Kunstformen der Natur
Posted in Discourse on Fri Oct 27, 06 by Kyle under Art and Science.
Have you ever heard the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? No? How strange… Well! Now you have and doesn’t it just roll right off the tongue? That phrase was one of the trademark utterances of German naturalist, biologist, theoretician, artist, and generally fascinating guy, Ernst Haeckel. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is a complicated way of saying that as an embryonic creature grows and develops it retraces the evolutionary path that the sum of its genetic ancestors went through. It is certainly an interesting idea, but ultimately turned out to be wrong.
Biologists determined that Haeckel’s theory was not the mechanism that caries out evolution and natural selection was declared the fittest theory. Haeckel was working during the 19th century alongside Darwin before we had so much conclusive information about genes, DNA, and other micro-biotic bits. So one might forgive him for making conclusions that were a little hasty. After all, the most sophisticated instruments and procedures biologists had available to them at that time were their eyes, albeit aided by early microscopes.
What is interesting to me from an aesthetic perspective was what the eyes of Ernst Haeckel saw, and subsequently transcribed. Haeckel produced a series of amazing color lithographs cataloging a multitude of creatures, focusing on microscopic sea-life like radiolarians and diatoms intended as a popular study guide. Being drawings they have the tendency to stray towards the idealized, stylized and systematized rather than objectively recording the exact appearance of things. (Photography is just of guilty of this, just in less obvious ways.) As a result of this, contemporary scientists have discounted the accuracy of much of his graphic work because they feel Haeckel fudged his prints so that they would better conform to his own ideas and theories about evolution.
The title of his book Kunstformen der Natur translates to Artforms of Nature and this particular volume was intended to generating an interest in biology among the general public, more than to be a serious objective documentation of nature. Regardless of their usefulness as scientific documentation, as aesthetic documents the prints are amazing.
The late 19th century was rife with cross-overs between the worlds of art/design and science. Christopher Dresser, one of the first people who could rightfully claim the title of “industrial designer” encouraged designers to study botany to improve their drawing and pattern making skills. His theories outlined in The Art of Decorative Design were balanced between learning from observation and creatively representing from observation. Dresser’s dislike of naturalistically shaded designs and encouragement of flat solid colored, almost diagrammatical, designs and patterns made the self-consciously hyper-rationalized graphics of Modernist designers possible.
At that time in history, there was less of an attitudinal opposition between art and science. Art was still primarily based on observation and representation of the material world, wether the “message” was expressly symbolic or primarily representational. Science was theoretically based in the observation of the physical world and had yet to develop the extensive amount of complicated and expressly technological instrumentation that it has now.
Science being an empirical endeavor has been able to shed some of its outdated theories and notions with the passing of time and the development of new discoveries. However, the art and design world, specifically some aspects of Modernism still use rhetoric based off scientific theories and ways of thinking that have long ago be discredited by scientific circles. For example, there are manly parallels between the ideas of Haeckel and Adolf Loos concerning the development of plant and animal species, humanity, by extension human culture.
Both talk about progress and development in teleological way, that is with a specific end goal in mind. Both would contend that things develop through predetermined stages that place them in a ranked hierarchy, progressing towards a final fixed outcome. Haeckel places humans, and specifically European culture on top of that hierarchy. Loos placed the unornamented object or building at the top of the hierarchy, claiming that ornament and decoration were “savage” and even criminal in nature.
While Haeckel’s arguments have been left by the wayside, often disregarded as racist, many of the basic arguments of Adolf Loos are still a central part of the rhetoric and even the curriculum of arts institutions. Maybe the avant-garde is not so avant-garde as it would like to style itself.