Denna Jones
The New Language of Art and Science.
Denna Jones, a curator with the Welcome Trust for over seven years, has been a driving force behind creating a cultural platform for science and art in the UK and is perhaps one of the most knowledgable people on the convergence of contemporary art and science.
[0:00]
[ Good evening everyone, and welcome to the first of the Messages from the Tower series of talks. The evening is organised by SlowfallProjects, an artist group committed to putting on exhibitions in non-gallery spaces, and the talks are intended to complement Ringing, our current exhibition in St Augustine's Tower, on Mare Street. ]
[1:49]They (Slowfall Projects) have asked me to speak on the new language of art and science. And I thought about that and I think maybe, we shouldn't be talking about whether there needs to be a new language of art and science, because I think art and science already have a language that is similar - it's culture. Everything that artists and scientists deal with are elements of culture that we deal with on a daily basis. So maybe what we need to be thinking about is not so much a new language, but a new understanding of art and science.
[2.51] I hate to bring up C P Snow because every time I go to a science/art lecture, the old creaky's, C P Snow lecture comes up. I won't go into it but it is the 1950's famous debate on science and art.
[3.18] There is probably a perception of difference between the two and it may be because I come from an American background, although I did do my Masters in Britain, I did have an undergraduate degree in the States. I think it might be partly due to the way that academic disciplines are taught in this country that there is still a very real perception that there is art over here and there is science over here and it's very difficult to marry the two. Undergraduate education in the States was, and I'm not by any stretch of the imagination saying that it's better that education here or not, but it is different. It's different in that if you are training to be an art historian, which is what I trained to be, you can't get out of university without having a certain number of degree units in scientific subjects. So I took physics and I took biology and I took geology and I took quite a few subjects to get myself to the stage where they would allow me to graduate. And visa versa, if you're training to be a scientist, or any other discipline, you have to have the kind of cross-disciplinary reach to a certain degree.
[4.39]When I came here to do a history of art degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and I became aware that it's not quite the same in this country, and that when you're very young you're kind of forced to, or somebody from the audience correct me if I'm wrong, to go down a certain path at a very young age and to decide, maybe before you should be deciding, that I' going to be a scientist or I'm going to be an artist. And there's very little kind of cross over between the two.
So I think the fact that there is this kind of idea in university education here that you have these disciplines over here and you have these over here, and you don't marry the two together, and I think it's unfortunate because there are a lot of similarities between the way that scientists think and the way that artists think. I mean the one thing that I can think of right off the top of my head that is similar between an artist and a scientist is that a scientist will speak in metaphor. They have to to describe their work to a lay audience, and metaphor is nothing but a creative device. I mean if you are able to speak in the language of metaphase, you are engaging with creativity. And another thing about scientists is that if you have one scientist over here and another scientist over here and they're working on the same idea, you're not necessarily going to get the exact same results from both scientists.
What does that mean? It means that maybe one is better than the other, or one is looking down a different avenue, but a lot of it again will hinge on creativity - the ability to think laterally. And again, lateral thinking is a form of creativity. So there are a lot of reasons why I think it's great that there is a lot of convergence right now between the arts and sciences and I think a lot of artists want to work wit scientists and a lot of scientists now, equally, want to work with artists.
[6.33] What we do at The Wellcome Trust, as you know, it is mainly there to fund biomedical research, but we do have an exhibitions department and the focus of what we do within the departments I'm in, is look at ways to engage the public with science. And one of the ways we do this is not in any way a dumbing down, and I've had that accusation leveled at me before, and I'm like, absolutely not. You can use movies such as Gatica which I think is a fantastic movie, to engage 18 year olds or 16 year olds with ideas about genetics and how we all have to be very aware of our environment, and how scientific discoveries are impacting our daily lives. And that's what I keep saying to people, whether they are artists or scientists, or the general public, we need to be aware of what science is doing right now because we are in the age of gnomic now and we're in the age of huge leaps and bounds being made in genetics at the moment. This is the century of genetics.
