When the invisible can be revealed.
Ernst Haeckel, Detail, 1904
There are many artists who love science, and scientists who love art.
Attempting to reveal the invisible or to find its imprints in the visible, understanding structures and systems around us, that we always pass through and that constantly pass through us ; questioning reality, immersing ourselves in it, appropriating it, reinventing it ; feeling in order to understand, understanding in order to feel - arts, sciences, technology and all the symbols that emerge from them, are at the heart of our human cultures and have enriched each other since ancient times.
One of the greatest book of knowledge, dating back more than two thousand years, that has come down to us and written in verse: the magnificent poem "De natura rerum", by Lucretius, which mixes art and science, beauty and truth". "The beauty is the magnificence of truth", said Plato. But what is truth and what is beauty? "Nothing is beautiful but truth", said Boileau. "Nothing is true only beauty", answered Musset." (Jean Claude Ameisen, "Quand l'art rencontre la science", Éditions de la Martinière, 2007).
If science have always supported art through the development of techniques and tools using the raw materials of nature, since Renaissance many contemporary artists are using scientific studies as a subject of art. Movements, forms, space and time, mathematics, physics, philosophy are subjects of interest : art et science, science and art, working side by side.
We will not question works of art that translate emotions or expressions of soul which could be regarded as an invisible system, a natural phenomena responding to natural causes. Works of art that are based on the state of the self are not going to be studies, we are going to focus on artists far from a representation of the inner self but closer to a representation of the reality that surrounds us.
I therefore propose a walk through time, which is not intended as an in-depth study of the evolution of works of art impregnated with science, but as a place for observation and questioning. What does the place of science in art tell us today? What does it tell us about our artists turned towards sciences, what does it tell us about the usefulness of sciences as subjects of art, what does it tell us about our times?
Can art reveal a truth and science be a source of beauty? And do you think that revealing what already exists can be considered as an act of creation?
Art and science have in common to question about what we are, what surrounds us and constitutes us, so I let you wander through this non-exhaustive chronological gallery by appropriating some of these questions.
The figure of the scientist artist emerged during the Renaissance, when the sciences were developing and mathematical laws were being drawn up with "anatomist painters" such as Leonardo da Vinci or Paolo Uccello, or those who integrated the rules of invisible geometry such as the golden ratio and the laws of perspective, such as Masaccio or Melozzo da Forlì. The Fibonacci sequence, set out in Leonardo Fibonacci's Liber abaci, published in 1202, and describing the growth of a population of rabbits, would suggest that invisible mathematical laws are at work in the construction of life. Then it was discovered that the Fibonacci sequence accounted for the number of spirals that seeds form in the heart of a sunflower or along the length of a pine cone... The secret constructions of nature revealed by science and introduced into art are then a source of proportions and the foundation of beauty in the time that the representation of the world is closer to reality.
Suite de Fibonacci
If in the Middle Ages there are some sublime books of medicine where the illustrations are real artistic beauties, like the Tractatus de Herbis (1440), it is necessary to wait until the XVII until the XIX century to see the scientist-artist appear. Botanist draftsmen will realize aesthetic scientific compositions like the lithographs of Ernst Haeckel, German biologist and philosopher of the end of the XIX century. This man was fascinated by the symmetry present in the nature, and in monocellular micro-organisms like radiolarians. He realized lithographs of his studies, classified today in the catalog of the art works.
Tractatus de Herbis, 1440
Ernst Haeckel, Tafel 61 / Phaeodaria, 1904
At the same period, scientific artists and engineers like Etienne Jules Marey, French physician and physiologist, and Eadweard Muybridge, English photographer, both born and died in the same years (1830-1904), decompose the movements of living beings by photography with the technique of chronophotography.
Etienne Jules Marey, Humain movement,1886
Then comes the XXth century, where a lot of works and movements defining themselves according to a thought or a scientific principle are discovered. Futurist painters decompose movement in painting.
Russolo - Dynamics of a car, 1912-13
Geometric and lyrical abstraction questioned the relationship of forms in space. Johannes Itten (1888-1967), painter and teacher, questioned the color and its transformations in contact with different environments.
