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This paper draws on the encounters between UK artist Neal White (b.1966)
and the late
British artist John Latham (1921–2006) in order to explore ideas and
contemporary forms
of practice between artists who have shared interests in science, its
developments and
impact. The prominence of science-driven activity in the cultural sector
provides a
context for the discussion of a renewed interest in some key artists in the
early Cold
War period, 1947–1972, including Gustav Metzger, Robert Smithson and György
Kepes. Whilst emphasizing shared concerns around the potential of
destruction, in the
archive and in terms of formal artistic process, the paper also argues for
a deeper understanding
of the vision and values that these artists bring. In doing so, it points
to a contemporary
landscape of art and science that might contribute to society beyond the
current cultural/scientific spheres, addressing broader questions and
concerns that are
considered urgent for scientists and artists alike.
A perspective on art, science and culture
In the last two decades, we have seen the continuing growth of a cultural
phenomenon in
which art is exhibited in a scientific context. This has happened largely
through
organizations with impressive amounts of funding supporting refined and
engaging art
gallery spaces: from the Wellcome Trust in London, to the Science Gallery
network
working out of Trinity Dublin, through to landmark architecture initiatives
such as the
Art Science Gallery in Singapore. The often seductive and spectacular1
exhibitions
curated in these environments perform a contemporary take on the
Wunderkammer,
or cabinet of curiosities, and are designed to appeal to mass audiences
with titles such
as the 'Institute of Sexology' – subtitle 'Undress Your Mind' (Wellcome
Trust, 2014),
through to 'Fat Lab' and 'Life Logging' (Science Gallery Dublin 2014–2016)
and revisit historical
works, as in 'Da Vinci: Shaping the Future' (Singapore 2014–2015). With
richly
illustrated catalogues and advanced media strategies, all attract very
large numbers of visitors,
perpetuating the media focus on science that has developed its very own
cultural
plaudits. For many artists, this sector also represents a rich and
rewarding space within
which to operate.
The emergence of such vibrant cultural activity in the late 1990s has not
been without criticism.
Among many artists working in this period, there was a view that the forms
of funding
were only made available to those who supported the 'positivist' science
agenda. The view
became synonymous with institutional critique in visual art, a long and
well-documented
area of practice in which the dominance of certain cultural forms,
represents control over artistic
freedoms. Art and Science in this respect can be problematic, from
restrictive practices on
artists working in labs, through to the broader agenda of life science
corporations/charities,
many of which were linked with the essential life support offered by
military spending on
research of all kinds. Whilst today it is argued a new wave of critics,
curators and artist challenge
this purely positivist approach, it has been difficult for those working
within this space to
shake off these pointed accusations. Even today, in appropriating more
critical voices within
the agenda of public understanding and science communication, the dissent
has not abated –
and other views of the relationship between art and science are being
valued. Many of these
values stem from a critical relationship developed by artists working in
the UK and USA in the
Cold War period (1947–1991).
The potential of destruction
The early Cold War period gave rise to artistic practices that engaged with
science and
over recent years, these pioneers have started to come to prominence in the
West,
notably in the UK and US. In part this was due to their radical and
critical approach
that tore into modernist ideas and the privilege of aesthetics over other
values in art.
Further to this, there was recognition by a younger generation of artists,
critics and curators
of the critical and conceptual shifts that occurred during this period.2 In
the following
short sections, a personal and historic account of some of the range of
these practices sheds
light on what is now termed as art in the expanded field, or
post-conceptual art (Krauss
1979; Osborne 2013) being practised in art and science today.
In April 2016, a John Latham retrospective at The Henry Moore Institute,
entitled
'A Lesson in Sculpture with John Latham' included a re-staging of a
performance of one
of his most infamous series of works by the author (this work was called 'Neal
White7
realises a Skoob Tower'). A key part of Latham's early oeuvre from the
1950s, the 'Skoob'
(the word 'books' spelt backwards) tower performances consisted of a tall
column or tower
of books, usually Dictionary Volumes, which were then set alight in a
public space. Having
remade Latham's work on several occasions the approach to remaking this
work has been
shaped both by a familiarity with Latham's work, but also as an ongoing
exploration of the
artist archive, and the role of events, including destructive acts through
practice led
research.3 In particular, the work follows a line of personal enquiry
started in 2004–
2005, having made a piece of work that campaigned for the restoration of a
series of
'destroyed' public sculptures made by Jacob Epstein on the Strand, London.
