The Idiosynchrasies of Shape
Claes Oldenburg’s Gun Ray collection, presented together with the Mouse Museum at MoMa, shows a visual thinker at work. Anything that has the shape of a gun, even objects that happen to encompass a shape made from two cylinders (or rectangles, in projection or roadkill) of different sizes meeting each other in an angle of 90 degrees, is worthy of the artist’s attention. The range of objects he decided to include in this panorma is breathtaking.
But now consider this. The 90 degrees between the handle of a gun and the cylinder from which the bullet is ejected at high speed is a result of our anatomy; the fingers clasp to form a vertical cylinder with adjustable diameter. If the gun had the shape of a straight rod, the bullet would go into the sky.
It gets better. Evolution, on a time scale of 3.5 billion years, had a similar problem on the molecular scale. tRNA and the ribosome co-evolved, leading to a 90-degree configuration of the two arms of tRNA as the best, one arm in contact with the decoding center, the other reaching the center where the peptide bond is formed.
Along with tRNA, a host of molecules came into being that were required to interact with the ribosome, sneaking in as it were under the guise of tRNA, mimicking its shape: RRF, EttA, TSS, and many more.
It is, believe it or not, the shape of a gun, and should claim its rightful place in Claes Oldenburg;s collection. If he had only known!
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