Science in the Art Gallery
It's been a busy few weeks for me, thinking, talking and installing about interactions between art and science with our new project The Art of Innovation: from enlightenment to dark matter opening at the Science Museum. I was therefore grateful to have two events that took me to a different headspace to reflect on wider but related questions.
The first was a discussion panel that I was honoured to be invited to join. It was run by Circus for London Design Festival and had the intriguing title 'In conversation with a dragonfly' to accompany the exhibition of puppeteer Oliver Smart's Imago: A dragonfly in motion exhibition at Circus's gallery. Oliver has worked with the collections and curators at the Natural History Museum, as well as a neurotechnology lab at Imperial College to create an interactive, mechanical puppet of a dragonfly. Alongside the final piece at Circus are displayed his watercolours, cad drawings and prototypes developed as part of the process.
Talking to Oli about his work before the panel raised a number of thoughts about histories of art and science, which I talked about in the discussion. The first was how Oli's work relates to the long history of automata, particularly the extraordinary automata produced in the 18th century, like the magnificent silver Swan at the Bowes Museum, and how people saw these as uncanny representations of life, crossing the boundaries between man and god's creations.
The second, concerned how we categorise visual images. The gallery walls are dominated by Oli's CAD drawings, showing the detailed mechanics that allow the final dragonfly to work. Yet, in showing me around, he lingered over the small watercolour sketchbooks on one of the plinths, showing me one particular painting that he said contained all the necessary information to understand a dragonfly. We might usually see the CAD as the image that captures scientific data, cool and precise in its level of detail, and the watercolour as the image of emotion and poetry. But, for Oli, it’s the watercolour that holds the 'data' he needs to understand the insect.
Thirdly, I thought about prototypes. Oli discussed these as working tools, developed with a mixture of objects-to-hand (including a cotton bud) and highly-developed mechanical parts, to see how the dragonfly could be articulated. In the gallery space, however, they became artworks in their own right. They hark back to the 'readymades' made famous by Duchamp in the 1910s, that he justified as making 'art' out of mass-produced everyday objects by the artist's choice and intention; or the machines made art in the gallery space by artists like Mike Nelson.
Nelson, indeed, has currently taken over the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, in a commission titled The Asset Strippers. I visited last Sunday and loved the takeover of the classical space at the centre of Tate. Nelson has purchased old technology from the online auctions of company liquidations, filling the galleries with run-down looking knitting machines, hay turners, industrial scales, stripped cupboards, doors and woodwork. As the interpretation outlines, it makes you contrast the decline of British industry with the sculptures that usually fill such courts, often acquired during the colonial era.
It’s a visual treat that you encounter every time you cross the Tate galleries, which makes you look at the objects differently. Yet – perhaps indoctrinated after more than two years at the Science Museum Group – I found it frustrating that there was nothing to tell me what the various machines were for, or from where they hailed. Such information could be very simple and could only have added to my appreciation of the areas from which such declining industry was being liquidated.
Likewise, following Oli’s prototypes, it got me thinking about the scientific aesthetic, and how Nelson is taking objects common in the stores and galleries of science museums and turning them into art. This seems to me to undermine, and perhaps overwrite, the stories of the people who made, used and operated these machines, as well as their technical beauty. Art galleries can be guilty of vague or exoticising use of science and its material culture, just as much as vice versa.
These are the sorts of questions I ponder regularly in curating art at the Science Museum, thinking about what makes it art in that space, and how it can and should be seen, understood and interrogated.