Order

by Frank Frank It's good to do stuff, because sometimes the creative process offers something fresh and new. As someone interested in sustainability, I can understand why Michael Landy might claim with his Art Bin there is too much stuff in the world making it artistically appropriate to destroy superfluous art works. It should not be forgotten that in terms of life cycle assessment, the act of destruction may require more energy than just leaving the stuff where it is. I mean, think of the petrol you use to drive to the tip' 

There is an implicit order in making art, without which it could not be communicable and appreciated in a social context. Creating this intelligible order requires re-working minerals to make paints, dyes,stone or plaster to sculpture,wool or cotton to make fabrics etc. thereby increasing the entropy in the universe.

Destroying these works extinguishes any semblance of order conjured in the creative process. Human creativity is native to the physical universe, yet can it be argued that the order of artistic pursuits, whether realised in engineering, architecture, paintings or sculpture acts inversely, perhaps in a proportionate way, to the consequent increase in physical disorder' 

This might appear true for all processes in nature, organic or inorganic , from growth of crystals, to recurrence of eg. fibonacci patterns, propagation, reproduction, and gravity conjuring spherical planets and the stratification of rocks. However, these natural phenomena represent cyclically evolving and changing states of energy, which, while they increase entropy in the universe, are neither created nor destroyed, unless the process is driven by some fundamental design.It may be for good reason the elusive Higgs Boson has been called the God particle.

This contrasts with works of art that are created and can be destroyed. While the creation of the work of art might have this inverse proportionality, it’s destruction does not, as the most subtle modification will be sufficient to wreck the work, with only the slightest increase in entropy.


If art is a Duchampesque state of mind, then all that is required to determine something a work of art is the declared designation of the artist and then it’s becoming a work of art or subsequent ceasing to be a work of art has no effect on the total entropy in the universe. This makes their creation pseudo events, actually non-events, at best represented by a communicable virtual reality. While ready-mades may require no adaptation and become endorsed as works of art by the space within which they are exhibited, works for example, by Picasso in adapting a bicycle seat and handles to make a bull's head or a toy car to make a monkey's head, involve reworking items manufactured for some entirely separate purpose. This innovative reworking communicates a new order, which in so doing expends energy and materials and increases entropy.

Richard Wilson's 20:50 synergy of imported materials and the gallery space,where the work of art does not exist without these two components,provides a more challenging objection.The juxtaposition of sump oil, a steel pier, and the interior room architecture is nevertheless, not remotely a 'ready-made' and closer in conception to Picasso's monkey than Duchamp's Fountain. In any event,implicit in the setting up of such an installation is the full panoply of thermodynamics; but then, that might also be said to a lesser extent about Duchamp. 

The correlation between increase in order and increase in entropy is not in any sense a measure of how good or bad the work created is. Aesthetics have never demanded that big is any more beautiful than small, let alone that order, singularly, determines art.


In one sense order and disorder are facets of the same phenomenon and at the end of time, when all energy has been exhausted and the universe has unravelled into a boundless inert cold soup, then such an homogenous state is itself a ground state of order(or disorder).