Reciprocity in art

Trikka Georgia :Feeling the roots under my feet grow

I finished my last post thinking about the importance of reciprocity and I referenced Lewis Hyde's book, 'The Gift'. Subtitled 'Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World', it is a very useful read if you are ever worried about the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism. I mentioned in my previous post that the press rarely write about visual art outside of the very exclusive 'art' sections and when they do it is nearly always about money and how high prices now are at auction. I also mentioned that as early as the 1920s Kandinsky was criticising the art market system as being unable to cater for what art was really about. In the art market the divorce of money from any spiritual or empathetic humanistic meaning is exemplified by the image of a 1955 De Kooning painting below. As an abstraction of the human figure it is interesting and it asks questions as to the embodied interrelationship between figure and ground, but at $300 million back in 2015, you could have given humanitarian aid to an entire community. In comparison a small, 50-bed modular hospital might cost £25-£40 million, at 2026 prices.

Interchange: De Kooning 1955. Sold for $300 million in 2015

During the late 1930s and early 1940s Hans Hofmann used to host a life drawing class that raised all sorts of questions as to how the human figure could be represented. During this time Lee Krasner attended and her drawings made as a student in his class were on offer recently at the Kasmin gallery’s booth at Art Basel, for prices ranging from $100,000 to $200,000.

Lee Krasner, Untitled (1939).

If you look at the Lee Krasner drawing you will see that she has been looking at almost exactly the same issues that De Kooning was exploring in 1955. So if the money spent on the De Kooning had anything to do with originality someone missed out on a bit of art history, as Hofmann was dealing with these issues in his classes almost twenty years before De Kooning got to grips with them in 'Interchange'. I don't think the price has anything to do with originality or 'greatness' as an idea or visual expression. it is simply to do with investment in a name and a time. In fact you could have bought a Lee Krasner drawing made when she was a student for a few dollars not that long ago, but her investment star is also rising and this is a good time for her in terms of her work's worth on the art market. Not that she would know that, as she died in 1984. But the gift of her work still keeps giving.

Amongst the indigenous peoples of North America the Kwakw_ak_a’wakw have a word meaning “a gift from the supernatural, a gift from the creator”. We all have these supernatural gifts, but in the western world we would call them our talents or special skills, we might be very aware of animal habits and become great hunters, have sensitive taste buds and love cooking but we might also be artists. These gifts are what individuals offer to others in the community and feasts are often held in order to celebrate achievements, a celebration that is associated with what is often called potlatching. This involved the giving away of or even destroying wealth to demonstrate status, reaffirm lineage, remember special achievements and mark life events like births, deaths, or marriages. "Potlatch" means "to give," and the practice, once banned by white governments, centres on generosity, community, storytelling and the redistribution of resources. It is a cornerstone of social, political and spiritual life. The reason that when white people showed up, they tried to stop tribes from potlatching, was that it was outside of any understanding of commodity exchange within capitalism; it was, like the idea of Communism, a threat to a particular way of thinking, in this case it seemed paradoxically that people were giving away everything that they had, in order to become wealthy.

When you have children you instinctively gift to them your time and energy, as you know that the family community will benefit from this. If you have any special gifts, such as an ability to play a musical instrument, you will gift this skill to your children by teaching it to them, thus passing on cultural capital and building the family's riches. You freely give away your time and energy, if you feel others will benefit. The Kwakw_ak_a’wakw tribe operates like a family and hosts celebrations to mark the various times that these gifts have been given. Lewis Hyde asks us to think about this type of exchange as being an alternative to the one we see operating when art is regarded as an investment, it is a gift that builds social capital.

I have occasionally received money for my work, but at the most just a few hundred pounds and there has always been a sense of exchange beyond the monetary value, people wanting to have an object in their house that represented a certain sort of idea, in a similar way to why you might buy a book. The money being more to do with a recognition that without some sort of exchange, it might be too hard for the maker to continue making. I have like so many artists kept the wolf away from the door by doing other things as well, such as teaching. I still make things and think about what it means to make things, this blog being one of the main channels through which I do my thinking. I do occasionally check to see if anyone picks up on what I do, as much as anything to see if what I do is of any use. It's good to hear from people too and open out conversations but sometimes a little research is useful. This is why I was looking recently at why other writers might have referenced my writing and came across a very interesting text on hair hanging as a circus discipline. It was illustrated by the writer's drawings, such as 'Feeling the roots under my feet grow', the image that opens this post. I found the text very interesting as it represents an attempt to fuse what a complex situation might look like together with how it might feel, an issue that I have had to work with during my own work on visualising interoceptual experiences. Trikka Georgia's text, 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release' had at one point referred to my blog post on horizontality, as this had helped her think through the issues she was dealing with. Hopefully what I had written had supported her thinking, just as in the same way what she had written helped me. This is what I mean by the gift; it is given freely and as it is received by others it allows them to do more and what they do then enriches us all and so by giving away our time and energy to create things, we eventually all profit. 

