Nature, Art and Values; an Essay in Three Parts. 2.

by Koenraad Kortmulder                                       k.kortmulder@kpnplanet.nl

I. On Art and Nature; some parallels.

II. On Imaging in Art and Nature.

III. On Values of Art and Nature.

Abstract.

Individuals are members of classes, and of classes-of classes. That is true for both individual animals and separate works of art. Classes result from break-throughs and the origination of new morphospaces. (I).

Interaction between or within individuals leads to imaging of one onto the other, and thereby creates an archive of the evolution of nature, art and the planet. (II).

The archive of retained images and their integration defines an object’s value. (III).

Part II

II. On Imaging in Art and Nature.

II.1 Imaging in nature.

Pitch sticks, as the saying goes. It leaves its traces on the person who interacts with it. Conversely, the person’s actions get depicted in the sticky substance as it is warmed, poured out or kneaded into forms. It conserves foot- or fingerprints, tiny skin scales, scents etcetera from which, given sufficient time, knowledge and technology, the actions of the handler may be read.

Some contacts are closer than the example; many are more remote. Your eye registers images of nebulae millions of light years away. It may be long before a reciprocal action reaches those same celestial bodies, but at least your act of observation here and now distorts the electromagnetic field radiated long ago, and depicts itself precisely and irreversibly in that field. Instead of depiction I shall henceforward use imaging.

Not all resemblances are caused by imaging through mutual interaction. Similarities between this hydrogen atom here and one at 13 billion light years distance are not necessarily due to their having met, though the greater regions to which they belong must have, during the early life of the universe.

As yet, the null hypothesis that everything is being imaged all around, and that the limitations to this process may be treated as special cases, looks like a reasonable point of departure. What kind of images?

The dry soil of the Nevada Desert, New Mexico, has through 40,000 years been conserving the nests of desert rats, complete with mineralised urine residues in the shape of chlorides and carbon-containing substances. From the latter, one can derive the age of the nests with the C14 technique. Among the chlorine (Cl) atoms in the urine deposits, a small proportion are Cl36 , formed out of normal chlorine (Cl34) under influence of cosmic radiation. The stronger the radiation, the higher the isotope percentage. Decaying time is very long. So the percentage Cl36 reflects the intensity of cosmic radiation at ground level at the time the sediment was formed. On this basis, researchers of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology were able to sketch the course of radiation intensity through the past 40,000 years. One conspicuous result was a rather abrupt halving of that intensity some 11,000 years ago. This event roughly coincides with changes in the earth's magnetic field, as measured using different methods. Earth magnetism wards off cosmic radiation; the stronger the field, the more radiation is intercepted.

Another example: when the atmosphere contains more CO2, plant leaves make more stomata per leaf surface area. In a moister climate, on the other hand, the same leaves grow faster, which results in larger stomata. Friederike Wagner (University of Utrecht) assessed these two parameters in fossilised leaves from datable layers of peat soil sampled in Florida. By doing so, she read back, as in a book, the history of the climatic factors during the past 1,000 years. With another method, Maarten Blaauw (now Queen’s University, Belfast) read fluctuations in the C14 content of the air through the past 10,000 years from Dutch peat-moor samples (Wagner et al., 1999; Blaauw & Christen, 2005).

The climatic conditions of the Earth, volcanic eruptions, ‘summer-less’ years and cosmic explosions have left their traces in the fine structure of the Greenland ice mantle, in peat layers of the world, in the stems of trees both living and fossil, as well as in fossilised rat urine. With a good deal of patience and laboratory equipment we can read that book.

At this point you may put forward that these examples are mere exceptions, incidental cases of conservation under special circumstances. You argue that by far the largest part of the planet’s crust is constantly put into motion by wind, water, erosion, tectonics, volcanos and what not, and much of it never was deposited in neat layers as discussed above. Would that not mean that most of what happens is never imaged or, if it is, erased soon afterwards? I reply: isn’t erasing only a question of the traces becoming more complicated, being among other things shifted from macroscopic to microscopic and still more microscopic patterns to the extent that we can no longer retrace them? The distinction between being imaged and readability is essential; the former is nearly unlimited (1), the other ends where technology ends. Scientists look for the simpler, practically readable traces for their reconstructions of the past.

So let me push the argument a little further. The examples above dealt with tens of thousands of years. Some readable traces are much older. The solid crust of our planet retains memories about collisions with meteors and fluctuations of the magnetic field during many millions of years. Sediments from diverse geological periods have been coloured, deformed, broken by magma eruptions, earthquakes and tectonic movements. Darkness following the crashing of comets and the dying of whole faunas were imaged in it, as well as the ever revived evolution of new forms. The drift of the continents has been reconstructed from the magnetic orientation of natural rocks in situ. Now we know that 300 million years ago all of to-day’s continents were united in one land mass: Pangaea.

