blogs to choose from, so thanks for making the OG one of your sources for the latest-breaking weirdo news.

Good night, and good luck because we're all gonna need it.

Trippy Art Theories From Oliver Sacks and His Antecedents

My own thinking about art theorizing, and later anti-theorizing, may have started as a young teenager on a beach towel in the sand, during the summer, at Huntington Beach, or Newport Beach. The visual tableaux of "straight line" horizon of sea/sky, the relaxing auditory soundtrack of Pacific Ocean waves crashing in their marvelous periodicity, the caress of sun on my melanin-deficient skin (yearly checkups now for melanomas, OY!), the primal people-watching of others there, barely clothed, the smell of sea-brine and cocoa-butter suntan lotion, and often, with friends, mind-altering chemicals, like beer or cannabis. On my back, the sun overhead and reflecting off the proto-glass sand surrounding, Sol beating down on my closed eyelids, entoptic imagery. I hope all of you reading this have had the experience of seeing geometric squiggle-waves, or waves radiating out orange or blue waves in roughly 360 degrees from a point, or little bacterium-like shapes floating around in your field of vision. Some people call them "floaters," and sometimes they encounter them while being ill, or faint. I saw them on the beach, always. I could always count on them. I could also banish them by thinking of more worldly things. But eventually, after looking at plenty of cave paintings from places like Lascaux, or Islamic Art, or modernist Abstract Expressionism and 1960s psychedelic art...I wondered: is my beach experience related to the history of art in some way?

                                            entoptic imagery, consciously elaborated

The OG Is Anti-Art Theory
I have no problem with anyone's art theory (with exceptions: Ayn Rand's, the Nazis, 1930s Soviet ideas, and a few others), and I will continue to read anything that seems new. I find value in many aesthetic theories. I get a kick out of Ruskin. E.H. Gombrich's book Art And Illusion was thrilling, and will thrill me again when I return to it. I love looking at Kandinsky's paintings, and his mystical-intellectual ideas about juxtapositions of forms and colors I find baffling yet still interesting. Etc.

I object to the idea of "the best" theory of art. If your favorite theory of art doesn't show up in the blogspew, I could not possibly care less...just continue to enjoy your Art.

Alan Watts, in his The Culture of Counter-Culture, wrote that it's good that we don't have a precise theory of art, or more widely, a precise aesthetic theory, one that, if applied correctly, would churn out great art and artists. Because that would be very boring. I read that over 15 years ago and still agree. Moreover, my developing epistemology increasingly provides evermore doubt we'll ever arrive at a precise aesthetic theory. There was a time - perhaps 1880? - in which this idea would've been thought pessimistic; I see it as an unalloyed joyous thing.

As a young man, Oscar Wilde was furiously reading esthetes and theorists, trying to find his own way. He read the great aesthetic theorist Walter Pater and fell under his influence. Eventually, as Richard Ellmann writes in Four Dubliners, "[...] but he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of the night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail [...] no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself." (p.23)

This seems quite isomorphic to Alfred Korzybski's "The map is not the territory."

                                                     basic entoptic imagery

Oliver Sacks
He's just produced another book, Hallucinations. My local library bought five copies, they're all checked out, and there are 42 holds. The Berkeley intellectuals (most of the population?) are fascinated by hallucinations, for multivarious reasons. It also doesn't hurt that Sacks is one of the few scientist-intellectuals who writes so well for the general public that his books still qualify as non-fiction juggernauts in publishing. I will devour his latest book as soon as I can get my hands on it, as I have all of his previous books. From reading reviews of Hallucinations, I find it laudable he's making a very nuanced argument in an effort to de-stigmatize hallucinations, because we're all hallucinating far more often than we'd think.

The paideuma - our collective semantic unconscious - assumes hallucinations are for the seriously ill. It seems part of our long historical baggage of overly-rationalized systems of thought that are now built into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives, and owes largely to the incredibly influential and persuasive rhetorics of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, St. Augustine, Descartes, and Newton.

