Curating Art and Science

This is a syllabus for Curating Art and Science, a course offered in museum studies, history, and cultural studies in fall 2022 at Claremont Graduate University. This course will explore the history of interactions between art, science, and technology, and how to curate exhibitions on the subject. It is partly based on the instructors’ work, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time 2024 program on art, science, and LA, to develop a multi-sited, campus-wide exhibition at Caltech on Caltech’s own uses of visual culture over the last century to produce science, to communicate it, and to foster scientific identity and community. Our readings will emphasize the 20th century US, and sometimes specifically Caltech’s own history, but student projects may extend beyond this geographical and chronological context.

The course will be divided into three modules:

1. Art and Science: During the first part of the semester, we will think about the relationships between art, science, technology, and visual culture more generally, studying foundational texts on scientific illustration, the influence of science on modern and contemporary art, technological art, and the architecture of scientific institutions.
2. Curating: The second part of the semester takes an in-depth look at the history of exhibitions, both in the science and visual arts realms, and explores the nature and roles of archives and collections as sources for display. We will pay particular attention to contemporary curatorial theory and practice as it has evolved from the 1960s to the present. There will be site visits to the Benton Museum at Pomona College, where we will see an installation by California Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian; the Huntington Library, where we view a site-specific installation by artist Lita Albuquerque and meet with senior curators working on art and science exhibitions; and the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, where we will explore the records kept by scientific institutions. Other guests will join the conversation to deepen our understanding of discourse and standards in the field.
3. Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations: During the third part of the semester, we will focus on the histories of visual culture in specific scientific disciplines, as well as art and architecture, often reading case studies from Caltech’s own history. Students will curate, design, and present possible exhibition displays on these topics drawing on the Caltech Archives and other local collections.

Throughout the semester, students will investigate a range of visual practices at Caltech and other scientific institutions according to the specific scientific, artistic, and institutional functions they serve. What kinds of information do scientific images convey, and how do we best look at them in their varying contexts? How do we account for the choices scientists and artists make when they represent their work, and what cultural biases or preferences might their images contain? How do scientific images relate to other images in art, technology, and popular culture?

This course does not require any specific background preparation. For those unfamiliar with the academic study of visual culture, additional reading in James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020) may be useful for context.

Student Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand the complex interactions between art, science, technology, and visual culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially as they relate to the California Institute of Technology, other American science institutions, and Southern California.
2. Navigate art and science discourses in the humanities.
3. Reflect on and engage critically with trends and issues in contemporary curatorial practice.
4. Collaborate with project partners.
5. Strengthen research, writing, and presentation skills, communicating in a variety of formats and for diverse audiences.
6. Create compelling exhibitions with an understanding of different spaces and their design, as well as the selection, care, and management of display objects.
7. Know artists, scholars, curators, and design professionals working in the field.

Assignments

1. Exhibition review (500 words) of a local exhibition of your choice which engages with both art and science. Specific guidelines for this review will be posted online and discussed in class. Reviews are due electronically before class on October 24, 2022.
2. Exhibition proposal of a concept, items, didactic text, and layout for a small display on an art/science theme either chosen from a list provided by the course instructors or proposed by the student. Elements of the proposal will include a short introductory text (500 words), a checklist of 15–30 display items, a sample wall text (250 words) and didactic exhibition label (100 words), and space selection and layout/fabrication ideas. You may work independently or collaborate with one or more partners. In addition to handing in proposal materials, each student will present on their proposal during the third portion of the semester. Your presentation will be assessed based on the comprehensiveness and originality of your ideas; their viability in a real-life gallery, museum, or library setting; and your creative communication skills. Specific guidelines for a successful exhibition proposal will be posted online and discussed in class. Proposals are due on your assigned presentation day, between November 7 and December 12.
3. Curatorial essay (15–20 pages, no more than 5000 words) providing historical, cultural, aesthetic, or other scholarly analysis of your proposal exhibition, or, with permission of the instructors, of another topic. Specific guidelines for the creation of a curatorial essay will be posted online and discussed in class. Curatorial essays are due electronically on December 16.

Your grade for the course will be based 20% on the exhibition review, 30% each on the exhibition proposal and curatorial essay, and 20% on your engaged and insightful participation in class.

We’ll discuss readings during every class, so please read everything assigned before the class meeting it’s listed under. Please submit assignments by email to both instructors.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

• August 29: Introduction

Art and Science

• September 12: Scientific Images

  • James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–51.
  • Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1–45.
  • Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1–40.
  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone, 2007), 9–53.

• September 19: Science in Art

  • James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), 339–362.
  • Chiara Ambrosio, “Cubism and the Fourth Dimension,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 41 (2016): 202–221.
  • Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” Art Journal 47 (1988): 323–340.
  • Vanja V. Malloy, “From Macrocosm to Microcosm: Examining the Role of Modern Science in American Art,” in Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein, ed. Vanja V. Malloy (Mead Art Museum, Amherst College and MIT Press, 2018), 71–97.

• September 26: The Architecture of Science

  • Sophie Forgan, “The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 405–434.
  • Robert E. Kohler, “Labscapes: Naturalizing the Lab,” History of Science 40 (2002): 473–501.
  • Thomas F. Gieryn, “Two Faces on Science: Building Identities for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (MIT Press, 1999), 423–455.
  • Thomas F. Gieryn, “Laboratory Design for Post-Fordist Science,” Isis 99 (2008): 796–802.
  • Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production,” in Galison and Thompson, Architecture of Science, 497–540.

