Art Review Article for Embryonic Landscapes

Artwork by Ariel Ruiz i Altaba, Artist and Genetic Researcher

Writer: Tamara Gurbis
Artists website: http://www.ruizialtaba.com/

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EMBRYONIC LANDSCAPES
English and Spanish editions
85 photographs and 23 texts
Published by ACTAR

I laid out the fourteen sheets, each with their six images, on the living room floor
of my apartment. On the background of my outdated yellow shag carpeting, the
black and white images were striking. Of course, I had
jotted down, weeks before, my immediate emotional
and thought associations to Ariels images: solitary,
fleshy, planetary, probing, erotic, gaping, potentiality,
explosive. They seemed much like the Rorschach inkblot
tests used in psychological analysis. I wondered, too if
other people in other professional fields would have
similar associations. For all I knew scientifically about
these images, I could have been
describing a mutant gene or moribund
cell as sensual.

My next impulse was to cut the images apart and even into
smaller pieces and put them in the form of a storyboard, a tool
of my trade and art. Actually, I was once challenged with a
similar storytelling feat. I was to use microscopic specimens as
characters for a short film. A friend compared it to an attempt to make sense
out of a pile of toothpicks. I could see the story emerging
though an eye piercing through the darkness, a silent
embryo oscillating in its dark liquid, tentacles swishing,
a penetration through a hairy fringe, the primordial release
of movement in spermatic form, an exploding light unto
replication of textures.

What I describe herein as my perception of these images is unlikely to be the

approach taken by, say, a genetic researcher. I am aware. This difference (or
dichotomy, in some opinions) brings to mind a novel discussing the seemingly
ongoing split between art and science. Robert Persig, for discursive purposes, in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance divides human understanding into two
modes: classical and romantic. A classical understanding sees the world
primarily in terms of immediate appearancemotorcycle riding is romantic,
motorcycle maintenance is classical. One is instinctual, expressive, and creative
and the usual gamut of artsy adjectives; the other proceeds by laws and
reason, and other similar abiding descriptions.

Now I ask you, which perspective, in my attempt to respond to Ariels images, do

you think I fall into? Romantic, right? Admittedly, in description, though what if I
were to go ahead and make a film based on his images using some of the
descriptions from my storyboard? Apart from the storys concept, I would need to
know what type of film stock to use, how to load and operate a camera and
determine correct exposure settings, which lens to use and its focal distance, and
the handling and film processing methods. This list only scratches the surface of
the many technical considerations and different knowledge needed to make a
film, not including such things as sound production or editing.

Not a far cry from motorcycle maintenance or microscopic imaging, this part of
the filmmaking process is classical creativity. I must observe the laws inherent to
those procedures. I have spent many joyous, adrenaline-filled hours filming, only
to disappointingly unravel a black or clear strip of celluloid. I guess that I should
look positively at those moments as learning experiences for I will never make
the mistake again, for example, of shooting a memorable sunset without
adjusting the exposure two f-stops down from my light meter reading. I really
dont even like the word mistake for many discoveries happened out of sheer
accident. So in the end, I suppose that I am on even par between the mis-
takes and discoveries.

I also retain, despite those unexpected outcomes, and probably the most
essential existentially, the moments of eye candy. Eye-candy, beyond superficial
sensory gluttony, is the feeling of being totally one with what I am seeing, albeit,
though a viewfinder the size of a matchbook. I am actually feeling the bold gold
and orange of the sunset slip into serene aquarelle of turquoise and rose. There
is a time when you have mastered enough of the technical aspect that it goes on
automatic pilot, so to say. You dont think about it anymore; you are your
camera, you and your subject, all at once. Everything is poetry then. Everything
is fluid.

Thus, the necessity of gaining experience of both modes of understanding,

classical and romantic, goes hand and hand. Persig devoted many pages to
explain the merging of the two, but asserts one leitmotif: Quality. Quality, as I
understand it, is the reflection of this fluidity, how the end result was come by,
the state of mind in which the work was achieved. This is essential.
Another example I can give is borrowed from an encounter with a Japanese artist
while I was doing research for a sociological paper on street performers. The first
time I met her, she was immersed in her strange dance in front of an audience of
two hundred or more people in the plaza of the George Pompidou Center in Paris.
Accompanied by the music of Phillip Glass, she had several different materials,
tinfoil, cellephane and plastic bags pierced with holes into which she would
contort her body. She called these materials her collaborators, and also
included the wind and other natural elements as her guides in movement and
space. In one of her trance-formational dances, she would slowly emerge from
her bright yellow plastic-bag cocoon to become the butterfly with sun-filtered,
transparent yellow wings.

She later explained to me that she had been a painter and had had many
exhibitions at many galleries, but she was still dissatisfied with the end product.
Beautiful paintings they may be, but the viewer never saw the process, a process
she explained as a dance with the brushes, the paint and even the space within
her studio. She wanted to visibly show through her gestures, and her
metaphorical and purely spontaneous choreography the state of mind somewhere
between play and concentration. You felt her there. In her dances, she embodied
Quality as a live, continually changing painting with the greatest of technique.

Although written more than twenty-five years ago, Id like to cite Mr. Persig once
again for it is still pertinent today: At present weve snowed under with an
irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there is not
rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are
also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts thin art because
theres very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists
with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both
with no sense of gravity at all, the result is just not bad, it is ghastly. The time
for reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.

For good art exudes a profound universality; a

commonality that can spur questioning and varied
responses in a large number of viewers. Sometimes an
artwork will speak to a particular culture or
generation, or even inspire diverse peoples throughout
many periods of time. It taps into what Carl Jung
called the collective unconscious, a bank of images
or symbols, stemming from experience, and embossed
in the memory and collective mind of humanity. Ariels snake images, for
instance, dont seem like the menacing creatures they are reputed, in common
thought, to be. In fact, they appear to me as tender, almost melancholy as they
wander over vast plains of other-worldly landscapes. Perhaps this is their faade
to lure us to knowledge. The snake too has been related to life-force, as in The
Aesculpian Staff or Caduceus, the medical symbol of a staff entwined by two
serpents in the form of a double helix. Jung also points out that in myths, the
symbol of the snake is a frequent counterpart of the hero. There are numerous
accounts of their affinity.

Ariels images, while delicate and sensitive, are also heroic.

They are a model of the unified vision of scientist and artist,
of simultaneous classical and romantic modes of
understanding. Just as Ariels images are fragile and
enduring, destructible and invincible, they are both at once.
His images and approach exemplify the Quality of divisions
that never were.