some thoughts on rudolf arnheim's book 'entropy … · leonardo, vol. 6, pp. 29-35....

Leonardo

Some Thoughts on Rudolf Arnheim's Book "Entropy and Art"Author(s): Peter Lloyd JonesReviewed work(s):Source: Leonardo, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), pp. 29-35Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572422 .

Accessed: 04/02/2013 19:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Mon, 4 Feb 2013 19:35:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572422?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Leonardo, Vol. 6, pp. 29-35. Pergamon Press 1973. Printed in Great Britain

SOME THOUGHTS ON

RUDOLF ARNHEIM'S BOOK

"ENTROPY AND ART"

Peter Lloyd Jones*

Abstract-The author points out the attraction the concept of entropy in thermodynamics has had outside of the fields of the natural sciences, especially its philosophical interpretation to confirm a pessimistic outlook on life. He discusses the meaning of entropy in thermodynamics, its implications in the realm of the physical universe and the misunderstanding about it that are prevalent among psychologists, aestheticians and artists.

Arnheim's book Entropy and Art is analyzed to show that he fails in his attempts to apply the central metaphor of gestalt psychology of tension reduction in field processes to the interplay of entropy and energy factors in maintaining structure in the world, in particular, in the world of art. The author concludes by stating that artistic, like other human values are not deducible from scientific hypotheses or laws but are assertions of the will.

I

'What the myth of G6tterdammerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy signifies today-world's end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.' These opening words are from Spengler's Decline of the West [1]. They sum up the extraordinary, even extravagant, impact of the Second Law of Thermodynamics upon the layman. Since artists usually derive their knowledge of such matters from popular accounts in the Spengler tradition, it is no accident that so many artists who have heard of the Law at all echo Spengler's pessimism. For him, under the impact of the scientific idea of entropy: 'Becoming, Become, Destiny and Casualty, historical and natural science are beginning to be confused. Formulae of life, growth, age, direction and death are crowding up.'

Arnheim in his book Entropy and Art [2] touches upon these sentiments most aptly when he quotes the sculptor Jean Arp, who found his release from destruction by playing along with fate-accepting humbly, even gladly, the principle of entropy. Casting down fragments of torn paper according to the laws of chance, he made his collages in which 'the dying of a painting no longer brought despair'. For as he says: 'Why struggle for precision, purity, when they can never be obtained ?' Why rail against the inexorable processes of decay that destroy the finished painting: '. . . the greasy fingers of the admirer who subsequently breaks into wild enthu-

* Artist living at 22 Bradbourne Street, Fulham, London, S.W. 6, England. (Received 24 April 1972.)

siasm and sprays the painting with spittle? Dust and insects are also efficient in its disintegration. The light fades the colours. Sun and heat make blisters, disintegrate the paper, crack the paint, disintegrate the paint. The dampness creates mould. The work falls apart, dies.' By accepting hazard in the creation of a work, though, Arp draws the sting from the processes of its decay: 'I had made my pact with its passing, with its death, and now it' was part of the picture for me. But death grew and ate up the picture and life. Thus dissolution must have been followed by the negation of all action. Form had become Unform, the Finite the Infinite, the Individual the Whole.'

A principle that can collapse together so many antinomies in the minds of people as otherwise diverse as Spengler and Arp must indeed be worthy of enquiry. And not only these two, for countless artists, musicians and literary men exhibit in the face of entropy pronounced symptoms of what Lovejoy called 'metaphysical pathos'. Not that all sufferers necessarily exhibit Spengler's gloom. For every carrier of thermodynamic 'Sturm und Drang' there are several laconic jokers in the idiom of Duchamp. This sort of cosmic 'gallows humour' is particularly common among art students and is, at the moment, the more commercially popular variety.

Arnheim is clearly against such negative responses. In particular, he is against certain kinds of art that are, in his view, prompted by a misreading of what it is that science really asserts. Not that Arnheim is exactly explicit about this. One of the

29



Peter Lloyd Jones

troubles with his essay is the way that he shifts between the roles of art critic and scientific commen- tator. Though his artistic values do pop up in critical asides and sarcastic footnotes, as well as in his choice of illustrations of art works for appro- bation. Moreover, at the end of the book he comes right out and delivers a call for a return to 'articulate structure' and a 'rehabilitation' of the principle of order in the universe that looks very much like a plea for another classical revival.