Around 2008 Sacks published a book on Migraines. His latest book seems to elaborate on some of what was in his headache book, but I'll have to see for myself. In Migraines - which he has had since early childhood - (he also has prosopagnosia, or "face blindness") he describes the imagery that accompanied a migraine headache: tiny branching images, like twigs, geometrical structures that covered his entire visual field, lattice and checkerboards (typical OG digression: this reminded me of Werner Heisenberg, trying to come to grips with quantum phenomena, and in order to escape his hay fever, retired to an island, where he could hike and think and play mental games of chess with his friends, finally arriving at a mathematical solution to the quantum by using a bizarre matrix algebra that no one would have ever thought would be put to practical use), and sometimes more elaborate patterns like Islamic carpet patterns and complex mosaics, spirals and scrolls and filigree, eddies and swirls. At other times he saw three-dimensional shapes like pine cones and sea urchins.

                                                       Heinrich Kluver

Now, this is not new territory. Sacks, as a neuroscientist, read Heinrich Kluver's books Mescal  and Mechanisms of Hallucination. Kluver experimented with mescal himself and saw infinitely small and transparent oriental rugs and malleable filigreed biological-like objects, often spherical, like radiolaria. Kluver hypothesized that these were "form constants" that were geometrical and ornamental but were innate, which reminds me of Mandelbrot's sets and their descriptions and fantastical arrays in our natural world.

Reading Sacks and then Kluver, this resonated with me because one of my favorite things to do, late at night, cannabis or no: page through marvelous books of prints by Kandinsky, Alex Grey's staggering book Transfigurations, and Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms In Nature, among many others.

When I consciously do this, it is because of the reliability of pleasure, and a concomitant entrance into a finite province of meaning, outside the primary, ordinary, taken-for-granted "reality" of our (in this case my own) daily lives.

                                                 Hubel and Wiesel

Basic Idea of Where These Forms Come From
Kluver was fascinated because these visual images seemed to not have anything to do with memory, personal experience, imaginative force, or the desire to see them. They appear to be archetypal. Furthermore, people the world over express these forms in their artworks, whether in Africa, ancient Mexico, or southern Europe during the Paleolithic. But why? What explains it?

The visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe near the "back" of our brains, was described by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel, and they deserved more than one Nobel Prize, their work was so fantastically groundbreaking. It turns out the part of our brains that is involved in seeing has very many layers and they're quite specialized. One sheet of neurons only knows a dot, others know little lines, other colors, etc. It's incredibly complex and totally amazing they were able to crack this code, via painstaking work.

So, via migraines, or sensory deprivation or hallucinogenic drugs, or fever, or flickering lights, or just-waking/just-falling asleep states: the cytoarchitecture of these basic sheets of neurons - each neuron only "knows" how to do ONE THING! - gets activated. Our primary visual cortex, in these altered states shows us, makes available to us for contemplation, the dynamics of a part of our visual cortex: lines and shapes, from Euclidean forms to non-Euclidean forms, up to - if we're really "out there," Mandelbrot-like forms: animals, landscapes, people, other Beings.

Oliver Sacks thinks the elementary forms of our worldwide human Art can use, as explanatory schema, non-ordinary states available to all of us in one mode or another, and the workings of the neurophysiological workings of the primary visual cortex.

Now, this may seem reductive. And I think it is. But it's my current Number One as far as the basic mental elements of Where Art Comes From. And it seems to go a long way in explaining what caused those shapes playing for me, unbidden, on the backs of my eyelids, in the Theater of the Entoptic,  while sunning on the beach. Am I married to this theory? No. But I will be astonished if a richer one comes along.

