Art and science collide in enormous project at dozens of museums and galleries

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: In 2011, some 60 art institutions in Southern California got together to create a region-wide art collaboration known as Pacific Standard Time. PST ART is now on its third iteration, and it's an enormous undertaking, the largest art event in the nation this fall.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown sampled some of it for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: Everywhere you look, light amid the darkness, illuminated manuscripts. Glowing, even shimmering objects, most from medieval times, a few created by contemporary artists, all part of an exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles called Lumen: The Art and Science of Light.

And the wording of that subtitle is critical. Katherine Fleming is president and CEO of the Getty Trust.

Katherine Fleming, President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust: Art and science may at first blush look like things that don't go together. But, actually, they do. These are both modalities of thought or of expression that are concerned with some of the most profound and basic questions.

So what we thought might be a kind of juxtaposition of tension has actually proven to be one of tremendous overlap and compatibility.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, Lumen and seven other exhibitions at the Getty are just part of an enormous project that encompasses more than 70 museums, galleries, and public spaces all over Southern California, featuring some 800 artists this fall and into the winter, all brought together under the title PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

The Getty took the lead and provided some $20 million in grants to institutions large and small to curate their own exhibitions.

Katherine Fleming: To have all of these different entities working on a common theme, but in their own way. There's just the theme, and then all of the people who are participating approach it from their own vector. And I think that's what makes it so incredibly rich.

Jeffrey Brown: There was a wide range of responses, among them, the Natural History Museum takes a new look at old ways of exhibiting the natural world, commissioning contemporary artists to reframe dioramas.

At the Huntington, an exhibition called Storm Cloud shows how the Industrial Revolution changed life, and how artists and writers captured the environmental and other impacts. Self Help Graphics and Art, a community arts center, presents Sinks, looking at land contamination in present-day Los Angeles.

And the Hammer Museum features more than 20 leading artists in Breath(e), just one of a number of exhibitions focused on climate change.

Katherine Fleming: All of these things sort of reflect a zeitgeist of fear that we have drifted too far away from the world of which we're a part and the hope of showing a way to reconnect to it.

Jeffrey Brown: At the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale, a direct connection between artists and scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for an exhibition titled Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination, collaborations that bring together science and art, to see the world, make that worlds, a little differently, as in this work conceived by sculptor David Bowen working with scientists and JPL data systems architect Rishi Verma.

Rishi Verma, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: One of the questions we had, maybe the seed of a question, was, how do we bridge a gap of 140 million miles between Mars and the Earth? And if we were to bridge that, what would that look like? What would that feel like?

David Bowen, Sculptor: What does that wind on Mars look like? That's what I wanted to know.

Jeffrey Brown: A simple question.

David Bowen: Yes, yes. Just, OK, so then how can we show that?

Jeffrey Brown: The result is called Tele-Present Wind, a sculpture in which we see earthbound grass stalks from the plains of Minnesota swaying in the wind of Mars, or at least from tiny motors using data of actual wind speeds on the surface of Mars gathered by the Perseverance rover.

Verma's job, to transform and analyze data gathered from Mars, Bowen's, to bring the data to life.

David Bowen: I would call it like a hybrid mash-up. I wouldn't say that this is like -- obviously, there's not grasses like this growing on Mars, right?

So, we're taking something familiar, we're taking this very unfamiliar landscape and kind of mashing it into this hybrid of something you would never see, but hopefully has sort of a familiarity to it that kind of helps you think, oh, that's what the wind is doing.

Rishi Verma: I have been so used to looking at the data in terms of numbers and printouts and graphs on the computer. And here was the data alive in front of me. So, it was absolutely magical.

Jeffrey Brown: That's pretty cool, huh?

Rishi Verma: Definitely.

David Bowen: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: So, if you look at this, is this art or science?

David Bowen: This is definitely art.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: Definitely art.

Rishi Verma: Yes. It's definitely science to me.

(Laughter)

Rishi Verma: I'm sorry, David.

David Bowen: Agree to disagree. No, I was too strong. I think it's a mix. I will own that, yes.

Rishi Verma: I think that's the beauty of it, is that it's these different disciplines coming together.

David Bowen: Yes.

Rishi Verma: So it's the same thing. But we're looking at it from two different perspectives.

Jeffrey Brown: Also in the pretty cool realm, a solo exhibition called OPEN at MOCA Geffen of work by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, a leading contemporary figure who often uses light, shadows, and elements of the natural world as materials.

Olafur Eliasson, Artist: So it looks like a big sun, but it's cluttered with trash.

Jeffrey Brown: He asks us to look anew, as in this large kaleidoscope, with beautiful, or trashy, strands floating through it.

Olafur Eliasson: In that way, it's sort of about exploration, exploratory, like investigating something. What does it mean to actually look at something?

And in that way, I think art and science, they can go hand in hand. When I make a kaleidoscope with mirrors that people can almost disappear in, it's a little bit of a science experiment, if you want.

Jeffrey Brown: It's also a way of grasping something that can feel very abstract and far away, like climate change.

These paintings were made through mixing paint with large pieces of glacial ice. As the ice melts, it paints its own work.

Olafur Eliasson: It's interesting for me to say to people, well, here's an opportunity to maybe explore the boundaries of what you normally see. What is imagination? Are we good at imagining things?

Sometimes, things are hard to understand, like the climate crisis. Well, it's difficult to understand the climate crisis. Well, we should work a little bit on our imagination to better understand, well, what is on the periphery of what I can actually imagine, in order to deal with it.

Jeffrey Brown: With so many exhibitions across such a large region, PST ART is likely impossible for any one person to take in as a whole. But there's plenty of opportunity to choose your science, your art, your combination of both, old, new, and into the future.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Los Angeles.