full interview_lawrence wechsler_1.mp3
Speaker 1 [00:00:00] So I'm going to jump in on Trevor and Ryan Oakes, who you know well. What do they paint the way they do? What are they searching for, trying to capture?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:00:15] One of the interesting things about Oak's twins, they're identical twins, and they have been having a conversation with each other about the nature of what it's like to see with two eyes. They have been having this conversation since the age of two. So when I first met them and they were 25, they were kind of at one level, wonder kitten. On the other hand, they were wise old men because they've been thinking about this a lot. The kind of thing that you, thinking about paradoxes of vision, might have with yourself, you'd go, huh, that's weird, that weird. Which reminds me of the great line, I think, is Isomov, who said that the great moment in science is not eureka, but rather, a long time before that, when the observer goes. That's weird. That's the moment of science. But they've been having that conversation since they were two. And they can have it with each other so they can compare. When I look at it this way, what do you see? Do you see this also? Do you this and so forth? So they've had a really detailed, profound conversation. Their mother told me once that she came upon them in a shrub wood. Outside their house, and they were sitting on logs, on stumps, 20 feet apart, at the age of 10, having a conversation about what the depth perception of a dragon with eyes that far apart would be like. It's not the kind of thing that most 10-year-olds are doing, let alone with each other. Anyway, but the point of it is that they've been doing all kinds of experiments, all kinds of observations, and then they had a breakthrough at one point. In effect, in common parlance, I would say that they have figured out a way to to camera obscura-like drawing. Which is to say the kind of optical drawing that David Hockney has shown has been going on for the last 500 years, going back to Van Eyck, but has been using various kinds of equipment, either curved mirrors or lenses or camera obscura is literally a dark box with a lens at the end and you can have reflections or a camera Lucida using a prism. They have figured out a way to do that with no equipment except their two eyes. Or either one of them's two eyes. And the way they figure this out. I guess you could say they had two major insights in this regard. The first was, if I'm looking at you there, if i'm looking right now at the camera, if I want to block out the camera I can put my thumb in front of the camera and I can close one eye and I block it out. If I close the other eye, my thumb goes over a little bit. You can do the same thing with me if you're looking at me. Now the interesting thing, the really fascinating thing, is that if I leave both eyes open... I see everything, even though my thumb's in the way, and I see a double ghost of my thumb. So my thumb shows up here and here in a kind of ghostly way. And their insight was, what happens if I put a pen in my hand, and then I have a piece of paper, and I traced the world on the edge of the piece of paper. Painting, you know, by just drawing over it. If I'm drawing you, I just draw the contours around you. I can put in your eyes and so forth. On the piece of paper, now it can only be the width of the space between your two eyes. That's the width that they can work at. And then they have to fold it and do it again to get the next section again and again. But that is the first basic insight. And they've been able to do astonishingly vivid images of the world that way. What they quickly realized, though, was that if you do that on a sheet of paper, let's say a flat sheet of paper, which is the Renaissance ideal of you, that a painting is like a window in the wall, that if you just do that rectangle, you begin to have terrible distortions at the top and the corners and so forth, which are kind of like Mercator projections, Greenland looks huge and so forth. And if you want to correct for that, if you don't want that, you have to look at the world the way you actually look at the world. It is a mistake or it's a misapprehension on the part of Renaissance painters and everybody since that the rectangle is how we look at the world, we in fact, actually observe the world as though we were on the inside of a sphere. That's how the world actually appears to us. And so they have created a tripod and a way of painting which allows them to do as if on the inside of a sphere and to do this method. And the results are quite astonishing. I mean, so that's one of the many things they've done as experiments.
Speaker 3 [00:05:53] That was really good. An example, can you think of something else?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:06:04] Okay, very good. OK.
Speaker 1 [00:06:11] So I'm going to get us into this with a parallel question. Would you say that one of their goals is to represent in painting and drawing the way we actually see? Yeah. Just to mention the oak.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:06:34] The Oaks Twins, in a sense, are not as interested in representing, re-presenting the world as in re- presenting to us how we actually see the world. So, for example, one of the things that they figured out was, well, if I look at some thing in the distance and I put my thumb in front of it, let's say a tree over there, wherever that might be. And I put my thumb in front of it. If I close one eye my thumb can cover it. If I close the other eye my thumb seems to go over a few inches. Everybody's had that experience. But what's really interesting is if you have both eyes open you see everything even though your thumb is in the way and what you get is a double ghost of your thumb, which allows them, if they put a pen in their... Hand, they can have a piece of paper up close and they can drag the pen through the world in the one half of the pen of the ghost onto the paper and do an exact duplication. Uncanny. And that is basically what everybody else who's ever tried to do this, what Andy Warhol will use projections on a slide projector. Van Eyck used the projection from a concave mirror. Anger used a camera lucida. Other people used, Van of Vermeer apparently used a box-like camera obscura. Everybody's had equipment to do this. They have figured out, first of all, that you can do it with your eyes, with your two eyes. By the way, you can only do it for the amount of space on the page That is the equivalent of the space between your two eyes. Then you have to fold back to do the next section and fold back and fold back to the whole thing. But on the one hand, they figured out this is a way to do it. More interestingly, they figured it out. This is what we do all the time. When we're looking, we're doing this all the, whether or not you have a thumb in front of it, your brain is, is matching and so forth. Just to give you one other example of a kind of thing that they figured out, which is really astonishing. If I were to ask you, when you're looking at things, do you see your nose? I think your intuitive thought is, yeah, if I think about it, my nose is in the middle of my field of vision, but I don't actually see it because I've learned to block it out of in some kind of neural neurological way. I don't think about in fact, your nose is not in the middle of your field of vision. Your nose is doubled on both sides of your vision. The nose from this side is here. The nose for this eye is here and so that there is, in fact, framing what you look at. Kind of blacked out area that's about this about the size of a it's kind of like a shield actually let's wait for this thing to go by It's right outside, they're backing up.
Speaker 4 [00:10:04] Uh...
