The Edge of Reason: Shedding Light at the Phipps
By Christina Schmid
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
– Albert Einstein[i]
Trust Einstein to articulate what reconciles two seemingly opposite ways of making sense of the world: science with its prerequisite distance to ensure analytical dissection of phenomena, its insistence on clear parameters, and its investment in objective, repeatable observations—and art with its open-ended and idiosyncratic inquiries, whose tangible and intangible shapes time and again refute rationality. Yet despite their differences, both disciplines share a deep curiosity, a commitment to exploring the mysterious, and an appetite for wonder.
The ambiguity of wonder, with its rare blend of speculation and awe, figures prominently in “Shedding Light: Art Explores Science.” Curated by Susan Armington, the show brings together six artists whose work engages with science: its discourse, methods, appeal, ubiquity, and history. This combination, which Armington describes as a kind of experiment in and of itself, allows for a multifaceted conversation about the interstices between science and art.
Why facilitate this conversation between art and science? Is it not true that most artistic production relies on science—think of photography’s optical, chemical, and digital adventures or painting’s sophisticated mixing of pigments, oils, and thinners–and that, on the other hand, science can explain art’s strange seductions? Yes and no. Art’s effects can never be reduced to the medium alone, regardless of how sophisticated the execution may be. And, despite neuroscience’s elaborate studies in cognition and perception, art continues to exceed what science can account for.
“The aesthetic response,” writes curator and critic Michael Brenson, “is miraculous. Such an astonishing amount of psychological, social, and historical information can be interwoven into a single connective charge that a lifetime of thinking cannot disentangle the threads.”[ii] But while Brenson cherishes this bewilderment, rationalists such as Rene Descartes might find it deeply troubling: “What we commonly call being astonished is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad,” he argued.[iii] Thus, despite their shared interest in the mysterious, art and science pursue different, though not mutually exclusive, goals.
While science aims at knowledge production that is verifiable and can be expressed in qualitative and quantitative analyses, the knowledge art promises is subjective, private, even intimate at times, and forces language to the point of fracture.[iv] Art always invites an embodied perception, while science seeks to abstract and generalize. Both rely on observation. Ultimately, both aim to produce a kind of knowledge that, for very different reasons, remains incomplete: while the embodied knowledge of the aesthetic encounter resists and exceeds verbal expression, scientific knowledge is useful only to the extent that it can be communicated, expressed, mapped, and purposefully harnessed. Additionally, scientific knowledge, while based on the most reliable methods and techniques currently available, is hypothetical, open to revision and refutation.
“Shedding Light” navigates the spaces between art and science by alerting us to such similarities and profound differences. Art, like science, can appear inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the jargon of either discipline. Susan Armington’s The Life Story of Petroleum addresses viewers in what she calls her storytelling voice, as if to assure us that yes, we, too, can join this conversation and explore science through art.
Inspired by scientific life cycle analysis, Armington’s time line of petroleum begins like a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, 400 million years ago.” The artist invites us to marvel along with her, as she unravels the infinitesimally slow transformation of microscopic plankton drifters and wanderers into crude oil and, eventually, petroleum. The fantastic oceanic world of old becomes increasingly ordinary, familiar, even mundane, as the time line slowly transports us into the present.
But what Armington suggests is that underneath the quotidian banality of pumping gas there is a story that is anything but ordinary: each drop of oil, each plume of exhaust, bears a trace of the tiny ancient creatures, transformed by unimaginable forces and immense time spans. In other words, The Life Story of Petroleum asks us to wonder unabashedly, to prize the ordinary for its very strangeness, and, via the tiny specks of mirrored tile, to see our own part in the unfolding of this particular story.
Krista Kelly Walsh’s installation Things Unseen overlooks the St. Croix River valley and, like Armington’s time line, asks us to treasure the marvelous in the ordinary. With its deceptively simple array of water-filled glass vases on the windowsills, Things Unseen entices us to pause, sit, look closely, and realize just how much there is to look at: the stunning daytime view of the river valley, the play of broken and refracted light and shadow, and, once we peek through the vases as lenses, a world warped by the concavities and convexities of the glass surfaces.
Rather than tell us a story, Things Unseen invites us to make up our own narratives of discovery, as each subtle shift in position vis-à-vis the vases leads to new surprises and literally makes visible things previously unseen. We may choose to stay in the realm of optics and reflect on why we see what we see, how lenses and light angles combine to produce these effects. On the other hand, we may venture into metaphor and ponder the importance of adopting different points of view and how doing that may change our very view of the world. Or, we may simply contemplate Walsh’s mindful arrangement of these deceptively simple materials—nothing but glass, sunlight, water—and, perhaps, play a little by ducking this way and that: after all, “if people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”[v]
Jantje Visscher shares Walsh’s commitment to working with ordinary materials to achieve extraordinary effects: clear plastic strips, fishing line, steel pins, and light form the basis of her sculptures, Twisting Fate and Breaking Light. Visscher’s vocabulary of light invites us to wonder, to speculate and marvel, at the uncanny affinities these inanimate luminescent shapes share with delicate dorsal fins or the graceful arc of birds’ wings. Her work simultaneously abstracts and condenses naturally occurring patterns. Without doubt, the language of mathematics could unravel the formulas and algorithms of these intangible webs, but just as surely that act of translation into scientific discourse would miss the point. Visscher’s work activates the science of light in order to create possibilities for perceptual experiences that exceed what scientific analysis can explain. Simply put, the visceral encounter with her work does not stop at the edge of reason. Then, we gently come undone, are radically de-centered, if only for a moment, by the experience of the beautiful.[vi]
Such experiences also play a prominent part in Christine Baeumler’s Darwin’s Table: on a massive wooden table, five bell jars house short video loops of animals the artist filmed while traveling in the Galapagos Island Nature Conservancy, following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin. Positioned centrally amongst these specimens of experience is a human eye morphing into a fish eye, alluding to Ernst Haeckel’s famous insight that ontogenesis resembles phylogenesis: each human embryo repeats the steps of our evolutionary development as a species. But the luminescent videos also speak to the development of scientific and creative conservation efforts. We no longer have to kill, stuff, and collect, as was the custom in Darwin’s day. Technology, that is, applied science, allows us to document and study the natural world in much less invasive ways today.
