JF Ptak Science Books

Blank & Empty Things 36: Sold Shadows and Fat Chairs (Peter Schlemiehl and Joseph Bueys)

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On the heels of my last post on the usefulness of constructing geologies of wrongness and on the extraction by Creationists of something from nothing comes today’s bit, where something really does come from nothing, and where (again) nothing of something is extracted from nothing. 

1)  Something from Nothing

How old are shadows?  Or, really, how old is the depiction of the shadow in the history of western art?  The shadow predates the modern re-discovery of classical perspective by a thousand years—little bits of shadows pop up here and there in deep antiquity, certainly way before Uccello and Alberti and the rest came along.  On the other hand shadows do escape notice of many painters in the 15^th century (and during the period of being very comfortable with the century-old realignment of perspective), which is odd, unless all of those works were depicting scenes at high noon or thereabouts. 

The something-from-nothing part with shadows comes from the odd and somewhat creepy story of Peter Schlemihl (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, "Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story") written in 1814 by the semi-ruined Franco/German aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso.  In one adventure, Peter, unfortunately poor in a land of the wealthy, makes an agreement with a mysterious grey man (who is probably the devil) to sell his shadow for a bottomless purse of gold.  In an 1861 British edition of this work, the great George Cruikshank portrays the very moment when the shadow is being literally lifted from the ground by the mysterious grey man—the point of contact between his hand and the shadow just gives me the willies.  The grey man’s own shadow, arching behind him, is also very threatening and terribly offputting to me.  Perhaps it is just a  great wrongness, making the shadow something from its vast nothingness.  (And the story goes that the gold is never-ending, but people are so repulsed by Peter not having a shadow that it makes his life supremely difficult—so much so that the grey man returns with a new deal, offering to Peter his shadow and the endless purse if only he would relinquish his soul when he died.  Peter begs off, throws away the purse, and lives without his shadow and without money.)

Hans Christian Andersen also provides a scary fairy tale in 1847 called "The Shadow", in which a man’s shadow slips away and is replaced by another shadow which slips back (slowly) into the old shadow’s place—but it is not what it seems:  "I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow.”

2)  Nothing from Something from Nothing.

Yes, this is terribly convoluted, but the title fits the subject, and the subject is Josef Beuys (1921-1986), a German artist (or perhaps he was a performer in art) who broadly dabbled in conceptual art.  He came to prominence in the 1960’s, when the acceptance of these art performances was as much a work of art as the art piece itself, and, I guess, he has remained, his appreciations now gaining an antique patina. 

I wanted to address his work, Fat Chair.  The title doesn’t quite describe the work, which is a chair with a wedge of fat on it.  Many a critic’s eyebrow has been plucked trying in deep intellectual desperation to see something in this work. Under the weight of these artistic appraisals of this work, I’ve just got to say, really, sometimes fat on a chair is just that.  I can appreciate Beuys as an artist and performer of his times, but the deep thought that has gone into Fat Chair is a bit much for my taste, praising observers biting off much more than can be chewed.  For example, from one website we see:

“ ‘Fat Chair’ (1964) is much more about the physicality of the human body. To Beuys, fat as a material could be considered before form was considered… Fat…appealed to Beuys b

ecause it was a composite with no internal structure…Beuys placed fat with its “chaotic organic energy”, symbolising warmth, in the cold, rigid, man-made form of a right-angle. This form, which represented the coexistence of instinct and intellect was placed in the right-angle of a chair between seat and back. The fat also occupies space on the chair that would be filled with our digestive and excretive organs if we were sitting on it.”

Another website states “Fat…was an ideal material for Beuys to use to sign

chaos and the potential for spiritual transcendence. Fat has the ability to exist as a physical example of two extremes: a flowing liquid when warm and a defined solid when cold. Beuys also believed that fat was psychologically effective, in that "people instinctively feel it relates to inner processes and feelings."

I’m sorry to not include the references for these opinions—it is just to painful, too embarrassing to ascribe them blame.  And they are hardly alone in this hagiographic myopia, pulling these strands of something from nothing about nothing. 

I’d prefer to leave it all at nothing in regard to the Beuys (or to Andres Serrano or Damien Hirst and so on),  thinking about lovely Ludwig’s self-abandoned seventh proposition (“Where (or of what) one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence”).  Better yet, better to apply the one of the last lines of the great classic “The Street of Laredo” (the Johnny Cash version of course)—when the young dying cowboy is asked about who shot and killed him, he simply says, in the best cowboy fashion, “speak not his name, and his name will pass on.”. 

Blank and Empty Things: the Case of pre-Biblical "Missing" Eclipses, Refuting Darwin, and the Geology of Wrongness

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A History of Blank and Empty Things #35.

