The Epistemology of Simon Shemov’s Art
In October 2023, I had the chance to visit Simon Shemov’s exhibit Multiverse at the Daut Pashin Hamam gallery in Skopje. I truly enjoyed the exhibit, after which I posted some of my highlights on my Instagram profile, along with the following note:
What happened a long long long time ago? What’s going on far far far away? These seemed to be the central questions connecting the works of Simon Shemov at his exhibit Multiverse. A very pretty vision about these deep unknowns, playful with order and symmetry, and scattered with entropy, as if it is revealing some grand Truth. I guess an artist’s take on these questions can be as provoking and valuable as the scientist’s.
This exhibit reignited some thoughts that I keep returning to: What is the connection between knowledge and art, between truth and beauty? How are creative artists and creative scientists similar? What does this mean for my own research and how I approach it? In this post, I will try to document a some admittedly scattered and vague thoughts on these questions, structuring them through the artwork of Simon Shemov.
Between Order and Chaos
Many of Shemov’s works are playful with order and chaos, with symmetry and entropy. Looking at them, they awake a specific aesthetic bliss within me, a meditative and seductive feeling. This feeling is not too different than the one I get when I see a large flock of birds collectively deciding what direction to fly in, or tree branches gently moving with the wind, or the movement art of Charles Auguste. All these sights incite a deep urge to order and predict, an ancient drive to recognize patterns and reveal the invisible vector fields around us. But this urge is never taken to its conclusion. As soon as I think I know what the pattern in Shemov’s painting is, a new detail emerges in front of me that disturbs my logic. As soon as I make a prediction about where the birds will fly to, or how the trees will be moved by the wind, or where Charles will jump to, entropy takes over, and something unexpected happens. This is simultaneously disturbing (I was wrong!) and exhilarating (I get to do it all over again!). And so the cycle repeats: every attempt to order is eventually proven fruitless, and I start anew. This is not discouraging though. On the contrary, these iterative cycles between Order and Chaos is what makes reflecting on these paintings so seductive and exciting! Not only am I forced to accept the Chaos, but also to see its value and beauty too. A much scarier — and deeply boring! — prospect is that I can actually reach some Final Order, with no Chaos to disturb it. What am I supposed to do then?
I believe this tension between Order and Chaos captures the job of a social scientist. We exist in an infinitely complex world, tasked to order it by drawing patterns and making predictions. This is not a linear process that builds on itself, as some Grand Chaos ordered gradually to approach some Grand Order. The process of creative discovery is not a one-way ticket from Chaos to Order, rather it is a never-ending cycle, a duality, a ying-yang. One cannot exist without the other. I think a creative researcher not only has to embrace this messy process, but also nurture both the Order instinct and the Chaos instinct within themselves. In the Birth of the Tragedy, Nietzsche posits two opposing yet complementary creative drives: the Apollonian drive to Order (logical, rational, disciplined) and the Dionysian drive to Chaos (passionate, emotional, intuitive). In the above examples, Chaos is thrust upon me, and my Apollonian drive tries to order it. But we can also create Chaos by embracing our Dionysian drive. In practice, this means not accepting knowledge (Order) as a given, but trying to actively challenge and disrupt it, only to reorder it again. Marrying these two drives is a never-reconciling tension, but one that can propel lots of creativity, the essential precursor to scientific discovery.
Archetypes: Beauty and Knowledge
Archetypes are another common theme in Shemov’s art. In his early works, the archetypes evoke ancient Pantheist cults: The Sun, The Mother, Nature and the elements. In Multiverse, these archetypes are more stripped down and abstracted. Simple geometric shapes and essential forms combine in various patterns, creating stunning Mandalas that seem to evoke both Beauty and Knowledge simultaneously. When I talk about knowledge here, I don’t mean one that is necessarily true, whatever that means, but one that is useful and has a meaning. In this sense, knowledge is often (always?) predicated on an archetype. I think of archetypes as frameworks or models of the world, an abstracted representation of the infinitely complex, that simplifies into manageable elements and relationships between those elements. Only through such archetypes can we learn something about the world. More than just useful, successful archetypes have to be beautiful. This defines a correspondence between Beauty and Knowledge, one I have not completely grasped myself, but one that I have strong intuitions (and feelings!) about. Two “case studies“ may be illustrative of this correspondence.
