Science and Society

When I told a friend that I would be taking Studio Art over J-term at dinner in November, she laughed and warned me that the final projects would be a challenge. I snorted with derision. Studio Art wasn’t a science class; so how difficult could it be, really?

Pride comes before the fall. I just got out of my second Monday class, and I’m not laughing; I’m getting steamrolled. “Disaster” would be a generous description of Thursday’s perspective exercise. I’ve realized I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. My handwriting and my thoughtlessness when it comes to the relationship between an object and its labeling text were both pronounced “sloppy”. My professor eyed my incomplete still life drawing assigned over the weekend with a mixture of disappointment and disdain and made a passing comment about incomplete drawings demonstrating a lack of commitment to both the art and the class. Thinking art effortless, I hadn’t given myself enough time to complete the assignment.

Studio Art delivered swift retribution for my arrogance; I’ve been humbled, shamed, deflated. My pride has been exposed as a crutch.

How was it a crutch? I wanted to believe that the lens through which I choose to view the world – as a molecular biologist (an oversimplification, but necessary for the sake of brevity) - as superior because those lenses brings structure and meaning to my existence.  Why did I pine for superiority? It probably had something to do with a sense of insecurity about my conception of self that results in a breed of hyper-competitiveness. I was deluded into thinking that if my worldview were superior, I would somehow win the game of life.

My need to structure my experience into a meaningful pattern is neither an anomaly nor a negative need. I’ve created a self, labeled part of it “molecular biologist,” and as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “Every piece of information [I] process gets evaluated for its bearing on [that] self. Does it threaten [my] goals, does it support them, or is it neutral?” My self-conception is a yardstick I use to measure and judge incoming information. It is a useful scheme insofar as it helps me understand day-to-day experience.

But that yardstick becomes problematic when used competitively, to judge another conception of the world as better or worse. I think that in my arrogance, I had relegated art to a position of inferiority in my mind to validate my own worldview, in which art did not yet have a place.

Reality proves again and again to be infinitely more complicated than any conception of it that a human or society can dream up. This complexity can either be a negative force of entropy or a positive source of richness and enrichment depending on an individual’s mindset. When the self is used as a tool of self-validation to ward off complexity out of fear of entropy, it becomes problematic, a cage in which we lock our minds.

My self was locked in this cage when I shrugged off Studio Art I. I wanted it to be “easy” because I was afraid to conceive of it as anything but; to do so meant acknowledging that the world worked in ways beyond what I conceived of as possible as a molecular biologist.

I’m glad I enrolled in the class, and I’m glad it’s kicking my ass. I think I’ve managed to liberate my self, even if only briefly. Today, for the first time in my life, I walked around campus looking at the buildings and landscape with the eye of an artist; I found vanishing points and horizon lines, and have a whole new appreciation for the aesthetics of the steel I-beams of the Proctor ceiling.