Art and science

224 Pages·2005·6.74 MB·English

by  Ede, Siân

Art and…
General Editor: Chris Townsend
The first premise of the Art and… series is that art matters. By this I mean that
art is not a futile game played by a few cognoscenti in a vacuum. Rather our
assumption in selecting titles for the series is that contemporary art is crucial
to our understanding of, and relationship to, the world in which we live. Often
the first response to art, especially in the popular press, is to stress its seeming
frivolity, its surface shock, rather than trying to draw out the deeper issues at
stake within it. Yet art still has the capacity to challenge and to change us.
Without pasting up slogans, artists have important things to say about the
conditions of our times and, directly or indirectly, they have chosen to take
on some of the biggest issues in the world today. In producing this series
we have deliberately aligned ‘art’ and those perennial issues such as death
and sex which trouble generation after generation. And we have deliberately
sought out particular contemporary issues: scientific advances, advertising
and celebrity. Books published in the Art and… series will be accessible, but
intelligent. Serious and often difficult art need not equate to difficult writing
– rather it demands clarity, and this is the second premise of the series. Above
all Art and… aims to connect art back to the world.
Published and forthcoming:
Art and Advertising Joan Gibbons
Art and Death Chris Townsend
Art and Fame Jean Wainwright
Art and Home Nigel Prince
Art and Invention Jaime Stapleton
Art and Laughter Sheri Klein
Art and Obscenity Kerstin Mey
Art and Science Siân Ede
Art and Sex Gray Watson
Art and Surveillance Denna Jones
Art and War Laura Brandon

