Open Systems and Emergent Forms: The Art of Noel Forster

1. The organisation of abstraction

All art is has an aspect of abstraction – thus any discussion about the organisation of abstraction covers a vast field of the lineaments of painting. One can talk in terms of the construction of perspective, the organisation of the surface, the use of proportional and organisational devices such as the golden section or other numerological theories such as in Piero and others. In this sense the mathematics of abstraction has a long history that extends back into the origins of mathematics in mysticism and numerology.

However the ‘abstraction’ used in this way is not an end in itself, but always a means of better expressing a topic. Panofsky’s great book on the development of perspective shows essentially how the use of this constructional device better allowed the physical representation of the godhead. One can look at art right across the spectrum in terms of significant form and organisational devices. Philip Rawson, in his formative and profound writing on drawing, shows how one can deconstruct the formal elements of a particular artist’s method, and in many cases through drawing’s transparency, reconstruct the process of the creation of an image. Several things come out of such an analysis. Firstly, the recognition that, in good artists, abstract formal devices are the absolute core of their communication and concern as they develop an image. In his analysis of drawings by Rembrandt, Titian, Poussin and many others, Rawson shows how the core vocabulary of this communication is essentially a series of formal devices and that these are elaborated in the construction of the ‘tenor’ of the image. So the psychological merging of lovers in Titian’s Venus and Adonis is made possible by his formal use of enclosures and linked shadow paths making merging notional bodies. In the more linear Poussin drawing of struggling torsos it is the building of what Rawson calls the gamut of lines that communicates the import of the picture. Above all his wonderful analysis of Rembrandt shows how the formal structures and gestural marks generate the import of the image.

But Rawson also makes the critical point that, despite these formal and essentially abstract elements of the language of drawing, they are in most traditions directed towards a purpose which is a topic external to the drawing itself, usually a ‘subject’. The formal elements depend on an external signifier to give them meaning. Thus while the vocabulary of drawing may be abstract, what is communicated is a topic. Rawson uses this as an argument against ‘abstraction’ as a movement: a language just talking about itself .

One can plot the history of 20th century painting by the different routes that have been taken to move beyond this apparent impasse: Is it possible to find a topic for abstraction which is not representation? Early attempts to do this are not of course entirely what they may at first have seemed, so it is a well known but still fascinating cultural episode that led the Blaue Reiter artists, especially Kandinsky and Marc, to develop the first ‘abstractions’ which were essentially not abstractions per se but representations of theosophic auras. Abstraction as a representation of the metaphysical remained a common theme and in that sense continues the tradition of the sublime into the 20th century: a representation at the edge of what is known, an intuition of the unknowable, as in Rothko or Newman.

Other approaches used science or pseudoscience as the basis of the organisation of abstraction. One interesting manifestation of this was in the Bauhaus group, particularly through the theory and teaching of Paul Klee. Klee made an effort to elucidate the key components of visual communication in a scientific way and to develop a form of abstraction based on the logic of these materials and methods. He argued that by building the picture from the laws of visual communication, both drawing and colour, the picture would build itself. Whilst sometimes these pictures remained abstract, more usually the interesting process happened for Klee where the picture ‘spoke to him’ and suggested a topic from itself. In this sense Klee was re-enacting in modern terms the traditional technique of building the picture according to compositional rules towards the representation of a topic. The difference was that the topic was not preordained, it emerged out of the construction of the picture and (presumably) his own subliminal preoccupations and projections onto the abstract shapes. In this of course Klee linked himself to preoccupations of surrealism, and a second way of generating an abstract meaning; through automatism.

Psychic automatism and Abstract Expressionism represent a radical orientation or emphasis towards a situation where the topic is the subjective state of the artist. This third way of organising abstraction is essentially around subjective expression and the belief in the communicative power of ‘automatic’ marks. The organising force of the picture is perhaps a mental state; the picture is a portrait of the subjective psyche. It led to the great breakthroughs of Tobey, Pollock etc.

