The Strangeness of Knowledge

by ruth barker, 30 Mar 2009

Hello,
I recently heard an anecdote which touches on the fabular; a warning tale for public artists of our time.

It seems that a well-known British artist was commissioned to produce a new, high profile public work for a scientific educational institution (not based, I’m glad to say, in Scotland). The work was elegant and ambitious, a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of knowledge and the transience of certainty. How do we know what we know? the work asked those who saw it; Do we know what we know at all? But the scientists at the institution weren’t pleased. They didn’t like the work because they found the question it raised to be inappropriate in that scientific context. Knowledge, they implied, is in some senses an absolute: a fact may be proved or disproved, but knowledge is something else, inviolate. We know what we know – and further thinking may underpin or supersede that. Scientists must, after all, stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before them – they stack their knowledge against the growing pile. And so the work was aborted and the artist went away. The institution continues its day-to-day business without the artist’s question hanging inappropriately over them.

There is no moral here as such. Like all the best fables, the story isn’t a tale of right and wrong but rather of difference and tension. Make of it what you will.

More later,
R