Long before the planet Earth existed, or even the sun around which she travels, the cosmos depicted itself in itself. The cosmic background radiation is a print of the universe as it was when only some 400,000 years old. At that ‘moment’, the first electrically neutral atoms were formed out of the seething plasm of ions, electrons and electromagnetic radiation. Subtle variations in density between diverse regions of the young universe left their traces in the shape of slender differences in the background radiation which can be read to-day - tremendously expanded and cooled-down, but still measurably different and slightly polarised exactly as calculated by the theory of its origin. In the future, scientists may be able to detect the traces even of gravitation waves that should have shaken the universe in its first few seconds.

II.2 Common languages in Nature

One basic feature of this our universe is that it is not homogeneous. Local condensations have given rise to stars, planets, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Organic molecules, cells, organisms have drifted together and actively assembled themselves into larger units. The complexity of communication necessary to keep a cell, an animal, a colony together is easily under-estimated. Effective signalling requires common language. A large proportion of scientific effort goes into deciphering such languages. A couple of examples may suffice.

‘Post-code’ systems. The control centres of leg- and arm movements of vertebrate animals are located in the spinal chord. The corresponding muscles are further down the extremities, at macroscopic distances from the controls. In full-grown condition the two are connected by nerve fibres or axons, long-drawn extensions of nerve cells which have their main body, containing the nucleus, in the spinal chord. It is these fibres that conduct the nimble, electro-chemical messages in the shape of impulse patterns, At some time during the individual’s development the fibres have bridged the gap between the cell bodies and the correct position in the right muscles. How does a growing axon ‘know’ where it has to go and when ‘it is there’?

To this purpose, very specific protein molecules sit on the surface of the growing fibre. As a group they are referred to as ‘neural-cell adhesion molecules’(N-CAM). Every axon has its own specific set of them. These molecules are carried with the growing tip, like flags, until they contact equally specific receptor molecules on the surface of the muscle that has to be innervated by this particular axon. Some of these contacts may be transient only, as with intermediate stations; after a brief stoppage, growth continues until the final destination is reached.

For such post-code systems to work adequately, the start- and terminal stations have to agree on the meaning of each message. How does a cell body in the spinal chord ‘know’ what kind of receptor is there on the muscle far away? Ever since the separation of the respective embryonic regions of the nervous system and the extremity, they have not ‘seen’ each other, both developing autonomously. Somewhere, at some time, mutual ‘consent’ must have been created on a common language, either during the very early development of the embryo, or during the phylogeny that brought it forth. In both cases there must have been a moment when the two regions were still close together.

At a much smaller scale, but just as amazing, substances are transported within a living cell. Molecules to be moved are tagged with certain chemical groups at specific positions. The groups are recognised at some distant address. The tags may be stereo-chemical configurations folded-in during transport and unfolded on arrival. Plied in a different manner at an intermediate station, they may act as codes for a further stage (Alberts et al.,1983).

II.3 Imaging and common languages in Art

An artist paints a landscape, a still life or a moment in urban life, but the subject is only one aspect of the whole creative process in which he is involved. That process entails a multiple Auseinandersetzung of the maker and his work, with his materials and competence; with imaginary or real beholders; with contemporaries, predecessors, his own earlier work, and his conscious or unconscious motives. All this together constitutes the world from which the work in progress derives its information. Again, common languages are indispensable to this complex communication network. A few examples may illustrate this: perspective and dissonance.

E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion does justice to the role of language (convention) in pictorial art. The ancient Egyptians’ visual faculties were no doubt the same as ours, certainly good enough for them to know that a person’s eye is not at the side of the head, that the gaze is not normally parallel to the shoulder, or the feet in the same direction. Nevertheless, they pictured people in that cramped posture. No spectator or commissioner of the time is likely to have had problems with it. They must have agreed on the current pictorial language.

The way the Greeks or the medieval and Renaissance artists dealt with perspective may look increasingly familiar to us, but does not convince anybody who sees it for the first time. Gombrich cites a risky misunderstanding around a portrait of the American Indian ‘Little Bear’, painted by George Catlin c. 1838. The traditional side lighting was interpreted by the native onlookers as representing only “half a man.” The story is apocryphal (2), but does draw attention to the fact that there is no objective difference, in a painting, between a face lighted from one side and one painted dark at the other, or half a face for that matter. Only convention can decide the point.

In the gothic pictorial language, as in the ancient Greek, perspective is indicated by representing objects or persons that are farther away as partly hidden by those on the fore-ground, or just smaller. For instance Simone Martini’s fresco of Guidoriccio de Fogliano on horse-back with a fortified town in the back-ground. The early attempts at representing buildings in perspective, such as  those by Giotto, look awkward to our eyes; not because their meaning is unclear, but because we are used to a different language: the developed linear perspective of the Renaissance (3). So accustomed are we to the latter, that we do not usually realise that also this depends on conventions rather than representing objective truth. To demonstrate this, Gombrich argues that a rectangular box painted in perspective is only recognised as such if one assumes that it is rectangular. Objectively, it could be viewed as a non-rectangular box in a different position, or rather an unlimited number of possible boxes. It is only through additional information in the whole painting (making a further appeal on the observer’s cognition) that this point can be decided. In fact, the very possibility of optical illusion proves the role of convention.