I first looked at the politics of a non-monetary economy, when a group of us were developing a model for the Leeds Creative Time Bank.  We developed a set of ethics, which were put into a poster form, which was itself at one point shown at the Tate Modern Gallery in relation to the ‘No Soul For Sale’ project. LCTB operated under a belief that we could use ‘social design’ to change social realities such as poverty or social isolation, which we saw at the time, as factors that were already impacting not only upon the creative sector in Leeds, but on all the city’s communities. Hyde's text was one of the gifts that we took from others to help us engineer the Timebank's structure. 

The poster developed for the timebank

However the politics surrounding non-monetary economies can be rather murky. The idea of the potlatch is a powerful one, but one that has come into being as much by desire as by reality. Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a system of banking and a means by which prestige is maintained, the potlatch is a central anthropological concept. Christopher Bracken in 'The Potlatch Papers' shows how the potlatch was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them, the government had invented something that people actually wanted. As Bracken put it, what had been invented was a mirror in which to observe not “the Indian,” but “the European.” 

The idea of the gift still has traction, because unlike money and traded goods, things like love, hope for the future, faith, beauty, the sentiment of a poem, the feeling tone of an image and the construction of an idea; you don’t have less when you give them away. Indeed, they are made to be given away and you feel better when you pass them on. As your gifts are passed on, somehow the world looks a little more like the one you would like it to be and you feel better about yourself. This reflection on the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism, doesn't perhaps help a starving artist put bread on the table, but it might explain why as artists we sometimes need to become involved with ventures outside of art making and how we might think about the role of the artist community and the objects that we make. I can remember a conversation from some years ago when I was part of a group exhibition and prices for our various works were being discussed. One artist put forward an idea that they thought their work was worth as much as a fridge. As they did others began to pitch in what sort of commodity their work might be seen as being as useful as and therefore as valuable as. Was a painting as useful as a carpet? Both have aesthetic qualities but one also keeps the room warm and softens the floor's impact on the feet. Therefore argued another, tapestries ought to cost more than paintings, as they could also be used to help keep a room warm. But argued someone else, an artwork is an idea and what people are buying is intellectual property and this is surely worth more than any single commodity. This was countered with, "Yes but counting backwards is also an idea, but its not worth anything." 

I don't have an answer to this, except to say that if at some point someone came along and said this blog is interesting enough to be published as a series of books and asked me if the content could be therefore sold in printed form, I would probably have a real dilemma to face. On the one hand the ideas contained in these posts might be disseminated even more widely and that would be a good thing. But by turning these online posts into hard copies that would have to be marketed and sold, they would join the rest of the commodifiable entities that the capitalist economy embeds within itself. As is often the case I'm lost and puzzled as to any answers to the conundrums I give myself, which is probably why I make art rather than write philosophy or engage directly in politics.

An anti-slug votive at work

I will be showing a few anti-slug votives in a small exhibition at the Trapezium Gallery in Bradford. At the end of the exhibition, I will gift the votives to anyone who feels they need a little other worldly support in their efforts to maintain a garden.

"That art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price." Lewis Hyde: The Gift

References

Trikka Georgia: 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release

An interview with myself about the Leeds Creative Timebank

Barker, G. (2018) Leeds Creative Timebank: reciprocity for sustainable social design, Expanding Communities of Sustainable Practice Conference, Leeds Arts University, 16 November 2018 available at https://www.academia.edu/87392269/Expanding_communities_of_sustainable_practice_symposium_proceedings_2018 

Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.

See also:

In praise of verbs 

Drawing and the principles of permaculture

Horizontality

Katja Heitmann and embodied memory

Defining art

Artists' signatures 

Shamanism and art

Ceramic fish

I ended my last post thinking about the artist as shaman. This association has been made many times. For instance, Kandinsky believed that contemporary art and ethnic artefacts were both suffused with creativity and that the shaman as a craftsman, should be given the same level of aesthetic and anthropological appreciation as an artist. Kandinsky believed that it was not just an aesthetic affinity that cultural objects have, but that the spiritual and ethical congruity of hand made objects came into being because of an inner necessity and openness to the underlying resonances of a deeply spiritual world.
He was an early critic of the art market system and pointed out that the separation of art from popular culture, children’s art or the objects that were normally associated with ethnography or primitive art was wrong, indeed he stated that in his eyes they were often identical. As far back as1889, Kandinsky had made a visit to the Vologda governorship, coming across the Zyrjane, a Finno-Ugric population, where he met shamans and was astonished by the beauty and colours of the furnishings and artefacts that decorated their homes.

