Anne Bobroff-Hajal's blog

Julian Voss-Andreae: Science in Fine Art

Anne Bobroff-Hajal — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:06:41 +0000

Julian Voss-Andreae earned a Masters in quantum physics at the University of Vienna, participating in a seminal experiment demonstrating quantum behavior for buckminsterfullerenes. He then left academia to become a full-time sculptor in order to express his powerful artistic response to the scientific phenomena he'd been immersed in.

One of Voss-Andreae's best-known works is "Quantum Man," which, seen from front or back appears to be solid. Seen from the side, it almost disappears. Quantum Man represents quantum physics, which, Voss-Andreae explains, reveals that electrons are not discrete points, but "fuzzy." In the quantum world, "things ultimately do not have a hard edge or some sort of well-defined boundary where one thing ends and another one starts." The Quantum Man sculpture's vertical metal sheets represent the fact that, according to quantum physics, particles in motion have "the features of a moving wave with wave fronts running perpendicular to the direction of its motion." Quantum Man's startling disappearing act as the viewer shifts perspective symbolizes "the dual nature of matter with the appearance of classical reality on the surface and cloudy quantum behavior underneath." (Voss-Andreae's article, Towards Quantum Sculpture, is available on his website.)

Quantum Man is a bit atypical for Voss-Andreae, in that most of his work portrays the infinitesimal: molecules such as protein chains, and subatomic scenes.

So like other artists Eileen has discussed on viz. such as Luke Jerram, Voss-Andreae makes microscopic natural phenomena visible to the human eye by enlarging them, and also by building them in materials and forms that capture our imagination. Voss-Andreae has set himself an admirable but difficult goal. We can easily recognize Jerram's microbe sculptures as life forms. Voss-Andreae, on the other hand, portrays molecules and subatomic phenomena that most of us cannot immediately recognize as such, and understand little even with explanation.

Voss-Andreae has provided explanation of his visual vocabulary in interviews and his own writing, enough for any student of visual rhetoric to explore. What interests me more here, though, is his writing about his general goals: his sculptures, he wrote in an article in Leonardo, "offer a sensual experience of a world that is usually accessible only through the intellect." Elsewhere, he says

"I am not after some kind of intellectual understanding. I want to make work that appeals foremost to the senses and is ideally intuitively recognized as meaningful. The conscious thoughts come after that.... Having an intriguing sculpture in combination with the most basic knowledge like 'this is shaped after something in your body that makes you live' can get people thinking about deep questions, such as 'what does it mean to be alive?' or 'what is left of me if I subtract my biochemistry?'"

It reminds me of what Eileen wrote about the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel's fabulous drawings, which

give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange....
Despite their problematic status as scientific illustration, these images make visible an eerie vitality that connects organic life. Their artistry invokes a feeling in the viewer akin to a science-fictional alterity: these images are both familiar and strange, hence their power to alter our vision.

Voss-Andreae has also written about the occasionally negative response he gets to the idea of portraying an - to others - estoteric world which he experiences viscerally and esthetically. "Many artists," he says seem strongly resent anything "scientific or technological.... Unfortunately, the divide many of us create between intellect and emotion, body and spirit, or art and science, is so far internalized that it actually blocks some of us from recognizing the sublime in nature if it happens to be scientifically obtained." I resonate with this because I, too, am striving to create art that expresses my own powerful emotional and visual response to "esoteric" research (in Russian history). I've had a similar struggle, often feeling I live between two worlds, not belonging fully to either. But why should this be? As Voss-Andreae remarks, the Renaissance - which we look back on as a peak of human endeavor and achievement - was all about the merging of new developments in science and art.

Danie Mellor: Environmental and socio-historical ideas in fine art

Anne Bobroff-Hajal — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:52:09 +0000

Danie Mellor is an Australian fine artist whose themes integrate environmental and socio-historical concerns. His message isn't quite as "left-brained" as the ideal I'm seeking (my goal is to find art whose ideas are clear through the art itself, without a separate artist's or museum statement). But there's something to be learned from Mellor about ways to achieve that ideal. Plus, his work is so beautiful that I'm utterly seduced into presenting it here.

