The return of the prodigal witch doctors -- Allan Giddy’s Active Public Sculpture
A rather decent violin player called, Albert Einstein once said that
“...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
Quoting Einstein may appear trite in this day and age but it is uniquely a propos in the context of interaction between art, science and society. It is hard to think of another, who managed to personify science and intellect and enable some of humanity’s most creative and most destructive elements.
The statement about the shared motivations of artists and scientists is heartening in that it points to a commonality of creative spirit and equally to common challenges faces by artists in their roles in society and in their relationship with general audiences, for whom the creative processes of both science and art often remain a mystery. Nonetheless contemporary political, social and environmental challenges render Einstein’s statement both anachronistic and escapist, something that luckily both contemporary artists and scientist recognize in making a concerted return to constructive and often collaborative engagement with the problems of the world. In doing so, both spheres can and have been found to encounter complementary parameters, which can be utilized to bring them closer to the societies and people they are ultimately there to serve and to enrich each other’s work.
The issue of collaboration has perhaps been easier to negotiate in Australia, where problems of isolation and smallness of the population, make inter-disciplinary connections perhaps more inevitable than in countries not afflicted by the “tyranny of distance”. Also relevant is the notion that geographic detachment dictates a certain understanding and approach to art and science which is rich in re-addressing both art and science to the connection with the environment.
One Australian artist, who is managing to single-handedly change models of perception of public art and technology, develop new modes of cooperation between artists and scientist and to influence the development of new technologies for new environmental concerns is Allan Giddy.
Giddy’s work is founded on the principle of using art as a prism for transformation of perception, communication and creating new paradigms of living and relating to our world and the environment. He is particularly sensitive to the fact that historically, scientific progress has been marred by the sponsorship of forces motivated by destruction, with much innovation even today either being sponsored or geared towards military use, intrinsically antagonistic to humanitarian ideals. Giddy’s purpose is to subvert this paradigm, with projects and works that speak intrinsically to our most humane, constructive and peaceful motivations and convert technologies to this purpose. ...Read on at:http://art-science.univ-paris1.fr/document.php?id=413
“...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
Quoting Einstein may appear trite in this day and age but it is uniquely a propos in the context of interaction between art, science and society. It is hard to think of another, who managed to personify science and intellect and enable some of humanity’s most creative and most destructive elements.
The statement about the shared motivations of artists and scientists is heartening in that it points to a commonality of creative spirit and equally to common challenges faces by artists in their roles in society and in their relationship with general audiences, for whom the creative processes of both science and art often remain a mystery. Nonetheless contemporary political, social and environmental challenges render Einstein’s statement both anachronistic and escapist, something that luckily both contemporary artists and scientist recognize in making a concerted return to constructive and often collaborative engagement with the problems of the world. In doing so, both spheres can and have been found to encounter complementary parameters, which can be utilized to bring them closer to the societies and people they are ultimately there to serve and to enrich each other’s work.
The issue of collaboration has perhaps been easier to negotiate in Australia, where problems of isolation and smallness of the population, make inter-disciplinary connections perhaps more inevitable than in countries not afflicted by the “tyranny of distance”. Also relevant is the notion that geographic detachment dictates a certain understanding and approach to art and science which is rich in re-addressing both art and science to the connection with the environment.
One Australian artist, who is managing to single-handedly change models of perception of public art and technology, develop new modes of cooperation between artists and scientist and to influence the development of new technologies for new environmental concerns is Allan Giddy.
Giddy’s work is founded on the principle of using art as a prism for transformation of perception, communication and creating new paradigms of living and relating to our world and the environment. He is particularly sensitive to the fact that historically, scientific progress has been marred by the sponsorship of forces motivated by destruction, with much innovation even today either being sponsored or geared towards military use, intrinsically antagonistic to humanitarian ideals. Giddy’s purpose is to subvert this paradigm, with projects and works that speak intrinsically to our most humane, constructive and peaceful motivations and convert technologies to this purpose. ...Read on at:http://art-science.univ-paris1.fr/document.php?id=413
