Mechanical Biota, Chromatic Scales

by Karl F. Volkmar, THE NEW ORLEANS ART REVIEW

EXCERPT

Origami

SHIMMERING REFLECTIONS OF the sunlit street muddled with vaguely discernable, shadowy art forms in the amorphous space of the large plate glass windows of the gallery. As I stood on the outside looking in, the experience was one of standing at the edge of the woods and peering into a shadowy subarboreal world where flecks of sunlight filtering through the leaved canopy above danced in unison with moles of white dogwood blossoms. Seduced by this enigmatic vision, I walked into the gallery to find myself in an enchanted plantation of species of the sort seen only in The Dream of Rousseau. Turning around while gazing curiously at the individual organisms was to stand amid a Klee-like landscape where the twittering machines really do twitter, albeit silently.

The experience of discovering this roomful of mechanical species was much more delightful than that arising from a chance checking of one’s account balances online only to find that not only had one received a raise but the raise was much more than you could have hoped for. The possibilities were so much more complex and fabulous. As I watched the arched elliptical leaves of Branch rotate around their axel axes and the curving stem revolve around the spherical prism of the base, my imagination was drawn beyond the world of what is to one of what could be.

Although the artist Lin Emery remarks that this post-Katrina body of work may be a bit more pessimistic than her earlier pieces, the suggestion of life and growth and the actual movement makes her pieces seem alive, belying this pessimism to the unassuming eye. Perhaps these pieces were the catharses for the artist creator, liberating her thoughts and feelings from the destructive path of implosive pessimism through the creative meditation that is art, as a Marcus Aurelius or Pascal did in their own way? To our selves as outsiders, works such as the spiky-leaved Palmetto allow multiple levels of appreciation, enjoyment, and reflection.

We might liken Emery and her work to that of the artist as subliminal physicist, engineer, and programmer all wrapped into one. While the levels of representation in which physicists and their laws, the electrical engineers designing chips, the designers of operating systems, the builders of hardware, the writers of software codes, and the manipulators of graphic interfaces involve an understanding within the limits of each domain, the artist as visionary with an intuitive feeling for the dynamic relationships among all levels creates the whole experience that is art.

Flower Tree

Imagine trying to catch a feather wafting this way and that way and another way while drifting in the gentlest of breezes and one can empathize with trying to grasp a single moment in the stream of continual movement of the delicately lithesome leaves of Sprout dancing in harmony amid arabesques of shimmering light. The nature of the experience lies somewhere between predicting what will happen next and the serendipitous transformations of seemingly chance variation. The artist’s biotic organisms are engaged in dynamic dialectic between phenomena and epiphenomena, a dance of becoming, a dance of life, a ballet of light.

Emery’s works release us from our melancholy, if we are so inclined, like the springing forth of new life from winter sleep or the unexpected receiving of a letter from one’s best friend with whom contact had been lost for too many years. This is the same ineluctable force that impels the so delicate and seemingly frail burgeoning First Buds as they rise from within the sturdy leaves that just a few moments of biological time before were themselves knifing their way through the warming topsoil in their season. Imagine a gentle wakening into consciousness to the sounds of one’s favorite music when the radio turns on in the morning.

The biotic vitality of Emery’s current work emanates from an intuitive understanding of the common ground of animal, vegetable, and mineral. Do you remember that wonderful moment when the homely rock you were carrying so carefully fell and split open to reveal the surprise of the crystalline geode inside? From its imagination in the late eighteenth century to the suggestion that the crystal could be the key to unlocking the genetic code, the idea of the crystal has been seminal in discovering how the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds work. The idea of the crystal that came from the nature of life became the idea that unlocked the secrets of life. From vegetable to mineral to animal to biota in general, a crystalline materialism was the theme that revealed the deep ecology of all things. Reversing the order of analytic work of the geneticist who brings to light the genetic codes of living organisms, Lin Emery the artist combines aesthetic memes and mechanical forms to bring create works like the Flower Tree.

The more I look at Emery’s works, allowing my mind to serendipitously go where it goes, the stronger the feeling of a slowly clicking into place of missing parts required to resolve problems that had seemed insoluble for too long. We watch in wonder as the individual parts of different pieces move into constantly changing alignments like some fabulous orrery. These mechanical biota make sense intuitively, and on a deeper level, whether we approach the work with the innocence of a child, the mystical wonderment of Teilhard de Chardin, or the rational materialism of Jacques Monod. Like teeth and tongue discovering a clove buried amidst the flavors of rice and vegetables and fifteen other spices in a new biryani recipe, fresh thoughts and insights and pleasures pop into our minds the more we watch.

