I’ve worked for many years exploring the interactions of art, science and the spiritual, regarding each as an open and systematic inquiry into the deep structure of human experience. Artistic and scientific themes have run alongside and interpenetrated each other throughout these years, both within my work with Interalia and also in my artistic practice. However it is becoming clearer that some kind of grand synthesis (or fusion) between these disciplines, although many advocate it, may be better described by the term ‘complementarity’.
Complementarity is a basic principle of quantum theory first proposed by the physicist Niels Bohr and refers to effects such as the wave-particle duality. For example, although a unified quantum mechanical understanding of such phenomena as light has been developed, light sometimes exhibits properties of waves and sometimes properties of particles. It depends on what is being measured (that is, observed). Light has no ultimate singular reality, it can be understood to be a wave or a particle, depending on the purposes and tools of observer. It depends on what question one asks – ask a wave question and you get a wave answer. Ask a particle question and you get a particle answer. In either case, use of the knowledge requires that light’s already present both/and nature has to be believed by those who had been locked into an either/or mind-set.
The term has also developed to suggest the ability to hold different world-views that inform each other. But, perhaps a more ‘poetic’ term than complementarity, and hopefully more akin to the art/science dialogue, is the phrase Gravity and Grace. The phrase is taken from the book of the same name by Simone Weil, an exact contemporary of Sartre’s; a philosopher, but with a deeply spiritual bent.
Gravity and Grace is a collection of her brief statements, aphoristic in nature, and gathered under rather arbitrary headings for want of any other organising principle. The book opens with this statement:
‘All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.’
Her work is profound but largely pessimistic and may be dismissed by some as romanticism, but it reminds us that artists and scientists alike have to give up a single world view.
We can think of Gravity and Grace as ‘lenses’ through which we can look at any phenomenon in one of two possible ways. Gravity corresponds the ‘lens’ of materialism and objectivity. Grace corresponds to the ‘lens’ of the emotional and the spiritual. But grace is in fact a specialised term in the spiritual, so caution is needed. Grace is specifically beyond the human will, though it does not necessarily imply a belief in an external God or other deity: it can be prayed for or prepared for, but it arrives from its own necessity, not ours.
For example - In the world of gravity colour is a wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, the heart is an organ that pumps blood. In the world of grace colour is emotion, the heart is the axis of love. A more sobering example would be that of a deadly virus. In order to combat it the science would need to understand its genetic makeup, its reproduction and transmission rates, the safety and efficacy of a vaccine while keeping in mind the human, emotional cost on lives and livelihoods.
Over the past year there have been numerous depictions of the Covid-19 virus, paintings and sculptures that are both scientifically accurate and aesthetically pleasing. Underlying all of these works is the knowledge, both of the artist and the viewer, of the deadliness of the cell.
With any artistic engagement with science there are questions of approach and intent - ‘In making an artwork, what takes priority, the art object or the scientific data?’ or ’is it a continual dialogue? To move into another’s territory requires, I believe, a balance of the dual aspects of Gravity and Grace, which are complimentary and relational. It is the relation between the outer world and the inner world, between the observed and the observer, between the objective and the subjective, which all inform one another.
First published in Interalia Magazine, ‘Convergent Territories’, July 2014) - https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/dialogue-in-art-and-science/