ArtSciLab Blog Post: Can things be both Particles and Waves? Announcing a Getty
exhibition with intro co authored by Roger Malina
July 25 2023
Palm Springs Art Museum is proud to host the exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern
California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 as part of the Getty initiative Pacific Standard
Time. The exhibition will be on display at the museum September 14, 2024-February 23,
- https://www.getty.edu/projects/pacific-standard-time-2024/grants-awarded/
.
Particles and Waves examines how concepts and technologies from the realms of advanced scientific research impacted the development of abstract (or non-figurative) styles of artwork in postwar Southern California. Uniting several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles, the exhibition explores how subfields of scientific investigation inspired a range of non-figurative artworks by practitioners concerned with light, energy, motion, and time.
Getty us equally proud to work with co-curators Michael Duncan and Sharrissa Iqbal on a publication for the exhibition. A lavishly illustrated hardbound book will accompany the exhibition.
Three Leonardo articles will be reprinted in the exhibition catalogue
Frank Malina, “Electric Light as a Medium in the Fine Arts,” Spring 1975
Bettina Brendel, “The Influence of Atomic Physics on My Painting,” Spring 1973
Robert Bassler, “Lenticular Polyester Resin Sculpture: Transparency and Light,” Summer 1972
The introductions has been drafted by Camille Fremontier-Murphy and Roger Malina :
Leonardo’s Goals and Intentions (Then and Now) July 25 draft)
Camille Fremontier-Murphy and Roger Malina
The international journal Leonardo was a peculiar project of an artist dedicated to creativity and his peers. It was first published in January 1968 by the artist-scientist-engineer Frank Malina (1912-1981), a major figure in Parisian lumino-kinetic art and an American pioneer in rocketry. In fact, Malina was also the founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is now responsible for exploring the solar system.
As a former scientist, he dreamed of a community of artists who would publish their own articles to discuss their practice, no longer leaving this mission to critics alone. He was particularly inspired by György Kepes’s book, Language of Vision (1944), one of the most important artist’s manuals ever written in the United States before Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947). Like Kepes, who founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Malina was considered a successful member of the American Bauhaus, although he lived in Paris. He believed in the benefits of interaction between art, science, and technology. He also advocated a new social position for the artist. They should become educated people, capable of addressing fundamental artistic, scientific, technical, social, and political issues in their own way. They were able to write about these subjects and their art, as mathematicians do. English was to become the dominant language, as it was already in science.
In the search for a new global and pacifist social order, with more room for creativity and the important vision of the artist, this quarterly publication aimed to defend contemporary art as openly and progressively as possible. It did not, like most magazines of the time, focus on a particular regional or national scene. It built bridges between different communities to promote peaceful international relations and cultural exchange. Contributors could be European or American, including African American, Asian, male or female. Invited authors could be artists working in a constructivist vein and sensitive to this program, kinetic artists, early computer artists, op artists, light artists, multimedia artists exchanging common concerns with scientists, psychologists, architects, musicians, economists, historians, and writers.
It was a large private enterprise based in Paris at a time when no institution would have supported such an adventure. Other innovative avant-garde publications, such as Bit International, a magazine devoted entirely to computer art, or the ambitious multimedia living art program of the ARC (Animation – Recherche – Confrontation) directed by Pierre Gaudibert at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, lasted only a few years. Sufficiently open and self-financed, Leonardo persisted until the admittedly unexpected death of its visionary founder and editor in 1981. It outlived him, and continued to flourish for more than half a century, thanks to the energy of his son Roger and an international team.
Camille Fremontier-Murphy
Camille Fremontier-Murphy has just explained that many of the dreams of the founders of the Leonardo publications have come to be achieved. Artists now have writing freedom, primarily online. The art world is less siloed. The RCM Galerie, co-directed by Camille Murphy, exemplifies cultural diversity. Artists have been told: “If you have to plug it in, it is not art.” Crossing “media” is now not unusual.
Leonardo has experimented with multilingual and trans-media publishing. Soon the Leonardo Metaverse bookstore will open, as current humans are born digital, and AI bots do most of the reading.
One failure is that we did not anticipate the negative aspects of emerging technologies. We now know that high-tech industries have created more problems than they have solved. Ascott explains the use of AI in art in 1968. Leonardo has now published over 500 articles that discuss the use of AI. Yet we did not fully anticipate the disruption of the concept of authorship and intellectual property that is now underway. There are new ways for artists to make a living, but the age of the ‘author’ or ‘composer’ may be over. Art creation is becoming a collective activity with electronic feedback loops between humans and computers. Our issue in Mandarin preparation with Tsinghua University seeks to capture the concept of Augmented Wisdom.
Leonardo championed the work of Helen and Newton Harrison, among the first eco-artists for whom being green was part of human nature, but these artists had little impact on our societies. Leonardo championed the work of the first bio artists such as Eduardo Kac and George Gessert. Intentionally controversial, they raised the red flags on genetic engineering before it was too late.
So what is the Leonardo community of art-sci-tech practice working on now?
Often art-science work is art in the service of science. Leonardo is trying to champion science in the service of art and the continuum in between. Leonardo for instance published STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION: ENABLING NEW FORMS OF COLLABORATION AMONG SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, ARTS, AND DESIGN https://leonardo.info/NSF-SEAD .
Our community of practice has had ah-ha moments arising from working with many indigenous cultures (see Nina Czegledy’s work with the Maori, or Adriana Gomez in Colombia). There is no logical reason why we have to divide knowledge into art, science, technology, law, etc.
Sometimes old knowledge is better than new knowledge (ingenuity), and sometimes knowledge from Tasmania works better than knowledge from Silicon Valley. NASA does call on artists to be ingenious on Mars (see the team led by Alejandro Garcia) https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/projects/nasas-marsxr-challenge/ .
Joan Shigekawa of the US government’s National Endowment for the Arts agency championed: the arts as a way of knowing https://annex.exploratorium.edu/knowing/index.html but this hasn’t provoked significant movement in governments.
Leonardo keeps morphing, evolving, adapting, hybridizing to redesign human nature as a fundamental challenge to live in balance with other species and materials on Earth.
“Particles and Waves” is a concept very connected to the work of Frank Malina. He was convinced that artists should express through art what could be seen through microscopes and telescopes, as well as the naked eye. As Murphy points out, Kepes had expressed a similar motivation in his 1956 book “The New Landscape in Art and Science”.
Roger F. Malina
For further info contact rmalina@alum.mit.edu
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