The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
The Spiral Time Concept at the Sideshow
Entering Sci-Art at Brisbane's Science Museum I pass a series of bright and imposing colourful alchemical symbols. The one which stays in my mind and haunts me somewhat like an apparition is that of a glowing snake consuming its own tail. Is this the art of Sceance or of Science? But more on this beginning at the end...
In the nineteenth century, exhibits in museums often appealed as much to the sensationalist desires of their patrons as they did to any thirst for scientific 'fact'. Both museum and the fairground shared a fascination with strangeness. Both were repositories of the fantastic, the bizarre and the shocking. The Sci -Art exhibition was held at the Sciencentre (itself a nineteenth century building) in Brisbane and, I suspect, evoked in many a similar set of responses. The show's themes were reflected in the work of a handful of contemporary artists who employ various aspects of scientific visualisation, procedure and methodology in their work.
Sci-Art was characterised by an obsessive attention to detail, and the work, in many cases, bore the hallmark of traditional scientific presentation, complete with carefully notated facts, footnotes and details about the circumstances of its creation, the various tools used, and so on. The work, like its counterparts in the sober domain of academic scientific disciplines, explored notions of compartmentalised categories of various phenomena. An obsession with labels and specialisation persists in the sciences as it does to a large extent in the arts as well.
Think of the solid boundary-affirming terminology of science: Medical, Astronomical, Forensic, Anthropological, Entomological, etectera. At the Sci-Art show, these aesthetic escapees from the lab have been stripped