Lawrence Wechsler [00:10:20] Okay so just to continue this thought what they figured out is that there is a quite narrow area of your whole field of vision which is basically shaped like a shield because of the nose on either side which has depth perception because of two eyes everything on either And on the other side of it, this, and over here... Is only monocular and doesn't have depth perception. So that has all sorts of implications. For example, that explains why boxers tend to be flat-nosed. Not because they have their nose boxed in, but because in the same way that basketball privileges tall people, if you have a flat nose, you have much wider range of depth perception then can see where the thing is coming from. Similarly, by the way, that is why shields are shaped like shields. It wasn't consciously so, but you wanted the shield to do two things. You wanted A, to protect yourself, and B, to block the person who was your opponent from seeing where your swing was coming from. And you also, thirdly, wanted it to be as light as possible. And it turned out that you could do that effectively in a shield shape that Did all that stuff. The third thing it does is if you look at the history of art, and I can give you all kinds of examples, you will see over and over again, Matisse, Lichtenstein, Morris Lewis, Rembrandt, you will these weird kind of framing nose occlusions that aren't even thought of as noses, but it stands to reason that a painter who has exceptional
Speaker 3 [00:12:18] It's okay. Go ahead.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:12:19] It stands to reason that painter who has exceptional visual acuity would have a sense of this barometric pressure from either side. Anyway, so that's the kind of thing that they And there's, I give you countless other examples that they are constantly thinking about.
Speaker 1 [00:12:39] So they talk about parallax. What's that parallax concept all about? If there is a brief way to explain it.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:12:48] Yeah, I'm not really good at that, because I don't use that phrase, but it has to do with your two eyes are seeing different things that are bringing it together in a way. It's a notion, I let them describe exactly what they mean, because i'm not sure what they mean. But it has do with what happens when you're looking at the world with two eyes. As opposed to, by the way, when you're looking at the world with one eye, which is different. One other example, by the way, just to quickly throw that in, is there's the famous painting of the Duke of Urbino who seems to have a notch in his nose that Piero della Francesca did, and that was in fact a Renaissance Duke who had a fencing accident where he lost a vision in one eye and had a notch surgically put into his nose so he would have field vision. Be able to continue fencing.
Speaker 1 [00:13:48] So it sounds like they've come up with a perfect solution with their patented easel.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:14:01] It's not a perfect solution, it's just one of many solutions that many artists over time have come to and visualized in the world. For example, you could say that Seurat came to a perfect solutions with pointillism of how color worked in the word. It was apparent that it would be perfect for its time, at a time when they believed that Adam's... Were billiard-like-shaped tiny billiards and stacked on top of each other. Now that we realize that, in fact, it's electrons swirling dynamically at all times, the twins came up with a better solution for the present, which is this notion they have of light foam, which we can talk about if you want to. But... No, as excellent artists, they are in a discourse, in the same way that scientists are in discourse, that goes back generations and will continue generations forward, a waterfall of insights. And they're a particularly finely shaped drop in that tradition.
Speaker 1 [00:15:12] So tell us a bit about their concave easel.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:15:17] So what the concave easel allows them to do. Well, what it addresses, the problem they realize. The problem the Oaks realized very early on, once they'd come up with this idea of the double ghost and the pen in your hand, was that there was distortions very quickly. If you just went exactly to what the world looked like, things higher up would stretch kind of like a Mercator projection, like Greenland in a flat map. The world is not flat, But if you try to flatten out the world, the spherical world, you're going to get distortions. And they realized that the standard model of the rectangle in the wall, as if it were a mirror, is not how we look at the world. The way we actually see the world is as if we were on the inside of a sphere of visual data coming into our eyeballs, and that... You would need to replicate that if you were going to use this method. So they had to create a tripod and an easel and the device that they figured out was basically uh... They were going be painting or drawing in strips strips that were basically the distance between the two eyes that size and They wanted to be able to, after they had completed a strip... And now they put a strip of blank paper. They wanted to be able to see to the outside world while that paper was exactly the size it was going to need to be in the final drawing. And then when they finished that, they would want to put another piece. So you end up with a grid. The thing that's very complicated is that it's not a simple grid. Every single slat has to be exactly determined so that it all comes down and by the way it doesn't come down to your nose it comes down I believe it's to yeah it comes to Trevor let's say Trevor is it's coming to Trevor it comes to his left eye when his left is being kept completely steady so there's this strange skull cap thing that keeps his face steady and the left eye is looking at the strip of paper the right eye.
Speaker 3 [00:18:02] Let's just wait. Can I just suggest, going back to the start of sentence by saying, when you look at their
Lawrence Wechsler [00:18:14] Yeah, they're easel. When you look at their easel, or when you see pictures of Trevor working from the easel you'll see that he has this skull cap on that is there to steady his head. It by the way rotates because he's going to be looking at the different slats, through the different flats horizontally, but at any given moment it locks on which one he is looking at. The idea is that all the squares, or the lozenges as you go to the edges, all converge perfectly on his left eye, I think, it's either his left or his right eye, but the point is that they converge there and he is able to see the paper and at the same time see through to the outside world at exactly that same square amount and he's able to draw that square of that flat onto the square of the and when he's finished drawing that vertical swath He will now put a vertical swath of blank paper in the covering the area that he was first looking through, and now he's looking through the next area. And over a period of hours, days really, sometimes entire seasons, depending on what he wants to do, he will gradually fill in the whole thing. He's done versions where. Took an entire year. He did a single swath in springtime and then late spring and so forth and then you get the whole thing. He's done versions recently he's been doing in the lake or for example a while back he was doing this very interesting view from Brooklyn of Manhattan and each day was different and as a result the light is different in different days and so with. Another scene aspect, by the way, is he does for a long time, he was just using a very thin needled pen, and it was a black and white. When he started doing color pen, he would just do four colors of pen. And was able to create a complete technicolor variety of imagery just using four colors. And then he likewise worked out this idea of light film, if you want me to talk about that.
Speaker 1 [00:21:06] Would you say that they've figured out how to create paintings that pretty much represent the way the eyes see?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:21:20] They are interested in portraying the world, but more interested in portraying how we see the world and how the eye works. In this sense, they are heirs to Robert Irwin, an artist who is trying to show people, how they help people perceive themselves, perceiving that that is the thing that's the most interesting. More than anything you can perceive, the way you perceive is the drop jaw, most amazing thing. There's nothing more amazing than that.