Mr. R.R. Menke, the author The Challenge from the Skies, Planetary Motion and its Solemn Witness Against Evolution and Higher Criticism, self-published his biblico-religico-astronomical diatribe against Charles Darwin in Huntington Park, California, in 1925.  What he launches in 51 labored pages against one of the most elegant ideas in the history of science  is simply, well, shocking; shockingly eyebrows-catching-on-fire bad, so-bad-it-isn't-even-bad bad.  Without reading the whole, um, thing, I do get the piercing whiff of a notion having to do with eclipses and the true date of seven (?) days of creation.  He uses some sort of chrono-alchemy layered in spreadable butter, the words made of microscopic asparagus, to prove his point that "as a consequence of the verified truth of these cycles of time, we are bound to believe that there were no eclipses before the prime date (5923 years ago)".  No eclipses before creation.  AND no precession  of the equinoxes, "no seasons before the prime date, no cycles of 360 years before the prime date".  Oh my.

His conclusion, by virtue of this magnificently weighty evidence (and which he doesn't even relegate to its own paragraph), is "Therefore Darwin's theory of evolution has no place in the domain of astronomical science..."  And this is so not so much, evidently, that there were no eclipses, and no seasons, and no 360-year cycles (?!), but rather, at the base of it all, there was nothing. No earth.  And since the earth is only 60 centuries or whatever old Darwin just doesn't work.  I have no idea why the eclipse business was necessary if Mr. Menke was going to argue that there was no "there" there for anything to happen, what with the impracticable nature of having something in nothing. 

There you have it.  There's more, much more, but frankly it just isn't worth the 20 minutes to dig out more.  I rarely read anything in Creation Sc__nc_ as there is nothing redeeming at all in it--I'm posting this today because it strikes me that this present work isn't necessarily singularly bad, but rather representationally bad.  Since the entire belief/hope/prayer system or whatever the Creationists claim as the intellectual/moral basis to their Principa in explaining the stuff of the universe is painfully wrong, and bad, and potentially harmful, I wonder why we should distinguish the levels of badness and wrongness?  It isn't as though  establishing a geology of wrongness will somehow categorize it all in such a way that something worthwhile could be discovered, like a miraculous toe-hold at the top of the  Sisyphusian hill they're trying to slide up.  And so perhaps Mr. Menke's work is just wrong, along with the rest of the others; perhaps the other side needs to deal with him as being one of their own more so than anyone else.  Certainly there are more elegant refutations than this unfortunate attempt, but that only makes the wrongness prettier:  a pig in a (white) wedding gown is still, after all, a pig.

History of Dots AND Blank & Missing Things: Particles, Galaxies and Missing Middles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 533

(Forcibly!) joining a continuing series of posts on Blank and Missing Things and a History of Dots, we'll look today at intellectual hermorphiditism, alpha omegas, nuclear particle tracks, negative galaxies and the wanderings of a centenarian vegetarian pro-lefty Vermont commie's middle-missing thoughts. 

I know that you can find dots everywhere if you look hard enough, or magnify things enough, or get far away from them enough....it seems that once you start on either route in the powers of ten game that getting to 10 (7th) things start to look very dotty indeed.  What was on my mind was the similarity between particle tracks (and particularly the photographs of the very earliest ones) and negatives of images of galaxy clusters.  The image to the left, to encumber things a little further, is another look-alike from 1947:  a moving target indicator (showing the cluttered field of a Japanese freighter convoy at sea).  A negative photo of a section of a galaxy cluster in Perseus is directly below, while just below that is a cloud chamber of what is probably the first photo showing the track of a cosmic ray (1927 by Dmitry Skobeltzyn).

 The next image,  also from 1947, is the first observation of the disintegration by a negative meson (appearing in Nature Magazine #126 for 1947). 

The galaxy and particle images, at nearly-opposite ends of the existence spectrum:  from 10 (-10) meters (or .0000000001) to 10 (+14) meters (and actually 10 +14 through 10+25 meters, looking pretty much the same), the story is all pretty much dots, from the deepest buzzy  recesses of a proton to the outer reaches of the outermost bits of the outer universe.  The middle part is where all of the "stuff" is,  the (near) alpha and omega of whatever there *is*. 

And somehow this gets me to the two works here, both issued in 1947, by Scott Nearing, our centenarian Vermonter communist, who manages his very own alpha and omega, who covers the very ends of the spectrum without getting bogged down with the slumpy middle part....which of course is just about everything. 

