But where's the Danish?

Let's play word association: "conference." What springs to mind? People in tight suits trying to impress each other over bad coffee? A weekend in Columbus, Ohio? Well, no doubt many more dubious predicates could be mustered. But, I'm here to tell you about an event I recently attended here in London-town.



Laden with the rather ponderous title "Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism: Representation in Art and Science," Old Ken had pencilled in this as a two-day slot in which to catch up on some zz's. Despite the fact that I was attending in my official capacity as Dean of the School of Serious Studies, I made sure I was comfortably attired. I donned my favorite Garfield sweatshirt (the one with the motto "I don't do Mondays"); some zebra-striped zubas (not unlike those worn by the gent in the photograph above); my elven sleeping cap; and packed my most comfortable lawn chair.



Well, things got underway at about 9:45 when we got little introductions from the goofy conference organizers, which explained to us why we should putatively care about these terms "mimesis" and "nominalism," what they might have to do with art and science and so on. Thankfully, reprieve came fairly quickly in the form of coffee, which had been delayed as the courier had tripped coming up the stairs. While thankfully he was okay, his pratfall was only appropriate: the coffee was about as weak as he was!

With this introduction finished, participants were then free to choose which of the parallel sessions to attend next. Being an experimentalist by trade, I figured I'd have more to learn from the art-inclined session on offer (called "Architecture and Space"). As such, I heard papers on how analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman claimed that architectural drawings were less like a painter's sketches than a musical composer's score and why a stange collage by Louis Kahn can tell us about visual languages used by architects to communicate with their publics in post-War America. The most interesting paper in the session, though, charted the relationships between so-called "light and space" artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin and the practices of psychological testing with which they were involved in the 1960s.



In the afternoon, I heard two really interesting papers on "chronophotography"—one which examined how Minimalist artist Sol Lewitt appropriated and re-interpreted the famous "stop-action" imagery of Eadward Muybridge (see above), the second pursuing a conceptual relation between the similar photographic efforts of Etienne-Jules Marey and the model of scientific activity advocated by Pierre Duhem.



Time for a break? Nap time? No time for that now, as we were then whisked off to the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre at the Courtauld Institute of Art for the conference's first plenary lecture. There, eminent art historian and theorist James Elkins gave a talk called "Report on the Book 'Visual Practices Across the University.'" An apt title. Basically, Elkins has been involved in staging first an exhibition and now a book that had explored how visual materials are used in various different disciplines within a given university. The "case study" university used by Elkins was University College in Cork, Ireland, where he has held a position for the past two years. And, admittedly, the examples in the book are somewhat self-selecting; he had solicited contributions from the university's departments and had received most response from the sciences.

Nonetheless, what the book tries to do is not compress all the different disciplinary strategies (thirty departments are represented in the book) into the singular or binary "scopic regimes" favored by art historians. Rather, the idea is that these visual practices can more or less be considered on their own terms, compared with one another and, as such, used as a basis for doing a kind of image-analysis that moves away from the narrow, humanities-based "ghetto" that Elkins sees supposedly interdisciplinary fields like "visual culture" as increasingly relegated. Whether or not Elkins' solutions to this problem are really that helpful, I think this is a provocative diagnosis of the place of visual studies and the images he showed from the exhibition were pretty amazing.



Well, after all that, we were ready for some dinner. And how! While an account of the conference dinner would take me a bit too far afield, I'll just throw down a few quick notes about the second day of the event. The morning of the second day began with a pleanry lecture by James Hyman, a philosophy professor at Oxford. This talk was basically a critique of the ideas of Vilayanur Ramachandran and Semir Zeki—two contemporary neuro-scientists who have claimed to have "solved" essential questions of art through new technologies of neural imaging. I've heard that most people in the artistic community find these claims of "neuro-aesthetics" about as convincing as Kevin Costner's English accent in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and about as relevant to the study of art as "The da Vinci Code." So—what a shock!—Hyman took it upon himself to debunk them yet again.



Far more interesting was the plenary session that closed the talk. This was given by Catherine Elgin, a philosopher based at Harvard. Elgin was a student of and collaborator with the late Nelson Goodman. Developing some of Goodman's crucial insights, she gave a paper in which she proposed a schematic account of representation wherein exemplification plays a crucial role. Like Goodman, Elgin began with the base-line assertion that resemblance is a useless basis for understanding representation. Resemblance possesses different formal properties from representation. That is, resemblance is reflexive and symmetric; in other words, an object resembles itself to a maximum degree while the statement "Object A resembles Object B" also allows for the inference that "Object B resembles Object A." However, a representation is neither reflexive nor symmetric. While a painting likely resembles itself, it is nonsensical to say that it represents itself. Similarly, while we can say that the painting represents Al Gore, a symmetrical relation does not thereby hold: Al Gore does not represent the painting.



