World of Wonders

Every human starts out with one cell and we develop, via regulatory processes we are still learning about, into a collection of about 10 trillion cells. To date those 10 trillion cells have been categorized into about 300 types, and we know how to turn one type of cell into another type, and we know that different cells seem to have different preferences about where they like to live and what surfaces they like to grow on. And we know that the proteins within cells cluster together. Just like stars.

Another thing we know now is that "waltzing" pairs of black holes way way way out in space do their dance (follow their pattern of movement) in a way that echoes the movement pattern of electrons in their little tiny orbits around tiny nuclei in tiny atoms. This seems both revelatory and common sensical -- that the movement in atoms, which make up all stuff, echoes the movement of all objects made of stuff. 

 

But who is the "we" I am referring to here? How many people really have an active engagement in the connections between atomic motion and the motion of invisible, immortal celestial bodies? And of course there is the question of what one does with the knowledge. Does knowing a thing compel one to spread the word? And what does knowing a thing mean, anyway? Facts are mutable, in time, and history is mutable as well. I used to "know" that punk rock would change modern life forever, that architecture was apolitical, that no one could ever be as bad a president as Reagan, and that Einstein wasn't a slut.

I also used to "know" that new endeavors of the mind were always their own reward, that curiosity was always a fuel for happiness, and that travel was always thrilling. But with age comes wisdom, especially about plane travel...and the recognition that it is patterns (of thought, of motion, of experience) rather than new and unique instances that make up most of what is. 

 

So, if one recognizes a pattern, is one compelled to spread the word? I realize most of my paintings are exactly that. They are expressions about the sudden recognition of a pattern. I know I often feel something like compulsion when I approach the canvas -- not to capture something of myself there, but to capture a moment of recognition before it blinks by.

 

As if I can see, however briefly, what a vast collection of individual movements (thoughts, memories, reactions, words) looks like as a whole. And as if capturing that perception is worthwhile.

Aphelion is Imminent Too

Can one really understand how fear acts on the motion of belief?

One NASA scientist who is tasked with answering the public's questions about the 2012 Doomsday end-of-the-world hoopla has named this unique fear; he calls it "cosmophobia." Every day he hears from people who are actually fearful that an invisible planet (possibly guided by aliens) is on a collision course with the earth right now. Or that solar storms will cause a polarity shift in the sun and cause an earth-wide electromagentic pulse to wipe out all electronics in about two years. They fear the event, they fear for their lives, and they fear "the government" is covering up the truth. Sure, people claim that they are scared of imminent death, but is that the root cause of the force that is fear? I see people react with fear to passive, non-threatening things all the time -- particularly to "challenging" works of art, and, of course, to abstraction. And anything in the cosmos is also an abstract idea, in the sense that it is out of the realm of our immediate experience. But why does it follow that the response is fear? Is it that all fearful people think communication of any sort is an expression of a belief system, and therefore an inherent challenge?

 

This morning I encountered a man who challenged me on my "belief" that we are all made up of atoms. "Don't believe it" he said, "you are made of the spirit!" I honestly had no idea what to say. It is tempting to dismiss his challenge as evidence of his ignorance, but if he does not regard himself as ignorant, what point is there in me claiming so? What is more interesting to me it the idea that he is threatened somehow (or his belief system is destabilized somehow) by...atoms. If you want to change motion, you need a force which will act on an object and cause acceleration. But if you want to maintain the status of a belief, is a forcefield of fear required? I wonder about that as the Catholic Church sex-abuse story grows globally, and as the impact of Arizona's new immigration status law plays out here...and as veil-wearing women in Yemen protest in favor of the practice of granting men child brides. The same atom-fearer mentioned above also believes that rape is "not always bad" since it is God's prerogative that sperm is destined for a unique egg, and man must follow God's law without question. 

 

What is it like to live a life of submission? And if you submit to life within that forcefield of fear which is required to maintain your beliefs about weird art, or African American Presidents, or alien-guided killer planets...can you really ever view yourself as a free human being, as free as any of the rest of us?

Solid Universe Theory and being an abstract painter

Notes from Abstraction and Solid Universe Theory: An Artist Talk given at DaVinci Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA by artist Martha Hope Carey / November 28, 2018

I wondered about what you need to have in place in your mind to believe that the universe is solid rather than what it is - which is pretty much empty space and things we can’t fully describe yet. I read a science fiction short story a few years ago that explores the impact of this belief being shattered. The beings in this story discover, using technology they developed, that the universe they believed or “knew” was solid (which they based their philosophies, their physics, their predictions on) was, in fact, not. They actually existed in a pocket of space within a solid sphere which was afloat in our universe. Which, mostly empty space and mysteries.