Speaker 1 [00:22:09] So how do you feel when you look at the Oak Creek look?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:22:17] Well. First of all, there is a, when I look at works of theirs, any individual one, there's often this kind of shock of recognition, huh, that's right. By the way, one of the things that's interesting is that if you step far away from it, it doesn't really work. You have to get to a point that is about as far away from it as Trevor was, and then it really pops into perfect. Experience and then you get closer in you have a different sort of experience of how the pen actually worked and so forth. I think there's a sense of delight and marvel that anybody was mad enough to do this thing. By the way not only is it difficult to do but that it's difficult to mount later on because you have to take those those same strips and mount them in a way that has tensile strength and keeps. Keeps its shape and so forth, but they figured that out. I mean, I basically always am delighted by things that provoke marvel, and I think that by the way is something they have in common with scientists. There's that great line, there's a wonderful Russian left-doctorist of the last century, a butterfly scientist, one of the greatest butterfly scientists in history, who made comment that the true master combines the precision of the poet. And the imagination of the scientist. Really great line. The precision of the poet, and the imagination of the scientist. This of course is the Russian emigre butterfly scientist Vladimir Nabokov who said that.
Speaker 1 [00:24:29] Could you attribute that to the Oaks Twins?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:24:32] I think and I think the Oaks twins are working in that terrain the combination of a poet's precision in terms of the hand and the detailing. But a scientist's imagination in terms of coming up with a method, but also one of the things that's definitely the case is that whenever they do a piece, they have long conversations before they set the easel up about which particular tranche of reality makes sense to be looking at. There are some amazing ones they did at the Getty Garden. With Robert Irwin's Yeti Garden. And there, for example, you have these shapes slicing in from the side, which are bougainvillea arbors. But they also play out this thing they have about noses in a very interesting way. There's always five or six different things going on that they're trying to play, that they are thinking about. I mean, by the way, there is this work of inquiry. That's what they're involved in. They are not trying particularly to create objects to sell. It will be nice if they can. And of course, in order to continue doing it, they have to sell these works and so forth. And which is why, by the way, it became more sensible to do oil paintings on the tripod than to do drawings because there are reasons why that makes more sense as an object to sell." But, but, at the end of the day, they are... Like the best artists and like the best scientists, they're involved in what Robert Irwin calls the dialog of imminence, which is to say that the people at the cutting edge of their different fields, whether they are architects, psychotherapists, fungologists, people who do look at fungi, artists, physicists, historians, the people who are working at the edge of their disciplines are bumping into each other all the time. And at the end of the day, they are animated purely by their open-ended curiosity. And that certainly seems to be true of the Twans.
Speaker 1 [00:27:01] That is a spectacular thought, and I am wondering if you could do it without the reference to Robert Irwin.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:27:13] Well, I can't say die out by a lot of imminence with that, because it's his thought, and that's his thought.
Speaker 1 [00:27:19] Can you explain? Only speak louder. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:27:26] No, no, I understand. I understand, but, but...
Speaker 1 [00:27:30] It's the notion of inquiry of artists in time.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:27:35] I can say that in a, I mean, basically it has been noted that the people who are at the edges of their discipline, who are moving their discipline forward from the periphery of the current shape of discipline, whether it's scientists or historians or psychotherapists or, or, uh... Painters or whatever architects, they keep bumping into each other because essentially they are working. They are the ones who are pulling the tether of their discipline further out, and that area in between is their really, really fertile place. And the thing that animates them, they're no longer able to use logic of their discipline, which is the ordinary ways of thinking about things. They come up with new ways, which is using their reason rather than a system of logic. Reason is something that is something you yourself do out of your center, out of your centered being. You reason things out. You don't logic things out, you use logic. And And the animating impulse behind reason is just curiosity. Cheer, free form, curiosity for its own sake. The twins are absolutely part of that, and that's why they're interesting to other people. You'll find that the twins are of great interest to all kinds of people.
Speaker 1 [00:29:20] So I'm going to come back to that thought in one second. You've touched on this, and I would love a concise statement of where they're positioned in the historic trajectory of convex line cameras. We will use animation to demonstrate the wonderful art and so we will be portraying that they have said it but we feel it should come from someone else.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:29:57] There's no way of saying this without referencing David Hockney.
Speaker 1 [00:30:00] That's it. That's okay. That's OK.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:30:07] As David Hockney has spent the last several years pointing out. Master artist. What that is, is the hill on the side, the kids are out of school. Let me close the door there so it won't sound so much in it. Can I move you? I can't.
Speaker 4 [00:30:31] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 [00:30:47] Um...
Speaker 1 [00:30:49] So this is, I'm going to say yes, love the hot meat reference, but it's going to go over maybe 20 seconds of animation.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:30:59] As David Hockney has recently been showing, people, for certainly the last 500 years, have been using a sequence of optical devices to help them work, whether it was van Eyck using a convex mirror, or other artists using lenses, or cameras obscura like Vermeer used, or eventually camera lucida like Hanger used, or slide projection like... Contemporary artists like Andy Warhol use. The whole challenge is how do you convey the three-dimensional world in two dimensions? And one of the breakthroughs the twins have made is they have figured out a technology which consists of nothing else than the operations of the two eyeballs in their head. Which is a, and it does much the same thing that all the other artists were doing in some ways a simpler old fashion.
Speaker 1 [00:31:58] So you touched on this a minute ago. How do the oaks just fit into the art-science-sciences-art-paradise?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:32:10] I would say that the
Speaker 3 [00:32:17] You can also save the twigs when you're... Yeah, right. Yeah, which is fine.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:32:24] Thank you very much. Well, I have a whole riff I could give you on art and science, but I won't do that. Artists and scientists. Certainly the ones working at the edges of their disciplines are doing very much the same thing. Certainly in the 20th century, the whole thing about physics is that the observer, the activity of observation, is central to the perception of the real world. That the real-world, when a scientist asks questions, he's not asking... Of the real world. He's asking of our methods of measuring and thinking about the real world as a way. And so that that whole discourse has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. And that's, and if you're going to deal with vision, with observation, you have found yourself in the terrain that painters have been doing for a long time. You know, the impressionists were thinking about light scatter decades before the physicists got there with the theory of relativity and so forth. But, and it's because these different themes... Became urgent, became the world was super saturated. The need for this next thing to be explored that both artists from their side and scientists from theirs would find their way working toward it and would potentially be of interest to each other. In the case of the twins, they are of considerable interest, for example mathematicians, topologists, and so forth. A very easy thing is that when I was working on a show with the twins at the Museum of Mathematics. We went out to Princeton to see John Conway, one of the great, great, great mathematicians. And the extraordinary thing that became evident at that point is that one of the twins, Trevor, with no particular mathematical training is clearly a prodigy mathematically, the other is not. But Conway and Trevor got talking and talked to each other for 12 hours nonstop, understanding each other. In ways that nobody else had ever understood the other. It was incredible. The rest of us were just looking at, what the hell are they talking about? But it was absolutely fascinating to watch. And clearly, Trevor has a very, very supple, untrained mathematical eye. And Ryan has other things that he brings to the table, very important things, but not that particular aspect.