Joseph Beuys saw himself as an artist-shaman, a spiritual guide who used art to heal and transform society by connecting people to deeper, often forgotten, human and natural truths. He believed that art could be a force for social healing and when in the early 1980s I met him, he made a deep impression and helped me to find a needed belief in the power and importance of the discipline I was involved with.

However I've never been as forceful in my beliefs as Beuys, I tend to work by feeling my way towards something, rather than having a plan and executing it. For instance when I make one of my ceramic ideas, something comes into being that wasn't there before, arriving out of a muddle of thoughts and possibilities, partly as result of the material having a voice and partly out of my own desires to bring a thought into existence. Once made ceramics belong to the world of objects and many of the human made objects we engage with can also be used as commodities and even the ones initially not made as commodities, are often judged or regarded as objects that in one way or another have a relationship to commodities. Such is the power of money and exchange value. The idea that monetary value is the only way to measure worth is central to the art market and it is no surprise that the media rarely discuss art, except when it is sold at auction and fetches astronomical prices. Under Capitalism, worth has a very narrow definition and the strive towards economic success, seems to have eroded away many of our more spiritual or communal bonds and in particular in relation to the making of art or other culturally significant objects, we are loosing sight of the transformative power of objects as extended minds. However the shamanic idea that objects have fetishistic power lies not far beneath the surface of our everyday economic reality.

Marx wrote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". He saw that a belief in invisible lifelike powers existing within inanimate objects was essential to our complex meaning system that embeds the believer into the wider world of objects with meaning. Coining the term 'commodity fetishism', things were Marx believed 'magical', in that they promised 'magical' effects, that were, he would further argue 'fictional' or of no clear practical use value, but which nevertheless appeared to be the drivers for possible life changing psychological transformations. Marx never did quite get his head around the psychological power of capitalism. He took several of his ideas from contemporary writings about tribal uses of fetishes and other animist practices and it is this fact, that makes me think again about the role of the consumed object within late capitalism. I see the animist idea that underpinned Marx's original observations still in place. In recognising this, perhaps this gives us a way forward when looking for alternatives to a Capitalist model. Any alternative possibility to values based in capital, should emerge from a recognition that whatever new system comes into existence, that it would have to exercise a similar underlying psychological lever, but one that drove people into making more communally supportive decisions, rather than rewarded the economic achievements of the individual.

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object, I am not making one to sell, whereby I exchange it for cash. What I am doing is though trying to make another type of transaction, one whereby the person coming across the object is asked to think about why such a thing might exist. The art object becomes in effect a type of externalised mind, a form that allows thought to be grown around itself. The exchange value in this case depends on the receptiveness of the person encountering the object and how entangled they want to be into the possibilities the object opens for them.

For instance, in relation to a work I made a while ago now, my initial prompt to making over 300 ceramic fish was a description I came across of thousands of dead fish, washed up on a riverside beach due to an outflowing of pollution into the waters that they had previously inhabited. I wanted to ensure a moment of news was not forgotten and to make it concrete and unavoidable. I also wanted to highlight the bigger issue, which was the fact that we are constantly degrading and destroying the world in which we and all other creatures live. But as I made the fish, each one emerged out of the making as having a different 'life force', some felt as if they had more élan vital than others. Where this came from I wasn't sure, but it had something to do with my relationship with the clay out of which their various forms emerged. Somehow something of my own life force had been transferred into what had been made. Something of my personal spirit had travelled out of my body and had been transported into an inanimate material which now had some sort of animate form. I had in effect performed an ancient shamanic rite and in doing so had also made 'fetishes'. Fetishes that in this case were meant to be found by people who were exploring this small stream in Barnsley.

Fish installation and three individual fish

There are different types of shaman, I don't for instance operate as a spirit walker, the type of shaman that can leave their body behind and travel in spirit form, but as a maker I do feel I have access to a shamanic tool kit. These tools are though not just physical objects but are things possessing spiritual significance that can be used to help make objects come into being, that are designed to connect people with concepts that have the potential to bring about change in their inner thoughts, energies or beliefs. 