Both ends of that are fascinating to me: the systems and strategies we use to define and refine the universes we exist in, mentally and emotionally; the changes that happen when perception changes; reactions to traumatic change; what kinds of things push accepted thinking to new levels; how resistant we can often be to stark realities.

And it made me think about seeing. I mean, before glass was ground and used in eyeglasses, every person on earth who had any visual impairment short of blindness saw the objects in the real world around us as reality. The way they saw things, however distorted by nearsightedness or astigmatism, was the way those things were. For them. Before the microscope showed otherwise, there was, in the Western world, a belief that each thing in the natural world was symmetrical – had been made that way, in fact. But, nope.

The moment we are living in now, in the U.S., we are being led by a person who sees solidity where there it in fact empty space, and whose nearsightedness has him continually describing objects of all kinds in a distorted manner. And this is disconcerting and enraging and absolutely a call to anyone who can see clearly to challenge this.

Those were some of the thoughts I’ve been having, putting together the paintings in my recent show Solid Universe Theory.

Because abstraction itself is a challenge to any solid universe thinking.

I have been painting for 17 years now. Always abstraction, no “phases.” Canvasses are resilient planes onto and into which I extend my ideas, reactions, history, body, feelings, mind. It comes naturally to me to do this. And it feels like the opposite of many other things. By which I mean, much of life is figuring out strategies that gain one a sense of satisfaction or clarity in relation to others. Encounters with new people, for example: we “place” them, they remind us, they sound or look like, we go along with or against their identity or energy. All the time. We take in knowledge using strategies that satisfy, too. Ways of learning.

During the last 17 years of painting, I also got a PhD – not in art. My dissertation work was ethnographic research in a school, where I was learning how a group of teachers made shared meaning of an experience. The work they did to make sense of things, and the work I did to make sense of their processes, involved lots of strategies, to get to a point of satisfaction. This is common sensical, since we are all contingent, and knowledge is as well.

Abstraction, to me, is…not that.

When I paint, I get to the edge of that plane in front of me and my brain must open, and suspend, in a way. I must get to a tense and aware place – or I am in that place and then grab a canvas – where it’s as if the unconscious habits of mind are like big airport automatic doors, but intentionally stalled open.

What does that do?

I stop having strategies. I stop seeking for something that is contingent to be satisfied. I am not social or engaged or thinking about another person. I barely think about my body.

That tension is fuel. I work and shift and move and drag and pull and grab tools and work and work. There is no representational aim, since I am not thinking about strategies that may make things recognizable for anyone (including brush strokes or styles). There is no recognition. My mind is the stalled-open door for as long as I am in the work, and frankly, every time I look at the work from there on.

Which is abstraction.

When one looks at an abstract painting, the viewer is pulled in, sometimes by color as a trigger or a feeling, but the viewer uses strategies to immediately find the familiar and…finds none, and so creates some, and tries to apply them, but there is no place for anything to rest.

So, you try again – is that an object in there? I see a window! Maybe a train track. An aerial map? But those things are not there.

And if you stay in engagement with abstraction, you wear out your strategies, eventually. Which means the possibility is there for you to bust through the solid universe, and out into the real one, which is lots of empty space and things we don’t have words for yet.

In that moment, you get a view of the capacity of your own mind.

For some people this can be very uncomfortable. After all, there is a lot of space and unknowable stuff in there, too. And in my opinion as a human and an artist, that is glorious.

The titles of my paintings are markers, for me, markers of what the thing was that activated the weird tension, that made the doors stall open. And it is never a question that does this. 

Questions are strategies to get to satisfaction. It is, rather, just a moment of comprehension about things I can never fully understand or even imagine clearly – like what thoughts and visions one would have, to get to the point where you could conceive of sending a probe into space to take photos of the moons of Saturn. This has been done, which is fantastic, but holy shit, the creative thought and acts of imagination that went into making that happen. To strive and build and plan a way to capture images of objects which reside so far out in space that no human in our lifetime will ever see with their own eyes.

That is an achievement of mind that awes me. The vast leaps of thought that had to be taken to even imagine maybe, and then if, and then yes, and then how. And to take those leaps for the sole reason of expanding the known, for the benefit of all of us. Remarkable.

Abstraction allows me to stay in that tense, aware, and in this case, amazed moment of awe.

It is glorious. It works my mind. And I paint.