‘Producing like a plant’: Artistic simplicity and environmental understanding

Introduction

From the focused clarity of minimalist modern sculpture to the starkly outlined figures in a prehistoric cave painting, certain art has a striking simplicity. This impact of simplified forms, key to representational and non-representational art across a broad range of styles, in turn suggests an analogy to science: a powerfully simplified depiction of deer in cave art could be, to real deer or to photorealistic drawings of them, like a simplified scientific model of ideal gases is to real gases or to models that also account for molecules’ size and inelasticity. Granted, complexity can also be a virtue ¹ – and prehistoric cave art can vary widely in its degree of depictive detail. Still, some art relies more on simplification, just as some science relies more on idealisation. And this art is like idealised models, in that both create valuable forms of simplicity by isolating or even actively exaggerating, for clearer effect, the core features of target systems.

Philosophers of science have asked how idealisations help us understand the world, even while falsifying or distorting it. ² My aim is to address a similar question, but focusing on art: how can artists understand nature by creatively simplifying it? ³ While the analogy to natural scientific models like ideal gases is one promising way to approach this question – as in recent work on models and fictions ⁴ – here I will pursue an alternative strategy.

My basic idea is that artistic simplification can embody an understanding of the sort of organic fertility or vitality in nature that fascinates a number of artists who prioritise simplicity. To motivate this proposal, I examine how the use of simple geometric or biomorphic forms in abstract art has historically been linked, as the German–French painter and sculptor Jean (Hans) Arp (1948: 70) puts it, to supplanting the drive to ‘copy’ or ‘reproduce’ nature with a drive to ‘produce directly’ as nature itself does. I connect this to understanding by drawing on Catherine Elgin's (2017) account of how dance can provide an ‘embodied understanding’ of properties by exemplifying them in bodily movement, in a way that renders these properties salient and so affords epistemic access to them. Likewise, I suggest, Arp's distinctive artistic method gives him an embodied understanding of ‘produc[ing] like a plant’ (Arp, 1948: 70) by exemplifying the generative power that he associates with plants.

This is related to simplification, in Arp's view, because he takes plantlike productivity to be paradigmatically expressed in processes of organic growth and reproduction that selectively intensify ‘germinal’ features, in a way Arp then exemplifies in creating his art. Thus, artistically isolating and amplifying an especially striking curve or red colour in a source of inspiration is a way to creatively exemplify (not depict) organic growth or vitality in nature. Of course, humans are organisms and part of nature, but artistic exemplification makes the shared fertility of human and nonhuman forms of life more salient than it usually is. Beyond tying this to understanding, in a way that Arp does not, I also show how this basic explanatory strategy can be decoupled from his organically centred vision of nature, by shifting attention to a broader class of natural phenomena. Namely, creative simplification can be a way for artists to understand processes of concentration and amplification in organic but also inorganic nature, by actively exemplifying them. This framework illuminates a range of cases beyond Arp and related 20th-century abstract art, from prehistoric cave painting to Andy Goldsworthy's contemporary site-specific sculpture.

Viewing simplicity in art through this lens suggests a sort of naturalism, which helps to counteract human exceptionalism, or an exaggerated view of humanity's difference from and superiority to the rest of nature. ⁵ By exemplifying organic fertility in his method of simplifying, Arp understands how artistic creation and aesthetic impact are continuous with other organic processes. Artistic simplicity thus offers an embodied understanding of nature that differs in key ways from the sort of understanding that science provides. This naturalistic outlook can in turn be extended to better account for abiotic objects: purposive concentrations of aesthetic force, in artistic acts of simplification, can exemplify often nonpurposive concentrations of force in nature, as in the striking red of iron-rich clay. This highlights how aesthetic impact and artistic creativity are like other forms of concentration and amplification in the organic but also the inorganic environment. Simplicity in art can reinforce a narrowly organic focus in environmental ethics, when tied, as in Arp's view, to appreciating the creative power of life. But artistic simplicity can also counteract this organic focus by highlighting deeper links between the fertility of life – human or otherwise – and inorganic environmental processes that equally merit our respectful appreciation.