A Parthian Shot: because I think it's basically correct - that various non-ordinary states in the human archetypal landscape have given rise to Art - I see the so-called War On Drugs (which I often extensionalize to a War On Certain People Who Use Drugs The State Arbitrarily Outlaws) - as a War on Human Nature, and I got this idea from David Jay Brown, in an essay he published in Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Entoptic Imagery and Altered States of Consciousness

Oliver Sacks on hallucinogens and hallucinations. We need more and more of these hyper-articulate intellectuals talking about their own phenomenological experiences on psychoactive drugs. This is less than 5 minutes, and get a load of what Sacks says about amphetamines!:

Drippy Jackson Pollock Theories: Art and Mathematics!

Sometime in 1996, physicist Richard Taylor decided he'd also pursue a degree in Art History, so he's my kind of guy, obviously. He was on sabbatical and checking out Jackson Pollock's drip-art (1943-52). In 1949 Life magazine featured Pollock as the Hot New Guy Painter and then received tons of letters protesting this abstract expressionist's work, a common argument being something like, "My kid could paint that!" 50 years later, a major exhibit of Pollock at New York's MOMA had lines around the block, and a Pollock has sold for $40million. You explain it. I've got some fractal fish to fry.

                            A detail-section from Jackson Pollock's 1949 work Number 8

Taylor got the idea that Pollock, in his use of particular paints, his manipulations of the paints' viscosities, his bodily motions, his attacking the canvas by walking around it from every angle, using his famous drip technique, had produced fractals. Either Taylor intuited that Pollock had intuited the basic minute algorithmic structure of Nature, or Taylor thought it might be really interesting to pursue the idea and see where it took him, I don't know. But he began an interesting controversy that rattles and drips down to today.

Taylor pursued his hypothesis. As a physicist he was already familiar (an understatement) with Benoit Mandelbrot's book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In order to test whether Pollock's paintings between 1943-52 contained fractals - whether they contained complex geometric patterns that could be detected at very small scales, medium scales, and larger scales, a hidden occult order that corresponded to well-defined parameters in fractal geometry - he scanned pictures of the drip paintings and put them in his computer. Then he divided the images into very small boxes that added up to five million drip patterns that were, when looked at by the naked eye, anywhere from four yards wide to less than 1/10 of an inch.

                                         Sabinoso canyons of New Mexico, aerial view
                             

If there were fractal patterns in Pollock, it didn't matter what the original size was that was placed into a tiny box in a computer image: fractals are "as above, so below": fractals at the tiniest levels are reflected in the largest levels. If we look at a tree, a twig fractally mimics the whole tree. Mandelbrot - whose work was sneered at when it first appeared (by the most eminent mathematicians of the day!), argued that he had discovered yet another non-Euclidean geometry, one that could be applied to the "roughness" of Nature. Previously, Euclid and other inventors of non-Euclidean geometry assumed smooth shapes basically governed "reality."

[Mandelbrot has won, and for further information - even though I assume nine of 10 readers of Overweening Generalist already know quite a lot about fractals - I've linked to a pretty good 50 minute Nova TV program, which includes Mandelbrot, Richard Taylor, Keith Devlin, Ralph Abraham and many others. If you're bored with my spew here and want to know more about fractals and Mandelbrot, skip to the end of this post. - OG]

                                          a computer-generated fractal image

Anyway, Taylor (1999 paper) found that Pollock's paintings were indeed filled with fractals. As Jennifer Ouellette wrote in Discover in their November 2001 issue about Taylor and Pollock, "Pollock was apparently testing the limits of what the human eye would find aesthetically pleasing." Let's be clear about why this might be so: if we contain fractal structures in our bodies, and Nature - say, a rain forest, mountains, trees, and clouds - are fractal, then we intuitively "understand" these very complex-looking images, because we evolved with them and they are in us. Studies have shown that people's stress levels can lower by as much as 50% by looking at fractal imagery.

This seems to be true at many levels. Imagine the sound of a baby pounding his fists on the keyboard of a piano. Then think of listening to someone playing major scales in every key on a piano with a metronome. Then imagine Beethoven playing variations on a simple theme.