2. Abstraction and systems

This era brings us to the 50s and 60s and to the influence of systems theory. Systems theory has two roots relevant to this argument. The first is a root in understanding biology, evolution and complexity. In traditional understanding the topic of evolution was God. What I mean by this is that the evolution of form in nature, the gradual increase in complexity and functional elaboration in species, the emergence of mind and human capability – what came to be called the ‘Great Chain of Being’ – had as its end point and topic the notion of God. As they evolved, organisms came to reflect God more and more clearly, their design could be understood in terms of this increasing approximation and the explanation for their emergent properties and quality could be found in the working of God’s purpose.

The extraordinary shift of Darwinism led to an inversion of this progression. Remove God from the picture and you removed the ‘topic’ and as it were the destination of this evolution. In Darwin’s secular universe evolution just happens and is more or less successful. Complexity emerges and is more or less useful. One of the many extraordinary issues raised by this idea relates intimately to the art of abstraction and the cultural dilemmas that it comments on. If there is no topic for these emergent forms, how to explain their presence? How to explain the meaning of design without a final purpose in mind and the generation of such intricacy without a guiding intelligence?

Systems theory is one theoretical model which proved useful in thinking about these extraordinary problems. Its topic was the emergence of complexity out of simpler elements; and the processes by which simpler elements self-organise to emergent complexity. To do this, systems theory recruited the second strand of its thinking; from areas of engineering and machines. Perhaps the key features of the resulting theory that are relevant for the current argument are these: firstly, the notion of open and closed systems; secondly, the notion of self organisation; thirdly, the notion of emergent forms. On the one hand these are biological metaphors, on the other aspects of mathematical modelling and machine design. Biological forms are characterised by open systems – that is organisms exchanging information and energy with the environment around. Simple elements combining together in a lawful way tend to self-organise, and this self organisation can result in emergent structures that are of a higher order of complexity to the constituent elements. This emergence of complexity from repeated simple lawful combination of simple elements is a key feature. The power of this idea self evidently is that complexity can be sui generis and requires no transcendent design. The emerging form is also often unexpected and unpredictable and this is the element of systems theory that was elaborated into chaos theory.

The cultural relevance of this kind of systems theory to art seems to me considerable. Firstly, it provides a rationale for a procedure to generate meaning within abstraction. One can trust that the systematic application of particular kinds of repeated procedures would not result a barren repetition of mechanical events, but the emergence of the higher order complexity which would intrinsically contain meaning. The key thing here is that systems theory allows for the generation of complexity sui generis, there is no need for the art process to refer to an outside (representational) topic.

This then leads to the second relevance of systems theory in cultural terms, which is that it supports the cultural centrality and meaning of abstract art. With its effort to generate meaning out of itself without reference to another representation, abstract art if properly done can be both an example of and an emblem of the emergence of meaning and form. It demonstrates how meaning can arise from material, not as a representation of the metaphysical (this kind of art is strictly antithetical to the metaphysical): not as a projection of the artist’s subjective state (this is not abstract expressionism), but as a demonstration of how method can generate meaning. As we will see, it certainly can touch on the sublime in the sense of generating a metaphor in which higher orders of organisation, meaning and consciousness are intuited: it can bring us to the threshold of what is not known, but with an intuition that it could be known. However, it does this through a disciplined application of rule and process which is essentially how we now understand biology works. It is not therefore a representation of the mind of its creator (the artist), just as biological form is not in the end a representation in the mind of its creator (God). It is a metaphor of the way meaning can be emergent from complexity. In this sense in the end it is a metaphor for, rather than a representation of, mind.

3. Noel Forster

Academicism can be found anywhere. The ‘academic’ application of systems theory to the generation of art can result in a sterile formulaic presentation, which has given this form of abstraction often a bad name, for people inclined to be hostile to it. There have been artists who have used the notion of system as a static formula. The result is usually pretty sterile, usually in systems terms a ‘closed system’. The key point of difference here is the notion of process rather than formula.

Noel Forster has on the contrary used these ideas to generate a much more creative procedure for making abstract paintings. Because he hit on such a good idea early on he has not needed to change it. The procedure, although seemingly relatively straight forward, has succeeded in generating a body of work of considerable variation and development over time. There are several elements to the procedure that are relevant here. Firstly, the vivid phenomena of Moiré or interference patterns. Secondly the idea of the gravitation free field. Thirdly, emerging forms that arise, but are not imposed or predicted.

