SOLVE, COAGULA, (FIGE)
CAMILLA PICKARD


‘NATURA NATURANS’ AND THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER



Solve

The phrase ‘natura naturans’ – nature naturing – evokes a lush flowering, a tangle of vines, an image of rampant and chaotic vegetal growth. The term is derived from 16th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza's conception of two basic modes operating in the world. 'Natura naturata' means something like an end product of processes – something finished or static – while 'natura naturans' implies something continuing to act, grow, create, live or change. Yet at first glance, the sculptural objects in “Natura Naturans” might be distinguished more by a quality of stillness and the appearance of mechanical manufacture than by any inherent suggestion of organic change. In what sense is this ‘nature naturing’?

Although Scott Bowering’s work emphasizes materiality and, in fact, materials, his interest is predominantly in the immaterial qualities of art’s transmission and apprehension. His approach might be compared with alchemy, which points resolutely at the material in order to uncover its opposite, the numinous and spiritual.

When alchemy was a respected scientific discipline, blending metallurgy with the earliest understandings of chemistry, the predominant worldview saw matter as both infused with, and representative of, spirit. The formula solve – coagula – fige was alchemical shorthand for the basic principles by which matter operates. At the same time, it was a metaphor for less tangible states and processes.

Solve is to dissolve, to free, to disperse. Matter becomes unstable: it melts; it comes apart from itself. It is free to become something else. Coagula is usually translated “to bind”, but in Latin it did not carry the association with rope and captivity that ‘binding’ has in English. Instead, it suggested both a process and a moment of transformation. Coagula is binding in that sense familiar to bakers of biscuits and pie crust, whose recipes often prescribe adding ‘just enough liquid to bind the dough”. Perhaps “to coalesce” would be a better translation. Coagula is the extended moment of drawing together during which matter becomes something other than itself. Fige names the end point of the process, when this new material form becomes static or fixed.

These terms can be used to frame and elucidate the seeming contradiction between static and generative properties in “Natura Naturans.”



Coagula

Bowering’s approach to his work encourages us to consider that the making of art also occurs during the process of telling about it. The charged field of memory, anecdote, imagination and hearsay that a community produces from the direct experience of art are, in effect, a continuation of its creation.

Bowering suggests that his work relies on social ‘distortions’ that are generated when a show is seen in a gallery, and afterwards. Individual moods and distraction can create misunderstanding, as can disinterest, or the desire for a work to mean a particular thing; unintended shifts of meaning also occur during the exchange of viewpoints and information. In comparison with an artist’s statement of intent, or a critical essay, such conversational ‘readings’ are often considered peripheral. However, for Bowering, they are central. The immaterial social component of art viewing, which provides a range of plausible intents or suppositions about the nature of the work, is really part and parcel of the work itself. Because of this, Bowering resists formulating concrete or didactic statements that might seem to authenticate a particular set of meanings for his art projects, circumventing the temptation, on the part of the interested viewer, to accept his words as ‘fact.’ Instead, his sculptures ask viewers to engage in a kind of construction work: the social process of building meaning. To write from a position of authority is to fix, and it’s precisely fige, the solid state in which no further transformation is possible, that Bowering seeks to avoid. His stance recalls Walter Benjamin’s insistence, in “The Storyteller” (1936), that a good story leaves it to the reader to interpret its events the way s/he understands them. By eschewing explanation, Benjamin says, “narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”

In his refusal to completely explain, Bowering revalues the knowledge and the incomplete or transient apprehensions of those who view his work. In so doing, he broaches a philosophical question about the role of the art show and the material nature of art. “Natura Naturans” intimates that an artist’s concrete expressions seed a generative and ongoing social process: a drawing-together of community in which an amplitude of meaning is created and shared. The object is inert but our relationship to it is not. The object is silent, but we are not. At an opening, we encounter both what art is, and what it might be: it is the unresolved nature of this experience that generates its life.



Fige

Does art need language to make itself understood?

Art viewing is primarily a sensuous experience of shape, colour, and texture, visual and tactile. These qualities distinguish it quite radically from theory, literature, criticism, philosophy, and other written examinations of experience.

Writing is a kind of formulation or fixing of ideas. Unlike speech – storytelling – it is intended for re-reading, exact consideration, study. It is reassuring for these reasons, but also didactic: it tells you what to know. Despite the fact that the primary, perhaps primal, sensory qualities of art ought to supersede writing in our experience of it, in the contemporary art world it is often the other way around. Writing surrounds art and introduces it. Writing – interpretation – tends to displace the immediate experience of art. It goes beyond this: often, art now appears as an illustration of theory.

Felt experiences are difficult to name; articulating the experience of viewing art is akin to identifying the notes in a complex wine or perfume. We use theory to help us. But theory is a convention. Theoretical terms, as habitually applied in contemporary art writing, have been rendered both familiar and meaningless. They give the appearance of significance (in its double sense of both ‘meaning’ and ‘importance’) but do not necessarily communicate anything intelligible to most readers.

In her manifesto “Against Interpretation” (1961), Susan Sontag called interpretation “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” She added, “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’ It is to turn the world into this world. (‘This world’! As if there were any other.) … The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”


© Camilla Pickard 2008

Camilla Pickard teaches in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at Emily Carr University. She has written on Vancouver art and artists for a variety of publications and galleries including Drain Magazine, Time Out, Third Avenue Gallery, and Kristi Engle Gallery in Los Angeles.