Science and art

Robert Irwin. Way Out West.

What happens when artists move into high-tech scientific set-ups? As a variety of artists head for a residency program at CERN, their stay will be limited to three months:

"When they're working with physicists, there's a tipping point where artists want to prove that they have the brains of the physicist. The minute they do that they start to lose their artistic creativity."

That's according to Ariane Koek, head of "international arts development" at CERN. I think back to the days when James Turrell and Robert Irwin headed to Garrett Corporation as part of LACMA's Art & Technology program, an episode chronicled beautifully in Lawrence Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Irwin's exposure to science certainly changed his art, but his art also changed the lives of the scientists he worked with, at least one of whom dropped his science career for a life of transcendental meditation.