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A new sublime
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A new sublime Paul Graham Raven explores a squeezed cosmos mankind – and I retain that gendered noun deliberately – was conquering that which it once held in awe, imposing rationality and order on the magnificent yet feminised chaos of nature.
Syzygy by Katie Paterson, at the Lowry, Manchester, UK, to 17 July
Solar eclipses from Earth shine like a glitterball at a fin de siècle rave
Infinite space Paterson works with scales that make the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the pavement: the depths of cosmological time, the breadth of the visible universe, the numbers of dead stars like grains of sand on an unmeasurable beach. The classical sublime was supposed to humble us before the awesome majesty of creation; the technological sublime, however, seeks to celebrate the power of science to bring nature to heel. totality © Katie Paterson, 2016
IN A small white room, deep inside Manchester’s Lowry gallery, a globe – a black sun, perhaps a metre across – hangs with its equator at about head height. It is covered with tiny reflective squares, each bearing one of thousands of images of solar eclipses seen from Earth. Two beams of light strike the globe from opposite corners of the room, and the eclipse images are reflected and projected in slow, dizzying, pinwheel arcs across the walls, floor and spectators. It’s like a glitterball at a fin de siècle rave, where disco and dark industrial finally get together to dance in the moment of totality. This is part of Katie Paterson’s Syzygy exhibition. Paterson has never been much of a sciencefiction fan, she says, but her father read it avidly. Perhaps that’s how she ended up making art that plays with one of science fiction’s favourite motifs, but in a contrary fashion, and to a different end. Science fiction has always toyed with the juxtaposition of vast and tiny, the very distant and the extremely intimate. This aesthetic has roots in the 19th-century concept of the sublime, which celebrated the capability of the natural world to leave a human beholder awestruck by their insignificance in the context of geological time and dynamics. Later, the technological sublime became associated with feats of mega-engineering, such as dams, railways and steamships, through which it was supposed that
the props department of a film But despite working at scales of the utmost sublimity, Paterson noir studio, show the passage of time as experienced on the is somehow doing neither thing. surface of seven objects in the And “sublime” probably isn’t the solar system. The sublime is first word you’d think of while always there, somehow, conjured walking around Syzygy: “stark” from deep silos of scientific data, is more likely. The gallery’s small before being made into simple irregular spaces are painted pure things that wouldn’t look out white, and populated by objects of place in a Bauhaus catalogue. of a seeming ordinariness, if not Perhaps the sublime has been exactly familiarity. sublimated? What’s happening A black piano plays itself – a gappy version of Beethoven’s “Paterson works with Moonlight Sonata with some of scales that make the its notes waylaid by interference Grand Canyon look like while on a Morse code trip to the a crack in the pavement“ moon and back. A rope of bulbs hangs from the ceiling, each is a sort of domestication, an emitting light as bright as we illumination and illustration of observe from a named star. that sense of scale, which neither On the wall, seven clocks, of makes it monstrous nor claims to the sort that might come from have tamed it. It’s less a bringingto-heel than a bringing-indoors – folding all those impossible distances and sizes into everyday objects in the comparative intimacy of domestic space. Paterson seems to have no agenda or message; even her pieces about glaciers lack preachiness or panic. The point appears to be that when you work with timescales as long as those of glaciers and galaxies, humanity and its follies become little more than a punctuation mark in a book as long as time. That’s a distinctive, if muted, stance. We needn’t be terrified to be small in the context of an immeasurably vast universe, Paterson’s work suggests, nor strive to build great works as compensation for our insignificance. We just need to get accustomed to having it around. n Paul Graham Raven is a writer and infrastructures futurist 28 May 2016 | NewScientist | 43
A new sublime Paul Graham Raven explores a squeezed cosmos mankind – and I retain that gendered noun deliberately – was conquering that which it once held in awe, imposing rationality and order on the magnificent yet feminised chaos of nature.
Syzygy by Katie Paterson, at the Lowry, Manchester, UK, to 17 July
Solar eclipses from Earth shine like a glitterball at a fin de siècle rave
Infinite space Paterson works with scales that make the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the pavement: the depths of cosmological time, the breadth of the visible universe, the numbers of dead stars like grains of sand on an unmeasurable beach. The classical sublime was supposed to humble us before the awesome majesty of creation; the technological sublime, however, seeks to celebrate the power of science to bring nature to heel. totality © Katie Paterson, 2016
IN A small white room, deep inside Manchester’s Lowry gallery, a globe – a black sun, perhaps a metre across – hangs with its equator at about head height. It is covered with tiny reflective squares, each bearing one of thousands of images of solar eclipses seen from Earth. Two beams of light strike the globe from opposite corners of the room, and the eclipse images are reflected and projected in slow, dizzying, pinwheel arcs across the walls, floor and spectators. It’s like a glitterball at a fin de siècle rave, where disco and dark industrial finally get together to dance in the moment of totality. This is part of Katie Paterson’s Syzygy exhibition. Paterson has never been much of a sciencefiction fan, she says, but her father read it avidly. Perhaps that’s how she ended up making art that plays with one of science fiction’s favourite motifs, but in a contrary fashion, and to a different end. Science fiction has always toyed with the juxtaposition of vast and tiny, the very distant and the extremely intimate. This aesthetic has roots in the 19th-century concept of the sublime, which celebrated the capability of the natural world to leave a human beholder awestruck by their insignificance in the context of geological time and dynamics. Later, the technological sublime became associated with feats of mega-engineering, such as dams, railways and steamships, through which it was supposed that
the props department of a film But despite working at scales of the utmost sublimity, Paterson noir studio, show the passage of time as experienced on the is somehow doing neither thing. surface of seven objects in the And “sublime” probably isn’t the solar system. The sublime is first word you’d think of while always there, somehow, conjured walking around Syzygy: “stark” from deep silos of scientific data, is more likely. The gallery’s small before being made into simple irregular spaces are painted pure things that wouldn’t look out white, and populated by objects of place in a Bauhaus catalogue. of a seeming ordinariness, if not Perhaps the sublime has been exactly familiarity. sublimated? What’s happening A black piano plays itself – a gappy version of Beethoven’s “Paterson works with Moonlight Sonata with some of scales that make the its notes waylaid by interference Grand Canyon look like while on a Morse code trip to the a crack in the pavement“ moon and back. A rope of bulbs hangs from the ceiling, each is a sort of domestication, an emitting light as bright as we illumination and illustration of observe from a named star. that sense of scale, which neither On the wall, seven clocks, of makes it monstrous nor claims to the sort that might come from have tamed it. It’s less a bringingto-heel than a bringing-indoors – folding all those impossible distances and sizes into everyday objects in the comparative intimacy of domestic space. Paterson seems to have no agenda or message; even her pieces about glaciers lack preachiness or panic. The point appears to be that when you work with timescales as long as those of glaciers and galaxies, humanity and its follies become little more than a punctuation mark in a book as long as time. That’s a distinctive, if muted, stance. We needn’t be terrified to be small in the context of an immeasurably vast universe, Paterson’s work suggests, nor strive to build great works as compensation for our insignificance. We just need to get accustomed to having it around. n Paul Graham Raven is a writer and infrastructures futurist 28 May 2016 | NewScientist | 43