This interest in art as a shamanic practice goes back to when I was a student at Newport College of Art. It was there that I first read the work of Mircea Eliade and Carlos Casteneda. After this experience, I had an intuitive feeling that a shamanic aspect of art practice was still viable, but didn't know how to harness this feeling. Casteneda's 'The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge' was widely read by artists in the early 1970s and although now more regarded as fiction, the ideas were very powerful and they developed an intuition that shamanic practices were still possible. 

It was only after working more as a community based artist and eventually as a votive maker, who then found himself more recently working in a hospital setting, that I have perhaps finally begun to see what my previous experiences were hinting at.

Another influential writer who also wrote about the continuing importance of shamanism and who has helped me in the past to make sense of what I do is Lewis Hyde. In particular the idea of art making as a gift. According to Hyde (1983): 'The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition…. A gift revives the soul.' This is an incredibly romantic idea and to offer up what you do as a gift is a rare thing, mainly because we are brought up to believe that we need a monetary reward for our labour, if not we cant put any food on the table and we die. However I now have a pension, having worked for over 50 years at what is now Leeds Arts University, so I am in a position to offer some of my time as a gift. 

The importance of reciprocity needs a little fleshing out, something however for another post. 

References

Casteneda, C. (1990) The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge London: Penguin

Poggianella, S. “The Object as an Act of Freedom. Kandinsky and Shaman Art, in Evgenia Petrova, (ed), Wassily Kandinsky. Tudo comença num Ponto. Everything starts from a dot , State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, 11/11/2014 - 28/09/2015, pp. 29-39 Available at: https://www.academia.edu/41629506/The_Object_as_an_Act_of_Freedom_Kandinsky_and_Shaman_Art?email_work_card=abstract-read-more

Eliade, M. (2020) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy New York: Princeton University Press

Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Classics. p. 165.

See also:

Audience as Shamanic community

Drawings of nervous systems

Why I'm making animist images

In praise of verbs

Exhibition: Piscean Promises

Penone draws a tree

I'm still thinking about the implications of last week's post on the fold. I remember seeing a video of Giuseppe Penone holding his hand around the trunk of a young tree. His fingers could almost completely encircle it. He then had a cast made of his hand in that clutching shape, going on to replace his flesh and blood hand with the cast, which I think was in metal. He then left the tree to its own devices, filming it every now and again over the following years. The tree gradually shaped itself, folding its form around the hand. I thought it one of the most sensitive drawings I had ever seen. The tree was making its own shape, as it grew it responded to the intrusion of the artificial hand, flowing gracefully around it, acknowledging its presence, but not letting it get in the way of its growth, it revealed a relationship, that many of us have seen before, but not as clearly.

Tree and remains of old fence combine energy fields: Digital print

I have in the past made images myself of situations such as a tree and fence becoming entwined as the tree flows around the metal that has been erected next to it. (As above, where I thought it looked as if the tree was eating the fence.) In these images I tried to show how energy flows were intermingled; but Penone took his time and made sure his idea had properly conjoined with the life flow of the tree; making the work in 'tree-time', rather than human time. 

Giuseppe Penone: I have Been a Tree in the Hand, 1984-1991

Penone's was an art work made over many years and it reminded me that we rarely take into account the different time frames within which the world works.

Tree and gesture 1985-1991 wood with iron

During the late 1980s Penone would return to the idea several times, in the case of the image above, it is perhaps much easier to see that he was thinking of this growth event as a drawing; it being finished once the branch of the tree is removed and transported into a gallery. 

The animated short film 'Rocks' (2001), by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger, reminds us that rocks, trees, the wind, the sea, plants, bacteria, birds, insects and other creatures, all have their own particular time signatures within which they operate.

 

Das Rad

However, these rocks as observers make a fundamental mistake in their view of what is happening, they are in fact part of a much larger pattern, woven into being by a series of interrelationships, part of an, as Bohm put it, "undivided wholeness", (1995, p.134) in which the observers are not separate from what is observed. 