What is this physical principle that stirs such violent feelings among artists and aestheticians? How does it come about that Arnheim, a psychologist, gives a physics lesson to reinforce his attack on certain painters and sculptors and his support for others? (A discussion of "entropy and art" by three scientists can be found in Leonardo [3-5].)

II

The Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts a fundamental asymmetry in natural or spontaneous processes. This asymmetry is an empirical fact and the law itself a generalization from commonsense experience. The law has been stated in a variety of forms but the formulation of R. Clausius (1854) is a simple one to grasp: 'Heat cannot of itself, without the intervention of any external agency, pass from a colder to a hotter body.' Let us consider a commonplace example in thermodynamic terms. The heat from a kettle of boiling water (the system) always escapes from the kettle into the colder air (the surroundings), which is thereby slightly warmed up. Never does this occur in reverse. Once this heat is dissipated, an external agency (again turning on the gas or electric heat supply) is necessary to restore the original temperature difference between the system and its surroundings. Clausius defined a simple quantity linking heat changes and tempera- tures that for any closed or isolated system gives a measure of this one-way dissipation or irreversi- bility. This he called the entropy of the system. If the Second Law is restated now in terms of this new quantity, the same fundamental asymmetry comes out in a new way: In natural or spontaneous processes the total entropy of the system and its surroundings always increases. (The First Law of Thermody- namics says that the total energy of a system and its surroundings is always constant, although energy can be moved around and transformed in kind as when, for example, the electric energy of the cooker is changed into an equivalent amount of heat and used to warm the kettle.)

Now, formally, all of classical thermodynamics can be developed logically from this point. Here entropy has been defined in terms of quantities such as heat and temperature, which are directly acces- sible to measurement. Problems do arise in giving precise numerical values to the constants in the equations of thermodynamics, since what is not explicit in the discussion so far is the appropriate baseline from which all measurements should be made. Subsequent developments have enabled

these constants to be determined. But before discussing these developments, it is well to consider first two matters that in thermodynamics up to this stage have not been described or discussed.

First, thermodynamics is not concerned in any way with time. The speed or rate at which some spontaneous or natural process may proceed is not treated. This is important, for a process that is, thermodynamically speaking, spontaneous may, in fact, proceed so slowly from the perspective of a man's lifetime that we say that effectively it never occurs. There are no immediate grounds for inter- preting the Second Law as a kind of hourglass, with the sands of the universe running out before our very eyes, bringing us to a 'heat-death' that may occur before we have finished our painting tomorrow! A millennialism that sees 'the hour at hand' is a psychological commonplace of many ages and civilisations but the entropy principle does not provide the current version with convincing evi- dence. For one thing, the continuous entropy increase applies only to closed systems. In open systems or in local parts of larger systems, decreases in entropy can and do occur. Life occurs in one of these regions of decreasing entropy and, while over infinite periods of time these enclaves will doubtless vanish, this will not happen tomorrow.

Second, thermodynamics does not say anything about structure. It is completely independent of any notions about the composition of matter or about the nature of energy (such as the atomic theory). Thus, although its concepts are cast in terms of concrete measurable quantities, they are highly abstract. It operates, in fact, without any model or picture of reality whatsoever. Unlike most other concepts, entropy does not visualize in terms familiar from everyday life ('billiard-ball' atoms, for example) some properties of substances that it thereby hopes to explain. On the face of it, therefore, the Second Law seems an unlikely candidate for a grandiose metaphor for degeneration and decrepi- tude. Why then has it been so often thus construed ?

