[This essay was first published to accompany the thirteenth ARTWORKS presentation, June 24 - October 29, 1995, in the Williams College Museum of Art's series of exhibitions of contemporary art. The installation involved a collaboration among Bill Botzow, an artist and art advocate; Tony Carruthers, who works in performance design, video, and media; and Frank Peseckis, a theoretical physicist and art critic. Combining sculpture, video, drawing, and painting, the two visual artists explore the perpetual flux of nature observable in streams, underbrush, grass, and leaves. The exhibition itself has been designed to be continually changing, mirroring nature's energy and movement. In his essay Mr. Peseckis connects the artists' observations of natural phenomena to current thinking in physics and mathematics.

ARTWORKS: Bill Botzow and Tony Carruthers -- Shift was organized by Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Curator of Exhibitions at Williams College Museum of Art. The ARTWORKS series was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of the museum's general operating funds for the 1995 fiscal year was provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency that offers general operating support to the nation's museums.

Portions reprinted in part with permission of the Williams College Museum of Art.]

We have all become pluralists. At least it seems that way. Ideology is dead or comatose in art, philosophy, politics, everywhere. Practicality killed it - no matter the details of the dominant ideology, each failed because it did not work. Now that we have seen that no ideology works by itself, we have become samplers. We take what seems most sensible from each and fashion a set of ideas that, like a custom suit, fits us best.

We should ask if this failure of ideology across so many disciplines is simply a transitional period to the re-establishment of new ideologies. We should ask whether we are just witnessing an accident, a coincidental collapse of flawed systems that await replacement by better-unified approaches. These questions are contained within Bill Botzow and Tony Carruthers' exhibition Shift, and I believe their answers are in the negative. It is not just these particular recent ideologies that have been shown to be flawed, but ideology itself, if it is conceived as a rigid understanding of things developed from a single, dominating perspective.

I do not mean by this that their work is didactic, in the sense of giving answers. Shift asks questions. It asks questions in a way that holds the entirety of their suggested answers. Botzow and Carruthers' method is dynamic; it moves from one perspective to another to induce in the viewer a similar movement of seeing that reveals the limitations -- the failure -- of the static, cyclopic gaze of ideology.

I am reminded of descriptions of the great theoretical physicist Yoichiro Nambu. Nambu has contributed in an essential way to the formulation of many of the most important ideas in contemporary high energy physics -- the idea that particles arise from the breaking of symmetries of nature, that certain of these particles provide a mechanism for the origin of mass in other particles, that stringlike structures are important to the interaction and identity of particles, that one class of particles, quarks, is held together by another, gluons, to form the nuclear particles we are familiar with in atoms. His former student Madhusree Mukerjee says of Nambu, "While working with [him] I noticed that he would look at a problem from several different, yet simultaneous, points of view. It was as if instead of one mind's eye he had at least two, giving him stereoscopic vision into physical systems."¹

Visual art and science are both about how we view things, about the integrity of our observations. Scientific concerns are explicitly about knowing, but knowing -- perhaps more accurately expressed as experiencing -- is similarly essential to the arts. Like Nambu, Botzow and Carruthers build a complexity of perspective. They do so in part from the subtle changes of stance and thought required of the viewer to take in their work. They never dictate the focus of a piece directly, and so transcend the limitations of a single predefined approach.

In several instances it almost does not make sense to speak of "this" piece rather than "that" in the exhibition. The physical space used by a video projection and system of monitors may overlap or intersect or reinforce the space of a construction hung from the ceiling, which is in turn within the "normal" viewing space of an array of wall-hung images. In the viewer who takes the time to gather in all these perspectives, these experiences will form a sense of unfiltered awareness of the things "as they are." There is a freshness to our sight that comes from the disruption of preseeing and preconceiving, both of which depend upon finding the expected for their operation. It is as though we can see directly into things through the active and changing participation of our ideas, in conjunction with the physical perceptions of our eyes and hands and other senses.

There is much in this exhibition that feels like a fluid in motion, at times turbulent, at times serene. The pieces flow into one another and out again, and they lead the viewer to mimic these actions. The form and imagery of the works repeat this fluidity. There are video images of water leading to branches, grasses, and trees, seemingly still images jostled by tiny amounts of movement. Projections of light flood through the space only to break it into contrasting regions of quiet and activity. Coils of wood rope wind across the gallery floor in a sinuous line that is itself composed of disjointed, smaller pieces. Watercolors presented in a large array directly embody the absorptive and transitive and repetitive qualities of fluid change. The familiarity of these images and materials seems like realism, but there is no depiction. The work is not descriptive, but it is deeply observed, and it encourages a similar change within the viewer.

An early lesson in life and physics is that whenever several things are connected and moving at once, a crucial issue is balance. This titles a central work of the exhibition. From opposite ends of an asymmetrical balance beam hang contrasting constructions. The beam itself is suspended from the ceiling. On one side of the balance are pyramid forms made of rough-hewn wood; on the other, a video projector. Images are projected upward to a screen suspended within the balance beam structure above the observer. The projections are observations of seemingly familiar elements of nature, altered and made new by editing and by the shifting vantage points an observer is compelled to take. The whole complex rotates slowly. You have to move with it, to see through it, to see anything else. There is no avoiding the balance, yet the balance never stays fixed.

The strength of the work derives from its position in the space surveyed by the viewer. By virtue of Balance's continual motions, you must as a viewer move throughout the space to see the same things again and again, though each time with subtle differences in the seeing. You must continually change your perspective but hold your present vision in mind with your earlier observations to put together a "whole" picture of what there is to see. As with the motion of fluids, indeed the changes of any complex dynamical system, the identity of the pieces is grasped only from a multiplicity of motions. It is from repetition of observation that one forms a group of perspectives that, when held in proper balance, provide a path to genuine clarity.

The historical development of realism in painting was in many ways the development of the mathematical idea of perspective. Botzow and Carruthers are in this sense working in the tradition of realism. Their work is about perspective, and about the direct experience of things as they are. But by using a shift in vantage points to bring out the oftentimes unexpected essentials of things, they supplant traditional realism's static pictorial approach with a dynamic approach to observation. In contrast to the more conventional and easy view that interaction between the observer and the observed obscures the nature of things, they make of observation a sequence of interactions that leads to a direct experience of what is, and they elevate process to a dominant role in that experience. This concept of a dynamic and multiple perspective I believe more accurately reflects what we have come to know in this century's physics, which finds in the complexity of change the nature of being. It, not simple pluralism, is the alternative to ideology of any kind.

Mr. Peseckis is a theoretical physicist who writes about art.

1. Madhusree Mukerjee, "Profile -- Yoichiro Nambu," Scientific American, February 1995, 39.

Figure 1. In the field: Bill Botzow (left) and Tony Carruthers began their collaboration for this exhibition by recording their observations of nature. Here, Botzow draws on glass; Carruthers videotapes the scene. Photo credit: Kevin Bubriski.

Figure 2. Botzow draws on glass while Carruthers videotapes. Photo credit: Kevin Bubriski.

Figure 3. A view of a portion of the installation Shift. Photo credit: Williams College Museum of Art.

Figure 4. Another view of a portion of the installation Shift, Balance roughly in the center. Photo credit: Williams College Museum of Art.

Figure 5. Another view of a portion of the installation Shift. Photo credit: Williams College Museum of Art.