Speaker 1 [00:35:42] So, we're living in a moment where technology is trying to or actually is transforming art. And Ryan and Trevor are really low-tech. Analog, you say? Analog. Yes.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:36:01] Ryan and Trevor are part of the analog as opposed to the digital world.
Speaker 1 [00:36:12] Does innovation have to involve, and innovation in art doesn't have to involve cutting-edge technology?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:36:23] That's involved with pencil and a piece of paper.
Speaker 1 [00:36:26] Tell me about Ryan and Trevor's analog artist in Crazy Technological.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:36:36] Well, I mean, you now have people, there's a certain sense in which you could say that what they are doing, what Riot and Trevor are doing with their grid is a pixelation of the world. But in fact, it's much more subtle what they're actually doing. And it's not clear to me that that artificial intelligence or digital animation can get there. I may be wrong, in which case I'll just go kill myself. But I think I recommend the same for all of you. But no, I mean. You know, it seems to me that the essence of the humanities is human being. Um. I will tell you a story about Robert Irwin. I know it's not a rabbit hole, but you should use this in your film. I had been waiting for the train to go by.
Speaker 1 [00:38:07] So I can...
Lawrence Wechsler [00:38:08] I just just let me finish the thought. At the end of 35 years of conversations with Robert Irwin, which make up a book of mine called seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, which by the way, is very pertinent question you're asking to actually see something to actually say that you'd have to forget the frame you would have to Forget the occasion you'd have to get you'd forget the painter you'd if you can. The name, you know, to actually see something. That's a line of Paul Valeris. But at the end of that book, Bob Irwin, who at that point was in his 80s, I was asked, we were talking about mortality, and he likes to say that he's not going to live to see what he's working toward. And in a kind of teasing mode, I said, do you mean there are not enough tetrabytes in the known universe right now to model the kinds of things you're going for. And his answer was, are you kidding? Of course not. The point is to get people to take the goggles off, to stop looking at screens that screen the world out, to start being in the world, being present to the world in a way that all this technology does nothing but get in the way of. And Uh. To the extent that the, uh, twins are on the analog side of this relentless digitization of the world. Uh, I would argue that they are on this side of the angels, or on the human side of angels, and, uh... That's important.
Speaker 1 [00:39:54] So in order to be innovative in the art world today, you do not necessarily need technology.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:40:06] You can use it or not. I mean, there are artists who I've... There are artists that I...
Speaker 1 [00:40:11] You can use it.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:40:14] I mean there are artists that I've written about that I work with, Federico Salmi, who figured out a way to reverse engineer the game Grand Theft Auto and use the algorithms to then lay in Renaissance painting techniques onto those algorithms and make videos. Happyed into he comes from Bologna the Bolognese 15th century Renaissance on that stuff he's not at the end of the day interested in technology he's interested in a certain kind of visualization whether or not you use technology. I mean, everybody, a pencil is technology. Everything is technology, but at the end of the day, it's the curiosity and the drive and that is the interesting thing, the human reaching after the not yet known. And no, you don't need technology for that. I mean you don't need what goes by the name, high tech for that. And in some ways, some of the people who use less of that can get deeper in, it seems to me.
Speaker 4 [00:41:40] So, we're going to, we are going to... Wait for a second, we have a mister. No, I was trying to sneak in. Oh, hi. Hello. Okay. I live here. Okay, very good. Okay.
Speaker 1 [00:41:57] Can we move that stuff so we don't trip? You're okay. Okay, see you later. So, I'm going to move on to some more general topics.
Speaker 3 [00:42:05] That was really good, can we just get some echoing?
Speaker 1 [00:42:12] Okay, you're answering my question. What else do you want in this?
Speaker 3 [00:42:17] Okay, so I have a couple of Oaks things, and I have to think about analog. Yeah, okay, and then we said that's new bodies. So, are we clear? Go ahead. So, can you start by saying Ryan and Trevor Oaks are, you can use the word decidedly or not, Ryan and Trevor Oakes are decidedly analog artists. And then talk about how that relates to innovation. Thank you. Basically in the same vein that you were talking about. I think that's how you declare it in a statement. Let me talk to Mary.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:42:54] Um. When it comes to questions about technology and arts, it seems to me that there is a spectrum with some artists being more analog and others drifting more and more into the digital. And basically, I would say that probably Ryan and Trevor are more in the analog domain, although they oddly enough are doing grid work, so that has the potential to go into. Digitization, although they specifically don't use numbers, they use their eyes, they don't quantify, they qualify, which seems to me to be an analog sort of activity, and as such, are among the many, many artists who use technology, the technology of the brush, the technology of a pencil, the technology of ink, technology of paper and so forth, technology and building and grid and so forth, but at the same time. Animated at the end of the day by their distinctly human, as opposed to artificial, intelligence, their quirky observational as opposed to digitized observational.
Speaker 6 [00:44:28] Okay, that's all right.
Lawrence Wechsler [00:44:29] And they seem to be, in that regard to me, if it is true that the humanities, first and foremost, require human beings, they are very much on that side of the current.
Speaker 3 [00:44:50] Yes, one other question. And then we'll... Okay, so you're scrolling down. It wasn't the Esplanade, but it was a long river in Brooklyn. And you see Ryan and Trevor. Trevor's got his thing up here. What do we see? What do you see? Give us your...
Lawrence Wechsler [00:45:15] If you come upon them in the middle of their labors, say you're walking down the Esplanade in Brooklyn and you come up on these two curious characters, one of them, his head inside of a mad cap, literally, that's locking his head and the other one is in consultation with him and so forth, it looks pretty bizarre. It literally looks mad what they're up to. It is an object of great curiosity, which is one of the values of Ryan. In addition to Ryan's importance in setting up the shot and in having continual conversations with Trevor as he is looking through his eye piece, through his skull cap, through the piece of grid and so forth that he's looking through. So they're having that conversation. But another value of Ryan is to intercept you when you walk up. Starting or referring with Trevor and saying What are you doing blah blah blah and Ryan is very good at talking to people and helping them understand and and he'll be there to to Intercept you and to help you put into you the dailiness of your life What's going on so it doesn't just seem to be completely mad and in fact seems to be deeply deeply human and and confoundingly present. Interesting.