Some evolutionary psychologists have surmised that, deep in our evolutionary ancestry, we became attuned to deviations in the visual environment that disrupted fractal patterns, and this aided in survival, thus making the argument that we are oddly soothed by looking at fractal patterns because they were primarily about survival, and predated aesthetic concerns. (Another Just-So story?)

What's weird is that Pollock did his drip paintings before Mandelbrot published his work on fractals. If we think Richard Taylor was basically correct and Pollock's drip paintings contain fractals, how did Pollock "know"? Almost every writer who's covered this story uses the words "intuition" and "instinct." Some link this to the fractal nature of our selves, but even if this wonderful idea is true, I still marvel at...how? My best guess, as of this date, is that Pollock somehow got himself into harmony with the way of Nature, what the ancient Chinese called Tao. 

"I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident." - Jackson Pollock

Taylor found, using the parameters of fractal geometry and his computer, that, as Pollock's drip technique evolved, the later, more complex paintings had even higher levels of fractal dimensionality.

The next step for Taylor was to build his "Pollockizer," which was a device that used fractal algorithms that allowed a machine to splatter or drip paint in ways that created paintings that were either fractally based, or, when he tweaked the numbers, produce just random, non-fractalized paintings. Then, to test his theory on the public, he displayed his machine-produced fractal paintings along with his non-fractal/ordinary "chaos" paintings. Of 120 people surveyed, 113 chose the fractal paintings as most pleasing.

Fractals are found in nature, but there are others that are man-made (like Pollock's dripworks), and there are still others that are computer-generated, and anyone can look on You Tube and find meta-psychedelic fractal videos that trippers during the Summer of Love could've never imagined. Taylor worked with perceptual psychologists and found that subjects preferred looking at objects that fell within the 1.3 to 1.5 level of dimensionality of fractals, irregardless whether the images were from nature, computers, or human-made. (This reminded me of my studies of why we find some people more beautiful than others.)

There's much more to Taylor's arguments about fractals in Pollock, but what he wanted to argue was that he had developed a way to quantitatively analyze the style of an abstract artist. As wild as Pollock's abstract paintings appear, Taylor said his method was objective and that he may have stumbled onto a way to authenticate and legitimate actual Pollocks, to detect the "fingerprints" of his style, and separate them from the (probably) hundreds of fakes out there. Conservators came running to Taylor, eager for him to apply his method.

The Method Gets Tested: Let the Drama Heat Up!
In 2003, Taylor analyzed 24 putative Pollocks and said they did not possess the fractal signature of Pollock.

In 2006, Alex Matter, the son of friends of Pollock, said he'd found 30 Pollocks that the famous painter had given to his parents. They were found in a storage bin in Long Island, New York. Taylor used his method and determined the paintings were not Pollocks.

Enter two physicists, Kate Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. They argued that Taylor's methodology was flawed and that it should not be relied upon to authenticate paintings. In the journal Nature they said, "Several problems must be addressed before fractal analysis can be used to authenticate paintings." And one was the small-box counting technique Taylor used. Jones-Smith took her own simple childlike line drawing, Untitled 5:

...and subjected it to Taylor's method. She and her colleagues used the box-counting technique and found them to have the fractal dimensions of a Pollock! (?) Furthermore, Jones-Smith said Pollock's paintings lacked the range of scales needed to be considered as fractal, because the smallest speck of paint analyzed by Taylor was only 1000 times smaller than the entire canvas. Taylor responded in Nature that invoking this power law "would dismiss half the published investigations of fractals." Additionally, Jones-Smith found that, when she and colleagues analyzed Pollocks using Taylor's published methods, they found that two out of three Pollocks failed to satisfy Taylor's criteria. They charged that Taylor had kept some of his methodology unpublished. Also, Jones-Smith said Taylor only analyzed 17 of the drip paintings (other sources I've read give it as 20), which makes the sample size too small, as there were at least 180 drip paintings. This means that Matter's works may have really been Pollocks and that Taylor's idea about Pollock's stylistic fingerprints should not be used in authentication.

