A unique exhibition seeks to reunite art and science.
by Daniella Ashkenazy
Professor Abraham Tamir is the curator of a unique exhibition at the Museum of Art and Science, located on the campus of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Established in 1998, the exhibition presents the "other side of the coin" in the relationship between art and science.
The spotlight, Tamir says, has traditionally focused on the impact of science on art: how science has provided new materials, new tools and opened up new techniques for artists. This is clearly demonstrated by computer-generated art and multi-media. However, how art can demonstrate science and laws of nature has been practically ignored.
The 200 works of art that Professor Tamir has placed on display in the circular central lobby of the campus' four-story Kreitman-Zlotowsk Building are not new works, nor are they originals. They are all large reproductions of world famous or well-known classics that range from old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci to impressionists like Van Gogh and Manet, to modern artists such as Dali, Picasso, Pollock, Magritte and Escher. In the same exhibition, which also runs along the corridors of an adjoining administration building, are dozens of holograms, optical illusions and multi-image photomontages.
Each item, Tamir believes, underscores how art can give visual form to abstract principles in science, or as he defines it, "demonstrates science through the eye' of art". Thus, we can not only look at art for its aesthetic interpretation of reality, but also as a visual expression of hard core scientific elements such as gravity, motion and fluid flow - even time, chaos and infinity.
Tamir explains the idea behind the exhibition. In the past, great artists such as Leonardo da Vinci did not live in a compartmentalized word separating the arts from the sciences. Today, in an age dominated by specialization and awash in "zero-sum", "either-or" relationships, art and science have largely become disconnected. His exhibition seeks to "reunite the two entities" and demonstrate to visitors how art and science interact.
The essence of the relationship is "duality not dichotomy": science is instrumental in creating art and art can be used as a means to illustrate science. Perhaps the most impressive example of the point the museum seeks to make is Einstein's theory of relativity. In Einstein's universe, the speed of light is also the maximum speed in nature. This yields seemingly bizarre conclusions, demonstrated - unknowingly - by different artists. For example, the fact that a traveler moving at the speed of light becomes totally flattened, so that his face could be seen in the rear of his skull, is "illustrated" in Magritte's playful painting, "The House of Glass". In "Persistence of Memory", Salvador Dali seems to illustrate another aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity: limp watch faces draped over objects against a desolate and still landscape may indicate that time indeed seems to have stood still.
Another one of Professor Tamir's favorite examples is Van Gogh's "Starry Night", a blue-tinged tranquil town asleep beneath a spectacular sky, where the cosmic ebb and flow is played out in streams and swirling vortices of yellow, blue and orange brush strokes. Professor Tamir points out two gigantic spiral nebulae entwined, he numerates eleven enlarged stars like fireballs with aureoles of light, he stresses the juxtaposition of an orange-colored moon crossing the sun, and he highlights a broad undulating band - perhaps the Milky Way - drawn just above the horizon. "While Van Gogh probably was not familiar with the hydrodynamics of fluid flow and flow over submerged bodies," he says emphatically, "he painted both concepts in a most expressive way." "
Tamir also sees in Escher's "Circle Limit III" of progressively smaller fishes a fascinating means of describing infinity. The fishes keep diminishing, each time by half their preceding size, in a finite circle enclosing an infinite number of fishes.
Professor Tamir, a distinguished chemical engineer and a former rector of Ben-Gurion University, regards the exhibition as just a beginning. His dream is to establish many such exhibitions all over the world, introducing and demonstrating to the public the intimate reciprocal relationship that bonds art and science.
Quoting Nobel Prize laureate physicist Cheg-Dau Lee, Tamir says, "Science and art are not separate from each other. They assist us in observing nature. With the help of science, we can discover the routines of nature. Through art we can describe the emotions of nature."