Fragments and Layers: Irreducible Complexity in the Sculpture of Ed Smith

by Frank Peseckis

[This essay was first published in 1988 in Ed Smith Sculpture/Drawings, a catalogue to accompany exhibitions of Smith's work at Frank Katz Gallery, Baltimore, MD, 14 Sculptors Gallery, New York, NY, and Five Points Gallery, East Chatham, NY, in 1988-89.]

The worth of a language is in some sense best determined by its richness of vocabulary and compactness of expression. In attempts to understand or describe something we have not before encountered, we search for new language through metaphor or allusion, borrowing terms from one field of ideas to express a perceived likeness in another. Literary terminology comes to be employed in discussions of painting, words from dance convey an implied sculptural motion, political jargon summarizes the sense of conflict experienced in a piece of music.

The language of contemporary mathematical physics is replete with subtle spatial conceptions, reflecting its evolution during this century toward progressively more complex visual thought. These are not the rudimentary classifications of elemental form -- line, triangle, circle, sphere, rectangular parallelopiped, whatever -- but wonderful topological and geometric notions -- compact region, multiply-connected space, fractal boundary, non-integer dimension, many others. They aim to bring within direct intellectual grasp the panoply of chaotic processes, erratic motions, or random structures which characterize complicated systems with many components whose physical properties appear to change unpredictably. Until recent years these phenomena were largely abandoned by theoreticians in the physical sciences, believed to lie beyond the descriptive capacities of even the most elegant mathematical symbolization. Now a new physics has risen to face complexity head on in all its permutations, and a new language of structure in space and time is one of its accomplishments.

These ideas have not yet found voice in criticism pertaining to the visual arts, nor have they consciously motivated many artists in a search for new modes of expression. This may be due simply to lack of communication between the scientific and artistic communities. Though several decades have elapsed since C.P. Snow's lament of the cultural gap between them, their sociological separation remains great. But perhaps what has been needed to bring forward this new language is the force of novel artistic invention, the creation of works whose incorporation of chaotic structure and complexity of spatial conception necessitate a matching language, one that only the contemporary mathematical sciences can supply.

Ed Smith's sculpture is on one level about minimal figuration -- what can be stripped away, how much can be broken down and removed, what must remain, for the substance of discernible figure to be preserved. Roughly textured volumes of pigmented ferrous cement are meshed with steel to suggest flesh and body, though fragmentary, as if they were recovered remnants of ancient sculpture. The sense of antiquity is reinforced by the appearance of external support with sawn timber and natural wood, organic versions of the conservator's metal rods. But the aim is to unearth figural invariance, to reveal what details of line and mass are essential to the very sense of figure. To quote Einstein, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".

The contrary to these perceptions is also on some level true. Smith's combinations of materials are not limited in their expression simply to the human figure, but are about complex form per se, form convolved in space to turn back repeatedly upon itself, form which is an amalgam of rough volumes and smooth, irregular surfaces and regular line, chaos and linear order. The works reveal countless layers of geometric detail, from the larger scales progressively to those ever smaller. This type of infinitely complex structure has been christened "fractal"¹ by Benoit Mandelbrot, its Latin root frangere indicative that these shapes are integral combinations of countless geometric fragments coexisting in an unlimited range of sizes.

Smith's work evinces the strength and solidity of random form, here rendered in cement, so that such form may at times be viewed as much as supportive of the wooden linear elements as supported by them. By doing so he breaks with a traditional sculptural anthropomorphism which equates line with the structure of bone, and mass with supported flesh. Instead Smith finds himself firmly aligned with contemporary scientific discoveries that permanence and structural durability emerge naturally from amorphous form in a wide variety of organic and inorganic material systems.

Complexity in Smith's sculpture is achieved topologically as well as with fractal geometry. His pieces are typically multiply-connected: their three-dimensional mass is punctuated with holes, allowing internal paths between points inside the work which cannot be made to overlap by any continuous deformation which stays within the piece. This is in contrast to, say, the organic monoliths of William Tucker, which share Smith's concern with fractal surfaces but whose volumes are uninterrupted units, i.e. simply connected spaces. The multiplicity of topological connections between internal points is experienced externally as a corresponding multiplicity of passages through the work, demanding from the viewer a thorough three-dimensional involvement which is not merely circumferential.