Taylor responded that Jones-Smith's Untitled 5 does not show fractal patterns. By late November, 2007, the idea of authentication by fractal signature seemed wildly unsettled.

Here's an interesting point for the OG: by the time physicists with the advanced ninja Mandelbrotian juju apply their numbers, I obviously lack the math chops to stick with the argument. It seems that when a story goes off in this direction - specialists clashing in a language I'm not conversant in - I retreat to the sidelines to watch the melee and see how it all plays out. And sometimes it takes years! Which is fine with me. I actually enjoy the drama of it all.

Enter: Four New Nerds
In early 2008 a paper appeared, "Multifractal Analysis and Authentication of Jackson Pollock Paintings," by Coddington of NY MOMA, Elton of Pegasus Imaging Corp, Rockmore of Dartmouth mathematics, and Wang of Michigan State mathematics. They looked at Taylor's methodology and how he'd determined that the 30 Alex Matter "Pollocks" were bogus. They extended Taylor's methods, adding the "entropy dimension," which they described as a quality related to the fractal dimension, and I'll just have to take their word for it. The four seem excited that geeks like themselves are making inroads into "Stylometry," and early in the paper cite its nascent use in literature, and this reminded me of a totally fascinating book I'd read a few years ago by Don Foster, Author Unknown.  Foster called what he did "literary forensics" (other times "forensic linguistics") and he used his computer and algorithms he'd developed about word choice, length of sentences, certain tendencies towards tropes, etc, to try to determine who some unknown author was. He was involved in the Unabomber case, he figured out who wrote Primary Colors, and showed that an incredibly literate and witty letter-writer to a Northern California newspaper, who signed as "Wanda Tinasky," was not Thomas Pynchon, as many suspected. It's a great read, but I've digressed. Again.

So yea, the four geeks. Stylometry would use advanced statistical analysis and improved digital representations to quantify works of art. They thought Taylor's box-counting method was legitimate. Hell, what do I know when they haul out their "entropy plots" and "slope statistics"? What did they conclude about Taylor's methods?

They thought Taylor was right: based on their entropy plotting, the Matter paintings were fakes. When they compared a known Pollock with one of Matter's "Pollock"s, they saw a "dramatic distinction between a secure Pollock and this drip painting found by Alex Matter."

Score one for Taylor.

2009: Jones-Smith and Mathur Team Up with Big-time Physicst Lawrence Krauss
They have done their best to debunk Richard Taylor. HERE is a short writeup on their doings.

2011: Fluid Dynamics Leaks In
Check out this article by Lisa Grossman from Wired. When I read the title I thought, okay, more of the math-physics-art geek wars and Richard Taylor, but noooo. What we get here is two geeks from Boston College and a Harvard mathematician claiming the first quantitative analysis of Jackson Pollock. The nerve! Grossman doesn't mention Taylor, but links to his 1999 correspondence to Nature about fractals in Pollock, co-written with Micolich and Jonas. There's no mention of Coddington, Elton, Rockmore and Wang. Why? Because they're not at Harvard or Boston College? What? If you're at Dartmouth it's a denigration?

Herczynski and Cernuschi of BC and Mahadevan of Harvard "believe they've done the first quantitative analysis of drip painting." Yea, hoo-kay.

Well, these fluid dynamics guys had just published an equation about how Pollock spread paint on a canvas, in Physics Today. So...why are they "the first?" Well, they're drawing on novel findings in the area of physics called fluid dynamics. How honey coils when you pour it onto a conveyor belt, the behavior of a dripping faucet, the movement of nanofibers and rope. Some whole other thing that ain't fractals. No, they've done a "quantitative analysis" of "inertial, gravitational, and viscous coiling regimes." Alright, but I think Taylor, Micolich and Jonas did a quantitative analysis in 1999, and the four nerds in 2008 did so also.

