by Jerome du Bois
From Ralph Blumenthal's review of Matthew Ritchie's big Houston show:
HOUSTON, Jan. 19 -- You don't have to know that Astoreth is a hermaphrodite and the lover of Stanley, a one-eyed card sharp also known as Satan-El, and that both are members of the Gamblers, who occupy a party suite at the Brockton Holiday Inn just outside Boston on Route 24 the moment before the Big Bang. (Tuesday, 1/20/04 NYT)
People seem to be very easily impressed these days with anyone who sounds like they can recite the alphabet all the way to L. I've written about Matthew Ritchie before, as one example of quasi-scientific thinking -- and image-making -- smuggling its way into art. (It was in my long essay New Eyes: How Darwin Clears the Day So You Don't Have To See Forever -- the first part of An Aesthetic First Aid Manual For Artists™, to which this present piece is a second installment.) In the meantime, physicists present truly mind-blowing theories (and findings) in cosmology and quantum mechanics; evolutionary biologists and psychologists are mapping the brain; Darwinism is turning out to be a powerful tool in all the sciences of human nature.
But artists would rather create gimmicks like glowing rabbits or private worlds, or even parodies of private worlds, than really examine what the sciences can contribute to strengthening the meaning in artworks by getting artists to look at the real world.
The quotation above doesn't qualify. It's part of Ritchie's vaunted 7 x 7 matrix of characters and notions, a spreadsheet of wannabe archetypes he cobbles together and runs through the permutations. It's videogame-generation mutual masturbation, chopped-up moments in an endless card game (he uses actual cards), endlessly reshuffled, and boundlessly meaningless. (Then again, he said, "maybe it's entirely possible I've got the wrong idea.") And everybody's impressed:
"It all makes sense," said Virginia Mohlere, a medical copy editor attending the show. "It's a combination of alchemy and mythology that can only be done in art." She said people shouldn't get too hung up on the content. "Even if it doesn't stand up to linear knowledge," she said, "it makes great art."
Linear knowledge is such a drag, it's so restrictive, it's so . . . hard. Holland Cotter earlier, in 2000, NYT: engaging, even peppy to look at, densely coded and encyclopedic in content . . . The results smack equally of medieval scholasticism and molecular science, with an air of epic-poetic grandeur keeping the whole thing afloat.
Patricia C. Johnson, Houston Chronicle:
[the show transforms the museum] "into a fun house of graffiti . . . Ritchie is very persuasive in illustrating the idea of a universe in which everything happens at once in a seamless continuum of space and time."
Back to Ritchie's rich narrative:
. . . arriving visitors are given a card from his deck representing any of his 49 characters, including Beelzebub, also known as Bubba, who is eviscerated by his fellow Gambler Lucifer, known as Lucky, who is in turn decapitated in an evil deed exemplifying the deterioration of everything.
I was just about to say . . . Lynne Herbert, senior curator, continues:
Purson (the Timkeeeper and the seventh gambler) shows up and carries away Lucifer's head. This action represents the integration of energy, light, material and time (E=mc² ), or as Ritchie states, the basic conditions necessary for art making.
Basic. Another excerpt:
There was a crowd in the [Extrocomputer] center; some bright heads playing Prime against the Extro (and losing), and Spangland's popular broadcast serial, The Rover Girls. We chased the kids but we couldn't chase the broadcast: Serious Dick, Fun-Loving Tom, and Sturdy-Hearted Sam are now cadets at the Pentagon Military Academy (after their transsex operations in Denmark) and are buying pot, poppers, googies -- Wait, whoa, my mistake, that's really an excerpt from Alfred Bester's 1974 sci-fi novel The Computer Connection. How did that get in there?
Can we get serious, people? Mr. Ritchie is one smooth, savvy operator -- "The Fine Constant," "The God Impersonator," "The Proposition Player," dice made from the anklebones of prehistoric elk! -- but his whole glossy Sintra-clad machine don't do nuthin, don't go nowhere. And we've been there. Artist Mark Tansey once said, "A painted picture is a vehicle. You can sit in your driveway and take it apart, or you can get inside it and go somewhere." When you take apart Ritchie's enterprise -- examine his M-Theory references, his angelic hierarchies, his spacetime geodesics from event horizon to event horizon -- he's just another card sharp who accompanies his cartoon surrealism with some clever patter delivered by his "infinite battery," his "engine for building imagery," as he once called his system. (Sounds like Keith Tyson's artmachine.) And what does it end up like? It doesn't end up at all. Nancy Princenthal, Art in America, May 2001: " . . . every stable ontological and material category becomes as slippery as mercury, and every kind of data seems headed for translation into another." Back and forth, round and round, deal the cards, pay the man, see the glory of the Royal Scam.
