The Universe and Art
30 July 2017
I feel privileged to reflect on an exhibition we have just staged at ArtScience Museum which was very dear to me.
The Universe and Art (1 April – 30 July 2017) was a major exhibition co-produced by ArtScience Museum and Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. It was curated by Fumio Nanjo, Reiko Tsubaki and myself.
The Universe and Art examined humanity’s fascination with the Universe and what lies beyond. It included over 120 original artworks, scientific artefacts and manuscripts, including masterpieces from all eras and cultures related to humanity’s view of the Universe. It featured ancient religious artifacts linked to Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, as well as first editions of astronomical books by the greatest astronomers of the Renaissance period, including Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton.
New thinking on the universe was explored in artworks by more than 30 leading contemporary artists including Jia Aili, Björn Dahlem, Laurent Grasso, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Mariko Mori, Trevor Paglen, Patricia Piccinini, Conrad Shawcross, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Wolfgang Tillmans.
The website is here: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibition-archive/the-universe-and-art.html
Below is my essay introducing the exhibition, which was published in the catalogue.
The Universe and Art – An Introduction by Honor Harger, Executive Director, ArtScience Museum
“Expressing the indescribable, understanding the incomprehensible, and observing the unseeable. That’s roughly what cosmology, the study of the origins, evolution and fate of our universe is all about. Just to make it really challenging, for all the high technology and cool rationality deployed by modern cosmologists, this is a research area teetering on the very edge of science, and encroaching on the territory we normally associate with philosophy, metaphysics, even religion.”
– Peter Evans (1)
The Universe and Art is an exhibition at ArtScience Museum in Singapore centred on cosmology. Rather than looking at this topic purely from a scientific perspective, The Universe and Art draws on the work of artists, writers, philosophers and theologians to provide interdisciplinary readings and new angles of interrogation. The exhibition is an artistic voyage through the cosmos, exploring where we came from and where we are going. It weaves a rich constellation of Eastern and Western philosophies, ancient and contemporary art, and science and religion, to explore how humanity has constantly contemplated its presence in the universe.
Long the subject of dreams, mythologies and artistic visions, the universe has been studied by people from around the world for millennia. Featuring over 120 original artworks, scientific artifacts and manuscripts, The Universe and Art presents visions of the cosmos from across the globe and through the centuries. Inspired by new developments within science, philosophy and technology, and ancient modes of interrogating the cosmos, the exhibition acts as forum to ask how our universe was created, what its substance is, and how long it has existed for.
These questions take us back to the very beginning of time itself. Nearly 70 years ago astronomer, Fred Hoyle coined the term “the Big Bang” to describe an explosive event that began the universe. Our universe originated as a minute point seen as a quantum singularity. Expanding swiftly in all directions, all the particles of matter, then the large-scale structures of the universe, came into existence.
Whilst Hoyle himself was skeptical about the theory, over the past half century it has been borne out by both astronomical observations. And yet, comparatively little is understood about this paradigmatically defining moment. As cosmologist Alan Gurth noted, “in spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang Theory, it really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn’t tell us what banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang”.(2) Thus cosmologists have been compelled to come up with increasingly ambitious experiments and theories, which aim to provide an explanation for what happened 13.78 billion years ago.
Even the basic notion of the universe having definite starting point is beginning to be questioned. Cosmologists Neil Turok and Paul Steinhardt have produced a cosmological model that suggests the universe may in fact be “ekpyrotic” in nature – that is, the Big Bang was just the latest of a series of violent events which lead to the beginning and ending of a cyclical universe. (3) This idea would seem familiar to many followers of Eastern philosophy, where the notion of cyclical time and reincarnation, are core concepts.
Ekpyrotic String II, Mariko Mori, 2014
The Universe and Art unfolds a series of narratives which explore cosmological ideas, and show how art, mythology and philosophy may give us tools to interrogate the enigmas of the cosmos. Curated and organized by Mori Art Museum and ArtScience Museum, with Asian Civilisations Museum, the exhibition begins with an exploration of historical cosmologies from around the world. Religious art from the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain traditions shows how we conceived of the cosmos as vast and multidimensional from the earliest of times.
