PST ART: Art & Science Collide – Part 2

Well into its fourth month, the sprawling PST ART festival themed to explore the intersection of art and science is still in full swing, featuring science-facilitated art projects that engage aesthetics and manipulated materials to rethink abstruse cosmic questions and render them visually

Joyce Hinterding and David Haines. Telepathy, 2008. Installation view, Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific (co-presented by Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University. Photo: Christopher Wormald.

Various venues, Southern California
15 September 2024 – 16 February 2025

by JILL SPALDING

Is our universe a vast computation, ask collaborative investigations by such as Refik Anadol and David Bowen at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Yes and more, answers Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures (at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until 2 March), an outstanding survey of humanity’s attempt to decipher the universe’s origins and meaning. Resulting from a 25-year collaboration with scientists and scholars at the Griffith Observatory and the Carnegie Observatories, 118 artworks unfolding cosmology’s layered history span the stone age to the present and Mesoamerica to South East Asia. Wondrous but familiar calculations, such as a bronze-age celestial diagram and a Mayan divination calendar, cede to mind-spinning structures built to align with celestial movements, psychedelic imagery generated by cutting-edge technology, breakthrough achievements such as the revolutionary image of the Andromeda Galaxy captured by the Hubble telescope’s famed H335H, M31 VAR! plate, and involute contemporary artworks such as Liz Glynn’s Celestial Globe 39N94W (after Galileo) (2013).

Joyce Hinterding and David Haines. Telepathy, 2008 (detail). Installation view, Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific (co-presented by Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University. Photo: Christopher Wormald.

Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific (co-presented by Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University, until 19 January) is an exhibition about the physicality of sound unlike anything I’ve experienced. To convey that soundwaves, though invisible, are visceral and emotive, an international group of artists worked with scientists to make palpable the impact on the senses of the vibrations from magnetic waves, kinetic energy, and the indecipherable sounds emanating from the dense military, electromagnetic and seismic activity of the Pacific Rim. Among the most successful are Joyce Hinterding and David Haines’s Telepathy (2008), which invites you inside a single-occupancy anechoic chamber for a sensory deprivation experience of the human body’s relationship to sound and vibration; Malena Szlam’s film Altiplano, an eerie soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of geysers, volcanoes and Chilean blue whales; and Music on a Bound String No 2 (2015), a silent, sculpted visualisation of soundwaves by Alba Triana.

Alba Triana. Music on a Bound String No 2, 2015. Installation view, Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific (co-presented by Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University. Photo: Christopher Wormald.

A related exhibition, Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (at the University of California, Los Angeles, until 7 June), illustrates the idea that anything that makes noise can be a soundwork, with such allurements as Yolande Harris’s four-year research project, How You Shimmer: Sound Portal for Whale Bubbles, (2024), an immersive sound sculpture built with projected light, blown glass, and “an inverted kind of ‘scrimshaw’” formed of outlines she carved from videos on artificial human bones and cast in bronze.

Yet more esoteric but well attended, Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time and Technology (at the Skirball Cultural Center, until 2 March) investigates humanity’s deep interrelationship with the arboreal world. Seeking to fold history, culture, and memory into our perspective on trees, the interdisciplinary artists Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg deploy photography, video and new technologies such as AI monitoring to identify species, map Los Angeles’ urban treescapes, and track the impact of climate change. Most marking is a set of six monumental cross-sections of salvaged trees inscribed variously with interpretive timelines of California’s history, Jewish history, humanity’s intellectual striving, a sphere holding opposing perspectives, and the history of science through mathematical equations. To involve them, visitors are invited to create a customised tree from one shown in their neighbourhood and submit it to ancientwisdom.art. 

Betys Saar. Mojotech, 1987. Altar installation. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Not to be missed exhibitions at participating galleries include (at Roberts Projects until 28 February) Betye Saar’s monumental 1987 altar assemblage Mojotech, her pioneering achievement in conveying the impact of technology on the natural world. Inspired by African “power” sculpture, Saar creates magic with ritual objects with circuit boards, computer parts, charms, and computer circuitry – randomly garnished by offerings that visitors are invited to leave at its base.

End on a high at the brilliantly curated Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography and Film (at the Los Angeles County Museum, until 13 July). A landmark exhibit of nearly 200 artists who, from the 1980s, manipulated the digital tools each era afforded them – early paint programs, open-source software, photoshop and AI image generators – to develop distinctive aesthetic strategies in the fields of photography, graphic design and video that have radically transformed our visual world. It was so enlivening to rediscover a movement that the art world has remaindered that I found no irony in the number of viewers taking moving pictures of the moving pictures. Sectioned off by category, they jump off the walls with the same vigour as the revolutionary technologies that first animated them. Focused not on issues but, rather, on medium, the undeniable artistry of their various technologies surfaces in infinite variations.

Loretta Lux. Boy in a Blue Raincoat 1, 2001. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund, © Loretta Lux/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Find here early forms of creative experimentation by such digital pioneers as Cory Arcangel, Andreas Gursky and Andy Warhol; distorted realities by Loretta Lux and Thomas Ruff; a clip from Jurassic Park; Petra Cortright’s deliberately chintzy webcam-shot videos, and the morph and warp of motion graphics developed by John Maeda and Todd Gray. Among the artists who detailed their efforts at the press view were April Greiman, leader of the California new wave, whose hybridisation of typography and imagery gave graphic design a fourth dimension (“In inventing new technologies, we reinvent ourselves”); Casey Reas, who “collaborates with software” to generate new imagery (“Digital art is a kind of performance”); Kevin Mack, who “collaborates with emergence” to depict “the novel properties and behaviors that arise from the interactions between existing things”; and Casey Kauffmann, whose digital collage practice, comprised of GIFs, longform videos, still images and drawings, draws on “poor images” sourced from social media and reality television (“taking things that already exist in the world, decontextualising them, and recontextualising them in a way that makes new meaning”). If, like the space/light artist Robert Irwin, you hold art to be a needle that moves you, then as this exhibition reveals, art produced by image-editing software can prove deeply moving.