An important reason seems to be the particular form of the law itself, the way it is logically laid out. It is an example of the type of formulation based on extremal principles, namely, 'that such and such a change proceeds in a manner such that some magni- tude which represents possible configurations of the system is maximized or minimized'. Nagel has pointed out that, while in general all quantitative laws can be so formulated, the general habit of scientists is not to do so [6]. Now the more usual formulation of scientific laws 'that some function of state varies in a determinate fashion with respect to another' is easily associated with the intuitively mechanistic view of cause, since the two functions can be visualized as isolated 'parts' moving with respect to one another. Extremal principles, on the other hand, easily acquire anthropomorphic over- tones, since it appears that different 'parts' of a change must 'conspire together' in order to obey some more general global constraints. Nagel's extremal reformulation of Boyle's Law makes the

30



Some Thoughts on Rudolf Arnheim's Book 'Entropy and Art'

point clear: 'Every gas at constant temperature alters its volume to keep the product of the pressure and the volume constant.' Nagel comments that 'physicists would find this preposterous or at best misleading'. For the natural question that comes to mind from such a statement of Boyle's Law is: 'How does the gas know how to do this?' The linguistic form of the statement is too suggestively close to that which we usually reserve for agents co-operating toward some goal. An inherently anthropomorphic response arises from the very sentence structure of laws laid out in this way. Spengler's 'twilight of the gods' is in this sense a natural layman's response to the entropy principle in its most general form. The neutral sentence structure of conventional formulations, on the other hand, reinforces the apparent impersonality of science.

It is, however, later developments that arose in the successful attempts to derive absolute values of entropy that provided the substance for the colour- ful prophecies of Spengler and his followers. In the reduction of thermodynamics (as discussed up till now) to statistical mechanics, the notion of structure (defined in a statistical manner) entered the discussion. It is this notion that relates entropy-in a new sense-to debates in psychology and in art.

Consider a pack of cards arranged in order-all the cards of one suit together and in ordinal array. Shuffling this pack produces progressively increasing disorder as the suits and numbers become more and more jumbled up. A similar process can be imagined for the molecules of gas in a box [3]. Random collisions gradually increase the disorder in the system. Now the chances of randomly shuffling the pack back into its original order are very low. Similarly, the chances of the gas molecules all fortuitously forming a patterned distribution are also low. There is thus an asymmetry in the direction of spontaneous processes characterized by the decreasing probability of their being in an ordered state. Boltzmann in 1896 defined a quantity called the thermodynamic probability of state that enabled him to connect entropy (in the old sense) with this new quantity. Entropy gives a measure of the degree or extent of disorder in the closed system compared with some ideal perfect pattern or order. Planck in 1912 put forward the idea that this perfect order was the pattern of all substances at absolute zero of temperature when all motion stops. This is the Third Law of Thermodynamics. It is now possible to interpret the Second Law in terms of a continuing tendency for the disorder in the universe to increase.

If this is so, we may well ask: 'Why are there any ordered systems at all? Why is not all chaos?' This is where energy comes in. Structural stability is due to the spontaneous tendency of systems to attain the lowest possible energy state. This lowest energy state is invariably characterized by some sort of long-range order or symmetry. Consider the ordered packing of balls in a box. It is easy to see, in a general way, why equal-sized balls will pack

closely into an ordered array, with one layer stacked in the depression formed by the one underneath. If there are different-sized balls, then more complex patterns will arise simply from the economics of space packing. If one complicates the situation still further by assuming some force of attraction or repulsion between the balls, then this may modify the pattern still further. There is a vast multitude of physical configurations whose raison d'etre lies in combining maximally dense packing, or maximum overlap, or area of contact, or distance of repulsion etc. In all these cases, variously symmetrical or ordered solutions give optimal results in terms of lowest internal energy. The stability of the infinite variety of natural order in crystals can be explained with appropriate combinations of the factors outlined above.

It must be remembered, however, that in real life existing systems are not static like those photographs of crystals and diatoms so popular in art books but are in continuous movement of the most complicated kind. As a result, they may spend a considerable part of their time in distorted or strained configurations, a long way from perfect symmetry. The point is, though, that the fact that many things have some (but not perfect) internal order or structure does not, however, call for anything beyond the normal range of physical explanation. Moreover, in physics there exist precise mathematical tech- niques for predicting the configurations that will have minimum energy. A given geometrical form can be shown to be the consequence of minimizing the internal energy in a precise way, although often enough the calculations are complex and difficult.