Aesthetic distillation

Artistic forms of simplification contribute directly to artistic value. My focus here will be specifically on aesthetic impact, which I take to be at least one important locus of artistic value. In that light, consider a basic form of artistic simplification that I will call aesthetic distillation: the technique of creating artistically valuable new works by isolating and amplifying the core aesthetic features of an original source of inspiration. This characterisation is directly motivated by an account that Arp gives of his ‘germinal’ method for creating new abstract sculptural forms:

A small fragment of one of my plastic works presenting a curve or a contrast that moves me, is often the germ of a new work. I intensify the curve or the contrast, and this determines new forms. Among the new forms two grow with special intensity. I let these two continue to grow until the original forms have become secondary and almost expressionless. Finally I suppress one of the secondary, expressionless forms so that the others become more apparent. (Arp, 1948: 70)

Aesthetic distillation is a widely used artistic technique, however, not restricted to Arp. It begins with a source: a target system to be simplified, as an initial source of creative inspiration. This may be a nonhuman environment or feature thereof, but it can equally be a human form, or an artificial object like earlier art that inspires new work. This source is then distilled in two ways. First, especially aesthetically valuable or impactful features of the source, which I will call its aesthetic core, are isolated. Thus, one might ‘exclude the ugly’ and selectively focus on the beautiful parts of something. ⁶ Or, in other cases, selective focus on hubs of negative aesthetic impact may be more fitting, as in making deliberately repulsive art about issues like sexual or domestic violence. ⁷ Second, the aesthetic core of the source is amplified: creatively intensified or deliberately exaggerated. This is a form of simplification insofar as it gets easier to apprehend the amplified core or its impact, as it becomes more pronounced – less subtle or hard to discern.

Thus, Arp takes one of his own earlier works as a source of inspiration, identifies the core aesthetic structure of this source (‘a curve or a contrast that moves me’), amplifies it (‘I intensify the curve or the contrast’), and isolates two new forms that ‘grow’ most intensely by excluding others (‘I suppress one of the secondary, expressionless forms so that the others become more apparent’). The result, in Arp's later work, was often a kind of fluidly minimal biomorphic form – as in his Wolkenschale [‘Cloud Shell’] and Entité ailée [‘Winged Being’], both from 1961.

Beyond Arp, another example of aesthetic distillation is Goldsworthy's Red cherry leaf patch, Brough, Cumbria, 4 November 1984, a site-specific work involving a small sheet of bright red autumn leaves held together by thorns, with each outer leaf skilfully torn by hand to form a smooth-edged, near-circular patch of vivid red, set against a darker natural carpet of wet brown fallen leaves – each red leaf fragment on the patch's edge also precisely matched, in size and alignment, to the brown leaf beneath it. Years later, Goldsworthy (2000: 25) reflected on how he had ‘found and worked with red in many countries and talked of it as the earth's vein’, noting iron as the shared source of red in blood and stones, and describing ‘[t]he isolated Japanese red maple set amongst green trees on a mountainside’ as ‘so violent that it appears as an open wound’. More broadly, Goldsworthy emphasises that he sees colour as, ‘not pretty or decorative’, but rather ‘raw with energy’ (1994: 6) – evoking wider themes in his work, like ‘the movement and change in nature’ (Goldsworthy quoted in Matless and Revill, 1995: 438); ‘delicate balance between stability and instability, between order and chaos’ (Bright, 1992: 42; see also Matless and Revill, 1995: 438); and the ‘incredible vigour and energy and life’ in nature, where ‘everywhere you go things are dead, decaying, fallen down, growing, alive’, in a way that is at once ‘intensely beautiful’ and ‘very unnerving’, or sometimes even ‘deeply frightening’ (Goldsworthy, quoted in Tufnell, 2006: 81; see also Brady, 2007: 293).

For Goldsworthy's red leaf patch, then, we might take his source to be a natural site, and its core to be red – whether the specific red of certain leaves, or the vital and violent red that links autumn leaves to iron-rich stones and blood, as well as the wider energy and life in nature. He isolates this red, in the leaf patch, and amplifies it to an unnatural intensity. The result is a kind of simplicity: stark, unadulterated redness – almost uncannily overt or surreally plain to see.

Aesthetic distillation is one possible way to produce the sort of formal simplicity that is a widely noted characteristic of certain traditions of visual art, from some abstract modern painting to Iberian ‘schematic’ art from the 5th–3rd millennia BCE, featuring geometric motifs as well as stylised animals and anthropomorphs (Robb, 2020: 458, 466). But schematic visual form need not result from isolating and amplifying core aesthetic features. Furthermore, distillation is not limited to visual art; for instance, a musician could distil the complex soundscape of a city into a simplified sonic form. Distillation is key to art in many styles and media, including minimalism, primitivism, and musical drone. Distillation also need not target formal qualities: it is compatible with different views about the nature of aesthetic value, including anti-formalism. Take scientific cognitivism in environmental aesthetics, which claims that appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature requires appreciating it as described by science, not dwelling on its formal qualities. ⁸ This is compatible with distillation – it simply entails that science bears on what is aesthetically core.

