Madeleine Burnside

	Double Zeeman (1978-79). Folded and seamed vinyl ink print. App. 26"x26". Photo W. Weider. Provenance

Herman Weyl, one of the leading mathematicians of the first half of this century, described contemporary advances in his field as a war in which "the Angel of Topology and the Demon of Abstract Algebra" struggle over the souls of the different branches of mathematics. In the light of this it comes as less of a surprise that Betty Collings' sculpture has been analyzed from a strictly mathematical point of view by the topolgist Phil Huneke, and that her work demonstrates the way in which a sculptor's study of continuity can contribute to science as well as art. Just as problems in diverse scientific fields serve to unify those fields if a common methodology may be used to solve them, so single investigations, such as Collings' into a speciific form, may comment on more than one area of cognitive endeavor.

Collings describes herself as someone who reads both art and science magazines passionately, a passion whose object is clarified when she begins to speak of her excitement over the biological implications of forms, over the way in which cells divide and how they evolve in water or space without reference to gravity. Her aesthetic is firmly rooted in the idea of forms and their transformations: situations whose physical reality can be tracked only by topological methods.

Collings' work illuminates the idea that knowledge is available, that other disciplines (those which an art audience may not have as their own) are not windowless ivory towers, exalted, esoteric, and only to be scaled by inner stairways. Medium has something to do with this. Collings makes forms from black or transparent vinyl that are reminiscent of such familiar objects as beach balls or water wings; there is not marmoreal aloofness here, but instead an airy fineness that speaks to visual sensibility.

The present group of works has been five years in the making and concerns transformations of a disc. The richness of this subject is apparent from the body of material that Collings has produced from the underlying concept. The disc appears variously as a globe, short spirals, yin-yang sections whose tails have been joined, and other sections of a globe which have been slid over one another or compacted before being finally inflated. The points of the globe - the places in which one might mark reference points - are consistently findable from sculpture to sculpture, so that the viewers may understand exactly how the disc has been pulled out or compressed. The drawings, intense compositions of colored bars and dots, are more opaque conceptually than the sculpture, but , when they are accorded the necesssay attention, they require only such tools of appreciation as most of the audience might be expected to have (reasoning methods from map-reading or high-school geometry) but which must be carried here to more advanced conclusions. The drawings have been made in order to keep track of the transformations in the sculpture. The points of the sculpture, Collings' seams in the vinyl, and the way in which she has rotated of slid the various sections around are schematically indicated. A third form of the work appears as a print made on transparent vinyl in which the reference number that each sculptural possibility acquired in the drawings is color-coded according to the type of transformation it represents.

Collings' work insists that there is an undifferentiated core of knowledge present in the world which has only to be interpreted. The way in which her work addresses this makes it hard to define the limits of the area in which her achievements take place. We are not living in a period of Renaissance-style interaction of disciplines, and it is difficult for us to imagine the intellectual environments in which Leonardo made his contributions to optics, Durer arrived at his brilliant aproximation of the trisection of an angle, or Wren had to decide between mathematical or an architectural career. But Collings has faith, born of her own success in "cracking another discipline," and she states firmly that it is possible to "come to knowledge visually."

Coming to knowledge is an old definition of art to which Collings has given extraordinary meaning, but there is growing evidience that hers is not an isolated case. How surprised should we be that in the month in which Collings' exhibition opened the New York Times reviewed a book called Godel, Escher, Bach in which a mathematiciain (Douglas Hofstader) explains the most fundamental mathematical discover of the century (Godel established that any formal deductive system rich enough to generate something like classical mathematics cannot be proved to be consistent in its own terms, and is therefore incomplete) in the light of his insights into a contemporary artist and a baroque composer. In the immediate past there has been a major movement among poets and other writers to include information form the sciences (Scientific American became one of the sources for them as it is for Collings); in this respect one has only to think of the advice and ideas exchanged in Charles Olson's letters to Cid Corman and Ed Dorn. To name a few more recent cases, there has been the Coca-Cola Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka, on which a group of artists and engineers collaborated; Robert Wilson used relativity as the them of opera Einstein on the Beach; Charles Ross has been exhibiting star-maps and work dealing with the passage of light through prisms.

Due to the biases of my own viewpoint, this review might have taken the form of an impassioned plea if it were not that its request is already met in the work of people like Collings and Hofstader. Having a type of idealism shaped by the interdisciplinary education of the Sixties, I tend to gravitate toward work in any field which may be included under the results of that environment. This is a very exciting show, a testament to the maturation of a new direction in thought -- art or other.

Exhibition at Bertha Urdang, May 8-June 2.