Well-Worn Ruts: Habits of Thought in Art, Science and Technology (and more)

Lynn Margulis, the late evolutionary biologist, was misunderstood and ignored as a young woman. People in her field, and in areas of knowledge contiguous to it, were slow to take her seriously. Eventually, though, Margulis’s postulation—that cell organelles (you remember: the parts of the cell that do the work) arose from the “invasion” of the cell by irritating bacteria.

I witnessed last summer the dangers of extrapolating from biological sciences to social and cultural life in no less resonant a spot than a cafe on Unter den Linden, at the heart of Berlin. I’d been invited to have coffee with an art collector whose interests overlapped with my experiences in art and technology.  

I told him about a class I’d been working on at MIT and we started talking about gardening, and got onto the subject of invasive plants. As I blabbed about matching the right plants to the right climate, the collector started probing. “So,” he remarked, “of course the plants themselves will be more comfortable in their native soil.” It took me a moment to catch on. He wasn’t talking about plants. He was talking about people. In Berlin. On Unter den Linden. I said something about the notion only applying to plants, and exited as quickly as I could, feeling like an idiot for letting him think for even a second that I believed his analogy was valid.

So, with trepidation, I’ll extend Lynn Margulis’s work in biology toward my work in art: If the truly original arises in irritations across differing entities, might art and science and technology all have something to gain from an irritating symbiosis? Might that help us to recognize the ruts in our habits of thought, and perhaps then to plough over, fill in, excavate, or re-shape them? And then, might that sort of mental terraforming help us to take a turn away from the troubles that we’re in right now?

What can artists, scientists, and engineers (and more) learn, and remember, from acknowledging humans’ embeddedness in “the natural world.” And what might arise when we learn to speak to each other across disciplines? Is it even possible? Here, a note from a “lazy farmer” who was also a microbiologist. He thought so:

Lately I have been thinking that the point must be reached when scientists, politicians, artists, philosophers, men of religion, and all those who work in the fields should gather here, gaze over these fields, and talk things over together. I think this is the kind of thing that must happen if people are to see beyond their specialities. - Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution, 1975.

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For this post, and for many months of thinking through associated issues, I am indebted to Lynn Margulis, who wrote generously for non-scientists, especially in her Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, to thinkers Isabel Stengers and Catherine Malabou (read Malabou’s What Should We Do with our Brain? for a look at how our conceptual understanding of how the brain works is made visible in our economic and political lives), to curator and writer Lars Bang Larsen for turning me on to Stengers’ life-altering book Capitalist Sorcery, to Caroline A. Jones for introducing me to Donna Haraway’s writing, and to the incomparable Donna Haraway herself, whose recent motto I’ve adopted: Staying with the trouble.

The Price of Everything (ish)

This weekend, I was a respondent, along with Johnetta Tinker and David Guerra, to the film The Price of Everything, at an event sponsored by the Arts and Business Council of Boston. After the screening, Johnetta, David, and I answered questions from the audience and from panel moderator Almitra Stanley, who works with the Arts and Business Council. 

The Price of Everything, by Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect), looks at the role of money in contemporary art, a topic I’ve been interested in for some time, and have taught at the Tufts University Experimental College and elsewhere. There were leading figures galore in the film: the renowned curator Paul Schimmel (whose 2005-2006 exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Combines kept me at the Metropolitan Museum in New York for hours), critic Jerry Saltz, auctioneer Simon de Pury, Amy Cappellazzo, Chairman (sic) of the Fine Art division and Executive Vice President at Sothebys, art historians Alexander Nemerov and Barbara Rose, gallerists Mary Boone and Gavin Brown, collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, and artists George Condo, Marilyn Minter, Larry Poons, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, and Akunyili Crosby, among many more. It was a breathless romp through the highest of the high end, focused on the glittering world of contemporary art sold at auction.

Here are some of my responses to the film, and to the questions I was asked:

 ·      The art world depicted in the film is one of the art worlds. There are many. The reasons we hear so much about record-setting prices at auction are (a) that the auction houses want us to hear about them (they’ll be offered more works to sell), and (b) very few other purchases of art are matters of public record. When we talk about art and money, auction prices are the main source of information about prices.

 ·      Gerhard Richter said, on seeing one of his smaller paintings in the gallery that represents him in New York, “It’s not good when this is the value of a house, it’s not fair. I like it, but it’s not a house.” Here it’s relevant to note that the price of housing is also unfair. But the question about a painting’s relative value is not just an ethical question. Richter, I agree (as was stated in the film) is a great artist – in my view, he is asserting his “doubt and belief in painting” over and over again, in works that usually have something important to say about living now.

 ·      An interviewee in the film made a brief reference to the influence of “the financial interests of certain parties.” Those “interests” are what got me interested in the whole subject of money and art. See, for example, Don Thompson’s analysis of the Nahmad family of gallerists “defending their inventory” of works by the visionary Italian artist Lucio Fontana.

  ·      When I was asked what I think makes a work of art great, I had a different answer than before. For now, I think it’s when a work re-arranges my habits of thought, when I can feel in its presence that the ways I’d been thinking are being made apparent to me, and that the work is insinuating itself into how I think. (I didn’t say it exactly like that, but I tried to.)

To those remarks, I’ll add this:

The film looks only at one kind of art that - regardless of its subject matter or style - we can think of as inhabiting traditional forms and formats. Everything featured in the film was either sculpture or something that goes on a wall. That’s an exceedingly narrow view of a world in which many artists are making works that are immaterial, that exist only in digital formats, that are actions, and/or that are made especially to circumvent the art market that is examined in The Price of Everything. Just like the dancers in downtown New York were doing in 1960, as reported by the incomparable Jill Johnston.

To Return, Again

I’ve written before about my long absences from this site, with excuses. There’s really no excuse this time, other than being pre-occupied with projects at MIT. During the past two years, there has been very little room in my head for much of anything else. 

But now: I return, again, with my usual big plans and my dreams of what I might accomplish.

In the next few days, I’ll be writing about how my ideas have evolved in the past two years, and about what I think Cultureburg is, and what it can do, now.