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corixus · 7 years ago

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Microcosms in the hand

Everything is sculpture

Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important sculptors, also famous for his iconic furniture, lighting, ceramics, architecture and set designs for dancer Martha Graham. His work was photographed in 2016 by artist Leah Raintree for her project ‘Another Land: After Noguchi’, shown at the Noguchi Museum, In it Raintree creates her own version of ‘astrophotography’ by rendering Noguchi’s work with stones as distant microcosms in space. Some of these photographs can be seen on line under the title ‘Space and Noguchi- iconic sculptures or microcosms in space’ ?

Raintree’s project was inspired by the European Space Agency’s study of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and in particular the photographs taken by the Rosetta space probe on its approach to 67P . The artist photographed a small granite stone at the center of the Noguchi gallery, reimagining it as an asteroid (Fig 1). She took this concept to the museum’s collection where she discovered an affinity with Noguchi’s stone sculptures. His work celebrates the qualities of rock, enhancing rather than shying away from fractures and imperfections that seem to show the geological passage of time. Noguchi believed, as the Japanese tend to, that rock and stone are microcosms with a lifecycle that they should be allowed to experience in full.

Fig 1 Rock exhibit: Noguchi Museum

It is Raintree’s clever lighting and framing that turns each of Nogochi’s 'objets trouvés' into distant celestial objects or uncharted microcosms in the vastness of space. The project is a fitting homage to Isamu Noguchi, who once said “Everything is sculpture.” This was also the philosophy of Max Ernst , who saw biomorphic microcosms in pebbles.

Biomorphic art

“Everything is sculpture.” was also the motto of the surrealist Max Ernst , who saw biomorphic microcosms in pebbles. Biomorphic comes from combining the Greek words ‘bios’, meaning life, and ‘morphe’, meaning form. The term was coined in 1935 by the British writer Geoffrey Grigson and subsequently used by Alfred H. Barr in the catalogue of his 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. Barr borrowed Grigson's term without acknowledgement and noted that "The shape of the square confronts the silhouette of the amoeba." The term seems to have come into use around the 1930s to describe the imagery in the more abstract types of surrealist painting and sculpture

Biomorphist art focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology. Biomorphism has connections with Surrealism and Art Nouveau. The three leading figures of the Art Nouveau movement, Antoni Gaudí, Hector Guimard, and Victor Horta, were influenced by biomorphism. Even in the expressionist designs of Hermann Finsterlin, Rudolf Steiner, and Erich Mendelsohn, we find the same influence. Matisse's seminal painting Le bonheur de vivre (The joy of Life), from 1905 can be cited as an important precedent.

The Tate Gallery's online glossary article on biomorphic form specifies that while these forms are abstract, they "refer to, or evoke, living forms...". The article goes on to list Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth as examples of artists whose work epitomizes the use of biomorphic form. Biomorphism is also seen in modern industrial design, such as the work of Isamu Noguchi, whose Noguchi table is considered an icon of industrial design.

Max Ernst,was a leading member of the Surrealist movement and like other members he was interested in the serendipity of 'objets trouvés'. His painted pebbles are model artistic design elements based on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms (Fig 2).

Fig 2 Painted carved pebbles: Max Ernst

In his artistic works, Ernst attempts to uncover the mysteries of the creative process within himself. This search emphasised the contact between materials, as well as the transformation of everyday materials, in order to arrive at an image that signified some sort of collective consciousness (Figs 3 & 4). He left it to a new generation of artists to grapple with this fundamental artistic question which is about how to penetrate the problems of artistic cognition by letting go of the canons of traditional art.

Fig 3 Pottery bowl: North American Anasazi culture (circa 11th century)

Fig 4 Murano glass bowl

Biomorphism taken to its extreme attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices (Fig 5).

Fig 5 Motor cycle: biomorphic design

Biodiversity ‘etched’ in pebbles

On some beaches throughout the world it is possible to find pebbles, derived from intertidal reefs of soft sedimentary rocks, which are riddled with holes. One of the animals responsible for making holes in rock is an elongated rock boring bivalve mollusc. Known as piddocks these molluscs, live out in the mid-tide and low-tide zones. Piddocks make their rocky burrows either by using acid to dissolve the rock or mechanically scraping it away. Based on estimates at Lyme Regis, UK piddocks are capable of removing up to 41% of the shore substratum to a depth of 85 mm over their lifespan (12 years). Their burrowing activities significantly compromise the structural stability of the soft rock shores and so contribute to bioerosion.