As in all irreducible complexes, the dualities within Smith's work generate conflicting elements which synthesize. Yet there is a unity of complexity from the fractal forms he employs which strikes one as more graceful and profound than any mere Hegelian melding of antithetical elements. The mutually supportive spaces of chaos and order, the multiple layers of geometric detail and topological connection, their variation in scale and density from one layer to the next, all produce and proceed from a hierarchy of meaning which displays the integrated structure of a cohesive though irregular whole.

One of the most fascinating, if not mysterious, insights of modern theoretical physics is that the most general laws of nature can be expressed as extremum principles. These state that the changes in any system occur in such a way that some property (which property determines the type of principle) tends toward the minimum or maximum quantity it can attain.

For much of the twentieth century sculpture seems to have evolved in accordance with some principle of geometric minimization: fewer elements, simpler shapes, smoother forms, more regular lines. And there is a poetry to minimal constructions, much as there is elegance to the notion that a straight line is the shortest path between two points (in a flat space of course).

Sculpture composed of fractal structures also follows an extremum principle, but one of maximization. Smith's constructions richly exemplify this abundance and variety of geometric form intrinsic to fractal shapes. For what form would a path take between two points if it were to be not the shortest but the longest path? It would be fractal; it would possess structure no matter how finely examined. Infinite length along its path between any two points is a mathematically precise defining property of truly irregular, truly random, fractal shape.

So we encounter another of Smith's dualities: his work supplants traditional constructivism by extending it. He shares the constructivist appreciation of ordinary materials rather than the bronze and polished stone of refined art. His technique is similarly accretive, a process of building form in an initially empty space by adding material, rather than a process of removing material from a pre-existing mass or of reshaping it. He shares the constructivist urge for a geometric vocabulary for sculptural form.

But his accretive technique is densely layered. His geometric vocabulary is not elementary Euclid but contemporary chaos theory. He has replaced simple line and curve and associated volumes with irreducibly complex fractals. The break with constructivism is Kuhnian², just as is the break of chaos theory from traditional linear physics.

The separate, coexisting regions of chaos and order in Smith's sculpture are to some extent made evident by the separate materials of timber and cement. The natural tree limbs and milled lumber develop line; in the artist's words, they are "drawing in space, a David Smith kind of linear structure." Varied types of line reflect the character of their associated woods. The organic shapes are already vested with nearly excessive personality, while commercial timber acquires a more personal line by its interplay with other geometric elements. These interactions use line to pose a question of emotional duality: while line is often supportive and structural, at the same time it can function as a containing and restrictive bound to its neighboring forms.

Smith does not view his use of cement as something apart from drawing. "Drawing in space can be moving mass, it isn't just linear structure. It can be layering. I want it to be random." As line varies with the different types of wood, so mass varies with the different ways of layering cement: how thick are they, what sizes are the units of cement with which they are built, how densely are those units placed, how much are they blended together or made discrete.

Mathematically these factors can be taken together in one measure of the roughness layering produces, the fractal dimension of the shape. Fractal dimension measures how much space is in a chaotic form, as our ordinary meaning of dimension measures space, but its number need not be integer like 1 or 2 or 3 but may be any in between. Different types of chaos have different dimensions; the more space the random structure takes, the greater it is. And with each subtle variation in the texture of chaos comes altered meaning and new impression.

To move mass in fractal form is to sense dynamically what it is to draw. Smith says "when I sculpt I see with my body, not just my eyes but my brain, my arms, my legs. I think more and more that drawing and sculpture are the same." This can be so only if one's visual imagination is not limited to integer dimensions, where line is line and flat is flat and volume is volume. Through chaos, through fractal form, emerges a continuum of dimension in drawing from line to plane to volume, a unity of spatial conception wrought eloquently in Ed Smith's work.

Frank Peseckis is a theoretical physicist who writes about art.

1. Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman, San Francisco, 1983.
2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1970

Figure 1. Ed Smith in his studio
Figure 2. Elgin Lapith, 1986, 4'x3'x2', structolite, steel, and pigments
Figure 3. Warrior Metope, 1987, 7'x9'x4', cement, wood, steel, pigments
Figure 4. Beebeville, 1988, 3'x4'x3', structolite, wood, steel, pigments