Chaos and Form: A Sculptor's Sources in Science

Abstract

In the 1960s the author sought to rethink the basic concepts of sculpture-space, matter, gravity and light-by studying the theories of relativity and quantum physics, the connection of space to time and matter to energy, and the relationship of all these to gravity. Subsequently, trying to understand the fundamental forms in nature, she discovered a continuity underlying them: Spirals are not only forms of growth or turbulence, but are also the link between spheres (forms of balance and minimum volume/energy) and waves (forms of energy/motion). Flow phenomena shaped the new style of her landscape sculptures, which are expressions of fluid dynamics and other nonlinear processes.

It is well known that the left hemisphere of the human brain is language oriented, while the right half generally processes tactile, olfactory and visual information. What was discovered more recently is that linguistic ability appears to be a late development in the human brain, whereas visual and spatial understanding existed much earlier [1]. Therefore, visual communication-form-is a pre-language of its own, independent from, and rooted deeper than, word-language. This is partly why I tend to mistrust language-biased critical theory, aside from its questioning of the empirical truth of science, which has been my fountainhead. But as Kafatos and Nadeau stated in their insightful book The Conscious Universe, the claim that science is a linguistically and culturally controlled institution can be dispelled by the fact that modern scientific developments have "led rather consistently to radically new and counterintuitive results, in terms of our linguistically based and socially determined construction of reality" [2]. For example, nobody could have imagined the weirdness of matter and space as revealed by quantum physics, and no one would have predicted a decade ago the even stranger conception of the universe-the Multiverse-postulated by today's cosmology. Unlike many contemporary artists, art critics and cultural historians, I am a believer in both form and science.

My interaction with scientific ideas started over 35 years ago when, as a young sculptor, I searched for the roots of my medium: What is sculpture? Matter shaped in space. Since sculpture usually has physicality, weight, it is also dominated by gravity, like our own bodies. But what is matter, space or gravity? I felt I had to shed the Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of space and gravity with which I was raised. I started reading avidly about Einstein's relativity theories, and soon I internalized the duality of matter/energy, the time-space continuum and gravity's relationship to both. As a sculptor, I also was fascinated by the concept of scale, how the size of my body and of my sculpture related to the surrounding world-all the way to the infinitely small and the infinitely large, to the outer limits of perception, from subatomic particles to galactic clusters.

At that time, the mid-1960s, cosmology was barely gelling as a science, and there were no general books on the universe, the formation of galaxies or black holes. Subatomic particle theories were well developed, yet the consequences of quantum mechanics for the meaning of reality were hardly assimilated even by physicists. I read every popular article I could find on such subjects, mainly in Scientific American; but the catalysts for my absorbing contemporary physics theories were my love of nature and the natural sciences-geology, biology, fluid dynamics, etc., all of which offered me visible clues to understanding the laws of the universe.

Throughout the 1960s I worked with transparent materials and liquids, light reflections and movement. Series such as my Wave Boxes and Galaxies of the mid-1960s or Antigravity and Phaenomena of the late 1960s were playful, participatory sculptures, dealing with the concepts of spatial ambiguity and malleability, floating and

Fig. 1.

Dripping, silicone fluid in Plexiglas cylinder, 2 x 2 ft diameter, 1969. Duration: 20 min. (Collection of Graham Gund, Cambridge, MA. © Athena Tacha.)

Athena Tacha (sculptor), 3721 Huntington Street, NW, Washington, D.C., 20015, U.S.A. E-mail: <at89@umail.umd.edu>.

weightlessness-and of course...