Argument

This essay aims to broaden our understanding of relationships between art, science, and technology during the 1960s by juxtaposing two of the most important, and under-examined, figures of this period, the artist Gyorgy Kepes and the engineer Billy Klüver. While these two are generally linked due to their similarities, a closer examination demonstrates significant differences in their outlook. Comparing the organizations they nurtured, Kepes, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Klüver, Experiments in Art and Technology, provides unique insight into the distinct origins of such organized collaborations between art, science, and technology. It reveals both how the cultural conditions of the 1960s contributed to the perceived need for such agencies and how interactions between art, science, and technology reflected, at once, the culmination of aspirations reaching back to the opening decades of the twentieth century, and a perceived break with the past.

Argument

Odilon Redon's dark-spirited charcoals and lithographs of the last quarter of the nineteenth century responded to developments in science, including the Pasteurian revolution. Rather than celebrating the progressive potential of science, Redon's noirs engaged national anxieties that attended scientific advances. His position was close to the Decadents of the 1880s who dwelled on themes of illness and decay. While the artist's original biographer André Mellerio referred to the artist's fascination with Pasteur and his microbial world, where in a single drop of water “there arises the spectacle of giants of a gripping horror and a frightful, predatory nature,” the topic has virtually disappeared from Redon literature. By recovering the scientific/medical issues that stimulated Redon's creation, this article restores the subjects of pathogenic organisms and contagious illness to their rightful place in Redon's oeuvre. Further, it provides the reader with a discussion of the cultural context in which Redon's interest was generated.

Argument

In 1867 Edouard Manet painted the execution of the Mexican emperor Maximilian of Habsburg. Manet broke with the classical tradition of history painting, for he depicted the actual shooting itself instead of choosing moments before or after the execution. Thus, the painting refers to a moment that in real time would have been far too brief to be perceptible. Manet presented a portrait of living actors whose execution has already taken place. This depiction of the imperceptible invites comparison to contemporaneous photographs of extremely short periods of time: attempts to capture flying cannon balls (Thomas Kaife), to take flashlight portraits of patients that would undermine their bodies' reaction time (Albert Londe), to visualize the successive stages of a drop falling into water (Arthur Worthington). Like Manet these scientists referred to an “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin). A closer look at their work reveals that they dealt with a space of knowledge that went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination, scientific and artistic pictures.

Argument

“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the urgent expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.

One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.

– Yves Klein 1958 (Klein 1973, 10)

This issue of Science in Context presents a sampling of current work by art historians examining modern artists' engagement with science as well as the relationship of photography to both science and art. The essays' topics span the mid-to-later nineteenth century to the 1960s and, thus, in a series of case studies provide an introduction to aspects of artistic modernism. Indeed, it is impossible to understand fully many of the radical innovations of modern art without some knowledge of an artist's cultural context, and developments in science have often played a critical role in defining that milieu. Collected together, these essays also represent methodological models of historical work on art and science that serve as useful examples in this developing field.

Although Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) is frequently cited by historians in relation to the impact of evolutionary theories on the Victorian churches, attention has not been paid to the audiences of working-class men in Glasgow for whom the papers were originally constructed. By drawing upon the notebook in which the author sketched out the series of addresses, in addition to materials relating to the interpretative habits of these audiences; I am able to consider the text as a work of practical apologetics rather than as a contribution to elite intellectual debate. This paper promises to open up new lines of enquiry with regard to the materials with which working-class audiences attempted to construct their own interpretations of contemporary scientific and religious issues. It also highlights Drummond's hitherto unrecognized use of specific practices of biblical exegesis and his debt to the work of the anatomist Richard Owen which, by keeping different forms of life distinct, and explaining organization as the effect of life already present, allowed the author to visualize the process of descent in terms of an inherent tendency to change in line with the unfolding of a pre-existing plan.

Argument

I propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play was “biocentrism,” the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.

The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.

– Moholy-Nagy (1938, 198)