The project,
entitled The Third Campaign (2004–5) was conceived as an exhibition that
would
become an artwork within the archive of the Henry Moore Institute. It
included a campaign
film, letters to those involved and props, and now resides within the
archive as intended.
The 'Skoob tower' further addresses the significance of what might be
termed as
destructive events in historical and cultural terms, addressing what it is
that can be preserved
– artworks or events – within the institutional archive. As Latham commented
to me whilst I was working on the Third Campaign, the project was more than
a
polemic; it was conceived as an interruption to the stability of the
archive, an insertion
of work into official records and into cultural time. Marking a decade
since Latham's
death in 2006, the proposal to perform the 'Skoob tower' in 2016 was made
as a tribute
to his ideas, in the context of his notion of 'event structures' that are
also relevant to
the archive. The work was commissioned on the agreement that it would
eventually be
interred within the Henry Moore Institute itself, as a new work entitled 'The
Archive in
Ashes', which is now ongoing.
My own interest in Latham's work and his ideas did not emerge out of a
formal academic
study of Latham, but followed an introduction in 2003 to John Latham and
his life-long
working partner Barbara Steveni. At this initial meeting, showing them a
book I had
jointly authored with the writer Lawrence Norfolk (Norfolk and White, 2001)
became a
powerful catalyst. Within this short work, the 196 pages are numbered as
divisions of a
single second, one second being the time over which a sneeze was recorded,
captured by
an advanced laser camera at a laboratory in Oxford. Linked to the first
ever piece of copyrighted
film in the US, which was a 45 frame film of Thomas Edison's assistant
sneezing
(1896), the book meditated on the filmed fragments of a one second sneeze
today and the
progress of technology from the chemical to the digital, referring both to
the speed of the
recording, and the disintegration of meaning into code. The book was itself
a piece of
time. In formal terms however, and unknown at the time of the first meeting
with
Latham, the spray of the sneeze we photographed and which features on every
page approximated
Latham's own early work, 'One Second Drawing', created for the Cosmologists
Christopher
Gregory and Anita Kohsen in 1954 (1959; Walker 1995)4. It was through this
work
that John Latham had developed his own vision of art, a vision informed by
science that
shaped his entire life. He called it the 'quantum of mark'.
3Firstly at Portikus in Frankfurt as part of a joint show with John Latham
and sanctioned by the Latham Foundation following
specific historical research of previous events.
4Asked to produce a mural for an event at their home, Latham decided to use
a spray gun as an experiment. Having made a
one second spay with this new technology for artists, he realized that the
image not only resembled a cosmos of tiny
blobs on the wall, but spoke of the event, the spray and the end of the
spray. Latham often referred to this as the
most important discovery in the development of his ideas about time.
216 N. WHITE
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Latham, who had his own intimate engagement with ideas emerging in
theoretical and
experimental physics, recognized parallels between his ideas and those in
the book I left
with him. This was the start of a short but deep journey with Latham at his
home, Flat
Time House, Peckham, London. Exchanges took part through both rational and
intuitive
means, an approach to art that would allow for both textual descriptions,
as well as 'eventbased'
works such as the 'Skoob tower' were discussed, and we planned for what was
needed in order to explore "the unspoken" in science now. It was, we
agreed, a form of
practice and research that required art to embody ideas and knowledge
beyond linear
and rational language. Without anticipating the effect, Latham's ideas
shaped my own
approach, as it had done for so many others, before and indeed since.
Latham had largely developed the ideas we were discussing after he had made
his single
spray paint gesture and following his exchanges with Gregory and Kohsen (
1959); together
they formed the Institute of Mental Images, later publishing a journal
called Cosmos. In
this period, where many ideas and possibilities were still open for
exploration, from cosmology
through to extra sensory perception, the distinct approach between
instinctive,
logical intuition and rational forms of enquiry were both real and urgent
projects.
Latham referred to how these ideas could be explored by different people
using Fyodor
Dostoyevsky analogy of the Brothers Karamazov.5 Whilst the psychophysical
cosmologists
had developed their proposition through a schematic they termed the '
O-Structure'
(1959), Latham reworked this diagram with their initial input over many
years before
settling on the 'Basic T Diagram Roller' (1991) as a method of articulating
his ideas.