Johannes Itten, The Art of the color, 1986
Then, during this century, different science art movements are emerging : "kinetic art" with for exemple Alexander Calder (1898-1976), "cybernetic art" (Nicolas Schöffer, 1912-1992), "robotic art" (where a robot paints a work of art), "technological art", "bio-art" (Eduardo Kac) or "generative art" (artistic creation, generally numerical, based on algorithms to conceive works that are self-generating and/or not determined in advance.) These movements are not only difficult to define, but they also raise many questions as to the exact use of science that is made. Can we speak of a science turned into art or should we rather qualify these works as new artistic inventions integrating here and there scientific tools or principles?
Alexander Calder, Mobile on two planes, 1930
Nicolas Schöffer, Lux10,1957
Eduardo Kac, Alba, 2000
Going back to the 1950s and 60s, the artiste Mark Rothko questioned "spatiality" and the experience of expanse by abandoning figurative forms and allowing himself to be invaded by color and light in large paintings where the viewer can be immersed. Is Mark Rohtko's approche about spatiality closed to communicate with the inner self or "spatiality" is it just a business of science ?
Mark Rohtko, Light Red over Black, 1957
In 1977, Walter De Maria, an American sculptor, completed his work The Lightning Field, in Quemado, New Mexico. It is a permanent installation of 400 stainless steel poles, evenly distributed over a rectangular area of one kilometer by one mile located in a desert plain, conducive to thunderstorms, where the visitor can stay 24 hours to experience the site and the drawings of lightning tearing the sky.
Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977
2000, The project Meart, The Semi Living Artist" is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic research and development project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of new biological technologies. It was developed and hosted by SymbioticA - The Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab, University of Western Australia. MEART is an installation distributed between two (or more) locations in the world. Its "brain" consists of cultured nerve cells that grow and live in a neuro-engineering lab, in Georgia institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA (Dr. Steve Potter's lab). Its "body" is a robotic drawing arm that is capable of producing two-dimensional drawings. The "brain" and the "body" will communicate in real time with each other for the duration of the exhibition. MEART is assembled from: 'Wetware' which are neurons from embryonic rat cortex grown over a Multi Electrode Array, 'Hardware' which is the robotic drawing arm, 'Software' that interfaces between the wetware and the hardware. The Internet is used to mediate between its components and overcome its geographical detachment.
SymbioticA, MEART/The Semi-living artist 2001-4, 2000
In 2003, the Swiss Re Headquarter, built by Foster & Partner's, whose design was inspired by the Euplectella aspergillum, more commonly known as the Venus Flower Basket. This marine organism is made of multiple layers of glass forming a very resistant skeleton despite the smallness of the filaments that structure it.
You will find on the link an article on biomimetic architectures inspired by living things: https://journals.openedition.org/craup/309
Foster & Partner's, The Swiss Re Headquarter, 2003
At the end of the 2000's Iris Van Herpen, fashion designer, proposes collections inspired by the forms of nature where cloth can be thought as a skin, a moving structure, a living architecture.
Iris Van Herpen, Capriole collection, 2001
In 2012 the dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde created a series of self-made clouds "Nimbus II". He chooses locations that are old, damp, that have no air circulation where clouds seems fixed in the space area. The clouds are made with a smoke machine and are held in place by an invisible wall of water vapor, he can create hundreds of them before finding one that suits him and capturing it by photographing it. The shape of the clouds is never fixed, always changing, always slipping away. The artist's gesture is in a way a way of freezing the moment in space, of capturing what we can rarely see. Poetry of the moment.
Berndnaut Smilde, "Nimbus II", 2012
In 2016, Fabienne Verdier, a French artist, steeped in Eastern thoughts, deeply inspired by nature and the energies that flow through living things, painted Forme-Force. The painting speaks for itself and the strength of the form immediately evokes for us the power of natural elements such as water, wind, speed, strength. His body and mind are at the service of the inner powers like a scientific machine that captures the invisible movements that run through it.
