Great video of artist Tauba Auerbach who works right on the edge between arts practice as personal subjective research and objective material research to the point where they become some other thing. That they are they reinforces the post-curricular, nominal nature of their work. That they seek to find the substrate that underpins our surface world fills me with wonder and awe. The header image is a boat she painted.
In this video Tauba says “I want to learn new things constantly. And I am always trying to find the pattern behind things. I have educated myself about a number of mathematical and scientific principles through crafts like paper weaving and paper marbling. To marble paper it is all about relationships and ratios…”
This appeals to me a great deal. I read nothing but books about maths for about 6 months once on the principle that maths may describe the underlying substrate of the material world. In the end I was unconvinced but concluded that maths provided the best map we have available for the underpinning of the objective world, but the maths was the map not the territory.
So like Tauba I explored art making as a way to get there by other means, subjective means that meant something to me personally. I made a things called ‘A Step Back’ here as this path about maths led to me exploring ideas about recursion between the digital and analogue domains and the oddly dissociative effect of things being in both domains. Recursion as a phenomena connects lots of things in maths, science, art, ecology, sociolology, philosophy, on and on. I believe it is a source of creativity and distributed or collected intelligence between intelligences other than just people, see here. Art making helps us encounter distributed intelligence. James Bridle wrote a great book about this idea, see here and the way it is embedded in the world.
Tauba also talks about art making as a way to get out of thinking in words. This is also important. Materials used in art making have their inherent material intelligence made available through the act of art-making. This intrinsically and in an embodied way extents your perceptions to re-view the world through art making. Thus arts practice facilitates the extended mind see here.
Tauba’s website is here and a great pdf called ‘Thy Fearful Dissymmetry’ is here to see more.
And the original link was for Art21, a great arts website here and here.
Moving Space 