If Mr. Schopenhauer had his way, conceptual artists would be unmasked as the mere scientists they are and quite probably hanged. For the very concept of a Concept, as opposed to the mere idea of an Idea, is scientific talk, a word that implies the search for processes, causations and explanations. Such specific searching, however, cannot hope to capture under its microscopes and magnifying glasses the metaphysical whole that exists behind those processes, causations and explanations; that, Mr. Schopenhauer thought, was the preserve of art – a notion that his mother’s friend, Mr. Goethe, may have appreciated.
Conceptual artist, Mr. Jonathon Keats need fear no lynch mob from the Aesthetics department of the University of Southampton, as he hides his artistic failings behind a prosthetic of science and the facetiousness of his science behind art’s liberty, cleverly blurring the two and not necessarily revering either. However, such lack of respect does not mean that he is another art world cynic or intolerable enfant terrible. Rather, he recognises art and science as branches of human curiosity and variations in ours attempts to discern the possible. It is Mr. Keats’ under-trained faculties that allow this inter-mingling, as expertise in one field may call into doubt his dabbling in the other. More importantly, his dilettantish incursion into two disciplines at once removes the burden to succeed in either. Instead, success is measured by his continued curiosity and the inspiration of curiosity in others, because the usefulness of any single idea is as nought to the usefulness of having ideas at all.
Belfast,
April 2008.
Dearest Mr. Keats,
It is with dazed pen that I write to you, having been struck by a thought all of a sudden, while contemplating where it is in the scheme that you fit. It wasn’t necessarily a weighty thought, but it does seem to go on for a bit. Or, perhaps, the force of the blow has knocked me a little inarticulate.
You see… I was thinking of how Mr. Goethe worried that the deductive approach to science would put too much emphasis on hypothesis, a methodology he thought may dangerously lead investigations astray by making them fit that hypothesis rather the facts as they are. Although, he saw the value of hypothesis and the place of personal experience in forming it, the problem seemed to be that the initial hypothesis at which the investigator arrived was so heavily informed by their personalities and cultural nuances that experiments would be devised to fulfil rather than prove it. Thus, the hypothesis was reached by and resulted in creative misinterpretations of the actual case. This sort of creative misinterpretation seems to be central to your work; firstly in the sense that you highlight that science must begin with a priori assumptions and, secondly, that you use your own (mis)interpretations to creative ends.
It is strange, though, that Mr. Goethe drew attention to this in the hope of making science more effective, whereas you do so to make more effective art. Perhaps it is worth mentioning, too, that the assumptions upon which certain scientific investigations were founded seem to reveal a little about the scientist or their times, while your experiments do not, necessarily, seem to express very much about you, when self-expression is what one usually expects from an artist.
However, in selling your thoughts or copyrighting your brain, that brain and those thoughts could not have belonged, originally, to anybody else. This does seem to tie in with Mr. Goethe’s ideas about the place of the observer in the experiment and in nature its self – that an investigation must be placed in a wider, holistic context and that the observer, who is part of the whole, views it with an individual sensitivity, which one must understand and compensate for. This sensitivity to experience, as it sits alongside the hypothesis, is a quality valued moreso in artists and philosophers than it is in scientists. Although it does seem to suggest that art, philosophy, science, religion and even satire (all of which you make reference to) would benefit from an inter-disciplinary approach.
For me, however, it is difficult enough to muster the discipline necessary to finish a letter.
As ever I hope you are well.
Your humble savant,
RC-K.
Dear Mr. Chamberlain-King,
I’m pleased that you mention Goethe in your letter, as I’ve been interested for some time in his quarrel with Isaac Newton over the nature of light: Where Newton deduced a spectrum of ascending frequencies, Goethe perceived a wheel of complimentary colors, two models apparently in mutual contradiction which nevertheless turned out both to hold truth. Newton’s observations were the basis of modern optics, while Goethe inadvertently founded perceptual biology. That Goethe was also an artist – a painter and poet – is apt. For his entire life, he approached science as a man confronting the world. He favored individual experience and first-person description, militating against Newton’s mathematical equations. Newton’s methodology became the scientific standard. For me, Goethe offers an approach to art.