[7.40] And I think it's interesting that Aemon Maxwell, in the forward to this nice catalogue to the exhibition, in his first paragraph he says "artists have always sought to push the boundaries in an attempt to communicate with their audience" and that's exactly where the really interesting art is coming out of right now, is the pushing the boundaries and artists, no wonder they're intrigued by the science and want to work with scientists because great science is happening but also some really scary science is happening too and I do think that it's in the hands of artists to a certain extent to engage with the science and let the rest of the world know what's going on because, obviously some of these difficult scientific issues, not everyone is going to pick up the lancet or the BMJ or whatever journal is out there to find out what's going on, so if an artist is engaging with some of these topics, then that is the way for the general public to find out what scientists are up to and to hopefully start a debate with the public to say, well maybe we don't want to be going down certain paths with genetics and it may be that the artist will play a really key role in the 21st century in debating, or bringing to the fore debates about current genetic research.
[8.59]The slides that I brought, just in case I was being boring I thought, well pretty slides of work that we've done in the past. I'll just flick through them and I might wait a few minutes to do that, but they are works tat we've had in the two ten gallery, there are works that we've funded through our Sci-Art programme, we do a lot of off-site work, I'm currently working with Barbican Art Gallery too on their Helen Chadwick retrospective which opens in June of next year, there's a medical mission is Clerkenwell that Helen did a temporary exhibition, a site specific exhibition in the 80's, and we're trying to work with the Barbican to recreate this very work in the medical mission which is a fantastic space, not dissimilar to where we are right now.
It's that type of outreach and public engagement that we're actively involved with so I'll run through some of the slides and try to explain some of them, but I think, back to the subject, the convergence of art and science, some of the scientists that I have, obviously through the Wellcome Trust I do engage with a lot of scientists, and I think I'm in a perfect position, hopefully to look at both sides of the issue, I've had enough scientific training to engage in discussions with scientists but I don't know so much that I'm an expert in any area of science at all. And I think that's what's important, to try and get across to our audiences the fact that you don't need to be an expert to debate the subject that are at hand, and we had Jon Salston at the Wellcome Trust recentlyto open an exhibition that I'd done on dna as this is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA so I asked 10 contemporary artists to, not work with the idea of the double helix, but to work more with the personalities behind the discovery, the four scientists and trying to engage on a personal level. And so John Salston, who has recently won the nobel prize for some of his genomic research, he came to talk to us and he gave a brilliant talk because it was great to have a nobel prize winning artist up on stage, saying to the public, which had a huge number of artists in the audience, and he said 'don't let anyone tell you that you need to have a scientific background to engage with the ideas that are coming out now, or to say to your MP's or to anyone, we don't want,maybe, genetically modified food or we don't want cloning or we don't want stem cell research, whatever it is that's happening now and there's a lot that's in the paper every single day of the week about these certain new levels of research.'
[11.59] He said 'all you need to do is have a basic understanding' and you can get a basic understanding just from reading the newspaper or from maybe reading some of the popular science press, not going into too difficult journals. And he said, 'you know, any scientist that stands before you and says that you have to have a specialist knowledge is wrong.' And I think that's also the danger, what's happened with the specialisation of disciplines that came out of the 19th century. I don't think the word scientist even came into use until about 1832, and that was at the point where everything started to get highly specialised, started going off into different disciplines and becoming specialist, and then from there it just grew and grew and grew to the point where now, there are sub-specialisations of genetics, and I can't keep straight the focuses of the people even at the trust in their research. And people get so narrowly focused on their areas of research and when they talk to you about their research they'll often expect you to know as much as they do because they're working on it every day of the week for years and years and years and it's very difficult for them to step back and say, well, everyone can't have this level of knowledge in the various areas of science. The bright scientists are the ones who can step back and look at the discipline widely and kind of ask the public to engage with it and not be so, kind of protective, basically, of what it is they're going that they think no-one can engage with it unless they understand all the nuances of what they do.
[13.46] So let me just run through some of the slides now. I think I'm about half way through my time, ok, (slide projector does something unexpected) help, (general giggles) what have I done wrong? Sorry about that..