To contextualise this concept of aesthetic distillation, it helps to consider how distillation relates to more standard categories. Especially relevant here is exemplification: ‘the connection between a sample or example and whatever it is a sample or example of’ (Elgin, 2017: 184). A tradition following Nelson Goodman, including Elgin and others, has analyzed exemplification in terms of ‘possession [of] plus reference [to]’ features of interest (Goodman, 1976: 53). It may seem that aesthetic distillation is just exemplifying a source (or its aesthetic core). However, this is potentially misleading in two ways. First, the amplification aspect of distillation has no clear parallel in Goodman's or Elgin's account of exemplification. While amplifying things can make them salient, which is part of exemplification, Goodman and Elgin do not discuss this specific method. Second, and more deeply, amplifying or exaggerating a trait conflicts with exemplifying it. For instance, a paint swatch exemplifies a given colour only if it instantiates this colour, whereas artworks can aesthetically distil a given colour without being a genuine instance of it. Likewise, Arp does not just sample forms from his earlier work; rather, he actively grows them.

To further illustrate this contrast, consider how Goldsworthy's leaf patch differs from a mere colour sample. Goldsworthy's sculpture aesthetically distils the visceral red of his site, even though its artificial saturation makes it worse as a sample or exemplification of this natural red. Admittedly, Goldsworthy's hyper-saturated leaf patch exemplifies the natural redness of his site at a coarse-grained level of description, e.g. overlooking tonal variation or exact saturation level. But this is to overlook precisely the finer-grained deviation from nature that is responsible for the added impact of Goldsworthy's work. More broadly, aesthetic distillation does not just instantiate or exemplify a source's aesthetic core, but rather actively intensifies or exaggerates it for impact.

Notably, aesthetic distillation can yield both non-representational and representational art. Goldsworthy's leaf patch, for instance, lacks representational content, involves no fictional entities or events, and is aptly classified as non-objective art. ⁹ One might think that distillation must represent its source, but even if so – which is debatable – this still need not yield representational art. Rather, an artist might use a distilled representation of her source as a tool to create non-representational art, as in a painter distilling a landscape by isolating its most striking colours or forms and using any abstract representations that result as the basis for a non-objective painting. ¹⁰

This matters insofar as non-representational art rooted in aesthetic distillation can offer understanding of its sources. Goldsworthy himself reports trying to ‘understand’ things like kinds of stone or a natural yellow (Riedelsheimer, 2001). Similarly, then, he might claim that his distilled red leaf patch helps him understand the leaves’ striking natural redness.

But aesthetic distillation can also yield representational art. Consider the monochrome female forms in Matisse's 1950s series of Blue Nudes, or the simplified human figures in his 1910 La Danse, swirling together over indistinct blue and green background forms. Matisse's dancers distil the visual and emotive force of human dancers’ fluidity, lightness, and collective motion by isolating and even amplifying these traits; his dancers almost float, for instance, in a way that humans cannot. The abstracted head in Brâncuși's Prométhée (1911/12) is another case. As is a prehistoric black stag at Lascaux, its lower body trailing off into oblivion while its head is starkly framed in silhouette (isolation), with treelike branching antlers creatively extended (amplification).

The key point is that distilled representation can be viewed as just one type of distillation. Across styles and media, distilled representational art may offer understanding of its sources in the same basic way that distilled non-representational art, such as Arp's or Goldsworthy's, does.

Aesthetic distillation as embodied understanding of nature

Focusing on aesthetic distillation, we may turn to the question of how artistic simplicity provides understanding. Arp's work is especially revealing in this context. Namely, Arp's method of ‘growing’ core ‘germs’ from his earlier sculptures suggests a subtle form of understanding via higher-order exemplification: not exemplifying the core aesthetic features specific to a given source of inspiration, but rather exemplifying the broader sort of ‘producing’ that Arp associates with processes of organic growth and reproduction in general. This understanding is embodied in Arp's artistic method – in the activity of aesthetic distillation itself. But it is equally embodied in Arp's finished works, insofar as they contain fertile ‘germs’ that induce their own (quasi-)organic growth by inspiring Arp's creative activity. This creates a natural cycle, or positive feedback loop of aesthetic impact and artistic creation. I then extend this framework beyond Arp, showing how distillation more generally can offer an embodied understanding of processes of concentration and amplification within organic but also inorganic natural systems.

