“My drawings invented the real—I was interested in designing fiction.”
Stephen Talasnik from a 2002 interview in Sculpture magazine.
In what ways can we use drawing to discuss the immanent structures of the world? Does drawing, with its historical baggage of subjective expression, have a role in scientific explorations? Furthermore, can art and science engage in a productive dialogue when their respective disciplines speak fundamentally different languages? Stephen Talasnik’s work provokes exactly this set of questions.
Are we to understand the lacy vortices of Arcadia as indicative of some natural structure, as an intuitive grasp of abstract relations, or as an expression of some personal desire? Their atmospheric recursivity simultaneously calls to mind the dense fractal patterns used by the contemporary mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and the labyrinthine prisons envisioned by the eighteenth century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Talasnik’s drawings partake in a similar desire to envision spatial relations as both contextual and constitutive. While the provisional architecture described by Intuitive Gravity and Floating World appears to represent a functional system, it does not depict any specific set of causal relations. This lack of specificity might tempt us to think of Talasnik’s diagrammatic drawings as simply the product of his imagination. However, his desire to “invent the real” implies a far more slippery dialogue between representation and reality.
In 1925, while working in Niels Bohr's institute at Copenhagen, Werner Heisenberg noticed that the movement of electrons did not correspond to their conventional depiction as orbiting spheres. On a quantum level, these particles did not occupy any fixed rotation but rather simultaneously existed in all possible permutations. This observation, along with the corollary discovery that the measurement of a particle’s position and momentum was mutually and incrementally exclusive, became the groundwork of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Besides predicating a nondeterministic and fully entangled reality, the uncertainty principle made it possible to understand how the act of observation changes the phenomena that are being observed. Implicit in this theory is the necessity to get beyond the simplistic notion that science or art represents and exists outside of nature. Rather, we are engaged in a co-evolutionary process with our representations, where the realm of possibility is fundamentally altered by its depictions.
Like artists, scientists have always struggled with the representation of reality. With the introduction of the mathematics of probability, quantum theory has made this struggle far more complex. Similar to Talasnik, physicists such as Richard Feynman have attempted to incorporate the incommensurability of infinite potential into their diagrams.
Both of the drawings Pachinko and Off-Shoot describe the arcing trajectories of movement. The expansive and variable line quality of Off-Shoot infects the page like a virus, while Pachinko’s descending momentum appears to be generated by the confluence of random impacts and the weight of gravity, much like the Japanese parlor game it is named after. Talasnik’s work shows us a world of nonlinear topologies and explosive dynamics, where movement and force preclude meaning. The dense atmospheric perspective visible in almost every drawing indicates a temporal dimension, where previous iterations fade into infinity and the surface exists as only the most recent unfolding of a varied intensity.
The interplay of delicately layered graphite and porous negative space in Talasnik’s drawings perform space as both provisional and interstitial. The elliptically curved spirals of The Flying City recall the non-Euclidean geometry generated by Einstein’s theory of relativity. The similarity to urban planning is no coincidence; cities too are contingent structures, constantly reforming themselves in relation to new vectors of migration, consumption, and production. Talasnik’s structural iterations are generated from the raw potential of space, as if the very scaffolding of reality were being called forth from the rolling chaos of the void. As the philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari note:
Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.1
Talasnik’s drawings suggest a similar field of becoming where chaos, as generative and random chance, gives birth to increasingly complex and ephemeral structures. This immanent virtuality is understood as constitutive of a reality from which we as participants can never be separate.
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1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 118.
Matthew Friday is an assistant professor at Ohio University. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from Indiana State University. As part of the international collective Spurse, Friday has exhibited at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Arts in Kansas City, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.