Penone's tree creates an analogy, whereby the tree accepts the iron grip of the hand as part of its reality and rather than rejecting it, it flows around it. This for myself clarifies the relationship between consciousness and the material world. We often think of our consciousness as being something separate from the world, it is the seat out of which we can observe the world. But as Bohm goes on to explain in the final part of 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order', "consciousness and matter in general are basically the same order" (1995, p.208), they can affect each other, "mind enfolds matter in general and therefore the body in particular. Similarly, the body enfolds not only the mind but also in some sense the entire material universe." (p.209) The atoms of our bodies being enfolded throughout all space and time, the mind and body being one. Bohm then goes to to state that, it is therefore misleading to "think of ourselves as independent entities, that interact with other human beings and with nature." (210), all are projections of a single totality. At a deeper level of order, the tree and the hand are one, the thought that brought the hand into contact with the tree, being of the same order of reality as the tree itself. 

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object there is no separation between my hand, my thoughts and the materials with which I am engaged with. Whether I'm making a drawing of the landscape in front of me or constructing a drawing out of my imagination, both are again projections of a single totality. 

Notebook drawing 

In my notebook drawing made to remind myself of an experience of how a tree had grown in response to an old wire metal fence, an old moment of consciousness is frozen and becomes as physical as the initial experience. Then at a later date, this drawing becomes a starting point for a digital image, one that I have just now used as an opening image for this post, one thing triggers another into existence. 

For Penone, a tree is a perfect sculpture/drawing/work of art. A living entity that like ourselves, records every instant of its life and experience in its structure. He comes back to this several times, sometimes bringing the tree together with stone forms, as in his project for the Garden of Stone below. In this case a drawing of a possibility, comes into existence as a solidified idea, one that in its turn, becomes another reality. 

Project for the Garden of Stone: 1968

Penone at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

At other times he takes rubbings or casts from trees, in the installation “Pensieri e Linda”, below, he makes a frottage of elderberry leaves on a linen canvas, of the trunk of a thirty metre high acacia tree. 

“Pensieri e Linda”

At one point during the late 1960s Penone decided to build a ring of wax around a tree. As he did this he realised that the wax registered two impressions; the bark of the tree and the press of his fingers; a double identity, tree and human conjoined. His drawing 'I felt the breath of the wood', reminding myself of how closely humans can find themselves identified with a tree and that shamanic practices can still be integral to how contemporary art is constructed. 

Giuseppe Penone: I felt the breath of the wood

"When you have your eyes open, the space outside goes inside your mind".
Giuseppe Penone

Reference

Bohm, D (1995) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London: Routledge

The perfection of the tree An interview with Giuseppe Penone

See also:

Ilana Halperin: Minerals of New York

Letting things happen

Charcoal

Drawings as entanglements of life

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

The Fold

My last post about a contribution to an artist's book project reminded me of the importance of the fold as an idea. I had read Deleuze's 'The Fold' a while ago and for him the fold was part of what he called 'the theatre of matter', an idea that I found particularly powerful. Deleuze was not the only writer to find great significance in the fold as an idea. He cites the work of Liebniz as being central to an understanding of the art of the Baroque as a type of folding, a way of impacting more and more information into limited spaces. In an earlier post whereby I was trying to answer a question as to 'What is embodiment?' I brought together several strands of my thinking around this, but as always there are a few other ways to approach the concept. So forgive my repetition of certain elements, which I'm having to do as a way of reminding myself of what I was thinking, but then hopefully I can take a step further into a personal understanding of quantum thinking as both an approach to confronting subatomic reality and as a metaphor for our deep entanglement with everything that was, is and what is to be.
Tim Ingold the anthropologist is also interested in the fold and he uses it to ask us to consider the fact that life is messy and convoluted and to beware of the way academic research tends to smooth it all out. Ingold states, 'in the correspondence of voices we are an intermingling. We are part of an ever forming plenum, which is the world we live in, the cosmos, the universe. (Plenum: an assembly of all members, or a space filled with matter). Research is supposed to clear the ground, but to clear the ground is not to make a space, it simply smooths it out. The kinks, twists and knots of reality, as everything is enfolded into everything else is the true order of the plenum. The convolutions of material folding in on itself as it goes along doing its doing is limitless, because it is a process of always carrying on. The plenum is therefore perhaps time itself. We therefore live in a ‘con-crescent’ world. (Concrescent: in biology, a growing together of initially separate parts or organs). In the plenum nothing is final. The world is therefore a ‘pluriverse’, consisting of endless multiples of kinks and folds and it is this situation that we should be responding to.' Taken from my own notes written when listening to Tim Ingold speaking.

A multiple of kinks and folds which our lives consist of is for myself a good metaphor. It reminds me that I should not always be looking for answers and that answers only provide a temporary simplicity that might feel as if we are in control, but which in the end are mere sticking plasters over the intricate enfolding of real experiences. My feeling is that all we can do is to flow with the complexity and to accept that our desire for control, is in fact a deep fear of a reality that we can never know.

