Archive for August 2011

(Joseph Wright, The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone (1771), depicting the discovery of phosphorus by Hennig Brand in 1669).

1. The Baroque Cycle

During the first week of the summer I discovered Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Browsing on Amazon, going through the ‘others-who-bought-what-you-have-bought-have-also-bought’ my eye was caught by the English cover of System of the World. In reading more, I learned that it was the third novel in the trilogy, which began with Quicksilver. I downloaded the sample chapter of Quicksilver to my Kindle.

Now, I’d seen these novels in used & remaindered bookstores for years, but they had never caught my interest, especially based on the blurbed summaries printed on the back. However, you could say that I’d reached the point where my background interests had finally intersected with a series of novels set in the 17th Century (listening to the Ideas series Origins of the Modern Public almost immediately prior to discovering the Cycle probably helped) and the sample chapter intrigued me. I dived in, taking two months to read all three books (as well as the ‘sequel’ Cryptonomicon).

Quicksilver begins with an account of the alchemist Enoch Root arriving in 1713 Boston to seek out one Daniel Waterhouse. This is noteworthy as one of the underlying themes of the Cycle is how the 18th Century Enlightenment had its roots in the foundation of the English Royal Society in the 17th Century, and how its letter-based communication network spanned Europe. The immediate predecessor to this activity was the Europe-spanning Esoteric Brotherhood of Alchemy, which given a scientific overlay in the 19th Century became Chemistry.

The character Enoch is depicted as visiting the Royal Society in 1670 to demonstrate the new substance phosphorous, which can be distilled from urine. This method of creating phosphorous is used at various plot points in the novels, and the substance itself features prominently in many scenes. So I was surprised when in browsing my RSS feeds Saturday to see the following article on io9.com.

2. Alchemy & Art

The Baroque Cycles‘s alchemy sub-plot reminded me of something I’d first heard in the late 1990s. In November 1998 CBC broadcast an Ideas episode which consisted of a recorded round-table discussion on art, featuring Ideas producer Max Allen, then Globe & Mail art critic Blake Gopnik, as well as Liz Magor and Diana Nemiroff. At one point (starts at 26:27min) Allen asks if their talk on gallery-based art might sound as strange to a far future audience as we would find a conversation on alchemy. This analogy between art & alchemy struck me as particularly apt, and I remember mentioning this point to a friend. My concern was that in pursuing art I was doing something wasteful, whereas his response was, “I wouldn’t mind doing ‘alchemy'”. His answer essentially recognized the aesthetic of doing something perhaps useless but also intriguing and fun in and of itself. This ‘use-based’ critique of arts is one happens all the time and it incredibly hard to avoid. My friend’s answer in turn, is also hard to avoid – that there are some things in life that are worth doing simply because it’s fun to do them (aka “the journey is the destination”).

[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/audio/1998-11_CBC_IDEAS_youcallthatart.mp3 ] (Ideas from November 1998 • Lister Sinclair! • Download Mp3)

So, in reading The Cycle, and with this memory, I found it surprising when I read the following tweet:

This immediate association between art & alchemy in light of my reading and memories rose my eyebrows. Then, more recently, the following line occurred in another article about art:

“Through the alchemy of the Internet, the performance loses some of its luster.”

This prompted me to tweet:

My suspicion is that this relationship between alchemy & the arts will become more and more prominent over the next few months (years?) and that maybe it’s because art & alchemy are similar to each other, as both being traditions with long histories that disappeared. Art, as it has been structured and known, is changing into something else, primarily through ‘the alchemy of the internet’. Given that we are so immersed in mediated images, it seems more and more impossible for a static artistic image or a mise en scene (‘installation’) to have much resonance, where resonance is proportional to its level of reproduction on the net (ie, today a famous image is blogged).

Under today’s conditions, a cultural product seems relevant if it goes viral. For the record, Liz Magor answered Max Allen’s question in 1998 (which presumed the future would consider 20th Century art & culture to be mass products like movies and television) by stating that assumes things have value simply because they are popular.

Of course, those who have known me for a long time will point out that I was once a part of the Instant Coffee collective, and that in August 2003 we put on a show called Alchemy & Mysticism. This was ‘Alchemy & Mysticism #2″ as #1 was the title of a collection of art videos shown in the Urban Disco Trailer earlier in June. The title was taken from the Taschen book, and chosen mostly for humour, as it had nothing to do with the content of either collection.