Fragments
and Layers: Irreducible Complexity in the Sculpture of Ed Smith
by
Frank Peseckis
[This essay was first published in 1988 in Ed Smith
Sculpture/Drawings, a catalogue to accompany exhibitions of Smith's work
at Frank Katz Gallery, Baltimore, MD, 14 Sculptors Gallery, New York, NY, and
Five Points Gallery, East Chatham, NY, in 1988-89.]
The worth of a language
is in some sense best determined by its richness of vocabulary and compactness
of expression. In attempts to understand or describe something we have not before
encountered, we search for new language through metaphor or allusion, borrowing
terms from one field of ideas to express a perceived likeness in another. Literary
terminology comes to be employed in discussions of painting, words from dance
convey an implied sculptural motion, political jargon summarizes the sense of
conflict experienced in a piece of music.
The language of contemporary mathematical
physics is replete with subtle spatial conceptions, reflecting its evolution during
this century toward progressively more complex visual thought. These are not the
rudimentary classifications of elemental form -- line, triangle, circle, sphere,
rectangular parallelopiped, whatever -- but wonderful topological and geometric
notions -- compact region, multiply-connected space, fractal boundary, non-integer
dimension, many others. They aim to bring within direct intellectual grasp the
panoply of chaotic processes, erratic motions, or random structures which characterize
complicated systems with many components whose physical properties appear to change
unpredictably. Until recent years these phenomena were largely abandoned by theoreticians
in the physical sciences, believed to lie beyond the descriptive capacities of
even the most elegant mathematical symbolization. Now a new physics has risen
to face complexity head on in all its permutations, and a new language of structure
in space and time is one of its accomplishments.
These ideas have not yet
found voice in criticism pertaining to the visual arts, nor have they consciously
motivated many artists in a search for new modes of expression. This may be due
simply to lack of communication between the scientific and artistic communities.
Though several decades have elapsed since C.P. Snow's lament of the cultural gap
between them, their sociological separation remains great. But perhaps what has
been needed to bring forward this new language is the force of novel artistic
invention, the creation of works whose incorporation of chaotic structure and
complexity of spatial conception necessitate a matching language, one that only
the contemporary mathematical sciences can supply.
Ed
Smith's sculpture is on one level about minimal figuration -- what can be stripped
away, how much can be broken down and removed, what must remain, for the substance
of discernible figure to be preserved. Roughly textured volumes of pigmented ferrous
cement are meshed with steel to suggest flesh and body, though fragmentary, as
if they were recovered remnants of ancient sculpture. The sense of antiquity is
reinforced by the appearance of external support with sawn timber and natural
wood, organic versions of the conservator's metal rods. But the aim is to unearth
figural invariance, to reveal what details of line and mass are essential to the
very sense of figure. To quote Einstein, "everything should be made as simple
as possible, but no simpler".
The contrary to these perceptions is also on
some level true. Smith's combinations of materials are not limited in their expression
simply to the human figure, but are about complex form per se, form convolved
in space to turn back repeatedly upon itself, form which is an amalgam of rough
volumes and smooth, irregular surfaces and regular line, chaos and linear order.
The works reveal countless layers of geometric detail, from the larger scales
progressively to those ever smaller. This type of infinitely complex structure
has been christened "fractal"1 by Benoit Mandelbrot,
its Latin root frangere indicative that these shapes are integral combinations
of countless geometric fragments coexisting in an unlimited range of sizes.
Smith's work evinces the strength and solidity of random form, here rendered in
cement, so that such form may at times be viewed as much as supportive of the
wooden linear elements as supported by them. By doing so he breaks with a traditional
sculptural anthropomorphism which equates line with the structure of bone, and
mass with supported flesh. Instead Smith finds himself firmly aligned with contemporary
scientific discoveries that permanence and structural durability emerge naturally
from amorphous form in a wide variety of organic and inorganic material systems.
Complexity in Smith's sculpture is achieved topologically as well as with
fractal geometry. His pieces are typically multiply-connected: their three-dimensional
mass is punctuated with holes, allowing internal paths between points inside the
work which cannot be made to overlap by any continuous deformation which stays
within the piece. This is in contrast to, say, the organic monoliths of William
Tucker, which share Smith's concern with fractal surfaces but whose volumes are
uninterrupted units, i.e. simply connected spaces. The multiplicity of topological
connections between internal points is experienced externally as a corresponding
multiplicity of passages through the work, demanding from the viewer a thorough
three-dimensional involvement which is not merely circumferential.
