Illustrating Art and Science: Metaphor and Cutaway

Slope

Reductionist Art

 

Visitor: What’s it mean?

Artist: It’s the slope of my life.

Visitor: Getting better every day?

Artist: No, no. It represents my accumulation of debt. If you buy the painting, you could help reverse the trend.

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Voice-over

Anatomy

Reductionist art. There are various strains, ranging from metaphorical as above to cutaway drawing developed in the Renaissance. Janvan Calcar (1499-1546), illustrated the anatomical findings of Andreas Vesalius in this way.

Metaphorical art is about crossing boundaries of narration and feeling. It is symbolic. It is usually about art (and sometimes art for art’s sake).

Cutaway illustration, on the other hand, is about detailed explanation of underlying elements, structures or processes. Art in the service of science and technology.

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Pictures at an Exhibition

Two critics discuss the works at the Out of Doubt exhibition…

Cavillor: Why is it called “Furniture Art”? Because there actually isn’t any furniture in it. There are hands, and I can see a rhinoceros or two. It reminds me of a play by Eugene Ionesco, Rhinocéros, in which two people in a café are having a conversation while a rhinoceros runs back and forth along the street in front of them. But at least the artist could draw.

Katherina: The buckets of cement with wires coming out I liked. Perhaps the artist meant to invoke a sense of space. But I also felt the arrangement produced a sense of clutter, much as we navigate our way through the clutter of an urban environment. With these kinds of installations, you're never sure if the artist has any graphic skills or not.

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Voice-over

Inverse Proportion between Graphic Art Skills
and Level of Absurdity and Reductionism in Modern Art

The reference to Ionesco makes a link between some examples of modern art and the theater of the absurd.  Sometimes might there even be a correlation between the lack of graphic skills such as drawing or painting the greater degree of absurdity? Or perhaps reductionism. But maybe this hypothesis could also be challenged as a reductio ad absurdum.

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