3 hypothesis about relationship of art and science
/Visited with Stephen Nowlin last week at the Williamson gallery at ArtCenter in Pasadena last week. He's executive director of the gallery and curator....and for years has been mounting deeply insightful shows about the relationship of art and science. He takes a non-techy view of the topic, and spends months mulling over a subject while he hunts for ways to convey and deliver new insight. The Energy show up now is stunning. On the plane back from LA, I read the catalog of the Neuro show from a few years back....and loved this comment he made in the introduction to the show.
"Beyond acknowledging that art and science significantly enrich each other's processes, NEURO [the gallery show] is informed by at least three hypotheses about the relationship between the two.
ONE is that both disciplines encourage the probing of boundaries, so it is likely that they will begin to doubt their own divisions--the boundaries said to separate art and science. SECOND, inasmuch as art is the means by which humans depict worlds of meaning, imagination and mystery, artists will be increasingly drawn to both the cultural impact of science and its exposure of reality as being far stranger than fiction. And THIRD, given our human compulsion to aspire to archetypes that are aesthetic as well as omniscient, and that we tent to self-fulfill what we have already idealized as divine, the integration of art and science is inevitable."