3 April, 1977.

This morning to Betty Collings' studio, the top floor of an old brick building in Columbus, Ohio - hard by a railroad overpass. There she works on the structural permutations germane to an organic gemoetry, inventing as she does so, what might be called an organic mathematics. She determined a range of organizations -helics, anolatabulata, con(jug)ations, fractured icons - a topological biology, exhaustively working through each of the possible variations. The "working through" is based on trial and error - a sculptor's term for intuition - and an idealistic love of inquiry.

Collings told me the story about the naming of anolatabulata. In Palaeontological studies of prehistoric rocks, microscopic exsamination revealed the pitted remains of what appeared to be an organism existing continuously since pre-Cambrian time to the present, an organism given the name Anolatabulata. Only recently was it recognized that the microscopic pittings resulted not from the formation of an ancient cellular structure but from the clorox solution used to wash the earth samples or slides - a record not of historical remains but of traces of contemporary inadvertancy. The story is funny - why it perversely appeals to Collings - since, after all, nothing is left to chance in her work.

Collings told me the story about the naming of anolatabulata. In Palaeontological studies of prehistoric rocks, microscopic exsamination revealed the pitted remains of what appeared to be an organism existing continuously since pre-Cambrian time to the present, an organism given the name Anolatabulata. Only recently was it recognized that the microscopic pittings resulted not from the formation of an ancient cellular structure but from the clorox solution used to wash the earth samples or slides - a record not of historical remains but of traces of contemporary inadvertancy. The story is funny - why it perversely appeals to Collings - since, after all, nothing is left to chance in her work.

One of the generative figures in her work is derived from the torus, a double ringed circle, a doughnut shape. The scheme for figure 2 is a kind of macaronic question mark. Granting the soft pliable material she works in - plastic sheeting, seam annealed under heat - the figure can be worked as parallel or congruent, face-to-face with one another or inversely, since the outer edge of the figure is exactly equal in length to the perimeter of any of its permutations

are only some of the combinations possible to the torus master figure.

20 February, 1978

…Collings remains dedicated to the episteme. She is determined to mine still more content from it. By contrast I begin to see the episteme as locked into that of a stylistic proposition or system. To distinguish hereself from a sense of period style, Collings feels that the epistemic freemasony has celebrated a party in a mirror, if I may state it so awkwardly. They imposed she feels, the value of the episteme only within the confines of an art world obsessed with a notion of style, whereas she has validated her episteme in a world where it really counts for something - mathematics. Indeed, P. Huneke, Professor of Mathematical Topology, presented a study of her work in "Tiling and Symmetries" at the Seattle, 1977, meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Married to an experimental physicist, Collings' insights are intensified by her living and working at Ohio State University. Had she worked in New York she might never have appreciated the full breadth of the epistemic ramifications of her work. The other epistemologists enjoy the "cushioning" and the possible shrinking effects of "easy art people and art world reference". …

Collings fantasizes that on completion of each of her series - so demanding are they - she will take her work, series by series, compact them, press them into an iron box on whose lid has been etched the information pertinent to each group and "bury the damn things". Sometimes Collings begins in Aristotle and ends in Duchamp.

Collings sees epistemic abstraction as a cognitive method while I have been calling it 'exploring a system', that is a 'style'. She insists that my view neither parallels nor is congruent with hers and she is right. She sees that as the going got tough as style the position was abandoned. Since she doesn't see the matter as a stylistic problem as I do she can remain with the information in a serious way. Indeed, in the long run, she 'wins' - even on sytlistic grounds because the seriously argued philosophical fall out of any given time comes to be seen as the period's essential style.

She feels that the module leading to the accumulation of information, what I have been calling the epistem, must have the psotential of a second or third order of information, if not the module was too limited or the artist insufficiently gifted.

Thinking has for Collings a physiological basis. She holds that there is a level of exploration that consciousness or literary gifts are unable to accomplish, denigrating what I take to be the necessary condition of verbal expression in the formulation of art - not the whole thing mind you but at least part of it. She takes such a formulation as I propose for tissues of deceit; as she says "You don't have to say to think".

11 August, 1978.

…Collings remains most impressive. She has just put forth an enormous effort in the working out of paper dot drawings. Actually the colored and black and white dots of these drawings encode the structural permutations inherent to the axial positions of Yin-Yang shapes. Collings' whole effort really is to explore the logical organicity of all the formal projections of the circle - spirals, concentric forms, etc. By dint of will, by sheer tenacity -moments of excitement and exhilaration, if you will - she has invented an abstract visual system that parallels the logic of another form (compare for example musical notation to the sound of music).

I don't want to make "all the formal projections of the circle" sound like some univeral om or anything remotely mystical, far from it. Collings is eminently a practical hard headed woman - often belied by her hight spirits and laughing good humor. I talk about "feeding the data into a computer", Collings would as soon, indeed has, photographed her taxing drawings so that she could in a way "play cards with the contacts", not only because the alignments of the cards would aid the revelation of unanticipated organizations, a new potential that is, but because it was good fun just to have played with them.

Collings' achievement keys into her belief in the demythifiied utility of art. Contrast this position to the retrograde and mythical claim made for sensibility abstraction and one begins to grasp just how radical Collings is. She has worked for several years on such problems yet each drawing or model is so fragile, so liable to be lost, especially as her studio leaks in the rain and is dreadfully dusty. There's that kind of sheer elemental danger to her work that most artists must own up to. She really must have the drawings photographed or reprographically transformed somehow into prints so that at least the information of her work, the information qua information is not lost. What will happen to the objectified works, the drawings and the inflatables.. that's another problem.

What she most admires - and so do I in a way - is absolute dedication to a problem. This she feels is the cardinal character of the authentic artist, a trait not necessarily projected by the art object or work. This dedication animates very few artists but it is surely absent from mindless exercises in sensibility, even the best of them, if such exercises can ever be said to have a "best".

Robert Pincus-Witten. Professor of Art History, Graduate Center City University of New York and Critic of Contemporary Art.