Notes on Order and Reality in Art

320 On the Meaning of Order (III) education, model-building is less evident; perhaps if it were used more, their operation might be more successful. References I. R. Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley. CA: Univ. California Press, 1969). 2. K. W. Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952). 4. Models as Elements for Control and Coordination Models are used not only by humans for interpreting and ordering their environment; they can be considered as functioning as important elements in the self-regulation of each living system. Even a single gene can be visualized as a kind oftaped model of the protein whose structure it determines. And in smaller organisms there are suggestions that not only the types of proteins formed, but their location in a cell and their times of production and function may be determined in comparable fashion, namely, by the relative positions of the relevant genes on the chromosomes and by specific nucleotide sequences that operate as signals in a structure that works as a model of the organism itself. This would be analogous, for instance, to the way in which a signal-box control centre acts as a working model-replica ofthe times and positions of trains at a railway junction. In higher organisms, there might well be complex hierarchies of 'super' models responsible for the control and coordination of the 'basic-level' models that act directly. The plan of the original simple model centre might thus be modified to an extent that would mask its model nature-in a manner analogous to that in which the 'deep structure' disclosed by Chomsky in most natural languages is obscured by the apparently more striking, but more superficial, differences developed through divergences between widely varied cultures. This same feature is seen, too, in the way written languages have developed from primitive hieroglyphs that resemble the things signified (a good example of model building in information transfer). Distortions rapidly appeared in the initial hieroglyphs, which soon became unrecognizable as signs, and so developed into simplified symbols devoid of any of their original resemblances to the things signified. These complications, if such they be, of course make it extremely difficult to trace an evolutionary history of control centres in living organisms in terms of model principles, because so many deviations are plausible. But, as a stimulatory exercise in attempting to understand the nature of things and of ways of looking at them, whether as scientists or as visual artists, the model principle seems worth further exploration. patterns that are directly and complementarily equivalent to many of the geometrically constructed shapes and forms met with in ordinary experience. If this is so, interaction in the form of an aesthetic experience between humans and their environment may in some instances be a reflection of a basic similarity or equivalence in patterns between the perceptive system and the objects perceived and, thus, not dependent upon a previously sensed experience and its associations nor; therefore, upon any model-building intermediary. This admitted, it still seems reasonable to propose that most visual art is, indeed, representational and must involve model-building, varied though this may be. A Braque/Picasso cubist picture of a guitar, a bottle of wine and a bowl of peaches on a table can besaid to be no lessa model of the subject than its photograph. In the same manner, a text-book diagram ofthe Bohr oxygen atom is as valid a model of the atom as a totally different type of map of the atom based on mass densities and areas of position probabilities. 3. Models in Science and Their Practical Applications Most people have visual memories and many think visually [I]; that is, they concoct visual images in order to understand, remember and analyze. And these images are models. Especially is this true of those who work in science and in technology. I believe the present impasse in nuclear physics arises to a large extent from an inability, at least amongst most physicists, to construct any kind of visual model of the situation now believed to exist inside the atomic nucleus. As in visual art, there are possible exceptions to the need for models, but these seem to involve...