When boring molluscs die, depending on their size, their burrows become shelters for encrusting animals such as sponges and moss animals, marine worms, rocklice, small snails, tiny sea stars, and crabs. Some of these creatures may make a permanent home in the abandoned hole, while others may simply shelter briefly from heavy surf, the drying rays of the sun or a carnivore on the hunt. On a longer time scale, the tidal erosion of the reef eventually results in a well worn storm tossed pebble being cast up on the beach to become part of the cabinet of curiosities of the human beachcomber, who selects it for its mindful qualities. Holding a holey pebble in the hand connects the collector to the amazing dynamics of biodiversity below the waves.

The zoology

Rock boring molluscs begin life as free-floating larvae and eventually settle onto a soft rock and take hold with their muscular foot. The two shells have file-like ridges on the outside, and the animal drills its way into the rock by contracting its muscles to spin the shell first one direction, then the other. The bivalve continues to enlarge its cone-shaped burrow until it is large enough to conceal it. During high tide it protrudes its fleshy siphon out the open end of the hole, which may be just half an inch wide, to obtain food and discharge waste.

Fossils of boring bivalves date from the Cretaceous period. The boring habit is thought to have evolved along two different paths [9]. In one path, the bivalves were attached to hard substrata by means of spun threads, but could still move using their foot. Thus they scraped at the substrata with their shell. In the other path, they evolved from species that burrowed in soft substrata such as sand. During the course of evolution, they gradually started to burrow in harder materials.

Barnea candida, commonly known as the white piddock (Fig 6), is one of the common British rock boring molluscs. It is a member of the family Pholadidae and makes its burrow in soft rock, peat and clay. It drills its burrow mechanically. During the course of evolution Barnea has developed a number of adaptations to accommodate its rock-boring lifestyle. Boring species occur in eight different superfamilies: The shipworms Teredo (Pholadacea) are wood-boring bivalves [1]. Barnea (Pholadacea) [2,3], Zirphaea (Adesmacea) and Petricola (Veneracea) [4,5] are examples of species that make their burrow in clay, soft rock and peat. Martesia striata (Pholadacea) is able to perforate PVC pipes [6], which gives it an economic significance because severe damage can occur within a year of it becoming attached to the surface.

Fig 6 The white piddock

Some philosophy

This blog was initiated by finding a small holey pebble on a Welsh beach at Oxwich Bay. The process of rendering it digitally can be traced in the following three images (Figs 7, 8, 9), The sequence records an exercise in existential creativity. Existentialism owes its name to its emphasis on “existence”. For all the thinkers mentioned above, regardless of their differences, existence indicates the special way in which human beings are in the world, in contrast with other beings. For the existentialists, the human being is “more” than what it is. Not only does the human being know that it is, but, on the basis of this fundamental knowledge, this being can choose how it will “use” its own being, and thus how it will relate to the world. “Existence” is thus closely related to freedom in the sense of an active engagement in the world through a lived perspective . In his 1945 essay, "Cézanne's Doubt," Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-61).examined Paul Cézanne's investigations into the phenomena of visual perception. Merleau-Ponty argued that through his paintings, Cézanne discovered that "the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one." In other words, art is not an exact science but a means of capturing the complexities of what the mind’s eye observes through an existential crack in a normal mode of thinking about our relationship with the world and how it can be expressed.

Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” has a line, “there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” This is a metaphor used by Wendy Miller and Gene Cohen in their book, Sky Above Clouds. They talk about the existential crack not only letting in light but also being the way in which the darkness of vulnerability enters human lives. As Miller states, “It’s as if a crack has opened in the landscape, exposing strata that have always been there but have never been part of life’s landscape on the surface”. A diagnosis of cancer can open a crack onto darkness, The discovery of a distinctive pebble on the beach can light up a new mental landscape that releases artistic creativity beyond the bounds of professional convention.

Fig 7 Rendered pebble I

Fig 8 Rendered pebble II

Fig 9 Rendered pebble III

Postscript

If you feel your purpose in life is to make something that will outlive you, it doesn’t matter as much that your body’s only temporary. Indirectly, some part of you will still remain as an existential creative achievement and an avenue for symbolic immortality, particularly among individuals who value creativity,

http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/76/2947/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00227-005-1582-0

http://thechromologist.com/space-noguchi-iconic-sculptures-microcosms-space/

http://paperity.org/p/46802210/adaptation-to-rock-boring-in-botula-and-lithophaga-lamellibranchia-mytilidae-with-a

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