Nice people don’t like to hear this, but the truth is that science and art are naturally in conflict. It’s a turf war. Both sides are fighting over the territory known as “the meaning of life”. Art says it’s all about aesthetic insight; science says it’s all about knowledge. Science wins all the battles, but cannot seem to wrap up the war. Art, lighter on its feet, simply dances away and starts all over again, pretending that those terrible wounds are actually colourful additions to its outfit. They are, but they’re still wounds.
In between pitched battles — the battle of New York, also known as postmodernism, and the battle of Paris, also known as modernism, were the previous two big encounters — the two sides try to patch things up. They make tentative moves towards each other. Science says that art is an important aspect of our evolved human nature. Art writes novels about quantum theory and deploys high technology — miniature video cameras, computers, the internet — to show it can work with science.
That, basically, is where we are now, in the midst of a lull in the fighting. Call it the Treaty of London, because this is where it is happening. Evolutionary psychology, on behalf of science, accepts the centrality of art in human nature; and by embracing technology, the visual arts accept a scientised world-view. Now there is even a shrine to this outbreak of peace. It is the Dana Centre, at the back of the Science Museum in South Kensington.
The centre was set up with £10m from four benefactors. It is named after the late American philanthropist Charles Dana. His European Dana Alliance for the Brain exists to disseminate knowledge about neuroscience. The centre exists to lure young people into an engagement with science. Surveys show that 18- to 45-year-olds are both the most distrustful of science and the least involved in the democratic process. Their basic position is that science will do what it likes and there is no point in discussing it. The centre’s primary function is to overcome that attitude.
“We’re trying to engage them in a debate on where science is going and the impact that science is having on their lives,” says Ben Gammon, head of learning and audience development at the Science Museum. “We want to illustrate how science is genuinely relevant to them.”
The centre is not for children. You have to be 18 to get in. This is partly because its main focus is a bar, and also because children are well catered for by the main Science Museum. Because of the number of children in the main museum, certain things simply cannot be shown or discussed there — certain things like sex and blood and guts.
For the striking thing about the centre is that, since it opened in November, it has drawn in the young by using the language of contemporary art, spoken now by both science and art. That language is the human body.
One of the first headlines the centre made arose from a discussion it staged about the possibility of face transplants. Then, via a video link to America, a heart-bypass operation was shown live, with the audience in London able to question the surgeon. It also considered displaying a dead body so that people could watch it decompose. It has now decided against this, though it is coy about the exact reasons. Meanwhile, there are well-attended debates about transplants and biotechnology.
The parallel with the visual arts is obvious. Rotting flesh in glass cases is obviously Damien Hirst; Mona Hatoum swallows a video camera to exhibit her innards; Marc Quinn makes a bust of his head by freezing his own blood, and, now, with Alison Lapper Pregnant, displays a sculpture of a naked thalidomide survivor on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Science is directly present in all these things — in the quasi-scientific way we are asked to look into Hirst’s glass cases, in the surgical literalness of Hatoum’s video, in the fact that thalidomide was a case of science gone wrong.
More important, science is also indirectly present. Both the Dana Centre and these artists have, subconsciously perhaps, converged upon a date — April 2, 1953, the day Nature magazine published Watson and Crick’s paper outlining the structure of DNA. As a result of that discovery, the balance of power in science shifted. Before then, physics had been the most exciting science, the one that seemed to be leading us into the future. After DNA, biology took over. Unlike physics, it threatened — or promised — to affect our daily lives; and, again unlike physics, it was becoming more understandable rather than less. While the physicists were vanishing up their own black holes, biologists were offering to tell us exactly how we were made and how we could improve on the basic human model.
It took about 40 years for the arts to hear the news. That is, as the great James Lovelock has pointed out, the normal time required for the acceptance of a big scientific idea. The news was, basically, that the body was all there was. DNA appears to be a mechanical, computer-like code: there is no mystery involved in life. Quinn’s Self (the blood head) was about the way personality emerges from and depends on the physical stuff of our body. Hirst’s carcasses were a memento mori, a simple warning that we could be no more than this flesh. The whole process reached a kind of kitsch peak with the exhibition of “plastinated” — preserved — bodies by Gunther von Hagens. These were just scary grotesques, but they sprang from the contemporary obsession with the body as the first and final term in the human experience.
This was popular art: it made headlines and it drew in the young. And so, when, at the Dana Centre, science decided to go for the same audience, it did so in the language of the body, a language spoken by science but made visible by art. The long peace of the Treaty of London had come full circle — from science to art and back to science.
Of course, the Dana Centre can’t just do blood and guts. It must also do physics, the environment and any number of other scientific issues. But what is the art that will lure people into these subjects? There is no obvious answer.