[14.22] Bill Burns. We had an exhibition last year, I mean, I'm generally given a fairly wide brief on what I can do but occasionally the trust does say to me 'something is coming up and we would like you to do an exhibition on, and last year it was the sequencing of Plasmodium Caliper which is the mosquito that carries malaria, and they had just sequenced the genome for it and so it was quite a significant achievement because it means that they now develop drugs that they can take into Africa and other areas where they have a real malaria problem. So because they've sequenced the genome, they can develop strategies for treating it. So they said, you know, basically, malaria, do something on it, and I was like, OK.
[15.13] So there was a conceptual artist that I've always admired in Canada named Bill Burns and I just rang him up and I said "big problem, malaria, what can we do?" and he said "oh, great" and he instantly came u with the idea that he would do a show about everything I could buy on e-bay about malaria and I'm assuming everyone here is familiar with e-bay, it is the worlds biggest kind of emporium on the web, and you can buy and sell, and it's an auction that anyone, my brother has sold cars on it, you can buy furniture, you can buy collectibles, you can just buy anything that you want so we gave him a finite sum of money, I think it was £1000 and he keyed in malaria on the website and just bought anything he could find that had to do with malaria so we had some punk album from the 70's or something called malaria and just all sorts of really bazaar things and I've just put this in because it's not specifically on malaria but it's just one of Bill's works, called the Pain Killer Factory.
[16.17] This is an artist based in France, Horrhe Orta (16.24) who's been going around the world doing installations on the heart and he does them by going into various communities that have indigenous materials and have local populations, for example this heart is made out of the potteries in southern England, Royal Dalton and that sort of thing, He went and had hearts made out of the local martial and he's basically talking about themes of transplantation.
[16.59] This was an interesting show. I was approached by the design museum to do an exhibition, they had seen, I don't know whether any of you had seen, the cover of Frieze Magazine, but about two years ago there was a cover that had a glass model of a jelly fish on it and somebody had gone into the Cardiff Museum, into the back storage rooms and kind of investigated all these 19th Century glass models of marine invertebrates that had been made out of glass and had written an article about it. And the curator at the design museum had read this and though 'god, this sounds like a great exhibition idea'. And he came to talk to me about could we collaborate on something and on the face of it, no we couldn't because I couldn't see how glass jelly fish had any relationship to, because everything I do has to have some kind of biomedical element to it.
[17.52]But again, with a bit of lateral thinking i thought Jelly fish, Christine Borland, she's done quite a bit of work recently when she was in residence at Dundee, researching jelly fish and she did a film called the ether sea which I knew about. And I realised, yes, we can link it via contemporary art by pointing out, it's surprising the number of contemporary artists who actually are working with jellyfish or those kind of marine invertebrate themes. Dorothy Cross, who represented Ireland in the biannale several years ago, was another artist. So it was great, we collaborated.
[18.62] They had a show at the design museum that has now traveled to about 5 different venues, it inspired a show at the museum of contemporary art in Sidney, called Liquid Sea, and it's just gone on and had a life of its own and it's just quite nice to have that kind of collaboration that come out of something very small and becomes something very different and interesting I've put this slide in because this is one that, when Christine Borland was up for the Turner Prize - this was one of the works that was part of her exhibition at the time. I don't work in this area anymore but when i first started at the welcome trust we had a history of medical gallery where we would use much more historical material that tie in with contemporary artwork, and we had a show called dr death, and one of the objects that we borrowed from Edinburgh an 18t century obstetrical doll that looked almost identical to this. and it had a foetal skeleton within and apparently it was used by doctors investigating or using it during, I have to be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure what they did with these dolls but anyway they were very amazing and Christine Borland came into the gallery and signed the visitors book and the next thing we knew when the Turner Prize was up we thought oh, maybe she got an idea off the obstetrical dolls that we had on view. and we've since worked with her quite a bit so she's quite an interesting artist , Catherine Yass too, we've worked with her for years and again, she was recently up for the turner prize, again Christine Borland's Jones case' that we showed at the gallery last year.
