“Wandering the Immeasurable” by Gayle Hermick

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It is January. I am on a tram at the border of France and Switzerland just by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, (the Large Hadron Collider guys.) I notice a huge curling metal structure standing proud from the persistent snow. A biting wind dissuades interest beyond a long-distance snap with my iPhone.

On-line, I find that this work is “Wandering the Immeasurable” by Gayle Hermick. I speak to a physicist friend who works at CERN. “All of us love that sculpture!” he explains. “It tells the entire story of our field.” I am intrigued. This reminds me of a stroll through Cambridge (UK,) and how beautiful sculptures and paintings are used to pay tribute to the brilliant minds who have brought extraordinary advances in knowledge and ultimately changed humanity.

More snow. The weeks pass before I want to return. When I do, I find this to be a work of staggering beauty in which the aesthetic combines with what is probably the most important human narrative of all.

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Hermick visited the CERN site in 2005. She was bowled over by the enormity of what the Large Hadron Collider represents: a massively ambitious experiment based on centuries of scientific exploration. What inspired her was the realization that any theory in physics is based on theories that came before it that, in turn, are based on other precedents. The connections between theories weave together the story of science. One side of the coiling stainless steel ribbon carries 396 important scientific and technical discoveries inscribed in their language of origin, accompanied by the names of their discoverers. The list begins with sexagesimal calculations in Mesopotamia from 4000 years ago and ends – for the time being – with the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. The tail of the ribbon remains suspended, as if awaiting future events.

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The other side of the ribbon showcases mathematics: the language of science. This helps the visitor, whatever his or her background, to appreciate how mathematics underpins the 396 discoveries. The whole is accessible to the non-scientist and so resonates with the educational goals of CERN.

Putting the aesthetic and the narrative aside; the work is awe-inspiring as a technical accomplishment. It took a crew of metal workers over a year to make. The process involved specialists who could laser-cut the text and electro-plate the equations into stainless steel.

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And what of the “who” behind this monumental work? Gayle Hermick trained in Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She gravitated to sculptural forms in clay. Metal was a natural evolution. She is tolerant of my persistence and generous with her time giving honest and elegant answers to my questions. I ask her how she won the commission for the work. She replies “It wasn’t a commission. I pitched the idea for a sculpture on the site after touring the then ‘in progress’ Large Hadron Collider. I did not visit CERN with a physics or mathematics background. The dance to create the right sculpture involved much research on my part and some to and fro with CERN to gain more insight into particle physics. I realized quickly that I did not have enough knowledge about contemporary physics to create a work about a specific theory but I also realized that I was in good company with most of the world.  My sculpture grew naturally from this point. I wanted it to be both a monument to what has been achieved and to inform myself, and hopefully others, about how we, humanity, got to the point of colliding particles just under the speed of light to understand what makes up our universe.” (Wow!) She continues “I was enthralled with the beautiful but impenetrable equations accompanying every article I researched.”

She tells me that whilst the inspiration for “Wandering the Immeasurable” was sparked by her 2005 visit to CERN, the visual concept came from the multicultural nature of CERN as an institution, its scientific goals, its educational goals and, by her own admission, her ignorance and confusion about contemporary physicists and theories. I cannot imagine that there exists many other sculptors with intellectual horizons as broad.

Naively, I ask her if, as a result of her extensive research, she has a favourite physicist or theorem. “This (the whole project) has been an exhilarating plunge into the history of science and physicists that will stay with me the rest of my life. I admire greatly the early scientists who came to their discoveries from different disciplines, there are so many – one, Gilbert, a physician, arrived at the conclusion the earth was magnetic which is why the compass points north. And there’s the ingenuity of Pascal’s calculating machine. Galileo’s dedication to observation is breathtaking; his thorough documentation of the moons of Jupiter and sun spots are astounding feats. I read about the careful tabulation of astronomical data from Brahe enabling Kepler to discover his laws of planetary motion. I enjoyed biographies of physicists: the Curies, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr, and Dirac to name a few. And what an exciting time in physics just prior to World War II!  After years of quiet experimentation, I believe (with discovery of the Higgs boson and the potential output from the Large Hadron Collider), we are in another exciting time for both cosmology and particle physics.” Does she understands physics now? “Robin I think this question is very funny!” she answers. “I think there are physicists who don’t understand contemporary physics.” She then lists, with citations, some prominent physicists who admit to not fully comprehending their chosen field. The list includes Einstein who, apparently, did not believe in quantum theory.