I will chalk all this up to the dimension of scientist's lives perhaps best shown in Carl Djerassi's books of what he calls "science-in-fiction," in which an anonymous author's short bio of Djerassi, we read, "illustrates, in the guise of realistic fiction, the human side of scientists and the personal conflicts faced by scientists in their quest for scientific knowledge, personal recognition, and financial rewards."

But just as Taylor thought Pollock was doing fractals before anyone knew about them - even himself - the fluid dynamics dudes say Pollock was doing experiments in fluid dynamics before any physicists had known about the way certain fluids of certain viscosities moved. (This all reminds me of a stunningly imaginative speculative work by a real Leonardo-level Generalist: Leonard Shlain's Art and Physics: Parallel Visions In Space, Time and Light. Here's a thick book on how, throughout history, artists seem to stumble upon "knowledge" about Nature before the physicists, astronomers, chemists, and biologists "discover" the same thing, and then quantify it. Shlain was a surgeon. Yet another digression. Sorry!)

Pollock was obsessive about finding new paints and pigments, and loved to alter their consistencies. Maybe the fluid dynamics guys have something here.

Meanwhile, Benoit Mandelbrot (who died in 2010) thought Taylor was right: Pollock drip paintings were fractal. He supported Taylor in a 2007 Science News article.

Harsh Mathur, Kate Jones-Smith's colleague and Richard Taylor's nemesis, is impressed by the fluid dynamics guys' work. But I find Mathur a tad glib when he says, "Either Taylor is wrong or Kate's drawings are worth $40 million. We'd be happy either way." Why? I'd still like to figure out whether Jones-Smith and Mathur had an ulterior motive for taking on Taylor.

As of 2011, Richard Taylor says that fractals are "just one key to authentication, and should be used with other methods. It's not a red-light green-light method." He's gone on to investigate neurobiology and fractals, using MRIs, EEGs, and skin conductance to measure stress levels of people looking at fractal imagery.

Tangentially, Frances Stonor Saunders, in The Cultural Cold War showed how the CIA covertly backed Western abstract expressionists like Pollock in order to win the war with the Soviets. The idea was that we were way ahead, because, well...just look how "advanced" someone like this Pollock character is! This is what a "free society" looks like!  A wonderful work of "hidden history" that almost reads like a byzantine spy novel, yet it's true. What a weird, weird world some of the CIA guys live(d) in.

Late in my investigation, I discovered Sarah Everts's article in Central Science. It serves as a recapitulation and extends my little ditty here. I like how she points out that fractals soothe, the debate rouses, the math and physics sooth, presumably due to their elegance.

"Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." - Jackson Pollock

Here's a good overview documentary of fractals and their history, Mandelbrot, etc:

Other Works Consulted

• Chaos: Making A New Science, James Gleick, 1987
• Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise, John L. Casti, 1994
• Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty: Graphics From An Unseen World, Clifford A. Pickover, 2001
• Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics, Ian Stewart, 1995
• Patterns In Nature, Peter S. Stevens, 1974
• Trialogues At The Edge Of The West, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, 1992
• Jennifer Ouellette's home page
• Jackson Pollack site at Artsy

Ayn Rand's Dippy Art Theory (and some fun schtuff too)

Jillian Steinhauer's "Ayn Rand's Theory of Art," which Hyperallergic ran a couple months ago surprised me, because I would have guessed Rand's ideas about art would be dull, but I had no idea how utterly impoverished they would seem.

A 539 page book that Steinhauer admits she didn't buy and only read in chapter summaries and excerpted bits, I might someday see if I can get my hands on a library copy to see if it's as thoroughly ridiculous as it seems, after reading what Steinhauer gleaned from it.

                                  Kandinsky's Unbroken Line (1923), which is NOT art,
                                 according to Ayn Rand, because it's not representational.
                                 Interestingly, the Nazis had a similar esthetic.