In economics, the field I am trained in, mathematical models are our archetypes, our tools of knowledge extraction. Just like in Shemov’s art, we take fundamental abstractions about the world (e.g. individuals, firms, their preferences, sets of choices they face, etc), and posit relationships about them. We perpetually combine and recombine the ingredients in these models to generate new knowledge, be it as a form of theoretical predictions, or as new econometric equations that allow us to estimate previously unknown parameters of interest. Done right, employing these archetypes captures the relationship between beauty and knowledge. Many of our models contain aesthetic principles that correspond to some beauty (or ugliness). In difference-in-difference designs, parallel lines in the pre-trends are beautiful, since they affirm that the archetype is valid. Similarly with “continuity at the cutoff” in regression discontinuity designs. These are aesthetic standards, ones predicated on “rational“ mathematical equations, yes, but ones that evoke feelings of beauty nonetheless. Even economists, one of the more rational breeds will point out the beauty and elegance of a mathematical proof. Writing a proof is the closest I have come to this dialectic between beauty and knowledge: knowledge of some fundamentals correspond to aesthetic visuals which then combine to generate a new finding, climaxing in a unification of beauty and knowledge. It’s a feeling that is hard to explain, but when one feels it its potency is unmistakable.
One of my favorite examples about beautiful archetypes and the knowledge they can afford comes from the Mandala concept in Southeast Asian cultures (Tambiah, 2013). The Mandala is an archetype that consists of a geometric pattern of symbols, a center and enclosing circle(s). For example, some elementary forms of the Mandala are 5-unit (1 core unit and 1 peripheral circle with 4 units) and the 9-unit structures (1 core unit and 2 concentric peripheral circles with 4-units). The Mandala is widely known to represent the sacred, for example with a Buddha at the center surrounded by other (less important) Buddhas in the periphery, but they tend to appear in many facets of life. The architectural styles in this region tend to follow these patterns, from large temples to simple village houses, and even scaling to the urban design of cities. As Tambiah argues in his article, the Mandala patterns have been used as a model of political organization at multiple levels too. At a spatial level, the capital is at the core, with provinces enclosing it as satellites, forming a Mandala in which political power radiating from the core outwards. This happens at the symbolic level too, with the King at the core being surrounded by his princes in the periphery. Zooming into provinces, the Mandala pattern of organization repeats itself, where the province ruler is surrounded by other less powerful vassals. Even the bureaucracy of these states has been organized to resemble the Mandala, with hierarchy and power represented at the core and diminishing into the periphery. Its Mandalas all the way! Setting aside the question of knowledge as “true“, it is clear that the Mandala archetype has conferred Southeast Asian cultures with a knowledge that is useful and meaningful, allowing them to order their societies at many levels, from cosmology and religion, to architecture and urban design, to political polities and their bureaucracies.
Shemov’s recent works resemble the Mandala pattern, in which simple geometric shapes (triangles, circles, squares) and representations of the elements (fire, wind) combine and recombine to create mesmerizing patterns (see selection of these works below). Seemingly concerned with the themes such as the origins of life or the vastness of the universe, Shemov’s art reminds us that beauty and knowledge may completely converge for these deep unknowns. The artist and the scientist are one and the same.
The Curiosity and Fun of Child’s Play
An early theme in Shemov’s works is children who learn through curious play. These paintings often come in one of two forms: an abstracted form of a child towered by the unknown and beautiful universe or a distorted child’s face attempting to learn something. Learning seems exceedingly fun in these paintings: a child curving its lips to learn how to whistle, a squinting eye looking at something with curiosity, or a beautiful unknown world that just begs to be observed.
The learning of the child and the learning of the scientist are less different than we may think. In that sense, scientists can learn from this innocent child play, and nurture the instincts that propel it: curiosity and fun! The incentives of academic work rarely encourage these though, and other “pragmatic“ considerations like publications and tenure tend to dominate. In addition, we researchers need to grapple with our own biases, from what kinds of questions we ask, to which answers we are more likely to admit, and I fear that some of these incentives may amplify the negative effects of our own biases. Sometimes, these perverse incentives have even led some to fabricate data and present fake results. If we look at the children in Shemov’s paintings, their learning is an antithesis of this behavior — you can’t “fake learn” to whistle! There is no fun or beauty in fabricating learning! In that sense, perhaps these children can give us the antidote to our own biases and professional pressures. If we understand research as a game of fostering curiosity, having fun, and constantly seeking the unexpected and unknown, unafraid to make mistakes and start all over again, maybe we can improve the process of learning and discovery. At the very least, it will be more fun, and that by itself is enough.
