ART (AND/OR) SCIENCE READING GROUP

The monthly Art (and/or) Science Reading Group is a low-key and chilled affair, providing a chance to do some reading around art and/or science tied to an ongoing exhibition, and have a friendly chat exploring ideas brought to the fore by these pieces. The Group is jointly run by myself and Ellie Armstrong. This page shows what we have covered in previous Reading Groups.

Sign up for a newsletter on the Reading Groups, and other art-science-politics news.

The November edition of the Art (And/Or) Science Reading Group discussed Collective bodies: what museums do for disability studies by Katherine Ott, which is in the collected edition Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum (2010) by Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. The book addresses issues surrounding disability representation in museums and galleries, a topic which is receiving much academic attention and is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for practitioners working in wide-ranging museums and related cultural organisations.

We compared this to themes arising from the newly curated permanent exhibition at the Wellcome Collection: Being Human. Being Human sets out to explore what it means to be human in the 21st century, including reflecting our hopes and fears about new forms of medical knowledge, and our changing relationships with ourselves, each other and the world.

The October edition of the Art (And/Or) Science Reading Group discussed the Displays of Power: A Natural History of Empire free exhibition running at the Grant Museum from September 2019 to 2020. The show connects the specimens in the Grant Museum of Zoology to a wider history of science and Empire, asking: “How did all these things come to be here in the first place?”

We juxtaposed this exhibition with an article by Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe: Nature Read in Black and White: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections (2018). You can read the abstract here.

We were excited to be joined in the May edition of Reading Group by special co-host Florence Okoye. The discussion was fixed on how the future is created. We focused on who creates futures, and how what they imagine may change over time. Reading Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Art Movement by Reynaldo Anderson, the discussion put Anderson’s ideas in conversation with the ongoing exhibition Is this Tomorrow? at the Whitechapel Gallery (itself a response to a 1956 exhibition “This is tomorrow”). We were helped through this discussion by Florence who has written extensively on Afrofuturism.

As well as discussing the Whitechapel show, the group considered some fantastic historical videos from the original 1956 exhibition. Very short, but amazing, videos available here and here (and well contextualised in this blog which has further images and videos in it including one on the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar which I recommend dipping into). Finally, for those pressed for time, there is a 9 minute version of the Anderson essay.

The April group reviewed the Spare Parts free exhibition running at the Science Gallery London until 12 May 2019. Spare Parts explores the art and science of organ transplant and tissue regeneration, and is the result of interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists from Kings College London.

We were very excited tojuxtapose this exhibition with Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto, an exploration of science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. A Cyborg Manifesto is available to review here. We suggested reading the following two short sections:

- Pages 5-16 An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit

- Pages 52-68 Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity

The February group covered 'Pretty Sublime’ by Elizabeth A. Kessler, in Beyond the Finite, available to read via Google Books here (pages 57-74). We related this to some online exhibitions. The first is Ansel Adams: Landscapes of the American West, recently shown at the Atlas Gallery in London and now available online here: http://www.atlasgallery.com/exhibition/ansel-adams. The second is Images From Mars Rover Curiosity, which you can see here: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/.

Next we have the online gallery of Albert Biestadt, available online here: https://www.albertbierstadt.org/the-complete-works.html?pageno=1 (apologies this site is a bit add-heavy). And finally we have images from the Hubble Space Telescope, found here: http://hubblesite.org/images/wallpaper.

The January 2019 group covered The Clock (on show at the Tate Modern until 20th January). It used Julie Levinson’s "Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock” to frame some of the ideas and issues that the artwork throws up about the nature of time. The paper is available to read here: https://works.bepress.com/julie_levinson/5/