Caroline Durre - Arnold/McDonald

Review of Raymond Arnold and Danny McDonald
'Press/Print'

at Australian Galleries Works on Paper, Melbourne, 1999

published in Imprint, Vol.34 No.4, Summer 1999

[...] If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,
--Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved,--still warm,--too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--0 what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen, Futility, 1917

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life'. It is information, words, instructions [...] If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London 1986

Think of our world as structured by algorithms. In mathematics, these are repeatable operations which can generate an infinite series of terms, or logical computational procedures that will solve a problem in a finite number of steps. Methods of encoding-- graphs, scans, languages, patterns-- are algorithmic. An abstract art which relies on codes and patterns may be an attempt to generate and discover order within the apparent chaos of the world. The orderly, ordering aesthetic mimics the struggle of life against the inexorable force of entropy, decay, disorder.

'Press/Print', a collaborative exhibition by Danny McDonald and Raymond Arnold, played with the possibilities of algorithms as expressive devices. McDonald's digital codes and Arnold's fabricated patterns manipulated the ciphers which are embedded in technology or are concealed in the natural world. From the industrialised slaughter of the First World War to a post-Romantic economy of 'nature' as encoded information, the show traced a teleology of twentieth-century technological determinism.

In 1998, Raymond Arnold visited the sites of the Australian actions in the battlefields of northern France, where his grandfather and great-grandfather had fought on the Western Front. These are spaces-- battlefields, villages, cemeteries, memorials-- of an intense emotional attachment, both for Arnold himself and for many other Australians. A sequence of ten etchings entitled 'Memory/History' arose from this pilgrimage. All the images make use of two square plates, overprinted onto each other, edge to edge across a horizontal divide. Semicircular shapes, juxtaposed and super-imposed, link together to form subtle ellipses and moire patterns.

As a nation is imprinted with its collective memories, so the etching plate retains a memory chemically corroded into it. Paper, too, gives witness to the textures and inks that have bruised and stretched its surface. Yet Arnold paradoxically treats the theme of war not with imagery brutal or tragic, but graceful, ordered and geometric. In La Commotion/War Film Concussion (soft ground etching, 1999, 138 x 69cm) the concentric seams of embroidered net seem to mimic the expanding bubble of superheated air around an exploding shell. An elegy to surfaces and textures in prints full of tactile presence, algorithms underpin all these formal devices of weaving, knotting, punching and lacemaking. Arnold's elliptical, pierced, patterned forms evoke in turn the grotesque face of a mutilated veteran; or the parted lips of a wound, a hole in tender flesh; or a soldier's face in the clumsy abstraction of a gas mask; or a leafy garland of mourning; or the tenderness of feminine domestic craft.

The span from First World War poet Wilfred Owens' despairing pantheism to late twentieth-century biologist Richard Dawkins' brutal materialism mirrors the space between Arnold's historicism and McDonald's syntactics. Where the calculus of war leads inexorably to death, algorithms, in the form of DNA codes, generate life, too. Cultural languages describe the world; scientific languages analyse the world; natural languages write the world.

In the lower half of Image/Convergence (digital print on polycarbonate, 1999, 138 x 47cm) from the ‘Fictive Document' series, Danny McDonald superimposes the distorted grid of a map projection on a field of tiny green leaves; in the upper half we see dark billows, apparently shapes of clouds or smoke. In McDonald's work, the horizontal split forms a dramatic divide. Above and below, contrasting surfaces, composed of both text and texture, sample some current means of encoding, from bar codes to star charts. McDonald's images play with some of the formulas, the algorithms, of which the observable world is the explicit expression.

In McDonald's vision of nature all manifestations of natural processes might be dissected and analysed, their secret encodings laid bare. In the geometry of its minute articulations a plant responds precisely to environmental stimuli; worn surfaces display the marks of erosion. Yet this is also a simulacrum of exact knowledge, 'fictive', an aesthetic play on the ceaseless pleasures of encoding and decoding. What is revealed in this interplay of materialist art and metaphysical science? The elegance of algorithms, mathematical god of that pattern-seeking species called humanity.