With this vertically striped roller blind, he was not only able to
translate further these
ideas, but to extend his own thoughts about scientific discoveries, from
quantum theory
through to string theory, and most importantly to find a new means to
communicate
how his ideas intersected with such approaches, through art.6
Latham's plan for the the 'Basic T Diagram Roller' work involved
positioning it on
the wall so that it could wind and unwind. As intended, it would be read
along the horizontal
at the top as the moment 'now', and as the fabric unwound against the
vertical
surface of the wall, the viewer could see through the canvas to traces of
the event now; a
schematic that reveals both history and present through time/movement. The
stripes
spaced along the horizontal were described as time bases; the amount of
time an
object exists for being the distance from left to right in the schema.
Starting on the
left with the letter A to Z on the right – that is, the distances represent
very small
amounts of time (the smallest measurable by science, to very, very large
amounts of
time – in other words from quantum to cosmic scale in one schema, unfolding
simultaneously).
The artwork was therefore neither formally an aesthetic representation, or a
non-representational abstract system, but a schematic or diagrammatic
reading of time/
space. Our insistence on reading matter as a quality of space and not time
was perceived
by Latham as a habit. Objects, particles, even institutions and governments
could be
understood better using ideas of a unified theory of existence that bridged
science, art
and religion.
5The three Karamazov brothers, Mitya, Ivan
On 2 September 2017 at 10:03, bronac ferran <bronacf@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Yasmin friends
>
> I thought that this recent article by Neal White may be of interest in
> terms of this discussion (polymathy - v - ste(a)m) etc
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03080188.2017.1297166
>
> Neal's argument is not for an amorphous wholeness to embrace and infuse
> all disciplines but for a level of cognitive resistance and action informed
> by intersections and live engagement among fellow travellers in various
> coinsecting fields.
>
> With very best wishes
>
> B
>
> On 31 August 2017 at 17:08, roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> yasmilners
>> sundar sarukkai at NIAS
>> Bangalore sends this in response to our provocation that maybe in
>> steam to stem we need to think about redesigning science itself, both
>> the scientific method and the social embedding of science to meet the
>> situations of the 21st century= both the scientific method and its
>> social embedding have evolved over the centuries
>>
>> as sundar notes- scientists are often allergic to any idea that
>> science itself needs redesigning
>>
>>
>> roger
>>
>> Roger, I was very pleased to see this email you sent about the need to
>> redesign science and scientific method. This is a bigger problem in
>> India and has been so for quite some time. We are a unique country in
>> that our Constitution has 'scientific temper' as one of our
>> constitutional duties! Scientists have repeatedly misused this to save
>> the ordinary people from their 'blind beliefs' and 'superstition'. And
>> use this to ask for more funds for science. Recently some of them
>> organized a march for science which also recycled such uncritical
>> views on science. I wrote against this ideology in a national
>> newspaper - see
>> http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-march-from-yesterd
>> ay/article19459043.ece.
>> The scientists, especially those who organized the march, got furious
>> (expected trolls in the social media) and one of them wrote a
>> rejoinder in an online site called The Wire pedaling the same views.
>> I then wrote a response which set out the faults in that piece - see
>> https://thewire.in/167673/sundar-sarukkai-march-for-science-
>> superstition-lynching/.
>> You might also find another response to this debate useful -
>> https://thewire.in/169521/march-for-science-superstitions-latour-salk/.
>>
>> As we can clearly see, many of these scientists don't read about
>> science - Wikipedia and dictionaries are enough for them to understand
>> any concepts in the non-sciences but they would not allow any
>> non-scientist to talk about quantum physics or relativity based on
>> their reading of such material. (I must also add here that there were
>> many scientists who did not agree either with the rationale for the
>> march or with the naive scientistic responses but the larger national
>> narrative about science continues to be at this level.) You are also
>> very right about the other point you raised, namely, the scientific
>> community's reluctance to accept the social character of science. To
>> try and incite a dialogue around this, I wrote an editorial for
>> Current Science on the sociality of science but haven't managed to get
>> the scientists to react - see
>> http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/111/11/1731.pdf.
>>
>> Glad you started this dialogue.
>>
>> Thanks, sundar
>>
>> 7
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>
>
>
> --
> Bronaċ
>
>
>
--
Bronaċ
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