Recall Arp's contrast between reproducing and producing like nature: ‘we do not want to copy nature’, Arp (1948: 70) explains, ‘we do not want to reproduce’; rather, ‘we want to produce like a plant that produces a fruit […] we want to produce directly and not through interpretation’. This clarifies why he avoids representation: Arp's later biomorphic sculptures are evidently meant to be, like his earlier paintings and collages featuring geometric abstraction, ‘Realities in themselves, without meaning or cerebral intention’ (Arp, 1948: 40). In Arp's early Dadaist period, this was tied to an emphasis on ‘the Elementary and Spontaneous’, such that his works, ‘like nature, were ordered “according to the law of chance”’ (Arp, 1948: 40). (‘Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order’, Arp (1948: 48) elaborates, ‘[…] Dada is senseless like nature’.) Biomorphic aspects of Arp's work seem to reflect a more organically focused conception of nature – as in his claim that ‘art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb’ (Arp, 1948: 50; see also von Asten, 2012), or his use of ‘cosmic’ oval forms, ‘[o]ften associated with a cell, egg, or bud as well as the navel, torso, and human head’, as ‘metaphors for the cycle of eternal change and recurrence, […] stand[ing] at the very beginning of the universal, natural cycle of birth, growth, metamorphosis, and death’ (Wünsche, 2012: 17–18).

For Brâncuși, too, artistic creation ‘meant participation in the universal processes of giving form’ – with the ‘egg-shaped volume’ again taking on ‘particular significance’ because it ‘embodies a strong tendency towards movement and change’, as an unstable sphere, and also because it ‘serves as a metaphor for beginning, i.e., birth and fertility’ (Wünsche, 2012: 16–17). Even Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter whose Suprematist abstractions used more rectangular forms, ‘connected those directly to biological metaphors such as cells and bacteria’ (Wünsche, 2012: 25), and so viewed his works as ‘living organisms, containing living forms’ (Lodder, 2012: 47–48). Earlier painters, Malevich (1976: 123) suggests, ‘should have created, but repeated’, transmitting only the ‘corpse’ of ‘living form’ in a ‘motionless, dead state’.

We thus have a basic contrast: ‘producing’ or ‘creating’ like a living thing, versus copying nature in representational art. In turn, we may go beyond these artists’ views in several key ways.

First, creating like a fruiting plant is, I argue, a viable way to understand organic fertility. Here it is helpful to draw on Elgin's account of how dance provides ‘embodied understanding’ by exemplifying properties in a way that ‘render[s] them salient, and thereby afford[s] epistemic access to them’ (2017: 205 and 208). This may be literal or metaphorical, as in classical ballet literally exemplifying delicacy or metaphorically exemplifying love and weightlessness (Elgin, 2017: 208). It may also be self-referential, as in Merce Cunningham choreographing dances that exemplify features of dance itself: ‘movements of dancers in space and time’ (Elgin, 2017: 208). And dance may offer this sort of embodied understanding even in the case of nonnarrative works that ‘do not stand in a representational or denotative relation to the world’ (Elgin, 2017: 206). In the same way, then, Arp plausibly offers an embodied understanding of ‘producing like a plant’ by exemplifying this sort of organic fertility in both his artistic method and his finished artworks. Arp's technique of ‘growing’ core ‘germs’ from his earlier works exemplifies organic fertility in a way that renders it salient and hence affords epistemic access to it. But the presence of fruitful ‘germs’ in Arp's sculptures also itself further exemplifies the same basic sort of organic fertility. Through this creative exemplification, Arp naturalises artistic creativity and aesthetic impact by highlighting their continuity with other processes of growth and reproduction in organic systems.

A crucial point of epistemological nuance, however, is that creatively amplifying the core aesthetic features of his earlier works makes Arp's new works inaccurate as samples or examples of the specific aesthetic properties that inspired them. That is, exemplifying organic fertility by intensifying a core curve or contrast in an earlier work comes at the cost of not exemplifying this core feature. (The core curve or contrast is deliberately amplified or exaggerated for effect, so the resulting new work does not truly possess, instantiate, or exemplify the original curve/contrast.) Arp's method therefore offers embodied understanding of ‘producing like a plant’ at the cost of limiting his (or audiences’) understanding of his more specific sources of inspiration and their core aesthetic features. While exaggerating an original feature could in principle highlight this original in a way that provides understanding, it can also divert attention from the original or even lead to conflating a source of inspiration with the new idealised art that it inspires. At minimum, aesthetic distillation stands in tension with embodied understanding of a source in its specificity, insofar as embodied understanding of a specific aesthetic core requires actually exemplifying it.