Blank and Missing Things 33: (Disembodied) Hands of Creativity

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[Last year's post for this day: The Wrong Stuff, Righted--the Attack on Darwin's Descent, 1871]

I wish that I had kept track of all of the images of "holy/phenomenal" disembodied body parts sprouting from nothingness or from pure creator-of-the-universe light that I have seen populating antique prints over the years.  Much more popular in displaying the indisputable are the images of the Primum Mobile,  the Hebrew word for Y_w_h, the smiling countenance of the creator itself, or doves arising from a shining star or sun--far less seen are the images featuring seemingly floating disembodied body parts.  Had I kept track of all of these magnificent things in the sky or air I'd really be able to compare them; but I haven't, so I just need to rely on a generalized memory of what seems to me to be uncommonly seen images, and then wax away like a groaning and saggy Moon. 

The image to the left is the decorated title page of the great Christoph Scheiner's (1573-1650) Pantographice sev ars Delineandi  res Quasilbet per Parallelogrammum Lineare..., published in Rome in 1630.  The book was about one of the most-employed inventions

of the 17th century,  Scheiner's very own pantograph, which was/is a very versatile tool used to project an object from one scale to a greater one, and used by grateful sculptors and architects and mapmakers and astronomers and engineers for hundreds of years. What we see in detail in the engraving (right) is the disembodied squinty-eyed-cloud-arm of creativity, using the pantograph, and copying a painting (in a chapel?)  But is this the soul of creativity, really, since the arm-eye is using a device to copy something?  I'm not saying that there is no art involved in this practice, because if that was the case then I could use this device with positive results--but I can't, and so there must be artistic merit involved.  Perhaps this curious image celebrates the art in the copied elements and not the use of the pantograph.  

Another interesting example of disembodied genius occurs in the
title page (at left) of the transubstantiated and sometimes-impossible Athanasius Kircher's encyclopedic Ars magna lucis et unbrae in decem libros digesta, published in Rome in 1646.  Of his very many works, this is perhaps one of the most important, and includes the first descriptions of (his discovery/invention?) of the magic lantern, of luminesence, and of the camera obscura.  (Among much else are Kircher's drawings of his microscopic investigations, which were very major contributions, and which predate the works  of Hooke and Leeuwenhoeck.)  This complex and iconographically-layered title page engraving contains (almost offhandedly) three disembodied hands, the first of which displays camera obscura image.  Given everything else that is going on in the image, the holy hands are the those demanding the least amount of interpretative skill. 

  

Revolutions in the Color "Red": Paul Gauguin and Edwin Hubble

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A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind.  Emily Dickinson, 1866

Color expresses something by itself.  V. van Gogh

Pure color!  You must sacrifice everything to it…  P. Gauguin

 
Standing in my friends Lucy & Andy Archie’s store, standing near a window and catching some sun on a cold stinking day, a large red jar cast a long red shadow along the wall, causing me to think about the color. (It was a pretty nice shadow.)

Red has turned up as an important color in terms of patriotic/vitriolic symbolism (as in the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi, communism), Aztec cochinealial luxury,  important burial dress of the Cro-magnums,  signs of divine favor and condemnation, Roman red divine, Egyptian danger, royal cinnabar of China , Indian bridal dresses, Japanese heroic figures, and on and on (into the lower realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing impropriety,  and etc.)

Red’s most important contributions, perhaps, at least in modern times of the past few hundred years or so, comes in the field of art and science—and its appearance really is pretty monumental, and weirdly coincidental in their placement in the chronology of Big Important Stuff.  The birth of impressionism (with Monet and the Salon des Refuses), the greatest change in the history of art since the rediscovery of perspective, and the solidification of spectrum analysis (Bunsen and Kirchhoff), both occurred around the period of 1859-1863—the great use of red for both of these developments would come somewhat later, though the red roots began here. 

The achievement of Bunsen and Kirchhoff, started in the epochal year of 1859 (the same year seeing the publication of the Origin), was nearly as spectacular as any other scientific achievement of that century.  The two men showed—and this would have been incredible to the mind of the 19^th century—that individual atoms had their own spectral signature.  When the Englishman William Huggins absorbed their work, he realized immediately (as did Bunsen and Kirchhoff) that the spectroscope could be turned on the sun and all the rest of it—the results of the experiments of these three revealed the elements of what stars were made of, something that must’ve seemed like science fiction come true.  The second part of the second step* in this fabulous discovery and application came 65 years later, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble** theorized and proved  that the red shift that occur in the spectra of all galaxies actually (a phenomenon which had been observed for years but not understood) meant that they were all racing away (at a speed proportional to their distance, Hubble’s Law) from the Earth—the basis of the Big Bang.  Cosmological significances aside, this was also a big deal for the advancement of color, as it really hadn’t played a very major part at all in the history of science to this point (excepting the brilliant occasional bits like Newton’s Opticks). Color just wasn’t a part of the great systems and ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, Newton and so on—it just didn’t come into play. 