Consider the backstory to this silver film of science overlaying his work:
An indifferent student at St. Paul's in London where the alumni include John Milton, another avid cosmologist, Mr. Ritchie won a scholarship to study art at Boston University. He traveled cross country by bus and landed a job as a building super at 107 Mercer Street in SoHo.
"The great thing about being a super, you get to read a lot," Mr. Ritchie said. He read discarded science textbooks left behind by New York University students and wrote hallucinatory tales that read like Alfred Döblin on LSD.
This sounds apocryphal to me. Nancy Princenthal called Ritchie "an accomplished autodidact" in M Theory. I doubt it, not by the above method -- M Theory (including string theory), according to the pros, is the most complicated physics there is -- but these days you can't say As I was on the road from Athens to Sparta, I came upon a two-headed snake, so people mythologize with the material around them, I guess.
Ritchie's matrix can be see as an artist's attempt to trap, or record, or display, the overwhelming complexity of knowledge, the impossibility of assimilating it all. To me it represents a profound surrender of reason to a cynical marketing strategy based on public ignorance. (A medical copy editor, one would think, deals with rigorous language every day. Yet read her reaction.)
I see his matrix as mere justification for ignorance -- or, not so much ignorance a kind of polyglot database of information in which no one piece of data or drama is more important than any other, but it's pretty or it glitters or it's hinky or it's kinky, so it flies for awhile.
Meanwhile, we're sailing through the sea of stars. The real world only moves forward, and we are all timebound, myopic, going concerns. Should I spend (check the etymology) my precious time either reading this proposition player's dense nonsense narratives, or marveling at the meticulous meaninglessness of his shaggy-geometric wallworks and extensions?
Consider, for example, George Dyson's well-developed notion that we cannot help helping our machines -- mostly the information ones -- evolve, and connect, and network, and mutate:
In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.
I think about what a different Tom Sachs than the one we have would have done with that idea. Dyson himself -- yes, he's from that family (father Freeman, sister Esther, and his lesser know mathematician mother, Verena-Huber Dyson) -- is a true autodidact, and his book Darwin Among The Machines is the partly autobiographical story of how a self-taught polymath kayak-builder who lived high up in a tree house in British Columbia for a couple of years developed a futuristic theory about computers by reading Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Butler and Erasmus Darwin, for the luvvapete.
Consider, for example, physicist Frank Tipler's Omega Point Theory, in which everybody who ever lived is going to be resurrected at the end of time. It's probably mistaken, but it's rigorous, exciting, and derived from respected foundations; so that reading the book he wrote about it -- The Physics of Immortality -- is a basic education in physics and its big ideas. Sometimes all you need is one or two to start a whole new line of thought. For example, if we know the universe is going to last 100 billion years, why are we only studying the first 20? Tipler took seriously the question of the far future, which led him to another assumption, the Universal Life Postulate, shared by many brilliant physicists (including Freeman Dyson): let the universe be such that Life -- "the society of intelligent living beings" -- continues on forever, literally until the end of time. And he was on his way. And the result was clear, understandable, and, most importantly, testable. (The OPT is now waiting for the heavy Higgs boson.)
Finally, because it has to do with cards, in a way, I'd like to mention a really esoteric theory, which is discussed in Lee Smolin's Life of the Cosmos. It is definitely not Smolin's own theory -- cosmic evolution -- which I think is on the right track because it extends Darwinism to universal scale. I wrote about that -- with an extended, beautiful quotation from Smolin -- in the New Eyes piece.
No, physicist Julian Barbour asked a different question, but it shows what happens when one focuses and reasons. Barbour wondered, Can time exist in a simple universe, or does time demand complexity? In other words, time may not be fundamental to the universe's structure. (I won't go into the middle part.) What he ends up with is what he calls the heap -- the universe as discrete moments, or time capsules, all piled together like photos in a cigar box -- or cards in a deck. They get sorted out because the world (the universe) is highly organized.
Now, I'm not asking artists to be scientists or to restrict their depictions to reflect scientific truths. I am saying their art would be stronger if they did, and their minds would have stronger, stranger imaginations. Investigating these questions, learning about the million-year-collisions of galaxies -- as if in some celestial demolition derby -- and the wondrous things those crude collisions create -- or how someday our descendants, who may be individual/collective living entities as large as solar systems, will bend the gravitational shear to point us toward Heaven -- well, that beats deciphering the antics of Ritchie's Stanley and Lucky anytime.
Let me close with an extended quotation from Richard Feynmann -- I call it "The Dance of the Phosphorus" -- spoken at a lecture in 1988, but sadly still true today, I say:
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how to read the music. For instance, the scientific article may say, "The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of the rat -- and also in mine, and yours -- is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago -- a mind which has long ago been replaced.
To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out -- there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.
Posted by Jerome at January 26, 2004 11:10 PM | TrackBack