The So What Factor.

Apart from the gee-whiz aspect of McIntosh’s and Kirschner’s “art” works which in themselves constitute only slightly aesthetisized science-fair projects, the ideas that they bring out are simple ones which have been existent for quite some time and rather well understood. The direction of the work is novel but its creative drive ought to punch through the “so what?” threshold. I like art as much as the next guy, but why should I have to say it’s great when it only fetishizes the common-place and only foregrounds the obvious?

I saw the “plans” for McIntosh’s Undulations in a chapter dealing with interference and resonance patterns in a pan of mercury in Duncan and Starling’s Text Book of Physics, vol. 2 Heat Light and Sound originally printed in 1917. If “artists” wish to illustrate interactivity or adaptation or evolution with scientific ideas, they should do so in a manner that is à la hauteur des temps or beyond, otherwise, it’s an insult to the intelligence and imagination of the spectator. There is a difference between minimalism and simplicity. I have no problem with “scientific” art per se, but the demonstration of a process au premier degré is not sufficient to constitute an artistic experience.

Natural processes and scientific or technological ideas deserve more focus than the simplistic reductionism that these two projects seem to want or be able to apply to them. And here I’m not referring to the implicit beauty that emerges in wave tanks or wind tunnels or watching copper sulphate crystals grow. Although some of 20th century art from Dali, Magritte, Balla, or Duchamp uses a scientific thématique, the concerns tie-in beyond the technique or the work at hand. Technological art of the type presented by McIntosh and Kirschner rose from a different experience than the artistic. You’ve likely seen etchings of some kind or other of a man of science demonstrating to a peer the production of some process of other: the one that immediately comes to mind is Newton’s demonstration of the breakdown of white light through a prism into a spectrum of colours. Is the demonstration in itself art? Later on, these demonstrations go public as travelling expositions or presentations of scientific findings and breakthroughs in public lectures. And now the presentation of this scientific knowledge has made its way from Scientific American to the Discovery Channel. But wait, now you can also own your very own piece of scientific process and exhibit it right in your very own home... Remember Sea Monkeys? Or the mail order ant farms? I think I’m choking on my madeleines.
The scientific experiments of the 19th and early 20th centuries not only demonstrate a level of sophistication in the understanding of these basic physical, chemical, electrical processes but a finesse and elegance in their demonstrations with simple unsophisticated means. And here I mean “demonstrations” such as Cheshire’s disc, or Bunsen’s Grease-Spot Photometer, or apparatuses to produce Lissajous figures, or Chladni’s figures, or devices to determine the velocity of light. Never mind the scientific and technological advances made in the latter half of the last century! The technical processes and their attendant technologies demonstrate an understanding of the ideas involved that far surpass the simplification of their explanation. “Is there anything more beautiful than a nuclear submarine or a Mercedes turbo-charged V-12 engine?” WW Simondon S?

There’s a huge divide between the understanding of the world by scientific and technological disciplines versus those of the artistic and philosophical disciplines. Is it that the scientific and technological advances are so far ahead of the aesthetic and philosophical understanding of the nature and implications of these advances that their simplistic depiction or representation as aesthetic ideas tend to be naive? Isn’t the device itself the best description of the process or processes to be illustrated? In the example of the Merc V-12, don’t we have the interactivity and adaptation to external inputs in a variety of circuits (electronic, thermodynamic, kinetics of gases, etc)? Don’t a lot of people already get it without getting all aesthetic about it and having to show it at the MOMA? I know people that would look at a Bosch turbocharger rapturously, in the same way that some people would look at a Bosch triptych. Or perhaps you have to actually make a turbocharger at home in order to really get its significance and be able to partake in the confrérie of techno art? But for me, what I find most lacking in the tech-art projects is the element of cleverness or surprise that grabs you by the throat and takes your breath away (the unheimlich manoeuvre) or the beyond the common-place as well as a scientific understanding of the principles at hand that would elevate these two projects from the mundane to the sublime. Do these simple presentations reflect McIntosh’s and Kirschner’s lack of appreciation for scientific and technical finesse or is this a reflection of the poverty of current artistic discourse? What if I were to put a multi-meter across the electrodes of Kirschner’s piece and looked at the needle oscillate? Exactly, so what!