Fabiennne Verdier, Forme-Force, 2016
During the summer of 2017, the Palais de Tokyo presented an exhibition entitled "The Dream of Forms", which brought together the crossed views of artists and researchers exploring in an innovative - and salutary - way a common approach to representing the world.
Dora Budor, Calendo, 2017
In 2020, Lea Barbazanges, a French artist made an exhibition "Cristaux" at the Château of Chaumont sur Loire. The pieces exhibited look like frozen water as frost and ice crystals. It showed prints of water, geometrical organic matter shapes reflecting an intense light giving an intriguing beauty to the work :
Lea Barbazanges, Cristaux, 2020
And to conclude our art and science tour, at the beginning of 2021, Claudia Bueno who is a Venezuela born artist, renowned for creating immersive technological wonders using light, sculpture and sound, made an art project called "The Pulse", an installation at Meow Wolf's new space in Vegas experiencing the slow, oscillating movements of natural life. Her mesmerizing multi-dimensional displays of captivating light and intricate composition transmit a quality of timeless spaciousness that viewers simultaneously lose and find themselves in :
Claudia Bueno, The Pulse, 2021
This artist's gallery presents a small state of the evolution of subjects from art in the field of sciences. If mathematics settles in the Renaissance in the works of the masters, biology will then be introduced more and more then the digital technology, without dethroning the bio-sciences. The presence of nature remains strong and seems to call the spirit towards the purity or the appeasement of being in front of an artificial nature. Need of air and nature by excess of civilization, or need of fictive nature by fear of the wild nature ?
What we can retain from these exchanges between art and science are : the need to reveal the beauty from natural forms; the desire to reveal what we cannot catch or seize, which is evasive or invisible ; science remains at the service of art as a technological support ; it questions what surrounds us and constitutes us. The science in the art allows to live spatial sensations more than temporal. It does not call to the memory or to the melancholy, but seems to want to catch the reality of the moment. Is it coming from a desire to think the world at the stop, rational and anchored, or the desire to bathe into the deep and invisible world but leaving aside the infinite ones of the imaginary and the beliefs ?
The reality becomes thus beauty. A reality far from the realism of the XIXe century about dailylife and hardness of life. This realism is the one from the background, the one that drive us but silence, the one that soothes us when we slip our ears in the bath water. Is this meeting of art and science a call to silence and mediation, or is it the human going down his Enlightenment pedestal to reconnect with the World...?
And about this business of beauty and reality : "Beauty is the magnificence of truth" (Plato). But what is truth and what is beauty? "Nothing is beautiful but truth" (Boileau). "Nothing is true only beauty"(Musset). Don't you feel those words doesn't really match through these works ? Of course there are beautiful and sometimes reveled something or influence scientists and vis-versa. Is marriage of art and science something other than beauty or truth... ? Something from the middle, no white or black, no color but present, between the two of them, as the exactness of a moment. Neither the excess of beauty, or the weight of truth, the in-between.
Somewhere between art and science...
Sources :
- Jean Claude Ameisen, "Quand l'art rencontre la science", Éditions de la Martinière, 2007
- https://www.fabula.org/actualites/art-et-science-regards-croises_76672.php
Hello Aurélie,
As I was too busy with my job, I could not participate in the English blogging exercise at the beginning of the year. Therefore, I started yesterday to review the blogs of the other students in order to choose where I would put some comments. I was so impressed by the content of yours that I immediately put it aside to take time to enjoy its reading.
As an art lover scientist myself, I feel personally concerned by the connection between the two worlds and was immediately attracted by Haeckel’s drawing. I discovered Haeckel during my bibliography on the monism dissertation and was quite interested in his work on ecology.
Once appealed by this first picture, I continued…
Many thanks for the completeness of your post. It's fascinating.
In my opinion, art and science are more and more closely linked. It involves a significant participation of the viewer, I mean not the usual passive attitude in front of an art piece. I keep in mind the experience I had with the cinetic art on the occasion of the great exhibition few years ago in Paris at the Grand Palais. Thus, the art work is only active through the viewer position and movement which change the gaze and calls a very personal relationship with the art work. Basic, you'd say...
Thank you again and congratulations for your blog. Very professional.