Essay by David Brookes
Sensitive Chaos, Delicate Empiricism and Epic Dust
Natural objects should be sought and investigated as they are and not to suit observers, but respectfully as if they were divine beings […] There may be a difference between seeing and seeing [...] The eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connexion with those of the body, for one otherwise risks seeing, yet seeing past a thing.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe **
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s inquiries into the natural sciences led him to construct a very particular philosophical worldview more than they led to any measurable and unbiased account of the “natural” world. To learn from Goethe is to discover that in order to see all of nature as a cohesive whole the observer must combine the faculties of objective perception with those of aesthetic creation. That is not to say that such inquiries are erroneous pursuits on their own, but rather that they are inseparable, and that is what it is to be human. To observe the world around us, and to articulate it, also means that we observe and understand ourselves, physically and mentally, through both faculties simultaneously.
If we use this rubric to consider the existence of an ecosystem, for instance, we realize that an ecosystem as such cannot be witnessed in the momentary presence of an observer. We know that an ecosystem surely exists. We have irrefutable data that verifies and defines the knowledge of such. However, we cannot see an “ecosystem,” for it is in constant movement through a myriad of processes that can be witnessed at times but elusive to the senses at others. It depends on when, where and how you situate yourself relative to it. It is elusive in its thing-ness, and must express its thing-ness over time. Therefore, it is only through the iterative knowledge of what we learn an ecosystem to be (measurably), combined with our own spatial-temporal experiences of what an ecosystem must be (empirically), that we can then use our own imaginations to create a conscious portrait (psychologically) of what an ecosystem is (ontologically). This is a circuitous way of saying that to understand, in the moment, the dynamic forces of the world that surrounds us is as much a process of ‘picturing’ it as it is of measuring it, as it is of being in it, and thus living it.
If Goethe’s sentiment rings true, and “the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connection with those of the body” then it must be true that to observe the world around us and to articulate it is to simultaneously observe and understand ourselves. I believe this philosophical conceit is the very aesthetic process by which Ernesto Caivano pictures the world around us. Picturing is an iterative process; it is not a thing, but is the act of subjectivity acquiescing to thing-ness. It is the moment of viewing, articulating, measuring, and being. It is a confluence – a liquid moment of ascertaining the spatial temporal thing-ness of a moment, an idea, an object, a scenario, the mise-en-scène. For Caivano, this is distinctly legible in how he pictures. The scène is his own confluence of a moment, an idea, an object, a scenario. But the mise-en is the act of working in living connection with the body. Caivano’s delicate act of picturing – with infinitesimal details all brought into focus simultaneously – is not an acting-out, but rather a living-out. It is placing one’s own body in living connection with perceiving. In rendering such granular moments the articulating hand lives out the contours of a thousand grains of sand. It is the geology of the hand. When splinters of wood suspend themselves with shards of stone in Caivano’s picturing, the metabolic mends with the geologic, and the marks on the page behave like material and not signifiers of material. This is Caivano’s materialization of the narrative; his rendering the narrative not as pictures, but picturing the narrative as particulates. Caivano’s aesthetic processing of the granular – like pixels in an image, fibers in a textile, rings on a log, strata of rock, stars in the sky, grains of sand on the beach, blades of grass on a hill – renders the particulates unquantifiable in acting as a whole, but still legible as individuals. These particulates, these individuals and active agents of the picture plane bridge the gap between image and life. They are Goethe’s divine beings.
Rendering suspended atoms of dust and wrinkles of matter synch mind and body to the act of perceiving as we quantify the very lines, cracks, and webs of relations in the picturing process. The slowness of receiving or ascertaining a work melds the dynamism of the metabolic with the speculative speed of the geologic. It is a slowing down both literally of reading the work, but also of the psychological perception of the work. When one looks at a beach and attempts to mentally reconstruct the timeline by which each grain of sand made its way to the beach, originating with larger stones tumbled into their current infinitesimally minuscule scale, the process of reading the drawing, like reading grains of sand, synchs our bodies with the act of looking. When an epic cloud of dust scatters slowly into the air, atomizing the picture plane into a granular sheet of future motion – like a cracked mirror stubbornly holding its rectilinear shape, at least for the moment – the mind and body and articulated moment are held in abeyant triangulation. Following Goethe’s mantra: the eyes of our spirit are working in perpetual living connection with those of our body, in order to see the thing.
** J. W. von Goethe, Goethe's Botanical Writings, B. Mueller, trans. (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1952)