The conventions implicit in these examples are of diverse origins. The eyes of artists, onlookers and users have the same capacities by common biological descent. The persons also share traditions and prejudices, living as they do in the same culture. They are thus connected by common languages created by ongoing and past interaction. In its turn, much of human cultural language has biological roots, and the biological has physical causes.

The other example is about the perception of consonance and dissonance in music. These are relative notions. According to the classical convention, dissonant chords must be resolved towards consonant ones. Which chords count as consonant, however, has varied with time. In Renaissance music (di Lasso, Palestrina) only a quint beside the octave was acceptable in a final chord (CGC’). Later, an additional third was allowed (CEGC’), but until within J.S. Bach’s time a minor third (CE-flatGC’)was considered to be less appropriate. In the 20th century also a sixth (CEGAC’) was accepted.

The law that dissonances have to be resolved drives classical music forward. While the family of consonants was widened, composers kept stretching the limits of dissonance by playing, for instance, with melodic lines (creating crash notes) and with the rules of tonality. In chromatics the degree of dissonance of a chord itself becomes uncertain. The reinterpretation of G-sharp into A-flat or of F into G-double flat manipulates the listener’s perception towards a different key, in which the push and pull instantly take new directions. In twelve-note music the notion of dissonance itself lost its classical meaning, because any resolution of a dissonant chord in the traditional manner would now imply an admission as to one or another diatonic scale, and thus should be avoided. On the basis of a different theory, Debussy created series of chords in which a certain degree of dissonance seems to be conserved rather than resolved.

Through the ages, the language of music, like that of the plastic arts, has kept changing. As a result, each particular chord came to be differently  perceived - it really did sound differently, even though the vibrations in the inner ear of humans were identical.

To summarise the fore-going sections, it may be stated that every object that has interacted with others, be it an organism or a work of art, may bear with it images of those interactions (and vice-versa). At this point, anticipating on Part III of this essay, I may suggest, that it is these images which somehow determine the object’s true value. In order to test this idea, we may now go into some further detail in the artistic and natural processes respectively. For practical reasons, the following discussion will be centred at the level of individual organisms and individual works of art.

II.4  The fine structure of the Artistic and Natural processes

The smallest unit of the artistic process is the ‘conversation’ between the maker and his work (Fig. 1a). As the painting develops, the actions of the artist are imaged in it, directed as they are by the latter’s observation, intentions, reminiscences of other works etcetera. All the while he is getting information back from the work, which he compares with his model and its lighting or his concept and the way to express it. The work as a process is thus continually being imaged into the artist.

Fig.1. Cycles of mutual imaging. a: the artist at work; b: beholders (elite, critic, maecenas); c: interests (user, owner, politician); d: 'beholders' (nature lover, breeder, conservationist); 'interests' (user, owner, politician).

The maker is at the same time observer, user and owner, in the extreme case the only one of each. In practice, however, the process is not limited to this. Somebody may come and watch, a second one may offer comment, and a third decides to support the artist. The elite, the art critic and the Maecenas have thus been born, and got involved in the process. Their cycles of observation and response nestle up to the primary cycle, influencing it and vice versa (Fig. 1b).

Similarly, cycles of interest come into being: the user, the owner and the politician, and feed back on the primary cycle (Fig. 1c). All these cycles together create a complex network of mutual imaging in people, culture and art, all influencing each other and soon becoming unique and irreversible.

What about nature? Does she have that sort of creative cycles, like art? Yes, but not the same (Figure 1d). From an anthropocentric viewpoint we may still recognise the cycles of interest: owner, user and politician. Perhaps nature lover, breeder and conservationist are similar to elite, critic and Maecenas in that order, but their impact is only secondary; nature has not been created by them. It is self-creating, self-organising, and therefore the relationships of these man-made cycles to the central, natural, processes are different.

What is in the centre? Nature has cycles of its own, within itself and on its own accord. Any single organism interacts with others: friend and foe, predators, parasites or preys, with its environment as a whole, and in all time scales ranging from actual behaviour to evolution. It is similar with the mineral world: stars within galaxies; sun, moon and earth; climate and geology; atmosphere and cosmic radiation.

All those interactions, the physical, the biological and the artistic, lead of necessity to mutual imaging, as the universe, life on this planet and art evolve.

End of Part II.

Notes:

(1) A limit is given by Quantum Theory, at least in its Copenhagen interpretation.

(2) The portrait still exists and shows hardly if any side-lighting.

(3) First formulated succinctly by Brunelleschi.