• October 3: Art and Technology

  • Fred Turner, “Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America,” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2008): 5–26.
  • Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,’” Leonardo 41, no. 2 (2008): 169–173.
  • Matthew Wisnioski, “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” Configurations 21 (2013): 85–116.
  • W. Patrick McCray, “Fallout and Spinoff: Commercializing the Art-Technology Nexus,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, ed. David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner (University of California Press, 2019), 61–77.

Curating

• October 10: Showing Is Telling: Contemporary Curatorial Practice

  • Guest: Tim Durfee, Principal of Tim Durfee Studio and Professor of Media Design Practices, Art Center College of Design
  • Robert Storr, “Show and Tell,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition? ed. Paula Marincola (Reaktion, 2006), 14–31.
  • Kate Fowle, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, ed. Steven Rand and Heather Kouris (apexart, 2007).
  • Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 14–16, 22–35.
  • Jens Hofmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine, no. 31 (November 2011).
  • Adrian George, The Curator’s Handbook: Museums, Commercial Galleries, Independent Spaces (Thames and Hudson, 2015), 152–206.

• October 17: Archives and Collections

  • Guest: elin o’Hara slavick, artist and curator
  • Elizabeth Yale, “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 18 (2015): 332–359.
  • Lorraine Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive,” Osiris 27 (2012): 156–187.
  • Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
  • Jennifer Tucker, “The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive,” Isis 97 (2006): 111–120.
  • Adrian George, The Curator’s Handbook: Museums, Commercial Galleries, Independent Spaces (Thames and Hudson, 2015), 30–48 and 56–87.

• October 24: Exhibiting Art, Exhibiting Science

  • Guest: Dan Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology, Huntington Library
  • Sharon Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibitions: An Introduction to the Politics of Display,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, and Culture, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Routledge, 1998), 1–24.
  • Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1–56.
  • Tony Bennet, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Fergusson, and Sandy Nairne (Routledge, 1996), 81–112.
  • Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012), 57–100.

• October 31: From White Cube to Black Box: Contemporary Curatorial Thought

  • Guest: Rebecca McGrew, Senior Curator, Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College
  • Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part I,” Artforum, March 1976.
  • Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue (Hatje Cantz, 2002).
  • Carolee Thea, “Okwui Enwezor,” in On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators (Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 43–53.
  • Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (MIT Press, 2016), 9–49.
  • Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 178–246.
  • Irit Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’: An Embodied Criticality,” August 2006.

Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations

• November 7: Astronomy and Planetary Science

  • Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “‘Stars Should Henceforth Register Themselves’: Astrophotography at the Early Lick Observatory,” British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 177–205.
  • Omar W. Nasim, “Handling the Heavens: Things and the Photo-Objects of Astronomy,” in Photo-Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences, ed. Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, and Petra Wodtke (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2019), 161–175.
  • Elizabeth A. Kessler, “Technology’s Palette: Voyager’s Eyes and the Hyperchromatic Enhancement of Jupiter and Saturn,” Technology and Culture 62 (2021): 1087–1118.
  • Janet Vertesi, “Drawing As: Distinctions and Disambiguation in Digital Images of Mars,” in Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar (MIT Press, 2014), 15–36.

• November 14: Biology

  • Nick Hopwood, “Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution,” Public Domain Review, May 18, 2016.
  • Maura C. Flannery, “Images of the Cell in Twentieth-Century Art and Science,” Leonardo 31 (1998): 195–204.
  • Christopher Kelty and Hannah Landecker, “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-Systems, and Film,” Grey Room, no. 17 (2004): 31–63.
  • Soraya de Chadarevian, “Models and the Making of Molecular Biology,” in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford University Press, 2004), 339–368.

• November 21: Chemistry

  • Christoph Meinel, “Molecules and Croquet Balls,” in de Chadarevian and Hopwood, Models, 242–275.
  • Alberto Cambrosio, Daniel Jacobi, and Peter Keating, “Arguing with Images: Pauling’s Theory of Antibody Formation,” Representations 89, (2005): 94–130.

• November 28: Art and Architecture

  • Stefanos Polyzoides, “Bertram Goodhue and the Architecture of Caltech, 1915 to 1939,” Classicist, no. 15 (2018): 8–19.
  • Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room, no. 36 (2009): 36–57.
  • Stephen Nowlin, “@Caltech: Art, Science and Technology, 1969–1971,” Leonardo 50 (2017): 443–447.
  • Lisa Lynch, “‘Out-liers,’ ‘Insiders,’ and Practical Harvest: Art as Technology Transfer in a Research Environment,” Research in Science and Technology Studies 13 (2002): 239–265.

• December 5: Physics

  • Peter Galison and Alexi Assmus, “Artificial Clouds, Real Particles,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 225–274.
  • David Kaiser, “Stick Figure Realism: Conventions, Reification, and the Persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948–1964,” Representations 70 (2000): 49–86.
  • James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980–2000 (Stanford University Press, 2008), 156–223.
  • Colleen O’Reilly, “Pedagogical Interventions: The Physics Photographs of Berenice Abbott,” RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 41, no. 2 (2016): 77–90.

• December 12: Conclusion