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Shadows of Copernicanis m
For the best part o f five centuries the Copernican
revolution has served as a virtually inexhaustible source
of philosophical and existential disquiet. Undoubtedly, we
have yet to fully adjust our spontaneous image of reality
to accord with our displacement from its centre. Yet
Copernicus and Kepler retained the Sun as the unique
centre. If later developments showed the Sun to be only
one of trillions of stars, recent observations even show
that singular stars are the exception rather than the rule :
The unicity of our Sun is mere cosmic happenstance, in a
universe where binary star systems are more common, many
capable of supporting Earth-like planets.1 Considering the
overwhelmingly heliotropic tendency of the philosophical
imaginary, from Plato to Heidegger,2 how might our image
of thought be disrupted by the loss of the unicity of the Sun,
of the object's shadow, of tomorrow's sunrise . . . ? These
are some of the questions posed by Conrad Shawcross's
1 . E.V. Qyintana &J.J. Lissauer. 'Terrestrial Planet Formation in Binary Star Systems',
2007, at http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.3444vl.
2 . 'Insofar as it structures the metaphorical space of philosophy, the Sun represents
what is natural in philosophical language [ . . . ] There is only one Sun in the system
[ . . . ] the unique, irreplaceable, natural referent, around which everything must turn,
toward which everything must turn' - J. Derrida, 'White Mythology', in Margins of
Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 243. 25 1 .
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motion sculpture Binary Star (2006) , a faithful cosmological
model whose two 'suns' rise on a world in which there is
'No Such Thing as One'.3 As the massive, wooden beams
of the mechanical contraption rotate in their simulated
gravitational dance, its two light sources, in their complex
paths, cast double shadows whose shifting superpositions
are baffling and unfathomable to the eye.
Philosophical tradition has often metaphorically
anchored thought to apparently fixed and permanent
characteristics of the physical world. Such models
are inevitably burdened with an inability to absolve
themselves of their metaphorical investment in the very
reality they claim to conceptually underwrite. When we
select features from a contemporary image of reality to
stand for the task of thought, we always run the risk of
becoming a hostage to the fortunes of scientific inquiry,
whose progress seems eventually to disabuse us of
every illusion of fixity and permanence. In Shawcros s ' s
work the physical realisation of such emblematic
epis temological models exacerbates the problem of
this 'bleeding' of the empirical into the philosophi
cal . Through an intriguing lateral shift, Binary Star demon
strates how the epistemological trope of 'Copernicanism',
in its naive acceptation as a simple reversal of perspective
between two heavenly bodies, remains tied to 'terrestrial'
tropes of thought: above all, the notion that an orbiting
multiplicity always pays homage to a central unity.
It seems that, even confronted by a radical shift in thinking,
we always risk attaching importance to the deepseated
3. The name of the show at Victoria Miro Gallery in London in which Binary Star
was first exhibited.
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prejudices it foregrounds but leaves intact, rather than to
its real consequences.
Does philosophy's thirst for such precarious models of
thought indicate that a surreptitious exploitation of the all
too-human world is a veritable condition for philosophical
discourse - at least insofar as the latter seeks to preserve
its proper domain from purely mathematico-scientific
accounts of reality? The more profound epistemological
lesson to be drawn from Copernicanism, of course, is not
that of a simple role-reversal. It is that of a gap opened
up between a mathematical model freed from the contin
gencies of human visibility, and the efforts of intuition and
imagination - conditioned by those very contingencies to 'make sense' of such absolutes. Much of Shawcross's
work seeks to locate the thinking of the artist and of the
philosopher on this fractured terrain, and to inquire after
the compromise involved.
In recent work, the artist confronts mathematical models
of space with those of an art movement that defined itself
in terms of conceptual interrogation. Artists such as Sol
Lewitt and Donald Judd, pioneering a research programme
into space as the fundamental element of artistic practice,
selected the cube as a kind of fundamental particle of
aesthetic experience; representing, apparently in the most
elementary manner, the three-dimensional Cartesian grid,
the plastic degree-zero which these artists would seek to
organise in optimally simple and modular fashion. In
Shawcross's Lattice Cube Sequence (2008) a 'barycentric
subdivision' (the cube is sliced by planes connecting the
'barycenters' which divide each of its faces into two) allows
the cube to retain maximal simplicity and symmetry, whilst
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breaking it down into a set of tetrahedrons. With this
mathematical procedure of simplification into more basic
constituent entities - the same 'simplicial approximation'
used to build up from simple forms the complex computer
graphics models used in movies - Shawcross questions
the claim of Lewitt's 1 960s cubes to be the fundamental
'simplex' of three dimensional space ('Space [ . . . ] thought
of as [ . . . ] cubic area') ,4 and reconsiders the nature of a
conceptual art practice that avowedly 'doesn't really have
much to do with mathematics, philosophy, or any other
mental discipline'.5
Lattice Cube &quence (2008)
What Shawcross explodes here is the bond between
aesthetic elegance and conceptual simplicity which the
sixties conceptualists had tried to push to the limit.
He has often tested this fundamental unity of human
aesthetic perception and mathematical elegance, confirming
4. S. Lewitt, Sol Lewitt (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1978) , 1 67.
5. lbid., 166.
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it, for instance, in his Loop System O!Jintet (2006) , a mechanised
visualisation of musical harmony. But contemporary
science yields substructures of 'basic elements' whose
configuration cedes nothing to our spontaneous image
of the world, unbinding us from the Greek heritage of
mathematico-aesthetic intuitions (Pythagorean harmony,
Platonic solids ... ) . Tracking this 'Copernican' vector, Lattice
Cube Sequence sees the serene perpendicularity of the cube
giving way to an inner structure whose complexity renders
it opaque to the eye. As the simplices explode outward,
the form of the cube itself evaporates, and with it the
cubic grid system, as if it had never been more than an
optical illusion, an anthropological artifact. The rotational
'grammar' of the cube, of which Lewitt was the virtuoso,
seems in retrospect a parochial dialect.
