CatArseTrophy Theory

1984-2007

mixed technique

Dedicated to Christopher Zeeman and René Thom

How could catastrophe theory (one of the Generative Sciences) be represented as a trophy shield if not by a cat taken from the front and back?

Salvador Dalì, in conversation with the artist in 1964, said, ‘… le Divin et le Dèsastre c’est une et la même chose!’

If ‘divine’ and ‘disaster’ are one and the same thing, so can catastrophe elevate a cat’s posterior to a symbol featured on a hunting trophy.

This work is dedicated to Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman and René Thom. The former is the British-Japanese mathematician known for his work in geometric topology, and for his scientific contribution to the theory of catastrophe. He continued the work of French mathematician René Thom, and encouraged the application of catastrophe theory to biology and behavioural sciences.

CatArseTrophy Theory II

«The hungry predator is its prey»

Catastrophe theory is neither unique nor absolute.

Vladimir Arnold, in ‘Teorija Katastrof’ quotes French mathematician Henri Poincatré: ‘Mathematicians do not eliminate the obstacles which their science meets along the way, they simply push them to their furthermost boundaries.’ Arnold adds: ‘May these very particular obstacles be now taken as far as possible beyond such confines so as to reach the realm of the unconscious and the irrational.’

Roger Penrose, in ‘The Road to Reality’ says, 'our road to understanding the nature of the real world is still a long way from its goal. And perhaps this goal will never be reached.’

Here the anterior of a white cat disappears into a black surface whilst pursuing a mouse, and emerges on the other side of the shield as the mouse itself: the predator becomes the prey, even at a molecular level. (In the past, enemies who had been defeated were eaten to assimilate their courage.)

The white becomes black and vice-versa. Everything is converted into its opposite.

‘In my end is my beginning.’
TS Eliot