Speaker 3 [00:46:44] Why is his head, why is Trevor's head encased in this? What does that do for him in terms of being able to represent what it is he's trying to represent?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:46:57] So, basically, you'll notice that skull cap he's wearing, and that has only one function, which is to steady his head for the entire day. The entire day that he is working on one slice, vertical slice, of the various grid pieces, he needs his head to be in the same position. Even as he's going up and down, it needs to be in the same relationship to the grid as a whole. The next day, after he's finished that piece, he'll move slightly, and he'll lock, he will lock himself into the next one. But it is... But the function of the skull cap is to steady him for a day's worth of work to allow the effect that we've been talking about to work.
Speaker 3 [00:47:53] One other thing about it. The way I look at these concave paintings, the way I looked at it is that what they're representing in the concave is essentially peripheral vision, right? I mean, it's a way of representing the world in a way in which we actually see it, but don't necessarily understand that's how we see it. Is that an accurate way of looking at it?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:48:18] What this allows them to do. What the concave canvas allows is for a... So that every single strip is in perfect focus, which is not the way it is when we, when I'm looking at you, this stuff begins to fade out and so forth, not in focus. But it is in focus because I then look over there and now it's in focus, everything I look at is in focus at the moment I look it. And this allows that sweep of that landscape or of the water scape or whatever they're doing, the city scape. To be completely in crystal clear focus all the way across. And as you look at it, it will repeat for you the experience of what it's like to, especially if you get your head exactly at the right place in that concave, you'll see the stuff right in front of you is in focus and now that's in focus as you're looking at it. Now that's a focus. And that's one of the things that you'll also notice through this device is what it is like to be looking at things.
Speaker 1 [00:49:30] Okay, big topic, the topic of our series, which is how through the ages, art and science have intersected to inform creativity and the creative process. Can you give us a, do you agree with that, and can you give a big headline statement?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:49:57] I used to run an institute at NYU called the New York Institute for the Humanities. And I agreed to take that on, provided it was understood that the whole distinction between the arts and the sciences is illusory. It is a relatively recent vintage. Leonardo would not have understood what you're talking about. Michelangelo would not have understood what you are talking about and that actually comes basically after Descartes you begin to get to it. My way of thinking, the sciences are not just one of the humanities, they are one of the crown jewels of the Humanities. Now having said that, it is... I am most interested in science when it is approaching what we ordinarily think of as art. And I'm most interested when it's approaching what I think of normally as science. That comes back to this great line of Nabokov's, that the true master melds the precision of the poet and the imagination of the scientist. Scientists are extremely imaginative. But not necessarily as precise as poets. And what you want is both. Another way of thinking about it, by the way, and there are differences. I don't anyway want to say that they're the same thing, but they are most interesting when they are approaching the same sorts of questions, it seems to me. There's a great, great line of Eudora Welty. Where she says, make the great short, Eudora Welty, the great, short story writer, where she said, making the real, real is art's job. As opposed to science, which considers the real in the mode of a model or a set of computations and sort of representations. But that, the great job of science is to make you realize that these aren't just models, these are really real and specific and individual that they're add to. Whereas a scientist may, the less interesting kind of scientist, would insist on getting away from I, thou, and having an abstract observer, observing an abstract model of the world, and getting at incredible amounts of information that way, and making great advances of a certain type. At the end of the day, the job of art is to make the real real. So that's kind of how I...
Speaker 1 [00:53:18] Do you have a favorite example, piece of art, a piece of sculpture, piece of the world, where science has informed the art?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:53:32] Everything. I don't have an example where it hasn't. I would say that if you're doing a history of civilization of the humanities, they are flowing constantly. So that, for example, perspective itself is... Hugely important in terms of why does it arise when it does arise and what is the need that is happening and so forth so that we could go back and have a conversation about van Eyck and and and almost simultaneously Bernalewski in and and the divvying up of the world into these different perspective conceptions and so forth. And that, in turn, allows great breakthroughs of physics of Galileo and Copernicus and so forth are happening simultaneously. And that goes right up to cubism and relativity. I mean, they are completely informing each other and so forth, even though they are coming at things from different sides. But it's not an accident that cubism in relativity are both 1907. They're happening at the same time. Because people are getting engaged in the same sorts of questions at the same time.
Speaker 1 [00:55:06] So which came first, the art or the science or the sciences?
Lawrence Wechsler [00:55:10] It's not one comes first or the other. I mean, at different times, different things happen, but... Questions become askable. Another way for you is that there's a great line of James Baldwin where he says that the artist. Delves into questions that have been obscured, that have been occluded by the answers. Every scientific or artistic answer solution raises a whole bunch of new questions. And in that sense, we're involved in a continual, in Star Trek terms, deeper and deeper into the universe, whatever you would want to put it. And every tentative solution. Only raises more questions. And you see that in both places. There's no question that the Oaks twins regularly read up on scientific things that are recommended to them by other artists and so forth. I first heard about the Oakes twins from the other twins, the Wartong twins, one of whom is a physicist and her sister, identical twin sister, is a artist. And they founded a thing called the Institute for Figuring, which is about figure drawing, figure numbers, the intersection of art and science. And, and... They thought that what the twins were doing, what the Oaks twins were doing was very interesting and alerted me to the Oakes twins. But, uh, the well-tempered artists. Is. Is open to what's going on, and vice versa. I mean, what is going on with doctors and music, for example, the number of doctors who play instruments, who play piano and so forth, or for that matter with scientists generally, and they're interested in music. Those music and the harmonics, you know, all sorts of issues in music are revelatory for people who are scientists who have a different sense of rhythm of what they're doing and so forth. I just think these things penetrate each other and that only, and I would go for, I would also say, however, that the increasingly siloed, narrowly silo education in the scientists in the sciences. I'd go further and say that the ever more siloed specializations and so forth in the sciences, in the sciences, is very, very problematic. You know, sometimes I think these days that the value of a Ph.D. In the science is you only have to learn two things. You have to know how to write a peer-reviewed paper and how not to read anything else but peer-reviewed papers. If you learn those two things, then you are given a medal, as now you're a scientist. That has nothing to do with what the world of Darwin, the world Newton, the world Faraday. You know, uh. You know, and those were deeply, deeply artistic souls. And it seems to me the twins are nicely straddling that world.
