An Art-Science Workshop in Edinburgh

0024-094X/82030213-02$03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. Leonmdo. Vol. 15, No. 3, pp 213-214, 1982 Printed in Great Britain AN ART-SCIENCE WORKSHOP IN EDINBURGH Christopher Cornford” On I1 and 12 November 1981, nearly forty scientists, philosophers, historians of science and of art, linguists and a handful of artists met in the Talbot Rice Centre, Edinburgh University, for a symposium on Common Denominators in Art and Science. We began by taking cognisancewith great sadness that Frank Malina, who had meant to come, was not with us. Fittingly, our proceedings ended with a moving tribute from Peter Lloyd Jones. All of US were conscious of being engaged in continuing and extending his life-work. Not that we resolve once and for all the questions: What is art? What is science? How do they interrelate?Such an outcome would be in any case impossible because the meanings of the terms ‘art’ and ‘science’, and the subcultures to which they point, are continually evolving and shifting with respect to each other. Therefore what is needed is a frequently-renewed conversation between interested members of, or observers of, both disciplines, and as much linkingof hands as may from time to time be feasible. This is what we tried for, and we were given a useful start by the philosopher Rom H a d , who took as his title Is There a Zeitgeist? Undeniably, he said, instances of art-science correlation emerged in the papers circulated in advance. The question was: why should they? Linear A to B to C influences? Yes; but why, in a given epoch, are some individuals markedly more influential than the rest, as though the culture were somehow attuned to their message? And in what domains should we try to detect correlations? In shared content (phenomena chosen for attention) or similarity of style (modes of attention)? Or in culture-wide predispositions and assumptions about the nature of the world and of mind? If there are ‘deep structures’, in the Chomskian sense, operative in cultures, where should we look for them: in psychology, in social relations, in language? By what means would such deep structures ‘work up’ from below? Or should we rather look fora meta-theory overarching each cultural epoch from, so to say, above? And how should we account for social change?Three generic types of explanation seemed to be available: the Marxist-dialectical (tension-contradiction-resolution); the evolutionary (elimination of the unfit); and the structuralist (invariant structures of mind locally modulated by circumstance). These were some of the key questions. It was noticeable in what followed that the philosophers and linguists tended to look for conceptual, structural or methodological comparabilities, while the historians of art or science tackled things inductively by means of case studies, as though to say: let’s not hypothesise, let’s look at instances of mutual affectiveness between art and science and see if any useful generalisations emerge. The epoch homed in on was the 19th century and,as it turned out, the early part of it. Eric Forbes opened with a consideration of Goethe’s view of science, his search for wholeness and _ _ _ _ _ _ ~ *Formerly of the Royal College of Art, London. Present address: Spring House, Conduit Head Road, Cambridge, CB3 OEY U.K. (Received 15 December 1981) continuity in the universe, for an ordering qualitative principle that would define each phenomenon as the Urpfanze defined ‘Plantness’; his critique of 18th-century mechanistic views of man and nature, and ofNewton’s Opticks.John Gage, however, showed how important Newton’s colour theory turned out to be for painting; the seven-hued spectrum having recurred in instructional manuals right up to Chevreul, and re-surfaced in the rainbow-hued paintings of Kupka and the Paris Orphists. Nicholas Rupke looked at the effects on art of 19th-century advances in geological science, pointing to the crises that occurred when new discoveries were at odds with sacred writ, e.g. the contradiction between the fossil record and the Biblical account of the Deluge. Acknowledgement of the new geology was nevertheless evident in the religious epic paintings of John Martin, who indeed was an eminent geological illustrator. But...