[20.21] This is one of the works that we showed in the last group show that we did, at the design museum, Franko Bee, I had a show a few years ago called shelf life and the idea was that i asked 15 members of the public and it was age range from 10 to 80 and different backgrounds different everything. and just asked people in exchange for anonymity and 400 quid, would they wrench their medicine cabinet off the wall of their bathroom, give it to me, put it in the gallery, and they would write 200 words, or 300 words of what the medicine cabinet meant to them or what was in it, and we ad the most amazing essays that people because they knew that they weren't going to be exposed, by name so i thing people were very honest in what they wrote, and really amazing, some of them very sad stories, came out of these medicine cabinets, and the reason Franko bee is here is because, you probably know his work mainly through his performance work, and he recently had a very moving performance at Tate modern that I was able to see.
[21.43] He also does 2 dimensional work and we showed it in the gallery, in the shelf life exhibition, and it was really nice to work with Franco. architecture and the body so the idea of how architecture relates to the internal workings of the body, which is why he's got this heart on a pole, basically feeding into the building. Although, one particular person who i won't name, at the welcome trust, came up to me one day and said "so what's with the stomach on a stick? - and I was like, OK, anyway. (laughter from the audience). It is a heart. (more laughter).
This is another work, he was inspired by Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins in in the 19th century and his work was a comment on that piece. this is an ad we ad in freeze about our artist in residence. anther one of our artists in residence from last year, that was Andrew de Kooner, we hope that the artist will not only engage with the staff but also use our resources, we've got a huge amazing library that not only has medical books in it but has books that relate to travel, and, we actually have a huge collection of 17th century cook books that have to do with chocolate, just all sorts of amazing things that have a lateral relationship to medicine, and so we asked them to go in and he did look at 19th century clinical photographs on which he based his work.
[23.20] This is a show on, called Growth and Form, we did a couple of years ago. I like to work with architects and designers too, and i tend to be not confined to just one area of the visual arts, unfortunately i can't often work with performing arts although recently in the last show i did i did have a performing artist but it's usually 2 dimensional work. Rachel Chapmen. this is an installation she did in New Zealand but she was one of our artist in residence. that's on the roof of the art gallery in Auckland. These are artists that were in a show we did a couple of years ago that are based in Amsterdam, and they did works on the idea of using the language of beauty products to talk about genetics.
A new York artist that did an installation based on the genome for the windows in the gallery. Louis Wilson.
I've put Sasa von Shultnes in here. This is a catalogue she did for the London College of Fashion, and this is a page from it. and it's in here because i always like to encourage people that are artists or people in the audience to think that whilst the welcome trust may seem to be an organisation that is only going to deal with medicine or that is very difficult to take the subject you might be working on and fit it in because we do huge amounts of funding and I'm always encouraging people to apply for the funding.
This was a student at the London College of Fashion who called me up and said that she was doing a magazine for her degree show, and it had to do with medicine and did we want to put any money into it and after a few phone calls i thought this is great that she would even think to call us up and ask for money and so we did, we put an ad in her degree show magazine and gave her partial funding for it and it was just partly because it did fit within the parameters of what we do, but i was also really pleased that there are people out there who think really widely across the board about the work they do and how it can relate to biomedicine.
[25.47]David Shirkly, I can't remember why I put this in. Oh, I know, it's because i did an exhibition article, I was engaged in an exhibition that he did at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital about 5 years ago, these are a few slides from Sci-Art, projects that we've funded in the last few years. And we are still currently running Sci-Art and we have people awards and society awards that are available for people working in some area of science and art so if you have any questions, or if you want more information on our funding, we have loads of funding, even though we're cutting back in some areas, a lot of our science art funding as actually increased, so do ask me about it or visit our web site.
Oh, that must have been the last slide, which is perfect, because i see that my time is up so if you have any questions, please ask me during the question and answer period. Right, thank you. (much applause).[26:52]
Last updated on 18th February 2007