Speaker 1 [00:59:38] Do you think these days that there's a danger of artists using science superficially as a way to signal intellectual sophistication without really engaging?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:00:00] Artists using science superficially, first of all I would say it's no more of a danger than scientists using art superficially. The number of neurologists who have come up their theories of what's going on in art is vast and fairly comical. The I I am drawn to artists and scientists who are drawn to mysteries. The questions and not answers. And and you can have some even have artists who who engage scientific technological things very interestingly, and not by the way, most most people don't do at the highest possible level. You know, it's relatively rare that you get people doing that. Having said that, people can appreciate, people can, anybody is in a position to suddenly stop for a second and say, God, how is it that I open my eyes in the morning and this whole world just presents itself to me? What on earth is going on? Anybody can ask that question. And that can take you any number of ways, places.
Speaker 1 [01:01:30] How do you see AI and generative art and robot art in the trajectory, the great trajectory of art history?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:01:50] Uh... Uh... You know it's it's it will obviously have effects and so forth but at the end of the day i think it's uh... It's a passing thing right now I hope it is. The claims that are being made. It's no more, I mean, we've been hearing for decades and decades and decades that we're going to have a self-driving car in no time at all. It turns out not to be possible that Well, okay, I'll tell you this, I will tell you the story. My touchstone in all of this is a late medieval early renaissance thinker named Nicholas of Cusa, C-U-S-A, who was an astronomer, a diplomat, a prelate, he was the Archbishop of Cologne, he is quite a fascinating character. He wrote a book. Fantastic book with the great title, Learned Ignorance. And at a certain point he was in a discourse with various sorts of other theologians about how you get to knowledge of God or of the essence of the universe. And he said that one way of thinking about it is that imagine a circle with a N-sided regular polygon inside a triangle, you add a side as a square, you have a side It's a pedigone. You keep out of sight. One way of thinking about getting to knowledge of the whole is you keep adding sides, you get a million sides, you're getting very close to the circle. And that's the way you could argue that artificial intelligence or technology is trying to do it. If we feed it more and more information, we'll have more, the billion sides, the trillion sides. And Hughes says, but of course that's not right because you're going farther and farther away from the circle, A circle has only one side, it doesn't have a million sides. A circle, has no angles, the thing you have is very colloquy with angles, he says. At some point, Cusa said, you have to make the leap, the leap of faith, he called it, which is where Kierkegaard gets that notion, from the cord to the arc, and that can only be accomplished for free without any causality and grace and eventually you get there. Artificial intelligence can only give us a trillion sided polygons, it can't give us a circle. That's another way of saying that the job of art is to make the real real. That's art, to read that. And it's funny that artificial intelligence has the word art in it, it has no art to it at all.
Speaker 1 [01:05:10] So where does medical illustration fit into the whole art-informing science conversation?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:05:19] Well, there you want to talk to Riva Lair, if it's too late for you to do that now, but she's the great person on that subject. Now, first of all, what we now call mythical illustration. 500 years ago was. You know, Leonardo and Michelangelo, dissecting bodies and drawing the muscle structures and the salias and so forth. This was all part of the same project of how you render the world. And to be able to render my hand, by the way, hand, my God. Look at that. Is that the most amazing thing you've ever seen? Is this unbelievable? If you look at Rembrandt's great painting, which is pertinent to your question, the anatomy lesson. You know, there's a mountain of people behind the anatomist, who is in the middle of dissecting a hand. And the people, a group of the people if you look at it closely, are just absolutely stunned. They are open-jawed, and you think that what they're looking at is the dissected hand. That's not what they are looking at. They are looking the professor who is holding this hand up like this, and he is saying, with these muscles you could do this. That marvel, that kind of interaction, intersection of art and science is before art and science separate out. It was absolutely of the essence. And by the way, if you want to go further back, the very, very first cave paintings 30,000 years ago, 40,000 of years ago are hand prints on the wall. They figured out ways to put their hand and then spit paint, you know, just kind of a vapor, a cloud of paint around it that they could move their hands. And then there would be a picture of a hand that was 30, 000 years ago. So that was being figured out. That the notion of man being the measure of the world, a necessity from our point of view, because we have to, we experience the world bodily. Goes all the way back. And so it's not at all surprising that, at a certain very, very crucial moment 500 years ago, there are people doing natural philosophy, it was called, which is basically science. And those are people who are trying to find through all different kinds of ways to figure out how the body works. And that's still going on, although they seem to have bifurcated into two different groups, but they're really the same thing.
Speaker 1 [01:08:18] Have a sip, take a breath. On this general technology course, any other, anything you guys want to add? No, no. No? OK. Onward. So artist's tools, how have they evolved over the ages?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:08:41] I mean, they are contain artists, the tools, the technology they use, you want to use technology that way, technology is tool making, you know, have been evolving constantly and returning I mean, it's not just a one-way direction. Things get rediscovered and so forth. During the last 500 years, or certainly since Van Eyck, there have been more and more optical devices being used by painters, for example, brushes that go through all kinds of different technologies. It's worth remembering that the twins, in their early days, the way they made a living was making artist brushes for a particular artist. They were making, there's this wonderful artist, Cecily Brown, who they were making her brushes. They were breaking brushes, I think, for Alex Katz. I mean, you know, they were very good at doing that, which is a whole art. So I mean things are constantly changing and then being abandoned, I mean. There are, there's always the artist who's going back to just a piece of, to a pencil and a piece of paper. And by the way, every artist starts that way at the age of three or four or five. And the ones who stay artists are the ones who retain that kind of divinist toward the world. And then they use different sorts of things along the way.
Speaker 1 [01:10:33] I have a quote from you on the subject of kids of three, four, or five. You say when you're a kid your first five or six years converge all the time. School essentially is about taking that out of you. And that speaks to one of our underlying questions about creativity. What happens to our natural creative impulses after our early years?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:11:09] If you, anybody who's been in the presence of a child of a toddler and just spends any amount of time at all realizes you're in the present of a genius, an absolute genius. When you see a toddler beginning to talk and then just the flood of language coming did. All the whys, all that kind of stuff. They are absolute geniuses of pattern recognition, of noticing things, of you know, so forth. And there was a time, relatively recently in the 19th century, when kindergarten... Was all about that. Kindergarten, when it was invented, it was invented by a crystallographer named Freibull. And he was all about pattern recognition, it had nothing to do with reading, writing, arithmetic, it has nothing to that. It had to do with, that's a whole other documentary for you to make, but a documentary about the invention of kindergarten. And the catastrophe of the last 50 years, I'd say, has been the Badly to that. And the emphasis on things that you can test. By the way, the kindergartners were the teachers, the gardeners of children. In the old kindergarten and so forth. But to the extent, you know, the main difference between Picasso. That other people could be described that he kept his child like. Absorption of the world and so forth lots of problems there but uh... Same thing with Einstein by the way the same thing with Cro-Magnon Man who we have this ridiculous uh... Notion that they were less less intelligent than we are that they dragged their knuckles and so for us Are you kidding? Cro-Magnon Man. And the childhood of the species and so forth was a hundred times more intelligent than us had to be just to get through the day. You know, make an ape surrounded by mammoths and so-forth. Their practical knowledge, the kinds of things that they noticed, so forth, was just phenomenal. And then indeed as they enter cities and so forth, they get stupefied. I would say a general problem that we have is with the internet and with social media and so forth is it's... With stupefaction. That look you have on your face when you're looking, that's your social Thank you. Now, what's weird about that, parenthetically, is the fascination that little small children have with those little screens and the problems of that.