Mellor uses a vocabulary of indigenous Australian animals and people paired with classic English china patterns. For Mellor, the kangaroo represents (as explained by a wonderful National Gallery of Australia audio guide), "all the native animals and indigenous people who lived in this land before white settlement." As for the blue china patterns, "The English firm Spode manufactured blue and white china in the late 18th century around the time of white settlement of Australia. The famous willow pattern, adapted from Chinese ceramics, became popular at this time. It demonstrates another way in which English culture absorbed another, creating a fabricated history." Artlink Magazine described another of Mellor's works as signifying "how colonisers always get things wrong; how Europeans looking for China and its fine porcelain manufactures, stumbled instead upon the land of the kangaroo, and traded and planted ideas of racial and cultural superiority."

Dreaming Beyond Paradise (Let Sleeping Giants Lie) by Danie Mellor

Once we know the language of Mellor's vocabulary, we can feast on his images and feel some of the tragedy of imperialism's domination of native habitat and culture. This dual vocabulary of English china and indigenous animals underlies even a more complex work like "New World Order (The Visitors)," in which Mellor also uses Masonic and other imagery:

In the lessons-to-be-learned-for-artists department, the very different visual qualities of Mellor's two primary components make his work very readable. The china pattern is elegant and finely detailed. The indigenous Australian elements are live creatures painted a bit more roughly.

Color above all distinguishes the Australian from the British in Mellor's art. The imperialist element is blue and white. The indigenous Australian is warm browns and oranges. The two are on opposite sides of the color wheel, reinforcing the contrast between the two.

So fellow artists looking to communicate left-brained ideas through right-brained art might draw on Mellor's device of creating a limited, easily-graspable vocabulary whose elements have high visual contrast. The viewer will then be able to easily distinguish the components of the vocabulary.

Another lesson learned through Mellor's work is how he speaks of tragic events with tenderness, joy, and fun. This is important in fine art when it takes on difficult issues. We're only human, after all, and we need to have some reward for facing catastrophe and reasoning ways to repair it.

Mellor also illustrates the fact that sometimes the best tool to express harsh reality is actually surrealism - through the artist inventing a whimsical version of reality rather than actual reality. Mellor places a kangaroo fast asleep on the bridge of the Spode willow china pattern. He paints an indigenous Australian man raising his spear over vertiginous painted-porcelain mountains.

What makes Mellor's surrealism speak so eloquently about reality is that the elements he chooses are visual synedoches: china patterns represent British imperialism; native animals represent the indigenous Australian people, culture, and natural world. The artwork we looked at in my last post, Nina Paley's animated film "THE STORK," is based on a visual metaphor - two elements with something in common. Mellor's work is based on the contrast of two very different synecdoches. They are two great examples of visual rhetoric.

PS Since we've been talking about science in art elsewhere on viz., you might want to look at Mellor's installation at the National Gallery of Australia and listen to the brief audio description. The installation's very long title is "The contrivance of a vintage Wonderland (A magnificent flight of curious fancy for science buffs, a china ark of seductive whimsy, a divinely ordered special attraction, upheld in multifariousness)." It's a joyful/tragic riff on "artificial and didactic" old exhibits in socio-historical and natural history museums. It's accompanied by a poem by A. G. Bolam, "The Trans-Australian Wonderland:"

A wonderland of truly wondrous things

That nowhere else upon this Earth are found;

Of reptiles rare, and birds that have no wings,

And animals that live deep in the ground;

And those poor simple children of the Earth,

(A disappearing race you here may meet),

Whom whites have driven from their land of birth

To regions still untrod by booted feet.

Nina Paley’s THE STORK

Anne Bobroff-Hajal — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:50:57 +0000

Still from Nina Paley's The Stork

THE STORK is a 3-minute film, a delightful and powerful piece of visual rhetoric by an independent art animator, Nina Paley. (Another of Nina’s animated films has been discussed by John Jones here.)

Paley has created several animated shorts about serious subjects such as overpopulation and cancer. I consider THE STORK her most successful balancing of left and right brain content. She achieves the feat of conveying a perfectly clear piece of rhetoric entirely through visual art.

Nina Paley's The Stork, with permission of the author

A bit of background: Independent animated shorts, created by individual artists, are possibly the very best fine art medium for clear transmission of ideas. One element that often makes them effective is a clever song (frequently written by the animator) used as the sound track of the entire short film. Song lyrics can be a fun, rhythmic, pulsing way of introducing words into a piece of visual art.

But an unusual aspect of Paley’s THE STORK is that she makes her argument entirely visually. She doesn’t need lyrics to make her point utterly evident (the sound track is instumental music). THE STORK uses no text or words at all. So how does she achieve her impact?