He says that 80% of visual art is paradoxically not visual but tactile and this is an important aspect of the method. Thus the paint is applied by hand using arcing movements of each arm to avoid any subjective manual signature or ‘style’ in the old sense. However, the colours and texture of paint applied are subject to human making, mixing and selection. There will usually be three primary nets of arcs laid down in this way. Following the initial selection of mixing of colour the procedure is relatively mechanical. It involves arcs of paint laid in brush width lines across the canvas and then another such net superimposed after a predetermined degree of rotation. This simple repeated act –like breathing or walking – contains rhythm or shape and motive or direction. This is the building block of his work - a procedure rather than an element of form. Two things, both procedural and symbolic, flow from this. Firstly, the procedure generates interference patterns as the grids overlap each other. Secondly and importantly, the rotation generates what Forster calls a gravity-free field. This is very interesting. It means that the painting is liberated from the usual implicit orientations of vertical and horizontal (which are even present in a tondo). Such vertical and horizontal orientation aligns itself to the sense of being upright and seeing oneself against a horizontal horizon - in other words the experience of existing in gravity. This fundamental orientation is well discussed by Klee in his ‘Thinking Eye’ as resulting in a symbolic grammar that underlies much of traditional pictorial construction, including perspective, the golden mean, the rule of thirds, the creation of distance, etc. The importance of this in abstract art links to ways in which a lot of abstract art is not really abstract at all but subliminal representation of hidden topics (take some of Mondrian’s early work). It reaches further expression in that of Barnet Newman where the vertical stripes and a sense of human consciousness are intimately linked. The cultural importance of this is reflected in all the old jokes about abstract art which are variations on the theme of “which way up should it go?” Forster disallows all of these anthropocentric references through the rotational technique which creates, as he says, a gravitation-free field. It is also why a lot of his work works best in tondo format. And it doesn’t matter which way up it is hung.

There is a substantive section of his work where Forster plays with these ideas in a really interesting way, by defining ‘gravitation dependant’ and ‘gravitation free’ elements within a single image. The tension between these generates a really interesting disconnection. The ‘crack’ between them allows an intuition of the border of what is known and what is not known, in other words a way again of generating a feeling akin to the sublime.

The criss-crossing ‘nets’ in his paintings have other obvious references and resonances, particularly with weaving and all the hand craft tradition that this implies. Woven strands are strong, containing, can be bent or shaped into three dimensional structures, and carry resonance of basketry, cloth, fabric, rug making: the list is endless. Whilst these are comfortable references, and reinforce the sense of tactile value in the work and its grounding in everyday human concerns, it is an easy misreading of the work to take this as in some sense a topic. The paintings are not representations of weavings. However the technique is not diminished, but is given extra solidity, by this association.

The real thrust of the work is much more abstract. Having generated these interference or Moiré patterns, Forster then underlies or amplifies the effect by highlighting the intersections with an additional colour application according again to a predetermined formula. With a basic pattern of three interlocking coloured groups, there are logically four types of intersection (AB, AC, BC, ABC); these different intersections can be assigned different colours, so that the three original colours can get joined by four more. These intersection forms are the first ‘emergent’ elements in the pieces. They are marked but not generated by the artist. Rather they are generated by the procedure of the painting. However there are choices to be made, for instance in the paint, colour and texture used to mark the intersections. The higher order pattern generated by the procedure is unpredictable, but feels extremely deep. This is accounted for by the fact that although the patterning is apparently random, one intuits that it is formed by some kind of inherent although hidden organisation. The patterning then stands as both a demonstration of form emerging from a process, and a metaphor for the quality of emergent form from other processes. Because much of our own mental experience is composed of such emergent organisational forms, this patterning seems deeply recognisable to us - hence the sense of depth.