Speaker 1 [01:14:18] Creativity be taught, can you learn to be creative?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:14:23] I think it's true that creativity can be squashed. Or not squashed. Maybe that's the way I would think about it, you know, is that people... People are deliriously observant and, and ravenously curious as children and seem to have that systematically beaten out of them. So if you want to know, I guess the way I'd answer it, if you wanna know, uh, can creativity be taught? Yeah, get out of the way.
Speaker 1 [01:15:14] So I am momentarily going to move on to the last very few questions. Do you have anything you want added here to art and creativity?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:15:25] Nope. Nope.
Speaker 1 [01:15:31] So you grew up in a world of music, what is it also in the company of Oliver Sacks, what is it about sound voice when they hit our ears can make us cry?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:15:47] I actually, my answer will be unsatisfying to you, which is that not only was my grandfather on one side a major Weimar-era composer, but my grandmother on the other side, my father's mother, was the head of the Vienna Conservatory of Music's piano division. I myself am completely amusical, and it just completely canceled that. So oddly enough, and this fascinated my friend, Oliver Sacks, who couldn't get over it. Oliver, for his part, was completely a visual, which blew my mind how he couldn't see anything. And in fact, whenever he was dealing with artists, I was brought in as a consulting person to explain to him why this might be visually interesting. Uh, I just, it's an issue, but I cannot hear whether a note goes up or down. I don't like tone deaf in the way that some people are colorblind. I am tone deaf and it very much undermines my appreciation. Having said that. There is no question that that music taps into primordial aspects of our lives. My grandfather wrote a book called The Shaping Forces in Music, by which he meant harmony, melody, counterpoint, and form. And, you know, he isn't the only person who points out that it begins with the heartbeat. Not only your own heartbeat, but as a, uh, the womb tone, as, as a eight month, seven month, eight month fetus, the main thing in the universe is the whatever it is, you know, and that... That is deep, deep, deep, yes, and, and. And it is, I mean, if you were to get grotesque and talk about our wiring, we are deep-wired. Which is a great, great blessing. And... I would say that's part, if you want to describe why we're like that, but it seems to me that's clearly the case.
Speaker 1 [01:18:35] Um, we've covered several stories about how art and technology are working together to help doctors and their patients further. A gaming company in California has the first FDA-approved video game for kids with ADHD and prescription. And there is an artist who paints with robots. Fort Worth who's working with a neurologist trying to help neurologically challenge children to paint, to access that creative piece of them by using a tablet that hooks into this robot arm. So do you think there's a future in art and technology together and making a difference.
Lawrence Wechsler [01:19:31] I mean, but that's just, is there a future in medical practice? Yes, there is. And doctors will always, the good doctors will experiment with different kinds of things that are in the world at the moment. And so I can imagine that. I would hope it didn't stop there and I think they would too. I mean. At a certain point you certainly hope that the autistic person who is somehow able to interact with the machine can be pulled away from the machine. On the other hand, to the extent that they can't have interactions, to have them be able to have those interactions is extremely important and wonderful and valuable. It doesn't bother me at all, but it's just... I just hope I saw a bigger horizon. I have a friend who talks about, when you talk about people on the spectrum, you know, that somebody's on the Spectrum, he says, we're all on the Spektrum. That's what a Spektrom is. And...
Speaker 1 [01:20:55] Or video game sort.
Lawrence Wechsler [01:20:58] Um. I would change the questions slightly. That, uh. The trouble for me with video games is the feeling is that they're not freeform, that there isn't the open field of freedom because you are constrained by the decision tree of possibilities that is at the heart of the algorithm and so forth. In that sense. I find that reading a story... There's a 360, 180 degree field of freedom ahead of you at any given moment. Whereas a game that says, do you open this door? Do you open the door? Do you reopen this door or do you reopen the door is constrained and then there is that done and do you pick it up? Do you not pick it? I feel like I'm inside a mad. Maze, you know. And the people who are very into mazes, I've decided to, I meant to sometimes amaze drawings from the outside, but I don't like being in mazes especially. Um, having said that, there's a remarkable, wonderful, yeah, I mean something like Tetris I find very, very, you know, simple and, you, know, rotating things. That's all very beautiful. And, you I've, in the same way that I don't partake of social media, I don't partake video games. But it's possibly generational. That's why I talk about childlike wonder. And its persistence into, at this point, middle age. No, it's a delight to be with him. To see the world the way he sees it. Hey there, don't go away. I'm at one of Matt's pieces.
Speaker 1 [01:23:31] We're mad in the general trajectory of contemporary or historic art.
Lawrence Wechsler [01:23:44] I sense that he's not somebody who worries about that. And I don't worry, it's not a question I ask about him. He's very much in the present, but there have been, you know, if you wanted to think about, you know MC Escher, there are various people, artists who've been very interested in topology and so forth. There is the whole rather silly argument as to whether paper sculpture is an art or a craft, you know which I find to be kind of silly. And And one of the things that's fascinating about him in terms of you're talking about art and science is how he, doing this kind of work, he was doing it just around the time that protein folding became a thing. And that people realized that DNA by itself wasn't the thing, that how the protein folded and the incredible complexity of different kinds of folds was going to be important for biology going forward. And it turned out that he was very valuable to... Matt probably told you the story about how he sent out, when he turned up at the University of Michigan, he just sent out a thing and the only person who contacted him was a doctor who had a very fluid and fertile thing. It doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 1 [01:25:07] Have you ever met his daughter, Flora?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:25:09] Yeah, yeah she's terrific. It's interesting, he was always doing things that suddenly there came a point in his life where he started working in color, which he hadn't been doing before. Before he had been doing things like this, but then suddenly color entered his vocabulary and I pointed out to him one day he was saying, seven years ago I started exploring color. I said yeah, how old is Flora? I didn't notice that.