So, as the warmer weather approaches, why not visit CERN and Hermick’s stunning creation? Take a picnic, listen to music, take photos and consider…. but for those texts and equations, you wouldn’t have got there, you would have no leisure time because you would be so busy trying to find enough food for your picnic, there would be no way that music could be recorded and you wouldn’t be able to take photos because cameras wouldn’t exist. In brief, without those scientists and their discoveries, all of our lives, assuming we even existed, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

César Baldaccini’s Directed Pink Expansion

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“Directed Pink Expansion,” César Baldaccini, 1967, Plastic bin and polyurethane.

I’m back in Stockholm. I decide to take a peek at Moderna Museet. As always, it’s hosting a nice mix of works by pop artists. On the floor of one room is “Directed Pink Expansion.” I do not gasp at its beauty; but the work is arresting in many senses. The entire spilled thing looks messy and sticky; it disturbs and amuses me. I like to have things in order; nice and neat and tidy. Call the cleaners ASAP! But I don’t move on. I become aware of association of thought and emotion unusual in the cool confines of a prestigious gallery.

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Even though I know the structure is made of hard polyurethane (for that is what the little sign says,) I want to poke this goo. An inner voice tells me that it is chewy, edible and maybe poisonous (or maybe all three!) The colour suggests caramel, tomato sauce or blood. Or maybe this is a bin of some awful all-invading toxic waste accidentally knocked over and now polluting the environment? How would the Ghostbusters deal with it?

César Baldaccini (1921-1998) remains a key figure in French contemporary sculpture. This is the guy who, in the early 1960s after visitng a car-crusher, famously exhibited cubes made of compressed cars at the Paris Exhibition. At the same time, he did a number of “expansions.” Wow! Fascinating links! Compression and expansion; pushing together and falling apart; filling and spilling; construction and destruction. Was César buzzing around the basic laws of physics about energy states and everything tending toward chaos? And why do I think of cleaners? Because what they do, in terms of physics, is expend energy to turn a tiny little bit of our chaos-destined universe back into order. I look again at Directed Pink Expansion. If universal laws of physics were in César’s head in 1967, there is something not quite right about the way the work is displayed here. It is on its own thin stage!

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Photo copyright: César/BUS 2015

Only when I look on-line for other images of this work do I see how it is so much more powerful when displayed in direct contact with the floor. This allows the idea of a real spill, directed or not. If you come across it unexpectedly, you might just call the cleaners and then I bet good old César’s ghost would bust out a smile.

Beyond the Ground: It’s all about our roots

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“Beyond the Ground” is – from left to right – Rachel Tan, Gabriella Saniotto, Monika Schodowska and Eva Scherly. It’s like meeting an ascendant all-female rock band. But they are not in the music business. These feisty, creative women serve up a giddying cocktail of contemporary installations and eloquent discourse. I am a fan and, if I’m honest, more than a little intimidated. They rock!

Photography students together in London at Camberwell College of Art, they now master a variety of media and push boundaries. With a nod to Nicolas Bourriaud (“Au delà de la terre”) their heterogeneous works converge on a common theme: who we really are and where we come from. Beyond the Ground opens at 16.00 on Thursday 5th February at ARCOOP (32, rue des Noirettes, Geneva) with, surprisingly, a debate. Sociologists, ethnologists and psychologists have agreed to be a part of this event along with Christian Bernard, Director of MAMCO. The audience will participate. The goal is wide engagement in a dialogue about our roots. I ask the four if this is not too ambitious. They laugh. They exude confidence and motivation.

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Gabriella Saniotto, “Citizen of the World: the Death of the Nations,” 2013, Installation, 196 black flags.