South American Miscellanea, a selection of Baeumler’s photographs turns back the technological clock: produced as platinum prints, a process used in Darwin’s day, and hung in the salon style of 18th-century Wunderkammern, the photographs juxtapose images of stuffed birds from the dioramas of Lima’s Natural History Museum with birds the artist encountered in the South American rain forest. By blurring the lines between the wild creatures and the taxidermied remains of their relatives, Baeumler’s work implicitly asks us to consider how we would rather encounter these avian creatures: as neatly arranged, labeled, and more or less diligently preserved specimens in a museum or as noisy, unruly, amazing flocks in the wild. But as Baeumler’s photographs insinuate, differentiating between the natural and the preserved has become increasingly difficult. The very idea of the natural as somehow pure and untainted by any human presence or scientific intervention seems hopelessly outdated, as we re-purpose nature and conserve shrinking habitats for scientific study and eco-tourism.
David Lefkowitz’s paintings tell a similar story of the irrevocable entanglement of nature and technology. The foregrounds of his Tangle paintings are dominated by complicated knots of wires and plant material, suggesting, at times, a parasitical, at other times a quasi-symbiotic relationship. In Tangle #29, the intertwined strands of organic and inorganic material are framed by a lavishly colored sky and eerily beautiful in their portentous embrace. Their intertwining becomes a new sublime in these paintings, terrifying and amazing, the source of fascination and fear. Yet despite the mythical splendor of Lefkowitz’s skies, technology’s ubiquity has also made it ordinary, weed-like, and cropping up in unlikely places, as in Tangle #32, where a precocious Dandelion defeats the tarmac. But this rampant proliferation also raises the specter of an out-of-control, invasive, metastasizing growth, an anxiety that the gathering storm in the background of Tangle #27 alludes to.
Aside from the ominous cloudscapes, the backgrounds of these Tangle paintings tell yet another story. Their blurry snapshot quality is reminiscent of amateur digital photography and alludes to a certain haste and shallowness in the everyday perception of our surroundings. The paintings suggest an antidote to this incessantly mobile, fast-paced mode of perception and aim to seduce us into looking a little more closely, lingering a little longer.
Heidi Hafermann’s untitled installation investigates a different kind of seduction: that of colorful pills that promise to make us happy, attractive, and smart. In this pharmacological universe, everything is a possible symptom, lucratively treatable. But Hafermann’s blotchy and disproportionately large pills look singularly unappealing. Imprinted with the cautious language of medical didactics, these hand-sewn pills effectively raise doubts about the trust we place in a system that sets the standard, determines the norm, and transforms the complexities of human experience into clear-cut diagnoses. Without explicitly discounting their medical usefulness or profitability, Hafermann’s installation emanates a certain unease.
The ubiquity of pharmacologically engineered experience in our lives should give us pause; the way these drugs homogenize experience and pale our emotional states should make us think, the monochromatic bedroom suggests. What, in other words, do we stand to lose by muffling and cushioning our exposure to the real by pills that double as tiny pillows? Hafermann’s work aims at making strange the colorful ordinariness of these pills.
Thus, like all of the artists in “Shedding Light”, Hafermann exhorts us to pay attention, to look closely, and to consider carefully the eponymous light that scientific inquiry continues to shed on the world. After all, as David Lefkowitz pointed out in conversation, “shedding light” can also mean abandoning light in favor of obfuscation and darkness.
This ambiguity pervades “Shedding Light.” Poised between celebration and wariness of our everyday entanglements with applied science, the artists in “Shedding Light” show us the marvelous in the ordinary. By using the visual and conceptual vocabulary of science in entirely impractical ways, they create opportunities for wonder. But equally important, they show that, taken together, science and art may deepen our understanding and appreciation of the world. If science takes us to the edge of the known and makes visible things otherwise unseen, art’s explorations of science invite us to pause at this edge—to linger, play, and reflect, lest we tumble over some proverbial precipice.
[i] Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown, 1954. 11.
[ii] Michael Brenson, “Art Criticism and the Aesthetic Response.” Act of Engagement. New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 66.
[iii] Rene Descartes, quoted in Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 89.
[iv] Dave Hickey, “Air Guitar.” Air Guitar. Los Angeles: Art Issues press, 1997. 167.
[v] Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 50.
[vi] Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999. 111.
Image List
1) Susan Armington, The Life Story of Petroleum. Detail.
2) Krista Kelley Walsh. Things Unseen. Installation Detail.
3) and 4) Jantje Visscher, Twisting Fate and Breaking Light. Details.
5) Christine Baeumler. South American Miscellanea. Installation View.
6)-11) David Lefkowitz, Tangle paintings.
12)-13) Heidi Hafermann, Untitled. Installation view.
This essay has been previously published on the Phipps Center for the Arts website.
[...] with an artistic edge. There’s an intelligent, thoughtful essay about the exhibit called “Edge of Reason” written by Christina Schmid, one of three managing editors at Quodlibetica, a visual and literary [...]
Christina, what beautiful writing! I especially appreciate the ethical insight you bring to your critique and your observation of how new science and increased cultural awareness (a decentering but not diminution of the human relative to other species) enable a fresh approach to nature.