NEW YORK, NY.- One spring morning, one wet English morning, John Keats looked up at a rainbow and felt nothing.
The colors that streaked across the sky in Hampstead should have awed him, as they awed people of centuries past — when Noah saw the rainbow as proof of the Lord’s covenant, or when Norsemen believed the rainbow linked this realm to the world of the gods. But by the early 19th century, all Keats could see in the rainbow were optical, verifiable facts. His countryman Isaac Newton had proved that the colors were just sunlight refracted on water droplets, each wavelength bent at a different angle. This was the scientific disenchantment that the young Romantic described in his 1819 poem “Lamia”:
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the
dull
catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow …
Culture and religion, dreams and angels: for Keats, by 1819, they had all been unwoven. Their poetry had been zeroed out by the cold calculations of physics (or natural “philosophy,” to use his word). And as the modern gospel of progress and rationalization continued to “conquer all mysteries,” artists and scientists began to look at each other with a mutual incomprehension — even disdain — that British author and chemist C.P. Snow notoriously diagnosed in 1959 as “two cultures.” Art imagines, science answers: and the answer is final.
But go ask Aristotle: Art and science were not always opposites. The Renaissance was an art/science crossover. Without Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein there is no modernism. “PST ART: Art & Science Collide,” the biggest artistic event of the fall season, is all about these two complementary curiosities — and in Los Angeles this September, where Keats would have most likely encountered disappointing rainbows at a West Hollywood happy hour, the denizens of California’s studios and laboratories are going to get to know each other a little better. Nearly 70 exhibitions, of antiquities and contemporary production, in museums and at universities and research centers, will put science in a new frame, and art under the microscope.
Originally called Pacific Standard Time, “PST Art” is an initiative of the Getty — the richest art institution on earth, and among the most intellectually ambitious — to produce a synchronized showcase of Southern Californian cultural clout. This is its third full-scale edition since 2011, and this fall the Getty will be presenting no fewer than nine PST exhibitions, including “Lumen: The Art & Science of Light,” a survey of optics and religion in medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic art, as well as an overview of Experiments in Art and Technology, a 1960s organization that brought leading American artists to Bell Labs. (Both shows opened Sept. 10.)
But this interdisciplinary festival stretches far beyond the Getty’s Brentwood acropolis. The Getty has committed $20.4 million to institutions large and small in Southern California, and, from the desert to the ocean, PST places a particular emphasis on research-driven exhibitions. There are shows of 1,500-year-old manuscripts and 20th-century aerospace technology, of botanical intricacy and digital minimalism.
At the Palm Springs Art Museum, “Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990” (from Sept. 14) examines how the astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory and the aeronautics engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena inspired painters and sculptors in Cold War L.A. Similar correspondences animate “Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020” (at six locations at the California Institute of Technology, from Sept. 27), which will present rare books of astronomy by Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus and a new installation by Helen Pashgian, a California sculptor who worked at the science institute in the late 1960s. “Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World,” at the San Diego Museum of Art, assembles miniatures, maps, carvings and navigational instruments to illuminate an intellectual tradition in which art and science were not at odds (from Sept. 7).
A notable through-line of this year’s PST is surveillance technology: a science of images, in which a picture’s beholder might now be an artificial intelligence. The Wende Museum, a small historical archive of Eastern Bloc art and memorabilia in Culver City, gathers police manuals, Stasi photography, and early facial recognition apparatuses in “Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency” (from Oct. 12). UCR Arts, on the campus of the University of California, Riverside, puts contemporary art in the context of the 1960s development of digital imaging technology in “Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World” (from Sept. 21).
The surveillance theme points to a surprising, and somewhat dispiriting, aspect of this year’s PST: for all its promises of interdisciplinarity, much of the newest art that will be on view seems skeptical at best about science. The festival’s exhibitions of ancient, medieval, and modern art treat astronomy, botany or meteorology as progressive enterprise, efforts to discover new horizons. But contemporary artists seem weirdly afraid of the sort of knowledge deduced in laboratories today, and much more comfortable with science fiction, atavistic rituals and hippie alternatives.
“Scientia Sexualis,” a group survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art from Oct. 5, turns to artists with “speculative” approaches to sex and gender, who reimagine bodies from “the way they have been historically defined by science.” Further speculations take place in “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.,” at the library of the University of Southern California, which apparently encompasses “a Halloween cosplay event.” Ancestralism and spiritualism will be rife this year; one PST show invokes “ancient wisdom,” another one “fire kinship,” and even the stentorian Getty is presenting an astrology exhibition. It all makes PST — or at least its contemporary side — sound less suited to the Salk Institute in La Jolla than the Erewhon organic grocery store on Venice Boulevard.
But contemporary science, as today’s best artists already understand, is neither an objective truth machine nor a western colonial conspiracy. It’s a human endeavor, which works best when it aims at the refinement of earlier knowledge and worst when it purports to answer things once and for all. That human understanding is what has recently led Pierre Huyghe, in exhibitions in Venice and Seoul, South Korea, to apply the latest neuroscience into his visual vocabulary, and Torkwase Dyson to integrate new climate research into her sculptural practice. It’s why painters like Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries adopt digital technologies of image compression and distortion when they turn to the canvas. That humanity is no less valid in the laboratories. The neuroscientists aiming to demystify consciousness, the quantum researchers who isolated a “God particle,” and the genomists troubling the frontiers of life span are broaching questions only a poet can truly answer.
Because when it comes to science, art can go to extremes: It is either too credulous or too skeptical. In one corner are the hustlers who keep promising “an intersection of art and technology,” lately typified by the kitsch debacles of the NFT boom and bust or the dopey image engines of AI. In the other are the mystics who caricature the scientific method as an instrument of oppression, and celebrate art as the province of alternative facts. These are twin problems with a common derivation — one that Keats, looking up at his rainbow, would have recognized. Art and science have become bare synonyms for imagination and reasoning. But both modes of inquiry require both modes of thinking.
In her eye-opening, discipline-jumping 2017 book “True Enough,” philosopher Catherine Z. Elgin argues that the sciences do not arrive at truth as such, but do something more valuable: They “advance understanding of the phenomena they bear on,” often through models that are not so much true as revealing. “In laboratory experiments, scientists simplify, streamline, manipulate, and omit,” Elgin writes. They assume molecules are perfect spheres, or pretend surfaces have no friction, “to disclose barely detectable or standardly overshadowed aspects of nature.” The scientist idealizes, approximates, prototypes; sometimes, as when Newton imagined shooting a cannonball into orbit, he invents thought experiments that could never take place at all.
These scientific imaginings — what Elgin calls “felicitous falsehoods” — do not actually aim toward absolute truth, but a perpetual refinement of the lenses and models through which we understand the world. Which is an argument that should make artists prick up their ears.
What if we set aside the aim of reconciling two supposed domains of art and science, and tried to reconceive the theories of knowledge that govern both? Eratosthenes’ calculation of the Earth’s circumference and Homer’s evocation of a planetary ocean, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Pablo Picasso’s fractured guitar, the rainbows in Keats’ poetry and the rainbows in Newton’s laboratory, are all in their way ideal representations. They are all models that spotlight what waking life leaves in shadow.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
