http://artsfuse.org/66469/short-fuse-commentary-josiah-mcelheny-and-cern-researching-the-possibilities/
Art and science rebuffed each other in this
show. Visitors are unlikely to leave with either a greater understanding of cosmology
or of Josiah McElheny’s art.
Josiah
McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite. At
the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, through October 14.
Scattering Surface, the second piece in Josiah
McElheny’s Big Bang Series, which describes the creation of the universe.
Conceptual art is sometimes thought of as a
dodge, a shortcut, a way of skipping the detail-oriented work of representing
reality. There are times, though, when the conceptual approach does more
justice to the complex nature of things than representational skill can
achieve.
These thoughts occur in connection with the work
of Josiah McElheny. Until Some Pictures of the Infinite, his current show at
the ICA, McElheny was known in the Boston area through two pieces, one owned by
ICA (“Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely”), the other by the MFA
(“Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism”). Both bear daunting titles,
to be sure, but are not weighed down by them. They are elegant and engaging,
using reflective surfaces to create sensations of endless interiority. When
getting lost in them, I sometimes think of a comment by artist/architect Anish
Kapoor to the effect that the dimension that counts most to today’s artist—the
“ultramodern” dimension—is that of inside out.
Kapoor is celebrated for teasing and defying
everyday distinctions between interior and exterior. It’s as if he has devised
his own non-Euclidean sense of space, one that Escher might have appreciated
and that McElheny, among other contemporary artists, approximates in some of
his work. Kapoor’s fascination with “inside-out forms” seems, however
coincidentally, perfectly suited to a twenty-first-century physics that
accommodates event horizons, singularities, and black holes.
Anish Kapoor’s Marsupial — his work is perfectly
suited to a twenty-first century physics that accommodates event horizons,
singularities, and black holes.
It was in anticipation of the ICA show that I
attended a panel discussion at Harvard last winter about McElheny’s aims. He
had chosen the most ambitious subject matter, cosmology—the big bang, the
expanding universe, and the possibility of a multiverse, or many universes
coexisting and overlapping at the quantum level. Inspired by chandeliers at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York, McElheny would apply his experience in working
with glass and mirrors to creating varied scenarios of the multiverse as it
exploded into being.
At the time of the lecture, the Harvard Art
Museum was still mounting Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern
Europe, a rich and deservedly much-praised show about the ways in which the
arts and the rapidly expanding sciences had interacted during the given period.
Curators were eager to include McElheny’s forthcoming exhibit under the same
rubric: his glass hangings would afford the kind of visualization for the big
bang and the multiverse that printmaking had for the zoology and geography of
an earlier age.
Melissa Franklin, a Harvard professor of physics
on hand for the discussion, tried gently to curb the curatorial enthusiasm for
McElheny’s efforts. Visual art would not reflect or advance astrophysics the way,
say, Durer’s prints and drawings had promoted the understanding of human
anatomy. In fact, according to Franklin, if you entered the lecture halls of
contemporary astrophysicists, you would find that efforts to visualize were
conspicuous mostly by their sabsence.
Franklin’s cautionary note came back to me when
I visited Some Pictures of the Infinite. The glass works might have been
rewarding in their own right but could not shoulder the theme. Art and science
rebuffed each other in this show. Visitors are unlikely to leave with either a
greater understanding of cosmology or of McElheny’s art.
CERN — the collider itself is nothing less than
a feast for the eyes and through them the imagination.
I recalled what Prof. Franklin had said about
how the multiverse is likely to be portrayed in today’s physics classrooms:
there would be an object on a blackboard labeled Universe A, an adjacent object
chalked in as Universe B, and between them, in big caps, the word “THEORY.”
This schema lacks for visual stimuli but conveys, conceptually, a respect for
what today is at best hypothetical in science and may remain so indefinitely.
It’s not always the case that new physics need
starve art of visual satisfaction. My case in point is the large hadron
collider at CERN, where persuasive evidence of the Higgs boson has been found.
The Higgs boson, for all that it supplies mass to the universe, may defy visual
representation, but the collider itself, as photographs amply attest, is
nothing less than a feast for the eyes and through them the imagination. CERN
is a fascinating structure that aims at giving clues to the structure and
origins of the cosmos. It has been compared to Chartre and other great gothic
cathedrals. The comparison is valid only to a point. At Chartre, the answers
were known in advance. You entered to absorb them further and to pray to them.
CERN gives no answers in advance. It sifts through the possibilities and, in
the process, achieves epochal beauty.
No comments:
Post a Comment