March 5, 2013
“Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.” ~John Singer Sargent
Left: Lucian Freud, The Hon. Colin Tennant (1968). Private collection
Convergences
When the arts and sciences intersect, the product of those partnerships is often greater than the sum of their parts. In a recent trend that is, after all, not so new*, nuclear physicists and biologists are in earnest dialogue with painters and dancers, for example, to determine what they can learn from each other. From this perspective—having, of late, witnessed some of the provocative and inspiring results of their combined labors—it may be fair to say that an entirely new genre of creative expression lies at this intersection. When joined together to configure, plan and share, these highly-energized collaborations between left brain scientists and right-brain studio types struggle, at first, to find a common language adequate to describe their respective domains. The lexicon emerging from these exchanges is worthy of study in itself, but it serves only as a means, not an end. artes fine arts magazine
Witness the particle physicist reaching out to the print maker and poet, encapsulating a description of a neutrino’s behavior in a high-speed accelerator, thereby enabling their research to be translated into images and phrases that adequately capture the pulse of the hidden world of the atom. Imagine a class at Yale called, The Physics of Dance, where a former New York City Ballet dancer teams with a university physicist to encourage students to think about the physics concepts behind dance—force, torque, and center of mass, for example. Consider the watercolorist who travels with a marine biologist to the deepest parts of the ocean, on board the research submersible, Alvin, to sketch and photograph rarely-seen creatures for later interpretation on her easel back at the studio.
These are just a few current examples of the increasingly-blurred lines between art and science. Seventeenth-century enlightened thinking propelled an increased reliance on objectification when depicting nature. Global expansion in the 1700s exposed western philosophical pragmatics to far-reaching and exotic portrayals of man in his natural world. The invention of the camera in the 19th century allowed people, places and objects to be captured and examined authentically, without the distorting ‘lens’ of the artist’s eye. Throughout that same period, science and the church clashed, as knowledge of the known world expanded, moving from the mystical realm to spheres of the practical and applied. Einstein and Picasso were unwitting accomplices in the early 20th century, as they reconfigured our notion of time and space with exotic formulations and gravity-challenged planes of time and light, form and color.
As the century progressed, artists continued to look to breakthroughs in science for inspiration. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 was central to Kandinsky’s creation of Abstract Expressionism; while in Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp reflected Einstein’s notion of movement in space and time. Relativity also influenced the Futurists, a group of dapper young Italians who rejected the static nature of Picasso’s Cubism, and evoked speed, violence and technology of modernity. Dali was inspired by relativity and then by quantum physics in his efforts to represent the passage of time. Mondrian reduced the world to lines at right angles, capturing what he saw as the dynamic nature of the cosmos in equilibrium, while Malevich concentrated on the end of the material world, as represented by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe will eventually run down. In Malevich’s white-on-white paintings, everything disappears.
Right: Pablo Picasso, Standing Female Nude (1910). Shows influence of new X-ray technology used to diagnose illness of his then current model and lover. Coll: Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
Throughout modern history, the discoveries of science have been made manifest by the ability of the artist to translate the abstractions of distant and unseen worlds into tangible images and forms. A story with a longer history than some might imagine, currently the term ‘art and science’ seems to be on everyone’s lips – but no-one quite knows what it is or where it is going. Does it mark the rise of a new culture in which science and technology will be the driving forces and will even, perhaps, define an important facet of our culture? Are there similarities in the creative processes of artists and scientists? How can scientific inquiry benefit from the work of artists? And can considering these questions bring us any closer to understanding creativity on both sides of the investigative aisle—the laboratory and the studio?
Thanks for reading,
Richard Friswell, Publisher & Managing Editor
*Read about a 17th century effort to merge art and science and a 21st century project to do the same:
http://www.artesmagazine.com/2011/11/harvard-university%e2%80%99s-sackler-museum-exhibition-explores-renaissance-art-science-connection/
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