While all of this sounds straightforward, the implications of Goodman's assertions chafe against much conventional wisdom. That is, a supposedly realistic still life painting (such as we see above) doesn't represent because it resembles the depicted objects. Rather, this is a "fruit-picture" that denotes fruit, because this is the kind of picture we viewers agree represents fruit. This sounds slightly convoluted, but in the second formulation resemblance is at most an incidental by-product of representation, but is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of it. What follows from this is that we need not be surprised by those traditions of visual representation (whether "non-Western", Cubist or otherwise) that depart from the kind of still-life painting above. Building from this, what Elgin claims is that we need to pay attention to exemplification—how works of art represent by instantiating (either literally or metaphorically). I would explain this, but Old Ken's getting tired so perhaps we can learn more later. Whee!

From Grecian Corner to Athens

After you've lived in the same place for a while, even a location as wonderful and fascinating as London can begin to feel like a bit of a grind. So what is a would-be experimentalist to do? Sit at home and stew? Pluck out your eyebrows in the British Library?



Well, all of these do sound amusing. But when presented with these options, Old Ken packed his rucksack and headed off for a weekend in Athens. By Zeus' beard, I hear you saying, what is that? Has someone left the refrigerator door open up on Mount Olympus?



Kidding aside, it is hard not to be amazed by the ancient sites like the Parthenon, which we see above.



Just marvel at this incredible polychrome sculpture from the 7th century BC. I'm sad to say that the Catford Cat, which I have claimed to be England's largest polychrome sculpture (see http://www.nicebirdrox.com/blogarchive/2005_02_01_archive.html), can't hold a candle to these things.



And this fabulous inscribed column? Pure magic!



Now, perhaps I hear you saying: "Come on, Old Ken. I've seen a million pictures of the Parthenon just like this one. Why should I be interested in seeing any more?"



Fair enough. But, just look at the incredible carving on the frieze beneath what had been the roof until the seventeenth century when it was blown up by the Venetians who destroyed an arsenal of gun powder kept in the Parthenon itself by the Turks.



No, inhabiting the Acropolis is no longer allowed, unless you are a kitty such as that which was spied catching forty winks along the northern porch of the Erechtheion.



Down below the Acropolis, in the remains of the agora where the ancients conducted democratic dispute, the most visible inhabitants were the ants. It was enough to send this experimentalist wondering if the ancestors of any of these insects had stolen an olive or grap from the picnic of Pericles and to wonder what Hesiod had to say about ants. Among some truly useful information about the desired cleanliness of one's genitalia when sitting by the fire (it's true!), I know he has a lengthy passage in the Works and the Days about analogies between women and animals, with the ideal wife being likened to a bee. But does Hesiod tell us anything of ants?



Here, we can see the Acropolis rising above the ancient agora (in the middle distance) as viewed from the steps of the Temple of Hephaistos. And speaking of animals, I think you'd have to be a real cynic—which is from the ancient Greek kunos meaning dog (hence, a cynic is someone who thinks like a dog)—not to appreciate Athens' ancient sites. They are what the ancients might have called hoi aristoi—the best! And all of this goes to prove (as if we didn't need any more proof) just how dangerous a smattering of classical learning can be.

An Anecdotal History of Blue

About this time last year, I shared with you some observations on an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery called "Colour after Klein." The eponymous artist of this show was, of course, Yves Klein—painter, performance artist (after a fashion) and self-proclaimed Rosicrucian in the modern era. Among Klein's most famous claims was that the sky was his greatest work of art. Perhaps to this effect, Klein patented a shade of blue (called IKB or International Klein Blue) that is not unlike the incredible skies over Lisbon, Portugal.



If I do say so myself, the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the monastery of San Jeronimos (whose profuse ornamentation suggests the effects of Monet's studies of Rouen cathedral) only serves to accentuate the nameless azure in the upper left-hand corner of the photograph above.



Now, while not even Old Ken would be so bold as to cite these environmental effect as its cause, the popularity of blue and white tiles in the greater Lisbon area is striking. As opposed to the discrete tiles frequently set into kitchen interiors in the Netherlands or the English tradition of culinary "Willow-ware," Portugese blue and white ceramics can be found in churches and set in to walls—designed on a large scale so as to represent ambitious figural scenes. Since both these Northern and Southern traditions seem to have taken their inspiration from their varying contacts with East Asia, they might equally be submitted to a larger history of Chinoiserie. But, of course, our subject here is but an anecdotal history of blue.



In any case, a truly amazing collection of these azure treasures is to be found at the Museu Nacional do Azulejo on the southeastern outskirts of Lisbon. This modern museum has incorporated the late medieval Madre de Deus Convent, which itself featured numerous tiled murals (as can be seen just in the lower right corner of the phtograph above).



However, my favorite example from this collection was a polychrme specimen from Lisbon ca. 1650 entitled "The Leopard Hunt." As three hunters approach from the righthand side of the picture plane, we see four leopards inspecting the traps set for them.



What is particularly enchanting, though, is the depicted use of a mirror inside the trap. Is this to lure in the leopard? Or is the bewitching spectacle of his polychrome world rendered in the blue and white vocabulary of the mirror simply enough to leave him transfixed while the hunters attack from the bushes? Surely, such questions need to be addressed if we are to understand the desire to see the world not in black and white, but in azulejo e branco.