Similar points apply to aesthetic distillation more generally, beyond just Arp. Again, for Arp, ‘producing directly’ is linked to amplifying core features via his focus on organic activity: Arp evidently associates ‘intensifying’ a ‘germ’ (1948: 70) with reproduction or growth in living systems. However, we also saw a similar focus on ‘living form’ in Malevich (1976: 123), and in Brâncuși's use of oval forms linked to the embryonic points of origin (fertility, birth, etc.) for ‘organic growth and development’ (Wünsche, 2012: 17). The idea of embodied understanding of these processes through artistically exemplifying them, both in the creative practice of aesthetic distillation and in the ‘living forms’ present in the resulting works, is readily extended to these other artists. In turn, a similar organicist or vitalist orientation plausibly underlies Goldsworthy's appeal to the ‘vigour and energy and life’ in nature (quoted in Tufnell, 2006: 81), visible even in phenomena like blood-red clay pigment coursing through ‘earth's vein’ (Goldsworthy, 2000: 25). Amplifying a natural red colour may thus be a way for Goldsworthy to exemplify – not depict – nature's ‘vigour and energy and life’, making it salient and hence affording epistemic access to it. This is an embodied understanding of colour as ‘raw with energy’ (Goldsworthy, 1994: 6), like the understanding of vitality or movement that Elgin (2017: 208) finds embodied in certain dances. Again, however, the nuance is that Goldsworthy's embodied understanding of how a red in leaves or clay is ‘raw with energy’ comes directly at the cost of artificially intensifying it in his work, such that his art is not a valid sample or example of the natural colour that inspired it. Thus, generic understanding of the ‘energy’ of colour stands in tension with a specific understanding of any particular colour that, like the violent red of an isolated Japanese maple, is especially striking. Goldsworthy's work simultaneously embodies and undermines an understanding of natural colour, just as Arp's approach simultaneously enhances and limits his understanding of his earlier work.

This complex structure of exemplifying organic fertility by isolating and amplifying core aesthetic features is helpfully contrasted with Elgin's simpler model of exemplification. The sorts of cases that Elgin describes involve ‘highlight[ing]’ or ‘rendering salient’ certain properties, while ‘exclud[ing]’ others (2017: 208–209), in a way that advances understanding of the former. For instance, a postmodern dance may exemplify ordinary movement that we typically ignore, in ways that add to ‘our understanding of ourselves as organisms capable of locomotion’ (Elgin, 2017: 210). This involves simplification, insofar as traditional virtues like ‘style’ and ‘virtuosity’ are deliberately shunned in order to highlight the minimal ‘essence of dance’ (Elgin, 2017: 209). But this exemplification is about dance or movement, not simplicity. In contrast, Arp exemplifies artistic simplicity itself, specifically insofar as it is like other forms of organic growth. In Arp's work, and Goldsworthy's, isolating and amplifying core features embodies an understanding of the ‘life’ or ‘energy’ of these core features. In turn, this understanding of the ‘life’ of core aesthetic features directly conflicts with genuinely possessing or exemplifying them. Rather, Goldsworthy exemplifies the ‘life’ or ‘energy’ of a natural colour by creating a saturated colour with more energy than the original. Distillation thus exemplifies generic aesthetic impact, not any specific aesthetic core, by instantiating and referring to the growth of fertile ‘germs’ in all organic natural systems. Thus, Arp and Goldsworthy both create art that self-referentially exemplifies the naturalness of artistic simplicity and aesthetic impact. This is similar to (post)modern dances that exemplify the properties of dance itself, but at a higher level of abstraction and with a more naturalistic focus.

This approach to explaining how aesthetic distillation provides (and limits) understanding can be decoupled from focus on organic growth or vitality, by reframing what Goldsworthy sees as ‘vigour’ and ‘life’, or what Arp sees as ‘producing like a plant’, in terms of amplification or concentration. This is one point of the present account of aesthetic distillation: amplification is less organically centred than notions like ‘growing’ new form from a ‘germ’, or participating in nature's ‘vigour’ and ‘life’ – but also less anthropomorphic than ‘idealisation’ or ‘simplification’. Processes of amplification are common across nature, from positive feedback loops causing intensifying drought or desertification, to self-reinforcing global warming, to self-sustaining nuclear fission driven by naturally occurring chain reactions. ¹¹ And so is concentration, from plants funnelling energy into flowers, to oil or precious stones formed under pressure and heat, to celestial matter coalescing into the Sun, which then radiates power. This is the aspect of nature that core-amplification in art is like, and indeed a part of – not figuratively, but literally. The core of a source is the naturally concentrated power-centre driving its aesthetic impact. Amplifying core features is then a way of exemplifying (not depicting) this concentration of aesthetic force.

This may sound fanciful, but it is actually less strange than Arp's or Goldsworthy's view. The lone red maple on the green mountainside, like the red cherry leaves, is itself a natural site of concentration: it focalises the landscape on which it appears as an ‘open wound’, along with the wider set of natural processes and human concerns that Goldsworthy associates with red. Leaves or clay need not be a ‘germ’ from which forms ‘grow’ organically, to do this. Nor must nature be ‘vigorous’ or ‘full of life’ in any figurative sense. Rather, the red of leaves or clay is a distilled source of power that literally energises Goldsworthy, who creatively exemplifies this energising process by amplifying red in his art. This is not a metaphor: red clay is only figuratively ‘vital’ or ‘alive’, but it is literally a site of aesthetic force. Figuratively, the red ‘amplifies itself’ via Goldsworthy; but literally, they co-constitute a positive feedback loop – the amplification of an impersonal force. Goldsworthy physically impacts his natural site by creating a sculpture in the middle of it, impacting leaves by moving and tearing them. This involves real positive feedback: the aesthetic impact (effect) of a striking natural red (source of effect) causes Goldsworthy to gather leaves in a way that amplifies their redness (effect influences the process that produced it), making the artistically modified site and the leaves in his work more aesthetically impactful (original effect is amplified). And even if Goldsworthy did not alter the site, there could still be positive feedback. If leaves inspired Goldsworthy to paint, their red might cause him to paint an even more saturated red, with intensified impact. Here, literal positive feedback – natural colour-saturation causing amplified colour-saturation in a painting – is simply decoupled from the leaves.

Of course, there is more to nature than amplification and positive feedback. Still, this is one important aspect of nature, which lets us re-describe artistic simplification in non-figurative and non-anthropomorphic ways. Like ‘cosmic’ cycles of organic growth and development, or life and death, impersonal processes of intensifying or amplifying are worth caring about. Indeed, organic growth can be viewed as one kind of amplification, in this sense. Likewise, the notion of energising impact by concentrations of power in nature, as in red leaves’ impact on an artist, provides a less biological framework for analysing the ‘movement and change in nature’ (Goldsworthy, quoted in Matless and Revill, 1995: 438) that fascinates Goldsworthy, among others.

This account can extend to cases of aesthetic distillation that result in representational art, like the prehistoric black stag at Lascaux. A real stag, for the cave artist, could be like a lone red maple, for Goldsworthy: a natural site of concentrated aesthetic force. Within the stag, its head and antlers are another natural focus of aesthetic force. Depending on one's aesthetic theory, the aesthetic force at issue may centre on the sensory impact of visual form and motion, or on abstract ideas and symbolic associations – as in a stag evoking wider reflection on human–nature interactions via hunting, or its antlers connoting strength, cycles of seasonal growth, or other branching natural forms. Isolating the head of the stag and creatively amplifying its antlers, in a cave painting, could in turn be a way of exemplifying – not depicting – these natural states of concentration, or the priority of a natural core to the source that it aesthetically focalises. The black stag at Lascaux differs from Goldsworthy's leaf patch in that it also depicts something. But this is compatible with the above: there are both enactive and depictive aspects of this process.

Arp and Malevich were too worried about avoiding representation. They took ‘producing like’ nature to conflict with ‘reproducing’ it – hence, non-figurative abstraction. But, in fact, it may be possible to do both at once. Certain ways of ‘reproducing’ nature may also be aptly viewed as ‘producing like a plant’. This subtler approach suggests that Arp-style exemplification of organic fertility can also be realised in aesthetic distillation that results in representational art.

Scientific idealisation, disrespect, and oversimplification

Aesthetic distillation embodies understanding by exemplifying the sort of organic ‘production’ or ‘vigour and energy and life’ in nature that fascinates artists like Arp and Goldsworthy. This requires amplifying the core aesthetic features of a given source of inspiration, which prevents the resulting art from being a true example or sample of these core features. Thus, Arp's embodied understanding of ‘producing like a plant’ stands in tension with exemplifying specific curves or contrasts from earlier works that he treats as ‘germs’ from which to ‘grow’ new forms. Likewise, Goldsworthy's understanding of colour as ‘raw with energy’ stands in tension with exemplifying specific colours in nature that he finds striking. His leaf patch does not merely sample the red of his site, but actively intensifies it.

This account raises several questions: First, why not draw a simpler analogy to scientific idealisation, in order to clarify how aesthetic distillation yields understanding? Second, is Arp's aspiration to ‘produce like a plant’ a respectful way of relating to plants, or might it be disrespectful? Third, does aesthetic distillation always enhance artistic value, or can art ever be oversimplified?

Scientific idealisation: Given the resonance between simplification in art and science, as in the intuitive analogy between schematic cave art and ideal gas models, why not just analyse the epistemic value of aesthetic distillation using existing work on scientific idealisation? While there is some value to this approach, it also has serious limitations. First, there is nothing obviously analogous to ‘producing like a plant’ in the practice of scientific idealisation. Of course, one could just ignore this part of Arp's view (along with Goldsworthy's appeals to ‘vigour and life’ in nature and the ‘energy’ of colour). However, even if this would still capture some key parts of Arp's (or Goldsworthy's) approach, it would exclude the most distinctive aspect of, if not also the basic motive for, his interest in aesthetic distillation.

There are further problems with the analogy to science. Scientific understanding requires ‘grasp[ing] a correct scientific explanation’ by ‘see[ing] what made a difference to the causal production of [a given] phenomenon and how it did so’ (Strevens, 2008: 69). One strategy for achieving this is minimalist idealisation: ‘constructing and studying theoretical models that include only the core causal factors which give rise to a phenomenon’ (Weisberg, 2007: 642). This builds on the intuitive idea that ignoring irrelevant factors helps us explain why things happen. For example, we might model a falling body's trajectory with attention to mass and air resistance but not colour. At face value, minimalist idealisation looks similar to Arp's method of selectively ‘growing’ striking features from an earlier work while ‘suppressing’ its more ‘secondary’ qualities.

This superficial similarity is misleading, however. Minimalist idealisation distorts non-core causal factors while accurately representing core factors, whereas aesthetic distillation also exaggerates core aesthetic factors. Furthermore, the analogy suggests an unrealistically cognitive view of artistic creativity. When scientists use idealisations, they often know that and how they simplify target systems – e.g. that a model excludes factors like air resistance. In contrast, artists often might not see so clearly how they are simplifying a source of inspiration: artists may just see an idealised image, without knowing exactly what it excludes. This objection would likely be endorsed by Nietzsche, who argues that broadly artistic idealisation is not ‘subtracting […] petty and inconsequential’ features, but rather ‘a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process’ (1994: 518). ¹² His thought may be that attending to the ‘petty’, even by targeting it for exclusion, gives it too much credit: it should just fall away automatically as one focuses on higher things. Presumably, proactively falsifying the petty to show how petty it is would be even worse. This may rule out ‘draw[ing] a clear line between difference-makers and non-difference-makers’, as envisioned by Strevens (2017: 39).

However, Nietzschean artistic simplification is compatible with an embodied understanding of nature, even if it is incompatible with grasping core and non-core features as such. Arp could ‘produce like a plant’ by deliberately amplifying core features from his earlier work, even if non-core aesthetic features fall away entirely unnoticed. My account has the virtue of not overstating the similarity between aesthetic distillation and the explanatory use of idealisations in science.

Disrespect: One might reasonably find Arp's drive to ‘produce like a plant’ disrespectful, much like disrespectfully mimicking other people. For example, Zheng and Stear (2023) argue that blackface is ethically flawed in virtue of involving imaginative activity that contributes to wider systems of oppression. So, if it can be disrespectful to ‘act like’ members of subordinated social groups, why think that ‘producing like a plant’ is respectful, especially in the context of an anthropocentric culture that has systematically exploited nonhuman nature (Plumwood, 2002)? Here there are several crucial points. First, blackface is often tied to racist caricature or ‘hackneyed’ stereotyping (Zheng and Stear, 2023: 409). So, there may be a key ethical distinction between ‘producing like a plant’ in a caricatured way and emulating plants as they truly are. Still, praising plants’ fertility might seem to legitimise their exploitation, much like blackface fictively deploys not just negative stereotypes but also traits that ‘rationalize … unjust differential treatment’ despite not being inherently bad, as in representing Black people as ‘happy-go-lucky’ (Zheng and Stear, 2023: 400). After all, sexist tropes can reinforce women's historical relegation to the domestic sphere by extolling their fertility or creative power in the context of pregnancy. But Arp's approach, by contrast, does not restrict plants’ opportunities to flourish or ‘put them in their place’. If anything, he resists inflated views of art's ‘transcendence’ by highlighting its place in nature.

Second, as Zadie Smith (2019) notes, there are ‘things to which subjectivity is blind and which only those on the outside can see’. Likewise with nature: while our distance from nonhuman ‘others’ is easily exaggerated – we are natural beings, after all, embedded in Earth systems – the fact that Arp tries to ‘produce like a plant’ as a human may limit his success but also give him a distinct clarity of vision, or an empathetic external standpoint with its own value. ¹³ Moreover, insofar as Arp is inspired by organic fertility in general, not just in plants, humans are not external to it. Arp's art is simply another instance of the organic fertility that humans, as living beings, often display – although Arp's art makes this productive activity salient in a way that it usually is not, and thereby affords epistemic access to it.

Lastly, while mimicking people can be disrespectful, emulating exemplars is also a cornerstone of agent-based virtue ethics (e.g. Zagzebski, 2017). Emulating human moral exemplars can be a way of respecting them and so may be a promising parallel to draw on, in clarifying how ‘producing like a plant’ can be respectful. This is not to deny the risk of disrespecting nonhumans (or people) by presuming to ‘act like’ or ‘speak for’ them. But it is to suggest a countervailing positive vision of nature as an exemplar: just as artists can respectfully understand earlier artists by emulating their style, artists can also respectfully understand nonhuman nature by emulating it – even if the highest forms of respect often involve creative departure from one's influences, as a way of internalising their generative power. When rooted in the kind of sympathetic attention stressed in recent work in environmental virtue aesthetics (Hall and Brady, 2023), emulation is less likely to carelessly distort or insensitively ‘speak for’ its targets.

