Turner Contemporary: Artists meet Scientists

I travelled down to Margate this Tuesday to visit the Turner Contemporary Gallery for the first time. I had met up with my supervisor Jorge to take part in what promised to be a very unusual conversation between a community of scientists and artists. The discussion was about a quote given by the artist Carl Andre whose work is currently one of three on display:

“The periodic table of elements is for me what the colour spectrum is for a painter. Copper is more profoundly different from aluminium that green is from red.”

In another part of the quote he mentions that he wishes to be the ‘Turner’ of matter, which also contributed to the discussion in the sense that he uses materials as his palette and wishes to express himself with it as Turner once did with light and colour.

Carl Andre is a sculptor and is known for his minimalist and ground-breaking approach to art. In a nutshell his work is more an arrangement than a physical ‘sculpting’ of his materials. His aims are to use the materials of his choice and present them in their rawest of forms without alteration. With influences from an industrial background the pieces shown in the gallery were familiar materials like wood and stone tiles but put out of their industrial context. One of the pieces was a tower or cedar wood arranged like a giant game of Jenga and sticks in my mind for its deep red colour and coarse unrefined surface.  For links to the exhibition here is the link:

http://www.turnercontemporary.org

I was a bit dubious about the exhibition at first and was unsure if I would really ‘get’ the artwork, coming from a mostly scientific background (but with some art experience in there too). That said, using the time before the scheduled discussion I walked around the exhibit with an open mind and found the display as a whole much more accessible than I though it would be. I was also a bit worried about the talk because I was nervous about being able to contribute. However I made it my goal to try and say something without sounding stupid.

The discussion was set up in a spacious room overlooking the sea and we were arranged in a circle of about 25. There was a mediator to the talk and she guided the discussion with some ground rules without taking part in it. The rules were simple and allowed a free flowing discussion, preventing people from talking over each other or getting stuck in loops.

Jorge kicked off the debate with a concise scientific smack down that got everybody thinking. To paraphrase: he commented on the quote by explaining that red and green are not so different as they only represent numbers on a continuous spectrum and defining what makes aluminium different to copper in a very fundamental scientific reasoning. That is to say that not only are these elements different in their atomic constituents or structure but in their inherent behaviours and properties e.g. in their groundstates: at very low temperatures one becomes superconducting while the other does not. Later in the discussion Bob Newport would elaborate on this point by referring to behaviours of different metals or materials that are easier to relate to and that can be sensed not only by looking at the material but by touch as well. He brought up the point that if you were to walk barefoot across one of the pieces shown in the gallery you would feel the difference between the materials as some would feel colder than others as they conducted heat away from your foot. I noticed people nodding along to this and I think it helped some of the artists to engage on a more technical note.

The debate bounced freely around exploring a scientific reasoning and then bringing themes more commonly excluded from science; like the cultural applications and characteristics of colour and tools that different people acquire in their experiences that help them to interpret things like the artwork on display. So in this sense it can be your cultural upbringing that allows you to identify red as a colour that can mean danger or be used in valentine day cards while associating green with health and the environment.  If this is one of the ways that you identify with art etc. then as a personal experience red and green are worlds apart but aluminium and copper are more similar.

I think that a significant outcome of the conversation was to demonstrate in an accessible in which ways the materials used are at least as profoundly different as different colours. And I hope that from both sides people gained insight into ways of interpreting and experiencing different things in or out of their respective ‘comfort zones’.

Everyone seemed to think that the conversation was a success and the Gallery took some of the participants aside to be filmed separately. In the next month or so they hope to have made a sort of documentary/animation of the event and it will go to showing people the interesting and innovating thing that the Turner Contemporary is initiating.

Hannah Irons