An Intersection of Art & Science at PST Art

Art and science met again when, as far back as ancient Egypt, painters discovered the fixative qualities of egg whites, applying them to colored pigments. In the year 500, the first dome topped the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, built not by architects, but mathematicians. A thousand years later, Renaissance artists adopted mathematical formulas to create the impression of depth. 

In modern history, the marriage of art and science is evident in the works of the impressionists and pointillists who relied on the human eye, not the palette, to mix colors, just as painters of the colorist movement did in the 1960s. 

So, what light does the new initiative “PST ART: Art & Science Collide” shed on this age-old marriage between disciplines? It’s difficult to say, since the show’s scope is so wide-ranging it seems to encompass all art– past, present, and perhaps future. In essence, both disciplines are about problem solving, asking what if, and then finding a way to make it so. 

Funded by The Getty Center to the tune of $20.4 million, the periodic presentation presents 70 exhibits across 80 institutions throughout Southern California, with nine of them occurring on the museum’s home turf in Brentwood. This year’s PST began with a bang on September 15th, when Cai Guo Qiang presented “We Are” at the LA Coliseum before hundreds of spectators gathered on the field. 

Best known for his fireworks display at the opening ceremony of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics, Cai employed daytime explosives to literally paint the sky, sometimes with bird of paradise or splashes of color resembling watercolor bouquets. 

A squadron of drones dispensed whiffs of black smoke in a pattern resembling the head of a dragon followed by a linear series of blasts that snaked through the bleachers at lighting speed.

In Cai’s home country, the first fireworks– bamboo stalks that exploded when thrown into flames– originated in the second century BCE, evolving into gunpowder blasts during the Sung Dynasty in 900 CE. It’s an age-old tradition that dwells at the nexus of art and science. 

Attending “We Are” were art world luminaries like Frank Gehry, Doug Aitken, Refik Anadol, Michael Govan, Jeffrey Deitch, and Olafur Eliasson who was in town to introduce his new show, “Open” at MOCA Geffen, utilizing lenses and filters to create dazzling kaleidoscopes and rainbows. 

“The spectacle lies in the gaze and not in the money you spend on it and technical achievements,” Eliasson told Art & Object. “That makes it accessible and open. I’m interested in science, but from a human perspective, the gaze of the psychologist.”

Across town at LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion is Josiah McElheny’s “Island Universe”, a gallery of five sculptures inspired by mid-century chandeliers that hang at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. At first glance, each of McElheny’s artworks appears to be a variation on a chandelier, but as curator Stephen Little notes, “The rods that project out of the spheres are representations of the changes in time. 

Every six inches, according to the artist, time doubles. This work proposes the idea that whatever cosmology you think is real, whatever we understand today about cosmologies is temporary, that will change.”  

It’s a little hard to get that by observing “Island Universe”, but the range of PST is best illustrated by juxtaposing it with the gallery next door presenting “Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures.” 

There, you’ll find roughly 120 works spanning Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Southeast and East Asia, the Middle East, Indigenous America, and Northern Europe, created over 12 millenia and examining the universe’s origins. 

Across from Resnick Pavilion, BCAM (Broad Contemporary Art Museum) contains an exhibit that seems a little more specific – “Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography and Film.” It offers glimpses of the CG-derived T. Rex in 1993’s Jurassic Park, which sparked a revolution in cinematic effects. Also represented is Gollum, the popular character in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which marked cinema’s first empathetic digital being. 

Daniel Canogar’s “Wayward” uses AI to cull images from the day’s headlines, creating ever-changing compositions inspired by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series, and the works of interdisciplinary artist Martha Rosler.

Indigenous artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has exhibits across three institutions: The Hammer Museum, which is showing several of his short films as part of their “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” show; the Autry Museum of the American West, which features “Watȟéča”, wearable sculptures from the Lakota tradition; and San Diego’s New Children’s Museum, which includes an interactive landscape. 

Luger’s body of work suggests what he calls, “a great utopian experiment, invested in radical, new visions of life on Earth.” Each show is embedded in “a holistic theme of future ancestral technology,” which he describes as an exploration into time and space. 

“As artists, as scientists and people presently developing culture, we are actually making those time machines we dream of. We’re just navigating through a four dimensional space that we can’t quite yet comprehend,” he tells Art & Object.

“One of the aspects that is most exciting to me is I can imagine and dream and hope that we collectively move indigenous ideas, which are our technology, through the mechanisms and technology we are developing today.”

The wide range of the initiative is also illustrated by two shows at the Getty: “Magnified Wonders: An 18th-Century Microscope”, which features a Rococo French microscope from 1750 and the slides that accompany it– among them a flea and an insect wing– versus “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).” Included in the latter is choreographer Lucinda Childs’ work with engineer Peter Hirsch, whose “doppler sonar machine” turned movement into sound. 

Steps away is an exhibit called “Open Score”, documenting a tennis match between artist Frank Stella and professional player Mimi Kanarek. Engineer William Kaminski affixed transmitters to their rackets so that each hit emitted a loud noise and extinguished an overhead light.

While the art-science crossover is plainly evident throughout media, it is more clearly observed in the role of fiction in scientific advances. Jules Verne’s “Robur the Conqueror” inspired Igor Sikorsky to invent the first successful helicopter. Robert H. Goddard, inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket, became fascinated with spaceflight after reading H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. 

Author Robert Heinlein’s short story about an inventor named Waldo F. Jones, who creates a remotely operated mechanical hand, was the inspiration behind manipulator arms nicknamed “waldos”, developed for the nuclear industry.

Glenn Kaino, who co-curated The Hammer show, best summed up PST in a panel discussion at the Getty, “Science is not the application of old knowledge or the discovery of new knowledge. And, art is not about auction houses, it's about ideas. It’s about how practitioners of the imagination– artists and scientists, create new maps and new pathways to understanding our world.”