Levitation
I sometimes wonder how old I was. Certainly no more than five, for I was not yet at school.
But not much younger, I am sure, for my mother, protective and conscientious as she was, would not otherwise have left me alone in the house. It was a Monday morning, I know. My mother, always punctilious, had done the washing. It is curious how the recollection of a habit fixes something as trivial as the day of the week, while the years become jumbled in one’s memory. However, it was a remarkable day for me, because it was then that I independently rediscovered Newton’s third Law.
My surroundings were dismal. It causes me to wonder whether my subsequent scientific career might have shone brightly had it also been pursued in sombre surroundings. I was seated at the kitchen table; seated, in fact (I remember so much of the detail), on one of four bentwood chairs with my elbows resting on the green formica table top. I had my back to the window, because the London suburban garden outside was obscure in the rain and half-light. The washing was inside, suspended from a clothes hoist. The hoist was a massive construction. consisting of two cast-iron brackets holding four parallel wooden rails, the whole structure being drawn to the ceiling by a system of ropes and pulleys, and secured by a cleat on the wall – an immortal relic of Victorian engineering. For the purpose of suspending shirts, socks, and the like it was designed with a safety factor of perhaps one thousand. However the attachment of the cleat to the wall was another matter, and I once had the pleasure of seeing the contraption descend on a family visitor for whom I happened to have an aversion. The impact of cast-iron bracket upon the unsuspecting skull was as violent as I could have wished. Had the hoist fallen on me that Monday, I might have apprehended, had I survived, some general truth concerning gravitational acceleration.
However, my thoughts were to do with levitation, and my attention was on the washing basket on the kitchen floor. I knew I was strong enough to draw myself up with my arms. If, then, I were to sit in the basket and pull upwards on the handles, surely I would rise into the air and remain suspended amongst the damp washing for as long as I exerted sufficient strength. I savoured the idea for a while, balancing scepticism against logic. If it were as simple as that, surely my mother, a robust, resourceful woman, would now be navigating her way aerially towards the high street in some kind of lightweight covered gondola instead of trudging along the sidewalk in wellington boots and macintosh. But I could see no flaw in my reasoning, and it was with a delicious sense of anticipation that I sat in the basket and made the effort to levitate. Now I experienced for the first time what Huxley called the great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. The fact was (need you ask?) that the basket and I remained motionless on the linoleum floor. But why? Perhaps, sitting as I was, I was unable to pull upwards with sufficient force. I stood in the basket, flexed my knees, and exerted all possible strength. It was then, tense with the effort and frustration, that I realised I was earthbound. The cause was apparent in my thighs; I was pushing downwards as hard as I was pulling upwards. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Like my illustrious predecessor, I was in no hurry to publicise the discovery. Its generality gave me some pleasure, but, as I remember it, the pleasure was outweighed by a sense of disappointment. The disappointment was not overwhelming however. I had no need to call on a higher authority for assistance in the dramatic manner of Huxley – God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
To Get Us Thinking
(Quadrant Magazine, Saturday, May 1, 2004)
IN THE LATE 1960s,” I read, “European and American artists began to question the very basis of art making.” Did they, one might wonder, escape the dilemma by finding employment as, say, carpenters or motor mechanics? Of course not. They persisted. And I am looking at some of their handiwork, shown under the generic title “International Art: Process, Matter, Form”, at the Australian National Gallery – of which, I hasten to mention, I am a Friend.
I avoid the confrontation between a lead pole and a lead plate. I forgo interaction with eight biscuit tins surmounted by illuminated photographs. I concentrate instead on an exhibit by Mario Merz, called Fibonacci Numbers. I know a thing or two about these numbers. They form a series in which each number is the sum of its two predecessors. It has intriguing connections with an array of natural phenomena. It relates to the disposition of leaves on a stem and seeds in a flower head. And the ratio of sufficiently large successive numbers in the series defines the felicitous shape known as the “golden rectangle”. Possibly, the series also represents the financial progress of a successful questioning artist, each new work fetching as much as the previous two.
Merz, it need hardly be said, is big-time in international art. He has been a leading member of the Arte Povera movement, initiated by an exhibition in Genoa in 1967 and so-named by art critic and curator Germano Celant. His work has appeared in major galleries in Europe and the United States, including, famously, a retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989. It is characterised by the recurrence of leitmotifs. The first was the “igloo”: in the words of Celant, “a metal skeleton covered with fragments of clay, wax, mud, glass, burlap, bundles of branches, and political or literary phrases in neon tubing”. (There is a rather more up-market version of this structure made of porphyry in the gigantic fountain provided by Merz for the city of Turin, in which he resides.)
Later, “Merz began to utilise the Fibonacci formula of mathematical progression within his works, transmitting the concept visually through the use of the numerals and the figure of a spiral. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1972, he had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolic as a locus of the human need for fulfillment and interaction.”
