The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth. This is where science certain aspects of science are seized upon, assimilated, or sometimes simply plagiarized in decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value. One such use, and it is a curious reversal of Aristotle, is the boast of factuality: the work of the artist is said to be research; his creations are findings.
— Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (1971)
Barzun spoke those words in his Mellon lecture forty-plus years ago. They have proven prophetic. The creep of art institutions toward a a burlesque of the sciences warrants more attention than it gets. It slouches along under the radar of anointed art appreciators, debasing authentic science, the scientific method, and language along with it. And the debasement of language is, perhaps, the current most potent agent of cultural dissolution: “decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value.” Just so. Even more so now than then.
Today’s mail brings an announcement for the fourth Weak Force project. [The installation photo, above, is from the second iteration. If you’ve seen one . . . .] Weak Force operates under the umbrella of a would-be international, but still largely Anglophone, collaborative that calls itself United Field Theory (UFT). It intends to “locate and represent the social and relational as the generative dynamic” in creative collaboration. It has done its locating, to date, in university galleries in Aukland, Halifax, Seoul, and Surrey.
Take no comfort from geography. The lunatic dogmatism of the group is equally at home on many an American campus. And it is not benign, no matter the inanity of the product. What counts is that this slither toward art-and-design-as-research represents a generational electorate well schooled in techniques of communication but barren of significant grasp of what is worth communicating. A generation technologically adept but uneducated. Miseducated.
Unlike the collaboration of the Curies, the Wright brothers, Crick and Watson, or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Weak Force, funded by UFT, provides artists with means to inquire into the intricacies of themselves and their discontents. They examine “to what extent an idea is separable from its specific material expression, and what latitude is possible for its material expression and presentation to constitute an authentic expression of idea.” The distance between idea—if that is the right word—and expression appears above.
Inhaling the vapor of science, the press release intones:
In physics, weak force is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, alongside the strong interaction, electromagnetism, and gravitation. It is weaker than the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force but stronger than gravity.
Weak Force celebrates the “artist as interlocutor.” It traffics in the weak force of social interaction: “social contracts and discourses of exchange such as barter, voice, critique, laughter, and sound.” Taken under scrutiny, these reveal “a politic of materialism” which will be exposed through a series of timetabled events, kiosks, pavilions, displays, and other stuff.
You can read artist Andy Thomson’s tractlet on “The Contingency of Gravity” here. Take care to grind through the hash of physics and metaphysics to the final line: “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change them.”
Keep the theory; just flip the facts. At heart, it is a totalitarian formulation that corresponds, with demonic ease, to our present political culture, one that has been metastasizing for decades. The substitution of rhetoric for fact and logic—sound over sense— endangers us far more than uncomely art.
It takes heavy doses of higher education to master a lingo engineered to upend the purpose of language by mystifying rather than illuminating. Weak Force is only a single day’s illustration of the lingua franca transmitted through university art departments to the culture at large. It keeps coming, a relentless reminder of Hobbes’ blunt observation that the universities “have been to this nation as the wooden horse to the Trojans.”
It is all for the commonweal, of course. As the good people at the School of Art + Design at Aukland University of Technology declare, they “accept a role as critic and conscience of society.” Naturally, they also “interrogate” the proposition that the arts are particularly suited to speak critically about social issues. Left unspoken is the accompanying belief that when art speaks, it is not to be defied.
Raymond Aron once commented that science encourages intellectuals to think the world before aspiring to change it. Today’s arts intellectual understands that the instinctual appeal of the arts deflects thought. Tacked to the mantle of science, it trumps thought altogether. No thinking is needed if art itself can, as Thomson insists, negotiate a relationship to gravity’s space-time.
