Art or Science?

by
Wolf Singer*

rt and science appear as complimentary attempts to discover the conditions of the world which could not be more different from each other.  Artists explore their innermost experience, search for an expression for that which they recognize, and so add new realities to what they find. Scientists collect and describe what they find, order it through separation and association, discover regularities and formulate laws only giving credence to that which can be proven through replication, that which works, or that which is at least equally comprehensible to all those who adhere to agreed-upon rules of observation and organization of phenomena. The former provide information about their most private, that is, subjective, experience of the world, while the latter claim that they paint an objective picture of the world. 

Still, what each one does is not so different. They have in common the idea that things—the concrete inventory of our world—are the tangible, visible, fixed points in an infinitely complex web of relationships, which—inaccessible to the primary senses—ultimately give things their meaning. They share the often-passionate desire to make these relationships accessible and to find descriptions for the invisible, which is not immediately comprehensible through the senses. They also have in common—if they then manage to do their own claims justice—the ability to learn or to invent languages which make all this possible. Of course, these artistic languages appear in disguises that make them seem different, despite similar fundamental structures. Presumably the uncovering of hidden relationships and the ascribing of meaningful connections always depend on the same cognitive processes, a function of the brain which we call “creativity”: the observation of the immediately knowable; the premonition of relations; the playful permutation of combinative possibilities; circumscription and elimination; the recognition of coherence using who-knows-what criteria  (maybe even the criteria of logic are aesthetic); and then the arising of the certainty (in the case that the exercise has been successful) that a new relationship has been discovered and a new ascription of meaning has succeeded.  We do not know what motivates this mostly laborious search, nor what makes the uncovering of new connections and the experience of coherence so satisfying, that the search for them can develop into an often painful addiction. It is difficult to imagine, however, that the struggle for the right proposition in the artistic expression is based on anything other than the search for coherent relations in the sciences—and that is why it is good when art and science recognize one another.

Gabriele Leidloff must have had an inkling of the invisible relationships between the hitherto unconnected languages of these two descriptive systems when she began to use tools developed by others in her search to make the invisible conceivable. Her work with visually presentable medical procedures and her project “log-in/locked out”—a forum between art and neuroscience—stand as metaphors for the premonition that behind the appearances lie hidden fundamental structures and relationships. It is these structures and relationships which must be discovered if one wants to add to the realm of experience more of the world than is immediately recognized by the senses—senses that, due to evolutionary pragmatism, are initially only interested in what lies at the surface and serves the ability to get away. The search for hidden relationships and basic structures also reveals itself in the combinative game in which Gabriele Leidloff plumbs the depths of the relational realm by permutating confrontations. Here too the reduction to the essential precedes the combinative search for relationships—a common procedure in the sciences. Gabriele Leidloff places reproductions, imitations, and copies—and not the concrete objects themselves—in relationships. She is interested in the relation between already abstracted contents and in the process takes advantage of the reductionist effect of each method of reproduction. In this way she frees the observer from the pressure exerted by the visual languages of media and protects him or her from being dominated by concrete, completely formulated pictures, which leave no room for wandering attention and the search for the invisible. After all, reproductions, excerpts, and fragmented sequences are in need of individual reconstruction, demand synthesis by the observer, and allow the option of concentrating on that which is not visible, on that which is in between, and on the relationships which help give meaning to the depicted fixed points.

In this way the search for the invisible produces new realities, which, in turn, demand further research. Neither science nor art can thus ever come to a conclusion, and because they both seek to discover the same world, each would do well to take notice of the other’s suggestions—Gabriele Leidloff’s work presents one possible way of doing this.

                 View Gabriele Leidloff's "Ugly Cast"