Art, Not
Chance: Nine Artists' Diaries
Edited by Paul
Allen. London UK: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
2001. 120 pp., illus. Softbound, $15.05.
ISBN 0-903319-94-2. Available from www.centralbooks.co.uk.
Science,
Not Art: Ten Scientists' Diaries
Edited by Jon
Turney. London UK: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
2003. 160 pp., illus. Softbound, $15.05.
ISBN 0-903319-98-5. Available from www.centralbooks.co.uk.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department
of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar
Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net.
Perhaps there
are no better insights into the creative
process (whether art or science) than the
candid and often astonishing thoughts that
appear unexpectedly in letters, journals
and diaries. Initially, that was one of
the reasons for my interest in this pair
of books, the first of which consists of
notes by nine British artists (musicians,
writers, performance artists, poets, choreographers,
sculptors, and so on), the second by ten
scientists (cosmologists, marine biologists,
geneticists, mathematicians, neurophysiologists,
biophysicists, and so on). In each case,
they were asked to keep a diary for more
than six months, with particular attention
to works in progress. When the book on artists
first appeared a couple of years ago, it
was sufficiently well-received as to encourage
the subsequent volume about scientific inquiry.
Both books were undertaken by the British
branch of a Portugese foundation formed
by Calouste Gulbenkian, an international
art collector. There is a long tradition
of anthologies of introspective writings
on artistic and scientific creativity, the
best of which may still be Brewster Ghiselin's
The Creative Process (University
of California Press, 1952). Comparing these
two volumes with that classic or with other
titles like Robert Root-Bernstein's Discovering
(Harvard University Press, 1989), I came
away unsatisfied, largely because I concluded
that the nourishment provided by these new
books, including the size of the portions,
is lean. While the diary entries are of
interest, even at times entertaining, I
was not particularly taken aback by the
observations of any of the participants
(neither artists nor scientists). I have
to wonder if this thinness or flatness of
content occurred because the participants
(many of whom, as the editors note, are
apprehensive about their future careers)
were asked to keep not private, confidential
diaries but ones from which parts could
be publicly quoted in a book like this.
Another problem may be due to the editors
having assumed that the nine people in the
first volume (from such widely diverse occupations)
or the ten in the second volume, have much
of anything in common, although for convenience
we commonly say that everyone in the first
book is an "artist," everyone in the second
a "scientist." It is easy enough to recommend
these books as they are certainly worth
looking at, but a distressing amount of
their content is more or less commonplace,
with the result that they're far less instructive
than one might have hoped. As I read them,
I was reminded of a passing note in the
letters of Bauhaus theatre designer Oskar
Schlemmer, who (in Tut Schlemmer, ed., The
Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer)
reported to a friend about his first meeting
in 1920 with the already well-known painter
Paul Klee. Schlemmer was disillusioned because
Klee was "strangely caught up in materialistic
concerns: questions about food prices, rental
costs. I mention this because his insistence
on such matters bordered on the ludicrous."
To a lesser extent, that's how I also came
away from reading these two books.
(Reprinted by permission
from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol.
19, No. 2, Winter 2003-2004.)