Presented as a "groundbreaking alternative view" of Art, contra the Art Establishment, it seems that Rand only thought representational art in painting, sculpture and drawing was legitimate. Apparently there were other ideas about poetry and novels. But let's learn about what IS NOT art from Rand:

1. any and all abstract art (remember: it must be representational!)
2. photography (fuck you, Ansel Adams!)
3. any sort of crafts from indigenous peoples (why? I'd like to know)
4. John Cage and Merce Cunningham (big surprise)
5. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (it seems likely that Robert Anton Wilson was going around calling himself an Objectivist - before he was finally summoned into Rand's presence and was thoroughly underwhelmed by her, mid-1950s - while he was a budding Joyce scholar. He probably had no idea at the time what Rand thought about Joyce, or her ideas of What Constitutes Real Art in general. That's my guess.)
6. inscrutable "postmodernist" poetry, like John Ashberry (gosh, I'm shocked)
7. anything "postmodern" or - seemingly - too cute for Rand: Warhol and Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg (one of my faves)...you get the point: none of this is true Art, according to our delightful Objectivist
8. any "art" that comes with a prefix: "visual" or "video" art IS NOT art; "pop" or "performance" or "installation" or "conceptual" art IS NOT art. These are all terms the decadent, socialist, weak moocher Art Establishment has been trying to pawn off as "real" Art to all you saps. Don't fall for it!
9. finally (yea, I know, you're enjoying this and don't want it to end; sorta like an installment of "Fox and Friends"): anything described by cretinous non-heroic artfolk as "challenging"or "explorational" or "confrontational" or "quirky." See these terms and run, ladies and germs. Get with the Objectivist Program and learn from the amphetamine-addled Aristotelian Ayn herself.

On a lighter note, I had not known that Ayn Rand had had her own cable-access (excuse me: private access) TV show from way back when.

Also: HERE's a link to 10 articles about the brilliant purveyor of "Me" and mean-ness, Ayn Rand.

Reykjavik's Wild Street Art
Check it out HERE.
I have the feeling Ayn would not approve.

More Street Art: Slinkachu's Tiny Worlds in the Street
Check it out HERE.
One strongly surmises Ayn would want to spit.

Shelly Miller's Temporary Sugar Mural, About Sugar: "Cargo"
Appearing as a ceramic, but it's not. It was placed on the side of a building in Montreal, and was made from sugar, something so playful and saccharine Ayn would no doubt want to puke. See it HERE. (Sugar murals, not Ayn Rand's puke.)

Speaking of Street Art: Jon Rafman's Google Street View Images
Found at 9Eyes. I use Google Street View but apparently not often enough! (Ayn is spinning in her grave: just think: images captured...ewwww...photography!) Why do I suspect the tiger in the parking lot is some sorta put-on? Still: pretty cool anyway. And who knows what the story is in the first image?

Yuri Suzuki's London Underground...on Circuit Boards
So cool. Cool enough to enrage Ayn Rand? Yep, the idea that this would be shown to a paying public?
Check it out HERE. And what would she make of nudists having an orgy on a polyimide surface of a semiconductor in an integrated circuit, etched with reactive ions? I do not think she would call this Art.

May K's Protein Strand-Art
How wonderful is this? Vote for her if you like what she's seeing/doing. Getting even smaller, you can get your personal DNA map enlarged and printed out and looking like...something Ayn Rand would not cotton to.

Top 20 from 2011's Nikon Small World Contest
HERE. I find all of these completely wonderful and when I got to the 5th place finisher, the microchip surface, I thought I had my favorite. But then number 20, "Agatized dinosaur bone cells, unpolished," from around 150 million years ago, was my favorite. Oops! It's photography, so for Ayn Rand it's not Art.

Finally: A Nod to the 2012 Election: Marriage Equality Art...
Made from seeds!

I first found out about more than half of the above collections of artwerks via BoingBoing.

I suspect the world I perceive is far far far more open than the more-famous Ayn Rand's was, but then I admit my bias.