Casey Kauffmann with her work It's Over Bitch, at Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography and Film, Los Angeles County Museum. Photo: Jill Spalding.

Were I to use only one word to convey the impact of this five-month undertaking, it would be “inspirational”. From thinking the dichotomy of art and science a stretch, I’ve come to see their collusion/collision in everything. So has architect Ma Yansong worked the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art into a fibreglass-reinforced polymer simulation of a spaceship. So shall the adjacent ZGF-designed Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center house the massive Endeavour space shuttle together with 100 new hands-on exhibits and interactive videos illustrating the scientific and engineering principles of atmospheric flight. And so does the just-opened expansion of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County – undertaken to engage a community intimidated by the bleak windowless south entrance – coax transparency from a clever interplay of light and science. Become a mantra after architect Frederick Fisher had an epiphany on seeing a structure in Venice, California, that Robert Irwin had reworked into a concept – the perception of an atmosphere – by removing the back wall; “Suddenly, I understood that a building is not an object but an experience.” The focus on transparency that thenceforth informed Fisher’s practice has lifted this fossil-based institution itself to an artwork. Encapsulating the synergy, its admission-free pavilion houses the radically renovated diorama hall, a 75ft-long, one-of-a-kind, 150m-year-old, sauropod, and the landmark, 1981 wall-length mural LA History: A Mexican Perspective, by the legendary Chicana artist Barbara Carrasco.

And these are just openers for the AI-generated art revolution that Refik Anadol will be marking here next year with Dataland, a world’s-first museum to showcase physical and digital art – timed to premiere with Frank Gehry’s much anticipated Colburn Performing Arts Center.

Belying the illusion that PST ART has overtaken the town are four talk-of-the-town gallery shows. Conceived to visualise air, the delightful immersive Work No 3868 (2024) by the British multimedia artist Martin Creed (at the Orange County Museum of Art, until 23 February) consists of hundreds of yellow balloons that contain half the air in the gallery. Billed as a “playful inversion of art and space”, this tangible measure of air – an otherwise invisible substance that inhabits free space – invites visitors to walk through it and, by changing the work’s shape and volume, to become an integral component of the artwork.

Martin Creed: Work No. 3868 Half the air in a given space, 2024. Installation view, Orange County Museum of Art. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio.

At David Zwirner (until 1 February), a fresh look at a first take on America’s byways, with the new (and final) prints of William Eggleston’s 1969-74 photographs of the American south and west. They are rightly iconic, both for preceding Ed Ruscha’s and for the tonal depth and saturated colours Eggleston brought to art photography with the technically advanced, four-step, dye transfer process that Kodak had developed for fashion photography. His handwrought procedure involving a single image split into three separation negatives pressed on to dye-sensitive paper allowed for – say – sky, car and road sign to be given equal visual and emblematic value. The road-stop was now as arresting as a painting; the passing field was now a landscape; interiors were now vehicles for colour, and colour was now object and subject.

Doug Aitken, Lightscape, 2024. Installation view, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Photo: Jill Spalding.

 
When Larry Gagosian takes over the Marciano Art Foundation, attention is paid – the stunning 2023 Anselm Kiefer show is still in the mind’s eye of those who saw it there – so tickets are going fast for Doug Aitken’s 2024 Lightscape (until 30 April). A sculpture of three pulsed-lit life-size souls riffing on Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais is the opener for the feature-length work taking over the main space that is best described as an Ed Ruscha road-trip gone amok.

Doug Aitken, Lightscape, 2024. Multi-screen art installation, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Photo: Jill Spalding.

A surround of seven screens flashing a duo of repetitive videos is accompanied by a deafening sonic collage of electronica and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A pick-up truck and nondescript cars driven by people in various stages of angst careen down freeways that connect the current chaos of city life to yesterday’s untrammelled plains via factories, gas stations, Neutra houses, swimming pools, bewildered octogenarians, crazed performers, and displaced wildlife – to be turned back when at last they reach America’s once wide-open frontier by a “Marlborough man” on a horse. Tedious. For masters of the split screen, go to Bill Viola and Steve McQueen.

Peter Saul. Dali in Trouble, 2004. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 150 × 160 cm. © Peter Saul. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.

In vivid contrast, at Michael Werner (until 8 February), Flunking the Talent Test offers a fresh look at the storied work of Peter Saul. Although so long maligned as dated and tasteless – its surrealist, pop, cartoonish exuberance flaunting any aesthetic that could rescue them from ugly – in this re-Trump era Saul’s seven-decade-long trademark goofy portraiture of malevolence and angry perversity seems culturally timely and artistically significant.

Of local note, the sea change at The Hammer Museum. After 25 years at the helm, its storied director, Ann Philbin, has retired – a seismic event, so impactful was her success with building its collection, endowment and operating budget. Happily, cresting on the wave of female directors Mariët Westermann at the Guggenheim, Sasha Suda at the Philadelphia Museum, and Sarah Ganz Blythe at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, Zoe Ryan has the university and museum experience that fully equips her to take over.

• PST ART: Art & Science Collide – Part 1 was published in Studio International in October 2024. You can read it here.