Collection of first edition works by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton. Photo: Marina Bay Sands
The birth of astronomy as a science is charted through a remarkable collection of artifacts from east and west, including star-charts from the 7th Century to the Edo period in Japan, and astronomical texts from ancient Persia and the Arab world. First-edition masterpieces from the most renowned astronomers of the Renaissance, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, are on show in Singapore for the first time. Together, they reveal revolutions in scientific thinking, charting the dramatic expansion of our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Installation view, showing Black Hole (M-Spheres) by Björn Dahlem, 2016 and 1610 II, Laurent Grasso, 2014
More recent scientific concepts are examined in the second part of the exhibition. New theoretical frameworks in physics, such as superstring theory and M-Theory, are providing ever more outlandish pictures of the universe we live in. These theories suggest that we live in just one of many universes, all of which contain multiple dimensions, which are impossibly small and strange. It is not just the origins of our universe which are providing scientists and philosophers with quandaries. Our understanding of matter is so incomplete that physicists require a mysterious phenomena called “dark matter” in order to explain the way things are.
Kamiokande, Andreas Gursky, 2007
Artists including Conrad Shawcross, Laurent Grasso and Mariko Mori provide us with intriguing lenses in which to view these new realities. They belong to a rich tradition of artists responding to dimensions which seem beyond human perception. At the birth of the 20th century, Cubist painters pursued the invisible realities suggested by the discovery of X-rays in 1895.(4) The surrealists were inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity.(5) Marcel Duchamp was so fascinated by new science, he developed his own laws of “Playful Physics” (6), whilst John Cage composed music using the principles of “indeterminacy” or “unpredictability”, terms he borrowed from quantum physics. Like these pioneers, the artists in The Universe and Art transcend mere representations of the cosmological.
As art critic Tom Morton notes, “if art is to succeed beyond the illustrative, it must bring something new to the table and must bite on the now”(7). Bringing us squarely to the present are Andreas Gursky, Trevor Paglen and Wolfgang Tillmans, who explore the technologies of contemporary astrophysics, in stunning depictions of astronomical observatories, particle detectors, and orbiting satellites.
ESO Paranal, Wolfgang Tillmans, 2012
The observatories and telescopes Gursky, Paglen and Tillmans depict enable us to look back in time, to a point before, we, and the Earth existed. The works the third part of The Universe and Art explore this time. Taking the notion of evolution as their starting point, Pierre Huygue and Hiroshi Sugimoto, refer to phases of life in the earth’s distant past, inviting us to meditate on the deep time of biological evolution, and imagine how evolution may work on other worlds.
Carboniferous Period, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1992
Patricia Piccinini, Vincent Fournier and Hajime Sorayama take a more speculative approach, contemplating how robotics, synthetic biology and genetic engineering may be used to evolve hybrid creatures here on earth, or elsewhere in the universe.
Our understanding of the cosmos as a place for humanity has been revolutionized by the Space Age. Since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space in 1961, 533 people have orbited Earth. A new era of space exploration is on the horizon, with private enterprises setting bold new goals to take a new generation of space travelers to previously unexplored realms. Through the work of historical pioneers such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and contemporary artists including Arthur Woods, Kitsuo Dubois, Dragan Živadinov and Takuro Osaka, the exhibition ends by pondering life in space.
Drawing from the manuscript Album of Cosmic Journeys, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1933
Far from being a harmonious zone of nothingness, space as it turns out is violently in flux, seized by entropy, and wracked by visceral physical-chemical transformations. Despite the intensity of research being carried out in multiple scientific fields, this unstable system eludes our understanding. Mysterious forces such as dark energy suggest a universe that is in a state of continuous expansion towards an uncertain event horizon. Parallel worlds, far from being the stuff of science fiction, are an important cornerstone of contemporary physics.
Dead Military Satellite (DMSP 5D-F11) Near the Disk of the Moon, Trevor Paglen, 2010
Humanity has always looked to art, mythology and philosophy in an attempt to fathom the universe and its mysteries. The Universe and Art shows how these fields, when combined with the understanding generated by science, give us new insights into the cosmos. We see how the universe has been an object of religious worship, a source of artistic and literary inspiration, and the basis of some of the most revolutionary scientific discoveries of all time. The exhibition is a potent confluence between the terrestrial and the celestial, the real and the fictional, the poetic and the technological. A place where art and science meet.
Slow Arc inside a Cube VIII by Conrad Shawcross, 2017 – new commission
Endnotes
1. Evans P. (2004), Frontiers, BBC Radio 4, 5 May 2004: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/frontiers_20040505.shtml
2. Gurth A. (2001), “Parallel Universes”, Horizon documentary, BBC, 2001. Transcript available from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/parallelunitrans.shtml
3. Steinhardt P.J. (2007), A Brief Introduction to the Ekpyrotic Universe, Princeton University
http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/
4. Dalrymple Henderson L. (1998), Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998
5. Parkinson G. (2007), Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology, Yale University Press, 30 November 2007.
6. Dalrymple Henderson L. (1998), Ibid
7. Morton T. (2007), Issue 105, Frieze, March 2007
Exhibition Website: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibition-archive/the-universe-and-art.html
honor harger 