SciArt Magazine - All Issues February 2016 | Page 7

be a way “of making imagery, of creating shapes that I
hadn’t seen before—a kind of Faustian fantasy.” Despite
the seemingly impromptu character of these musings,
Stella’s interest in the relationship between order and
disorder that the smoke rings, disintegrating into apparently random configurations, represented stretches
so far back in the artist’s career that it might be called a
leitmotif. During the 1960s, the clarity of Stella’s seminal shaped paintings gave away to his “Protractors” in
which the colorful arching bands intersect each other so
as to suggest impossible patterns of interwoven strands.
Stella’s “Polish Village” paintings and constructions of
1971–73 similarly suggest unattainable relationships, now
between intersecting planes. In the later part of this
series, the works began to actually project from the wall,
and while Stella spoke of these pieces as investigations
of ‘real’ space, his spatial configurations had become
extremely complex and ambiguous. In Stella’s “Circuits”
(1980–82), the spatial tension and complexity that he had
courted in his earlier career reached an explosive apogee. The reliefs explored the limits of the artist’s organizational abilities and the fringes of what the eye and
mind can comprehend. The “Circuits” were individually
named after automotive racetracks on the European
Formula One circuit, and the constructions propose
analogies between the swerving path of a race car seen at
speed and the spectator’s visual reflexes. Stella has indicated that the title “Circuits” also refers to the “intricate
connections within the structural network of the picture.” One thinks of elaborate electronic and computer
circuitry, but even more of the human brain—the most
complex chemical and electrical circuit.
Stella’s “Moby Dick” series (1986-89), which features a
new configuration, the wave, is another stage in the artist’s evolution toward chaos theory. Previously, the projecting forms in Stella’s constructions had been largely
planar—the surfaces were flat and the designs confined
to the edges. By contrast, the waves are curved–space
structures; they feature both curved edges and curved
faces. Stella’s concerns with movement through space
were well served by the waves, which undulate along
their entire surface. At the time that Stella was working on the “Moby Dick”s, he was reading James Gleick’s
Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), a book providing
popular history of the seminal developments of chaos
theory.2 Gleick’s strength was to tell the invention of
chaos theory as an intellectual adventure story that
brought together dozens of creative minds in disciplines
that ranged from theoretical physics and advanced
mathematics to meteorology, biology, and botany; he
also popularized Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals. So inspired was Stella by Gleick’s narrative that he
considered naming the “Moby Dick” series “Fractals,”
and at that point Stella began to read more extensively
about fractals and chaos theory. The January 1989 issue
of Scientific American featured a cover story with richly
evocative photographs of fluid mixtures, patterns that
resemble some of those Stella later created.3 Stella’s

SciArt in America February 2016

understanding of Melville’s novel was related to his
burgeoning interest in chaos theory because he thought
of the book as a nonlinear dynamic system, noting that
“Moby Dick is so elastic in a way, you can fit in almost
any image… But it’s the movement of the characters and
the machinery around a group...that’s a kind of voyage.”4
In 1990 working with his studio assistants, Stella
constructed a device for freezing the flow dynamics of
smoke in a mappable form. It was an eight–foot enclosed
box, lined with black velvet and lit internally by four
electric bulbs. On all six sides of the box were stop–action cameras focused on the center and drilled in the
vertical edges were holes through which Stella could
exhale smoke. When Stella blew smoke rings into the
box, all cameras fired simultaneously capturing the image from six sides. The photographs were then digitally
processed by a computer to create two–dimensional
maps of the billowing three–dimensional smoke. At first,
simple programs like Illustrator and Photoshop were
employed to chart smoke patterns; later on Stella used
more sophisticated three–dimensional imaging packages, such as Z and Alais/Wavefront. In this manner,
Stella froze moments of the extremely complex physical
activity of these air–flow systems. From the thousands
of photographs taken, Stella chose about a dozen images
that most interested him. His choices share important
characteristics—they exhibit both the clear initial patterns of the smoke rings and the point when turbulence
occurs so that easily recognizable order disappears. In
the selected images, the plume of cigar smoke rises
smoothly, accelerating until it reaches a critical velocity
and then splinters into wild eddies. In fact, several of the
configurations that Stella has used repeatedly have been
named by fluid–dynamics scientists—they include oscillatory, cross–roll, knot, and zigzag. As seen in Stella’s
images, when the flow of smoke is smooth, or laminar,
minor disturbances are actually suppressed, but past the
onset of turbulence all the rules appear to break down
and disturbances seemingly grow without order. This
transitional moment, which so fascinates Stella, has long
been a critical area for human observation and investigation. Thus, the works from this period relate to more
than Stella’s internal development—their compelling nature derives from humankind’s age–old attraction to vortices and turbulence. It is an infatuation that is recorded
in art, literature, philosophy, and science—one that gives
Stella’s art broad cultural and intellectual significance.
Representations of vortices date to the paleolithic
period when spiral configurations painted on cave walls
may have resulted from helixes observed in the water,
air, sky, and such objects as shells. In H