 Now, as to the importance of Red in art.  It comes for me with Gauguin.  Gauguin and his red grass.  Red grass doesn’t mean anything today, but in the early 1880’s, well, red grass was, simply, everything.  It was a revolutionary idea to make the idea of what grass”is” subject to the color that the artist thought was demanded by it subject, and that all of this was an artistic variable in the control of each individual interpretation.  It happened right there in the middle of the Impressionist movement, and was the beginning of the end for representational art, the final blow to which would not occur until 1911 with Mr. Kandinsky.

 

This was a lot to blow through in under a thousand words, and undoubtedly I’ve slandered several good ideas—but I think overall that this is a reasonable idea, this importance of the color RED.  There’s much more to be said about the Impressionists and a whole bunch more on the absence of color in the history of science, but that’ll have to come later. 

Of no importance but of some smiling interest is the notion that the paintings that were rejected for exhibition in juried salons (in France in the 1860’s) and which were used in a new movement and in new “juried” shows called Salon des Refuses, were all stamped with an “R” on the back of their canvases.

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*the first great advancement coming in the solving of the so-called “ultraviolet catastrophe”, arriving through the Maxwell equations of 1873 and riding into the quanta of Planck in 1899/1900 (and then to quantum mechanics).

**Hubble, Edwin, "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae" (1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of

America

, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173

Return to the Poem-amatic: Tristan Tzara's Dadaist Poetry Engine

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Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.
--Rene Magritte

I am very fond of images like this--images that show us  everything and nothing. The engraving was meant to show some of the ephemeral antique bric-a-brac collected by whatever collector was currently residing at Chantilly.  Remove that explanation, and the meaning of the engraving goes spinning into whatever space you open for it.  It is a wonderful thing to open these dis-associated image combinatorics to free interpretation, each viewer finding their own meaning in a mysteriously composed components. 

This of course was an unintentional artifact of the artist and engraver.  Images like this--confusing, anti-intuitive, misleading--weren't constructed to be so (at least not in a major and determined way) until the arrival of the Dadaists in the 20th century.   This was a short-lived, proto-archaic (?) group with a confusing history, a tumultuous existence, and a short and sure ending.  They were disengaging from the avant garde to form a group that went somewhat beyond*

(Even the naming of the group is a story of unusual ripeness and spoilage, no one being able to tell the truth of how it came into being.  Suffice to say that "dada" either was or wasn't found by an accidental grazing through Larousse by Tristan Tzara in February 1916.  At least Hans Arp tells this as the true story, saying too that he was there, along with his 12 children and a brioche in his left nostril. Anyway the naming doesn't seem to matter terribly much to a group like this that disposed of and twisted names proper and otherwise.)

An example of a Dadaist work is at right, by Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919)

The Dadaists, born in the Cafe Voltaire, were interested first in the written arts, and didn't move to painting and the plastics for a couple of years.  The first among these creative equals was probably Tristan Tzara  (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro, 1896–1963) who was first a writer and poet before an artist.  True to the Dadaist great non-existent history, Tzara set forth a method of constructing poetry.  It was basically an engine for a simultaneous poem, as in the "bruitist" Futurists tradition, which built upon the work of Hugo Ball, who in turn was the inventor of the sound poem (Lautgedicht). And so tongue deep in cheek, Tzara set forth these principles:

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

(Some few weeks ago I made a post about an automatic poem-making device--the poem-amatic fist micrroscope--a fun little bit about making poems of ordinary printed pages by recording what you saw of them in the visual field seen through the barrel of a semi-closed fist. 
Then there is the entry “Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist Mr. Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.; 1923-1988))” in my growing and imaginary museum catalog called Weltin and Wantin.  Mr. Norme constructed poems in much this same way, except that he stripped his poems out of the lines of his books. His effort is here, called Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasies brillantes (by  “the man who found obscure phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic ideal”).

Now.
I tried this out, but not with newspaper--rather I did it with Tzara's instruction itself, and let me tell you, it doesn't work.  There's just too much left to chance, and, frankly, too many prepositions, too much grunting work.

On the other hand, if you lay out the pieces before you and determine to allow yourself 15 minutes to select a poem from the scattered bits on the table, then the method does stand some sort of chance.
Here's what I came up with, and it is almost something or other; at least I think that  is probably not nothing.  In the very least, though, it is a very interesting exercise, trying to get your mind to find a poem in strips of paper.  In that way Mr. Tzara was perfectly correct. 

(Below is a fragment of Mr. Norme's work.)

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*  Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation