Jorinde Voigt’s Epicurus
A text by John Yau
Epicurus’ letter to Pythocles is the source of Epicurus: Letter to Pythocles, Jorinde Voigt’s suite of seven drawings. In the letter Epicurus refers to a letter he sent to Herodotus, which details the key doctrines of his major work, “On Nature,” of which only fragments have survived. In these letters – which amount to philosophical treatises – Epicurus sets forth his understanding of the universe, which was partly based on the theory of Atomism that the pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus, had developed a few hundred years earlier.
Long before our search for the Higgs Boson and the building of the particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland, Democritus believed that the universe was made up of atoms, bits of indivisible matter. According to Democritus, the natural world was comprised of two invisible bodies, atoms and the void. He posited that the atoms were in constant movement throughout all eternity, which is one reason why things continually changed.
An empiricist, Epicurus believed that knowledge was derived from the senses, from direct observation. He felt that it was necessary to exclude myth in order to begin studying the universe. He wanted to understand natural phenomena such as earthquakes, wind, snow, dew, ice, rainbows, comets, and the halo around the moon – all things he cites in his letter to Pythocles.
Epicurus seems a particularly apt subject for Voigt. His model of the universe, based on his study of an encyclopedic variety of phenomena, is one in which everything is ceaselessly moving and changing. Voigt’s drawings and sculptures are predicated on the recognition that each of us is enmeshed in an unstable field of visible and invisible forces, ranging from the microscopic to the immeasurable. Time is marked by continuity, repetition, change, and upheaval, all of which she registers in her drawings.
Epicurus’ view of reality stands in stark contrast to those who held that gods, magic and other inexplicable forces ruled the world. In Epicurus we have one of the early foundations of scientific observation. At the same time, observation does not preclude speculation. In his letters, he advances a number of prescient theories regarding the nature of the universe, including his belief that it is populated by an infinite number of celestial bodies where life of some kind is able to thrive.
In her drawings, which exist in the territory between writing and art, between precision and speculation, Voigt is a diarist and philosopher, information gatherer and celestial cartographer, an individual attuned to both the minute and the infinite, the solitary inhabitant of a planet drifting between a forgotten origin and an unknowable future.
For Epicurus, the knowledge of celestial phenomena – of the stars and infinity – has no goal other than peace of mind. He believed that it was possible to come to terms with what is impossible to change. At the same time, he cautioned against making “empty assumptions and arbitrary laws.” The one way to achieve happiness was to gather facts rather than tumble into myth.
In Epicurus: Letter to Pythocles, Voigt brings together fragments of Epicurus’ letter, which she hand copies, and various signs –envelopes, celestial spheres, a wrapped box and flames – which she connects through various patterns of black lines rotating across the paper (the universe). The lines are not arbitrary. In addition to the black lines, Voigt uses two colors, gold and silver, to underscore the celestial nature of her signs. The wrapped box (a present) suggests that the artist recognizes Epicurus’ letter as a gift to the recipient. And she, in turn, is offering that gift to the viewer.
In each of the drawings, Voigt devotes herself to mapping the visible and invisible. She wants to stay open to reality in all its manifestations: the thought and the seen, the wind and the rotation of the planets as they spin around the sun. In all of her decisions, she is guided by the application of rigorous procedures: algorithms to decide the direction of a line or the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of lines branching off the initial one.
Chance and persistence are essential to Voigt’s drawings and understanding of reality. The turbulent networks of lines transform the large sheets of paper on which they are made into imaginative spaces as well as maps tracing the movements of time and its innumerable elements. In her citations of Epicurus, she underscores his recognition of things that are “yet to be explained” and “still need to be verified.” Voigt is essentially bringing Epicurus into the present, where he belongs, searching for peace of mind in the face of our awareness that the universe is infinite and that chaos and entropy are unavoidable.
In her work, Voigt gazes directly into the turmoil and upheaval – the constant change that animates our daily lives – without averting her eyes. This is what she and Epicurus have in common: fearlessness in the face of the inescapable.