As
in all irreducible complexes, the dualities within Smith's work generate conflicting
elements which synthesize. Yet there is a unity of complexity from the fractal
forms he employs which strikes one as more graceful and profound than any mere
Hegelian melding of antithetical elements. The mutually supportive spaces of chaos
and order, the multiple layers of geometric detail and topological connection,
their variation in scale and density from one layer to the next, all produce and
proceed from a hierarchy of meaning which displays the integrated structure of
a cohesive though irregular whole.
One of the most fascinating, if not mysterious,
insights of modern theoretical physics is that the most general laws of nature
can be expressed as extremum principles. These state that the changes in any system
occur in such a way that some property (which property determines the type of
principle) tends toward the minimum or maximum quantity it can attain.
For
much of the twentieth century sculpture seems to have evolved in accordance with
some principle of geometric minimization: fewer elements, simpler shapes, smoother
forms, more regular lines. And there is a poetry to minimal constructions, much
as there is elegance to the notion that a straight line is the shortest path between
two points (in a flat space of course).
Sculpture composed of fractal structures
also follows an extremum principle, but one of maximization. Smith's constructions
richly exemplify this abundance and variety of geometric form intrinsic to fractal
shapes. For what form would a path take between two points if it were to be not
the shortest but the longest path? It would be fractal; it would possess structure
no matter how finely examined. Infinite length along its path between any two
points is a mathematically precise defining property of truly irregular, truly
random, fractal shape.
So we encounter another of Smith's dualities: his work
supplants traditional constructivism by extending it. He shares the constructivist
appreciation of ordinary materials rather than the bronze and polished stone of
refined art. His technique is similarly accretive, a process of building form
in an initially empty space by adding material, rather than a process of removing
material from a pre-existing mass or of reshaping it. He shares the constructivist
urge for a geometric vocabulary for sculptural form.
But his accretive technique
is densely layered. His geometric vocabulary is not elementary Euclid but contemporary
chaos theory. He has replaced simple line and curve and associated volumes with
irreducibly complex fractals. The break with constructivism is Kuhnian2,
just as is the break of chaos theory from traditional linear physics.
The
separate, coexisting regions of chaos and order in Smith's sculpture are to some
extent made evident by the separate materials of timber and cement. The natural
tree limbs and milled lumber develop line; in the artist's words, they are "drawing
in space, a David Smith kind of linear structure." Varied types of line reflect
the character of their associated woods. The organic shapes are already vested
with nearly excessive personality, while commercial timber acquires a more personal
line by its interplay with other geometric elements. These interactions use line
to pose a question of emotional duality: while line is often supportive and structural,
at the same time it can function as a containing and restrictive bound to its
neighboring forms.
Smith does not view his use of cement as something apart
from drawing. "Drawing in space can be moving mass, it isn't just linear structure.
It can be layering. I want it to be random." As line varies with the different
types of wood, so mass varies with the different ways of layering cement: how
thick are they, what sizes are the units of cement with which they are built,
how densely are those units placed, how much are they blended together or made
discrete.
Mathematically these factors can be taken together in one measure
of the roughness layering produces, the fractal dimension of the shape. Fractal
dimension measures how much space is in a chaotic form, as our ordinary meaning
of dimension measures space, but its number need not be integer like 1 or 2 or
3 but may be any in between. Different types of chaos have different dimensions;
the more space the random structure takes, the greater it is. And with each subtle
variation in the texture of chaos comes altered meaning and new impression.
To move mass in fractal form is to sense dynamically what it is to draw. Smith
says "when I sculpt I see with my body, not just my eyes but my brain, my arms,
my legs. I think more and more that drawing and sculpture are the same." This
can be so only if one's visual imagination is not limited to integer dimensions,
where line is line and flat is flat and volume is volume. Through chaos, through
fractal form, emerges a continuum of dimension in drawing from line to plane to
volume, a unity of spatial conception wrought eloquently in Ed Smith's work.
Frank Peseckis is a theoretical physicist who writes about art.
1.
Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman, San Francisco,
1983.
2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1970
Figure 1. Ed Smith in his studio
Figure 2. Elgin Lapith, 1986, 4'x3'x2', structolite, steel, and pigments
Figure 3. Warrior Metope, 1987, 7'x9'x4', cement, wood, steel, pigments
Figure 4. Beebeville, 1988, 3'x4'x3', structolite, wood, steel, pigments