In order to allow us to think about this type of situation, David Bohm introduced the idea of 'explicate' and 'implicate' order, two different frameworks that we could use to help us think about both our everyday perceptual experience of the world and how we use that to come to some sort of understanding about what we think of as reality and possible realities that might lie outside of our limited embodied perceptual framework, these concepts were developed in order to explain the sometimes apparently non-logical behaviours of subatomic particles, for instance some quantum researchers believe that time doesn't flow forward but folds in on itself. In 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' Bohm described how differing contexts might change the appearance of certain phenomena. The "implicate" (also referred to as the "enfolded") order, is a deep fundamental order of reality. The "explicate" or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally construct from perceptions. He stated in relation to this, "In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements." Our 'normal' reality being the smoothed out version; again it is the enfolded complex of experience that is regarded as reality beyond our experience of it. As Bob Dylan put it, 'something is happening here but we don't know what it is.'

Perhaps though there is a halfway house, somewhere between the "implicate" and the "explicate" and this could be the gap into which art might insert itself.

In 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce Lipton, there is a recognition that quantum properties are essential to the production of life itself. The manipulation of quantum properties influencing not just biochemical reactions, (Lipton, 2015, p.99), but the creation of life itself. The first cells when beginning to form clusters needed a mechanism to entangle themselves and this mechanism would need to operate at a quantum level. Gradually as we have evolved, the quantum biology that sits below all the physical stuff that we see, touch and smell, is still in operation and its signalling systems still work to help harmonise the complex bodies we now inhabit. Lipton goes on to explain how the cells that make up our bodies are affected by our thoughts and most importantly for myself, our emotions. (An issue that I may well come back and unpick further in a future post)

Raymond Ruyler in 'The Genesis of Living Forms', wrote extensively on the evolution of early life. He was fascinated by the problem of how life forms could pass on 'memories' of their complex final forms using a single cell. Every cell forms itself out of the 'memory' of the principles adhered to by the sub-atomic forces that control the behaviour of materials. Therefore the form of each creature and its various attributes, (perhaps in the case of humans, even consciousness), are the products of the movement of relationships between atomic forces. How they can move and in what possible variations being dependent on the structural principles inherited from all the previous embodied generations of electrons and protons, neutrons and / or electromagnetic or other forces that underpin everything. These rules then determine the possibilities of events coming together in different arrangements, such as in the form of a human being.

One of the key structural elements of animals with backbones, like ourselves, is the neural tube. In relation to the developing backbone, the neural tube is the embryonic precursor to the central nervous system, which is centred around the brain and the spinal cord. The neural groove gradually deepens as the neural folds become raised and ultimately the folds meet and coalesce at the middle line and convert the groove into the closed neural tube.

The development of the neural tube follows processes similar to those observed in the development of gastrulation itself, the final enfolding that produces the tube, being reminiscent of one of Raymond Ruyler's folding diagrams, that he used to illustrate his ideas about embryogenesis.

Stages in neural tube formation

Ruyler's diagrams explaining the significance of folding to embryogenesis

In 'The Genesis of Living Forms', the folding of the earth to form the Alps is compared with the folding of a flat sheet to form a tube, which is in turn compared to the folding of cells during the process of embryogenesis, in particular during cell division and differentiation. In my post on the topology of dreams I tried to explain how orchestrated objective reduction theory, sought to bridge the gulf between physical matter and felt experience. The idea I was trying to articulate, was that consciousness arises when gravitational instabilities in the fundamental structure of space-time collapse quantum wave functions within tiny proteins called microtubules, which are themselves found inside neurons. Consciousness being based on quantum processing performed by qubits (like binary bits, qubits are the basic units of information in quantum computing), formed collectively in cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified through the neurons themselves. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles and operate in a situation that can only exist at an intermediate scale between the subatomic and the everyday world. The vibrational mode of a single molecule is the coherent collective vibration, vibrating at the same frequency as the majority of the collective of atoms that it is made up from. This brings about an oscillating electric dipole moment at the same frequency, which forms superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules. The oscillations can be either electric, due to charge separation from London forces or magnetic, due to electron spin and they are also in form very like the ones that Ruyler was thinking about when imagining life's early moments.

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse and they are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine

B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.