What are antecedents of the Emery’s ideas? There are bits and pieces scattered throughout time. Was it the amusing mechanism of a cuckoo clock? Perhaps a mechanical ballet by Leger, Picabia, and Satie? Maybe the kinetic sculpture of Moholy-Nagy? Could it be the Stravinsky Fountain by Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle at the Centre Pompidou? Even Judy Pfaff’s playful Cirque, Cirque in the Philadelphia Convention Center? It could be any these, all of them, or none of the above. Whether the influence was direct or indirect is not the interesting question here. That lies in realizing that each evolved from similar memes randomly modified according to chance circumstances and represents an adaptation to unique cultural environment of their time and place.

Wherever one looks, one watches as the different parts follow their memetically determined behavioral paths. There is the elegance of Little Lily‘s elongated petals and leaves rising quickly into and piercing the air in graceful pirouettes. The solid color and ephemeral reflections of Origami mimic the manipulation of folds and surfaces as familiar shapes are conjured into being by the prestidigitations of the origami artist. Works are continually changing before our eyes, posing, pausing like an Albanian folk dancer inspired by classical Greek sculpture, moving into new positions, pausing… . Whether it is the articulate geometry of Gate or the elliptical grace of Sunflower, the shifting relationships among the many elements move around multiple axes of rotation and revolution.

Little Lily

Shaped surfaces glisten in the light, imaging the surrounding environment in their mirroring planes, projecting luminous wraiths that glide along the walls and floor and ceiling in constantly changing patterns. Movement is the medium, light and space the means, metal and mechanism the substrate shaping the viewer’s experience of movement through space and light. Twirl, Circles, and Curl present themselves as they are yet are much more than their physical beings. How many iterations have to take place before reiteration becomes pattern? What are the mechanisms that manifest themselves in these mechanical forms? That which can only be imagined because it is no longer visible, like the immense and marvelous scaffoldings needed for building a Chartres or a Hagia Sophia, can be as fascinating as that which can be seen.

Whether seen as syntheses of Arp’s biomorphism and the geometry of Gabo and Pevsner, or as time-based homologues of Eva Hild, Emery’s auto-mobiles move with an intentionality and purposefulness more so than one finds in a Calder mobile or Rickey’s exquisitely balanced constructions. Perhaps more significant are the analogies with natural experiences, happy surprises like spotting the bright red feathers of cardinals darting hither and thither among the branches of newly leaved trees in spring courtship, or the now you see it now you don’t now you see something else experiences of a master aesthetician”s amazing feats of legerdemain.

Change and transformation are not always wonderful and the artist responds in kind. The sharp-spiked, vajra-like forms of Katrina move eccentrically with the same awesome force of the storm. The storm that followed the same natural laws that direct buds and sprouts and flowers. The obverse side of the wonderment of change and transformation is destruction and death, an understanding represented so fully in the dancing Shiva Nataraja that signifies the ending that is the beginning. And in Emery’s art.

My first response to works like Protest and Ship of State were that they are out of place, anomalies within the biota theme. Then I remember the almost infinite variety of living organisms that have evolved, and will evolve, by varying the sequencing of the finite number of protein molecules in dna! If we carefully observe what seem to be parallels between biosphere and culture (thank you, Richard Dawkins), we can identify similar processes of creation, regeneration, and survival. Cultural organisms responding to the changes in the cultural climate, springing forth in protest when life is threatened as natural as spouts in the spring and buds in their season according to the species. Protest and Ship of State appear quite natural in this light!

The most unique work in the show, the large installation Breaking News, is an ambitious work that is a delight. Although the artist states her intentions that Breaking Away is a work of social criticism and commentary on the ugliness in the world, the actual experience is more in tune with the likes of Miro’s Harlequin’s Carnival, Calder’s Circus, or Pfaff’s Cirque, Cirque. Without the written narrative that accompanies this installation, I could not imagine that the shimmering surfaces and fantastic shapes were intended to tell a tragic story. One only realizes that the disjunction among the elements was to be symbolic of the disconnection too characteristic in the modern world if one reads the explanatory text. To a naïve observer such as myself, Breaking Away is a most delightful mechanical confection that lacks even the unplanned irony of Tinguely’s Homage to New York. If Breaking Away fails to affect as the artists intended, this is not a failure of the artist. To my mind it seems that Emery’s deeply rooted creative energy unconsciously asserted itself through the cloud of her expressed pessimism like the new growth of spring to give form to a wonderful art that is an affirmation of life, and art, amid the troubles of the world.