Gabriella Saniotto dresses in black. (This is, apparently, the colour of anarchy.) Her work hunts around the notion that all too often we refer to our nationality as our roots. She proposes that this is human folly. Isn’t it our nature that determines who we are? What if there were neither frontiers nor governments? Wouldn’t we be able to find our real cultural roots? Wouldn’t we have a richer human heritage? She sits by one of her installations. It is 196 corner-stacked black flags: one flag for each country in the world.

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Photograph of the Embassy of Luxembourg in London in: Gabriella Saniotto, “Citizen of the World: the Death of the Nations,” 2013, Book.

The other half of her installation is a book of photos showing all the embassies in London flying only black flags. The outposts of each separate nation are thus portrayed in anarchic unity.

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Eva Scherly, “Quince jelly,” 2015, Suspended sheets in plaster of Paris.

Centrally placed in ARCOOP – and made specifically for this event – are two beautiful and mesmerising structures. They are sheets frozen as if suspended by their corners: but there is nothing suspending them. Eva Scherly loves working with plaster of Paris and the ephemeral and delicate nature of the result. The works are created in situ and their construction involves several day’s drying time. They cannot be moved. They will be destroyed at the end of the exhibition. Eva sees the plaster’s cycle of dust to liquid to solid and back to dust as a parallel to a fundamental cycle of life. “And the roots?” I ask. “The title?” She smiles. The shoulders drop. Assertive becomes nostalgic. “Well… when I was a child, my father used to make quince jelly. He suspended sheets this way to strain the fruit.”

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Monika Schodowska, “I knew I would come back,” 2013, Wood, metal grills and light bulbs.

Monika Schodowska is Polish. She has spent the last thirteen years in London. Her roots relate firmly to socialist Poland.  “Everything was politicised,” she tells me, hesitantly. “Especially aesthetics, architecture and space. Everything was conflict.” Her installation “I knew I would come back” is, she says, about warm domestic light emanating from low coffee tables. But it is also about alienation. She admits that she has difficulty finding the right words. Her creative capacities seem to have a more visceral provenance. At first pass, this work appears simple, banal even. But there is discipline and an elegant geometry. I listen to Monika and I wonder if the conflict to which she refers can be seen in “I knew I would come back.”  Warm wooden domestic furniture fights the order, stark metal grills and naked light bulbs of military security and prisons. Given a glimpse of what this work may be about, I find it very powerful.

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Rachel Tan, “Lee Governs You,” 2013, Posters and video installation.

“Guan” in Chinese means “govern.” Lee Kuan Yew was Singapore’s first prime minister responsible for the country’s economic success. However, he exerted a very conservative authority on all creative activities. “Lee Guan You” (Lee Governs You) is the play-on-words title for one of Rachel Tan’s thought-provoking contributions to Beyond the Ground. She would love to return home to Singapore but it would be impossible for her to organise exhibitions of her work there because any such event has to be approved by the state-run Media Development Authority. Her installation here comprises posters promoting a film entitled “Lee Governs You” about the political dynasty Lee Kuan Yew founded, a letter to Ms. Tan from the Media Development Authority stating that she cannot show the film as planned and a video that begins with the title and then dissolves into a censored blur. Brilliant! Rachel states simply “To be who I am, I have to leave my roots.”

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Rachel Tan with Rachel Tan, “Self Portrait” 2014, Photograph.

Rachel was determined to photograph her real self. Never bowing to convention, her self-portrait involved cultivating samples of her own DNA on multiple petri dishes and then photographing them. I guess you can’t get any closer to your roots!

In Beyond the Ground, Rachel, Gabriella, Monika and Eva strut a broad stage already set with politics and emotion. But I think there is an important, behind-the-scenes narrative being told here about our roots and how we perceive them. This narrative is based on our innate “soft” senses.  Whilst we recognise that our biology equips us with the five hard senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, science is now beginning to explain how our biology also equips us with, for example, a sense of justice, a sense of empathy, a sense of loss and a sense of the aesthetic. The fab four have, with their works and their discourse, opened avenues for us all to explore two other soft and innate senses necessary for our survival as a social species: a sense of community and a sense of home.

So come and kick-start Beyond the Ground. You’ll discover something about your roots.

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