Aesthetics 101

Let me guess- you're in the mood for a conversation about the nature of art, and you need an unexpected documentary to throw a spark on the tinder. Make straight for Between the Folds, a PBS special that takes you on a grand tour of the arresting and unsung world of contemporary origami. Once again, Jamie is to thank for the find.

It begins with an artist from Israel making some grandly lyrical statements about the act of folding: "...DNA folds, too! Life comes from the act of folding..," etc., the kind of let's-tie-the-whole-universe-together talk that comes frothing out of drunk people at parties, and I'm afraid I rolled my eyes at it. I regretted this later, when I realized how much the movie had, in good time, earned the right to draw a line from origami to just about any other human concern, certainly not excluding the origin of life.

This documentary is populated by artists, scientists and philosophers who a.) fold paper, b.) are fiercely individual, and c.) know how to muse well. Musing and origami clearly go together; these paper folders do not do either frivolously. By the end of the hour, I thought I had never heard a more thoughtful, articulate, diverse, or productive forum on the nature of art, the more intractable problems in art, or on the intersections of art and math, art and science, or art and philosophy. I'm quite serious, it really is that rich of a program- and all the while, you're looking at paper creations, which, rather than getting tiresome after 20 or 30 minutes, keep getting more surprising and spectacular as you move along.

The most astonishing thing to me was how these artists could refer specifically to origami, yet seem to be talking generally about all media of art. A Frenchman laments that the young people who approach origami today are mostly drawn to its technical possibilities- that their delight in the potential complexity of a piece surpasses their concern for aesthetics. Then an American responds by reminding us that technology is usually developed in waves, and that art almost always progresses once we learn to properly wield new methodologies. I immediately thought of cinema, how much its soul has been sapped in the last two decades by new methods. And then thought of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, how they pile new methods into their tool kits along with the old, and how sublime the results have been.