Art and Science
Siân Ede
Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Siân Ede, 2005
The right of Siân Ede to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1 85043 583 9 hardback
EAN 978 1 85043 583 9 hardback
ISBN 1 85043 584 7 paperback
EAN 978 1 85043 584 6 paperback
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Typeset in Agfa Rotis by Steve Tribe, Andover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Ambiguities and Singularities 1
I. The Problem with Beauty
1. Everything Is Connected in Life: Beautiful Things in Science 13
2. Disconnections and Asymmetries: The Less than Beautiful in Art 29
II. Evolutionary Perspectives
3. From the Future to the Past: The Evolution of the (Artist’s) Mind 46
4. New Mythologies: Reinventing the Past 59
5. Universal Studios: Scientists Measure Art 79
III. Mind and Body, Body and Mind
6. Sculpted by the World:
Art and Some Concepts from Contemporary Consciousness Studies 101
7. New Bodies for Old: The Art and Science of the Body Elective 133
IV. The Fragile Environment and the Future
8. It’s All Over, Johnny: Art and the Fragile Environment 161
9. Reconnections: A Muted Curiosity 179
Notes 197
Select Bibliography 209
Index 212
For my father, Eddie Nicholls,
who taught me how to read maps,
and my mother, Peggy Nicholls,
who managed very well without them
Acknowledgements
I must warmly thank Mikhael Essayan, Paula Ridley and all my colleagues
at the Gulbenkian Foundation who, in the Foundation’s long tradition of
risk-taking and pioneering, have allowed me to pursue my interests in the
name of work, especially through its grants programme The Arts and Science,
though I should stress that this book reflects my own views and not those
of the Foundation. I am extremely grateful to many scientists and artists
who have patiently explained things and encouraged me further. Some of
these are named where appropriate in the endnotes but significant ones
include Ken Arnold, Frances Ashcroft, Aosaf Afzal, Paul Bonaventura, A S
Byatt, Christine Darby, Richard Deacon, Jayne Anne Eustace, Richard Gregory,
Christine Kenyon Jones, Janna Levin, Felicity Luard, Mark Lythgoe, Richard
Mankiewicz, Mark Miodownik, Steven Rose, Nicola Triscott and Richard
Wentworth. I must particularly thank my editor, Susan Lawson, Steve Tribe
and all those who have read earlier drafts and tactfully pointed out fallacies
and indiscretions. If I have failed to heed their suggestions the fault is my
own. I am especially indebted to my daughters, Kate and Alice Quine, for
putting up with my obsessions on a daily basis.
… semiotics and ergonomics
lasers and caesuras
retro-rockets and peripeteia
sapphics and turquoise
sines and sememes
hubris and helium
Eliot and entropy
enjambment and switchgear
quasars and hapax legomena
thermodynamics and macrostylistics
anti-hero and anti-matter
bubble chambers and E.K. Chambers
H2O and 8vo
genres and genera…
Edwin Morgan, Pleasures of a Technological University1
Introduction
Ambiguities
and Singularities
Contemporary scientists often talk about ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’; artists hardly
ever do. Scientists weave incredible stories, invent extraordinary hypotheses
and ask difficult questions about the meaning of life. They have insights into
the workings of our bodies and minds which challenge the way we construct
our identities and selves. They create visual images, models and scenarios
that are gruesome, baffling and beguiling. They say and do things that are
ethically and politically challenging and shocking. Is science the new art?
Contrary to the claims of some in the science community, the public is
better informed about contemporary science than it is about contemporary
art. Scarcely a news bulletin passes which does not contain the words
‘scientists have discovered that…’ followed up with accessible explanations.
All schoolchildren in the West (unless they live in Creationist Kansas) must
compulsorily learn the basics of genetics, chemistry and physics. Our television
and movie fictions glamorise medicine and forensic science; we relish and
revere the slick clinical jargon of ER and Casualty and their crash crises, instant
diagnoses and gorily authentic-looking body parts. Even small children can
2 Art and Science
be knowledgeable about the appearance and function of a gerbil’s kidneys
and the gynaecology and obstetrics of cows, thanks to Animal Hospital and
the prime-time viewing of vet documentaries. ‘Nature’ programmes attract
huge viewing figures. General practitioners regularly encounter patients who
come to the surgery with self-made diagnoses, full of technical information
acquired from the Internet. Moreover, we subscribe to the purity and implicit
justice of the scientific method, with its emphasis on the primacy of impartial
evidence, which has become so much a part of the police detective and
forensic science fiction and films we seem obsessed with. Logical argument
and rational expression, together with a Gradgrindian respect for ‘facts’, are
paramount in public and political discourse and the arts constituency itself
must justify its existence through a semblance of order which involves the
continual making of strategies, audits and statistical surveys, even to the
extent of identifying rules and conditions which govern the nature of that
hallowed term ‘creativity’. And, while scientific ideas are intelligently aired
every day, art is not explained or discussed on its own terms except as an end-
of-the-news item where it is likely to be derided for its apparently infantile
sensationalism or its knee-jerk irony, or vaguely revered for its decorativeness,
or its hints at some kind of inaccessible sanctity. We are much more likely to
be seriously persuaded, moved, worried or enchanted by science.
One of my objectives in this book is to show that in our clever, curious
and materialist world ‘art’ is as vital to our existence as ‘science’. Visualising,
abstracting, imagining, inventing, pretending, storytelling, re-presenting and
ceaselessly reinterpreting things are as important as indications of human
achievement and communication as rational discourse and the presentation
of empirical evidence. We may be afraid of the uncertainty and chaos that
this implies, but we should be able to acknowledge our susceptibility to
seeing things from a range of viewpoints and be confident in the value of
such approaches. We have probably survived as a species as a consequence.
Indeed, our brains easily and simultaneously incorporate many systems of
knowledge. We possess the capacity to test out the evidence of our sensations
and to make reasoned conjectures, but also to fantasise, guess and imagine.
Real scientific progress could not happen without daydreaming: intellectual
research and logical planning are essential for the making of art. We can take
interest and pleasure in understanding how the brain processes the visual and
emotional signals that present themselves to us in an artwork, in discovering the
historical and cultural basis for its composition, and in actually experiencing