III

Arnheim attempts to use the central metaphor of gestalt psychology-tension reduction in field processes-to describe this interplay between entropy and energy factors in maintaining structure in the world. And, since his world includes the perceptual world as well as that of art, it is not surprising that his notions crack under the load. It is remarkable that anyone should still attempt such an ambitious enterprise as the synthesis of physics, psychology and aesthetics-even armed with such an adaptable tool as the concept of the gestalt. In the event, gestalt makes a poor showing beside conventional physics. To lump together, as Arnheim does, a vast range of disparate (though determinate) interactions under one grandiose 'Law of Dynamic Direction' is to pin on them an honorific label with no predictive value whatsoever.

More important, though, is the way that continuous shifts of meaning in the discussion of order, structure and form make the relationship (if any) between art and physics remarkably obscure. Unless order is defined with mathematical rigour and the limits of the system pertinently drawn, almost anything can be blamed on thermodynamics. This is where Arnheim is fatally vague, for he tries to maintain a distinction between 'real order' and 'mere

31



Peter Lloyd Jones

orderliness' that depends on criteria completely extrinsic to physics. Some sense of this distinction can be gleaned from a quotation that Arnheim uses to open the book, a passage from Marcel Butor pointing the difference between the apparent order of the regular skyscraper grids of New York and the teeming chaos behind the patterning of the facade. Instead of 'real order' (i.e., a built form where regularity expresses some 'genuine' social organization) we have 'mere orderliness'. Arnheim's distinction is not helped by his own difficult writing on the matter, for example: 'Homogeneity is the simplest possible level of order because it is the most elementary structural scheme that can be submitted to ordering. Orderliness comes in degrees, order comes in levels. A structure can be more or less orderly at any level of complexity. The level of ordered complexity is the level of order.'

It is always important to remember that the interpretation of entropy in terms of structure (order and disorder) depends on the assumption of isolated or closed systems that contain astronomically large numbers of specifiable elements. Only then are the statistical assumptions of Boltzmann valid. The Second Law may well fail for systems with small numbers of elements. Thermodynamics will predict that under certain conditions sugar will crystal- lise out at the bottom of the tea cup. It will not predict whether it will be in the form of one crystal or of many small ones. In such conditions it is better to avoid the use of entropy altogether- even as a metaphor. Certainly, when Arnheim takes a statistical notion and applies it to a single work of art (wherein the notion of a part or element is at best vague), as, for example, where he says that 'the work of art represents a state of final equili- brium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy', the scientific content of the term is drained away entirely.

Arnheim is, of course, right to assail the naive formalism that arises when notions like entropy are taken out of their context and used to reinforce theories of art. The snag is that his own apparatus of gestalt psychology is just as vulnerable. Its central concepts have little or no heuristic value in any art work of sufficient complexity to interest us. As a tool for art criticism, gestalt psychology has always run into the same trouble. If 'tension reduction' really is a universal principle shaping our percepts into the simplest available structure, should we not have a preference for just those art works that already have a very simple structure ? In general we do not. We tend to find them banal or boring.

Total unity is, in the event, less interesting than 'unity in variety'. This is what Arnheim is groping at in his accounts of the 'clash of orders' in complex systems. Without some adequate technical description of the variety of orders though, one is no better off than the traditional critic who points to major themes with their associated sub-plots. When Arnheim is describing the composition of the 'Madonna of Wurzburg', he notes the major axis running through the Madonna and its counterpoint

with the secondary centre of the infant Jesus, while the role of fold formations and the tilt of the Madon- na's sceptre are brought to our attention as rein- forcing the secondary variations. This is true enough but it could have been written before gestalt psychology and thermodynamics were heard of. Only windy rhetoric is added when it is explained that the composition is due to an 'interplay of forces in which each element has its appropriate form in relation to all the others, thus establishing a dis- tinctive order in such a way that none of them can press for any change of the interrelation. The play of forces is at a standstill, the maximum of entropy for a given system of constraints has been reached.'

