Dan Goods and David Delgado; Refraction, 2014; Theater light, water, custom electronics; Courtesy of the artists.
The painter Willem de Kooning once said that the idea of space “is given to the artist to change if he can.” And of the real, Robert Rauschenberg opined that a painting “is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.” Space in painting is measured on a scale that begins with deep illusion depicting what appears beyond the window of the canvas, and moves successively forward to tangible real tactility in front of the canvas.
Where an artist chooses to work on that illusion-to-reality scale can have meaning in and of itself. And the modern history of those choices can be viewed as a kind of archeology of existential change. The exhibition REALSPACE, opening October 4 at Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery, is meant to reflect on how science intersects with that history. Poeticized by artists and studied by scientists throughout human history, the intractable reality of the natural world is examined by contemporary art and artifacts included in REALSPACE.
REALSPACE will be installed in the Williamson Gallery October 4, 2014 through January 18, 2015. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, October 3, from 7 to 10pm. Artists in the exhibition include Adam W. Brown and Robert Root-Bernstein, James Griffith, Dan Goods, David Delgado, Santiago Lombeyda, Rebeca Méndez and Jennifer Steinkamp. Artifacts and writings by James Ferguson (1710-1776), William Herschel (1738-1822), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), on loan from The Huntington Library, are also featured in the exhibition that combines works from contemporary art and science. At its opening, the exhibition will be accompanied by a 20-page free booklet and, eventually, a 40-page catalog.
Beginning around five-hundred years ago, history showed a slow curve away from knowledge formulated around the supernatural and imaginary and toward knowledge derived from the natural and scientific. The rate of scientific progress intensified as it reached the 1800s, which was reflected both directly and metaphorically by the art of that century.
“Nineteenth-century art’s deconstruction of illusion in pictorial space and its ultimate relocation of aesthetic experience in real space can be viewed as a metaphor for simultaneous changes taking place in the humanities, sciences, and technology. It helped create a cultural Weltanschauung, a worldview shaped by the gradual decline of supernatural theories about the world (analogous to paintings depicting things in illusory space) and the rise of scientific ones (analogous to paintings becoming objects themselves in real space),” says Stephen Nowlin, Williamson Gallery director and the curator of REALSPACE.
“This emerging view continued to evolve through various channels in 20th century art and into the 21st century, and can be interpreted as having done its part to undermine the dualistic assumption that nature and a supernature co-exist. This is, in retrospect, one of the more profound and under-heralded epistemological contributions made by late 19th and early 20th century art. The erosion of illusion in painting that accompanied a movement toward the concrete in painting, symbolized the general erosion of confidence in the supernatural brought about by the advancement of science.”
Toward the end of the 20th century, technology and science joined earlier artistic movements as a new and inevitable means by which art could continue its foray into the aesthetics of the real. The increasing gravitation to science by artists and curators over the first decade of the 21st century, and the proliferation of art/science-related non-profits, galleries, and university programs worldwide, underscore the continuing inclination of many artists to wrestle resonant, poetic, and provocative content from the scientific world view, continuing the exploration of real space aesthetics begun almost two centuries ago.
Works in REALSPACE include: paintings from James Griffith’s Natural Selection series, rendered using tar from the La Brea Tar Pits; Rebeca Méndez’s (BFA, ’84, Graphic Design; MFA, ’97, New Media and Communications) large-scale video CircumSolar, Migration 3, 2013, an Icelandic documentation of her ongoing research on the migration of Arctic Terns; Jennifer Steinkamp’s (MFA, ’91, Grad Art) architectural projection 6EQUJ5, 2012, a reflection on the panspermia theory of life’s introduction to planet Earth; Santiago V. Lombeyda’s Expressive Maps, 2013, prints on vellum derived from DNA; the artist/scientist duo Adam W. Brown and Robert Root-Bernstein’s Origins of Life: Experiment#1, 2010-2014, a re-enactment of the famous 1950s experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey that mixed the primordial conditions of Earth in test tubes, which in turn produced chemical building blocks of life; and Dan Goods (BFA, ’02, Graphic Design)/David Delgado’s installation Refraction, exploring the optical science and aesthetics of light and space. Among additional included works are a stunning group of astronomical engravings from the 1806 book Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles by astronomer, instrument and globe-maker James Ferguson; excerpts from the 1925 silent movie Wunder der Schöpfung (The Wonder of Creation); and haunting imagery encircling the asteroid Vesta as seen from NASA/JPL’s orbiting Dawn spacecraft.
To artists engaged in exploring art and science, the border between those two domains is meandering and porous, inherently resistant to being defined as a firm property-line. Far from the clichéd view that science is an emotionally sparse and strictly diagrammatic view of existence, and that art is a pleasurably therapeutic escape from the straightjacket of rigorous endeavor, the so-called ArtSci movement searches for the two domains’ truer and overlapping realities. “Science enjoys a popular patina of certainty which, however, conceals a process of groping and foraging, being messy, and tentative — while behind the veil of art’s seemingly cavalier processes and sensual indulgences, there is in fact cerebral order, structure, and intent,” says Nowlin. “The true kinship of art and science is to be found outside the persistence of those stereotypes thought to separate them, and instead in the spark of insight that can result when each discipline is allowed and encouraged to ignite the other.”
REALPSACE is a partner project of AxS 2014: Pasadena Festival of Art and Science, September 19 – October 5, 2014; organized by the Pasadena Arts Council. www.axsfestival.org
The Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design is located at 1700 Lida Street in Pasadena; hours are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, with extended hours on Fridays, until 9 p.m. The gallery is closed Mondays and holidays. For more gallery information, call (626) 396-2446. Williamson Gallery exhibitions are funded in part by the Williamson Gallery Patrons and a grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance.
A Google index of links to Williamson Gallery art-science activities can be found at here.