If these concepts are right, or even just semi-right, it would mean that quantum processing is being undertaken all the time within our own bodies. So what is quantum processing and how can it be undertaken by biological entities? Somehow quantum bits need to be manipulated if they are to effect change. Contemporary quantum processing is mainly developed within the field of quantum computing. Within quantum computing a “quantum” implementation manipulates quantum bits called qubits, which can have a value of one, zero or both simultaneously. When the bit is simultaneously a one and a zero, the bit is said to be in a state of superposition, where a system can exist in multiple states (like being in two places or having two properties) simultaneously, only collapsing into a single definite state upon measurement. Moreover, the state of one qubit can influence another qubit, even if they are separated by a great distance, in this case, the states are said to be entangled. Superposition and entanglement are at the heart of quantum computing and provide capabilities that can speed the types of calculation required for certain computations from years to minutes.
Within the microtubule tubulins of orchestrated objective reduction theory, oscillations switch states and they are generated by electromagnetic forces. To understand how both this biological process and a quantum computer works, we also need to understand the properties of an electron and how electrons behave in the presence of electromagnetic fields. So lets imagine for both situations a duality as set out below, where the oscillating electromagnetic energy, is both up and down at the same time.

A spin moves up and down at the same time

Now you have to imagine a Bloch sphere, (Named after the physicist Felix Bloch),
which is a geometrical representation of the pure state space, the set of all possible pure quantum states, represented mathematically as rays within a Hilbert space of a qubit. (A Hilbert space generalises the notion of Euclidean space to infinite dimensions).

A Bloch sphere

The north and south poles of the Bloch sphere are typically chosen to correspond to the standard basis vectors |0⟩ and |1⟩, respectively, which in turn can be used to correspond to the spin-up and spin-down states of an electron. Any points on the surface of the sphere correspond to the pure states of the system, whereas the interior points correspond to the mixed states.

I was listening to a Radio 4 broadcast on the world's top quantum physicists' trip to Helgoland to celebrate the pivotal 1925 summer when physicist Werner Heisenberg, escaping hay fever on that isolated German island, developed the foundations of quantum mechanics; when a quantum computing expert was asked how she envisioned quantum and she said that she saw it rather like a line that ran through the centre of a sphere, from top to bottom. One end was a negative and the other a positive and all possible angles that could be made between lines radiating out from the centre of that sphere and its surface were the indeterminacy of probability that points that were not the two fixed ones might occupy. This was for her the quantum. I later decided she was imagining in her head a Bloch sphere.

Physicists use mathematics to represent these things, as in the equations below, but I have to picture them.

The frequency of applied electromagnetic energy causes electrons to move from one energy state to another.

For physicists to measure what is going on they have to apply certain values to each element and this is how best I can grasp what is going on by cutting and pasting from various web sites and wikipedia.
Each atomic orbital, (a 3D region around an atom's nucleus describing where an electron is most likely to be found and also represents its wave-like behaviour rather than a fixed path), is represented by an energy level measured in electron volts, with the lowest orbit called the ground state. As a particle can also be a wave, its energy level has a frequency equal to the energy level in electron volts divided by Planck’s constant (the quantisation constant). Consider the diagram above. If we want the electron to move to a higher energy state, we apply electromagnetic energy at a frequency (f) equal to the desired energy level (E1) minus the current energy level (E0), which is the energy level of the ground state, which is then divided by Planck’s constant (h). The electron will absorb the energy and jump to the next quantum energy level, its excited state. Once the energy is removed, it will fall back to its original level, emitting the energy at the frequency previously absorbed. Therefore, if we can constrain the energy levels to two, we have the fundamental building blocks for manipulating ones and zeros with a single electron.

Electrons also possess a type of angular momentum called spin.

As the electron moves from one energy level to another, the spin momentum changes. At the lower energy level, the momentum is pointing down, called the “spin-down.” When electromagnetic energy is applied, the spin changes until the momentum is pointing upwards as the electron achieves the next energy level. This is the “spin-up” state. When the electron state can be defined like this, it is said to possess an eigenstate, as both the position and momentum are known and can be quantified through measurement. However it's not quite as simple as this because as Schrödinger postulated, the probability is that an electron can at any chosen moment be in neither a spin-up or spin-down state, it is most probably somewhere between. As the electron is not at one energy state or the other and not oscillating between the two, it is in both states at the same time or a superposition of the two states. Another way to say this is: when two disturbances occupy the same space at the same time, the resulting disturbance is the sum of two disturbances. We know that each energy level is proportional to frequency, and since a particle is a wave, the state of superposition is simply the vector addition of the upper and lower states. A vector addition combines two or more vectors (quantities with magnitude and direction) to find a single resultant vector. Superposition is fundamental to the operation of a quantum computer, but it carries with it the “measurement problem.” A state of superposition only can exist if you don’t “observe” it. By applying a measurement frequency pulse to a qubit in superposition, the state of that qubit collapses or snaps back to one of the two quantised energy levels, which is how quantum bits are manipulated to have a value of one, zero or both simultaneously, which in computing are the binary digits;1 for on and 0 for off.

