“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.” (Max Planck (1858-1947)[i]
.
BRIDGE of METAPHORS
An inconceivable percept or concept must be anchored in something conceivable… In the bible, a burning bush, In science fiction, entities that want to communicate with humans arrange to manifest in a more familiar form: e.g., “Contact” (1987) SEE A&O notes on metaphors for the unknowable. We’re using dramatic examples, but the problem of translation is pervasive and in the background of a vast amount of our interconnectedness. For example translating one language to another or from one modality to another (such as verbal descriptions of art or music).
.
MODERN ART
Modern non-representational art ? Kandinsky, often credited as the critical stepping stone to modern art worked at about the same time as Hilma af Klint early in the 20th century.
“At the tail end of the 19th century, a string of scientific developments were radically altering prevailing ideas about the world. Darwin’s evolutionary theories, while not yet entirely accepted in academic circles, matriculated into almost every sphere of popular culture. The discovery of subatomic particles, radioactivity, and the X-ray confirmed for spiritualists that there was, in fact, a godly, invisible realm of existence.” [i]
.
There is no evidence that hey knew of each others work. They were both affected (as most western culture was at the time) by spirituality, but “Kandinsky’s brand of spiritual abstraction looked inward to the artist’s own unconscious muse, af Klint literally felt that astral spirits were working through her.”[i] They were not competitors and grew o have deeply different motivations. Both well trained professional artists, but after af Klint became more absorbed with a circle of friends to explore sprituality, she worked outside traditional art circles. She became the visionary that now compels our attention, particularly since a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2018.
af Klint intuitively appreciated the burden, possibly fatal curse of prematurity: She …”placed a 20-year embargo on exhibiting her work following her death—not in order to be secretive, as Bashkoff, the curator of the Guggenheim show, initially assumed, but as a “gesture of controlling and trying to determine the audience of her work,” which, to Tracey Bashkoff, reiterates her agency as an artist. Af Klint was “grappling with the works she was committed to, wanting them to be received in a safe space by a spiritually ready audience.” Although she “…was intermittently connected to both mainstream society and the Swedish artistic vanguard—she chose to believe that the world was not ready to understand and accept what she knew was groundbreaking work.” (Fiore 2018)[i](see Artsy essay and interview of the Guggenheim curator on swedish-mystic-hilma-af-klint-invented-abstract-art . then a Guggenheim video: https://www.guggenheim.org/video/hilma-af-klint..
The idea that CREATIVITY always involves REMIX of previous intellectual or cultural. even recreational ideas is developed at multiple levels of organization, creativity always builds on some something: prior content of mind–some of which is congenital, most is previously received (during development). Take a look at Kirby Fergusons video “Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition)” emphasizing music and culminating in consideration of AI — artificial intelligence.
[i] Julia Fiore (2018) How the Swedish Mystic Hilma af Klint Invented Abstract Art. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-swedish-mystic-hilma-af-klint-invented-abstract-art Oct 12, 2018 6:28pm
[i]. Max Planck, German physicist who framed the quantum theory in 1900. “His research into the manner in which heated bodies radiate energy led him to report that energy is emitted only in indivisible amounts, called ‘quanta’, the magnitudes of which are proportional to the frequency of the radiation. His discovery ran counter to classical physics and is held to have marked the commencement of the modern science. He received a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. To learn more about Max Planck, visit: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/5/0,5716,115045+1,00.html .”)
.
BIG BANG: Neil deGrasse Tyson has another good example of PREMATURITY and UNIQUENESS (a repost in his Facebook):
“Edwin Hubble has always been credited as the man who discovered the Cosmos. That assertion is not correct.
The universe is a big place, and you might think that it would take a genius to discover it. But you would be wrong. It turns out that the person who first realized that we live in a vast and expanding cosmos was not a famous scientist, but a humble priest from Belgium.
His name was GEORGES LEMAITRE. He was a soldier in World War I, then became an ordained priest and an astrophysicist. He studied the works of Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, who had observed that galaxies are moving away from us in all directions.
LEMAITRE had a brilliant idea: if the galaxies are flying apart, then they must have been closer together in the past. And if we go back far enough in time, they must have been packed into a tiny point, which he called the “primeval atom”. He proposed that this atom exploded in a colossal firework, creating space and time and everything in it. This event was later called the “Big Bang”.
He published his theory in 1927, but it was largely ignored by the scientific community. It was not until 1929 that Hubble confirmed that the universe is expanding, and not until 1965 that two radio astronomers detected the cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint echo of the Big Bang. By then, LEMAITRE was an old man, but he lived to see his theory accepted by most astronomers.”