Opening Speech: SYNTHESIS by Robin Rodd
21/01/2014SYNTHESIS
I’m neither a scientist nor an artist, but an anthropologist caught between science and art. So, by way of introduction to this exhibit, I want to touch on a couple of ideas about the relationship between art and science, what synthesis in this context might mean, and why this order of synthesis matters.
Synthesis involves transformation of disparate elements into a new whole. This exhibit has united scientists from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and artists working in a variety of modes to develop projects that present ‘scientific ideas’ through ‘artistic processes’. Each of these collaborations has taken on its own life as the contributors have worked out ways, over the last year, of thinking about, transforming and presenting ideas in novel ways. Here, the dialogue between different worlds, languages and backgrounds is a fertile ground for creative endeavor.
Science, as a practice of seeking and legitimizing knowledge, and art as a way of creatively shaping and experiencing the world, are two halves of the Enlightenment dialectic, the great project of Western modernity out of which faith in progress, improvement of the social world and mastery through knowledge of the non-human realm have shaped the last 300 years of history.
The split between science and art as ways of thinking and doing is associated with a number of other complementary oppositions central to Western civilization, its glories and failures – subject/object, mind/matter, individual/community, thought/feeling, nature/culture, form/function. But the Enlightenment carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Modernity is a process of devouring the periphery (destroying difference), and hence the ability for both change and creativity.
Psychological transformation and human change are creative acts that occur when one encounters difference and finds some space in which the net result of an encounter with a genuine “other” is greater than the sum parts of that encounter – in this case ‘Synthesis’. ‘Now’, it could be said, ‘in our petri dish we see not only how static and complacent cells become at the centre of our “culture”, but by contrast how those at the periphery of the colony – where toxic wastes do not collect in high concentrations – tend to have access to the nutrients of change and therefore to be the most vibrant’ (Napier 2003:12).
We now live in an age in which the tenements of the Enlightenment remain to haunt us as ghosts – no longer able to animate as they did ‘the age of invention’ but herding us into innovation feedlots and air-conditioned suburban strip malls, while the wake in fright sensation that implied constitutional rights no longer preserve civil liberties or check a drift into authoritarian government becomes stronger. We celebrate indigeneity and ‘human rights’ after the populations have been ‘pacified’ (conquered). Environmentalism becomes popular at the moment when all parts of the globe are affected by industrial capitalism.
Whereas invention involves the bringing into being of novel forms, innovation is about tinkering around the edges of a static system without challenging the rules of the game. We live in an age of innovation, and innovation, sadly, has come at the expense of imagination, creativity and invention, means to bring forth new ways of being in the world and radical solutions to our destructive tendencies.
The radical political potential of art, to the German artist and theorist Joseph Beuys, is its ability to imagine new ways of being in and constructing the world, reshaping society to utilise untapped artistic abilities of everyone to create new political structures. ‘If every realm of experience could be approached artistically and creatively, it could be possible to enact what Beuys called “social sculpture” – a creative reconfiguration of every aspect of life’ (Krause 2011:17).
Synthesis is a timely step towards social sculpture, and encourages creative thought about scientific questions, and scientific thought in artistic practice.
Down with innovation! All hail invention! Welcome to synthesis!
Robin Rodd,
Townsville 2014
References
Krause, A. 2011. Art as politics: The future of art and community. Porsgrunn: New Compass Press.
Napier, D. 2003. The age of immunology: Conceiving a future in an alienating world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