The success of THE STORK comes from a visual similarity Nina observed: storks fly to deliver babies from the air, and planes fly to deliver bombs from the air. She uses this disturbing visual equation to create the metaphor that forms THE STORK.

At the beginning of the film, an appealing, smiling stork flies above verdant green earth carrying its precious cargo to strains of Edvard Grieg. How bucolic!

But soon, the first stork is joined by another stork … and another, and eventually tens of storks, each with a baby to deliver to earth. The storks move into military formation and start bombing.

At first this seems outrageous: how can we equate the joy of new life with the death and destruction of war? Paley answers with another visual metaphor: each of her storks’ “bombs” explode to create the mountain of Stuff needed to support every new human being on earth: house, car, stroller, Huggies, toys, TVs, clothes, toilets.

So Paley equates mountains of human Stuff with bombs. But does that metaphor make sense? Bombs are destructive. Isn’t the manufacture of Stuff creative, not destructive?

Well, in THE STORK, the massive amounts of Stuff needed by each human are destroying larger swathes of our planet than bombs could. Wild animals flee as newly-built homes carpet-bomb their habitat. Fish become skeletons as the children swim and are toilet trained, polluting waterways. Finally the green earth is replaced by brown aerial views of cities, still overflown by endless formations of storks.

Whatever you feel about Paley’s view – and I personally relate to it more amidst today’s realization that our current lifestyle is unsustainable than I did years ago when I first saw the film – she argues her point clearly. She uses imaginative visualizations that are exactly pertinent to her line of reasoning.

Here are techniques we can learn from Nina: The first, a general one, is that humor – even dark humor – makes it much easier to entertain a horrific realization, think it through, and integrate it into our world view.

More specifically, when arguing visually, we might look for appropriate, telling visual metaphors. Perhaps best are equations of elements whose appearance is alike but whose function at first seems opposite. If the work of art can reveal an underlying similarity not at first seen by the viewer, this alone gives the art power.

Note: Since I’ll be looking at a number of animated short films in this art blog, one might ask whether these films are truly fine art. I feel they are indeed. We don’t hear about them often or have many chances to see them, because they fall through the gap between museums (which show mostly still art) and arthouse movie theaters (which show mainly full-length films).

To me, animated shorts – by which I’m not referring to kids’ cartoons, which are something else – are important because they give the artist additional tools. One of these tools is, of course, the dimension of time. Another is the potential for narrative. Yet another is movement.

But what about the often less than perfect drawing style? What about the borrowings from popular culture? Well, Andy Warhol long ago showed that style and imagery taken from popular culture can make fine art.

Introduction: Seeking Logos in Fine Art

Anne Bobroff-Hajal — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:28:17 +0000

Because I seem to be the first non-UT/DWRL blogger on viz., I’ll introduce myself. I’m Anne Bobroff-Hajal. I'm an artist interested in something rather hard to find: fine art that incorporates clearly-graspable rhetoric. Art that attempts to integrate the left brain with the right.

Detail of Home Security at Any Crazy Price

So my entries on this blog will be a treasure hunt, searching for artists who have a double goal: to communicate something rational or scientific about the real world in a way that also powerfully moves and/or delights us. There aren’t many such artists. John Jones accurately observed that visual argument tends, “contrary to Aristotle’s advice, [to] foreground the use of pathos and ethos rather than logos.” I’m searching for those very rare artists from whom I – and maybe others – can learn techniques to balance logos, pathos, and ethos.

I’ll look for lessons we can learn about how to convey sophisticated, logical ideas on any subject: society, science, current events, history, the environment, whatever. I’m not looking for propaganda, though, except in cases where its artistic content is very high.

Much “political” art today is actually at the other extreme from propaganda. It may be beautiful to look at, but its rhetorical content can’t be discerned without reading a lengthy accompanying artist’s statement. I’d like to find visual art that falls between those extremes: art that makes its rhetoric evident via visual means that are also beautiful, or wondrous, or touch us deeply.

I won’t debate the points of view the artists portray, but rather look for the lessons we can learn from each about how to make an argument visually. I celebrate the skills of artists who move their audience to debate.

Readers’ own finds would be most welcome additions to this treasure hunt. Please post them in the comments section.

By the way, my interest in this search began after I began Playground of the Autocrats, a series of mixed media triptychs that convey my theories about Russian history (which I consider relevant to our lives today), developed during my Ph. D. studies in Russian history at the University of Michigan. I wasn’t sure for a while whether Playground of the Autocrats could be considered art. So I hoped to find other artists who had successfully achieved what I was attempting.