Oversimplification: Aesthetic distillation creates valuable forms of simplicity, but clearly it can also go awry. Artificial colour-saturation in photographs of flowers can cheapen their natural vibrancy – more a garish affront to nature than a striking amplification. Similarly, musical drones can be more boring than primal or entrancing, much like idealised models can oversimplify the world. In concrete cases, like asking whether a Rothko is ‘too colour-saturated’, this line would often be open to reasonable disagreement even if aesthetic judgements were universally valid or objective. Detailed analysis of the aesthetic distillation/over-distillation threshold is also affected by one's underlying accounts of artistic and aesthetic value. ¹⁴ Given those, aesthetic distillation is ‘too much’ if and when it starts to undercut aesthetic or artistic value – much as scientific models become too idealised if and when idealisation starts to undercut its epistemic or pragmatic aims.

In principle, this risk of excessive or otherwise failed simplification could be admitted even in a modernist manifesto that calls, like Ezra Pound, for ‘greatest efficiency’ in art – for a systematic focus on the ‘vortex’ or ‘maximum point of energy’ (1914: 153; see also Flint, 1913: 199). There is no inconsistency between holding a strong preference for simplicity in art and also acknowledging the possibility of artistic failure tied to oversimplification or dogmatic avoidance of complexity. Pound (1913: 202) himself advises, not to avoid all ornament, but rather to ‘[u]se either no ornament or good ornament’. This might involve a practice of erring on the side of simplicity, which leaves room for ‘good’ complexity in art, even as it rules out ‘put[ting] in what you want to say and then fill[ing] up the remaining vacuums with slush’ (Pound, 1913: 205). Even so, Pound's fixation on ‘the primary pigment’ – ‘the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet SPENT itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing’ (1914: 153) – casts aspersion on many artistic styles. He dismisses Futurism, for example, as merely ‘the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, DISPERSAL’ (Pound, 1914: 153).

For those who believe that there is also a place in the artworld for maximalism – for the intricate metafictional involutions of a postmodern novel, or the virtuosic fireworks of jazz solos and classical cadenzas, or even Rococo ornament – Pound's insistence on ‘efficiency’ may seem too ideological. But my account is not a modernist manifesto. My analysis of distillation could be used to reinforce calls for efficiency in all art, with a minimal allowance for ‘good ornament’. However, my account is equally compatible with a pluralistic view that recognises the value of both simplicity and complexity across different artistic styles, and even within individual works. Either way, if simplifying nature offers artists an understanding of nature, this demands explanation.

Conclusion

Arp's germinal method is not just a way to understand his earlier sculptures by grasping quasi-scientific explanations of their aesthetic impact. That is a key part of aesthetic distillation, in some cases, but not the only source of understanding it offers. Arp himself seems more deeply interested in producing like a plant, or exemplifying (not depicting) organic growth and fertility. This clarifies how amplifying core factors can offer understanding: insofar as nature's ‘vigour and life’ is displayed in aesthetic impact, ‘growing’ an aesthetic core is a way to exemplify its vitality. This generates higher-order organic growth in a cycle of aesthetic impact and artistic creation, as striking ‘germs’ elicit ‘production’ by artists and so continually give rise to new germinal forms. Through his exemplification of organic fertility, Arp naturalises artistic creativity and aesthetic impact by highlighting their continuity with other processes of organic growth and reproduction.

This framework can then be decoupled from organically centred conceptions of nature, or merely metaphorical modes of description, by recasting Arp's ‘growth’ of ‘germs’ as a positive feedback loop of impersonal force. Thus, the vivid red of iron-rich clay may induce Goldsworthy to further intensify this red in his art. Nonpurposive concentrations of aesthetic force in nonhuman nature elicit the purposive human distillation of aesthetic force via artistic simplification, yielding artificial concentrations of force that may elicit higher-order artistic response. Aesthetic distillation can exemplify states of concentrated physical force, from the intense red of an ochre pigment or a lone Japanese maple to the most striking visual forms in an abstract sculpture. This helps to naturalise both aesthetic impact and artistic creativity, by highlighting their continuity with other processes of concentration and amplification in the organic but also the inorganic environment. Art does not transcend nature, from this standpoint, but rather distils in a way that echoes other natural processes and can help counteract human exceptionalism. Aesthetic distillation can even challenge us to reach beyond an organically focused appreciation of nature, to respect for the nonliving world.