Simmilarly, Arnheim's criticism of the use of information theory (which is in many ways connected with the idea of order as expressed in entropy) in art criticism is less incisive than it might have been. However, his analysis of the bizarre manner in which the scientific concepts of information content and redundancy have been borrowed from information theory by art critics and, in the process, sometimes come to signify the exact opposite of their original meaning is long overdue. In the mathematical theory of information, the information content of a sign sequence is defined as its surprise or news value, calculated from its statistical improbability. The more improbable the sequence (i.e., rare in a given set of possibilities), the higher the information content. Formally, the equation for the information content of a sequence is identical with that for the thermodynamic probability of state as derived by Boltzmann, except for a difference of sign. For a while the term negative entropy was used instead of information content. Although the parallel is real, the usage proved confusing and was dropped. For the layman, however, information content is an equally confusing name. As defined, it is entirely a statistical notion in no way related to the commonsense meaning of the term that remains to him intractably concerned with interpretation-what a message 'means'.

Even worse is the confusion that arises over the word redundancy. Since a sequence that contains statistical regularities such as homogeneity, symmetry or the iteration of pattern contributes little surprise value compared with an irregular one devoid of such regularities, it is called redundant. The layman, who is unaware that this is a purely technical word for a concept that could well be otherwise named (perhaps by some synthetic Greek word) is puzzled by a usage that seems to imply that all those regularities that constitute the real bform of the message are in some way redundant, that is to say, superfluous! Whether any artist has been misled into producing works more confused than he otherwise might is doubtful but, in any event, the misunderstanding is the layman's and not due to some wickedness or stupidity of the information scientist.

A closer look at the passages where Arnheim is discussing this problem reveals, however, that he is not simply taking to task would-be 'scientific' art critics who have not done their homework but is

32




himself lambasting the information theorist for his 'Babylonian muddle'. He is further castigated as a 'gambler' who: 'Takes a blind chance on the future, on the basis of what has happened in the past. The use of the word redundancy occurs because he is committed to economy: every statement must be limited to what is needed.' Arnheim then observes that the meaning of redundancy in reality depends on 'whether one chops up patterns into little bits or whether one treats them as structures' and continues 'a straight line reduced to a series of dots, for the purpose of piecemeal analysis or trans- mission can be highly redundant; in the drawing of a geometrician, engineer, or artist it is not. The procession of almost identical figures on the wall of San Appolinare Nuovo in Ravenna are not redundant. They are intended to impress the eyes of the beholder with the spectacle of a multitude of worshippers united in the same religious function. In our own day, Andy Warhol has presented one photograph in rows of identical reproductions in order to explore the connotations of mechanical multiplication as a phenomenon of modern life.'

What this commentary suggests surely is that no purely syntactic analysis, however fleshed up with the formal apparatus of science, whether thermodynamics, information theory or gestalt psychology, tells us anything of real interest about such works. Arnheim's analysis consists of an ad hoc disentangl- ing of the sociological and historical context of the works cited, i.e. it is quite properly semantic. When Arnheim attempts to distinguish between mere orderliness and real order he is not talking about two types of syntax, for his descriptions of real order are always in terms of relations to another context, the context of meanings. It is these meanings (for example the felt diversity of social life obliterated by the skyscraper's bland facade) that are held to be more real. Arnheim has fallen between two stools. The art critic, concerned rightly with meaning and significance, has inadvertently got them muddled up with physics. The gestalt psychologist concerned with the interaction of systems into formal orders has got them muddled with the meaning of works of art. Not only does this confusion of categories lead to the Quixotic assertions about order and entropy discussed above, it continually deflects attention from the business of the art critic of probing the details of the context-and in the end to a blindness to formal subtlety, as well.

A telling example of this is the lack of critical grasp in Arnheim's remarks on Andy Warhol and on Minimal Art. The obvious fact one notices about most of Warhol's prints of multiple portrait sequences is that they are not identical. On the contrary, by establishing a prima facie similarity through our immediate recognition of a familiar face or object, Warhol then forces our attention to small variations in detail of the varying colour and overlap of the printing screens. These tiny and eminently aesthetic variations are in counter-point with the stunningly obvious image. We are forced into a consideration of their relevance in the context of the

3

significance of the repeated image that is, after all, not just any image but that, say of Marilyn Monroe, the famous film star of her time. Warhol is not telling us about the graphic reproduction process but, obliquely, about Monroe, our society and ourselves. The minutiae of formal variation carry an enormous semantic load. A purely formal description of them, whether in terms of information theory or gestalt psychology, would miss the point entirely.