One has to ask why this works so well when a kind of formulaic systems approach just creates pretty patterns. I think the answer lies in the tactile values and crafted elements of these paintings. This is poles apart from the kind of trivial complexity inherent in for instance Damian Hirst’s spin paintings. These spin paintings have a procedure underlying them (throwing paint at a spinning wheel) but the procedure generates utterly trivial and boring results. Anything ‘nice’ that might emerge from such spin paintings is completely random and essentially decorative. This is because this procedure is neither a demonstration of, nor a metaphor for, any complex system process. If it is a metaphor for anything, it is for a sort of ‘explosion’ or ‘anarchy’ of the ‘shit hits the fan’ variety. If it is a demonstration of anything, it is of the characteristics of mechanical reproduction. In other words what is intrinsic to the process is a mechanically spinning wheel, in itself a closed system. In a way this is a sort of destructive art (either simply cynically destructive of meaning, or implying a meaning related to hopelessness and destruction), and the contrast is with the constructivism of Forster’s method. By contrast to spin painting Forster generates hand made marks by the action of his body (arm movements). One could generate similar interference patterns mechanically, for instance using a computer. There would be emergent form here, but it would probably have a mechanical decorative quality. So what makes Forster’s marks different? Presumably it is that at every level there is the operation of mind on the making, as well as the kind of human scale, inaccuracies or variations that humans are very used to intuiting when they see them (he has talked of the importance of ‘errors’). This application of mental process manifested as choice occurs at every stage. So for instance the initial choice of colours will often be dictated by symbolic concerns; experience of earth, sky and water, symbolic resonance of colour, the working of memory etc. Forster has a rule only to use pigments derived from natural elements or natural type oxidation processes in a furnace. So he will use siennas, umbers, cadmiums, sepias, but not azo dyes, chromes or chemical pigments. Here is an ethical and personal choice being made. He then uses particular tools; a particular size of brush, and a particular texture of paint. The paintings are done on linen or silk, sized or primed in the traditional manner. Then the grids are made not as in some other systems type work, according to a mathematically measured series of intervals, but with proportions drawn by the eye and measured by a manual arc. All these details result in marks that reflect the movement of mind and body on a human scale and reflect human experience of colour and feeling. Because of this, Forster’s work is locked into a human dimension. The systems element lies in the way that he generates form. This is true abstraction, because there is no topic beyond the painting, only that which arises from within it. However, because the basic elements of the painting derive from personal marks on a human scale, the resulting emergent form and meaning does reflect higher order human experience. There are other kinds of systems works which are more impersonal in terms of their basic elements. Properly done, these can generate higher order meanings that are equally interesting, if in a more impersonal way. Forster’s works remain intensely personal and human scale. The emergent forms are not simply decorative but have higher order human meaning because of the detailed choices he puts into the making. This does represent the use of systems ideas as a solution to the problem of meaning and topic in abstraction, and it does so on a human scale that means in the end that Forster’s art, like much really good art, is essentially an embodiment of human thinking and experience.

The final quality of his works relates to their open system character. The forms that come are emergent and not controlled. These emergent forms re-combine into higher order complexity. Because there is no closure, the process allows a metaphor for further endless growth, ie transcendence. So they do point to what we normally think of as spiritual experience. On his wall Forster has his own photographs of the famous rose windows at Chartres which allow a metaphor for the linkage. But he also has pictures of the emergent forms of butterfly wing markings developed through evolutionary pressure. Somewhere between these two phenomena lie our more modern notions of transcendence; and in their cultural context, these paintings of Forster’s point to this through the workings of biological systems and human activity. This is one answer to what the activity of painting can do in the age of mechanical reproduction. Not bad and still relevant.

4. Open system house

Forster’s ‘open system’ house embodies the process. Jung built a house to represent his psyche. Forster lives in a space that suits his creativity. Levels of the house are permeated with gaps in the floor and walls with holes. The house is nicely permeated with open space, although you have to be careful where you tread. Fixed points in the design are the accessing light through windows, and making music through an organ and a piano. Food and sleep also have their space. This house takes the concept of ‘open plan’ to new dimensions. It is definitely semi-permeable. Indeed it has recently been flooded. Throughout his paintings hang either in free space or against walls and inhabit rooms like guests. At one end he has created a stained glass effect against his windows looking east. At the other end he can play Bach organ preludes in the evening. It is a fine oeuvre.

France
August 2004