In order to digest this I have to turn to other forms of thinking and as I have often suspected that ancient ideas of the body's energy levels and chakras are actually deep insights into these things, I reestablished in my mind a connection to the concept of Yin Yang.

Yin Yang

The Yin Yang symbol represents opposite forces that interact to form a dynamic whole. The two magnetic moments of up and down-ness could easily be symbolised by this figure. Each side of the symbol slides into itself and it is always in a state of becoming, like the Necker Cube illusion, first one then the other shape takes precedence and if you stare at the image for a while, its optical negative will appear, reinforcing the either or or yes/no value of the sign.

At the level of quantum we cant ask what or where things are, because it is all simply relationships. Just as speed is about the relationship between distance and time, it is not a thing in itself, it only comes into existence as a concept by thinking about how distance and time might relate. The idea of relationships takes us back to the entanglement of everything and that there is no such thing as an isolated individual object; as Ingold put it, "we are an intermingling."

At which point I can perhaps begin to see what this post is all about. It's not an attempt to describe how quantum biology works, or how quantum computing operates, it is about finding supportive undercurrents that help me come to some sort of heightened awareness of my art practice and how it sits alongside my ever evolving ethical framework. It's also to do with the fact that I believe that art is also about how to communicate emotion and how at some point emotion and physical reality are deeply entwined.
I have been drawing at the same time as thinking about these issues and recently have returned to making what I see as 'post-amoeba' images.

The amoeba is a powerful signifier for life itself. The way it works within a permeable membrane and manages to maintain itself as an entity, whilst it is mainly water in a water environment, its membrane just holding it together with enough force to stop it dissolving back into the water it emerged from; provides for myself a metaphor that suggests the fragile impermanence and hard fought existence of all living creatures.

An amoeba

The drawing I made of an amoeba, above, became the first of several images that gradually like the amoeba itself developed cell extensions like pseudopodia and as each one was drawn I thought more about evolution, interconnectedness and entanglement. 

The amoeba takes on a future form

The flow of energies passing through and around an evolving form

Relationships entwined as the threads of the Norse Norns weave a destiny

The liquids of making forming the plasma of connectedness

Animal possibilities 

Monkey takes his first steps

I have recently been using the form of a monkey to enact or represent myself within various drawn situations of imaginary encounters. The image above was the equivalent of the moment of embryogenesis of that idea. My thoughts about the invisible interior landscape of the body, coupled with a need to use other narrative forms, becoming for a moment fused together. In this image the exterior does at one point penetrate the interior, an idea I have developed further in other drawings, the fold can reveal the other side of a surface, whilst a torus can be a donut, a worm or a human body, all of which have contiguous insides that eventually become exterior surfaces.

My wife is a follower of Buddhism and she will sometimes remind me that many of the issues I struggle with have been thoroughly thought through by Buddhist monks many years ago. For instance in the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra by Shantideva, the image of the monkey is used as an analogy for the untrained and easily distracted human mind. The monkey represents a mind that is mischievous, restless and undisciplined, constantly leaping from one thought, sensation or desire to another. This undisciplined state is seen as a major obstacle on the path to enlightenment, but in my case it is a symbol that reminds me never to take what I do too seriously and that it is only in releasing and accepting my inner more intuitive animal, that I will find peace in my entangled relationships with the universe.

References

Bohm, D. (2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London, Routledge

Cook, L. S. (1887) Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation an Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts London: G. Redway

Deleuze, G. (2006) The Fold London: Continuum

Lipton, B. (2015) The Biology of Belief London: Hay House UK

Ruyler, R. (2019) The Genesis of Living Forms London: Rowman & Littlefield International

Yanagisawa, E (2017) The Fold. A Physical Model of Abstract Reversibility and Envelopment in 'The Dark Precursor, Deleuze and Artistic Research'. Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici. Orpheus Institute, Ghent. Leuven University Press  

See also:

Drawing as entanglements of life

What is embodiment?

Dream photography

Geometrical psychology and the fold

The weaving of grids

Paper, folding and the songs of trees

The split

Body auras

A linear enjambement