Ironically, Arnheim evidently dislikes Minimal Art. Taking up Robert Smithson's claim that his minimal geometric shapes provide a 'visible ana- logue of the Second Law of Thermodynamics', he asserts that the fact that such a claim could be made must be due to a change in our notion of entropy that used to 'deplore the degradation of culture (and) now provides a positive rationale for "minimal art" and the pleasures of chaos'. Later on he mentions in a footnote the (to him) odd fact that 'some people who profess to be repelled by the monotonous rows of identical human dwellings in so called sub-divisions, seem to admire rows of identical boxes in art galleries'. This is again, pre- sumably, a reference to artists like Smithson, Don Judd, Sol Lewitt or Carl Andre, who have at some time been concerned with sequences of repeated cubic or other simple geometric modules. What is missing from such comments is once more an ac- count of the context for these works. For although such simple matters as scale, proportion and visual weight have never mattered so much, these factors are, however, not considered primarily as matters of internal organization or form, as in traditional works such as cubist sculpture. The shapes are minimal. They are important rather in relation to the setting and to the spectator. It is his responses in the situation that are primarily in question. So much so that the debate on minimal art was overwhel- mingly about semantics (and the favourite philo- sopher Wittgenstein).

It was the fantastic efflorescence of hairsplitting as to the significance of minimal boxes that prompted Harold Rosenberg's comment: 'The less there is to see the more there is to say.' But this is obviously bound to be the case. The smaller the number of words in a poem, such as, for example, Haiku (or even in a telegram for that matter), the more attention is shifted to the question: 'What does it mean?' Given this imperative to make sense of a highly attenuated situation in terms of its meaning, there is no earthly reason why a spectator should have the same response to homogeneous repetition in two contexts as different as the lot house and the art gallery.

Minimal art, like other art, operates as metaphor. In the case of Smithson, the terminal state of maximum entropy in a closed system has been taken as a metaphor for the boredom and enervation of affluent American life. Life is, of course, an open system in continuous interaction with its environ- ment and the vagueness that overlooks such a distinction is characteristic of the level on which the

33



Peter Lloyd Jones

debate took place. This is not to say, though, that Smithson perceives this enervation any less sharply than Butor or Arnheim. His strictures on the foyer of the Union Carbide Building and 'Park Avenue geometry' are as savage as theirs. It is his reaction, however, that is different. Minimal art jerks us into an awareness of this enervation by giving us nothing else. Its technique is the alienation of the audience and the subversion of its learned responses to existing geometric art, which had up till then been the symbol of a technological utopia.

Alienation was achieved, for example, by combining familiar geometric forms with lurid com- mercial paint surfaces ('Hi-fi' from the Harley Davidson motor-cycle company). 'An exacerbated gorgeous colour gives a chilling bite to the purist context' remarks Smithson of such 'impure- purism' [7]. Unfortunately, the chill is only temporary. Our ability to stifle the alienation-effect with our own purely aesthetic perceptions has already made these works look like most modern art of other varieties, variously pretty but little else.

The attempt of minimal art to produce 'non- structures' was an equally sectarian inspiration- the interaction of Constructivism, with its emphasis on specified and programmatic structure and Dada nihilism, as represented by the artful solemnities of 'send-up' perfected by Duchamp in his 'scientific' works such as the 'Three Standard Stoppages'- bits of string dropped at random. But here again as anyone who had cared to remember the disap- pointment over 'free form' verse could have recalled, 'free form is only one more form and not freedom from form'. Not that any minimal artist could admit to hankerings after social reform or the invention of a new, more humane architecture. To do so would destroy the alienation effect that relies on insouciant equivocation. Even methodically to correct the errors in their use of thermodynamics is to miss the irony. In Smithson's polemic 'Entropy and the New Monuments', the quotation from Bridgeman on thermodynamics sits down on the page with Alice Through the Looking Glass.