Back to the construction in front of me. The materials are redolent of impoverishment. No porphyry, no Harley-Davidson, here. The background of synthetic polymer paint and metallic paint on a loose canvas vaguely depicts five pine-like trees. For the benefit of those having better eyesight than arithmetic, the Fibonacci series, running from one to 233, can be made out on each trunk. In front of the canvas there stand two wire-bound bundles of twigs, then an array of branches supporting part of a broken pane of glass. Neon tubular lights in the shapes of numerical digits are suspended from its upper edge. Their sequence appears to form the first eight Fibonacci numbers.
I RECALL A REMARK made by an artist about a Neo-plastic painting by Mondrian. The beauty of its composition would be destroyed, he said, if one were to move any of the vertical or horizontal black lines just a millimetre or two. It is an observation not easily verified. However, a friend of mine once performed an equivalent investigation at an exhibition in Kassel, Germany. During a moment of inattention by the attendant, he left his pocket comb protruding prominently from a small pile of household objects the merit of which, according to art critics, lay in its ineffable geometry. The intruder caused no stir. It remained in comfortable companionship with its neighbours and, as far as one can tell, the beauty of the whole assemblage was undiminished in the eye of the beholder.
Now this work by Merz, so it seems to me, has a property in common with that exhibit in Kassel. Unlike the art of Mondrian, it is robust. That is to say, one could mess it about quite a lot without detracting from any aesthetic appeal it may possess. The brushwood, certainly, would be a good candidate for random rearrangement.
But what of the tubular lights? A closer examination reveals a surprise. The first two are juxtaposed, and so are the third and fourth. Thus the first three numbers are not one, one and two; but eleven, twenty-three and five. What is going on here? Is Merz now questioning the very basis of the Fibonacci series? Or has a curator neglected to treat his conception with due care? Perhaps someone with the inquisitiveness of my German friend has been meddling. I resolve to return to the Gallery soon to see whether any adjustment has taken place.
But let me not be too analytical. The numbers, whatever their sequence, do not relate to anything else in the exhibit. The twigs are leafless and flowerless; the shape of the background canvas is not “golden”. I am now reminded of a staff development officer confronting us, staff in need of development, with an eight-digit number. He has written it on the first pristine sheet of his pad of butcher’s paper (butcher’s paper is an essential prop in this variety of performance art). He invites us to dwell on its significance. I venture to suggest it has no more significance than any of the other eight-digit numbers he might have chosen. “That’s right,” he says, “I did that just to get you thinking.” Maybe that is the modest aim of Mario Merz and the Gallery also. To some extent they have succeeded.
A postscript. The above was completed just before Mario Merz died, on November 9, 2003, soon after he had been awarded the Japan Arts Association’s Praemium Imperiale, the world’s richest arts prize. Nevertheless “a little judicious levity”, to borrow a phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson, may not be entirely out of place amongst the obituaries. Germano Celant is now the artistic director of the Artistic and Cultural Program of Genoa 2004. Doubtless, work by Merz will be prominent once more in the city in which he first became prominent.
Presidential arms
I, a somewhat decrepit, somewhat elderly man, but one who, according to a devoted son, still has all his marbles intact, visited my general practitioner the other day. What was the problem, or, rather, what were the problems? I am not prepared to reveal all, but one was about the integrity of my marbles. I have what used to be called a benign, essential tremor. The terminology is a variant of those irrational esoteric languages that established professions promulgate to prevent intruders getting to know what they are talking about. However, they have, so it seems, now dropped the adjective benign. Not before time! How could an ailment be benign if it causes one to spill sauvignon blanc over one’s lower garments and creep about the floor, post-prandially, to collect and consume fragments of pasta inadvertently dropped? I hope the time comes when such inelegant behaviour will no longer be deemed essential.
But back to what was, as best I can remember the point I had in mind when I first set finger to keyboard. Ah yes! It had something to do with the Ukraine.
I revealed to the general practitioner, who shall be nameless, a concern that my unbenign but essential tremor might herald the emergence of an even more essential disability. He was not helpful, except in remarking on my observation that swinging my arms violently when walking helped greatly to preserve my balance. “That’s good,” he said, “an inability to swing arms is a sign of Parkinson’s.” Naturally I was both intrigued and heartened. Further research via Google informed me that the early onset of Parkinson’s is indicated by a tendency to swing asymmetrically (I am still referring to arms of course).
What the hell has this got to do with the Ukraine, I hear you ask. Well, just watch Vladimir Putin emerging from the golden gates in the Kremlin to address the tremulous world. One arm is held stiffly at his side and the other swings freely. When Parkinson’s sets in, which will dominate; the KGB arm or the Gorbachev arm? The destiny of the Ukraine may lie in an unbenign essential asymmetrical conflict between a few swinging neurons in the cerebral cortex of the Russian President’s brain.
And the future result of that contest is indeterminate.The present state of the Ukraine is ambiguous, like that of Schrödinger’s cat.
THE MACROPOD 