Speaker 1 [01:25:40] We captured a little bit of Flora by herself on film, apart from that, and she gave us a demonstration of the many things she creates. Tell us something about the creativity and childhood that I could like Flora to demonstrate.
Lawrence Wechsler [01:26:06] First of all, I would say every kid demonstrates it. Let's save that for starters every every kid every kid not only demonstrates creativity, it is creativity. That's what being a kid is, until it gets beat out of them. And if they are lucky to have a father who, and a mother who do the kinds of things that Flora's father and mother do, then they'll be able to have it for considerably longer, I hope. But, but, anyway. You know, it's just my creativity, it is a strange word, I don't quite know what it means, it means something different to everybody, but if we're talking about... Open this. Pattern, delight in pattern and patterning. It has something, excuse me, to do with prehensile, so it's hands, you know, and the understanding that... There's not a mind-body division, in the same way that there's not an art-science division. The brain. To the extent that you stay stuck inside the little combine of, you know, gray jello that is the brain, you're not understanding what mind is. Mind is eye, it's hand, it is the manipulability of the world, it it's looking at, or if you're blind, see, hearing, whatever it is, the point is, this is as much the brain, this as much as the brain as that little thing inside there. And to make sense to you. You limit yourself to thinking of creativity as some brains are more creative than others. No, that's not at all the case. It is an entirely tactile thing. Going back to artificial intelligence, I was recently talking, looking at the really, really pathetic attempts of artificial intelligence to be funny, if you ask artificial intelligence, to tell you a joke, and I suddenly realized that... You know, there are no belly laughs without bellies. You have to have a belly to be able to have a belly laugh. You have be incarnated. You know you have to be in a body to be able to do that. If you're not in a a body, you can do approximations, you could do imitations, you can ape it, but you can't do it. Anyway, so coming back to, I don't know if any of that made sense, but I guess I would So the creativity is the interface between. Our incarnated being, this profound mystery of being the center of perception from all different types, tactile, eyes, ears, but also hands, and manipulating and moving toward and moving away, all that with the world, which is the world of other people, but also the world of other things, other creatures, projections. Transfers and that's what a scientist and that is what a better scientist and a better artist have and it persists longer, it's basically what they had when they were kids and they just keep doing it.
Speaker 1 [01:29:49] What do you make of Rafik and Adal?
Lawrence Wechsler [01:29:59] The, the, for example, the piece of the modern, just recently, or, I mean, I don't, I've been calling it a lot, but I mean I think he makes very absorbing, beautiful kinds of things. I think his claim that that thing has anything to do with the history of art or that it has to do with. With the museum itself or the papers, and yeah, it's just, you know, it could, it's random, you feed it all kinds of parameters, it will do all kinds things, and I think they are very, very absorbing. The thing I like the most about his invention is that incredible sense of... Of the blob coming out and of the seeming box that it is in which is a digital box that it seems to be able to lift out of and so forth. I found that very, very beautiful to watch, completely absorbing, deathly dull at the end of the day. I mean it ends up being kind of a You know, soundscapes we're going to sleep to, you know, I mean, you know, the sound of the ocean or whatever, uh, but, uh. But, I mean, having said that, what he does, he does very, very well and he's very cutting edge and fun, but I wouldn't want to go to a museum that was only those kinds of things. I think Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl. Beats, something like that, hands down.
Speaker 1 [01:31:44] In the cave.
Lawrence Wechsler [01:31:46] I enjoy the, I was in Chicago ten years ago working there and being aware of what he was up to and it's very, very fun and one of the things that's funny about his work is is how those costumes. Are there to be danced in. And they don't... He has the same problem that African art displayed has, that very often these things are part of ritual and dance. Very often these things are part of ritual and dance and movement and and to have them just the husk you know displayed it's kind of like madame tussauds wax museum or something when they get moving. I must say, by the way, that I thought the recent project of the murals that were done, they're terrific. I think they're really, really good. And I think one of the reasons they're so good is that as you move about them, because of the way in which each of the stones is... Slightly angled, just inevitably, you get a dance of light across them in a way that does repeat, even though they're just still, they dance before your eyes, and in a way that perhaps a photograph doesn't. If people ask you the importance of materials in terms of informing art, the question answers itself. Informing. The material is the thing that that is the matrix that informs that gives that you form into the word matrix in this context is very interesting the loom i mean there's a whole bunch of interesting words that are on top of each other loom and womb the matrix that you will have in a loom comes from mater. Mother, which the word material also comes from. And in fact, the whole question is, what's the matter? What's the matter? I think, by the way, Shakespeare is the first person who used that expression. What's the matter is of the essence and so you have that wonderful war. There's incredible stuff that comes out of what is now material science begins, I think, in Greek times and earlier times, and then coming through Albers and so forth, is precisely this setting up these grids, we're back to the world of the twins and their grids. And the interweaving. The turning fancy into form, that's the terrain of material science. Material science which in effect, broadly understood, includes pigments and cloth and rag, paper and all that kind of stuff is coming out of the same thing and then you get into any of the materials. Including plant material or You know It comes back to be incarnated To be in incarnate is made flesh the word made flesh I think about it. I mean all that stuff is is of the essence, both of art and science, it seems to me. Artists, excuse me, like scientists, are very interested in what is at hand. Let me come back to the prehension. And grabbing and rotating and looking at from different angles myself for it. And they will be interested in anything that is at hand. And that can be the latest technology or it can be a kind of marble that nobody's looked at before or looked at in that particular way or a kind a paper or a kinda pigment. I mean, you know, the fact that they didn't have blue. Until relatively late and completely affected how our painters were able to paint blue for a long time was extremely valuable, very very very costly lapis lazuli and so forth and and so they were constantly looking for new ways to do that to bring it out. No, that is That is part of our creatureliness, because we are going all the way back to neanderthal and homo sapiens and chrome magnets. We are interested in what is at hand. That's by the way why you have that scene at the beginning of 2001, with hitting the bone, you know, that magic, amazing moment when the ape uses a tool. What is at Hand? And then the tool goes slightly to the sky and it becomes the space station. That is one continuous history and artists like scientists are, some people say opportunistic, I just, they're alive. That's what being alive is.
