Why I read Pynchon (pointer to article)

[Doug Millison]

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/essay_jencks_aug01/index.html

"[...]Yet the question of beauty is deeper than mere pattern formation: the
formal aspect of beauty, its foundation, concerns the intensification of
patterns. Put in a nutshell, this first principle of beauty is patterns
about patterns, or patterns squared. By this I mean the way in which the
artist plays with patterns--cubes, curves, fractals, blobs or any forms--so
that they refer to themselves. The self-referential notion of the aesthetic
sign makes us attend to the plane of expression as if it were the content.
It heightens sense perception, whether it is information coded as sound,
taste, smell, touch or visual form. [...] Patterns about patterns, patterns
squared or heightened, are produced by nature. I may seem a bit hung up on
this notion of patterns as the foundation for an objective beauty, and
indeed I am: the reason is that, as mathematicians are telling us, they are
the most basic things in nature. They are deeper than the maths (which only
discovers their algorithms) and much deeper than our eye or mind. At the
beginning of the universe supersymmetry reigned, the primeval symmetrical
fireball misnamed the big bang. From then on it is symmetry-breaking, all
the way down to the present. More and more interesting patterns arise--which
is not to say they are all beautiful. It is only those which call attention
to themselves through some rhetorical means, some aesthetic manipulation or
accidental heightening, which pass the minimum foundational test. Beyond
that I would argue that heightened patterns which are highly interrelated
and more complex than simpler patterns are more sustaining; they allow
deeper and more different readings, and for that reason are more
long-lasting. [...] This implies that there might be an abstract code of
beauty at some deeper level of perception, a point put to me by the sculptor
Anish Kapoor when I mentioned the importance of the first principle,
patterns heightened. He countered with the intriguing idea that beauty is
the presence of the absence of any pattern, and pointed out the positive way
we respond to "all-overness," a quality that his own work exploits. It often
consists of an all-over colour, a single pigment such as deep red or dark
purple, and a continuously varying shape which seemingly has no beginning,
end, dimensionality or pattern. In his sculptures boundaries are vague;
depth is impossible to determine. They draw us into an experience because we
cannot figure them out: mind-teasers, sense-teasers, impossibility-teasers.
All these works engage the viewer in a speculative activity, they invite the
projection of inner sensations on to a void. Most people find the work, or
activity of projection, "beautiful." [...]