Venet and veracity - Letters - letter about Thomas McEvilley includes a reply from McEvilley - Letter to the Editor

To the Editors:

I formed my high regard for Thomas McEvilley's illuminating insights and solid scholarship when I read his "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: '"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art' at the Museum of modern Art in 1984," so I was surprised to see that, in his review of Bernar Venet's recent math-based murals and paintings [A.i.A., Apr. '03], he commits the error he once decried, choosing to "wrench [the objects] out of context, calling them to heel in the fermalist defense of modernism." This gives the impression that he is unsure of his subject.

We have some shared experience. McEvilley and I were, for a number of years, colleagues at Rico University. He went on to write about art and math; I went on to chair a math department and write about art.

McEvilley argues that by beginning each title with the phrase "Related to," Venet "seems to indicate that the painting's presence is not entirely identical with the mathematical formula, that there is something more added by the art context: materials, color, art-historical references." But this is the very approach he once found objectionable in "Doctor, Lawyer," one which "breaches the principle of economy, on which all science is based: that explanatory principles be kept to the smallest possible number." It is more economical to suppose that the artist has adopted a judicious policy of caution, since he admits that he is not quite certain what the schemas and formulas reproduced in his work are really about.

The dangers have become obvious in the surely erroneous Related to: "Causical Field Quantization" cited in the review, a term which makes no sense to anyone familiar with the philosophical issues of causality that are intertwined with quantum field theory, No doubt a mere misprint, it nevertheless emphasizes the good sense in Venet's titling policy.

Although Venet may intend that "these pictorial suggestions should be read as accidental, like forms seen in clouds, and not as attempts to smuggle representation into the paintings," the informed viewer--of whom there are many more than either the reviewer or the artist may realize--will necessarily see them in a richer way, fully loaded with both conceptual as well as representational meaning.

The Venet-McEvilley method simply leaves the viewer at a loss. How would--how could--someone unfamiliar with the English language or its alphabetic characters understand the meanings implicit in Robert Indiana's Love (1966), other than to be merely intrigued by the inaccessibility of the content? How would--how could--someone unfamiliar with the language of mathematics understand the meanings implicit in the equations and diagrams that Venet has appropriated? McEvilley should have acknowledged that the failure to understand the cognitive meaning of a visual work limits the ability of the viewer, and the reviewer, to appreciate it. Perhaps we will be treated to his insights on some of the deeper issues raised by these paintings in a later article. But we can make a small start here by remembering what McEvilley, borrowing an anecdote from Edmund Carpenter, wrote earlier.

Consider from the following anthropological example what absurdities one can be led into by assuming that the look of things, without their meaning, is enough to go on:

   "In New Guinea, in a remote native
   school taught by a local teacher, I
   watched a class carefully copy an
   arithmetic lesson from the blackboard.
   The teacher had written:

      4+1=7
      3-5=6
      2+5=9

   The students copied both his beautifully
   formed numerals and his errors."

McEvilley notes that "For Venet, it is the essential unavailability of the content [my emphasis], its pristine seclusion--like a vestal virgin of hidden inner meanings--to which the viewer does not have access, that is the point." Yet there are certainly more people who understand Related to: "A Parametric Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order in Two Dimensions" than there are art historians and critics. And these viewers see far more than the "massive wave of arrows that seems to expand across the field of the painting." Where McEvilley finds an "unintended quasi-representational association," a cartoonlike face, in Related to: "Dispersion Relation for the Pion Propagator," others might just as easily and more accurately see the higher dimensional space that so intrigued Duchamp, here enriched by beautiful structures.

According to the article, Venet believes that there are three types of signification in visual art. Traditional polysemy (which he associates with figurative painting), modern pansemy (which he relates to abstract painting) and his own innovation, monosemy, "where the sign means itself and itself alone." But these math signs mean infinitely more than themselves alone. Placing them in the art-world context of a painting should make them mean even more and cannot make them mean less. They are not examples of monosemy, and the reviewer should have pointed that out. These signs stand, like the ideas of Plato, for classes of innumerable instances that share meaningful properties. They are grammatical, and often poetic, combinations that are unique and charged with individual signification. One signification may be the laws of the motion of the wind that propels the scudding clouds, made visible to the mind by a massive wave of diagrammatic arrows.