It would be wrong to imply that Lewitt himself was
uncons cious of his 'failure' in this respect : Against any
theoretical or illus trative relation to science, he argued
forthrightly for the artist's need to be 'smart enough to be
dumb'.6 And his intention, for instance, for the very first
modular cube 'to be large, but not too large',7 clearly betrays
the anthropocentric nature of his research programme.
In this respect Shawcross's piece is as much homage as
critique, since the very manufacturing and exhibiting of
Sequence opens it to the vagaries of embodied perception.
In inviting the emotions and associations occasioned by its
physical encounter to derail the precision of the scientific
model, Sequence seems designed as much to disturb
as to evoke the self-sufficient serenity of its abstruse
prototype.
6. S. Lewitt (quoted by L. R. Lippard) in Lewitt. op.cit.
7. Ibid., 4.
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Shawcross's work is characterised by this ambivalence
towards its scientific sources. Against the violence done to
the imagination by mathematical science, the deliberate,
relentless arcs of Binary Star's hefty oaken beams sing the
glory of the creative vigour of the mad inventor, the gen
tleman-amateur. With scientists' models of reality increas
ingly inimical to any grounding in metaphors drawn
from the everyday lifeworld, Shawcross's diligent physical
renderings mimic the efforts that philosophy must make
to incorporate them into the grain of language without
ceding the latter entirely to mathematical abstraction.
The artist himself has consequently qualified his machines
as 'tragic' or 'misguided' ; but the most profound content of
the work seems to lie precisely in the vacillation between
object and model that indexes its 'failure'.
From the same group of work as Lattice Cube Sequence, Slow
Arc Inside a Cube (2007) redeploys the mechanism of Binary
Star at a more abstract level. The 'slow arc' is described
by a brilliant, omnidirectional halogen bulb moving inside
a cube whose barred walls it projects onto the walls of
the installation space, in a ceaselessly shifting mapping of
object onto environment. Rather than a separate source of
light illuminating worldly objects and casting shadows, the
blinding core of the object brands the environment with the
continuous phases of its own projected image.
Shorn of Binary Star's literal reference to astronomi
cal Copernicanism, Slow Arc exerts all the more profound
pressure on philosophical (Kantian) Copernicanism, for
which the transcendental ego has become the point-source
of objectivity. Its proposed object-model scrambles the
Platonic heritage of Kantianism, and releases a cloud of
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philosophical associations. In transforming the environment
into a continuously-shifting image, Slow Arc already seems
to move through Husserlian phenomenology towards
Gabriel Catren's quantum model of objecthood. In Catren's
account, the unification of multiple phenomenal aspects
into a single object ('eidetic variation') is no longer the work
of a synthesising subject. Instead, the object itself is 'a kind
of "projector" of phases, aspects or profiles', a hallucinatory
'dream machine' with its own inner Sun.8
For Shawcross, Slow Arc bears a broader reference to
the process of scientific experimentation and discovery.
The piece was directly inspired by x-ray crystallographer
Dorothy Hodgkin's discovery of the molecular structure of
insulin, and in particular by the scientist's comparison of
the exhaustive process of extrapolating the dense protein
'cloud' from reams of chromatographic grids with 'trying
to work out the structure of a tree purely from looking at
its shadow'. Like Plato's Sun, the blinding core of the object
cannot be confronted directly, but must be speculatively
inferred as the origin of the projections thrown onto the
inner surface of a phenomenal camera obscura.
Finally, however, the source of light itself is a moving
target. It is the cage - that through which the light is
thrown to create the shifting projections - that is the only
constant. So an alternative interpretation might take up
Alberto Gualandi's post-Copernican anthropocentrism:9
8. See G. Catren 'A Throw o f the Qyantum Dice Will Never Abolish the Copernican
Revolution', this volume.
9. See A. Gualandi, 'French Philosophies of Nature and the Overturning of the
Copernican Revolution', this volume.
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The structure that locks us out of the object's core,
imprisoning us in the phenomenal realm, is also the only
constant by which we can measure that which exceeds it.
In this case, both artists and philosophers should be
wary of falling victim to another superficial reading of the
'Copernican imperative', indicating a peremptory jettisoning
of the evidence of the senses and of inherited language.
'Smart enough to be dumb' and 'misguided', a part of their
task will consist instead in probing the discontinuities and
the slippages between those blinding mathematical abstrac
tions forever closed to intuition, the shadows they cast
in experience, and the imaginary heritage with which we
struggle to make sense of them.
Fittingly for what has been read here as an extended
meditation on philosophical heliotropism, Shawcross's
latest 'irrational machine', to be unveiled in summer
2009, returns to the depths of the Earth. But Chord does
Working sketch for Chord (2009)
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not presume, like the philosopher, to drag benighted
cave-dwellers up into the light; instead it excavates
and brings to light a forgotten underground space.
A descendent of Shawcross's (2001) spinning-machine Yam,
the piece will elaborate on that work's automated weaving
of hundreds of coloured threads into a single rope. But in
Chord this process will be co-ordinated by the two halves
of a gigantic 'twin machine' to be installed in London's
disused Kingsway tram tunnel. Laying down their own
tracks as they proceed, the two machines will illuminate
the expanding space between them as their multiply-artic
ulated tri-arms fabricate a line of communication across it.
According to Shawcross's latest yarn (narrative, creation
myth, epistemological model?) , therefore, the emergence
of a linear simplicity is contemporaneous with the clearing
of the space in which it is knitted together, by intricate
machinations on the edge of darkness.
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