COMING SOON .....
(Written by Oliver Harris)
If there is nothing new under the sun, as King Solomon insisted three thousand years ago, then what about above the sun? What about before it ever existed? We now live in a world in which the re-creation of events that occurred seconds after the big bang is a reality. The Hadron Collider project was inaugurated with the bold intention of producing these conditions, and, in the process, finding the Higgs Boson, the final particle as yet undiscovered within the atom. The search for an ultimate, unified field theory is underway. It seems science, at least, has never stopped dreaming. How is art to respond?
This exhibition has been assembled to introduce the audience to paintings and sculpture made since the Large Hadron Collider began its exploration. It asks not only how visual representation might reflect and index this quest but, perhaps more crucially, whether there still a place for a response at all?
It is our belief that there will always be a role for art that seeks new ways of seeing the world, in reaction to the ever-changing realm of human knowledge and enquiry. The most progressive art has always responded to the advances of science: from Renaissance uses of perspective to the Impressionists’ experimentations in optics. The Impressionists were shunned by the mainstream of their own time, and set up their Salon des Refusés as a result.
Here is a new Salon des Refusés, presenting an untold recent history of art. Like those original men of vision, these artists guard an aesthetic at odds with a consensus of superficiality; they bear an antidote to an art-world that fails to look beyond the gallery walls.
Artists’ engagement with science here takes several forms. Some hijack a means of production. Frank Stella has always worked through experiment. Since the nineties his encounter with the cutting edge of science has informed his work through the manipulation of titanium, often called the space age metal, and also the use of computers to model works that are then fabricated. These produce shapes that are endlessly suggestive, and can seem to map the configuration of particles themselves (see K115, K109, K118).
Harold Cohen has taken the use of computers one step further. His own scientific creation, Aaron, is the first Artificial Intelligence artist. The work produced in this way makes new demands on the viewer, and on our ideas of artistic expression itself.
Larry Bell also brings visual art to a conceptual boundary, with his ethereal cubes formed from sheets of glass created in a vacuum. Where the vacuum of the Hadron Collider forces abstract theory into real experiment, Bell’s own creative use of vacuums produces sculpture at once tangible and ethereal, objects that remain both aesthetic and intellectual.
Science seeks abstract ways of describing physical phenomena. Abstract art seeks the physical expression of the emotional, spiritual and conceptual. In images such as ‘Streets of Baltimore’, Larry Poons discovers new ways of expressing voids and vortices of energy. Bram Bogart and Marc Vaux demonstrate the fields of force within colour itself. The purity and essentialness of Vaux’s work is reflected in the titles: NE2/3M/07. These are triptychs that relate back to a tradition of icon painting, refracted through a systematic twenty-first century minimalism.
Finally there is the ever-evolving visual field of science itself: the array of symbols, techniques and styles that infiltrate twentieth and twenty-first century society. Since the 1950s, William Tillyer’s art has responded to this visual realm, evolving alongside it. In pieces such as ‘WT9387’ his work captures the melting of the figural world, the border between figurations of science and abstraction, the objective and the human.
In ‘Hitch Hiker – Speed of Light’ (1999), and ‘Passenger – Speed of Light’, James Rosenquist brings Pop Art up to date. Today’s Pop, he suggests, is inextricable from the techno-abstraction of scientific illustration. What was science fiction is now just science. Rosenquist reflects the forms of the scientific imagination back at itself.
Monet took his studio into the world. The likes of Frank Stella, Larry Bell and James Rosenquist take the world into their studio. These artists follow a universal tradition with a rare, cross-generational appeal.
We believe that art should be a response to having eyes and minds opened in a new way. It should instil that experience in its audience. Einstein claimed that the greatest respect lay with the artists. The scientist discovers what is waiting to be discovered, an artist brings something more to the world. It is a question of the imaginative and conceptual demands upon a mankind that must always find new ways of representing itself in response to the very changes it brings about.
The task of imagining, testing and creating new forms of meaning continues.