Or perhaps I’m formulating that incorrectly. As a child, I wanted to be a scientist. Then I discovered what scientists did, working systematically in industrialized laboratories, contributing collaboratively to fields within fields, and I realized that the sort of scientist I wanted to be belonged to the age of Goethe. In other words, I wanted to become, circa 1994, a natural philosopher. Despite the discrepancy of centuries, I had to believe that the open generality of natural philosophy, motivated purely by personal curiosity, could still be meaningful. However natural philosophy has no institutional framework. (How could it?) If I wanted to be a natural philosopher in the present day, I realized that the one domain expansive enough to tolerate my vagabond intellect was art.
In other words, I’m an artist by default. My projects – petitioning to pass a law of logic, applying string theory to real estate development, genetically engineering God in a laboratory – are thought experiments, undertaken publicly, and often facilitated by museums or galleries. I don’t propose it as an alternative to science, but as a compliment: a sort of conceptual biology, concerned with how we understand our place in the universe.
So, in closing, I both agree and disagree with Goethe. Newton also had the right idea. As is so often the case, their quarrel shouldn’t be seen as a showdown, but as a dialectic.
Yours,
Jonathon Keats.
Belfast,
April 2008.
Dearest Mr. Keats,
The approach of the natural philosopher is one that I think could be well-applied at the other end of the art community as well. The world is so awash with information now that the cultural experiences of any two people are likely to be quite different and never quite synchronised. Thus, maybe, the most versatile critical tools available are individual experience and first-person description. This has always been the way that most people speak casually about culture, but it may now be the best tact for professional critics too.
Thought-experiments, in your sense of thoughts tested by actual experiments, could be a means of investigating the boundaries of one’s own experience or seeing where it overlaps or joins up with others. As with your projects, then, it would be the processes one invents, rather than the results one comes up with, that reveal something about the investigator. Or, perhaps, the processes reveal nothing so much as they create the investigator, or their aesthetic, as the two go along.
All of which is one way to look at it.
Your humble savant,
RC-K.
Dear Mr. Chamberlain-King,
I can imagine no worse fate for culture than passive appreciation by an audience that accepts the primacy of the artist. Yet that antiquated mindset is the default response to contemporary work. I think you’re right to mention the overflow of information, for I believe that this is the underlying cause of our disengagement: Who can presume to have the expertise to engage another when everyone is specialized to the extent of being sui generis? Paradoxically, independent thinking terminates in a crisis of confidence.
That is why I believe, as you do, that natural philosophy can be productive for not only the artist, but also the audience. When I say that my projects are thought experiments, undertaken publicly, I mean it literally: The work exists only as audience members involve themselves in it, creating meaning with me.
Perhaps a good example would be my application of string theory to real estate development a couple years ago. Approaching Northern California homeowners at the height of the real estate boom, I purchased the property rights to develop the six or seven extra dimensions of space posited by particle physics, dimensions that the owners weren’t using and in most cases didn’t realize existed. I then subdivided, opening up a real estate office at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, selling lots in the one-to-two-figure price range. As sellers and buyers, people became part of the thought experiment, as I had become through my trading. All of us were participants and observers simultaneously, exploring through our financial interactions the faith we place in the reality of scientific principles that may not be empirically testable even in theory. Of course that’s just one take on this project. Other participants were more interested in the simultaneous exploration of property rights through the act of purchasing land in dimensions curled up too small to be occupied in any meaningful sense. For me, every possibility is a part of the project, not in the sense that I take credit for it, but rather in the sense that I claim authorship of nothing, and have no authority over it. For me, the most exhilarating projects are ongoing, mutating, open-source in the broadest possible sense.
So, like you, I do hope that everyone, creator and spectator alike, becomes a natural philosopher, until there isn’t a meaningful distinction between these, and we can let the scaffolding of art fall away, uniting in our individual experience, without foregoing independence, simply to be curious together.
Yours,
Jonathon Keats.
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