It is hard to believe that this technique has in fact had any effect on the more crass optimists of modern science and it is certain that neither exploiters nor consumers have taken the hint. Nonetheless, it is crudely oversimple to range Smithson and his colleagues with the enemy. It is like assuming that in Antonioni's films the bleak geometry of modern interiors reveal him as a frustrated property- developer. Such unsympathetic and even naive critical misunderstandings must be cleared out of the way first before Arnheim's final question can be answered, for it may be in part simply a question about tactics.

IV

When Arnheim reaches into the world of affairs and asks rhetorically 'If all around is confusion and disorder who should we value most, he who expresses this state of affairs with disorder of his own (random ink blots or music scores played with dice) or he who

stands against confusion with clarity and order?' he is asking a moral question not a physical or a psychological one. To a question about human values-what should we, as artists, do in a given historical situation, a situation as he sees it, of social chaos and spiritual bankruptcy ?-any answer must be a personal one. It is individuals-artists and their publics-who must stand up and be counted. The art critic may judge them, as movements, more or less significant; as intelligent and courageous or, on the other hand, as frivolous, self-indulgent and intellectually shallow. Opinions will vary as to the place of Arp, Duchamp or Smithson on this scale. But a pusillanimous surrender to the real or imagined onslaught of entropy cannot be and does not need to be refuted by Arnheim's tortuous logic. It needs only to be juxtaposed with its opposite- a contrary assertion of the human will.

It is sad, but not too surprising, that this comes best not from an artist or a critic but from a scientist. These last words are from the founder of information theory, Norbert Wiener: 'The question of whether to interpret the Second Law of Thermo- dynamics pessimistically or not depends on the importance we give to the universe at large, on the one hand, and to the islands of locally decreasing entropy which we find in it on the other. Remember that we ourselves constitute such an island of decreasing entropy and that we live among other such islands .... Nevertheless ... it is a foregone conclusion that the lucky accident which permits the continuation of life, even without restricting life to something like human life, is bound to come to a complete and disastrous end. Yet we may suc- ceed in framing our values so that this temporary accident of living existence, and this much more temporary accident of human existence may be taken as all important positive values notwithstand- ing their fugitive character .... In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity' [8].

REFERENCES

1. 0. Spengler, Decline of the West (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959), p. 423.

2. R. Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1971).

3. L. Rapkine, I. Notes for a Scientific Theory of Aesthetics, Leonardo 3, 351 (1970).

4. J. Monod, II. Commentary on the Aesthetics of Louis Rapkine, Leonardo 3, 353 (1970).

5. J. Mandelbrojt, III. Comments on Rapkines Notes and Monod's Commentary, Leonardo 3, 354 (1970).

6. E. Nagel, The Structure of Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 407.

7. R. Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments, Art Forum 4, 26 (June 1966).

8. N. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950).

34




Editors note: A further discussion of R. Arnheim's book Entropy and Art appears in this issue (Leonardo 6, 76 (1973)).

Reflexions sur le livre de Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art

Resume-L'auteur souligne l'interet qu'a pu re- presenter le concept d'entropie en thermodynamique, en dehors de son application aux sciences de la nature. I1 rappelle en particulier comment ce concept a ete interprete dans le sens d'une conception philo- sophique pessimiste de la vie. I1 explique le sens de l'entropie en thermodynamique et ses implications dans le domaine de l'univers physique, ainsi que les

erreurs d'interpretation a ce sujet qui se sont repan- dues chez les psychologues, les estheticiens et les artistes.

I1 analyse le livre d'Arnheim, Entropy and Art, pour montrer que ce dernier n'a pas atteint son but. Ce but etait d'appliquer la metaphore centrale de la psychologie de la forme (gestaltiste), a savoir la reduction de tension dans le champ d'experience, a l'effet reciproque de l'entropie et des facteurs ener- getiques tendant a maintenir une structure de l'univers, en particulier du monde artistique. L'auteur en affirmant que les valeurs artistiques, de meme que les autres valeurs humaines, ne peuvent etre deduites d'hypotheses scientifiques, mais sont au contraire des affirmations de la volonte.

35



some thoughts on rudolf arnheim's book 'entropy … · leonardo, vol. 6, pp. 29-35....

Documents